Caveat Vendor

Universities, audience capture, and bullshit; Beowulf, Kendrick Lamar

I think a lot about the limits of being “well adjusted”.

When you can get along in the world, you start to have a vested interest in thinking that the status quo is good, since, after all, you are successful, and, of course, you work hard, so what could be more fair. Unless you are something less than well-adjusted, in my experience, it rarely occurs to you how close you are to being on the business end of the system.

But this does not only spell trouble for you. Often in practice what this means is that you end up hawking a system in which other people are, on average, doing much worse than you. Eventually they get tired of hearing how they should adjust to this, of being told to take it. I don’t just mean the present, or the obvious; I mean the realisation, currently being resisted, that what came before now is not worth going back to. That whatever composes the ideal that we find ourselves nostalgic for is part of what lead us to here.

I will take just one example, from my own narrow world. I think academics should ask ourselves the following: What did it take, what does it take, to adjust to a world where our colleagues are palling around with Epstein, and preying on students and juniors in the profession, and doing all sorts of other things besides? All the while they lecture the rest of us about what it means to be smart and moderate and serious and successful? And while we are instructed to take this to be “the good life” to which we should aspire, and toward which we should reach? What does it mean that this is — this still is — right up until the moment that it can be no longer — success? And that that is part of the world that we must now feel nostalgic for, and must even try to protect? Like, I am supposed to respect this?!

Look. Obviously, it does not do to go entirely insane about it. Going insane will not change any of the facts. But I think it does not do to remain entirely tethered to or one with that reality either. It is not good to be comfortable there. Here. I guess.

People who work in universities have to be careful. The university sells an idea of legitimacy. By our inherent function, by our nature, university professors cannot be radicals. To an extent this is true of all established institutions and corporations, but universities are literally more conservative — we have not changed that much across centuries. Teaching and learning are timeless activities, and their gains accrue over decades. Even as senior admin seeks to hollow these things out, to wrest control of our courses and research and assessment back from us in almighty service of the dollar, we will, and thus these things will, persist.

But we persist in bad condition. And it is awkward, at a minimum, to keep ushering new people into an increasingly broken-down house, unsure whether you can, in good conscience, sell it to them.

At a certain point in my first year of the PhD, one of our professors announced to the class that academic publishing is broken (actually it is one of the least broken parts of academia, but it certainly is broken) and that “your generation” (our generation!) would have to fix it. I wanted to yell at him. You are a tenured professor at MIT! You have the highest level of influence and success to which anyone else in this room could hope to aspire, and you are delegating this task to us??? But I kept my mouth shut. Not all commentary invites reply. An academic lectern can be somewhat like a pulpit. Sometimes I feel cursed by this knowledge, but I know when to shut up.

In some way this is sensible — you can’t just spend all your time yelling. And at least the professor above knew that things were broken! It astounds me how many of them refuse even to understand this. (He deserves some credit, not just yelling, as a result.)

There are good people here. It is possible, with herculean effort, to stay in these systems without being swallowed up by them. There were and are people inside, for example, the Harvard ecosystem, who challenged the people whose names you can see in the Epstein files. I am not being coy — more than one Harvard professor is in those emails, and so are many other institutions. It is very painful to think of it. It is tempting to wash one’s whole hands of it.¹ But it is not inevitable that academia ended up this way, nor is it inevitable that we continue to bend the knee to the logic of money and power. It is possible to reject the poisoned chalice of the Trump “Deal”, as Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, USC and others did. It is possible to reject their NSF money, as did the Python Foundation.

Even in less obviously shambolic places, such deals are always on offer — often interpersonally, in ways that can feel startlingly persuasive. And they are yet also, almost, always, possible to refuse, and it is meaningful when you refuse them. The powerful need accomplices. They can’t get this shit done without our help.

But it costs us, at present, to refuse them. Every instance in which I personally stood up to mistreatment by someone — usually someone senior — it took a chunk out of me. I sometimes also took a chunk out of the other guy, but I would have preferred to not do it. (And as always — listen to me — guy is gender neutral. This problem is not confined to a specific gender or race.)

