Killing Cool: Fantasy vs. Reality in American Life

by Kurt Keefner

Do you live in the real world? Many Americans don’t. “Cool” people, for example, imagine they can ride a mystical “next wave” to greater glory. Such seemingly innocuous thinking can pose serious threats to self and society. Tragedy ensues when teenagers take up smoking to be cool, presidents try to be cowboys and young men justify their cynical sexual games by invoking misinterpretations of Darwin. In eleven illuminating essays ranging across American culture, Killing Cool explores our troubling tendency to falsify reality and the self. It also offers solutions to the problems it describes, ways of re-connecting with reality and becoming who we really are. In the tradition of Allan Bloom’s "The Closing of the American Mind," Kurt Keefner brings philosophy, psychology and culture criticism to bear on syndromes we normally don’t notice but that actually permeate our lives.

260 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2014

Reviews

[Rebecca Reale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Motivated by my experience of the author as a bright, independent, and astute thinker, I recently finished reading “Killing Cool: Fantasy vs. Reality in American Life.” The book is organized as a series of essays, but they hold together as an integrated presentation of personal reflections and insightful analysis of American culture. While the book includes both autobiographical elements and appeals to philosophy and psychology, it is fundamentally about ethics, identifying and illustrating a psychological phenomenon that hampers the ability to live well, a phenomenon Keefner calls “pretenderism.” A pretender develops a false self that “starts with a moodlike feeling—call it a ‘pseudo sense of life’—which he uses to define an artificial self and which he projects onto the world in an attempt to generate a certain kind of emotion or style. In other words, where a genuine sense of life is a response to experience, a pseudo sense of life is an attempt to conjure experience.” The harm is that those pretending do not (cannot) live in reality; they see reality through the tinted glasses of their donned pseudo sense of life, typically looking to be entertained by the world rather than engaged by it. Reality may seem to them like a fantasy story and other people characters in it.

I recommend the book if the topic of authenticity sparks your interest. The book is both masterfully written and entertaining—amid the deep contemplations it prompted, I sometimes laughed aloud. While I’m generally uneasy about the potential harm of labels and psychologizing, Keefner does a decent job of avoiding these pitfalls while describing and supporting his theorized psychological phenomenon. He doesn’t preach, blame, or denigrate but offers examples, insights, and suggestions for improving self-awareness and growing in authenticity. I found myself quibbling with some specific points and examples, but overall, I found that this book expanded my perspective. Authenticity is essential to integrity and happiness—and thus to living the good life—and this book is both an invitation and a roadmap to “keeping it real.”

[Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to change the course of popular culture is always going to be an uphill battle and something of a thankless task—spitting into the wind, so to speak. But that is exactly what Kurt Keefner tries to do in his book “Killing Cool.”

Kurt Keefner thinks what he calls “Pretenderism” is an insidious and serious problem for society. Coolness is put on to satisfy the cool pretender’s ego, to create a personal fantasy world. Pretending has consequences.

Keefner defines coolness as “an attempt to achieve superiority in the realm of popular culture by means of alleged esoteric wisdom about style.”

Keefner blames coolness for substance abuse, morally compromised protagonists on TV (such as vampires), tattoos, and deviancy in politics and various arts.

“Coolness over the last few decades has been supplanting other categories of goodness in art and style such as beauty, drama, meaningfulness, depth and so forth.”

Keefner argues for a life guided by reason and striving for excellence and self-perfection rather than striving for the trappings of coolness, such as status, charisma, and power.

Keefner’s writing style is straightforward and understandable. He defines his terms in plain language. He has clearly given a great deal of thought to his theory of coolness and presents the theory clearly and concisely, with personal anecdotes and a sense of humility and humor.

My only quibble is that I wish Keefner had written more about why people are so enamored of pretending to be cool. Why is pretending to be cool so compelling? Or to put it another way, why is reality so disappointing? Apparently, many people (Keefner estimates 20% of the population are pretenders) are convinced that their fantasies are better than reality.

For those seduced by fantasy, Keefner describes antidotes for the urge to seek coolness and describes the joys of appreciating reality as it is.