Cool tactic: dissatisfaction with the world --> the world is bullshit--> be cool, don't be part of the system, reject the system.
Religious tactic: dissatisfaction with the world --> the world is immoral --> focus on the immaterial world, the spiritual world, don't be part of the system, reject the system.
Cool's mechanism of social cohesion, the counterbalance to its distancing effect, involves sharing knowledge of some secret that is denied to members of respectable or mainstream society. This was the original meaning of that synonym for Cool, 'hip', which was used as in 'I'm hip to that.' The content of this shared secret may be many different things, from the appreciation of a certain style of music, to predilection for a particular illegal drug, participation in crime, or some forbidden sexual practice. However, in the background there is always the hint of a bigger, seldom-verbalized, more abstract secret, namely the perceived hypocrisy of 'straight' society. Cool people share a belief that society's taboos have no moral force for them, and that these taboos are in any case regularly broken by even its most supposedly respectable members.
This big secret has many facets which encompass all the most important aspects of existence. Sex: even the President of the USA, even your preacher, even your parents do it. Family: 'They flick you up, your mum and dad.' Money: everyone has their price, they'll all try to rip you off. Politics: the good guys never win, all politicians are liars. Crime: the only real crime is getting caught. Drugs: they tell us drugs are nasty, but drugs feel good, so 'they' are either liars or hypocrites. Death: we're all going to die, so what's the use of worrying. This quality of worldly knowingness is absolutely central to the Cool personality, which always wants to know everything and loathes secrecy, concealment and duplicity. In essence then the psychological core of Cool is self-invention coupled to a hyper-acute awareness of such self-invention by other people. It amounts to the creation of a calm psychic mask to hide inner disturbance, whether rage at racist mistreatment, anxiety in the face of competition or merely a furious urge for sexual conquest. It's no coincidence that Cool became the dominant attitude in a Hollywood where self-invention is a way of life, and this supplies us with a plausible mechanism for the reproduction and dissemination of Cool. Celebrities invent an unattainably attractive Cool personality, an image which makes insecure teenage fans feel so inadequate that adopting the Cool pose is in turn their only way of coping with their enhanced anxiety. Repeat ad infinitum.
The self-invented nature of Cool also explains its profound distrust of authority, which can often amount to a unilateral declaration of independence from social responsibility. All society's major institutions: government, the courts, the police, schools, hospitals etc. - require that their agents be accorded a degree of professional dignity in order to function. This involves a certain 'suspension of disbelief'. You know, for example, that a high-court judge is a human being like yourself, who eats, sleeps, excretes and copulates, but that knowledge is to be put aside when you stand before the court. The Cool persona refuses to suspend disbelief, seeing authority figures as just mask-wearers like itself, and the result is a loss of respect for authority figures that has been a notable feature of most democratic societies over the past decade (and is the source of much disquiet among social conservatives). As an example, one could cite the weakening of deference toward the royal family and House of Lords in the UK.
This inability to suspend disbelief along with an insistence on uncovering all of the world's sins also constitute Cool's Achilles heel as a strategy. Anxiety may be deflected by refusing to play the game, but insisting on uncovering all the most gruesome aspects of reality merely breeds new anxieties - which are often more virulent and less rooted in the everyday, and hence less tractable. The results can be frankly pathological, and this is where we should look for explanations of the love affair between Cool and violence, which reaches its creepy consummation in high-school massacres and flirtations with satanism and neo-Nazism. On the other hand it is possible to relearn how to suspend disbelief, to eschew irony and repudiate hedonism, hence the world-wide resurgence of religious and political fundamentalisms which offer various forms of faith, in place of detachment, as the required psychic shield. From the Islamic Taliban to the Christian 'right to life' movements, these are the sworn enemies of Cool.
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