Even when you are not fighting these people directly, you are also fighting the mentality that has infected the majority of everyone else, that says that it is impossible to stand up to these people or in these spaces — that “no-one” could reject these moneyed offers, that “no-one” can refuse to attend a meeting with Epstein that might enrich them or their lab or their research area, that “everyone” does such and such obviously questionable thing, that it is normal to disregard boundaries, dismiss criticism, and mistreat one’s students and colleagues.

What does it mean to be well adjusted to that?

One can be excessively adjusted. Just as one can be overly emotionally-regulated, and one can overfunction. There are obvious perils to being underadjusted, under-regulated, underfunctional; lacking tools for self-awareness, self-management, and self-control. But it is possible to have these things in surfeit. It is possible to be too sane in the eyes of the world. This usually speaks of alienation, though it can often look like just the opposite. The true non-alienation requires a little alienation, when alienation is right. To be overly adjusted to the status quo is in fact a kind of self-inflicted theft: It robs you of power to change it.

This might also explain the astoundingly regular fact that it is juniors who are most likely to blow the whistle on powerful seniors, even though they have the least protection and are in the most precarious position. They have not yet adjusted their worldview to make sense of the senseless. They have not yet found a way to deny and ignore what we all know.

I recently read four translations of Beowulf, for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture.² ³ The part that has stayed with us culturally is Grendel — the arm, that hideous death. But, at the end, Beowulf dies also; because he goes after the dragon.

He has only a squire to accompany him. When this young person, Wiglaf, gets back outside the cave, he berates the other, older, more experienced knights in their useless finery, calling them a waste of mail. Yes, Wiglaf says, we have triumphed; you are safe. And yet:

I life-protection but little was able
To give him in battle, and I ’gan, notwithstanding,
With some aid, I could have saved our liegelord
Helping my kinsman (my strength overtaxing):
He waxed the weaker when with weapon I smote on
My mortal opponent, the fire less strongly
Flamed from his bosom. Too few of protectors
Came round the king at the critical moment.

I feel this complaint in every part of me, though he says it better; these white boys have rhythm (I’m not sure when we lost it).

If more of you had joined us, he says, essentially, the king would not now be dead. And because he is dead, and because of your timidity, you are safe now only until our enemies invade us, which they will.

***

I keep wanting to say stuff like “Courage is the master virtue, because it enables the exercise of all the other virtues”, which rattles constantly inside my head. I know it’s just a paraphrase of Maya Angelou and everybody else. I am incensed not just by the greed and myopia but also by the capitulation and cowardice I see around me in the world. But at the same time Bari Weiss is going around quoting the same thing almost verbatim. So what fucking good is it to quote it?

The words don’t mean anything. 20 years ago when I was watching Randy Pausch’s last lecture — I’ve gone off it, I wouldn’t recommend it today, though for me it served its purpose — how many other computer science professors get interviewed by Oprah? It’s not many, as you see, you have to die to get that much attention — anyway, from there I got his very good advice about dating, which is “Ignore everything people say, and only pay attention to what they do.” (Actually, he was giving this advice about men, but it applies to women and everybody else also.)

I guess words from people we trust can still provide us with the energy we need to keep on going. But is that good? And why should you trust me? I am painfully aware that part of why all of this (gestures to the essays) works is because you have the track record of how I have conducted myself in another sphere. You can see that my actions do not reflect an untrammelled desire for status; at least, there must be limits to my greed. I seem to have competing priorities. (I do.)

But I don’t really want you to take my word for it. I don’t want to take anyone’s word for anything myself. I wish there was another way. I’m not sure there is, and I struggle with that, as I always have; and I struggle yet more, the wider is the circle of people who seem to know me, or feel they know me. A public persona, even on social media or intellectual circles, is at best a natural curation, or it has been for me at least. Why would you take advice or even input from someone who not only does not know you, but whom you do not know?

And yet I think I have, myself, more than one real experience of getting good advice from books and essays and blog posts, at times when I needed it most; at times when advice from people around me was — I’ll put it gently — sorely lacking. I’m not against the life-advice-or-thinkpiece-industrial-complex per se. But it has severe, restrictive limits. I think we have reached them.

