For the first time in many, many generations, maybe centuries, the leading classes have no interest in reading, no system of references, no capacity to sustain critical and dialectical thought, no interest in metaphor, illusion, or poetry of any kind. No real, humanizing education.
One way of looking at the failure of the Biden administration, for instance, which is sort of nakedly a project of former Obama interns and other PMC with vaguely utopian ideals and a lot of ambition, is that the PMC are just stupider, less well-read, less thoughtful, fake—fake elites.
Today's populism is simply driven, is driven not exclusively but partly by the conspicuous failure of the elites to be elite, of the meritocracy to have merit. Cultural capital has been stolen, not earned.
Think about it another way. The academic left has been busy writing compelling justifications for why what an oligarchy of petty strivers and sycophants—at the cost of any real democratic impulse, excluding any reference to what ordinary people think, feel, believe—want is good.
Beauty lives in its own ungovernable world, and in a way, as such, it's unforgivable. Unforgivable because it's forever at a remove from us. And yet desire, because it's so tragic, is strangely pure.
Creativity is supposed to save us from ourselves. That is to say, produce counterfactuals, alternates, fantasies.
Creativity is supposed to alleviate the symptoms of the human condition, but not entirely cure them.
There are certain moments where you feel like you've been alive for 10,000 years. I guess the idea of reincarnation comes from this deep, unusual sense that all of this is new, is something you've seen before in a different form, rather than for the first time.
Beautiful and rich people at parties—performing rituals to keep death and entropy at bay. A certain kind of party is about being young forever. Or pretending to.
Writers are people who have stuck their fingers in the electric socket of death and have never forgotten the shock.
I think the last 15 years are basically about a revolution of the BoBo’s, the bourgeois bohemians, and the imposition of a new kind of Victorianism that is bourgeois (rigid, moralistic, self-serving) under the guise of the bohemian. Polyamorous, vegan, electric car driving, whatever. The optics for a long time hid the intent, control, order, domination. But those optics are fraying more and more. And the cultural counter-revolution is less about fascism or the ultra-right, and more about just calling bullshit.
Mass consumption looks for ways to look sophisticated and subtle, when in fact it's animalistic and primal. Stupid. The leisure class is always looking for ways to hide its behavior, to hide its sensual selfishness, and to signify its own importance. To join the leisure class unthinkingly is actually to subject yourself to a kind of spiritual death. Or if not a death, a spiritual hibernation.
Very few people can demonstrate taste without pretending that they don't shit. Very few people approach the beautiful with respect and desire for the sensual and the physical and the immediate. The leisure class like to pretend that the beautiful has now come of their own ritualistic behavior and self-cultivation.
Unfortunately most people can only conceive of marriage in America as a leisure class celebration of status, or as a working class tragedy. Or as a lower middle class minor tragedy, or tragedy of boredom. There's very little notion of sacrament, union, love.
Many of the people who run New York's cultural apparatuses in the 2020s got to the position they’re in now by canceling their bosses in the 2010s. Crude careerism. Masked moralism. Social climbing masked as social justice.