Hotel Concierge

hey man there’s a hole in my head where information goes

I. 

1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3 And they said one to another: ‘Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’

5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.

7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.

9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1–9)

In Sunday School or Illustrated Classics, we are taught that God punished humanity for hubris, for daring to disobey Mesopotamian zoning laws. That’s not what it says here.

Biblical man didn’t build a tower to sneak into Heaven’s happy hour without ID. He wanted to “make a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The tower was symbolic, decorative, a community service project. It was supposed to bring people together.

And accordingly, the LORD doesn’t care about the tower, doesn’t even mention it by name. The tower is merely a tip-off that something is awry. When God descends to Earth, His complaint is,

'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.’

The Judeo-Christian capital G—o—d, robed, bearded, opinionated, deadlifts, thematically male, is the avatar of civilization, just check the year. Even so, His omnipotence is not uncontested. He knows this. You should see what He did to the guys with the golden calf. God said, “Let there will be light,” and there was light. But just as Nyx preceded Zeus, that means the darkness was already there. And the house always wins at the second law of thermodynamics.

“Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do.” God didn’t punish Homo sapiens sapiens for hubris, he launched a pre-emptive strike. “Now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” Far be it from me to psychoanalyze God. But if I’m reading the tone correctly, He did this because He was scared.

II. 

But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only.

—Bob Dylan

Everyone deserves to figure out the meaning of life at least once or twice. We’re talking late teens and early twenties, when work is too easy and finding better work too hard. Turning the post-acid feeling of cosmic oneness into a fridge-note to-do list is harder than expected, but whatever man, MWF pass/no pass. Start from the basics. Matter is math, mind is matter. Determinism except for the quantum stuff. Time is a flat circle, space is a mobius strip, morality is aesthetics and aesthetics is quantifiable. Big Bang and billiard balls of 1s and 0s colliding and uncolliding on loop. “Though existence has no inherent meaning,” you tell your ex over chamomile, “in the end, all we have is each other.” Reply: something about how all behavior is an expression of the ancestral Art that is shared by our collective unconscious. “Um, yeah,” annoyed, “I thought that was obvious.”

Ah, surprise surprise, turns out your inch and footnoted masterpiece was predicted by the Greek philosopher Fuchylus in 380 B.C.E. Like, you could have right-clicked that guy’s papyrus for synonyms. Not to mention the next twenty-three hundred years of middlebrow philosophy you somehow missed. Why did you think your reductionism was original? Even your doodles are boring. Wolfram plays coy. The rock band turns to sediment. Making a fool of yourself drunk won’t get a rise from fate and sobriety gives a hangover too. Atoms don’t touch they just brush electrons; the sky magnifies the sun onto the anthills of man. Spilled soda on the counter and cashed bowls on the kitchen table; it’s the witching hour, and some guy in an Neff beanie is asking if you have any Xanax. And the meaning of life strikes again, that sacred cosmic oneness, how strange it is to be anything at all—but just for a second. And with the wisdom of a philosopher, you reply, “Dude, I need to sleep.”

That’s when the open-mic audience would start finger-snapping and I would do a handle pull from whatever was available, probably Seagram’s. Look, we’ve all been there. And to the best of our abilities, I hope we’ve all moved on.

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. (Beyond Good & Evil)

But I also hope that you’ve kept some sympathy for homebrew creation myths. Even though one inevitably stumbles upon some version of “existence is suffering, might as well floss,” the challenge of applying vocab words to reality sometimes reveals patterns that would not otherwise be obvious.

So consider yourself warned: the unfortunately academic ideas hereafter will not take the controls you so desperately proffer, and they will not grant you an answer that does not exist. I still believe they are important.

The question is thus: why don’t we choose to be happy?

For those who doubt humanity’s anti-joy stance, look no further than the sci-fi concept of Wireheading. If in the year 20XX the Hegemony announces a Guaranteed Happiness Machine, would you use it? There’s no catch. You sign in triplicate, there’s low-volume Sinatra playing from an overhead speaker, a lab tech hooks up electrodes to your forehead, terms and conditions, agree, YES, ON. And then you feel good. As good as it is possible to feel. The machine makes heroin look like a sharpie high. The feeling it gives you isn’t mere hedonistic pleasure, it is limitless understanding, loving and being loved, progress and growth—whichever nouns or adjectives you prefer, the sum feeling is happiness. The machine never stops working and it never induces a tolerance. You can stop anytime, although no one ever does, they live in rapture while undergrads making $12.50 an hour tend to their fluids. Ninety years later, they die.

I have no doubt that some readers would hit the ON button so hard they’d break a metacarpal. Not unreasonable, if you are depressed or a hippie circa 1967. I can’t question your axioms, I’ll drop a few nickels when I pass by on Telegraph Ave. Those of you who reject suicide by Hallmark, I agree, but please note that instead of happiness, equanimity, transcendence, or any other internal state postulated as the ‘meaning of life,’ you are prioritizing something that is not a feeling at all.

A second thought experiment re: that something. Suppose that your behoodied Silicon Valley boss offers you an all-expenses-paid vacation to virtual reality paradise. This is more than a chemical high: an analysis of your preteen forum posts nudges the universe into whatever genre fiction your unconscious craves most. The VR offers you the chance to live out your dreams. Alas, for copyright reasons, any memories of the vacation will be wiped upon your return, any skills you acquired will be unlearned, and any metadata of your adventures will be destroyed. You’ll remember inhaling the sedative, then you’ll wake up with lumbar back pain to show that time has passed.

I’m more tempted by dreamland than the empty calories of wireheading, but even so I recognize that both choices are fundamentally the same: an ecstasy that leaves no trace vs. bland but tangible reality. The decision is almost binary. If you would spend a year in the Matrix, why not twenty? Why not the rest of your life?

These concerns are not theoretical.

In the study, Kahneman and colleagues looked at the pain participants felt by asking them to put their hands in ice-cold water twice (one trial for each hand). In one trial, the water was at 14C (59F) for 60 seconds. In the other trial the water was 14C for 60 seconds, but then rose slightly and gradually to about 15C by the end of an additional 30-second period.

Both trials were equally painful for the first sixty seconds, as indicated by a dial participants had to adjust to show how they were feeling. On average, participants’ discomfort started out at the low end of the pain scale and steadily increased. When people experienced an additional thirty seconds of slightly less cold water, discomfort ratings tended to level off or drop.

Next, the experimenters asked participants which kind of trial they would choose to repeat if they had to. You’ve guessed the answer: nearly 70% of participants chose to repeat the 90-second trial, even though it involved 30 extra seconds of pain. Participants also said that the longer trial was less painful overall, less cold, and easier to cope with. Some even reported that it took less time. (Summary by this website, source Thinking Fast and Slow)

Ur-Rationalist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between the experiencing self, which reacts to the bartender’s “you’ve had enough” with pain fiber shocks of disbelief, and the remembering self, which, subject to biases such as duration neglect and the peak-end rule, leaves the two star Yelp review. The cold water experiment is a brilliant demonstration of how, as in the wirehead and dreamland examples above, our remembering and experiencing selves often disagree. This should be intuitive: consider the TV series ruined by the finale, the regret that follows junk food bliss, or the bad date that turns into a comedic memory.

Except Kahneman doesn’t take his idea far enough. Consider the motivations of a suicide bomber. The experiencing self knows nothing save immediate pleasure and pain. It has no interest in martyrdom. It will only pull the trigger to end some greater agony, such as during sickness, when some elemental part of you literally does “want to die.” The remembering self is what chooses to endure the flu, since it knows from its internalized stories that all pain eventually subsides; failure of this mechanism is the cognitive basis for depression. At times, the remembering self will even coax the experiencing self into discomfort, e.g. work, in exchange for a future reward, e.g. dough. But the case of a kamikaze, the remembering self is willing to die not for its own postponed pleasure, but so that some other remembering self can look back on its behalf.

Ask any teenage boy, would you prefer an miserable life—and I mean no “life satisfaction,” no “dopaminergic reinforcement,” nothing but anhedonia and abject suffering—with a great legacy, or a happy but unremarkable stay? All he’ll have to do is point to his Nirvana t-shirt. In his own faux-hawked way, he’s continuing the sacrificial tradition of his ancestors: warriors, prophets, and parents. Any given hamartia may cut your QALYs in half, but plenty of Greeks would’ve taken an arrow to the heel in exchange for a Homeric cameo. This is why utilitarianism is for nerds. I get the need for a heuristic, fine, but the remembering self doesn’t want quality of life, it wants quality of death, and it is impossible to factor that into your calculations because nothing ends, Adrian, nothing ever ends. Your story continues postmortem on the Ship of Theseus down the River Styx, vulnerable to necrophiliacs and redeemable by eulogy. The remembering self is not bound by pleasure, it is not bound by time, it is not even bound by self.

