John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

You are who you fuck — or so I am told. In this miserable city where status is gold, I’ve seen shit-eating people who claw their way up, looking for the acceptance that they never got. It’s all about winning the meat-market games among all the rejects, dropouts and fakes. Did everyone give you the attention you seek? Whose arm are you draped on this fucking week? Trophy boys and trohpy girls, go fuck yourselves. I hate your world. Fairweather friends are keeping score. Name-dropper, name-fucker, you’re a fucking whore.¹

For all its rampant paranoia and barely veiled envy, I still love the passion and desire for a less shallow world you see in great hardcore bands’ lyrics.

1. The Suicide File : Some Mistakes You Never Stop Paying For : Now Lie In It↩

The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group — centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty.¹

1. Michel Houellebecq : The Possibility Of An Island : Daniel 1,3↩

One of the most frequent observations I make in life is that the people who most often complain about boredom are not very bright. As far as I can tell, these people simply cannot entertain themselves by pondering a question or reflecting on their past: they require constant external activity to feel entertained. If true, this would be mean that seemingly small differences in IQ lead to considerable differences in personality.

I would like to see a careful psychology study done that considers the correlation between IQ and subjective reports of feeling often bored. In order to make the pattern clear, it would be necessary to distinguish between two types of boredom: boredom because one finds an activity boring and boredom because one has “nothing to do”. While the first sort of boredom is surely universal, I think the second sort almost never occurs in individuals past a certain threshold value for IQ.

We can begin by thinking about that thin layer of students of the highest cognitive ability who are being funneled through rarefied college environments, whence they go forth to acquire eventually not just the good life but often an influence on the life of the nation. They are coming of age in environments that are utterly atypical of the nation as a whole.¹

As I grow older and am exposed to a greater variety of my fellow Americans, I come to dislike America more and more. In large part, I think the explanation is to be found in a sudden exposure to people who strike me as disturbingly and even reprehensibly stupid. As a child growing up in a private school with a student body so intelligent and well-educated that it made the Columbia student body seem to me to be filled with lazy morons, disbelief in evolution was as unthinkable as doubting the laws of arithmetic. It was not until I had met men and women with doubts about evolution that I began to realize that the doubts were to be explained as products of low relative intelligence and low levels of education. Americans on average are an exceptionally poorly educated bunch when you compare them to the citizens of other First World nations. For a long time, I did not realize this because I had been only exposed to America’s brightest and best-educated.

I personally think one of the most interesting statistics that could be taken is to find the correlation between belief in evolution and high IQ.

1. Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray : The Bell Curve : The Emergence Of A Cognitive Elite↩

I would like the fascination with avoiding the word “he” to finally stop soon. The entire crusade to remove it from our language is simply nonsensical and has proven to be a brilliant example of how conformity and peer pressure have built a new cultural custom out of an absurdity.

It is not simply that the claim that using “he” as a generic pronoun creates or reinforces sexism is made without any evidence: there is actually ample, unambiguous evidence to disprove any such assertion. We can see that there is no correlation between relative levels of sexism in countries in which there is a generic use of the masculine for arbitrary humans and those in which this does not exist. Romance languages employ the plural masculine for any group containing mixed genders, yet this is not considered to create or reinforce sexism in the way our generic use of the word “he” is considered to despite being precisely equivalent. (Indeed, one could argue that this usage, like our usage of “he”, leaves the feminine pronoun containing more information since it unambiguously determines the gender composition of the group in question.)

From this point on, I would like to see our language return to speaking of “he” and of “Man” and rid itself of signs of what has proven a needless and pointless moral crusade.

One cannot separate sexual destiny from the overall course of one’s life: the woman whose beauty is exceptional is far more likely to live an interesting life, to leave a small town, to acquire wealth, etc., etc.

There should be a law prohibiting the use of the word “seachange” in any context not involving an actual sea. In addition, there should be another law prohibiting the printing of what is clearly a compound noun as two separate words.

I’ve never looked for women. When I was a teenager, perhaps. But they are looking for us, and we must learn that very quickly. They decide. We just turn up. Never mind the superficialities — tall and handsome and all that. Just turn up. They will do the rest.¹

An intelligent observation.

1. Peter O’Toole : http://boomers.msn.com/articlees.aspx?cp-documentid=380213&GT1=8985↩

Depressives are basically incapable of love, because love requires that some other human being make you lastingly happy and depressives are basically incapable of being lastingly happy.

I am utterly in love: over the past week I have finished three Houellebecq novels and will likely finish another in the next few days — this next one being the last of his novels still in print. Within any single one of his novels one finds enough new ideas to provide years worth of solid philosophical reflection about our society’s failings. The passages above touch on some of the ideas I’ve been exploring for the past few months before discovering Houellebecq, though often from a very different set of assumptions.

Obviously I couldn’t come up with anything to say, but I returned to my hotel deep in thought. It’s a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberation produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what known as ‘the law of the market’. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberated sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. On the economic plane Raphaël Tisserand belongs in the victors’ camp; on the sexual plane in that of the vanquished. Certain people win on both levels; others lose on both. Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable.¹

Here I would contest Houellebecq’s conviction that our age is radically different from previous ages in anything other than professed morals. I do not think sexual liberalism is to blame for the things described above, but universal human traits that often were previously suppressed by restrictions placed on women’s ability to choose their mates.

Pettiness, egoism, arrogant stupidity, complete lack of moral sense, a chronic inability to love: there you have an exhaustive portrait of the ‘analyzed’ woman.²

This is not simply a portrait of the “‘analyzed’ woman”, but of most modern men and women, regardless of direct exposure to psychoanalysis.

A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Veronique had known too many discothèques, too many lovers, such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two.³

Here I think Houellebecq confuses the cause with the effect, claiming that a great number of sexual exposures takes one’s innocence when I think it is actually the absence of innocence that leads to what Houellebecq calls “sexual immorality”. What might be true is that the constant feeling that sex is easily accessible lessens its value for us: we note this attitude in those sure of their high position in the sexual hierarchy.

1. Michel Houellebecq : Whatever : Part Two, 8↩
2. Michel Houellebecq : Whatever : Part Two, 8↩
3. Michel Houellebecq : Whatever : Part Two, 10↩