God condemns Conservative Bullies for Opining on Comedy

Dateline: D.C.—Conservatives condemned Michelle Wolf’s comedic speech at the 2018 White House Press correspondents’ dinner, until God reminded them they have no sense of humour because they’re bullies.

“The hand of God descended from the sky,” said one observer. “The arm was clad in a glowing white robe, and the hand carved the Ten Commandments into the side of a mountain near Boulder, Colorado. But then the hand added an eleventh commandment. Can you believe it? An eleventh, after all this time.”

The eleventh commandment reads, “Conservatives shalt not opine on comedic matters, for their heartless soul hath no sense of humour.”

At first Americans were mystified, but comedians were quick to explain God’s message. “Comedy is for underdogs,” said comedian Tobias Laffaminute. “It’s always been that way. That’s why Jews are known for their comedy, because history has given them the perspective of underdogs and outsiders.”

By contrast, bullies aren’t funny, because they stand for the oppressive status quo that comedians are supposed to mock as an underhanded way of getting even on behalf of the downtrodden.

“It’s a little like Nietzsche’s point about slave morality,” said historian of comedy, Camilla Vanderwhatsit, “except that instead of vindicating their weakness with moral fictions, the funny representatives of losers fight back by getting the dominators to laugh at themselves.”

According to culture critic, Emilio Highfalutin, the new divine revelation explains why Ann Coulter’s comedy faces not one but two nearly insurmountable hurdles: she’s a woman and she’s a conservative bully.

“She tries to be funny,” said Mr. Highfalutin, “but while it’s possible for women to have a sense of humour, they have a much harder time of it because it isn’t as easy for them to fail in life as it is for men to do so. Only 30 percent or less of American homeless are women, for example. So women tend not to identify with losers and underdogs.”

“But more importantly, Coulter’s persona is that of a sadistic tyrant. And when the strong beat up the weak, it’s just not remotely funny. That’s why Germans are infamous for their solemnity, because they carry the baggage of Nazi tyranny, and because their hard work and efficiency make them so powerful that they have a hard time sympathizing with losers.”

The key is humility, added Mr. Highfalutin. “A comedian should be humble, not self-righteous, unless the comedian’s playing an ironic character, like Andrew Dice Clay or perhaps President Trump.”

Michelle Wolf’s speech was mostly funny and powerfully satirical, according to comedy insiders, because Wolf’s frizzy hair and off-putting voice lend her the loser’s viewpoint. Similarly, Jon Stewart has at least two strengths of the loser: Judaism and shortness. Bill Maher is half Jewish. Celebrated African-American comedians such as Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and numerous others have as much right to the underdog viewpoint as Jews, because of the legacy of slavery.

After the correspondents’ dinner, CNN’s Jake Tapper noted that token African-American conservative pundit Paris Dennard didn’t crack a smile the entire time Michelle Wolf spoke. Mr. Dennard responded by calling her speech offensive and unfunny.

But after God pointed out that asking a conservative to assess something’s comedic merit is like asking Donald Trump for advice on how to tell the truth, Mr. Tapper apologized for having wasted the viewer’s time by allowing “a heartless and clueless conservative to pretend to know the first thing about comedy.” Whether the conservative defers to the power of the state, added Mr. Tapper, or to the amoral market logic that creates plutocrats, the conservative becomes authoritarian.

For his part, Rabbi Mazel Tov interpreted the eleventh commandment as “the Lord’s way of apologizing for his evident lack of humour.” Life generally is absurd enough, he said, but “the dreariness of most of the Bible indicates that God may not get the joke.”

CNN replaces Serious Commentary on Trump’s Presidency, with Constant Laughter

Dateline: ATLANTA—CNN has dramatically altered its strategy in covering the Donald Trump White House, having first milked Mr. Trump’s scandals for ratings in the 2016 campaign and then attempted to provide serious, fact-based analysis of the first two years of his presidency.

“We realized that we were the true traitors,” said Toby Cynic, the CEO of CNN. “It’s a little embarrassing to admit that as a news organization we haven’t had the moral high ground for decades, since we’re very critical of Trump and he calls us ‘fake news.’”