If someone hits your hippocampus with a rock and proceeds to wipe every trace of your existence from humanity’s collective memory, then you aren’t you anymore, pick a new name and maybe stop messing with the CIA; but anything short of that and the remembering self rises up like The Thing. In every interaction worth memory, some fraction of your breath-by-breath biography is pasted into the the recipient’s memory and thus into their remembering self. The size of this interpolation varies, as does the fidelity of translation. Cashier gets a caricature, lovers get a short story, and you get an anonymous manifesto called ‘The Tower.’ Burroughs: 

The word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. (The Electronic Revolution)

Of course, it’s not just words. It’s everything.

The idea of “cultural evolution” is as old as Darwin, the idea of transmissible cultural information bits—“memes”—at least as old as Dawkins [1]. For the idea of human consciousness as a collection of memes, Keith Henson coined the term “memeoid,” although he defined the term as “victims who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential.” Pleading guilty to the goofy vocab, I contend that we are all such victims. Schizophrenics are absolutely correct to be worried about the insertion and theft of one’s thoughts. Memory is a collection of memes. The so-called remembering self scores our attempts to secure the interests of such memes, the experiencing self totals the millivolts of pain and pleasure, and the algorithm to which we ascribe free will chooses between them.

But by this point I hope that I have demonstrated the limitations of Kahneman’s terminology. So, in older and perhaps better words: superego, id, ego. Q.E.D.

III.

One is a sterile number. When there is only one there can be no love, no yearning, no union. Two are required to forge a relationship. Without the other, the self has no meaning. (Myth = Mithya)

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius)

The first dichotomy, per Freud, divides ego-instincts from object-instincts. Ego-instincts bubble up from within. Our necessities, the autonomic-prompted lower rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy, are such: hunger, fatigue, defecation, micturition, respiration, crude sexual desire. Newborns, lacking cerebellar motor plans, with vision only capable of parsing light and motion, respond solely to ego-instincts, treating the entire world as an extension of their ill-defined bodies. We are born narcissists.

Object-instincts, together composing the infamous libido, develop as we learn the range of our power and begin to direct it outwards. Freud marks draws his second dichotomy as the yin and yang of libido: Eros, the love instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct. I have written elsewhere about this dichotomy. Whether our interactions with the outside world can be reduced to two fundamental modes is debatable, but while other categorizations are possible, I find this one to be a useful approximation.

In my view, Eros—true love, sure, but also the sacred moments of connection between strangers in a mosh pit—is best approximated as belonging. Not cognitive empathy, affective; not the conscious decompiling of another’s code, just the instinctual feeling of namaste, “the light in me sees the light in you.” Eros can mirror neuron a puppy or a mood-concordant landscape; even the Buddhist desire to renounce desire falls within her domain. Eros asks for nothing save acceptance. Acceptance is belonging and belonging is pleasurable. Only when we see ourselves reflected by the universe can we believe that it is part of us.

With Thanatos, Freud describes an extreme. Our other primordial desire is not for death per se, but for control—Ananke. Self-destruction is the ultimate form of such power—the pleasure of failure is that you know how to do it—but sudoku falls on the same path. Ananke hates nothing but entropy. Ananke rewards us for turning atoms into tools and tools into appendages, so much the better if those atoms comprise other humans, viz. the high of domination. But Ananke cares not if we are weak, so long as we are choosing to be weak, viz. the high of submission. Ananke demands action. Ananke compels us to learn, to make the universe predictable, to gain control over time, what next happens, and space, what happens next. Only when the universe is predictable can we believe that it is part of us.

“The ego is the libido’s original home,” says Freud. Other human beings are no more than anthropomorphized objects and anthropomorphization is no more than self-reflection in a funhouse mirror. We are born narcissists and it is narcissism to which our instincts pull.

Exposition and truisms, nothing more distasteful, I apologize for inflicting them on you. What I’m trying to prove is that the battle between id and superego is cooked from the start. All of the above goddesses are bound within the id. The id is what we want, by definition. The superego has to sneak and skulk around this fact. Its power—our sacred power as conscious beings—is that we can choose how to go about wanting.

How do we make that choice? At first, Pavlov. Suckling is a spinal cord reflex, calories are tasty, welcome to the rat race, kid. Ananke drives development: contracting the sarcomeres of babbling or crawling is intrinsically pleasurable because it is a new form of control. Once we piece together the object permanence scam, operant conditioning takes over as lead programmer. Convincing dozens of children to sit quietly and crank out long division is possible only with a mass conspiracy of reward and punishment for strange, bureaucratic tasks, see also golf, San Francisco, writing longform on Tumblr. These inculcated memes compete for the real estate of your mind, e.g. a meme A that reads, “Do not allow meme B entry.” (Although the message might sneak past the immune system as a mutated meme B2.) Memes also cooperate—“Do not forget meme C, no matter what”—and this process of anchoring new memes to existing residents (per terminology, creating a “memeplex”) is the mechanism behind semantic memory. As always, the map becomes the territory. Certain memes sate the id and are reinforced into habit, new memes follow through behavioral association and in turn dangle the carrot and wield the stick. The final algorithm of one’s existence must to some extent serve Eros and Ananke in each moment (you have to “want” in order to act), but it may or may not work towards their long-term procurement, or the sum of their derivatives, happiness. However, pleasure or not, the remembering self will use the superego’s algorithm when assigning meaning to memory: “Did I do what I really wanted?”

But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man…will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses. (Beyond Good & Evil)

The remembering self doesn’t care what MacGuffin you pick. Five-act memories are the natural consequence of movement toward a goal—static friction, activation energy, climax, relaxation, rest, there’s no other way to so much as cross the street. Stasis is the enemy, action begins with the disruption of routine. Minimum wage jobs are worse because of their pointlessness more than because of their indignity, work harder/better/faster/stronger and no one cares, screw up and you’re replaced without a missed beat. No direction, no story; the days blur together until arthritis leaves you crippled. Stoned summers don’t get you off the hook, duration neglect compresses both good and bad sensations. No matter how pleasant, when nothing is happening, the superego starves. There’s a reason couples fight on vacation.

The secret to a cozy deathbed is to pick a single memeplex and grind towards its goals alone, a Nietzschean Will to Power over Schopenhauer’s Will. Being a dilettante is simply too easy: flat lines don’t form memories. Reinventing yourself between brunches feels good—the illusion of control—until you’ve dreamt the same dreams too many times and they no longer get you high. A little navel-gazing, mind-wracking, and soul-searching is necessary, but adolescence is supposed to come with an expiration date, and adulthood marks the switch from explore to exploit. The menthol-smoking relativists in acid-wash jeans are correct: the meaning of life is arbitrary, constructed, cultural, fake. But the path to a meaningful life is universal.

Happiness and meaning—sometimes they overlap, sometimes you must choose. I don’t have the answer, there is no answer, all I can do is warn you about the trap by which you obtain neither. Even if you’re sign-me-up-for-the-Orgasmatron all in with Team Experiencing Self, the id is too myopic to be any good at long-term hedonism. The unchecked id would have left us cavemen, samizdat & chill wouldn’t even be on the table. Conversely, even if you’re polishing trophies for Team Remembering Self, the default superego is an incoherent mess, infected with millions of selfish, MALIGNANTLY USELESS memes that have no interest in your happiness, care not for the coherence of your autobiography, and will drive you to madness rather than let you winnow them away.

The key word is default. We all have some degree of protection, either through physical isolation or memetic immunity, “Mom says not to trust strangers who say they have candy.” But most of us fall short of contact precautions. And in that case, we are ruled by probability—by Moloch, by Nyx, by Nature, the only force that God fears. Why else would He confuse mankind’s language? Why would He demand obedience to 613 commandments? Circumcision? What was Judaism, with rabbinical prohibition against interfaith marriage or proselytization, except God’s attempt to create a religion that would not spread? It failed, as it always does. Autotune and Manifest Destiny. The house always wins at the second law of thermodynamics.

