The Gauntlet of Critique

This was a short essay I wrote for Industrial Park in March of this year. It's a little constrained by the 500 word limit, and I'd change a few things if I rewrote it now, but here it is.

We've weaponized critique beyond its purpose. What began as a tool for understanding art and discourse has bloated into a Gauntlet of Critique, built layer by layer in the crucible of modern education.

The Gauntlet of Critique is a memetic virus that has mutated and spread through universities, chat rooms, narrative therapy, storytelling tropes, and celebrity culture. Platforms like YouTube increasingly shift away from original work toward easily repeatable commentary about commentary, where the act of critiquing failure becomes more safe than creation itself in a deluge of 24/7 trivia. The result isn't just 'slop' - it's a deadening fog of ironic distance and snark.

It's naïve at best to say that social media caused this virus. The shift began earlier in the 20th century as our culture transformed from valuing steadfast character to prizing magnetic personality - a change that turned inner worth into something that must be constantly proven. We take personality tests to assure ourselves that we like what we like, watch charisma courses that turn socialization into mind games, and attempt to trip to ego death as if it's a certification. The perfect substrate for this gauntlet is one where authenticity is measured by confidence.

In an ecosystem where authenticity becomes performance, we've developed an arsenal of psychological terms to critique those who fail to perform correctly - none more pervasive or misused than 'narcissism'. Any analysis of those who possess this black mark states that deep-down they actually don't "have" self-esteem. There is an obvious double bind at play here - so-called narcissists have "grandiose self images that don't consider others" yet simultaneously "don't love themselves enough because they're too obsessed with how they're seen." Such circular logic reveals the deeper absurdity - there is no ruler for measuring the constantly moving storm of someone's inner world. Instead of correcting the concretely harmful actions, decisions, and behaviors one would hope to address, the term has become nothing more than another tool of critique for its own sake - measuring nothing but condemning absolutely.

The world that produces such an unproductive term is one that endlessly compares the abstract and artistic. We need critique - it's the breath of art, the pulse of growth, the way ideas evolve. However, we've turned this vital process into an impulse that jumps to deconstructing the formless at the drop of a hat in fear of being cringe. Everybody is a critic when it becomes the default language to address the world. The madness of grading escapes the nightmares we have of being in school again to be applied to people themselves.

The only way to end the Gauntlet of Critique is to seal the monoculture that haunts modern education away. Change to cultivate, but don't accept critique only to fit a mold. Instead, balkanize joyfully so that we may replace this Tower of Babel with a forest.