Mr. Cynic now admits that CNN helped to elect Donald Trump, by shutting Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton out of most of its news cycle. “Trump took up all the oxygen and we couldn’t help but give him most of our airtime because we’re a business and we have to make money. We supplied what people demanded.”

Realizing that the American free press has a constitutional duty not to defer to market logic, but to educate the citizenry to prevent the American democracy from falling to pieces, Mr. Cynic made sure to hold Donald Trump accountable, once he was elected.

“Ever since he was elected, we left no stone unturned when it came to raising fair criticisms of this presidency. We offered fair, fact-based coverage of the reality of what Mr. Trump has done in office.”

But critics pointed out that CNN’s dedication to providing sober, reality-based commentary has had the unintended consequence of normalizing Mr. Trump’s bizarre, chaotic regime.

Granted, Don Lemon routinely stressed on his nightly CNN news program that it would be wrong consider Donald Trump a normal president. Mr. Lemon castigated his guests for pretending that Mr. Trump has been functioning well in high office, as though Mr. Trump’s scandals were in the same league even as George W. Bush’s.

“The problem,” said Mr. Cynic, “is that calling Trump abnormal—or even psychotic and authoritarian—doesn’t matter if you’re pointing that out in a professional CNN broadcast. By sitting around with a dozen pundits, soberly picking this president apart, you can’t help but leave the impression that despite all those criticisms, Mr. Trump must be the new normal, because you’re still generally treating him the way you treated all the other presidents. You’re still just sitting around a table and talking seriously about the daily news. After all, the medium is the message.”

Two years into Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Cynic took CNN in a radically different direction by barring his employees from engaging in serious analysis of the news from the White House. CNN’s reports are now issued only by the news ticker at the bottom of the screen, the essential facts of which are read aloud by a synthesized voice. The sole job of CNN’s human anchors, reporters, and analysts is to laugh a lot in response to those reports.

“We switched from comparing our savvy zingers, to comparing each other’s fits of laughter,” said Mr. Cynic. “For example, after Trump ranted for thirty minutes on Fox and Friends, the robotic voice we programmed at CNN read the bare-bone facts of that news report at the top of the hour, which took a minute or so. Then the news anchor and his or her guests laughed hysterically for fifteen minutes straight until it was time for the next segment, and the process was repeated to cover the next bit of Trump news.”

“We take turns laughing,” said CNN news anchor John King. “I’ll laugh for a while, then one of our analysts will bust a gut laughing, and we’ll go round and round in that fashion. Sometimes we interrupt each other with a little cross-laughter, but we try to let each other’s laughter speak for itself.”

Mr. King reportedly balked at the new policy at CNN, because “he likes to hear himself speak,” according to one of his colleagues at CNN. But Mr. King saw the wisdom of the transition when he learned that CNN had been doing more harm than good by attempting to offer serious-minded commentary on the Trump White House. Much as CNN bolstered George W. Bush’s fraudulent case for the Iraq War, from 2001 to 2003, “the most trusted name in news” had been unwittingly giving credit to President Trump just by relaying the disturbing facts of what Mr. Trump is and what he’s been doing.

“It’s like reporting on a stark, raving mad person, someone who’s lost all touch with reality,” said Mr. King. “Do you just keep announcing one shocking instance of lunacy after another, saying that this person is flinging his feces out the window and now he’s drawing on everyone’s shirt with a red magic marker and now he’s shouting and dancing in the streets or acting as though he were Napoleon Bonaparte? At some point, it’s no longer news and you’re just wallowing in something tragic or ghoulishly preying on the viewers’ weaknesses. At some point, you’ve got to stop pretending the naked boy emperor is wearing any clothes.” 

Do We Really Want to be Free?

What is freewill, socially and historically speaking? As I explain in The Irrelevance of Scientific Determinism, many of the perennial philosophical questions about freewill are beside the point, much as the abstract, idealistic legal questions and economic models and principles are meant to be counterfactual. Lawyers-in-training and economists ponder unrealistic scenarios, devoid of real-world context, to test their understanding of certain principles. The danger is that these professionals might begin to mistake their maps for the territory, the rigor of their learning process with some scientific status of their discipline. This mistake can happen in either case when these professionals forget the normative dimension of society, and pretend to be technocratically neutral about how people should live.

