There has never been a better time in human history to be stupid
Alright that's enough Odyssey. Let's skip ahead to the next fucking thing. Unless you didn't read this piece yet then fine go do that but afterwards we're done.
Today Gareth Watkins returns to write about what a great time it is to be a hedonistic dumb guy. Even the stock market is for dumb guys now. He writes:
The highs and lows of gambling still exist, just as the visceral thrills of sex and drugs are still there for men like that, and it’s almost always men, but the context they appear in means that there’s no actual pleasure available. You aren’t Dean Martin in the MGM Grand putting it all on black with a showgirl on each arm, you’re some guy with an email job on an extremely hot leather couch taking out another mortgage so you can buy 0.88494844 of elon.moon.coin. Structurally there is no way to “do anything else except pursue pleasure,” and, structurally, there is no pleasure in pleasure.
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He previously wrote for Hell World about the proliferation of AI-generated "deepfake" pornographic images and the domineering masculinity of the "traditional" conservative family structure.
Luke O’Neil
The child of conservative parents grows up seeing that their father’s power is intimately connected to cruelty. And so he must be cruel to maintain his power and he must maintain his power in order to continue to enjoy cruelty. Whether that cruelty takes the form of emotional neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse, a female figure is almost always close, able to help but unwilling. When the conservative child is an adult, he will continue the cycle. It’s hard to imagine a world without power, and harder still to exist in this one while renouncing a simple way to have one’s needs met. That could mean expecting free domestic labour from a woman maintaining a “traditional” household, or feeling powerful by hurting somebody weaker than you. The child of conservative parents has no choice but to Be A Man, and will grow to fetishize male power and cruelty while despising the entire gender that failed to protect him from it.
After that a bunch more from me including a couple of new poems I really like, the saddest most beautiful thing I've seen all week, new song recommendations, and more News to Get Pissed off At.
There is no pleasure in pleasure
by Gareth Watkins
There has never been a better time in human history to be stupid.
Throughout much of our species’ existence it was required to have a certain level of baseline canniness. A subsistence farmer had no choice but to learn when to plant certain crops or what to do in the case of a failing harvest. Hunter-gatherers needed to know which plants were edible and which animal calls represented predators and prey. Elites were not immune either. Roman Senators, Samurai retainers and Borgia nobles all had to master the complex social systems of their milieu. One wrong gesture, one misplaced honorific, and they might be killed – often horribly.
Over time that has changed. At the start of modernity the world became much more hospitable to hooting morons. Advances in farming and medicine meant that many more had access to a safety net previously only thinkable for royalty. And like them the average person could become complacent. With mass populations came mass culture, and a good part of that mass culture was necessarily pitched to the lowest common denominator. In recent memory – in my recent memory – there was very clear dumb guy canon: nu-metal, the films of the Farrelley and Wayans brothers, most video games, Insane Clown Posse, wrestling. Today you have, as Dan Ozzi noted recently in Hell World, “unregulated brain pills, gas station energy drinks, Pornhub gooning, vape tricks, Worldstar videos, rap battles, Deadpool humor, and a certain intangible spiritual quality we’ll call Jokerfication.”
That’s all certainly true, but the spectrum of modern stupidity doesn’t stop at guys in Tapout hoodies and Crocs. Today even the stock market is for dumb guys. There’s quantum physics for idiots.
When I use words like “stupid” and “dumb” I’m not referring to an absence of the vague property we call “intelligence.” I don’t believe in IQ testing as being predictive of anything but how well a person will do on an IQ test, and I don’t think that a person can be either smart or “stupid.” There are some ferociously intelligent people, Slavoj Zizek for instance, who are just as “stupid” as somebody who can’t discuss Hegel and Lacan. One of the few ways to make good money with a philosophy degree is to pretend that you are teaching morality to Large Language Models. “Stupid” here instead functions as a shorthand for a habit of mind that I want to call Epistemic Hedonism. That is, using whatever intellectual capacities one has – maybe a little, maybe a lot, it doesn’t matter – not to try to better understand the world, but purely for one’s own base amusement.