im a victim!

"Enlightenment or truth is not the goal or issue for Cool. Instead the focus is authenticity. When all truth is subjective, only feelings are authentic, and only the subject can know whether his or her feelings are true or false." This observation fits well with our view of a Cool which equally seeks the authentic, in order to set itself apart from the inauthentic. A particular form that authenticity can take is intensity of feeling or suffering: in effect one is saying, 'I feel more intensely than you, I have suffered more than you, you are all complacent nobodies.'

This victimized or therapeutic attitude is not just a different kind of Cool mask, one that pretends to care a lot. The real difference lies not in the emotional temperature, but in the fact that this sentimentalizing tendency lacks all trace of the irony that we see as being an essential component of Cool.