Likewise, the philosophical question of whether we’re free persons or puppets of prior causes asks too much and abstracts from what would have to be the preconditions of producing a real creature with freedom. To dismiss the independent identity of something, by reducing its contribution to some prior influence is to commit the genetic fallacy and to render all distinctions erroneous. The only legitimate subject matter for this severe reductionist would be something like the Big Bang singularity or whatever else amounts to the First Cause, all subsequent objects and events being nothing but byproducts. Needless to say, the kind of independence or freedom that could violate all possible natural ancestries, that is, that could ignore its birthright, as it were, in so far as this free being is part of the natural order, would be supernatural, absolute, and thus unreal as far as anyone could tell.

So the freedom at issue must be limited to have arisen in the natural order. Instead of being sufficiently independent of nature to be capable of resisting all possible influences, to have always been able to do otherwise than would be predicted from an understanding of the total set of circumstances, a free creature must be only partially able to resist some features of its environment. This is to say the creature would be natural and real, not a ghost, an angel, or a god. The free creature would approximate those absolutes, and its autonomy would play out as a coordination of anti-natural intentions and capacities. This freedom would thus require what we call a mind and a body, a self that sees things its way as often defined against the broader flow of natural events, and an organic interior or sub-world, separated from the broader world not just by a barrier or membrane but by the anomalousness of all its internal processes, which both contribute to the creature’s limited freedom.   

Taking all this as read, this still addresses only some of freedom’s preconditions. A remaining question is how the degrees of freedom affect our anti-natural agenda, thus shaping the history of freewill. Another question is whether freedom ends up being a worthy ideal. All species have some degree of freedom, but there’s a meaningful distinction between animals and people, albeit one that explains without justifying the mass extinctions we’re perpetrating. Animals are slaves to their biological life cycle, because their minds aren’t liberated by language or by higher-order thinking. Their behaviour is almost entirely evolutionary, which means their genes keep their host’s neural control center on a short leash, as the psychologist Keith Stanovich puts it in The Robot’s Rebellion. The word “animal” thus has similar connotations to “robot”: both entail subservience in the sense of forced labour. The first robots or “robota” were peasants in the European feudal systems, and the writer Karel Čapek speculated in 1920 that mindless humanoid bodies could be produced, so that “robot” came to be applied to at least the idea of artificial labourers. The idea was to replace sentient with mechanical slaves, out of respect for moral principles. The Cartesian contention that animals are machines with no rationality or consciousness has exactly the same implications. The humanist wants to say that animals or robots should perform our labour to free the lower class of people from having to degrade themselves and to behave as though they were mere animals or robots themselves.

Again, the truth here is mixed. Many animal species do have some degree of rationality, consciousness, and freedom, and these attributes fall into a continuum. Nevertheless, our species is far removed from all the others on this planet with respect not just to our liberated mentality but to the flexibility of our phenotype which enables us to apply the virtual miracle of our godlike perspective. Perceiving the ugly truth that the natural order enslaves us all in so far as we’re animals (forced labourers serving the duopoly of genes and the environment) isn’t the same as being able to do anything about it. It’s obviously possible to be imprisoned without having the power to break out of the prison cell. Most likely, animals either don’t comprehend the absurdity of their situation or don’t care about it. Even intelligent animals such as apes, octopi, or dolphins are likely interested only in narrow applications of their mental maps. Thus, they don’t waste their life as though they were locked in a prison cell, knowing that the world treats them as robots and yet lacking the equivalent of an opposable thumb to begin to externalize their anti-natural will with technological transformations of their pristine habitat.

Last Remaining Internet Author Paid accidentally by Parakeet

Dateline: Cubicle District 64, Year 2028—Mystifying tens of millions of authors, Horatio Masterson is the only remaining writer who is still somehow being paid for his work, and in this exclusive report, we reveal the secret of his success.