With free flow of information, how can any belief system hold? All belief systems rest on axioms, if you grant equal footing to a contradictory axiom, the belief system collapses. I suppose I’m that guy claiming that atheists invent a God—not an interventionist God, nor a fuzzy deism, but a set of unprovable principles that determine right and wrong and to which one must atone. Don’t give me that humanism bullshit. When someone slaps your hypothetical girlfriend’s ass in the proverbial club, what does humanism say you should do? At least toxic masculinity has an answer. Humanism is a motte and bailey, a set of milquetoast ideals which provide no guidance in day to day life and so leave you passive (“Hey, man—first principles!”) or, more likely, vulnerable to whatever crypto-ideology is most virulent. If you do not have a code of conduct, one will be provided for you.

With free flow of information—a suppressed memetic immune system, a hypothetical Tower of Babel—it is statistically inevitable that every meme will attain its most infectious form. There are countless ways to make an idea more or less palatable, but the first step is always the same, a single amino acid substitution, a lingering desire affixed to every thoughtlet: “SPREAD THIS MEME.” With free flow of information, this will be the only value that remains—every other axiom will be cancelled out by its opposite, but the codon “don’t spread this meme” will, definitionally, not spread.

A pathogen that is too restrained will lose out in competition to a more aggressive strain that diverts more host resources to its own reproduction. However, the host, being the parasite’s resource and habitat in a way, suffers from this higher virulence. This might induce faster host death, and act against the parasite’s fitness by reducing probability to encounter another host (killing the host too fast to allow for transmission).

But as long as transmission continues despite the virulence, virulent pathogens will have the advantage. So, for example, virulence often increases within families, where transmission from one host to the next is likely, no matter how sick the host. Similarly, in crowded conditions such as refugee camps, virulence tends to increase over time since new hosts cannot escape the likelihood of infection. (“Optimal virulence,” Wikipedia)

At least natural selection is a package deal: half your genes per haploid donation. Even the most selfish of genes is bound to help its chromosome buddies reproduce. Not so with our minds. Speech can excise one meme at a time. That meme has no obligation to help any of your other memes spread. Indeed, insofar as your other memes occupy time and energy, they are its enemies. The result: an overpowering desire to be understood, all I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away, unquenchable, because the memes that want to be understood are contradictory and changing from moment to moment: you have failed to define a you, so you are a vessel [2]. 

At least the force of natural selection acts along one axis. Here, you are torn apart.

IV.

Art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature. (Sexual Personae)

“Culture is not about esthetics” by Gwern Branwen is worth reading even though I oppose its conclusion with a vehemence others reserve for colonoscopies and Ayn Rand. I can’t do justice to 125 footnotes of background research with a bullet-point paragraph, but the argument goes:

• We subsidize the creation of art, both directly (museum fees, camgirl wishlists) and indirectly (universities, copyright law).
  
• There is already far more art than could possibly be consumed in a lifetime.
• Old art is better than new art—because of the selection bias of time, if nothing else.
• People would be happier if they consumed only the best art.
• We should not encourage the production of new art; indeed, if it truly is harmful, we should ban it. (Gwern gives nonfiction a pass.)
  

If you’re not in the right mindset, this may seem completely insane, which it is, but you have to respect a guy who goes for the null hypothesis hat trick. Intellectual honesty is best achieved by contrarianism against every belief encountered, including contrarianism. We arrive at verisimilitude by ping-ponging between falsehoods, praise be unto Gwern for serving as one of the paddles.

The first objection to an art ban: what qualifies as “better?” Let’s assume that all art can be boiled down to a single rating between 0 and 10. Perhaps even then an 8 may be situationally better than a 10; perhaps for some people Eminem’s rhymes resonate more than George Chaucer’s. Do niche and novel issues benefit from niche and novel perspectives?

Gwern says no. “Fiction can be unfairly persuasive, bypassing our rational faculties.” “Time consumption is zero-sum between fiction & nonfiction.” “As a society, is it good to have our discussions and views about incredibly important matters like space exploration hijacked by fiction?”

Either fiction is effective as propaganda and setting societal agendas, or it isn’t. If the latter, then the loss is nil; if the former, then fiction is dangerous!

Gwern seems to think that if we banned Guardians of the Galaxy the relevant audience would switch to Douglas Hofstadter. The assumption here is that nonfiction exists, distinct from and more truthful than fiction. I don’t buy it. Whenever a human is involved it’s fiction, and if policy decisions came from Excel spreadsheets that data still would have been collected by a mortal of limited peripheral vision. Please recall that extremely fucked up scientific racism tomes of yesteryear such as “Crania Americana” and “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race” were nonfiction bestsellers. A glance at the news site of your choice will show that we have achieved only a marginal improvement in veracity. If you ban sensationalist fiction, odds are that the proles will get their info from sensationalist nonfiction, and if you think our discussions and views are hijacked now, just wait.

But the greater oddity here is that, when pondering the possible benefits of fiction, Gwern chooses to talk about…space. This reeks of too much Modafinil. Gwern gives two lines of courtesy toward the majority of modern fiction:

Now, what good deeds could only new works produce? Certainly it’s not edifying & educating our youth; it is not as if the pedagogy of Euclidean geometry has changed much over the last millennia, nor is 20th century fiction known for teaching moral lessons.

What the hell? I don’t know what 20th century fiction Gwern has been reading. Even Go, Dog. Go! had a moral.

That’s right. Love in the Time of Cholera, natch. Fiction needs motion which requires a MacGuffin which generates a value system around it. Fiction dispenses a moral lesson even when it’s not trying, and before you come at me with “the only moral question is whether you voted for Trump and how many bednets are you sending to Africa!!!!” allow me to point out that fiction is strongest when it deals with microethics, not “is war bad y/n.” (“A triumph of honesty…a shocking exploration of modern values.”— The New York Times.) We face a hundred small dilemmas every time we get close enough to breathe another person’s exhaled nitrogen and NOTHING BUT ART CAN ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS. We can gin and rummy about how conserved moral questions are over time—I’m sympathetic to Gwern’s object-level claims, the classics are underutilized, subsidies are bad—but even if the disease is ancient, you have to speak a living language if you want to recognize the symptoms.

All of this supports the first objection: that new art provides a nontrivial benefit to the observer. But I’m going for a bigger claim: it doesn’t have to.

Gwern states the following:

The humanities have made notoriously little use of science’s techniques, worldview, or results…Conceptually, I see no problem with a nation of sober hard-headed engineers and scientists doing quite as well without the novelists.

This seems like Gwern’s idea of a utopia. So let us suppose this art-banned nation of engineers exists—every man, woman, and child, speech-therapied and carbuncular, saluting a flag of the golden spiral—and indeed, is so successful that a post-scarcity economy is achieved and everyone retires to leisure. Now, enlighten me: what would these people do all day?

They could read Dostoyevsky. Maybe Notes from the Underground, if they’ve retained a sense of irony. They couldn’t write analyses of Dostoevsky, however—that would be new art. There wouldn’t be much in the way of comedy, but why would that be needed when one can recite from the classic jest and prankbooks of yore? As for tragedy, at the funeral of a loved one, choose from any of the more than sufficient eulogies already written. No new fashion but khakis are always in season. No new recipes but who doesn’t like Mealsquares. They could fuck. They could play tic-tac-toe. They could plug into the Orgasmatron—and this, I suspect, is the endgame of Gwern’s utilitarian fantasy hell, inspired by a glance at Maslow’s Hierarchy and, “Well, that part seems unnecessary.” I know it’s gauche to claim that your opponent’s philosophy would lead to the extinction of the human race, but he not busy being born is busy dying. “People would be happier consuming only the best art.” A rat in a cage will mash its nucleus accumbens until it starves to death. Are you a rat?

Gwern never defines what is art, perhaps because a broad conception would render his argument absurd, so I’ll help, apologies in advance for clichés. Art is compressed communication. The better the compression, with regards to both perceived fidelity and amount of information contained, the more artful the art. Limitation—poetic meter, scene-cut-scene, verse-chorus-verse—is the essence of every form because removing redundancies and noise, unnecessary memes, is how one creates a map. Satire is effective when via exaggeration or noun-swapping absurdism it calls attention to the underlying pattern. A twelve minute ambient or noise track may lack musical structure but conveys a precise-yet-generalizable mood to the listener; a random field recording feels less artful because it does not. A Pollock canvas may be composed through randomness and chaos, but the choice to use randomness and chaos…and so on. Life itself is walls between fluid. Beauty is objective, because we all interpret beauty by this criterion, and subjective, because experience dictates the extent to which we can unpack a given compression [3].

