Three Uncomfortable Truths

Better to acknowledge them. They're already true.

"The one thing I know, everyone respects the true person and everyone's not true with themselves. All of these people who are heroes, these guys who have been lily white and clean all their lives, if they went through what I went through, they would commit suicide. They don't have the heart that I have. I've lived places they can't defecate in."

—Mike Tyson 

You have the life you have and so you are well-acquainted with its specific burdens because you face them every day. You need to be in certain places, doing and saying certain things, obliged to observe social, familial, and professional norms. When you imagine having another life, you imagine the benefits of that life. If you were king, you would do x or y thing. You would have a gorgeous, supportive wife, an abundant varied harem, a maze and food to keep your Minotaur cheerful and sporting. You would be exactly as moral as you are now, only more altruistic because of stonks.

But do you ever consider the things the king has to do? The ceremonies he has to attend, the times he must bite his tongue before a foreign dignitary, which duties he must execute to maintain his wife’s spirit, which postures prevent his bodyguards from executing him? If you did, you might understand why the king not only neglects to execute your brilliant policy initiatives, but why he instantiates many you hate, knowing full well they inspire hatred.

Should a rebellion or uprising take hold in one of the hinterlands of his kingdom, he must send guards to squash it, even when he has a soft-spot for the ilk of peasants wilding tf out—especially when he likes the peasants wilding tf out! No one wants to appear weak to their populace and preferential treatment to those who betray you is suicidal. On the other hand, breaking out the catapult and razing a few huts in the hamlet is messy business with bad optics. Then again, the peasants are simple and it is really best to use force-multiplication over nuance which—it is not their fault—they cannot understand. Should a crop yield come in shy, the king may need to redistribute rations among his people. Which is when he takes from a more industrious group (gnomes) and gives to a less industrious group (sprites). And sooner or later your Based GigaKing begins to resemble the contemporary state replete with IRS, ATF, a fleet of evermore miserable and pear-shaped sprites, along with several SWAT teams filled with the most retarded criminals the king can convince to fight on his side. 

While I fully plan on writing a piece about why we are way too mean to rich people (like the king and his friends) and insufficiently stern with the poor (scarabs of low breeding), I will save it for a later date. The reason I bring up the parable of your highness is that every mature person needs to apply this question to themselves: 

Knowing that you are stuck operating as a serf with your genetics and your maximal pay scale, which of the less pleasant truths about human nature should you get comfortable with so that you can better do the job of managing your lot and keeping a cool, equanimical head? 

Rather than write an exhaustive list of such truths, here are three:

Mr. and Mrs. Problemz on The Riviera.

Truth #1:

Anyone can betray you but lacking high quality human capital you can depend on is a weakness.

No matter how much software advances and how much we continue to socially atomize, many endeavors will be best coordinated by charismatic individuals. Assuming the people developing AI aren’t TechnoHitler (evidence pending) it is unlikely it will be programmed to deliberately cause negative outcomes. On the other hand, anyone with children can tell you people are programmed to know convincing ways of manipulating your judgment, they are self-interested, and as Cody Wilson says “latently criminal, opportunistic.” The thing is, that search engine you send queries through isn't loyal. It doesn't know what loyalty is. It's just a machine and it serves you the same as the next user. Conversely, humans are built to betray you and so, every time one doesn't, you can increase your measure of loyalty in the person helping you. Many con artists rely on this dynamic to make their final move and yet, to assume that dependence and reliance should be avoided outright, will make you less successful than you could be. There is a saying that there is no honor among thieves but many people are saints to one person and conmen to others; if you want to get things done, you may rely on a conman at some point to make a discrete move that substantially improves your strategic position. Such moves are often achieved through the use of the following: wingmen (and wingladies), matchmakers, financiers, shills, podcasters, big brothers (and sisters) influencers, brand ambassadors, sluts, and lawyers. Knowing when you can rely on these often duplicitous types comes with time but relying on only yourself is inefficient and suboptimal.

No matter how spiffy that LLM gets, people can still accomplish things that LLM can’t. For instance, an example I have no firsthand knowledge of: There are ten year-olds in The Bronx who can get you affordably priced, bistro-quality drugs. But an LLM will only fetch articles on why child-labor laws are good and drug laws bad. Precisely because it is risky to deal with humans, it becomes preferable to do so. 

Sophia Auld pictured with her plug, Frederick Douglass.

Truth #2

Getting what you want and acting how you want are frequently at odds.

Everyone knows someone who talks about how the stock market is fake, really jacked guys can’t fight because they are too big and slow, most men/women actually enjoy androgynous blobs for sexual conquest, etc.

What someone is saying when they utter this nonsense is: People who get rich through investing didn’t earn their money in a way I personally like; sure, that guy looks like he could inseminate you from ten feet away but I have a hyper-specific James Bond villain fight-scenario in which I subdue this thoroughbred and get the girl; I disapprove of the amount of work that must have gone into looking as good as this person we are talking about—they should be doing something important like filling their big podcast-head with Substack takes.

