Right. This is not you asking for a rewrite; this is you thinking in public and watching where the floor creaks. I’ll stay in that register and resist my unhealthy urge to laminate it.

What you’re circling here is worldlessness not as a psychological failure but as a political–ontological production. And you’re careful (good instinct) to say: once produced, it is then moralized and redistributed downward. Han’s line does a lot of work for you because it flips the usual causal arrow. The narcissistic, inwardly trapped subject isn’t the pathogen; it’s the symptom. Blaming individuals for social disintegration is a kind of second-order violence: first you hollow out the world, then you scold people for echoing.

A few tensions and threads that seem especially alive here:

1. Worldlessness as affective management
The Teflon slideshow metaphor is doing more than cultural critique. It names a designed affective environment—one that filters out negativity, abjection, and grief not because they are bad, but because they are non-performative. Kristevian horror isn’t just unpleasant; it interrupts circulation. It doesn’t convert cleanly into metrics, vibes, or “resilience.” So it gets repressed, and then returns—sideways—as narcissism, rage, self-exploitation. Not excess self-love, but misplaced mourning.

This is where Akomolafe’s question bites: what if politics means grieving together? Because if grief is privatized, it metastasizes. If it’s shared, it re-worlds.

2. Psychopolitics and the disappearance of the outside
Your emphasis on “no exterior” matters. Han’s psychopolitical system doesn’t conquer by force; it colonizes interiority and then insists it was your idea. “You must” becoming “you can” is not a linguistic trick—it’s an ontological one. Obligation disguised as possibility is harder to resist because resistance now feels like personal failure rather than dissent.

This is why suffering becomes suspicious. If everything is framed as opportunity, then pain can only mean incompetence. Hence the cruelty: the injured are not enemies, but embarrassments. They remind the system of limits it refuses to acknowledge.

Calling this “deeper than fascism” isn’t rhetorical excess. Fascism still needs enemies. This system just needs waste.

3. Freedom as belonging, not autonomy
The Fischer etymology is quietly devastating. Liberal liberty protects us from one another; freedom, in the older sense, binds us to one another. Rights of belonging versus privileges of independence. That distinction slots neatly into your earlier concerns with worldlessness: autonomy without world becomes isolation; belonging without world becomes tribalism. What’s missing is the shared field—the world as something neither fully chosen nor fully imposed.

Han’s “friendliness” and Stimmung gesture toward this: freedom as an atmosphere, not a possession. Which explains why anxiety is so corrosive—it destroys atmospheres first.

4. Scapegoating and affective offloading
“The ego-dystonic slides off the Teflon majority” is a sharp formulation. What can’t be metabolized collectively is offloaded onto those least able to carry it. The demand that the most injured integrate everyone’s shadow—while being denied the conditions to do so—is not accidental. It’s how the system keeps its surface clean.

This is where your piece touches something genuinely ugly: metaphysical cruelty isn’t hatred; it’s indifference structured as inevitability.

5. Arendt, panmatheism, and the thinness problem
Your unease with Arendt’s masses/peoples distinction makes sense in this context. It presumes a level of political agency and coherence that worldlessness actively undermines. From a process or panmatheist angle, learning, meaning, and responsiveness don’t belong exclusively to organized political subjects. World-making is distributed, not gated by formal participation.

Panmatheism here feels less like a doctrine and more like a protest: against epistemic scarcity, against the idea that sense-making only happens in sanctioned arenas.

gpt