Instinct, imagination, and rationality need to fuse in order to have maximum release of cultural energy. Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Emerson; Athens, Florence, London, Boston… Goethe, Weimar. Great artist-thinkers appear whenever reason leads (great civilizations)—but does not have the luxury of ignoring intuition (those civilizations are under threat).
Plato got his metaphor, his trope of the two horses that lead the soul, from experience. Reason alone did not help Athenians survive the plague, the Peloponnesian War, and the Thirty Tyrants. Reason alone did not help Dante escape Florence or Shakespeare, who pleased the queen and later the king. Emerson had to deal with the death of his first wife and his son (young America had a high infant mortality rate). Goethe quite literally oversaw the transformation of the Enlightenment cult into the Romantic cult. He fought in battle, traveled alone through Europe, climbed mountains, and exposed himself to great physical risk and adventure.
Since I’ve gotten a flood of new free subscribers, I thought I’d offer 20% off paid subs in perpetuity to interested parties—offer ends Feb 7th
https://matthewgasda.substack.com/2b0e7b22
You can reverse-engineer Substack essays and figure out what the writer reads and what they grew up reading.
There's a certain very popular style here that stems from Tumblr—the bits of poetry, philosophy, and fiction that got reposted on Tumblr. Bespoke, twee writing with traces of high style.
You can tell who the former academics are and how they've learned to temper their style.
You can tell who the Gen-Xers are who came of age during the first age of blogging and had careers in magazine journalism. Bespoke, blunt longform argumentation.
You can tell who the 20th-century fiction heads are.
You can tell a lot of things.
The question I ask myself: can I use the internet just to communicate? Is the exchange always going to be asymmetrical? I need to have an audience, but the cost of finding that audience is, to some degree, my cognitive integrity. I know it. I can feel it. I struggle to just post my Substack and log out. I have an idea for a funny tweet—it comes at the cost of 30 minutes of scrolling. We're all hostage to each other's minds.
I've seen a few different pieces on here—and I think I may have even written some diaries on the subject myself—that all assert the following thesis: the bad boy, the rebel, has disappeared from contemporary literature and the arts in general.
This liquidation happened slowly during the 2000s and rapidly after 2010. It's hard to be a bad boy when... it's hard to get published… when you're socially liquidated or threatened with liquidation. Conversely—unlike the 1990’s—it became cool to be a conformist and an ideologue in the 2000s—a rule follower.
More broadly, I think we need to understand how unusual American culture was between 1968 and 2012 or so—how unusually permissive. A figure like Norman Mailer might have been an outlaw before or after the late 20th century, but in the late 20th century, Mailer could be a best-selling writer.
Lord Byron wasn't socially acceptable. Shelley wasn't socially acceptable. Tolstoy for that matter wasn’t. But they were rich. And the world was smaller. Much smaller. Outlaws could have some privacy. Aristocratic writers could break from social norms. Proust is another good example (just look at his sex life).
So the late 20th century was relatively unique in that the market protected badness—not necessarily illegality, but moral dangerousness, moral boundary-breaking, massive personality, sublime personality. The market let working class, upstart writers play Byron.
After 2012, after the invention of the iPhone camera, after everything began to be documented, you could make money from being a fake good person on Instagram or other social media, and this weird and exciting interregnum came to an end. And the difficult personality, the erotic personality, the Dionysian personality, was driven to the woods—exile and starvation.
The strangest feature of this phenomenon is that it wasn't really conducted by the state. It came from readers, consumers—from young people. Democratic liberal politics might have sanctioned it and supported it, but it was driven by individuals agglomerated into online mobs via Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and later TikTok. Millions became secret police. Thousands became interrogators. Inquisitors.
Bad boys either lost their deals or lost any chance of getting them—of getting published. The market turned against them.
Until about 2021, there were no bases of countervailing cultural power. There was very little infrastructure to support the tortured subjects of the Reddit Inquisition, the great screaming hive mind; the satanic, devitalizing, infantile, hypocritical hive mind, pounding the pulpit, demanding an Instagrammable form of goodness.1
What was the greatest taboo of the 2010s? —that geniuses with charisma, talent, and beauty require greater latitude and flexibility; that they make shocking choices, charm, and push the rest of us forward and outward (and threaten too, yes, to pull us backward into the primal parts of our consciousness).
The other second great taboo—that a purified culture is a sanitized one. A boring one.
The third?—that the court system is a means-tested way of deciding crimes and people and is better than anons coagulated into mobs.
Hopefully, the 2010s (a vicious, empty, diluted age) continue to wither. .
What are we realizing now? That progressivism was an enforced set of unneighborly, toxifying beliefs perpetrated by NGOs and corporations that wanted to cover their bad behavior. Millions of young people turned on their family, their friends, their neighbors, their teachers because they believed that the moral arc of the universe was ecstatically close to the end of history, to liberation… and that only a few bad people—horny people, aggressive people, beautiful poeple, negative people, tribal people, tribalistic people, prosperous and successful people—were in the way; that you could go about conducting yourself in this alienating and violent way, that you could participate in a covert cultural revolution because the ideal end was near (and that the main thing you had to do besides destroying the Enemy was promote your own decency and joy and forward-thinkingness on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter).
For a decade or more, this hateful, narcissistic meekness was the paradigm of a successful, educated urban person; the puritanical certainty of the 2010s was antisocial, and the momentary euphoria of the digital mobs obscured a deeper, even physiological derangement—a derangement of the body and the soul.
In 2025, it's exciting to believe that we're past it—that some kind of gregariousness and residual sociality might return to the metropolis and the country—and worrisome to consider that we’re not: that this weird, morbid cult of puritanical sadism is evolving underground.2
The danger of moralities incubated on the internet—like Tumblr morality among teenage girls or Twitter frog morality among Twitter/X.com boys—is that it creates the following durable pattern: a fear of the Real, an inability to deal with the nuances and contours of the Real, and a ridiculous, hard-and-fast obsession with boundaries, which makes the physical real world and the seething biological world of human interaction feel safer to their deeply parochial minds (minds that have been stultified in their digital villages and thus become a menace to the rest of us).
Anonymous posting may be more popular than ever. Sadism is less effective, but no less tempting and practiced. The internet reeks of negative vitality—living in a hell of unfulfilled desires, vague wishes, enfeebled anxieties, morbid hatreds and compulsions, dreary fixations on minor celebrities who embody sin and lust and power.
Must be on another planet if you think woke-ism is giving way to some form of ‘gregarious’ social cohesion
idk... One of the silliest things Virginia Woolf every wrote (I think in 1925?) was that "on or about December 1910, human nature changed." It seems particularly silly because you really could try to be precise in this way if you started in 1914, but 1910 all that happened is that there was an art show (mostly of French stuff) in London and some pretty good novels were published. The vibes shifted, but there's something perverse about her dating the shift to 1910 (partly this is just her prejudice against Henry James).
What happened in the 2010s? We still don't have enough perspective to know. If it was a matter of genius being repressed by dumb politics (of which there was plenty, it expanded and now it is contracting a bit), I'd be pleased. I fear that we're all just becoming ever more mediocre, with dumb politics serving either as the justification or the excuse.