12/9/06

Lord High Editor Sexo Grammaticus addresses the origins of 1585,
his hopes for the future, his amazing powers, and Bugs Bunny.

Before you say that this photo is Instagram and rush down
to the comments to call me a hipster and tell me to kill myself
in all-caps, be aware that this essay is from 2006
and I just did that with normal Photoshop.

What do you think people will say about this site? 

SG:  They’ll say what they always say about smart people in this culture:  that I “think I’m better than everyone,” that I may have a high IQ but I have no “common sense,” no “heart,” no “street smarts,” or whatever-the-fuck phrase they want to use to try and pretend that something else is “realer” than intelligence. 

“Fancy book learning.” 

SG:  Exactly.  As if I read all this stuff in a book rather than thinking of it myself.  And even if I had read it all in a book, that wouldn’t be the point.  If something is true, then it’s true, regardless of whether someone only knows it because they had a “fancy education” or whatever.

You do kind of seem conceited, though. 

SG:  Of course I am.  I’m really, really good at something.  And America encourages conceit in people who are good at something, as long as that thing is not being smart.  An athlete or a pop star can say over and over again that he’s the greatest guy who ever lived and people eat it up.  People love it because it allows them to pretend that those things are important.  But when someone’s good at something that really is important, people are disgusted.  We use words like “philosophy” and “poetry” to praise things that aren’t actually philosophy or poetry — stuff that’s pretty good for a regular guy — to elevate its status.  But when something actually is philosophy or actually is poetry, people hate it and they get mad.  So it’s weird that we use those words as compliments.  It’s like we’re trying to replace the actual things with lesser versions of them so we all feel better.

But wasn’t wanting everyone to feel better the Left’s project?  And yet you identify yourself more closely as a Liberal than as a Conservative. 

SG:  Good question.  Yeah, the Left was doing all this, you know, “self-esteem…  you don’t have to listen to anyone… you’re great the way you are… spend your whole life finding yourself… you are the center of the whole fucking universe and don’t let anyone tell you different” stuff for forty years, and it totally backfired.  It would have been a great idea if it had turned out that human nature was basically good; that we’re all really nice as long as we steer clear of nasty outside influences.  But it turns out that in the State of Nature or whatever — in the State of Nature man is a flaming asshole.  It’s the good stuff that comes from outside.  When a little kid gets mad, their natural instinct is to hit someone, and they have to be taught not to hit.  But that doesn’t mean that teaching kids not to hit is “fake” or “brainwashing” or something.  I mean, what’s the alternative?  That everyone hits everyone else all day long?

You seem to think you’re really special.  Even now, during this interview, you are standing on the table shirtless, surrounded by candles, with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” playing on a loop and a wind machine aimed at your luxurious, flowing hair.

SG:  Okay, well, yes.  But that’s the whole thing.  I really am special.  It’s totally acceptable to think you’re special if you really are — I mean, why wouldn’t you?  The problem is that everyone else thinks they’re just as special as I am, when they really suck.  People have been told for forty years that, you know, if you don’t believe that black holes or something work the way Einstein said, then you just go right ahead and believe that, because you’re just as good as Einstein.  I mean, other scientists have proven Einstein wrong about a few things — I think Hawking did with regard to black holes, and someone else may have proven Hawking wrong since then.  But that’s different.  I’m talking about the whole “I don’t have to believe you, because I can do whatever I want” type of thing.  But you’re not — the general you, I mean — you’re not as good as Einstein.

Not as good at physics, you mean?

SG:  That’s the thing.  We’ve confused right in a “true or false” sense with right in a moral sense… confused being good at something with being, you know, a good person in your heart or whatever.  And that’s a huge problem.  It allows people to say, “Well, I’m a good person, and therefore what I believe about anything is just as valid as what someone else believes, even if that other person is an expert and I’m not.”  Plus, the ironic thing is that people who think that way aren’t even usually actually good people — they’re usually dicks. 