The internet’s early enthusiasts promised a socialist paradise, but while advances in communications technologies encouraged many more people to speak their minds and try their hand at some art form, the “Let Information Be Free” movement ensured that most of these budding writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, and other artists became paupers.

As we’ve all come to realize, the trouble was that the large manufacturers that advertised on the internet had much more clout than content-providers, because things like clothing, furniture, and cars were more in demand than ideas. Robots can produce things more efficiently than can human labourers, and so those people were swiftly put out of business. Unable to be retrained for the new economy, they took to overdosing on opiates, committing suicide, or getting themselves locked up in prison. 

Artificial intelligence provided the same unbeatable competition to those who had made a living with mental rather than manual labour. But whereas the machines used to manufacture material goods were enormous and costly, and thus not easily replicated, AI programs proliferated and so after 2025 anyone could create a work of genre fiction, a digital painting, a hit song, or even a computer-graphics-laden film just by turning on the AI on a common mobile device. Once art’s mystique was gone, demand for the arts dried up.

That didn’t stop the world’s artists from expressing themselves in their work, since they’re compelled to be creative; only the economic value of their products has fallen off a cliff. No one was interested in paying for a stream of content on the internet, including for this very article you’re reading, because so many artists were willing to work for free. After all, they created mainly to express themselves, not to make money. The market for news, pop cultural reviews, or philosophical articles thus became oversaturated.

Only Mr. Masterson discovered some trick to earning a living as a content-provider on the internet—in his case as a culture critic who writes articles on various subjects. A team of social scientists investigating the phenomenon confirmed that Mr. Masterson is human, not a bot or a cadre of hackers faking the payments. But Mr. Masterson’s articles aren’t noticeably higher in quality than the millions of other such texts available for free all over the internet.

The miracle is that someone somewhere is paying Mr. Masterson to write. We’re used to seeing all the internet money going to the advertisers, not to the thinkers and artists, as our species came to appreciate our inferiority to the new generation of machines and artificial minds.

But the secret of Mr. Masterson’s success hasn’t been revealed. Until now.

Our producers followed the money and discovered that his benefactor is a parakeet owned by a wealthy woman named Elizabeth Milton. Unbeknownst to her, the parakeet, named Jimmy, has gotten in the habit of pecking at the same keys on an old keyboard connected to Miss Milton’s computer that she’s left on for years but doesn’t use.

Coincidentally, the timing of Jimmy’s pecks coincides with the publishing of Mr. Masterson’s daily output of articles, so that as soon as each article is released, Jimmy has accidentally sent the author hundreds of dollars for that day from Miss Milton’s bank account.

Miss Milton confirmed that she’s never read anything written by Mr. Masterson, but that she doesn’t intend to turn off her computer, because she’s under the impression that Jimmy likes the sound of its humming.

“I suspected some such oddity,” said Mr. Masterson after we revealed our discovery to him. “It seems, then, I’m in a precarious position as a professional author. I’m the last of my breed. Should dear Elizabeth’s parakeet cease to push those precious buttons on the keyboard—or as soon as the bird passes away—I don’t suppose such a lucky confluence of events will happen again for me or for anyone else.”

Other writers resent Mr. Masterson’s stroke of good fortune. Tomas Bombastico is an unemployed teacher who publishes his lectures on YouTube and his academic articles on his blog—all for free, of course.

“I’ve read Mr. Masterson’s output,” said Mr. Bombastico. “His articles are nothing special. My writing is ten times more interesting and no one pays me a dime. And there are millions of other writers just like me, writing pages and pages that no one ever reads or pays for. It’s a travesty.”  

Mr. Bombastico resented the suggestion that if all those writers hadn’t been willing to sell themselves so short, perhaps the market wouldn’t have become oversaturated.

“We write because we have to express our ideas,” he said, “and we’ll do it for free if we have to. But where’s our crazy parakeet?”

Against Steven Pinker’s Case for Humanistic Progress

In Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker argues that the Enlightenment worked! Reason and science have brought progress to humanity. Don’t believe it? Pinker proves it with dozens of graphs. The hard numbers tell the tale: scientific advances have led to technological and social ones that have increased human flourishing not just in the West but around the world.

