Of the Based and the Cringe
Of the Based and the Cringe
A Song of Soy and Cope
Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
I’m like Peter Pan, but racist. I’m based.
-Rucka Rucka Ali (Black God)
The evolution of slang and etymology is always an interesting process…like all great cultural genesis there’s a blend of the truly artistic: the spontaneity of creativity, the pure invention of connections that might not be made in another thousand years, the imagination of metaphor… and then of course there is the pure stupidity: the exploitive annoying earworm quality of pop or slang, the slur of one word into another… merely because it sounds funny or there’s a social cache to a regional accent, or the affectation of one… The serendipitous blend of the artistic and the autistic.
It can seem random… but the more you observe, there’s a linguistic necessity that exerts itself over the affair, like runaway pop music, the fierce artistic competition ensures only the surprisingly genius can truly reach escape velocity, while the pure stupidity of linguistic adaptation… the now common “Fren” for “friend” (based off of misspelling and (affected?) retardation), ensures that any adaptation which sticks inevitably reaches its most basic primordial form… Pure Schelling’s points of linguistic and cultural thought, and fierce competition to find the next one.
If you doubt the power of this… consider the last president was determined largely by his meme value… his “telling like it is” style, his name and its conscious cultivation, across generations, to mean “Besting by being better” (and John Oliver thought he could undo that century long effort with a grade school insult: “Drumpf”…. in what? 5 months?) or think of the brand power of Yeesy, or the rising cultural cache of someone like Chet Hanks… or Alex Jones.
All dumb…(at least in appearance) but following a memetic logic that necessitates their success.
There is a logic and meaning to linguistic and memetic invention that has in it a real power… you might not notice it, but your brain does.
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So what of the “Based” and the “Cringe”?
These two terms have rapidly expanded to become the Yin and Yang of the internet age… Surpassing even the Red Pill/Blue Pill dichotomy.
Every day young influencers win or lose tens of thousands of followers, and the attendant fortunes they generate, merely off the judgement of their audience… Based or cringe?
High stakes indeed.
But why “Based” and “Cringe”? The two are very unlikely opposites…
”Based” has a long and very intricate memetic history. going back past the 2016 “Great meme war” long before the appearance of “Based stickman” and many other such figures… Before even 2014 when one might be praised as “Based and Redpilled”, Based was a term popularized by rapper Lil B, self-monikered “Based God”… indeed for a brief window in 2010ish “Based God” was used expressing ironic and unironic praise for Obama… So how did it change 180 degrees from memes praising Obama, the first black president, to being a term of endearment amongst, among many others, online racists?
Well Lil B was not the true origin of the term… His “Based god” was the first time “based” was used as a term of endearment, but he only used it to invert “Based Head” an insult he was regularly receiving in regard to the quality of his music…
And what pray tell does “Based Head” Refer to?
One who free-bases cocaine.
Lil B’s critics were saying he wrote sloppy CrackHead music.
Thus the humor in referring to Obama as “Based God”, it being a perennial running joke to imagine the first black (well half) president, one of the most boring upper-middle-class establishment careerists (with maybe some rad-left and/or CIA connections?), would instantly transform into the blackest hood-est crack fiend the second he was off camera (Rucka captures the joke well).
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Notice how implausible this evolution is… An insult derived from the freebasing of crack cocaine, evolves into a term of endearment thanks to one rapper, gets popularized in its application to an American president, only to subsequently become an online term most associated with the politics of his fiercest online critics. Crackheads→Based Heads→ Based God (Lil B)→Based God (Obama)→Based and Redpilled→ Based.
The individual stages of the evolution don’t make much sense, the language merely seems to have a potency that gets latched onto, that keeps it gaining momentum as a linguistic phenomenon even as the context in which one reaches for it changes completely...
But yet there is a logic.
What is it about the act of Free Basing crack itself, that lends it this metaphorical power? What desirable trait do crack addicts have that we seek in Rappers, Presidents, influencers, and political extremists, yet find so scarce?
Authenticity.