You mentioned Einstein, and it occurred to me:  doesn’t being smart always imply some sort of specialization?  I mean, it’s not like there are just “smart” people who can do everything, right?

SG:  Good point, and yes, that’s true.  If you compare, say, Einstein, Shakespeare, and Mozart, it makes no sense to talk about who was “smarter” than whom, because each one could do something that the other two couldn’t do — although it can safely be assumed that each one was “smarter” in the general sense than an average person.  But now let’s throw in Freud.  What he was good at — figuring out what “made people tick,” so to speak — is just as specialized, but more far-reaching from the point of view of a human being living in a society.  Freud could talk about what made Einstein Einstein, but Einstein couldn’t talk about what made Freud Freud.  I mean, he could talk about what would happen to Freud’s body if it fell into a black hole, but when we refer to a person, we mean the processes by which their mind operates, not the molecules that make up their physical body.  Even though he didn’t possess their respective talents, the questions of, you know, why did Einstein become a good person instead of a bad person who sold his potential weapon-designing ability to the highest bidder, or why did Shakespeare write plays instead of getting rich by becoming history’s most eloquent con man, those are questions for Freud more than for Einstein or Shakespeare themselves.  So even though Freud’s talent was technically just as specialized, it ends up looking like everything because it has implications for everything — I mean, what person or deed is beyond the bounds of the questions of what makes people who they are and what makes them do the things they do? 

Wasn’t that also what Shakespeare addressed, in a different way?

SG:  Yes.  Which brings us to the fact that talent is inseparable from environment.  Shakespeare may very well have been better than Freud at what Freud could do, brainwise anyway, but he lived before psychology was invented, so he wrote plays.  Plus, he was born an English speaker at a time when the English language was ripe for what he did to it.  What if he had been born with the same brain, but into a culture that spoke a less interesting language?  I think that, all things considered, Shakespeare was the greatest genius who ever lived, but what the fuck does “all things considered” even mean in this context? 

Now you sound like the people you were bashing at the beginning of the interview — the people who say there’s no such thing as genius.

SG:  No, I don’t.  Saying that the ability of genius to reveal itself is dependent on external factors isn’t the same thing as saying that it doesn’t exist.  Just because you can explain something doesn’t mean it’s not real.  I mean, you can explain why Hitler was evil by saying that he was beaten as a child, but that doesn’t mean you’re saying he wasn’t really evil, or that there’s no such thing as evil.  Everything I just said was no different from saying “What if Michael Jordan had been born before basketball was invented?”, and people have no trouble understanding what that question does or doesn’t imply.  The bottom line is, what the people I was bashing at the beginning are concerned with is coming up with rationalizations for why regular people shouldn’t have to listen to smart people, and nothing I just said supports that as a conclusion.  The Academic Left's version of the same thing is to talk about how everything is social — but just because something has to be put before a genius in order for the genius to act on it, that doesn't mean that it's the thing acting instead of the genius.

That’s true.  There seems to be some kind of eternal quest among dumb people to come up with reasons why smart stuff isn’t actually smart.

SG:  Yeah.  And when they can’t do that, they try the next-best thing, which is coming up with reasons why no-one would want to be a smart person, even if the stuff they believe is true.  Usually, they do this by making up associations between smartness and various undesirable qualities that balance things out in the dumb person’s favor.  You look at chat rooms and conservative blogs, and the jokes are about how smart people smell bad or something.

Yeah, I’ve seen stuff like that.  I don’t get it.

SG:  Neither do I.  I guess it might be an outgrowth of the “smart people are socially awkward and can’t get dates” thing, or an association of college with environment stuff and hippies or whatever.  They just make up some shit and repeat it until all their friends believe it — or not even really believe it, but all agree to act like it’s true — and then they feel better, or they think they do.

They think they feel better?

SG:  Yeah.  The fact is, everyone wants to be smart and it’s impossible to say otherwise.  If someone who’s really good at hockey or something gives me shit, I can honestly say that not being good at hockey doesn’t bother me.  I don’t think it’s bad for the other guy to practice it and enjoy it, but I’m just not interested in it myself.  But everyone wishes they were smarter than they are.  Everyone wishes they were smarter, better-looking, and had more money.  And anyone who says they don’t is lying.

