Junk Food for the Mind

A partial examination of a mentally unhealthy essay by "BILLIONAIRE PSYCHO"

This past week the Tonic 7 (about 4-5 attending) discussed the article Pygmalion and the Anime Girl, which has drawn a lot of attention and popularity in the past week or two. I wasn’t involved in the talk, which is unfortunate because unlike the lads I really disliked the work. Honestly, it might just be me, because I do not understand why people seem to like this sort of thing. Below is my attempt to explain why I find this sort of work repugnant, even if I agree with many of the general themes. Indeed, perhaps because I agree. If you have time for a two hour podcast and a 33,000+ avalanche of words, I recommend listening and reading to get the other side. You might even want to follow along for a bit, in case you don’t believe what I am writing.

What has been generated here? Sort of looks like a little boy… I guess?

Our opening subject, possibly the instigating incident for the essay: Sen Hawley says stop looking at porn and go outside and ask a real woman out. Then quote from Biblical Matthew about how the Pharisees say one thing then do another, piling burdens on and not helping.

Then pictures of Hawley's wife and kids with him...

Skip to: Politicians are bad. Ok, I am with him here…

[Hawley] preaches of duty, honor, and masculinity. But if you look at his thin, scrawny arms, it’s obvious Senator Hawley rarely lifts weights.

… so no point is valid unless the speaker lifts as much as you consider proper? If your arms are not a certain shape you must be wrong? When did “Do you even lift?” become a valid logical argument outside of fitness discussions? You can’t be at all masculine, or even discuss it, if you don’t have thick arms?

Then BP claims modern religion tries to glorify women at the expense of men which... what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?

Oh... eventually he gets to the point that women tend to reject a lot of men, and apparently there is data detailing how much. It seems he considers it Hawley's responsibility to know about this data. How dare he suggest that men stop taking matters into their own hands and start, well, taking matters into their own hands by pursuing women? Doesn’t he know women reject men a lot?

(And who the hell claimed "women are catering to the whims of men"? That isn't referenced in the essay anywhere else, attributed to Hawley or anyone... who are you arguing with, BP?)

However, women rejecting "the vast majority of men" isn't relevant here, anyway. The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment¹. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to.

To that point, considering most people only date one other person at a time, rejecting the majority of those interested is expected. Most people who marry only do so once, which implies they reject the majority of those who they have ever dated, just as they rejected the vast majority of everyone of the appropriate sex they met as dating partners.

Women reject the vast majority of men, and chase fruitlessly after a small handful of conceited, womanizer jerks (such as myself).

Frantically, desperately competing for the same narrow batch of playboys encourages those ego-inflated bachelors to avoid commitment.

Feast, or famine. There’s no middle ground.

Women enjoy rejecting men, especially handsome men; the power to select or spurn suitors based on arbitrary reasons, mercurial moods, is fun. It provides a validational ego boost.

These truths are politically unpopular.

As a result, Senator Josh Hawley feigns ignorance, and blames men.

There are only extremes, all one or the other, nothing in between. That's the quality of social observation we are reading here.

That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out. How dare he blame men for being single because they spend their time on porn instead of asking women out (and not on Tindr, I would note.)

Apparently Hawley touched a nerve.

The larger argument, however, seems to focus on women being awful, and that is why the family as an institution is falling apart. (Wait... weren't we just talking about dating?) The evidence for women being the reason for this disintegration of the family is a statistic that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Why might that be other than women being at fault?

Well, one might consider why one initiates divorce. Infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical abuse come to mind immediately. Which sex is more likely to commit those, leading to the other spouse to initiate divorce, I wonder... I wonder, but apparently BP doesn't.

Heavy porn use being a symptom of dysfunction in life, escapism to fill an otherwise unfilled void, is a fair point. Overuse of porn is a symptom of a deeper sets of problems, just as skinny arms are a symptom of genetics and less time spent making ones arms bigger. One aspect is beyond ones control, but another is not.

Then of course we get another assertion that is simply wrong. (One suspects that a more focused essay with more thought put into the claims and their truth value might help avoid these problems.)

Politics is downstream of culture.

Culture is downstream of economics.

Economics is downstream of technology.

Although I am unsure as to the exact position of politics and culture relative to each other, leaning towards politics being mostly downstream of culture, I am quite certain that culture is not downstream of economics, nor economics downstream of technology. All three are mutually interacting, like any good complex adaptive system.