Art is not necessary for a meaningful life: if you contort your superego enough you can find meaning in rolling a boulder uphill. But given the Tower of Babel, the Will known to teenage pirates as “information wants to be free,” most human beings are compelled to spread memes above all else. And if your goal is such, then you must choose between compression and manic, babbling psychosis. The sharing inherent in romance and child-rearing is still the most efficient method of spreading one’s memes, but a conversation and a concerto are different in degree, not kind. Good fortune spoils if you cannot share it, yet when the pink slip arrives your instinct is to forgo the yellow pages to work on your novel. The old and homeless tell bawdy jokes and cirrhotic anecdotes, anything to anyone who will listen, street preferred to asylum, that anoxic last ditch expulsion of gametes trying to leave behind something of meaning. We live an world of aspiring communicators if not aspiring artists, everyone but the children who do not yet know they will die. Art is the way by which man purifies his soul from chaos, it his revenge against Nature, he decides which memes of consciousness to spread and he takes the rest to the grave. Or she.

“Best art?” There is no best art, only more and less true. Art exists for its own sake, it may heal, torture, corrupt, enlighten, restrain, or indulge, but this is incidental; all it wants is to be understood.

V.

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. (Invisible Man)

I’ll pull the political band-aid—I think “ease of having one’s art understood” is a defensible conception of “privilege.”

Don’t @ me, bro. I’m not trying to score internet groupies, here, I just want to torch this hydra of semantics once and for all. Per Wikipedia:

Privilege is a social theory that special rights or advantages are available only to a particular person or group of people. The term is commonly used in the context of social inequality, particularly in regard to age, disability, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and/or social class. Two common examples may include having access to a higher education and housing. Privilege can also be emotional or psychological, regarding comfort and personal self-confidence, or having a sense of belonging or worth in society.

This is one of the better definitions, and it is still so vacuous that when I plugged it into Google Translate my computer crashed. No one disputes that “some groups have advantages relative to other groups,” even proud racists admit this. The argument concerns who has which advantages and the relevant score multipliers. Case in point: the above definition includes “self-confidence” and "worth in society.” So who has more privilege, a cis-white-hetero billionaire with full-checklist depression or an unemployed transgender black woman who, despite this, is basically content? Either the billionaire has less privilege, in which case “privilege” is a Harrison Bergeron happiness tax, or the suicidal person has more privilege, in which case, how much does “privilege” matter, really. I know, not supposed to be a linear scale, but in a country of unhappy people this is the question that always comes up: “I am so alone and so miserable, you’re dancing on tables at the gay club, sympathy bottled or on tap, and I’m supposed to prostrate myself to atone for my 'privilege?’”

The academic leftist notion of privilege fails—is infuriatingly counterproductive—because it rests its weight on the experiencing self. Kahneman (in)famously found that, in the U.S., income’s effect on "positive affect” saturates after $75,000 per annum; race and sex impact happiness less than one might think; I’ve met Upper East Side kids less fulfilled by their iPads than Sub-Saharan kids without running water were with “catch the rock.” I am not saying such differences are insignificant. They are significant. But the vicissitudes of chemistry and fate (sickness, isolation, loss, defunct serotonin receptors) are the most important predictors of day to day happiness, which correlate but refuse to be limited by demographics. Saved wealth buffers against tragedy but suffering finds a way. Hedonic treadmill is the buzzword: as monoxide salesman Thomas Ligotti puts it, “We do not have the power to make our lives monumentally better, only monumentally worse.”

The remembering self tells a different story. Kahneman’s 75k study found that while happiness levels off, “life evaluation” does not satiate with income; other studies support a stronger link between income and “life satisfaction” than income and happiness. Of course these surveys are semantically loaded enough to put a postmodernist into anaphylaxis. The satisfaction question is usually phrased: “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” This is not a good measure of the remembering self. For our purposes the question ought to be: “Looking back, how satisfied are you with how your life has played out?”

Now even the most melancholic billionaire is gonna start singing My Way. The suicide note of George Eastman, founder of Kodak: “To my friends, my work is done – Why wait?” Poverty does not allow for such closure. Like a forgotten drive to work, we are amnestic to routine, and memories of “eat, menial labor, sleep” blur together in the rearview mirror. The important-yet-oft-forgotten obverse is that, independent of happiness, wealth buys freedom from routine. Chores—with increasing tax bracket, dry-cleaning, maid, gardener, and nanny. Work—the cheapest jobs get replaced by machines, nurses deal with the predictable consequences of urination and defecation, PAs treat a narrow range of colds and sore throats, doctors can research, lecture, politicize; at the top of the food chain, some CEOs fly to new city each day. Even leisure—a night at the opera is no more fun than pizza and brewskis, but the former is novel, for a time, and the latter soon fades from memory.

Just as freedom from routine can be spent on new experiences it can be spent on new ways to express them. Most purchases this side of a bodega are autobiographical product placement, from name-brand Tylenol to the SkyMall catalogs of the 1%. Ever since Gutenberg invented copy/paste, however, it’s been cheaper to ditch symbolism and go straight for the symbols. We describe upper-class people as “cultured” because…they know a lot of culture. Class is language, education over wealth, no one would invite a Duck Dynasty heir to the new Soho vegan place but you can tell instantly if a homeless guy went to college. What counts is breadth not depth, knowing the right way to convey your opinions—“underrated,” “progressive,” “guilty pleasure,” “ironic, I think”—not the specifics of taste. The bourgeoise use The New Yorker as a word a week calendar, or Slate if they can’t read. In a post-guillotine world, mainstream culture is the new counter-counterculture, and since dressing oneself in the morning is a middle finger to the haters, it should be no surprise how many childfree consumers are working on novels or at least unwatchable concert videos. We are all celebrities now. Map becomes territory, and as anyone who has kept a journal knows, soon you witness the present as you plan to record it, seeking out events good or bad that are likely to yield something worth recording. As the old try and fail to teach the young, life comes at you past.

Pause, value check. Leaving aside the moral question of whether it’s okay to Eat Pray Love while lonesome atheists starve, is Cash 4 Novelty, as a personal value system, a) the disgusting slop of narcissist-capitalism, or b) the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart? Answer: yes. Let’s review. Option 1, reject the demands of the remembering self altogether, “memes are viruses and should be purged.” But this takes you to some weird places: if you’re a glass half-full kinda guy, wirehead extinction; if you’re a pessimist, vas deferens snip-snip and/or mass suicide. Option 2, the remembering self is good but the Tower of Babel is pathological, we should make like Sisyphus and find meaning outside self-expression. Whether or not this is a noble sentiment, it is an inevitable flop. The Tower of Babel is a logical consequence of memetic selection: to prevent a version of "spread this meme” from taking over, one would have to ban any and all communication between human beings. Seems impractical.

And so we face reality. Pleasure is necessary, so necessary, all the more necessary as one grows older—but not sufficient. We plan our lives around being understood. If wealth grants freedom from routine, increasing the ability to define oneself and the language to express this, then it bestows a privilege independent of its effect on happiness.

This has political implications, namely, that money is good [4]. If a country’s per capita GDP rises threefold over ten years, that is a positive even if the happiness surveys don’t budge. A trade policy that bumps the purchasing power of the bottom quintile by 5% and the Bilderberg Group by 500%—increasing both societal wealth and inequality—is in vacuo a good idea. Absolute amount of money, not relative, buys freedom. Economics is not a zero sum game. (There may be better ways to distribute the dough, sure. Different argument.) Switching political stances in the batter’s box, the reactionary claim that American women were happier before they had orgasms or jobs is untrue. But even if it was, the indisputable increase in the ability for women to self-define and self-express is likely worth the cost. See also: every other pitch for traditional values and neonatal pneumonia.

It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol—to a people who have no refrigerators. A motor car owned by a worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt to a people deprived of even the necessities of life… [Hollywood] helped to build up the sense of deprivation of man’s birthright, and that sense of deprivation has played a large part in the national revolutions of postwar Asia. (The Medium is the Massage)

Which brings us back to privilege. Belonging to the dominant race and sex of a culture grants the same in memoriam advantage as class, but by a different mechanism. Poverty and lack of education prevents one from speaking the language of culture. Differences of race, gender, and orientation prevent others from listening.

