The Undebatables
Proposing a reality television show where we try to discipline liberated elites into enough emotional regulation to conduct and win a debate
For those of you in the U.S or in other European countries, you should know that the UK has long mastered the art of bad reality television. There was once a show aired on Channel4 called ‘You are What You Eat’ in which a nutritionist would pester overweight families for weeks on end, ordering them to defecate into tupperware, inspecting and then castigating them for producing sub standard faecal matter.
There was also ‘How to look good naked’ in which a gay man held together by copious amounts of plastic surgery would strip middle aged women down to their underwear—during which they would normally have a minor mental breakdown(on national television of course). The idea was to accustom them to their own aging, saggy, mis-proportioned reflections and then conduct a make over. It was a pretty brutal way to advertise overpriced designer clothes from high street brands. Sort of like expressionistic shock-art and house wife marketing fused together into some godawful frankesteinean episode of media consumption.
Or what about ’Embarrassing Bodies’, in which celebrity styled Doctors would visit patients with some of the worst and most repulsive ailments (nothing life threatening, stuff like genital warts, giant verrucas or haemorrhoids). This last example was particularly curious as free medical treatment in the UK couldn’t determine a financial motivation for people previously too shy to attend normal doctors in private, suddenly deciding to have their private parts screened (in both meanings of word) in front of the entire nation. Perhaps a vulgar sort of desire for fame motivated these people; something which predicted the psychology of the social media era which followed it.
The British—at least for the 2000s decade—surpassed all others in public displays of self-flagellation. And although these secular rituals of liberal-protestant social guilt have been most recently expressed through the identarian-progressive lens of American-centric university campus politics, they manifested themselves through British reality television a decade before in ways which have still gone largely unrecognized. One of the primary motivations of these reality TV productions was to exhibit the human form in its most uninspiring shapes.
It’s worth wondering for who and what was going on here? In this degenerate form of media, one could see in the civic-journalistic motivation to ‘uncover’, moving from political and industrial corruption and malfeasance to the uncovering of ordinary people’s private repulsiveness. One can entirely distinguish this repulsiveness from vulgarity. With vulgarity, ordinary people exhibit a sense of dignity with what they are. They reject super-ego demands to make themselves more proper and hygienic, often turning around that request to point out the elite are frail and insulated; in some sense accusing the elite of lacking vitality and character. With these British experiments in televised repulse-exposure, the ordinary people were not the hard nosed, proud and witty characters of the industrial era, but those desperate to share in middle class aesthetics. The post industrial average man was now re-educated out his previous sense of pride and character. These people agreed to be on these shows, after all.
New legions of social service employees, social workers, public health advocates and ‘community media’ producers, now armed with new media technologies, suddenly became investigative journalists, trouncing around the British nation with their Blitzkrieg styled shock-documentaries, which moved through a 1-2 social engineering combative-posture, of first: humiliate, and then: rebuild the person under the moderately different category of being a bit less fat, a bit better dressed, finally having that haemorrhoid sorted out. (a bit more middle class) The main shift in values which these reality television shows expressed in the first decade of the 3rd millennium, was that it used to be unhygienic to not understand certain boundaries around the public/private distinction. Now, under the neo-liberal and managerial guidance of health exposure and education, it was to be unhygienic to have any boundaries at all. Privacy and dignity became public health issues to be quickly resolved. This is likely why humiliation was part of the hygienic-civilizing process.
The results of these investigate social improvers were moderate and probably not long lasting for the actual task of civic and character development—but that wasn’t the point. The point was actually to use the uncovering of admittedly uninspiring living habits of many modern people in the post-industrial consumer age, to create a new framework of medical-expressionism—or in less obviously medical form, of some sort of public-hygiene expressionism. Eating habits, dress codes, taking care of your genital hygiene—all of this expressed the early stages of the sort of hygienic nanny state which exploded into the lockdown ethos a decade later.
