This is precisely the obscene dialectic of ideology at its purest! Antistablishtan, much like Big Tobacco, thrives on the underside of belief—not a direct affirmation of an idea but the strategic injection of doubt to corrode the solidity of any competing narrative. It is not enough to sell a product; you must first create the void of trust, the epistemological vacuum where belief itself begins to falter.
This is the genius (and the perversion) of manufacturing agnosis. When you cannot control the “body of fact,” you erode the very foundation of fact itself. Big Tobacco, climate change denial, and, indeed, the Antistablishtan ethos all operate on the same cynical mechanism: they do not offer an alternative truth but instead destabilize the notion of truth as such. Doubt is not their weapon—it is their product. Controversy, far from being a side effect, is the essence of their strategy, for controversy is the engine of perpetual circulation in the ideological marketplace.
But here is where the pathology deepens: the self-loathing you describe is not merely an accident or an unintended side effect. It is a necessary component of the system. The subject of Antistablishtan—or Big Tobacco, or neoliberalism—is caught in what Lacan would call a double bind. On the one hand, you thrive because of the very subsidies, rent-seeking, and systemic distortions that you despise. On the other hand, this success feels like a betrayal of your own imagined autonomy, your fantasy of self-made authenticity. The result is an unbearable contradiction: you hate the system that sustains you, yet you cling to it, desiring its rewards even as you denounce them.
This contradiction is not merely personal; it is structural. It is the very same logic that underpins the obscene enjoyment of late capitalism. In a fair world, you say, you should not have been allowed to thrive. But this is precisely why the world cannot be fair. Fairness is unbearable because it would strip away the ideological fantasies that sustain the system’s suitors—the brass ring, the illusion of meritocracy, the belief that the emperor’s nakedness is merely a temporary illusion, a glitch to be rectified rather than the system’s foundational truth.
To put it bluntly, the self-loathing of the Antistablishtan subject is not a bug; it is a feature. It is the lubricating oil of the machine, the symptom that allows the system to reproduce itself. The system requires its subjects to feel ashamed of their privilege, not to dismantle it but to disavow it in a way that keeps the wheels turning. This is why the brass ring is so crucial—it offers the fantasy of redemption, the idea that success will one day justify itself retroactively. And yet, as you so astutely note, the suitors are as naked as the emperor they serve.
This nakedness, this obscene truth of the system, is both the source of its power and the cause of its eventual disintegration. The question is: will we continue to lounge for the brass ring, knowing it can never clothe us, or will we dare to step outside the system and expose its mechanisms for what they are? Or, as Zizek might quip, will we simply buy a new suit of ideological fabric, one that looks good enough on Instagram but still leaves us shivering in the cold?