A while ago on substack someone posted a complaint that all the writing on here sounds the same — which is true, at least approximately. There are about 5-7 broad approaches, which are different, but there is still remarkable conformity beneath each archetypal hood. Whoever made this observation (I’ve forgotten) immediately generated 10,000 identical essay-type thinkpieces of backlash, either denying the situation or claiming this is all just okay, in fact it’s good, it’s good, it’s fine to copy other people, it’s fiiiiine that everyone wants to sound like everyone and nobody will ever say anything risky or interesting again. It’s good that the online slop machine feeds back to me the thing I already know I want to hear. Cater to my desires. Feed me. Make it palatable to be stupid, lazy, feckless. Make me feel smart and successful and mature. Make me feel better about how the only thing I want is to be seen in certain lights, or get attention; power, money, status. Validate the craven life I seek.

Looking around, it is hard not to feel that people in our society, even in so-called serious fields like government, academia and journalism, are being rewarded for style over substance, and that this has been true now for a very long time. This occurs, obviously, on both sides — we the woke by and large want for ourselves and other people to sound woke, not to be woke, since being woke sucks as an experience. Bringing the whole vibe of the function down with your misery, complaints and alienation — who’s going to pay big money for a corporate seminar for that?

To give in too much to the logic above is what leads to audience capture. Here, again, I am not 100% against this (how could I be). A little bit of deference, as a strategy, is no bad thing. In fact almost all power — even the divine right of kings, or whatever, or the fear-induced reign of a spree-killing warlord — in practice has limits imposed on it by the courage and resources of the governed. Loved, feared, sure, yes, but you need one of them (unless you plan to debase your population, a strategy they are currently trying out in North Korea; the fact that there is then very little to extract curtails this lemma’s application). We as a culture have decided that being loved is best for a ruler, and I am inclined to that too. But one can be loved for bad things and bad reasons. I think that’s what it means to sell out.

People do not want to think of themselves as selling out. So next it becomes necessary to sell oneself the lie that one has never done this. And unfortunately by the point that one would need to do that, one is already good at selling.

This is not merely an individual moral failing, but a structure that forms part of a system. In professional life, one is obligated to traffic in a certain amount of bullshit. We all know that. But it has to be finely calibrated, and that is hard. The easiest way to sell a lie is to make yourself actually believe it, and I see that all around. Some of our colleagues have actually deluded themselves that they are so incredible and intelligent that their specific research can and will save the world, rather than falling back to the more modest, collective fact, that research as a whole will have a part to play in progress. They downplay the inherent uncertainty, they know what their research will achieve, and they feel that they should be allowed to do essentially anything in service of that clearly worthy goal.

Of course to get to this point is to have broken the core rule of any and all kinds of dealing, in the words of Biggie Smalls⁴: Never get high on your own supply. But the problem, at least, according to drug dealers, is that as a matter of experience, dealing drugs is almost more addictive than taking them. The proportion of addicts who get clean is probably much higher than the proportion of dealers who get out.

***

Kendrick started to grapple with this when he first found his way to the public. In “Buried Alive Interlude” — a track he did on a Drake album, back when they were friendly, even friends — he realises:

You belong to the people when you outside
So dig a shovel full of money, full of power, full of pussy
Full of fame and bury yourself alive, then I died.

Death is a real risk for rappers, but this is about soul death, which comes for the rest of us also. It is too easy to become what other people have a use for. I do all I can to resist this, but it is a constant struggle. My median outcome is that I fail. I am getting better, but my progress is slow.

Watching from the inside, I can say this: There is clearly some selection into who becomes successful, but there is also just as clearly a treatment effect. Success clearly drives you insane. I’ve been on social media long enough that I’ve seen people who get too popular driven mad by their own bullshit, huffing their own paint — and it would be one thing if this was just posters, or media, or artists, but this also destroys academics. And we pretend to be better! The additional pretension only makes us look exceptionally dumb.

It would not be impossible for us to be better. Everything is set up for it, and many good incentives are there. And I think we are a little better. But only just. It’s not enough. We do not live up to the way we sell it.

I do not mean to exonerate the buyers. Especially in the cultural realm, a lot of people are clamouring to buy this pack of lies — about success, about intelligence, but above all about fame and who gets famous. It’s interesting how much we want it, how much we want what we make, for it is people who make influencers. No executive plucks them from the air, now, or the Pasadena sidewalk; it’s the public. Can I say “it’s the market”? (Of course it is laundered by “the algorithm”. I want to say that raw attention is still the most powerful force on the scene, but I guess that, too, is wishful thinking.)