Alas, one sticking point remains: Pinker writes like a jackass. If Pinker’s case against religious, postmodern, authoritarian, and romantic critics of the thesis that rational enlightenment is progressive were as airtight as he suggests with his quantitative analysis, that counting of the numbers should speak for itself. Why, then, does Pinker supplement that supposed proof with his haughtiness and his slippery, specious philosophical arguments? The answer is that the graphs don’t speak for themselves after all. Who would have thought that statistics is a shady business, that you can “prove” whatever you like by twisting the facts as you please, as is common practice in advertisements! Enlightenment Now follows upon Pinker’s similar but more-focused book, The Better Angels of our Nature, which argues that the facts prove that global violence has declined due again to rational progress. But critics pounced on that book’s use of definitions and statistics. Conflicts between states have declined, but civil conflicts have increased, as the discussion in this video points out. Plus, as pessimistic economist Nassim Taleb argued, the 70 years of global peace Pinker points to may be only the trough between catastrophic conflicts that happen on average only once a century and that falsify any such notion of a steady decrease of armed conflicts.

Pinker, however, doubled down on his method and in this newer book presented graphs showing that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are all on the rise. Critics this time have focused on the question of how evenly or fairly these goods are distributed. For example, average global health may have risen only because a minority has received the best medical care, leaving the majority with health problems. Averages can cloak this divide, which is why Pinker dismisses the concern about economic inequality, since as long as everyone’s welfare increases, he says, it doesn’t matter that some people are doing much better than others. Inequality isn’t the same as unfairness, says Pinker, which is true as a matter of semantics but is irrelevant, since empirically the top one percent are more or less sociopathic and thus don’t earn their wealth fairly. 

In any case, these questions of tangible progress don’t much interest me. It’s perfectly plausible that the rise of objectivity and skepticism from the Scientific Revolution onwards has led to technological and thus to some social progress. The main defect in Pinker’s argument, however, is apparent from his chapter on humanism. There he means to show that science is inherently humanistic, and this is the primary point of disagreement between Pinker and his critics; moreover, this question of humanism is the source of Pinker’s dismissive attitude towards those critics. Pinker pretends the numbers speak for themselves, whereas everyone is familiar with how statistics can be abused. The reason for that pretense is to justify Pinker’s lapses in the philosophical and historical departments. From a scientistic perch, Pinker can “argue” the philosophical points about the humanistic implications of reason and science, which means he can presuppose those happy connections, to excuse himself from having to provide anything like a strong philosophical or historical case in addition to his statistical one. The numbers allegedly do the heavy lifting, so all that’s left for Pinker to do is to boast. You wouldn’t expect the scientistic shiftiness from his persona in his public discussions and interviews in which he appears as a longer-, greyer-haired Spock, all mild-mannered and even-handed. But his writing on the philosophical and historical issues is both triumphalist and pitifully weak, as John Gray points out in his review of the book.

The Social Reality of Heaven and Hell

In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Shylock the infamous Jewish moneylender provides what’s become rhetoric for an egalitarian rallying cry, when he compares himself to the Christian and asks rhetorically, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” The inference drawn from the extracted meme about how everyone bleeds the same is that everyone is therefore more or less equal. In fact, Shylock’s speech reads as a rationalization of his preoccupation with vengeance, on which he subsequently dwells in the last third of the speech. The implicit equality, then, isn’t so much between those belonging to different creeds or religions, but between humans and other clever primates who understand the concept of revenge. In any case, the notion that blood type matters to whether people are all in some important sense equal is quaint. The invention of the computer has demonstrated the many-to-one relationship between software and hardware: instances of the same type of computer can be running very different programs, just as individuals with the same phenotype can be mentally dissimilar. Whether we all bleed the same is thus a classic red herring, as far as an egalitarian should be concerned.