Without getting too bogged down in vocab, the canonical term is “stereotype.” Stereotypes are necessary to function. If art is compressed communication, a stereotype, in the broadest sense, is a pattern of extrapolation. We are constantly making small stereotyped judgments. A raised eyebrow and pause after the end of the sentence may signify “He’s skeptical,” “He’s joking,” “He’s mad,” or, “He’s mad because I ran over the Japanese Prime Minister,” depending on context. Conversation would be unfeasible without these snap judgments, with social confusion verging on autism.

Contrary to the pop-ethical consensus, discrimination is not caused by having too many stereotypes but too few. If you wake to find a lithe man dressed in all black standing over your bed and holding a katana, it may be quite reasonable to infer that he is a hired ninja and that you are in grave danger. If, however, you assume this about every East Asian man that you encounter, you lack nuance of stereotypes. If you want to insert a more topical example, go ahead, it should be obvious however that misunderstanding can result in racist outcomes even without conscious ill-will. Example: stories about disparities in use of Emergency Room analgesia make the headlines about once a year. My observation has been that there are certain culturally accepted ways to express pain, some verbal (saying “I have a high pain tolerance” suggests the opposite) and some nonverbal (wrong ratio of gritted teeth to screaming). When ordering the Dilaudid, physicians unconsciously underestimate the pain of patients who didn’t dot the i’s and cross the t’s of their agony, or, less charitably, unconsciously realize that an undocumented migrant is less likely to write a complaint letter than the hawk-like Shakespeare professor who has given two stars to every book club novel for the past 45 years.

Small comfort for the guy with a broken femur, I agree. But this matters hugely for any campaign against -isms. The above bias would not necessarily be picked up by the, ah, "replication-challenged” Harvard Implicit Bias Test, because if a person of the race in question was wearing an argyle sweater and reading Middlesex the mistreatment would not have occurred. The collegiate notion that some folks are Racist and some have been Saved betrays a preschool understanding of human beings. Most racists are really culturists, or “I don’t hate them, unless they X,” and all racism starts this way, a single heartfelt (although not necessarily true) observation that is falsely extrapolated. I am not defending this, just pointing it out that you do it too and that to some extent it is inevitable. Race and gender are social constructs, but the cultural norms that correlate with race and gender—and goth, prep, jock, etc—are real. Avenue Q theory: until we evolve a hive mind or learn to speak pheromone, every interaction will be mediated by a model of the other. There will always be a stereotype. The unsurprising path forward is to talk to the stereotyped individual, acquiring new detail which is added to the map as it asymptotically approaches the territory. “Be aware of your biases” is excellent advice, but framing this as “don’t be racist, join or die” fails—is infuriatingly counterproductive—because it doesn’t create a new stereotype to work with, an alternate explanation for the genuinely felt observation.

Denying one’s stereotypes altogether is impossible, although you can’t say the woke garbage wytch industry isn’t committed to the attempt. Nevertheless, if you, well-intentioned young person who gets anxiety with phone calls, are trying very hard not to fit someone’s behavior to a stereotype, thinking “don’t stereotype don’t stereotype” over and over throughout the perilous encounter—then too bad, kid, because a) you need to start lifting or something, b) you have a fixed view of how to treat someone based on demographics, which is c) uncomfortable for all concerned, and d) a stereotype. The social justice term for such benign stereotyping is “microaggression,” but when it concerns the opposite sex, it is more precisely dubbed “objectification.”

The Reddit demographic seems to have a mental block about this concept, so allow me to Joe Rogan you some experience: it is perfectly acceptable to think that buxom blonde women are hot. However, if you convey to your waitress that you are attracted to her solely because she is a Hot Blonde, you are saying that all of her other personality traits are irrelevant, i.e. her choices don’t matter, e.g. you get maced. (See also: “What should I wear tonight?” “Honey, no one cares,” and then the fight.) What’s confusing is that sometimes it is okay to like someone just for being comely and flaxen-haired—even the same waitress at the club that night. But notice the difference: at the club, the waitress is trying to convey “Hot Blonde.” You’re not boxing her in, you’re correctly identifying and complimenting her outfit. See also: catcalling vs. dirty talk.

Microaggressions are no different. Someone asking to touch a black woman’s hair may lack malice but nevertheless reminds the woman that in the eyes of others she cannot escape her race. Even explicitly positive stereotypes are harmful—gays are fashionable, Jews are smart; 1970s rockstars lamenting dehumanizing fame—and I hope you can see that they are harmful not against the experiencing self, for at some level attention is always enjoyable, but against the remembering self, which demands to be understood.

What’s less obvious is that the mere existence of a stereotype is harmful. If you have never been hated, as in people-wish-you-were-dead hated, then you may not understand this, but—hatred is painful even if you never encounter those doing the hating. There’s an element of paranoia, sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about this very old very fundamental feeling of being misconstrued, of one’s memes being stymied somewhere out in the ether, of one’s legacy going down wrong, a feeling closely related to shame and to which the response is, invariably, rage.

This particular flavor of suffering spares the privileged: historically, straight white males. They had the money so they got the education so they defined class so they controlled the language so they spread the most stories, any of which can serve as template for “white dude.” This says nothing about acuity of suffering, only that such suffering can be communicated more easily and with more nuance. “I’m not Elliott Smith depressed today—it’s more of a Bright Eyes feel. Know what I mean, officer?” “No lies, just love, sir. You have a nice day.” Gross misunderstandings are rare. Oh, you can try—Bushwick art majors tweeting “white people be thinkin physical intimacy be spicy food”—but it rings hollow, because everyone knows at least one horrible “free hugs” guy and his equally horrible friend with a fetish for sriracha. Or at least knows the type. In contrast, white people get their info about minorities from cuckold porn, or worse—sketch comedy.

If we care about the remembering self and we care about other human beings then forging new stereotypes is crucial. This puts me in agreement with mainstream liberalism—although I hope my conservative readers can see that this comes from a genuine desire for fairness rather than brownie-point trend-hopping or sublimated self-loathing—that minority representation is important. Something worth fighting for.

Except there’s a catch: the current push for “diversity” isn’t going to work. 

Like so many policies with charitable intentions but terrible incentives, executed by so many people with no understanding of Goodhart’s law, the current push for multiculturalism will spin the wheels of progress while accomplishing very little. It will create a new hatred for every one that it solves. And those in power will laugh all the way to the vault.

VI.

Real, total war has become information war…the cold war is the real war front—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies…It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. (The Medium is the Massage)

If globalization is the defining phenomenon of the modern age, then immigration—physical and cultural, the latter determining who gets to be understood—is the defining political conflict. Let’s take a break from theory and see what the LA Times is doing to bridge the gap,“How Houston has become the most diverse place in America”:

The boys sprint in white and yellow uniforms down the green turf, grunting and sweating as the coach shouts from the sidelines. “Búscalo, búscalo,” he yells in Spanish, urging the players to sprint for the ball.

“Umusitari!” comes a voice on the sidelines — run down the line — from Biganiro Espoir, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Margaret Long Wisdom High School soccer team hails from Central America, Mexico, Africa and points between. Its bench hums with Spanish, Kinyarwanda, Swahili and often English. But its real unifying language — soccer, played hard — is universal.

Okay, first of all, no American gives two shits about soccer in between World Cups. Entry number 80, Stuff White People Like: “The Idea of Soccer.” ("Many white people will tell you that they are very into soccer. But be careful, it’s a trap.”) Nor is it a coincidence that the photographed uniforms lack red and blue. I’m just saying, kind of provincial that they didn’t call it football.

“It’s really surprising to see a place like this in the South, where you consider it to be racist and xenophobic,” said Michael Negussie, a Wisdom High School senior from Ethiopia. “Stereotypes of Texas don’t apply here.”

Note that it’s taken for granted that “you” consider the South to be racist and xenophobic—and indeed, the stereotype only doesn’t apply because:

…demographic experts say the Houston metro area, home to the third-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country — behind New York and Los Angeles — is a roadmap to what U.S. cities will look like in the coming decades as whites learn to live as minorities in the American heartland.

What that means is a whole new dynamic, in which minorities are no longer seen as outsiders. “Suddenly these are 100% American kids, and they’re falling in love with each other, making multiracial babies,” Klineberg said.