But one can see why he makes this error: better to blame impersonal forces outside one's control for one's ability to find a spouse and thus over indulge in porn than to consider one's own actions might be contributing. Actions such as "not asking women out but rather spending too much time on porn." It isn't that you don't ask flesh and blood women out on dates, but rather the economy that keeps you from dating.

The images of Tweets he chooses to highlight this point are another good example of the loose thinking, the "well emotionally it feels right, so it is probably true" approach. My favorite is as follows from one Jacob Shell:

"1990s middle class lifestyle" means 3-bedroom house, 2 cars, annual family road trip holiday, every 5 years overseas holiday, the 2-3 kids go to solid 4 year colleges, something like home roof repairs is financially non-catastrophic.

In 2022 I've described a 400K/yr+ household.

So... for whom was that the middle class lifestyle in the 1990's? I was a teenager in the 90's and I knew precious few people who went overseas every 5 years. Zero, in fact. And today, save the overseas holiday and adding in a few more road trips, that pretty much describes my household, and we make a hell of a lot less than 400k$ (unless my wife is really holding out on me.) I note he doesn’t bother to note what the incomes of those 1990’s middle class people are, either.

Now, it is entirely possible Mr. Shell has a very specific idea in mind. Maybe he is talking middle class in and relative to coastal California or NYC, both places which have seen costs of living get extremely high extremely quickly. For the big cities in general that might be true. But lots of the population doesn't live in the major big cities, so we should be a bit careful there. Moreover, we are left with no way to check whether what he is claiming is true. Focus on the emotion, not the reason.

Now, to be fair, I think it is largely true that the economy is worse now than a lot of people credit. Many things are more expensive, particularly things like health care, college, housing, food and child care. This is partially masked by the decrease in the cost of consumer goods. In other words, the less regulated or government subsidized industries are doing great in terms of "better quality for less money" while the more regulated and subsidized industries are the opposite, at best pulling off "questionable quality improvements for a lot more money." Again, much of these numbers are driven by urban areas, but health care and college prices know no geographical boundaries. Especially as the official inflation numbers don't generally include food, energy or housing prices in a way buyers would recognize, I am very sympathetic to arguments that actual inflation, particularly in specific areas of the country, is far greater than the official numbers would imply.

But after pages of images regarding the economic difficulties of starting a family we get this quote:

Widespread usage of intense, high-resolution, cinematic pornography is a symptom of our culture’s sexual dysfunction, which inflicts many second-order effects.

Not the cause.

… and you lost me again. What is "our culture's sexual dysfunction?" Is that related directly to its economic problems? If so, how? Is it related to women being more picky and nasty now than in some previous era you had in mind?

In this society of atomized consumers, romance and passion and authenticity are purposeful acts of rebellion. Happy relationships are often destroyed by our poisoned ecosystem. Natural impulses have been hijacked, funneled into various forms of self-destruction.

Community itself has become a commodity.

Emotions, and experiences are designed, packaged, marketed, and sold as consumable products.

Casual human interactions have been monetized, and paywalled.

There is a fundamental absence of meaning.

Wait... what? Our poisoned ecosystem is destroying happy relationships? Where the hell did that come from? I thought people couldn't form happy relationships from the get go, but now they existed and are being destroyed by the ecosystem?

And what the hell is the rest of that? Do you intend to explain or demonstrate what you mean, perhaps with examples, BP?

No. No he does not.

Thus dies the hope of a coherent argument emerging from this rant as the author shifts into full on "state everything I perceive as wrong with the world," mode.

Down around word 1,444 of a 33,500+ word essay (if you don't count the image inserts) we then get this interesting point:

Porn brought us the social contagion of troons, and the psychological contamination of autogynephilia on broad scale.

Wait... so porn is bad again and something people should stop whether it makes them feel better in the face of a crap-tastic world or not? So now he rambles about how social media breaks down people and feeds psychological diseases. Ok, I am again sympathetic... oh wait, now "these are industrial contagions"? Social media is industrial?

Digital opium destroys focus by providing instant gratification. Willpower is eroded by an excess of easy pleasures. Cheap distractions saturate our surroundings.

Psychological diseases are invisible, asymptomatic during the early stages of mass formation psychosis. Contamination is subtle. Novel strains of mania, and hysteria build in quiet isolation.