There are reasons to think, on the contrary, that the rich and the poor effectively occupy very different worlds, phenomenologically speaking. Of course they live in different parts of the city or country, in different-sized houses and so on, but their qualities of life are also divergent, as are the social systems in which they operate. This is shown, for example, by the proverbial golden parachute which saves only the wealthy. In most cases, the wealthy aren’t socially punished for their failures. They fail as often as any other fallible person, but normally they don’t suffer much as a result of their misdeeds. On the contrary, the punishment is typically externalized, which is the Orwellian kernel of truth in trickle-down economics. For example, the vulture “capitalist” swoops in, purchases and dismantles a company, earns a bonus from the short-term boost of the company’s stock price (since in theory the company’s temporarily worth more as a skeleton than as a working business, until the realization kicks in that a skeletal company can’t make much money), and flies away from the wreckage as the stock price plummets and the company goes bankrupt. Instead of being tarnished by associating himself with antisocial, Darwinian logic, the CEO is celebrated in the business literature and the banks are quick to finance his next takeover venture. Then there are the many examples of white-collar criminals hiring a team of the best lawyers to get away with their crimes, or of their having hired armies of lobbyists to have legalized their destructive lifestyle in the first place. The rarified world in which the power elite lives goes to great lengths to prevent this dashing knight from failing in the fullest sense, from hitting rock bottom by recognizing, for example, that his business model trains him to be a predatory sociopath who must segregate himself from mass society to avoid the backlash he deserves. White-collar sociopaths who wreck companies and thousands of employees’ lives are heralded as gods, while blue-collar sociopaths who rape or murder are locked away or executed.

In the ancient and medieval worlds, this difference in social class was codified in warfare, when the nobles would engage only in single combat, away from the chaos of the war itself. Often, the defeated king or lord would be captured and held for ransom instead of killed, whereas the peasant soldiers would savage each other in a free-for-all bloodsport. In the modern world, the highest-ranking military commanders are typically civilians who command the troops far from the battlefield, while the grunts languish beneath the fog of war, showing fealty not to those commanders but to their brothers-in-arms. At least in societies that have no military draft, the grunts who derive from the lower social stratum fight in a world in which the element of chance predominates. The stakes for the soldier are a matter of life or death, whereas the main concern for the generals is their military career. For reasons set out by John Ralston Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards, modern social systems compel rationalist leaders to fail upward, because these systems are amoral and their inclination is only to ensure that the systems are efficient. The ultimate outcome is irrelevant, according to the instrumentalist, as long as the system and its logic prevail. Thus, the dishonour involved in commanding the Iraqi battlefield from the Green Zone, which invites contempt from America’s adversaries and which hurts American troop morale is of no consequence, because this democratically-controlled military system is presumed to be much more technical and efficient than the Islamist militant’s guerilla warfare. As Saul points out, this instrumentalist reasoning was fatally undermined by Robert McNamara’s loss of the Vietnam War. Saul assumes, though, that this value of efficiency should be taken at face value.

Open Letter to President Trump, from the Entertainment Industry

With all due respect to the outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign, to those who voted for Donald Trump, and to the policies and performance of the Trump administration, we members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, and of numerous other unions pertaining to American arts and letters implore Donald Trump to stop pretending he can be president, so we can skip to the part where artists get to lament or ridicule everything he’s done in office.

The artistic importance of the Trump White House’s shenanigans dwarfs the political or economic effects of that administration’s actions. The Trump administration isn’t competent enough to put its stamp on history by the strength of its convictions or by the novelty or relevance of its policies. The Trump family intended to get into politics only to enrich themselves or to show off. But as far as the rest of the world should be concerned, their regime will have only entertainment value and so Hollywood, for example, must be allowed to capitalize on that fact.

Decades from now, no one will associate the Trump administration with any political accomplishment, despite the need for an overhaul of the neoliberal way of doing business at home and abroad, as is plain from the rise of state-controlled capitalist countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, and from the decline of liberal democracy in Europe and North America.

Only the artistic commentaries on the Trump fiasco will matter, and these will consist of mountains of films, novels, poems, television series, plays, songs, and operas that will duly arrive at the meaning of Trumpism for the benefit of humanity.