There’s an idea that smart people are less happy; the sort of Woody Allen, perpetually-in-crisis thing.

SG:  Yeah, that’s a little bit valid at least.  Smart people understand stuff better, so when there’s something troubling to think about, we’re more likely to think about it.  But being concerned isn’t the same as being unhappy.  That’s another bullshit rationalization — dumb people think they have power over smart people because they have the power to bother us; they think not giving a shit about anything is the superior position, and equate caring about stuff with being crazy…  They always talk about how smart people “freak out” over this and “freak out” over that, like it’s funny.  Their reaction to, say, pollution is like “it makes smart people mad; ha ha, look, I have the ability to make smart people mad!”  It’s like ruining the world is their revenge for feeling bad about being dumb in school when they were kids — as if they won’t die too when the world gets fucked up beyond repair.  Well, we think it’s funny that you’re too dumb to understand why we “freak out” over it, so there. 

But we don’t, though.  I mean, it really does bother smart people when dumb people ruin something for everyone else, right? 

SG:  (sigh…)  Yeah, you’re right.  That’s what sucks about the whole thing.  The catch is that smart people do in fact need other people to listen to them in order for their powers to work.  To return to the Michael Jordan analogy, it’s like “What if everyone else in the world just refused to play basketball, just to spite Michael Jordan?”  Then he wouldn’t be Michael Jordan anymore, because in order to be better than everyone at something, you need other people to agree to play against you.  That’s why people keep returning to physicality — to strength and sexiness — as the “realities.”  If you can beat someone up, then you don’t need them to agree to get beaten up in order for your power to be evident — you can just beat them up against their will.  If you’re sexy, then people don’t have to agree to have the desire to sleep with you — they just have that desire, whether they want to or not.  So intelligence, by comparison, ends up seeming like an artificial game that people can choose either to play or not play, like basketball.  Or even a game they can control.  Like Bugs Bunny with the matches.

Bugs Bunny with the matches?

SG:  That’s probably the best analogy.  There’s this one cartoon where Bugs Bunny is giving the business to Yosemite Sam on Yosemite Sam’s ship — you know, fucking with him in various ways — and eventually Bugs lights a match and throws it down into the munitions hold where all the gunpowder and shit is.  Sam, understandably, “freaks out” and runs down to grab it before the ship blows up.  Then he comes back up, huffing and puffing but relieved, and Bugs does it again.  Sam runs down after the match again, and comes back up again, and then Bugs throws another one down.  At this point, Sam realizes that Bugs can just keep doing this to him indefinitely — after all, it’s nothing to Bugs, because it’s not his ship — so he says something like “If you do that one more time, Rabbit, I ain’t a-goin' after it.”  Of course, Bugs calls his bluff, lights another match, and throws it down.  So Sam tries to play it cool, whistling and playing jacks and shit, and then realizes that he has no choice but to run down after the match — but it’s too late, and the ship blows up.  This is the one advantage dumb people have over smart people.  They see culture — and, to a certain extent, the world itself — as something that belongs to smart people rather than to them.  So they try to get back at smart people by fucking it up.  And smart people can never say, “Well, fuck you, dumb people — this time we’re just going to let you fuck it up.”  As many times as they try, we have no choice but to expend all this energy trying to stop them.  And they don’t give a shit — it’s not their ship.  The difference is, Yosemite Sam deserved to get fucked with, because he was a pirate or a Hessian or whatever the fuck he was in that particular cartoon.  We don’t deserve to get fucked with, because we’re not just protecting ourselves from the dumb people, we’re protecting the dumb people from themselves as well.  It's fun to feel like Bugs Bunny, to be able to fuck with people — but Bugs Bunny only fucked with people who deserved it, and that's an important difference.     

Aren’t there any exceptions to that sort of behavior?