A “psychology of inevitability” begins to set in around immigration, he said — it’s happening, and it might not be a bad thing.

“Maybe it’s going to position Houston…for success in building the connections to the global marketplace. Maybe I can make money off of this…. And then we begin to say, how do we make this work?”

This article is bad. It’s bad for conservatives, it’s bad for immigrants, and it’s bad for anyone caught in the crossfire called America. No matter our superficial differences, I hope by the end of this essay we can agree on one thing: if the revolution ever comes, the LA Times should be a first round draft pick to be burned to the ground.

Theory of mind, please: how does this article look to conservatives? When I said that since white people control the language they have an advantage in communication, I didn’t mean, like, Republicans. It’s no big mystery that sleeveless undershirts can only get off to NASCAR and daydreams of slavery. Count off the archetypes: hypocrite evangelical priest. Serial killer. Grandiloquent but inept oil baron/plantation owner. Mentally addled inbred bucktooth. The only nuance is whether those hicks are gonna die off from diabesity or heroin, am I right?

This didn’t happen overnight. At some point there was a modicum of mutual respect, or so I’m told. But ingroups gonna outgroup, and slowly—faster after the insult of George W. Bush—the y’all class became a stereotype, got stereotyped so thoroughly that they weren’t interesting to talk about, which left them no way to contest the verdict. So now the LA Times can take your opinion as a given, and the poor, suffering factory workers are only brought up when some Coachella communist wants to say “they’ve been fooled by the 1%” and call for “solidarity.”

No. It would be unfair to say that you have blinders on when far as I can tell you have gouged out your eyes altogether. Talk to any, any, any Trump supporter, and you get:

There was a working-class, white bar I spent two days in and that’s where it really struck me: This man [Trump] is really resonating. This message is really taking hold and really hitting people. What sociologists and others have long talked about when you go to a poor, working-class black neighborhood is that there is this code of honor, this demand for respect. That same thing was taking place in the white bar I was seeing. And Trump was fulfilling that respect. It was all about respect, regaining respect. (The Atlantic)

Respect. Being understood as an imperfect human being struggling for his or her values, “even if I don’t agree, I can see where you’re coming from.” It’s so simple and yet no one wants to do it, because once you concede that other value systems are valid you start to question your own. Better to pretend at being Robin Hood, 90% tax on Martin Shkreli and basic income for all. And maybe that’s a great idea, but it doesn’t solve the problem: You could give every Appalachian 2 mil and they’d still vote for Brexit and Le Pen. They don’t want your money, they’ll take whatever government handouts are offered but they’d rather go nuclear than beg. Class matters, but this problem is cultural, not economic. “Look, I’m [gay/Muslim/an immigrant/from Portland]. You’re asking me to ‘respect’ people who would deny my existence.” I empathize, you don’t have to respect them, but you unless you think bigotry is Mendelian you should at least look a little deeper:

“…is a roadmap to what U.S. cities will look like in the coming decades as whites learn to live as minorities in the American heartland.”

The LA Times is speaking excitedly of how a group that has already been forced out of the social discourse will soon lose their voice completely. They’re thrilled by the up-and-coming Yelp $$ restaurants and the possibility of “making some money off this” in the “global marketplace.” They’re saying that once the right sort of people move in it might turn out to be a really nice neighborhood. The direct consequence of this brand of pro-immigration sentiment is hatred of immigrants. Oh, I’m sure there was some animosity to start with—that’s why the media had to build a Doomsday Device, to make sure the situation didn’t get out of control. 

Cheesy example, bear with me: “The Gay Agenda.” Treated as a joke, and does indeed sound like a fantastic glam rock band, but when rural conservatives denounce it they mean “the advocacy of cultural acceptance and normalization of non-heterosexual orientations and relationships.” And here’s the thing: they are right to worry about this—just as they are right to worry about immigration—not because David Bowie will corrupt the youth but because of the LA Times. Once acceptance becomes orthodoxy even private dissent becomes grounds for ostracization. No matter your other convictions you become a stereotype that society will single-issue-vote off the island, just ask Brendan Eich. Of course I support gay marriage; my point is that if one’s views before were “well, it is kind of weird,” then being told “soon there will be enough of us that we won’t have to deal with people like you at all”—that makes homophobia logical. And at least you can change your opinion of gay marriage. It’s much harder to change being white and low-class.

It would be correct to blame the LA Times and their ilk for the rise of Donald Trump. But that would let them off too easy. This problem began long ago and it extends far beyond a political issue or presidency. If you’re working class and want to get a promotion then odds are you will have to impress a bureaucrat, be it a manager or a Dean of Admissions. You will fail unless you share their values or convince them that you do—these values are the biggest obstacle to your advancement. So when some vacant skull in a dinner jacket tells you that the working class “votes on social issues” and “against their economic interests,” splash some pinot on his ascot and inform him that they are one and the same.

No one is born hateful, stranger anxiety doesn’t even start til six months. But culture war is history being written by the winners, first draft. Conservatives are offered the choice of fighting the ever-changing tides of social values or toiling away in obscurity while journalists pretend to like soccer. People want to be understood. And they will rage all sorts of ways against the dying of the light.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are others left over to receive their aggressiveness…When once the Apostle Paul has posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. (Civilization and Its Discontents)

Please understand: I don’t think that the red tribe is in any way morally superior to blue, see above and also history. But in our society there is a meaningful asymmetry between them. The upper-middle class—mostly urban, mostly blue—claims by far the largest share of America’s income, more than the middle class and far more than the 1%. This, despite their protests to the contrary, gives them disproportionate control over the news and entertainment industry, which in cyberpunk America is tantamount to controlling the culture. 

So even though individual subgroups may feel under-represented—perhaps the mainstream media is “liberal” and likes Katy Perry while certain free-thinkers are “leftist” and like Kate Bush—they are by and large clueless as to the feeling of freak-show isolation that comes from existing outside their norms altogether, norms which are ubiquitous every time you turn on a screen. They are, one might say, “blind” to their “privilege,” blind to the fine print disclaimer of their culture, “Swipe left if you voted for Trump.”

I didn’t vote for Trump. And my personal experience of refugees and illegal immigrants—via medical and psychiatric asylum cases—has been overwhelmingly positive. But policy decisions shouldn’t be settled by anecdotes. There is a moral imperative to help those in need—and conservatives should recognize this—while at the same time friction is inevitable when two cultures exist side by side—and liberals should recognize this. One would hope for a reasoned discussion of how to balance the two. But that won’t happen as long as those whose are insulated from the consequences of policy—need I point out that Los Angeles is not located in Houston?—use multiculturalism as a weapon to enforce class.

And what’s so infuriatingly tragic is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Do migrant farmworkers have more in common with Sarah Silverman or a rural mother of four? Polls show that 9 out of 10 Syrian refugees think John Oliver is worse than the war. One of my Muslim colleagues wears a Dallas Cowboys hijab and plays Fire Emblem in the break room—why doesn’t the LA Times do a story about her? How come when “multiracial babies” get mentioned the context is always sexy brown man and not sexy brown woman? Do liberals think that only Broad City characters have the capacity to consent? Some right-wingers buy into the predatory immigrant mythos wholesale, and they’re idiots, but many more are concerned not because they think most immigrants are drug dealers, rapists, etc, but because if they were, the castrato left would post three monkey emojis and say that the reports of such incidents are proof that Islamophobia is alive and well. It would be so easy to validate the concerns, to say #notallmigrants, sure, but to say just as loudly that misdeeds are misdeeds and will be punished as such. I’m no skinny-armed libertarian saying “if only we didn’t talk about race, no one would be racist!” I’m saying that the specific way the media talks about race and culture, creating an incoherent set of rules regarding “appropriation” and etiquette, proudly crying out that this is the end of those boring, selfish white people, has made the situation much, much worse. If the left wanted to prevent assimilation, there would be no more effective way.

That’s the point.

VII.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” — Sun Tzu

Suppose you’re a benevolent Disney executive (maybe an oxymoron) who wants to increase minority representation in movies. How are you going to do it?

Well, your first instinct is to throw a fistful of Franklins into the writer’s room and scream “write me some of them brown people!” But here’s the problem: all your writers are white.

So now the decision tree forks. You can tell them to write “how they imagine” a person of color would talk and act, taking food choices, cultural dialects, and quinceañera celebrations into account. Or you can tell them to write an a-racial dude and use the paint bucket tool in Maya.

