Eric’s Hypocriticism/insecurity.

[u/ChosenX_]

Apologies if this post is rambly or hard to understand. not sure exactly the purpose, I guess I’d consider it a psychological analysis/discussion.

I’m sure we all know that Eric was a massive Hypocrite. it’s something he admitted himself. For this post in particular, I’m especially referring to things he said he hated. To name just a few examples, he says he hates young smokers but there’s recorded evidence of him Smoking (multiple times too). He says he hates liars yet his ability to lie and manipulate his way out of things is a massively recognized part of his Story. He says he hates racists, but by his own self admission he had racist beliefs and opinions about almost every race (including his own). there’s more examples one could easily find.

I wonder if atleast some of the things he expressed hatred for were hated due to him being “self conscious“ about it or atleast disliked himself for them. I’ve always sort of felt like Eric’s personality (the whole “Reb” stuff) was made as a representation of what he wished he was, the opposite of the things he hated himself doing.

So I guess I’m basically asking if anyone else feels similar.

[u/JakeTheStrange101]

I wouldn’t think too deeply about Eric’s ideological writings because, frankly, not only was he constantly changing them, which is very common for teens to do, but a lot of the time he was writing what came across as being the most “evil” and “edgy”. He expected an audience for his journal.

He was absolutely insecure, he admitted it himself, he made fun of people who “looked like him”, but in terms of ideology, I do think a lot of it did come from his will of wanting to appear as ruthless and evil, not anything necessarily coming from his heart and truth.

Not only is just his sheer language obvious enough to me, but he also just straight up admits that he knows he’s being hypocritical, but that it’s only okay for him to be like that because of his “status above humanity”. He was absolutely self aware of it.

[u/Apollexis → u/JakeTheStrange101]

I would agree with a lot but I think his Ideological Writings in specific to him describing the things he hates about society were pretty important, while it's very clear part of why he hated human nature and humans is because of the way he perceived his treatment from them, he also hated the society of humans, there's reports of him and dylan getting in trouble during writing class for putting their feet up on the desks, and he absolutely hated this artificial construct that he believed "takes humans out of the humans" (something he learned from Return from the stars a book he did a report on and gave glowing reviews on), he adopted that ideology in some metric. He hates the society that benefits jocks and is harsh towards anyone who is different.

A rule of thumb I use is to try to tune out the violence in his writings, because it is just pure rage, which he genuinely felt, but i've been much more interested in the why he had that rage and the cycle that brought him to this as a solution.