Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:
“It’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry, you will someday.”
-American Beauty
Survey the corporate media and you will notice that everything gets progressively (no pun intended) uglier with time.
And more nihilistic. And more hopeless.
In architecture, in music, and in people themselves, aesthetic beauty is no longer a virtue – quite the opposite.
Obesity is marketed as a feminist victory. Appearing as inhuman as possible is the main aesthetic goal. Neon hair no longer subverts the beauty standard to the left; it is the standard. Engaging the disgust mechanism in fellow humans is a victory over the White Patriarchy™ or whatever. Face tattoos are the new normal.
The uglification of everything goes hand-in-hand with the purposeful appropriation of anything traditional and perverting it into an obscene, coarse, scatological display.
Think morbidly obese Lizzo playing Founding Father James Madison’s elegant crystal flute in a sequin thong, twerking with her rolls hanging out.
Similarly, drag queens, by design, are not beautiful. They are intentional cartoonish mockeries of feminine beauty.
Being so hideous as to be shocking is an act of revolutionary defiance. The goal is to spit in the face of the White Patriarchy™ — and beyond that, in the very concept of humanity itself.
This millennial woman declares on TikTok that her pronouns are bug/dirt/it! She voluntarily dehumanizes herself and mistakes this as empowerment.
This is a cry for help. But even if she went to a therapist, he/she/zhe would probably just end up affirming her ridiculous pronouns, either in true ideological solidarity or so as to avoid a lawsuit or career suicide. The online community she participates in will also affirm her self-dehumanizing pronouns, as a way to signal their virtue.
In this way, the LGBTQ+++™ cult, and the left more broadly, breaks down their members’ identity over time like a drill sergeant in the military. The individual’s humanity is sacrificed for membership in the collective.
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The destruction of beauty and the mockery of the sacred (in this case, sexual union) is why the left aggressively defends porn as “art.” Here, MSNBC of the internet The Young Turks liken pornography to literature, poetry, and statues and encourages its production as an act of creation.
But porn is not art. Rather, it is arguably anti-art: a depiction of the basest human instincts in the crudest graphic format available that can be reproduced and consumed at scale.
The commonly accepted definition of art is “something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.” There is nothing transcendent or inherently meaningful about pornography. It requires no imagination or skill. After the orgasm, no one gazes at pornographic depictions with any sort of lasting appreciation. The most lasting emotional payoff, indeed, is shame at having debased oneself.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”
-John Keats
True beauty makes life more livable. It enables perseverance through suffering. Appreciation of beauty is transcendence beyond the mundanity of day-to-day living. The striving for beauty lends purpose to life.
None of this serves the interest of the corporate state, or its unwitting footsoldiers who ironically brand themselves “anti-fascist.”
Jordan Peterson has received substantial scorn and mockery for claiming, when asked why Antifa behaves so abhorrently, that they are enacting “revenge against God for the crime of being.”
But it may be the truest thing he’s ever said.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.
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