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Because of the lack of technical virtuosity required to produce rap (yes, I said it) the social/status aspect… the question of who is a “real G”, takes on a paramount career defining importance. In cities across North America young Artists without even significant criminal enterprises, engage in deadly feuds and gunfights with each other over the most symbolic of status markers and slights. Unlike metal bands or EDM acts, skill is not the market differentiator… the esteem audiences hold them in for being authentically “Gangsta” instead of a “poser”… that is career defining. In the 2010s and beyond Gangster rappers don’t shoot each-other for control of territory or drugs…they do it to control the imaginations of white suburban kids who buy merch…
Thus Lil B saw the opportunity in being associated with Based Heads… Who’s more authentically “Street” than the rapper listened to by crack addicts? Did any actually listen to him? Who knows. But that association… The “based God” of “Based head” music , presumably…maybe… possibly… with a fan base of real crack addicts? What suburban white kid seeking “Real G” rap wouldn’t be intrigued?
And with rare exception, that’s what based means… Real, authentic, harsh reality…not a fake product put out by corporations trying to control your consumption and thoughts… Thus is the rise of the term on the dissident right, so defined by opposition to the polite lies of political correctness and “Decent” people, so enamored of the idea of forbidden truth hidden behind a veil of acceptable institutions declaring taboos, and excommunicating heretics…
The dissident right is a movement defined by overwrought Matrix metaphors, offering “red pills” and allusion to the mind melting, sanity destroying, forbidden truths that animate the horror of H.P. Lovecraft… that one’s unflinching takes might come from straight from the Necronomicon, or a related text…
Of course the metaphor for authenticity, the one word term of endearment these online cultures would reach for, is that of smoking cocaine in the most hazardous and health destroying of manners.
Notice also the prominent left wing dismissal: the criticism/accusation of “Toxicity” that certain ideas or people or works are off limits because of some critical buildup of negative traits, is directly dismissed via the praise of Basedness.
To be based is to have embraced authenticity, the unfiltered, undiluted vein of truth, ideological purity, aesthetic perfectly… with the ruthless and reckless pursuit of potency, without concern for any toxic after-effects.
Thus you see in the very online counter-cultural scene an diminutive affection for terrorists and extremists who escalate to violence: the fondness for “Uncle Ted” Kaczynski, or Killdozer, or countless other Absolute Mad Lads… to borrow Dankula’s term.
Are these figures being praised? Not exactly… it’s more they embody an aesthetic ideal uncompromised, such as the light brigade charging into the jaws of death, the samurai who commits seppuku, the duelist who stands and receives fire, the kamikaze who pitches downwards… advisable? Not really. Ethical? Extremely Debatably. Daring? Undeniably. Insincere? Impossibly.
These figures produce such cults of personality because in a world full of LARPers, posers, feds, snitches, grifters, and bots… they’re the undeniable genuine article.
the claims of the “New right” (or is it the “New new right”?) to be the new counter-culture is indeed quite plausible because they embrace this no limits aesthetic ideals of counter-culture. Indeed embracing the cost and consequence of “Toxicity” as evidence of authenticity. It is punk in a way very little associated with the old counter-culture still is.
But then what of The Cringe?
“Cringe” is a shortening, linguistic adaptation of “cringeworthy” and early forums that assembled cringeworthy media, moments, etc. To cringe, but also to sneer … or atleast debatably… the cultural record for this development is less clear.
However the usage of cringe is far more straightforward than that of “Based”, whereas “based” almost represents a new sentiment… A blend of the now dead “hardcore” with a sense of self-destructive political/social authenticity, in purposeful opposition to more acceptable or even stable attributes… Cringe would be recognizable to your great grandparents, it so immediately steps into the shoes of Cringeworthy… Though why their online descendants find each other so cringeworthy would probably be a mystery those ancestors.
Indeed this is the true mystery of the coinage… why Cringe? Out of all the sentiments that could take off and take on a linguistic primacy? in 2022 we do not say “That’s so pity” for pitiful… or “How Inee” For inept… why do we not denounce our opponents as “Mediocre” like Miller’s Immortan Joe? obviously you say these and they lack the magic… but what lent “Cringe” such magic?
And how is “Cringeworthy” the opposite of Free”Based” cocaine?!
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The bluepill and the redpill are conceived as opposites, like yin and yang, their primary attributes are that they are not the other… What does it mean to be yin in a world where there is no yang? What is right if there is no wrong? How meaningless is “Taking the red pill” if there had been no “blue pill” offered?
Based and Cringe however are two completely independent concepts evolved completely separately… that somehow merged into being opposites…
Why?
How?