And that’s not really a decision at all. Not only could asking white boys to Tarantino another race lead to potential uh-ohs, having your characters speak anything but the dominant language/culture would limit your audience (definitionally, else it wouldn’t be the dominant language).

So you tell the writers to write an a-racial character, but since the cis-white-hetero patriarchy created the dominant language, the default assumptions of how people act—that means white. Which gets you a blockbuster superhero movie and a million Tumblr webcomics. Nice!

Except you’ve only sort of increased representation: there are minority characters, but in every way besides melanin they’re lighter than Luke Skywalker. There’s something to be said for that (for children in particular, since kids are kids wherever you go) but it’s not going to help the 18 year old black girl whose tastes, mannerisms, and values have been shaped by the pressures of being black in America, if nothing else.

Ergo, you decide to hire some minority writers to write your minority characters. Applications rush in. How are you going to decide who makes the cut?

“You know, the usual. Interview. Letters of recommendation. College transcript—”

This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power. (The Last Psychiatrist)

This is how the system protects itself against change. At every step of the social hierarchy, what is required for a person of color or a woman to succeed is determined by the values of the ruling class. I think that’s “white patriarchal supremacy,” but don’t quote me. Of course, the same principle applies to e.g. homosexuals and Jews; thankfully those traits are easier to hide.

Here’s your analogy: when you glance over at the in-flight movie flickering in front of the passed-out behemoth blocking your path to the bathroom, it is instantly apparent whether he’s watching a good movie like Face/Off or terrible Oscar bait. What gives the latter away? The meticulous set design? The histrionic orchestra? The slow pacing? The lingering close-ups of faces? The heavily scripted funny-because-it’s-sad-and-true? Oscar bait films are theatrical, a word which is supposed to mean “keeps reminding you that you’re in the audience,” but actually means “keeps reminding you that you are the audience.” The actors are side characters, background dancers. The hero is the camera. It’s the one with the character growth, guilt and redemption, it’s the one for whom the score sings. Which means the hero is…

It’s better than nothing. Better than segregation, better than open and unpunished murder in the street. It’s progress. But as Baudrillard said, that The Matrix was the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix itself would produce, I suspect that the most art about inequality is precisely the art that inequality sanctions.

And that’s bad. There’s a case to be made for affirmative action, but you know who gets the scholarship? Whoever can best conform to the in-demand stereotype. Middle of the road for the med school application. Tone it down if you want to get into Wharton. But maybe play it up a little for the grant proposal—go ahead, be a queer Chicano nationalist, send some mean tweets, academics eat that shit up. Of course they’re the only ones that will: the rest of society will stereotype you as “another” queer Chicano nationalist academic and never listen closely again. Even if you’re Manny Pacquiao you better not step from the party line. About half of African-Americans oppose gay marriage—you ever see that op-ed in the Times? Of course not, no one wants to hear that, they want Dear White People, an extremely controversial show about how important it is to pay Ivy League tuition. This is the scam behind every campus free speech debate: Freddie DeBoer and Ezra Klein draw pistols at dawn, but no matter who wins it is further cemented that Twitter, Vox, and college are where the correct opinions of class are determined. I often hear arguments about [insert school] not having [insert support group], which might be a real concern except that no one seems to care that outside of college it’s either AA or the bar. Harvard Inc. was America’s first corporation, FYI. Better make sure your toddlers are practicing their Latin.

You want some sick irony? Everyone knows that class is somehow hereditary, that a rich kid will get a better job than a poor kid even if the former has a rap sheet for selling ecstasy to One Directioners. But if you know or have had sex with any of the sons/daughters of the bourgeoisie you will have observed that no one is more critical of such nepotism. These “gifted” but “troubled” people will bumble through their whole lives, getting second through tenth chances, mysteriously finding that anything involving an authority figure goes their way, as they ruthlessly condemn capitalist injustice, never realizing that criticizing privilege is…the language of privilege. And wouldn’t you know it, the promotional video for the latest Run The Jewels album features none other than the cast of Portlandia, helping such youth bridge the gap between the predictable children they’ve been and the predictable adults they are going to be.

This isn’t a new trend, although it is trending. Think about it this way. The service industry is any job where the customer is always right, e.g. writer, therapist, barber, sales. This has always been a proxy for class, since only the aristocracy had the time and knowledge to make listicles for the King. (“The Ten Most Protestant Criminals In Bastille Prison—You Won’t Believe Number Three!”) On the other hand, if you have a manufacturing job—anything that involves doing rather than talking—no one cares whether you have problematic faves.

Enter the industrial revolution, as featured in Office Space (1999): mind over matter, words over matter, manufacturing jobs get replaced by machines. Unemployment + labor saving machinery = a lot more people have the time and ability to read Wealth of Nations. No more kings, no more monopoly rights, now theoretically anyone can code Ye Flappying Birde and please the market. So if you’re an aristocrat and being literate was like, your whole thing, how are you gonna keep partying like it’s 1899? You need a job that lets you tell other people what is okay to read/write and consume/produce—a job that keeps you one step ahead and thus relevant. And so the meta-service industry: mass media, academia, and government work. Fast-forward, and note that the remaining manufacturing jobs now involve a) operating machines or b) designing machines. And gosh darn does the newspaper hate those alt-right nerds and those Silicon Valley tech bros.

So the conspiracy comes full circle. The meta-service industry promotes a version of “multiculturalism” that is hostile to everyone outside their class but doesn’t affect them, LA ain’t in Houston and Manhattanites would never step in a neighborhood without HBO. This pushes the suckers of the working class into xenophobia, and those they mark as alien have to abandon the idea of making things and assimilate through the only other path offered: the meta-service institutions. Now you have a glut of wannabe thinkpiece writers. Supply and demand, university prices go up, labor costs goes down, and everyone buys the assigned woke products and logs onto Twitter to bemoan capitalism. Well, you may not love capitalism, but capitalism loves you.

In a global market, the main criterion for a service industry gig is your ability to speak inoffensive in four languages, which winds up being a proxy for class. Fine, no surprise, pop music sucks. But the incentive of the meta-service industry—I’m not saying it’s all they do, but it is the incentive—is to create new ways to be offensive (n.b: not offended), new required extracurriculars, new rules of etiquette making it harder to advance the class hierarchy without paying up. Some would call this racketeering. Those would be uncharitable people. But consider effort the school system spends on teaching the approved answers to ‘why’ questions, as opposed to ‘how’ questions like ‘how to balance a checkbook’ and ‘how to feed oneself,’ with the assumption that if you reach the upper class you’ll be able to pay someone to do those practical skills for you— and if you don’t, hey, there’s always food stamps. Think carefully about whether this mode of education is likely to make society more meritocratic or less.

The issue is not that youth of color see academic success as limited to whites. It is that they typically see white teachers as enforcers of rules that are unrelated to the actual teaching and learning process. (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y'all Too)

Bonus: if you say that you’re trying to help the disadvantaged, then when your policies make the situation worse—well, that’s all the more reason to redouble your efforts.

What’s the solution? There’s only one and it is so radical that I hesitate to even suggest it: stop being a pleb. You. Stop treating words as a substitute for action. Stop paying time and money into institutions that loan a symbol of mastery in lieu of actual depth. Stop looking for such symbols in others. Stop judging policies by the veneer of good intention rather than the details of consequence. Stop looking past people, because this is all the same, isn’t it? Working from a map, a stereotype, a symbol, instead fighting for the complex truth? None of this horror requires malice or even stupidity. All it requires is taking the easy way out.

Or don’t change. Keep hitting the like button, the algorithm guarantees it’ll be something you like. But there’s a price to pay. And it won’t hurt right away. It’s a price paid in memory, not sensation. That’s why it’s so terrible. It won’t sink in until it’s too late, when you look back and wonder,

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? (Invisible Man)

VIII.

“The ingenuity and adaptability of Homo sapiens has led to its becoming the most influential species on Earth; it is currently deemed of least concern on the Red List of endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.” (“Homo sapiens,” Wikipedia)

Accelerationist philosopher Nick Land is very smart and very edgy and can sometimes finish a full sentence without asking the reader to recognize this. This eagerness makes him very empathizable and lovable, and he does get the problem, even if his solutions are, you guessed it, calamitously, catastrophically, direly, and dreadfully wrong.

