The men who say that “everything is fake and gay” are, sadly, often right.
It’s a sentiment they share, somewhat ironically, with postmodernists.
And Nietzsche. It really all goes back to Nietzsche.
He told the world that God was dead, but it kept on running around like a chicken with its head cut off until it figured out what he meant.
Or what I think he meant. Everyone seems to know what Nietzsche meant, but so many of us disagree.
It was a French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, who provided the persistent definition of postmodernism in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition.
Lyotard, who had an unfortunate name, wrote that the postmodern condition was characterized by “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Basically, the idea is that people have lost faith in the stories about the world that guided their ancestors and conferred authority on their institutions. There is a prevailing sense that everything has been contrived, or, as Baudrillard later added, simulated.
So, God is dead, and everything is fake and gay.
Another thing that postmodernists and many thinkers on the right have in common is their critique of materialism and commercialism.
The thinking goes that when people believe that God is Dead, and nothing means anything anymore, there’s nothing left to do but chase sex and money.
Everything is about getting one or the other, and every new story is just some kind of come-on or sales pitch.
And those two things are somewhat interchangeable. Sex sells everything and many evolutionary psychologists would probably say that the ultimate if not proximate reason why men chase money is because attaining status and resources is part of the male reproductive strategy.
The postmodernist solution to the idea that every story you’re being told is some kind of manipulation seems to have been to laugh about it and turn everything they believe to be fake into something that is also gay.
Andy Warhol anticipated this cultural shift with his appropriation of pop culture and commercial advertising, but by the 1980s, artists and architects were making intentionally postmodern art and buildings characterized by pastiche and ironic references.
Many people retreated into a kind of spiritual and aesthetic hipsterism that was terrified of taking anything too seriously. This peaked in the late 2000s. Grow a goofy mustache and make silly art. Ride a unicycle. Nothing really matters. I lived in Portland at the time. It was ridiculous.
The postmodern mindset even seeped into the world of comics. In the spazzy Deadpool films, the hipsterish hero is so hungry for chuckles that even when he’s serious, he has to crack jokes and drop clever references.
This desperation to be seen as knowingly clever and funny—but never serious or sincere about anything—seems exceptionally empty and I don’t think people who live and stay this way ever feel fulfilled.
The postmodern reaction on the right to the idea that everything is fake and gay and materialistic has been to try to turn back the clock.
Trump tapped into this with his slogan “Make America Great Again,” which he appropriated from Ronald Reagan. But making America great again is a vague and pleasant thing that allows you to move the goalposts whenever you need to. I’ve come to respect Trump as an incredibly Machiavellian man who I happen to agree with, and who seems to truly want the best for America. But he also understands that politics is the art of the possible and isn’t strongly tethered to any specific version of the past.
Most conservatives and traditionalists on the right, however, believe that the solution is to resurrect some previous order. Their reaction to a commercially driven order and widespread “incredulity toward metanarratives” is to find an old metanarrative and double down on it. Some look back to monarchies, pagan empires, and a few to more recent fascist projects. Many more are true believers and members of established religious communities, so the orders they want to revive seem closer and their projects seem more plausible. However, putting any one denomination of Christianity in charge of America—much less “the West” is not. The fracturing of Catholicism into competing factions—or, one might say, “metanarratives”—was one of the reasons Nietzsche wrote that God was dead. The Catholics lost their monopoly on capital-T “Truth.”
The conservative Christian response to materialism and “incredulity toward metanarratives,” however, has also become a commercial enterprise. If I were more cynical and opportunistic—or perhaps just smarter— I would start selling “Christ is King” crusader merch. So hot right now. Or I’d reinvent myself, slap a Bible quote and a crucifix into an Instagram profile, and offer some kind of fitness or mindset coaching for “Christian men.” The Christian market is still growing and it will continue to attract both good and bad men as long as it remains lucrative.
This online commercialization of Christianity will inevitably create some suspicion about the motives of these Christian salesmen and their ads, automations, click funnels, six-packs, sparkly teeth and supplement regimes.
It will probably also lead to some incredulity about their narratives, meta or otherwise.
Sales isn’t new or evil or even “capitalist.” Trade is a human universal. So you can’t rationally be mad that people are trying to sell things.
I sell things, too.
Gotta make a living somehow.
The rational concerns about consumerism and commercialization from both the right and left have to do with the sense that financial gain has superseded all other human values, and the feeling that every space and interaction has become polluted with sales pitches.
People used to buy and sell in marketplaces, and there have probably always been something like door-to-door salesmen. Then newspapers, radio, and television brought advertisements into people’s homes. Seemed fair and honest.
Gotta pay the bills.
Now we carry around these little devices everywhere we go, and every time we look at something on them, someone is trying to sell us something.