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If one were to naively conceive of an opposite to ‘based” one might take the sentiment it is meant to express… that of unconstrained authentic realness, and reverse it, the constrained inauthentic fakeness… one might think the opposite of “The Based” might be the corporate, or the Politically correct, or the teachers pet… indeed corpo, and PC are insults in the space… but they haven’t risen to be the opposite of based.
Based is often paired with “red-pilled” and indeed to be “blue-pilled” has many of these connotations…that of the willing submission to corporate PC authority…the choice to be comfortable believing obvious lies as opposed to uncomfortable believing the truth.
Likewise we could try to reverse the metaphor… What is the opposite of free-basing cocaine? One might say consuming healthy things you are told to: therefore we might have expected “based” to be opposed by a food metaphor… Like Broccoli, or lettuce. “I thought he was based, but he’s so painfully broc”. And indeed there is a food “metaphor” (Synecdoche?) quite prominent in the space…
Soy.
The (debated) estrogenic effects already made it meme material… it’s literally zapping the manliness from you. But combined with the environmentalist push to eat more soy based foods and less (manly) red meats and animal products, plus the (suspected cope) by left wingers insisting not only were soy, tofu, and other “plant based” vegetarian or vegan products better for the environment, it was supposed to be healthier… and you had a perfect storm of self-righteous mockablility and ready parody.
The jokes about “soy boys” followed by the spread of memes about the faux excited painfully non-threatening “Soy face”…
And then of course there is the Soyjak, the iconic meme art and which depicts the stereotypical victim of soy consumption:
the Soyjak has evolved to become a catchall meme for all the mediocrities of the weak emasculated, soy-ified, modern male. Forsaking his own puberty the Soyjack is Invariably obsessed with marvel movies, Nintendo games, and other artifacts of childhood; eternally a grade-school student he is credulously trusting of the lowest tier of credible “sources” so long as they have official sanction (though completely mistrusting of primary sources); he is overjoyed at culinary possibilities of whatever “plant based” processed crap fast food franchises announce. As well he is “ally” extraordinaire ever keen to assist poor racialized communities, champion the disabled, aide the trans in their struggle, or defend the honor of feminist girl-bosses who don’t need no man to protect them; and invariably a great fan of fictional girl-bosses, always ready with a “slay queen!”, not so much out of sexual titillation (though yes), but more that out hormonal and ethical emasculated impotence, he cannot experience the vicarious joy of masculine power unless it is displaced onto some put upon teenage fictional queen, or a trans woman, or a black man.
the Soyjak is of course contrasted with the chad… whether the now rare “chad Thundercock”, the groomed blonde and suave “YesChad”, or the Olympian elemental zen of the barely human “GigaChad”… the Soyjak is contrasted with various visions of “based'“ ideal masculinity one invariably conceived as more manly, more muscular, more mature, less concerned with the feelings of others, more truthful, and more attractive.
The Soyjak reads Rowling’s Harry Potter, the Chad reads Caesar’s Gallic War; the Soyjak watches Marvel movies, the Chad watches Master and Commander; The Soyjak eats plant based meat alternatives, the Chad eat venison he hunted and butchered himself., or a few dozen raw eggs when he needs a meal on the go.
It is an entire memetic ethos of what masculinity is and what the modern post-male has failed to be, a rejection of 30+ years of marketed consumption habits, if not the entire postwar method of upbringing (divorced as it is from athleticism, ancient languages, and the expectations of empire).
Chads harkens to this classicism, creating a style somewhere between Greek statuary and the photography of Leni Riefenstahl.
And yet this is not the essence of based and cringe.
We know it’s not because Chad and Soyjak are its own separate mode of comparison that’s not linguistically interchangeable, we do not speak of the Chad vs. the Cringe, or only rarely of the Based vs. the Soy…
Much as it might have been convenient to contrast the contemptible consumption of soy with the based consumption of crack, which unlike soy “health food” does actually lead to weight loss, but to say that is the essence of based and cringe…
We cannot. The Cringe remains unexplained.
What is a Cringe?
There is of course the most basic physiological explanation… the physical sensation one experiences when having a tooth pulled or experiencing extreme discomfort… which some of the more sensitive experience in moments of profound embarrassment.
But it is of course the social or sympathetic cringe that animates our discussion, to say something is cringe or cringeworthy, is to imply that one is or almost could, cringe in embarrassment for them.
This fundamentally empathetic character of the insult is interesting… to “Cringe” for another is to imagine oneself in their shoes… to feel a vicarious discomfort and pain out of sympathy for them.
And yet it has become an insult.
