The point of all this isn’t just more academia-bashing (fun as that is, and thank you Jesus for early retirement). The point is: Life deals people bad hands. Many, perhaps most, of the people I know in academia are there because they really can’t do anything else — a combination of (as they feel it) genes and circumstance has landed them there, and while it looks like a really cushy upper-middle-class life materially, spiritually it’s the pits, because it’s aesthetically awful. The Classical Greek adage that the Good is the True is the Beautiful might not be factually accurate, but it sure feels right …
… and never more than to people who know themselves un-beautiful, therefore not good, therefore false, and locked in it. Forever.
These people hate us, not because we’re better looking, more socially skilled, or whatever — this is, after all, the Internet — but because we’ve got options. We’re not all fighting over who gets to be Big Fish in an ever-shrinking pond. We’re different things to different people; we haven’t collapsed our social context down to faculty mixers and the one or two non-hamplanet grad students who are silly enough to apply each semester. We can go days, maybe even weeks, without obsessively comparing ourselves to our peers. We don’t care that we’re not “Chad” or “Stacy,” because we’ve got other settings on the emotional dial than “smugness” and “jealousy.”
But we need to start caring. I don’t mean getting obsessive over our appearance. I mean that, since this is in many ways an aesthetic battle, aesthetics will help us win. I half-jokingly suggested a “Normal Guy Uniform” a while back – an all-white ball cap with the New England Patriots’ logo on it. I’m not really kidding now. The Left wins, in large part, because they’re fugly losers that no normal person could possibly consider a threat … until they bash your skull in, or get you fired, or send a SWAT team to your house.
Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.
February 22, 2021
QotD: Modern academic “life”
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