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by Esther Yi

So the problem with today’s cultural excretions, according to the Music Professor, wasn’t the erosion of an artist’s idiosyncrasy but the insufficiency of that erosion. This was not limited to the arts. The spiritual vacuity of our consumption and conversation, the daily torture of justifying our ethical fraudulence, the ever intensifying yearning for love in a world that systematically handicapped our very capacity for it—amidst this desolation, how could one not think that the solution was to retreat behind the walls of the self and become utterly singular? This was why people clung to markers of identity as if they were differentiating, when the mere fact that there already existed a name for this difference meant it wasn’t differentiating enough. No, the perverse cunning of the human spirit manifested itself in submission to the erosion of all categories, a descent into namelessness, homelessness, nothingness. Only then did one have a chance at achieving universality.