This is bizarre.
To insult someone is almost always to withdraw sympathy, to distance one’s self from the other:
If i call you an idiot, I am drawing a contrast…Implicitly stating that I am both smarter and better than you (Correctly in both instances).
To call you ugly is to imply I am the more beautiful (naturally)
To invoke a racial or sexual slur is to imply that one is racially or sexually superior. (which is why I so rarely feel the need to… the dominance of Twitter CatGirls is so readily apparent.)
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And yet to state something is cringe is to state one is sympathizing on some level with the subject. One is emotionally in their shoes, one is feeling vicarious embarrassment, one could imagine a younger version of themselves or some conceivable version of themselves in that position… One does not cringe at Hitler or Stalin, one cringes at the partygoer who opens their mouth with the worst take on Hitler or Stalin.
This actually accords with many of the paradoxes of internet culture… Fake corporate aesthetics are despised and derided by online culture… yet American Psycho Patrick Bateman is memed and celebrated. It is not cringe to be a psychopathically immoral embodiment of corporate and consumer hypocrisy, as long as one is consciously a psycho, consciously being hypocritical… to knowingly invoke the HR magic words sheerly for cynical career advancement. What’s cringe is to earnestly believe the false slogans… to earnestly believe Amazon cares about the fullness of your gender expression.
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Thus the casual racism, Hitler jokes, and ironic sexism that permeates so many online spaces.
It is a Shibboleth, something corporate grifters, careerist establishment types, and Beatles listening Boomers can’t imitate. A mode of humor that immediately reveals one to not be in the thralls of bourgeoise respectability, petty yuppie ambitions, pop culture praxis, or internalized grade school moralism.
To what extent these 20 something educated coastal urbanites have ever even experienced a “trad” society they can react back to is beside the point, their cottage-core fascism or Eastern Orthodox Theocratic ambitions are aesthetics first, ideologies…Nth?
But the cringe!? What about the Cringe!?
Just as it’s not cringe to be knowingly hypocritical, knowingly defrauding, knowingly putting on the face of corporate power… The essence of Cringe is unknowingly believing it…
Well, To bring things full circle with the drugs metaphor... Freebasing crack was latched onto as the linguistic shorthand for uncompromised authenticity. Keeping it real and seeing things to their most logical conclusion without concern for toxicity.
What is the opposite? It is not Broccoli which is actually good for you, nor is it even soy which claims fraudulently be good for you…
It is not even the unscrupulous drug dealer who sells bags of oregano to gullible teens telling them it’s weed, or large sugar crystals telling them it’s crack…
No.
The Essence of Cringe is the gullible teens,
Who having been defrauded and gone to smoke “weed” or “crack” for the first time, only to experience nothing, conclude not that they’ve been ripped off, but instead, in their naivety, nervousness, and willingness to believe, convince themselves that they’re high!
“Oh man it’s really hitting me!” “Man dude this is rough” “Oh damn dude that’s good shit”
That is the embarrassment the internet holds in such contempt. That is the cringeworthy behaviour and attitude the world sees in each other, a contemptible willingness to believe (either out of social insecurity, or desire to fit in, or fragile self image) what any reasonable person by rights should know is a lie.
One might compare it to the modern film goer who sees the 45th marvel film then comes away making arguments that no really this mass produced corporate product is “Art”.
to go back to an earlier iteration of this memetic dichotomy… the red pill/blue pill distinction was imperfect.
in The Matrix (in what might be the greatest scene ever put to film (seriously the cinematography and conception is brilliant)) Morpheus offers Neo the choice. He can take the blue pill, he’ll wake up in his bed and believe whatever it is that he wants to believe, or…. he can take the red pill, and find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
This is an amazing metaphor, a powerful one, used for close to two decades now as an internet shorthand for all kinds of things… the spectrum of pills that have been conceived approaches a paint catalogue.
And yet it’s imperfect… Neo can take the blue-pill and wake up and believe whatever it is he wants to believe….but he knows he took the blue pill. He knows what he chose wasn’t the truth… and he knows it more or less consciously. He knows that he knows it.
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What does it feel like to be wrong? Not to be found out to be wrong, but just going about your life being wrong… well if one truly believes what they’re wrong about, then they don’t know they’re wrong… to be wrong feels exactly like being right.
How does it feel to be cringe? Well if one is truly cringe, it feels exactly like being based.