SG:  Yes, thank goodness.  If someone is sick, they want a smart doctor who knows what they’re doing to operate on them.  No-one is going to go “I think I’ll go to a stupid doctor just to spite the smart one.”  And even strength and sexiness are subservient to intelligence in some ways.  I mean, it would have been a smart caveman who invented the bow-and-arrow, thereby negating the physical strength of the others.  And sexiness has a lot to do with figuring out what people want to see and how to play around inside their heads, which you have to be smart to do, especially at the legendary level — Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield both had very high IQs.  And then, of course, there’s Madonna, who turned her career into this brilliant , massively influential art project that seemed to regular people like it was just “being sexy.”  Figuring out new ways to be sexy is probably the most culturally important thing someone can do.  But because these aspects of intelligence get converted into unstoppable forces, people then stop thinking of them as aspects of intelligence, because a characteristic hallmark of intelligence according to how most people think of it is that it’s supposed to be something that dumb people can ignore or even fuck with.

A la the Bugs Bunny analogy.

SG:  It’s meta-bullying.  They aren’t physically around smart people to push them up against the lockers anymore — and besides, if you beat someone up as an adult then you get arrested — so instead they push the world up against the lockers.  There are all these people who got out all this jealousy when they were kids by picking on smart people and making fun of them, and then they graduate and they can’t do it anymore, but they’re used to being able to do it, so all that anger has to go somewhere.  So it goes into being wrong on purpose, because that’s the only way they have left to hurt smart people.

Did you get picked on as a kid?

SG:  Yes and no.  I mean, in elementary school yeah, but then I grew early, and started working out a lot.

In elementary school?

SG:  Yeah, in like 5^th grade.  And then no-one could take me, at least until I got into junior high and high school where there were kids who were way older.  But they didn’t come after me so much as I would always jump in when I saw someone else getting picked on.  I would get in the middle and draw the bully’s attention away.

Kind of like you’re doing now.

SG:  I guess.  I could have tried to stay under the radar if I’d wanted to, I suppose.  Or maybe not.  Maybe trying to be on everyone’s radar is just as much a part of who I am as being smart is, so I couldn’t have done anything about it even if I’d wanted to.

So being bullied was your choice, not theirs?

SG:  No, it was…  It was weird.  Everything that was allegedly the reason people would fuck with me, I’d fix it.  It started off as, “you may be smart, but you’re a pussy,” so I started lifting weights.  Then everyone said “well, you’re big, but you don’t know how to fight, and you suck at sports,” so I learned how to fight, and won a few prominent high-school fights hands-down, and practiced the one sport I was okay at until I got good.  So then people were like, “no-one gives a shit, because you’re still weird and can’t get girls,” so I put some energy into that, and ended up having more sex than the cool kids.  But then people started spreading rumors that I was fucking teachers and people’s moms and shit.  Eventually, I was just like, “fuck it, these people are going to hate me no matter what I do.”  It was like fixing the shit they said was wrong with me just made it worse.  Once you realize that your enemy is unappeasable, you take a different tack. 

You make right action sound like just another type of vanity.

SG:  Well, maybe it is.  But if it has good results, what’s the problem?  I mean you could say that any good person just wanted attention or whatever, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t actually good people.  That’s just another tactic dumb people use — saying, “well, you’re right, but your motivation for being right is questionable, so therefore you’re not actually right.”  That’s kind of the downside to Freud’s legacy.  People are afraid to do anything, because of the possibility that whatever they try to do will reveal some embarrassing thing about themselves that they themselves don’t understand.  So everyone just sits around, except for the people who are too evil to give a shit.  That’s another one of those things that people think is conservative but really isn’t.  When someone sees that you’ve started some kind of movement with a bunch of strongly-worded articles about what you do or don’t believe, right away they assume it’s going to be conservative, because whoever heard of a Liberal with the confidence to do something like that? 

So how do you know 1585 will have good results?