The thing is that people, or at least enough people, in addition to liking what is true and good and beautiful, also like what is bad, stupid and soothing. And so with us. Enough students want us to pass them even when they haven’t tried and haven’t learned. Enough of the admin wants us to do that also. Enough of our colleagues don’t care, or are distracted, or they want us to collude in their abuses, to spare them from accountability, or else to spare their friends. People are capable of buying a fantasy from totally disgraced purveyors, like elite education institutions, or Chris Brown.

People even still like Drake! He offers nothing! Nothing!! What do people who like him even like?! He has no story but the Insta story, no target but Target, no metric but metrics themselves. A lonely-eyed jukebox, just a vapid simulacrum of a rapper. A missing stair, a sham pain mocktale, a beat without a heart; an empty needle in the veins, a teenage dreamless sleep. (Stop, Meager, he’s already dead.)

I relate to how much all that shit enrages Kendrick. Kendrick has always struggled with fame, and had to balance his ambition for greatness against the obvious risks and temptations that success provides. Drake, on the other hand, cannot see beyond the end of his nose; he is a black hole of greed, seeking endless accolades and validation. I sometimes wonder if preying on younger people emerges after people your own age see through your bullshit. Then, if you will not reform yourself or curb your desires, it’s clear which of your tactics you can change. But actually I wouldn’t hold too strongly to this thought. These people also abuse and sucker-in plenty of other people their own age, and plenty of youth see through them.

And for the 8, nearly 9 long years since I got my phd I have looked around at senior economists to see how they deal with the heavy burdens of power and influence and I have inescapably noticed that for the most part they do not deal with these burdens, because they do not bear them. They enjoy and use their power for their own myopic ends. They do not feel any sense of responsibility to those who are vulnerable to them.

I cannot describe to you how enraging it is to look to well-established, reputable, publicly altruistic people to seek to understand how to use power, fame, and influence responsibly only to discover that for the most part this question, or this agenda, has never occurred to these people at all. I found this to be a betrayal.

It’s not everybody. (I would quit if it was everybody.) I am not sure if it’s even the majority. There are seniors who do care; I was and have been lucky in my immediate mentors, especially in undergrad and grad school. But that luck made me naive. And now I’m 37, and I’m here. This feels too old to get wise to it.⁵ There is a weight in me of all that wasted time.

I feel bad that I de facto encourage others to join academia by my continual presence in it. I have a secure, or even cushy, job here. I have some influence I can use to do good; there are good people here, worth cleaving to. But a persistent minority of very bad people make this house a horror show for everyone, and I grow increasingly repelled by the silent majority that stands by and watches and enables it.

Sometimes I think one way out of the corporatised destruction of the university would be to transition to a model where the professors own the university in a kind of partnership or mutual cooperative agreement, like a law firm. Then I think, bro look at the state of my full professoriate. I do not trust these guys to run a Walmart. They’re still better than the senior administrators, I think, on average, but it is NOT a uniform dominance relation. Maybe I would still support it. Then again, look at the state of the law firms.

The fact that there is no obvious place to run does not make the situation better and does not speak to this being some kind of natural constraint — these are all correlated outcomes, fed into by an underlying system. I have a set of standard answers I give to myself when I curse god and ask why all these people seem so perennially eager to demonstrate either cowardice or else extreme greed at the slightest provocation. But none of the answers are all that compelling and they cannot quell my rage.

I think the rage keeps coming because the offence continues.

At long last — and it has been a journey — I’m not inclined to think myself wrong for this, at least not uniformly. When you hear about abuses of power, you should feel disgusted. That is what disgust is for. If you no longer feel disgusted, that is not wisdom or cleverness. Something has gone very wrong.

***

Hall’s 1892 translation of Beowulf is the oldest usage I have seen of the construction “self-help” in any form. It meant then almost what it has come to mean today: The practice of assisting oneself with one’s own problems; with refusing, or not availing oneself of, outside help: thence Beowulf came then

On self-help relying, swam through the waters;
He bare on his arm, lone-going, thirty
Outfits of armor, when the ocean he mounted.