Since this is the epilogue, i.e. not the place to defang every noumenon, I’ll skip to the punchline: Nick Land thinks we’re nearing the end of the world. Or at least the end of a world where debates occur via blog post rather than bone cudgel. Per his condensed manifesto, “The Dark Enlightenment”:

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).

No, man. Tell us how you really feel.

As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

Land titles the next subsection “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse” and provides stats for the possible governments (“Communist Tyranny,” “Authoritarian Capitalism,” “Social Democracy”) that occur in sequence before “Zombie Apocalypse.” Okay, sick campaign setting. But why is this all inevitable?

Militant secularism is itself a modernized variant of the Abrahamic meta-meme, on its Anglo-Protestant, radical democratic taxonomic branch, whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism.

Land is describing the Tower of Babel. I wouldn’t name its essence as “anti-traditionalism,” but the meme “spread this meme no matter what” has a similar destructive effect. Land’s solution, depending on the essay, is either an omnipotent AI ruler or biotech augmentation of high IQ individuals into elite übermenschen. Which, who knows, maybe that is how the Rapture will go down. I’m not here to make fun of anybody’s religion.

But in the short term, Land is wrong. This isn’t the end. The fall of Babel wasn’t a warning of what might happen. It’s something that happens all the time.

Since the death of God there’s been a vacancy, now everyone wants evolution to answer “why.” If anything seems unjust, it’s because evolution cares only about memetic fitness. Moloch, who elects foolish politicians! Moloch, who crowdfunds terrible podcasts! Moloch, who makes it so girls only like tall guys who drink Natty Light!

The catch is that evolution doesn’t care about memetic fitness. That’s a meaningless statement; evolution IS memetic fitness. And what determines memetic fitness is: whatever we decide.

Competition is ugly, no denying that. But blaming Moloch for fidget spinners is unfair to that poor Carthaginian spirit: people just want fidget spinners. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be fidget spinners. It’s possible that folks don’t know what’s good for ‘em, sure, and you can elect some small deity to enforce your taste as law, but you haven’t killed Moloch, you’ve just shifted the arena in which people compete. Now all the bullies are under 5′7″ and pontificating about how partying is for nerds. Or how much they love Stalin.

Evolution is always bound by a value system. History has a progression, but it’s not an arc, it’s a spiral. God strikes down the tower, the “democratic virus” burns through society, we move towards a single language, the masses cry now nothing will be withholden from them, and God strikes down the tower once more. This is predestined by the very fact that each human being is unique. When you impose one language, one value system, when you hold someone back from that desperate desire to be understood—don’t expect that person’s God to forgive you.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

Land and his followers are wrong twice over. Wrong because they are fooled by the word “multiculturalism” and thus advocate for the pretend solutions of social exit, “assortative mating of the elite” or a “white ethno-state,” when it was cultural inbreeding of a white aristocracy that created the monoculture, multiculturalism in name only, that they so despise. It wasn’t Moloch, it wasn’t Nature, it was regulatory capture and top-down imposition of values. Those who feel persecuted for thoughtcrime are those who should be pushing hardest for diversity—real diversity, as opposed to a slick brochure of the indebted. Such diversity of ideas was what made America great, not that we haven’t punished people for race and sex and religion and a million other insane reasons that are not “bad behavior,” but even so America is the country of the stolen sample and the conspiracy theory, a nation of ingenuity and creation like no other, while the “white ethno-states” or “Scandinavian social democracies” you adore have created, I think, Avicii. Like wealth, class should not be treated as a zero sum game. There should not be a single ladder of correct beliefs. Having more ideas, even bad ideas, allows more ways to self-actualize and has worth in of itself.

It’s true that no group can perfectly match the values of its constituents. But the reactionaries are wrong again because their ideal nation would look no different. There is always a language gap between human beings, and fidelity is sacrificed to bridge that gap. Groups come together and cleave apart; it is the nature of individuation. Even if our society prohibited every value but the uncritical passage of information, soon we would be competing to pass information the most uncritically. Soon we would split into rival factions based on philosophy of uncritical passage. Man is a machine that extracts meaning. But communication of such meaning occurs in spite of groups, not because of them. Only when treated as an individual do we feel listened to. Existence is suffering, but once in a while someone else gets it. Might as well floss.

Still, don’t let me trick you into undue optimism. Though all value systems can generate meaning, though individuals will always fight to belong and then fight even harder to push away—that does not mean that all value systems are equal. Not long ago kids would argue over which console was better. Now teenagers whisper ‘cuckold’ and ‘nazi’ like it’s considered good manners. We are in the midst of a profound rearrangement of what traits are to be incentivized and rewarded, driven by some seven billion people each acting with what they believe to be the best of intentions. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?

[1a]. Memetics is not without controversy: in academia, it often stands accused of the heresy of dualism. The meme of “Christianity” cannot be sequenced in the way that DNA can, so how can one confidently say that it has “spread” from missionary to convert? Or that a gnostic sect is a “mutation”? Show me the nucleotides of thought, quoth the critics.

Two objections. First, we can’t isolate memes for mass spectrometry because consciousness isn’t a physical entity, it is a PATTERN of relation AMONG entities, an emergent property, meta-neuronal, not neuronal. The order of letters gives meaning independent from the letters themselves, ditto words, ditto sentences.

Second, it doesn’t matter. Is your neural firing pattern for “green” is the same as my neural firing pattern for “green”? Maybe or maybe not, perhaps your brain codes hues in RGB and mine uses hexadecimals. But it seems clear that some information is exchanged between us when we agree that grass is green. “Meme” is a proxy term for that unit of information. And if you accept this, then the burden of proof is on you to show why the mathematical algorithms of evolution—mutation, migration, and selection—the near-universal laws of information exchange—fail to apply here.

[1b]. If you take memetics seriously—and you should, Daniel Dennett’s in the New Yorker so it’s gonna be status quo in 10 years—then you should be skeptical of the gross extrapolation of IQ. Review: Is IQ a useful measurement of innate cognitive ability? Yes. Is IQ a summation of multiple somewhat-correlated skills into one number? Yes. Are some, if not all, of those skills trainable? Yes, with the greatest effects in early childhood. Are IQ tests sexist/racist? No, but they are trainable, training is culture-dependent, and culture cares a great deal about sex and race.

Ah, but here’s the trick. Let’s pretend that, like the SAT, IQ is an immutable and comprehensive measure of inborn intelligence. It would still describe hardware, not software. An out-of-date Compaq could still run new games if you allowed for a slow enough frame rate. Someone with an IQ of 80 could pass medical school given sufficient perseverance; there’s no single meme in the medical field (or quantum mechanics, etc) that is too big for the human brain, it just takes varying amounts of time to flip the pages. If you claim that IQ predicts various negative life outcomes, fine. If you claim that it’s an ability cap, you’re an idiot.

[2]. Note that the desire to love another (Eros) is actually more primitive than the desire to be loved (i.e. understood, Babel). If this seems counterintuitive, note that the Eros does not require recognition of the love object as a separate being. Babel does, and empathy takes effort. Last time you felt desperately alone, was the dominant emotion, “I hope one day someone loves me,” or “I hope one day someone accepts my love?” Pet your therapy dog and think about it.

[3]. Hence the template model (section II) of human beauty: men are attracted to wide hips because experience teaches that this trait is representative of the category “woman,” not because of an inborn preference for curves over lines. I suspect that inanimate beauty follows a similar mechanism: a view from distance is pleasing because if you zoom out far enough you can see a pattern in anything, symmetry is pleasing because… 

Paglia: “Every time we say nature is beautiful, we are saying a prayer, fingering our worry beads.”

[4]. Of course, it’s possible to blow one’s freedom from routine on a fresh set of rituals. Buying novelty is meaningful only until it stops feeling novel. It’s quite easy (and socially encouraged) to pull a Blue Jasmine and wake up just as unfulfilled with more credit card debt. Struggling with increasing strength against escalating challenge—“work”—is the only lasting source of meaning precisely because of this escalation: all other wells of novelty will run dry. But as previously alluded, landing this type of job requires personal wealth (e.g. time and money to apply to grad school) and societal infrastructure (e.g. institutions to hire you). Exhortations to “finish your Soylent, there are kids starving in Africa” are the worst sort of pointless sanctimony, but there’s a real lesson hidden inside “be grateful”: if you’re hearing it, you have the freedom to change.