This conversation (about this interview)? It looks like those comments got eaten, I guess that’s one point in favour of being able to view the whole conversation including deleted parts after the fact.
Personally, I think Crumb shows a bit more self-awareness; he’s honest about the fact that he’s a mess and his views aren’t correct, just his own opinion and the result of different damaging experiences. He’s not a role model, but I like an interview like that where someone is open and specific about negative feelings - it takes away some of the power if you can identify where they’re coming from.
I’ve just lived in enough different cultures in my life that when I see a large number of terrible people in a culture, most of me is wondering what made them like this. Honestly, some of the worst men I’ve met have been Americans (although there are plenty of good people there too). I knew some American men in China who had so little self-awareness and such a casually exploitative attitude towards women (especially Chinese women) that they were basically sociopathic. Not by nature, it was obviously a learned cultural attitude. One of these guys (who I had the pleasure of sharing an apartment with) ended up admitting to me that he had serious problems and asked for help. This isn’t just an issue of mental illness, and in other countries I’ve seen much less of this attitude.
Crumb points out the particularly American “extreme isolation, alienation, loneliness” which affected him and his brother, and I think he’s right. I do feel sorry for people like this - they are harming other people, but in spite of their wealth and privilege they are often fundamentally miserable and depressed people who hate themselves. I think this obsession with sex as the solution is part of the problem - humans need much more than this and no amount of sex or objects will satisfy these basic needs that they don’t even seem to recognise.