These are industrial contagions.

I am going to stop here for a moment, as my brain starts to scream "What the actual fuck am I reading about?" This essay so far (my description is now up to a bit over 18,000 words into the essay after the swarm of fever dream stream of consciousness) is a great example of how semi-coherent mindless bullshit can trick the sympathetic audience member.

I say audience member because you see this sort of thing most frequently in bad cinema. A movie or tv show, such as (picking two modern examples at random) Black Widow or The Rings of Power, seems at first glance to have a story that makes sense. The expected emotional beats are there, and words that are shaped into something resemble dialogue, spoken in an order that appears to be related to the progression of the story as shown by the scenes that seem to follow logically from one to another. But then you step back and think about it for a moment and realize hey, this part doesn't quite make sense, and this doesn't really follow... and why would she do that? The unsympathetic or lazy audience member will just say "This is just stupid" and stop there. The more sympathetic however, will begin to connect dots, back into reasons and meanings that make the whole narrative hold together, no matter how tenuously. What those sympathetic hearts do not notice, however, is that they are making it all up; in their desire to give the author the benefit of the doubt, they are doing the author's job for them, and writing a coherent narrative that is not present in the actual work itself. Those dots don’t connect, those reasons are not reasonable, and the meaning isn’t there.

Billionaire Psycho's essay, brings out the same behavior. People agree "yea, it is tough for young men these days" and try to bend the written words to make sense so that this nice fellow who agrees with them isn't writing garbled nonsense. After all, surely it can't be nonsense if they agree with the gist of the argument, right?

So what does BP mean when he says "the end of cheap energy" and blames much of the current economic problems on it? Doesn't matter, just insert whatever you think it means such that it makes his story coherent.

Do his claims and statistics hold up in how he combines them? Well... we can assume he really means to say something slightly different.

Is this coherent at all? Well, no, not really, but it is directionally true.

Where have I heard that sort of thing before?

I remember, it was during a mandatory DEI struggle session, where the presenter said dozens of things that were demonstrably false, but even still we were supposed to take it seriously because it spoke to the emotions of some downtrodden people.

A serious person might say those emotions of the downtrodden were perhaps real, but their diagnosis of problem was apparently way off, and this twit bloviating nonsense wasn't doing them any good. Yet many of otherwise nice, presumably well meaning people took it all seriously. Sure, this particular twit might not know what he is talking about, but the phenomenon is true. Systemic racism is real, and that is why we are all obliged to sit through "training" explaining how we are all racists and how we need to be racists in the other direction, paid for and mandated by the supposedly systemically racist organization in question.

Sometimes sympathy for the emotions of others leads you into madness right along with them if you aren't careful.

When we want to agree with people, whether because they are like us, are expressing frustrations we share, or otherwise saying that which we want to be true, we have a very strong motivation to take everything that they say in the most beneficial light. We paper over holes in arguments, we assume we know what they mean when they say something nonsensical, we give them a pass on factual errors as "nonessential to the argument" when they say things we know are wrong. At the extreme end, we assume that what they are saying must be really profound and deep, and we just can't quite grasp it all yet.

You see this in people's admiration for the "classics" as defined by university English departments. Why the hell is Marx so popular? It isn't because his ideas cohere or follow together in a consistent and logical manner, it is because he throws an absolute avalanche of stuff at the reader, a wall of emotive words they want to agree with, then presents a conclusion as though the last thousands words were evidence or reason or an argument instead of just things. There is nothing there, but people want to agree with the conclusion because they find the parts emotionally agreeable, and so people laud it as a brilliant work. No matter that it resulted in the exact opposite of the societies that it promised.

So sure, I agree that there are many problems with our society, and the dating process is worse now than it was, for a number of reasons. This essay/article/poem/small book, whatever it is, does not, however, provide anything valuable, and instead is the intellectual equivalent of junk food. It triggers all the emotional responses, the shape and the feel of reasoning and value while providing none of the actual value of intellectual activity, just as a sugary donut triggers all those fun food feelings without actually providing real sustenance. Whether intentionally or not it preys on those who want to agree with it, pretending to reveal truth but instead just telling you what you want to hear.

It is in fact just Woke style propaganda, but for those on the right.

Now, raise your hand if you think leftist Woke propaganda has done any good for the average leftist.

1. How large a segment? Damned if I know, and BP doesn’t tell us.