As of the start of 2012 I will be cutting the “far” out of my life. That means no political economy, no ethical theory, no economics, no legal theory, absolutely nothing having to do with feminism, none of it. Governments will still kill, maim, imprison, and tax. Academics will continue to lie like it’s their job, because it is. Media shills will keep covering for all of them. Fat chicks will keep eating, whether or not I have anything to say about it. Of course this was known from the beginning, and apart from a brief political operation/bank heist back on campus, it’s always been intellectual curiosity rather than any strong hope or desire to “be the difference” that drove me. And yet there are plenty of other things about which I am curious. I’ve neglected them. Why? One reason we talk about these issues in bars instead of computer programming or crochet is that that is how people signal various group affiliations and loyalties etc. (Hanson).
So the plan is an information diet. (Ferriss). No more of the blogs I check every day just to check up on the idiots who disagree with me. No newspapers. The New Yorker but first I’ll have someone tear out some of the content based on a few criteria I’ll provide. (The New Yorker has been on a hot streak of holding my interest lately. Yes it’s a liberal rag but I’m not obsessing over that any more. That’s the idea.) No more reading Planned Parenthood v. Casey over and over for no reason. Maybe I’ll read a book; I used to read those things until they piled up to the ceiling.
This is not to say I’ll never return to these discussions in the future. But I need a break. These days I feel less like an imperturbable maverick and more like a lonely martyr, and that’s no good—we have better things to do than martyrdom. For example, these days when a girl flakes on me or deploys some feminist platitude, instead of taking it in stride and turning to the next one, I take it as (1) evidence of the statistical dearth of respectable girls and (2) a harbinger of Western demise. It is both, but I think I would like to have a good time of my youth while crushing my own badass goals. Muttering to myself at the bar—“Fools! Why won’t they see?”—interferes with those goals.
Also I quit law school. As a veritable shrine to bullshit, it would have been somewhat incompatible with what I’m talking about. Armed with that extra time, by this summer I’ll have hosted a hundred couchsurfers, taken another foreign adventure like the awesome one I had before school started, gained another fifteen pounds, made sweet love to ten new girls (or just one—hey, you never know), and gained great strides in my quixotic quest to master the piano. I’ll take up Russian again. I’m going to be selfish and utterly self-centered (which terms, in the context of a dissolute society, include helping my parents more and looking in on my grandparents and throwing footballs at my cousins). Though of course I don’t really expect to clear every single bar I’ve just set, none of it is in any way unrealistic. Energy and mood can be managed and we can insist on a high price for every gray hair if we want to.
Obviously this will have some consequences for the blog for the indefinite future. It’s not going anywhere, and the other authors are still permitted/encouraged to post on whatever. My posts are going to veer simultaneously toward the more practical and the more abstract. Not quite on the level of what I had for dinner every night, but then again I do have a post like that, because I thought it would be of use to someone who isn’t me. So you’re going to see my crappy shell scripts that I believe pass a certain minimal likelihood of being useful or interesting to others. On the abstract side, econ questions but only if they are mathematical (abstract) enough to pass the filter I have described, cultural shit like the thrashing I’m going to give that TV show Portlandia, and who the hell knows what else. Pictures of my cat, if I had a cat. Fiction the New Yorker would be lucky to have. I’ve also been thinking about writing a book or pamphlet about how to have sex (not how to get it), so maybe sketches of chapters will appear here.
It’s just as well. It’s been an interesting intellectual walk for me since the end of college. I would say that the broadest characterization of it would be my shift from Milton Friedman/Julian Simon cheeriness to the sort of Rome-is-burning mentality that now seems to me the better part of wisdom. But, in tension with the pessimism I have just expressed, I truly have the feeling that for those of us who are willing to embrace it, we now, currently, have available to us an astonishing amount of truth. The connections that have formed in my mind between seemingly disparate fields of inquiry, seemingly discordant voices, seem to me like a move toward truth, a way of explaining more phenomena with fewer ideas, as when Newton combined Kepler’s planetary motion equations with Galileo’s laws of motion (or when Maxwell reconciled light, electricity, and magnetism). Thanks to people like Robin Hanson we have remarkable ideas about why humans collectively keep choosing waste and vice over freedom and success. Guys like Tim Ferriss are giving step-by-step instructions for health and vitality and productivity. And we have something pretty close to Maxwell’s equations describing the heretofore inscrutable mysteries of love. Strange days indeed! These truths are not always palatable, and most of them draw active scorn from society’s mainstream, respectable censors. But they are there now, on the internet, for all who would seek them.
If the blog has brought these things to the attention of (a handful of) people, great. If I have elucidated those connections in a compelling way, great. Stay tuned.