a follower from abroad recently observed a very distinctively american disinterest in even the most meager historical accounts of the origins of various ideas, and I admit I have been thinking about this constantly ever since
why not just impose your own cursory prosthesis of origin on a concept like emotional labor? why acknowledge any of hundreds of books written about something like "neoliberalism" when you can just say it means nothing more than you're experience of being called names online?
the key tell in all these debates is that the defense people take is invariably a type of projective offense: it's not you, but the people who are trying to tell you about the origins or context for an idea who are the ones "making it mean whatever you want"
I get this a lot in the guns context. people demanding things like, "Don't you believe in Natural Rights?" as though these were not just real objective things in the world, but things where, if you ever talk about their origin + meaning over time you must be simply "denying" them