This is the first anglophone superhero, the one who has the strength to bear the mail of 30 men. But he dies for lack of compatriots, and unlike our greek and viking counterparts, we do not send our heroes onwards after life.

The above definition is a little complicated since obviously in practice now what “self-help” means is purchasing and reading books, and listening to any number of the hundred million podcasts. But I think the Beowulf example lends a more sinister note to this procession — Beowulf relies on self-help in the end not by stoically refusing the assistance of others but because almost all the others abandon him, despite the fact that he has recruited their assistance and kitted them out in his finery. The others are just all too scared to fight.

And it is not because they are weaker: Wiglaf has the courage they do not. One cannot help but think of Zoe Ziani, the grad student who raised the alarm about Gino, and whose intellectually-bankrupt advisors repeatedly dismissed and attempted to suppress her concerns — not as wrong, but “inappropriate” — because — “academic research is a like a conversation at a cocktail party”. ⁶ And then the rest of you fucking cowards say the system “works” because Zoe was not entirely deterred from blowing the whistle by these fools, and because Data Colada was there to blow the whistle to. This is a handful of people, working at maximum risk. The system is running off the blood and bones of the most precariously-situated scholars. That’s what you call how it works?

And, in the same thought: the countless grad students who are brave enough to turn their supervisors in to HR departments and Title IX offices despite the absolute soul-destroying cruelty that they are routinely met with there.⁷ And the endless minimization of these issues from our colleagues, the unquenchable desire our colleagues feel for just one more chance… for their friends.

Don’t worry, however bad it is. Everything is improving! There is on-campus meditation and puppies you can play with for exam week! Have you tried keeping a gratitude journal? Let’s go around and say one thing we’re thankful for! This is just a tough time! You’ll get though it! The administration are listening. We’re here for you! But we are also saying: We know it’s hard, but you got this! You are resilent! Be positive! Be kind!!!!!

Sorry. I regret that even as a joke.

I guess I am not against self-help as a genre. I have used it, and I consider myself to have been helped by it. But I also think that what has passed for mainstream life advice for the past 20 (or 30, or 100) years is now intolerable, and that as a culture we are up against the edge. In the whole genre, only Mark admits this, and I probably stole this set of thoughts from him, for he says it so well: “Wellbeing is not individual; it is something we do together. To my mind, this is the principle blind spot of the self-help genre, especially the self-improvement gurus like Huberman.” Individual thought, no matter how bent towards self-betterment, is not going to be enough for us to push back against our real collective problems. By its very nature, however, the rest of self-help is loath to admit that, for “I can help you with about 10% of what ails you” does not sell that many books.

One thing that drives me absolutely nuts about the individual, non-collective focus is the foundational assumption that it is always better to have an internal locus of control, better to always consider one’s own faults and failings first, and better to give others the benefit of the doubt in virtually every single case, without ever questioning whether the people one is interacting with are doing anything remotely close to the same thing or extending themselves towards us in return.

People who are hawking this shit will try to tell you that since you don’t control other people’s behaviour, you should not dwell on it, nor investigate it. Bull fucking shit. It matters what is the truth. It matters if someone has good or bad intentions towards you, or, in fact, considers you such a non-entity that they have no cause to formulate an intention towards you at all. (So what if you can never really know. You can never really know anything. You probably can’t even know your own intentions. But that’s why god invented probability.)

Overthinking is one thing, but a lot of “letting go” is just avoidance. It costs you something to internalise a brutal reality. It’s heartbreaking to realise there are people in this world, and perhaps quite a lot of them, who do not sincerely want the best for you or indeed for anyone other than themselves and a small coterie of their favourites. They do not have any loyalty to academia in general, to research, to teaching, and not even to the truth.

Academia selects for people who are willing to take punishment. That also means it selects for people who want to dole it out. Where there are many people who either will not or cannot interrupt abuse to themselves or others, there abuse will flourish. If we do not eject or penalise abusers, that means that we will live among them.

The self-help, inspirational solution, is just to stop being worried about it. Think of all we’ve gained! Focus on the positives! By whatever means necessary, insulate yourself from this emotion! Stop having the normal, human reaction to a life filled with abuse. But then — What is the goal? To be happy no matter what? To be happy while people are tortured around you, in front of you?