What is always presumed is that it’s no big deal for the people who devote so much time, effort, and money to achieve their rarified status, for some Patrick Bateman type to get up, don a suit, and run through an early ass skincare routine. He enjoys calisthenics and graphs. It is no big deal for him to lift thousands of pounds of sets x reps throughout the week. He gets drained by people and depressed if you don’t let him herniate a disc now and then. Similarly, anyone can devote themselves to a life of cosmetic surgery, wearing the right dress, preening, plucking, becoming sexually successful, and admired. It’s why we have pain killers and weight loss meds. Practically the easy way out.

What is conspicuously unaccounted for is the fact that wearing a tie and talking to normies sucks. Most people who work out, no matter how hard, are never going to look the way they want (may never look the way anyone wants), being a sex object is a full time job. (OnlyFans exploits the fact that you can be sexy OR a nurse right now but it is very hard to be sexy while being a nurse, the patient is coding and your iCloud is full.) 

The point is all of these types: the broker, the specimen, the GigaStacey—they all get ahead by unpairing what they would like to be doing (watching beheading videos on X) so that they can put on these success masks (charging you a copay in between hitting the vape, getting you to finance the buttplugs on their wishlist).

You must figure out what you are willing to do and what you would like to do and manage the tension between process and outcomes. I, for one, would like to get paid for receiving sexual favors and consuming edgy content all day.  Alas, I must respectively stay chaste and produce the content I wish to see in the world. Always the noble, never the king.

Spreadsheet chad Davis Clarke before detonating several IED’s at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

Truth #3

Hypocrisy should be avoided; yet you should increase your budget for it.

There is a great scene early on in the film Training Day where Denzel Washington pressures fellow cop Ethan Hawke into smoking weed. Depending on your moral code, this may or may not be a bad thing. However, most of us can agree it’s probably worse for a police officer to do this (rather than a citizen) insofar as the officer is trusted with making sure no one in their jurisdiction ever feels this pleasure. Whether you have seen the film or not, we can basically agree that this behavior, using illicit substances while banning them, can be classified as hypocrisy. While Washington is far more corrupt and hypocritical than Hawke, he is also far wittier, funnier, charismatic. Having a hot Spanish mommy making pupusas for him further endears him to me.

While I can think of any number of people who lie and are unsuccessful (most liars are not wealthy, well-respected people), all of the really successful people I can imagine are also liars and hypocrites. So what gives?

One thing that separates successful people from proles is a sheen of prestige. Prestige is highly contingent and subject to the pressures of history and fashion. What is high fashion in one locus of space-time makes you a pauper in another. Hence, trends regarding sun exposure/avoidance, preferred BMI, etc. If you suspect that someone like Hillary Clinton can get away with things you cannot, that is true. However, she will never make looking like her prestigious because she is also unlikable and nothing about the way she looks is enviable.

If you are not Hillary Clinton, do not despair. For one, you have been President the same amount of times as this lady. For another, being likable is pretty much within your reach even if you are homeless. I have literally known a guy who went from being homeless to married on Brickell in one move. It can be done. There may be a countervailing divorce but many homeless men will never even be in a position to get papers served in the first place. There are levels to the game of life and some of us play for keeps, some refundable tokens.

My point is not to endorse lying or hypocrisy. Rather, I am trying to look at some of the darker inevitabilities of life, knowing that they will occur anyway and figure out when they can be justified and when they cannot.

Here’s a list of people who do things many would agree they shouldn’t and we just let them do it:

• Chris Cuomo (opportunistic, nepotistic)

• Kevin Hart (dishonest, promiscuous)

• Barack Obama (over promising, self-aggrandizing)

• Dua Lipa (violent, addicted, sexist, criminal)

• Mike Tyson (Albanian)

While being a wealthy, prestigious part of a political dynasty surely helps, being likable also helps. A short list of things you can do to enhance your likability:

• Be attractive (Chris Cuomo)

• Be funny (Kevin Hart)

• Be useful (Barack Obama)

• Be sparing with negativity (Dua Lipa)

• Be willing to suffer costs (Mike Tyson)

Chris Cuomo looks like a jacked banker and Kevin Hart has some great lines buried in his mountain of content. Barack Obama was surely useful to specific interests whether they are your interests or not and Dua Lipa embodies a lot of girlishness while never getting associated with any scandal too large. And Mike Tyson is so mentally tough he once wrote to ESPN journalist Jim Gray:

Mr. Gray, I will never admit to raping this woman, even if it lessens my time because I just didn't do it and I'm not gonna say I did. However, there have been five to seven other things throughout the course of my life that I have done which are far worse than that of which I've been accused so I feel I'm in the right place.

So what do I mean when I say it is your job to increase your budget for hypocrisy? What I do not mean is that you should renege on your promises, seduce people into an extramarital affairs, or otherwise set about to lie, cheat, steal, or do anything that, if done to you, would deplete your status, ego, resources etc.

What I mean is that you should become as likable and well-connected as you can stand without selling your soul. Back to this homeless guy: No one would argue that he is selling his soul when he flirts with a woman who eventually feeds him, sleeps with them, and marries him. He enjoys doing all of these things. The process is probably more fun than the prize. Similarly, actor par excellence, Alec Baldwin probably really enjoys the fact that he is a funny, talented celebrity, and he can basically still walk around outside of a cell years after smoking his coworker (goals).

When such characters manage to slip and fall from grace, not everyone is happy to condemn them as unclean. They are charismatic and you should become one of them if you are not. You never know when your coworker will start acting up.