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But wait! I hear you object: People are offered the truth all the time. The red pill/blue pill scene is analogous. And Neo didn’t go about thinking he knew the truth before being offered the red pill… he was riddled with doubts, he felt deep in his bones that something was off or wrong about the world and what he believed…
The “Blue Pilled” the “Cringe” they surely know deep in the backs of their minds that something is off, that their sincerest beliefs don’t line up with what they wanted to be… that what they’re smoking isn’t overwhelming their senses with its sheer basedness like they’d imagined or hoped.
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To which I say: Oh really dear reader. And is there not someone out there utterly convinced you are refusing the truth that they’re offering? Is there not some gnawing disappointment between vision and reality in your ideological and Aesthetic commitments? Are you so overjoyed with what your politics has done for you? So enamoured of the music genres you listen to? Are you so consistently blown away by the shows and movies you watch? so overjoyed with your style and lifestyle that it has matched or exceeded every dream you had of it?
Or like so much does disappointment and cope mark your life… the acceptance of the mediocre as “Good enough”…
Cringe is a biting insult because so much of everything in our lives are so compromised and marked by mere acceptance and coping.
So many young graduates sacrifice their lifestyle, hobbies, dreams, and ethics to chase the wealthy dreams of becoming their own Patrick Bateman…. only to wind up making 50-80k working some miserable job they hate. How many really get out of their hobbies or social groups what they hope to get out? How many “bingeable” shows were actually worth the 10 hours put in? How many movies the price of admittance?
And as for politics…
How many people in 2015-16 though Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump were the worst possible candidate their party could put forward… only to reverse within a month to defending them as the best hope for civilization? How many of those anti-establishment conservatives kept defending Trump even as he was propping up the vaccine and authoritarian COVID responses as a marker of his quality leadership? How many of those Hillary voters who defended her as the most qualified candidate in history then voted for Biden, a Candidate barely clinging to consciousness?
No faction in American life is at all pleased with their candidates or the state of their political movements… The Socialists would much prefer Sanders, or better a socialist who won’t endorse Hillary, The conspiracists would much rather vote for Alex Jones than Trump, The Catho-cons would much rather vote for Rod Dreher or someone with real faith, the Woke would much rather vote for Ta-Nehisi Coates, the establishment democrats would much rather vote for Gregory Hayes, the establishment republicans still mourn John McCain, and the libertarians… Well they’ve been having their Bolshevik v. Menshevik civil war… but the Mises Libertarians would much rather vote for Ron Paul, and the moderate libertarians would much rather vote for Hillary Clinton (that’s not a joke Bill Weld endorsed Hillary Clinton when he was running on a ticket against her)
Meanwhile others will say they eschew organized party politics or voting at all… that they pursue a political of the personal, and seek to live best at their small scale… Is this wisdom? or mere cope at their impotence?
Yet others pursue extremist lifestyles… The environmentalist Freegans who only eat what comes out of dumpsters, or the extreme libertarian Agorists who live only via counter-economics (Black market activity (mostly drug dealing))… are these the truly authentic punk lifestyles? Or are the ideologies mere cope for being poor freaks with addictions to feed? Are their literal crack addict lifestyles the essence of based? Or is their declining dentistry literal cringe?
Can one be based if they pursue their ideals with less than the upmost ardor? If they accept anything less than the ultimate? Allow any cope or seethe into their existence? Did the last beautiful based soul die in that compound in Abbottabad?
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We all imagine ourselves based… we all imagine we are uniquely insightful into the aesthetic, social, political, and economic course of global history… that we are all with, and hip to, “IT”.
But there’s the rub… for in that base’ed dream what cringe may come?
Like Abe Simpson are we doomed to discover that they’ve changed what “it” is? That what we are with, is no longer it?
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Dear reader, ask not for whom the based cringe, they cringe for thee.
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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
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I would argue that the opposite of based is not cringe but pozzed, as pozzed is an affirmative description of the identity. But perhaps that merits another column.
Where in the world did you get "Based Heads"? I'm older, and I can actually remember when free-basing cocaine became a thing, I had a friend who went down that path. It was never "Based Heads", there were "baseheads", the term having been immortalized in one of the better Public Enemy songs of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyR09SP9qdA&ab_channel=PublicEnemyVEVO.
That said, I'm also old enough to remember when "Based" because a thing, and it never had anything to do with "baseheads", it was short for "opinions and views based in facts and logic".