These people are selling you the ability to adjust to anything. Heroin also does that. Is heroin only bad because of its side effects, and of its attendant risks? No. What it does is bad. Total equanimity is bad for you. It robs you of your humanity just as much as being a hyperreactive mess.

It should be unpleasant to hear about betrayal and abuse. Bad behaviour should make us feel bad. It should make us angry, it should make us feel betrayed, it should even move us towards despair. If you should feel anger, or hatred, and you don’t, that is just as much a sickness as if you feel anger and hatred when you shouldn’t. This knowledge itself feels uncomfortable because it means that what is right and healthy and wise and good is actually tethered to reality in some way, and that to live well, we have to be able to discern what reality it is.

But that’s true. That’s just what the truth is. It horrifies us to see our colleagues acting chummy and cosy with Epstein and his ilk because we think that this job stands for something, and what it stands for is pretty strongly antithetical to sex trafficking minors. There is no way out of this observation. If you shut down the part of yourself that is horrified by this, you are just shutting parts of yourself down, and nothing else.

I am not in favour of the crash-out. I understand it, and I even respect it. But it doesn’t work. Endlessly puking your guts up — living in permanent revolt against everything, refusing to acknowledge what is good in the world that we have — is not efficacious. But constantly fellating the status quo no matter how horrific things get is approximately as dumb also. There has to be a line in the sand, a point at which we would shrug off our inertia, our allegiance towards the gains of this system and the progress our society has made. If there is not, then there is no end to the cruelty that will be meted out to us and those around us, while we cling, in the name of loyalty, to some bloodless institution.

And the people in the Epstein files, and all the people like them who aren’t in there, and Chris Brown and Diddy and Drake will never stop causing problems. Even if we win victories against them, they will not read the writing on the wall as you or I would; they will not get the message and decide to stop, nor even purvey their bullshit elsewhere, in some other field. They will keep coming back as long as they are able, because they have no objective other than to keep coming back.

Someone who cares only about being in the game has no competing allegiance. They will stay in it, clawing for status, making themselves and others miserable, no matter how much we disavow them. We can’t really actually cancel them until they are cancelled systemically. Words will not do this. (Yes, again, it would work on us; they are built different.) You can even tell them to their face that their behaviour is unacceptable, but this means nothing to them until they face some consequences. They will stay here until we have the courage and the ability to co-ordinate our energy, to either deny them our attention or to actually kick them out.

It is hard to design ways to overcome thorny, uncertain, high-risk collective action problems. If only there was some field dedicated to working out the theoretical and empirical possibilities for solving these kinds of problems. But there isn’t. There is only a field that sells itself that way.⁸

***

How does a dragon acquire a hoard of gold? They don’t really have arms, how do they pillage? The answer in Tolkien’s analysis of Beowulf is that the hoard was created by men, accumulated by generations of kings and heroes until it was eventually left unguarded and without protection. Dragons don’t even have a use for gold. They are drawn to piles of shiny things that people won’t defend.

Of course now this rhetoric is tainted. The above sounds a little like the ramblings of a white supremacist obsessed with a declining west. We have exhausted the verbal defences of defence itself.

According to Tolkien, the gold was cursed also.

Sometimes I truly ask myself what is the point.

The dragon is not even really presented as evil. Grendel is evil, the other enemies are evil, the cowardice is evil. But the dragon is a sort of nascent, umbilical creature between worlds. So it’s the wrong metaphor anyway. Somehow we are given a sense that this was not a dishonourable way to die, and that Beowulf was not motivated by greed. And so I guess nothing is simple, not even at the end.

If I haven’t quit yet, is it only because I have a tendency to move slowly? Until I get information that something is unsalvageable. And I don’t feel that way about our profession; not this year, not yet at the time of writing. (Or, it could also be spite. But I would like to think there is a limit to how much suffering I would impose on myself purely to spite others.)