These artistic monuments to Trump’s folly are waiting to burst forth, but the artists are prevented from starting their labours in earnest by the fact that this administration is still perpetrating its absurd pretense that it has some business to accomplish. Decorum requires that artists hold their fire until Donald Trump is no longer president or until the full farce of his time in office has unspooled.

To begin the cinematic excoriations midstream, for example, would invite Trump’s defenders to retort, “Too soon.” But we believe the majority of Americans have waited long enough. Donald Trump has no legitimate business to tend to as president. His time in high office has been laughable from beginning to end. We demand that President Trump bow out of his political fraud so that the entertainment industry can turn its full attention his way.

The dozens of movies alone that will soon enough be made about the Trump disaster will be worth more to history than everything Trump will have done while he was president. Indeed, Trump’s abominable presidency will have the sole merit of providing so many raw materials for artistic and comedic sublimation.

In effect, President Trump is working consistently only for one special interest besides that of his personal family’s enrichment, and that’s the entertainment sector. Trump’s every utterance and buffoonish performance feed artists a wealth of absurdity to challenge their respective muses. Far from working to improve America as a whole, President Trump has effectively aligned himself with the liberal entertainment industry, since it will be left to the artists to redeem the shit sandwich of his presidency.

But by remaining in office where he obviously doesn’t belong, he’s delaying that superior work that needs to be done.

Thus, we the undersigned say: Enough with the fake politics; let’s skip to the art.

The Travesty of Self-Help Advice

Outside of the academy, self-help platitudes have largely substituted for philosophical literature. This is both pitiful and fortunate. The pity is that the advice peddled by self-help writers is abysmal. The blessing is that if the masses are attracted to New Age-flavoured self-help therapy, they haven’t the stomach for authentic knowledge and so it’s just as well they steer clear of philosophy. Still, here’s a philosophical take on some pearls of self-help wisdom.

Warped Stoicism, Garbled Liberalism

The charlatan sometimes lures you in with a veneer of ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism. Authentic Stoic philosophy is tragic, because it was meant for warriors in a literal battlefield in which a violent death can come to anyone with no warning. The Stoic concedes that we have no control over the external world and therefore shouldn’t expect to get what we want if our desires are based on the false premise that we can control anything other than ourselves. Thus, we shouldn’t expect to be happy if we think happiness ought to include monetary wealth. As in Eastern religions such as Buddhism or Jainism, we should tailor our desires to natural reality: our naïve, self-centered, extravagant desires are unrealistic; the external world is indifferent towards our success (especially in war), and so the most we should hope for is to avoid disappointment if we can learn to be humble, to expect to control only our mindset. This is why Epictetus said the Stoic is invincible, since as long as he or she aligns her thoughts with natural reality, the Stoic won’t expect more than the world is likely to provide.

All by itself, then, genuine Stoicism refutes most of what passes for self-help wisdom, because Stoicism includes the tragic principles of Buddhism, which were much more recently reformulated by pessimists and existentialists in the wake of modern science. But in summarizing the top self-help lessons, one charlatan recommends taking “full responsibility” for your life. “This means that you have to own your mistakes and your victories too. You should not blame anyone else for the conditions in your life. You have to take responsibility for your life so as to live the one that you desire. Do not place responsibility for your life in the hands of your parents, guardians or romantic partners. The quality of your life is completely up to you. Do not make excuses, only progress.” Another source puts the point this way: “Don’t be an asshole. There’s enough negativity in the world; don’t contribute to it. If you’re able, be kind, but if you’re having a rough day, just try not to be a complete dick.”

This advice appears to be a garbled rendition of Sartre’s view and is thus in line with the bastardization of Stoicism. The exoteric slip-up here is to slide from Sartre’s early phenomenological focus on how consciousness is free to escape the present, to the notion that our freedom encompasses our “life.” In short, Sartre’s early account of freedom amounts to Stoicism, so his point is that we’re free to adjust our conscious states to accept reality. Thus, he says in Being and Nothingness that even a prisoner is free as long as he or she doesn’t wish to leave the prison cell. This is just the Stoic warrior’s tragic attitude of accepting the unpleasant likelihood of suffering or death in war, which extends to the broader conflict between nature and all creatures not occupied on a formal battlefield.