SG:  Well, I hope it will.  But what am I supposed to do, nothing?  There are all these people trying to do shit that we know will definitely have bad results, so the argument “if you try to stop them, it might not work, so don’t try” doesn’t really mean much to me.  That’s another problem:  everyone’s more motivated by the possibility that everyone will laugh at them if they try to do something and fail than they are by anything good that could come of their success.

Well, how would you answer someone who says that what you’re attempting to do is futile, regardless of whether it’s a good idea?  I mean, most people would probably be inclined to say that religion will simply always exist no matter what anyone does.

SG:  They’d be saying that because religion always has existed, and has been a central facet of all heretofore existing cultures.  But this actually means very little.  A couple of hundred years ago, it would have sounded just as unlikely if someone had said that one day slavery would cease to exist, and for exactly the same reasons — it had always existed, lots of cultures had developed it independently of one another, it had been an essential part of the most successful cultures, etc.  But then people realized that it was wrong, and once that happened, it did in fact go away — and it went away rather quickly too, compared with how long it had been around.  Things can change very quickly provided that the right chain reaction gets moving.

Well, what if it doesn’t ever get moving?

SG:  It already is.  Religion has already been in the process of dying out for quite a while.  If you look back over the last several centuries, the world has been less religious at the end of every century than it was at the beginning.  If this trend continues, then religion has to eventually cease to exist.  If someone disagrees, then the burden of proof is on them to explain why this wouldn’t happen, rather than on me to say why it would.

But won’t there always be mysteries in life, unexplainable things, etc.?

SG:  Of course.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people will always turn to religion to explain them.  For instance, do you believe that there will eventually be a cure for cancer?

Yes, I guess I do.

SG:  Okay.  And you believe this is because scientists will eventually discover it, right?

Yes.

SG:  Well, there you go.  Right now, the cure for cancer is a mystery.  But you didn’t say that the only way it would ever be explained is if God reveals it to us through a miracle.  You just said that eventually scientists would figure it out, even though they haven’t done so yet.  People only look to some idea of God for answers if that’s what they’ve been told they’re supposed to do.  Once they aren’t told that anymore, they won’t do it.

But people will still have heard of the idea of God.  I mean, if the absence of religion would require there to be no record of there ever having been such a thing as religion…

SG:  No, of course it wouldn’t require that.  Yes, people will still have heard of God, but so what?  Contemporary people have heard of vampires and witches, but they don’t believe that they really exist, even though they know that people in the past believed in them and used them to explain things.  A person in the future won’t be any more inclined to say that an unexplainable good thing was caused by God than a contemporary person would be to say that an unexplainable bad thing was caused by a witch, no matter how unexplainable it is.  If someone knows that there’s no such thing as witches, then you can throw all the unexplainable things in the world at them, and they’re still never going to suddenly go, “Okay, I give up, it must be witches.”

Well then, I’ll ask you the opposite question.  If the things you hope to achieve are already inevitably happening, then why bother doing the site?  Are you just trying to jump on the bandwagon of the right side of history?

SG:  No, I am the bandwagon of the right side of history.  Or a small part of it, at least.  Your question assumes that history is a thing that’s going on outside of us, and that we can either make the decision to “join” it or not.  But history isn’t going on outside of anyone — everyone is a part of it, including us.  When you asked “Why do we need people like you, if it’s already happening,” that ignored the fact that “people like me” are the reason that it’s already happening.  There have been people like me in the past, who said the past precursors of the things I say.  So I’m not “joining” the process in a way that’s superfluous — I’m just occupying my natural role in the process, which is the way the process works.

Heavy.

SG:  Not really.  It’s just what happens.  How can something be “heavy” if it’s the only thing that could possibly happen?  I mean, what would be non-heavy?

Finally, let me ask you:  How do you justify the fact that this interview was just you talking to yourself, rather than being interviewed by an actual other person? 

SG:  Paul McCartney did the same thing in the liner notes from his first solo album.

Was that the one with “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey?” 

SG:  No, that’s on Ram.

Oh, well that’s alright then.