Social media became a bit of a bait and switch, too. People logged onto apps like Facebook initially to network and share thoughts and ideas with their friends and neighbors. Ads were there to pay the bills, and that made sense.
But then people started trying to make money posting about their lives, as if they were your friends, but they were also always selling something. This started out relatively innocently, as personalities gained large followings for things they were doing or saying, and companies approached them to start recommending their products. Most of the people online who were sharing their lives had “real jobs.”
At some point in the mid-to-late 2010s, the REAL salespeople discovered social media and started gaming the system. They dumped money into slick productions and circle-jerk cross-promotional podcasts and developed apps for the apps that helped them capture attention and monetize it. By 2022, every place online where we went for entertainment or to interact with our friends was filled with aggressive, manipulative, high-pressure salespeople. And half of what they were selling were systems to help you and your friends also become aggressive, manipulative, high-pressure salespeople.
All of a sudden, your aunt Susan had a ring light and she was developing her personal brand to monetize her quilting course.
It seemed like EVERYONE online was always trying to sell you something.
Everyone became a huckster.
And people got sick of it. They developed sales fatigue.
Some have called it a “trust recession.”
People got burnt out on the slick, high-pressure sales culture.
But the money didn’t go away, and neither did the salesmen. They just responded to the market and changed tactics.
They started pretending to be “just like you,” yapping into their phones casually like they were talking to their best friend on Facetime.
Even politicians started talking into little handheld DJI lavaliers like they weren’t multi-millionaires surrounded by teams of public relations professionals.
Everyone wanted to look “real” and “unscripted.”
The thing is, this selects for people who are really good at running their mouths.
You know what kinds of people tend to be really good at talking fast in a convincing and charismatic way?
Professional salespeople, actors, habitual liars, narcissists, and psychopaths.
I’m not saying that skilled communicators can’t be good people. Many are. I wish I was better at this myself.
But being a convincing, off-the-cuff speaker does not correlate with honesty. The abilities that produce fluent, seemingly authentic talk overlap heavily with the abilities that produce effective manipulation.
The phrases “fast talker” and “smooth talker” have negative connotations for good reasons.
So the pressure to perform “authentically”—because make no mistake, you are performing the second you turn the camera on, even if the lighting is bad and you’re wearing pajamas—is going to select for a bunch of talented manipulators.
Eventually people are going to figure that out, and they’ll be disappointed, and conclude once again that everything is fake and gay and overcommercialized.
If there’s one thing that the online salespeople beat into our skulls, it’s that social media created an “attention economy.”
This unfortunately seems to have convinced many people that attention is the highest value, and that “any publicity is good publicity.”
I discussed this at greater length in a recent essay titled “The Ringmaster’s Advice.”
The attention economy produces a lot of people who will do or say anything for attention. They don’t believe or care about what they’re saying or doing. They’re just playing a game to score views, likes, and shares.
So, like the salespeople and the fast talkers—and there’s a great deal of overlap in these circles—the people who will say or do anything for attention create another layer of fakeness.
There are people who will keep falling for these schemes, and there are others who will become cynical and nihilistic.
But, if men truly want to emerge from the postmodern condition and live in a world that is less fake and less gay, what they need to demand is sincerity. Not performative “authenticity.”
What is needed is an insistence that men mean what they say and say what they mean. Socially stigmatize insincere attention-seeking and dishonesty as well as hipsterish irony and cleverness. And socially elevate and recognize people who really seem to be passionate and committed to their work and their words.
Sincerity is unfortunately hard to prove, precisely because so many people are so good at faking it.
What makes it even more complicated is that being sincere doesn’t mean that you can’t change your mind. In fact, being able to admit that you sincerely believed something and then figured out you were wrong because you accumulated new evidence or experiences is often a sign of sincerity. But not always. Sometimes, saying that you were wrong can be damage control.
Sincerity becomes a question of character, in the sense that Aristotle wrote about it, as a habit. What is this man in the habit of doing and how consistent is his behavior over a long period of time? What do his core values seem to be, over a long period of time? Where is he putting his time and effort?
Sincerity is also a question of intention. Is this man doing or saying something because he truly believes it is good, or because he may gain something by doing or saying it? That kind of sincere intent is actually what Aristotle called “nobility” or kalokagathia—the “good and beautiful” way of living.
We’ve had decades of people trying to seem clever and ironic, because the postmodern condition convinced them that anyone who truly believed in anything was a fool. They were terrified of being laughed at for taking themselves or anything else “too seriously” or trying too hard.
We’ve suffered through a vertical video rapid-fire barrage of liars and con-men and desperate buffoons who will do or say anything for attention.
I think the world is ready for serious men of conviction who say what they mean and mean what they say again.
I think the world is ready for a new age of sincerity.
Maybe I’m wrong.
But I hope I’m right.
Stay Solar.
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