I guess I still think there is good here. We have a good part to play in society. I still think that we represent, on balance, a quest for knowledge, and a desire to pass that knowledge down. There are enough people who do care, and I suppose I have a stupid hope that in my lifetime we will get rid of this current way of doing things, that we will find some way to effectively contain these people. I do think I see some glimmers of it; people waking up. But I wonder if that is wishful thinking, and if hoping for that is keeping me too emotionally invested here.

It’s soothing to say that bad behaviour catches up to people. In my experience, usually it doesn’t. It’s fun and cathartic for us to crow over the few people whom we can bring to justice, to say you see, you see, you can’t get away with this forever. But maybe you can. Then what. What happens if you can really fool people. I guess then we can’t appeal to your self-interest to stop.

So I guess you could do that, probably. If enough people like you and your lies, or are scared. I think this can “work” “for” “you” if you are truly, completely numb to yourself. (Some of our colleagues are that.) But I think being even vaguely aware of this truth about yourself is torture; it must be. It does not cause me to wonder, when I see audience capture drive people insane. In fact I think in some cases audience capture is a weird sort of self-harm by proxy, where one uses the audience as the instrument of torment on oneself.

I do think this endless status-grubbing system is bad and dangerous not only for the consumers of this tainted slop but also for the producers, who are ever-increasingly herded into smaller and smaller pens, told to be an ever-more restricted set of things under risk or threat of penury, or even just the social stigma of “not winning”, of not “staying relevant”, of not having anything that announces to the world that your wants and thoughts and your opinions matter.⁹

But still. For most people in our echelon, this is a choice — a choice between a normal, middle class life, and wealth and stardom. I recommend to you the normal, middle class life (like, get it while you can!). Let me tell you where a pathological determination to have it confirmed that your ideas, your views, your influence, your theories, etc, are culturally, globally salient, that you will always and everywhere matter and not just to the small group of people who care about you but to the whole entire stinking world, leads. It leads to the Epstein list and nowhere else. I have seen people I know start to be tempted by that path; I have had the gross realisation that people I have met are on it.

When you are a little bit successful, the world does kind of want you to start with this. And it’s very hard to say no, even if you clearly see the peril. You tell yourself you can compromise. You can. But it is hard to broker a compromise with an appetite that has no end. It takes constant vigilance, which is a lot of work. And when the desperate need to have your fame and power and importance confirmed has crowded out all other values, there really is nowhere else you can end up.

This need not happen publicly. I guess it usually doesn’t. But privately, eventually, I think it happens. Despite that, perhaps — or, evidently — you can be so clever in your machinations, and so lucky, that you can fool many others to the end. But it is remarkable to me how often people are fooled by our bullshit purely because they want to be — and that, in turn, because they want something from us. People who want you because of your status or because you instill fear or because you tell them lies do not love you. They just pretend.

The opening shot from Squabble Up, which you should watch expeditiously.

1. I suppose what I am doing here constitutes a partial hand-washing.

2. You bet this is a Due South reference.

3. Don’t bother with the new Maria Dahvana Headley one, it’s not worth your time. Stick to Hall, or Heaney. Tolkein’s is just fine, though his commentary and notes are excellent.

4. He is indeed responsible for this formulation (Ten Crack Commandments) but he was paraphrasing a line from Scarface — still, the writers of Scarface obviously did their research, so I am inclined to think this was a sort of folk maxim, or folk theorem, among drug dealers. That makes me feel it is right to attribute it to Smalls.

5. In my defense, I’ve been chewing over this for about four years in private. I don’t come running to you people with my first fucking thought, ever. You know?

6. HOW CAN THESE PEOPLE CALL THEMSELVES ACADEMICS

7. I’ve been told that these offices have been getting better, and I hope that is true.

8. Okay. This is unfair. Economists have done a lot of good in terms of antitrust etc, and we deserve credit for that even if certain countries I could mention seem loath to enforce it. And close to home, actually, in terms of improving our own profession: Zingales had a crack at this once, suggesting that in all IP disputes between senior and junior coauthors the project should revert to the juniors automatically. This is a good idea! I think about it biannually. (Yes, I know he also platformed Bannon.) If you have more links to similar, let me know in the comments.

9. For those playing along with my public/private sphere theme at home: you are supposed to cultivate private, personal relationships that make you feel that way. Do not look to feel loved in the culture. I need this thought as much as anyone which is probably why I even need to write this.