We've got a utopian situation here

The Jersey Shore has a sort of communal set-up, so let's think of it as a utopian communist experiment. Like any utopian political project, all material considerations are provided for, and conflict resolution usually amounts to one or another participant bellowing, "Bring it on, bitch!," in the way that only the most committed idealist can supply. There are communal living spaces, a communal copulation corner, and, as US custom would have it, the communal Cadillac Escalade. Marx called the earliest human societies "primitive communism," but even they were sophisticated enough not to endorse petroleum-powered entertainment systems, preferring what we would today call "running." Don't plume where you eat is an important lesson for contemporary utopians.

I'd rather live communally with Jenni "Jwoww" than someone like myself. It's not the fake breasts. It's that there's less pretense about other things that I actually care about. It's like if you put two people in a room who both had a lot of pretense about their breasts, there would be this competitive pressure to be all about the breasts. So when it comes to someone like myself, who operates with too much pretense along the lines of what he is about, don't put me in a room with another person like that, because we will see through each other and bicker about foolish things nobody else cares about. The easiest way to identify two pretentious people is when they bicker at length about things nobody else cares about.

It's also good from a dialectical perspective to experience life not as sameness but as difference and contrast. Personally, I don't like to use the word "dialectical" because I'm not sure I understand what it means. But I get the point about having different tendencies come together as a synthesis. In other words, you can listen to someone like Noam Chomsky talk, and that's interesting. On the other hand, if you put Noam Chomsky in the communal hot tub with Ronnie and The Situation, you'd get a lot more information than you ever could by just letting one dude talk. Now that I think of it, this is why the Q&A portion of any Chomsky-type lecture is always the most interesting, at least for me. There are more Situations in the audience than there are in Chomsky's brain.

I guess the whole point of this is to say that if you are one way, don't try to surround yourself with a bunch of people who are the same way, as if more meaningful differences won't surface naturally. It is tempting to believe that how we identify, our pretenses about ourselves, provide us with the information we need to distinguish between allies and adversaries at first glance, just because we look for a "match" in others. No wonder this formula so often fails, when all we are doing is comparing pretenses! What we believe about ourselves and what other people believe about themselves will never reveal anything like that which is discovered through the work of real relationships.