Ugliness, the American God
Ugliness, the American God
Chemical waste as nourishment. Endless wastelands of asphalt. Hateful pillars of concrete. Gelatinous masses of humans. Gen Z goes online.
What many describe as general despair or disappointment with our times often comes with a comparison to the time of our forebears. These reflections often come to one, overwhelming conclusion: everything is unbearably, assaultingly ugly now.
We live in cities that no longer strive to be aesthetically pleasing in any significant way. Attempts to seek a civilizational style are decried as fascist and authoritarian, while American urbanists try to de-regulate neighborhoods into affordability, and in the process, liberalize and ruin skylines with monsters of steel and glass in contrast to their older compatriots, alongside ramshackle structures and 4-over-1s that ooze “modernity.”
We live among people who themselves are decidedly unaesthetic in numerous ways. In their fashion, they don athleisure or form-fitting wear, even when such apparel is woefully ill-prepared for their disgusting, amorphous bodies. They cover their skin in revolting, meaningless, thoughtless tattoos, gotten only because they thought it was “cool” to go into a tattoo shop with their friends.
Their bodies themselves, even, degenerate further and further into forms lacking definition. Limbs fatten, stomachs roll over beltlines, and shirts struggle to close their collars around necks thick from fat tissue. They do not seek physical activity, instead, they actively avoid it out of some fear of injury — a possibility which only becomes a possibility because of their aversion to it.
Ugliness is our value. Our culture promotes the ugly as a new “beautiful” for its own ends — perhaps shifting demographics, perhaps the majority of people really do like things this way. Whether its the music, or the animalistic, base appeal to physical attraction, we’re not sure. But if the marketing boys say that the kids want more Ice Spice? Promote her everywhere.
Passages out of ugliness themselves are quickly becoming tainted. Popularization of gym culture has had a benefit to the youth — and the hang-wringing about its possibility of causing the kids to go right-wing is positive (1, 2, 3) — but alongside these passages are the undercurrents of PED abuse, gay for pay, and drug addiction.
Some might think that it’s a safe bet to assume that plenty of younger men who are growing involved with fitness have some tinge of right-wing beliefs at their core. To some degree, they’re right. But the people that they will surround themselves with, and envy at the top of the hierarchy, are far from perfect in this degree.
Beauty does not dispel ugliness on its own — the more pure-hearted men and boys rising in the world now, making space and demanding attention in the culture and markets — their rise will not destroy the ugliness. For now, it seems like the rising culture among these communities is steeped in irony and self-awareness to some degree, while others are doused in the predominant online culture that makes them largely indistinguishable from their generational peers.
As for a historical and international parallel — Yukio Mishima, in his time, was steeped in a culture of despair following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. For a time, his literature reflected a sort of delicate outsideness to Japan as it was in the post-imperial years, but as he turned to fashioning his own body in line with his titular Sun and Steel he began to see things differently. He cultivated virtue in the face of a social structure that was quickly losing all hope.
Mishima, however, lost his fight with ugliness. On a grander scale, he decided to go all-in on a coup attempt to restore the emperor. Part theatrical performance, part fantasy fulfillment, part genuine attempt with a genuine private army, and committed suicide. Was it a better fate than dying geriatric and alone after a more glorious life? To live in pursuit of beauty, and have done nothing to restore its last embers in a country that once believed in something?
Japan now resembles something different entirely, with its most “beautiful” aspects largely being its landscapes, appreciated by Redditors from afar, and its cultural exports of anime and manga, which itself has become, as Katherine Dee put it, the “lingua franca of disaffected young men.” Men, even those who embody masculine virtue through their physical and personal accomplishments, have a penchant for anime and Japanese culture writ large. “Right-wing bodybuilders” seem to have a surplus of anime avatars and extensive knowledge of every seasonal release.
Is it strange, or perhaps contradictory that men who are cultivating virtue outside of Japan are producing and relishing in the cultural productions of a nation that’s largely considered to be in decline in every way possible? It may be, instead, because they are rudderless to anything that could be called “beautiful” in their own media — because, as Richard Hanania put it (very recently) — there is no common culture. American TV is now reality shows, Disney+ slop, and boomer news. American movies are remakes and shitty adaptions of media that should have never been brought to the big screen. American video games are ESG clusterfucks and indie projects that inexplicably have the trans flag in them, usually due to mentally ill developers. American music, at least its headliners, is discordant, repetitive, and splintered.
Hanania, of course, ends his piece by saying that this is all a good thing — more freedom to consume more slop. That is, of course, the problem. We’ve viewed freedom as the ultimate goal, and in the process, made everything ugly, because there is nothing to aspire to beyond one’s self-fulfillment. Gluttony, unleashed. Sloth, unleashed.
We’re seeing this emerge in Generation Z, the generation that’s being heralded as the “based” generation with rising self-identification with “conservative” values, at least among boys. But we’re also seeing the emergence of horrible, endless chats with artificial girlfriends, virtual YouTubers, and parasocial relationships with streamers — these things are not befitting of virtue and beauty.
As much as some of these streamers may align themselves with the more “based” of the online world, they themselves are exploiting young men who perhaps don’t know any better (see: the replies to any of their tweets or videos, or breakdowns, if you prefer). Their handlers, with their public profiles and LinkedIn, are no better.
To see many (that I personally follow and respect) unironically engrossing themselves in the content, casually enjoying it, as opposed to doing anything else with their time, developing a dependency and obsession with someone who doesn’t even know they exist — it’s a pathology that could only exist in our ugly, debased era.
Take a step back — it’s hundreds of thousands of men, bonding at a parasocial level with women they will never meet or receive attention from beyond reading their names on a screen. We know this was a problem with radio, TV, and movies — but we’ve let the internet have a pass. Only now are we realizing how bad social media has made it.
American boys are turning away from the real world and diving into the online, because who could blame them? America is ugly. Our people are ugly, our cities are ugly, our food is disgusting, our system is broken. They’re turning to outright fiction, or alternatively, real people wearing fiction as a second skin to hide their imperfect selves.
Are remarks like the above ironic? Maybe. But they, at a minimum, reflect a genuine dissatisfaction with the modern world, and often, modern women. The prolific brothers in Romania (their names intentionally avoided) had drawn attention and scorn in large part because they reflected a cause of men demanding more from women. Did they have grounds to make such demands? It’s hard to say. Gen Z and Gen Alpha, however, saw something in them, given their skyrocketing success on most platforms before a rag was shoved in their mouth to silence them.
There must be an outside, higher purpose to which Gen Z rallies. A guiding obelisk of some kind on the horizon is necessary. The generation will find the idols that it sees align with its goals — and, no, it will not be Christianity. It is too late for that. God has been displaced, at a minimum, or has been totally and completely usurped. Ugliness is the new American god. We’ve built temples, made sacrifices, mutilated and defaced our people, and demanded devotion in its name. It must be broken completely, and that will only happen when we have something strong enough to replace it.