Although the neo-liberal period of the 2000s still contained some quasi-authoritative corporate social relations, the point wasn’t to simply humiliate and exploit ordinary people for the hell of it, but it was to symbolically implode the risk of higher social standards which could be then used to cover elite institutions. After all, if you were to be repulsed by these images, you weren’t so much bigoted in the obviously political sense, but—similar to the new-atheist attitude towards religion—you were exhibiting the problematic trait of believing in minimal human dignity and privacy—of which a media culture obsessed with social surveillance cannot tolerate.
All aspects of life must be inspected by hygienic social improvers. By training the public to internalize an absurd tolerance of people’s most disgusting attributes, now liberated from the civic boundary of public/private, the elite were actually training us to tolerate their own degeneracy, incompetence and corruption. It has recently become unhygienic and uncivilized to expect minimal moral and social standards from elites or would be elites—and their moving of such hygienic re-education into the realm of online speech has proved that the attribute of non-elite and ‘uneducated’ speech, normally now is censored and coerced along the lines of forcing people to be nice to the affluent and powerful. For example, when Youtube got rid of the dislike bar after nauseatingly cringe documentary about Fauci was ‘ratioed’. Much of this censorship isn’t simply about concealing or repressing facts and data (which is becoming increasingly difficult given the technology we use) but to associate any recognition of the elite’s frail, insulated and sclerotic character with barbaric, uncouth or other markers of ‘uncivilized’ speech.
Further evidence that these reality television shows were not simply making fun or ordinary people in the traditionally elitist sense, can be seen in the fact that the same group of elite media producers and executives which once tried to humiliate ordinary people for being somewhat overweight of having too large of an age gap between partners, now bombard them with images of child strippers and obese models.
All of the schizoid and contradictory messaging makes sense (from their depraved perspective) when you realize that the aim of this propaganda is to liberate all human life from the bothersome standards of the past—and in a media culture those standards are accessed and admired largely through visual representation. The tomato soup destruction of art or statue destroying activists is not so much the Maoist reigning in of a new era through creative destruction but rather the disconnect of any intuitive understanding of social distinction and standards which were so abundant in the past—and only now live on through visual representation. In other words, the truly elite character of the elite 500 years ago threatens to reveal the lack of character of the contemporary elite.
This brings me to another peculiar reality television phenomena: The ‘Un-dateables’. This—as it sounds—was a show about people with horrendously bad social skills, border line disabilities, in some cases, going on dates. If we ere to re-make one of these shows from 10-20 years ago, I would personally invest money in the production of a show called ‘The Un-debateables’—those lacking the ability to debate, discuss an disagree in minimally decent logical and communicative standards. It would reflect the long term effects of such social-improvers on institutions and spaces which were once considered genuinely elite or exceptional(in the classical sense), such as academia and civic-minded media.
The Un-Debateables would perfectly fit the elite culture’s odd fixation on liberating substandard mental capacities as a form of acceptable governance and leadership(Biden here is the most obvious example). In this case, it’s mild disagreement—of which Universities and other lower educational facilities are now reduced to the harbourers of—and while being the initiators of the educational destruction of the mental and emotional standards needed to participate in. The goal could be something like: Let’s take 6 weeks to see if we can get a gender studies student to go from giving themselves a brain aneurysm and urinating on themselves in public, to conducting and even winning a public argument’. Of course, no producers would allow such a show to be aired, considering it would be airing the reality of their own substandard characters and not falsely opposing themselves to the vulgar masses.
Given that we’ve endured the best part of a decade of images of infantilism reflecting progressive advocates of sensitivity training and other forms of public education, there is an increasing attempt to remedy this bad PR with a counter representations of modern progressive, well educated people—of which are less so radical activist and more so hygienic social improver. In other words, more of a return to legions of media-producing nutritionists, doctors and social workers working for Channel4 in the mid 2000s. Although for the people in question these are basically the same thing, they express a different stage in the aesthetic and bio-political project of Lasch’s ‘Revolt of the Elites’.
One example I came across recently was which reinforces this turn was on Triggernometry, where somebody called ‘Cosmic Sceptic’ debated the host Konstantin concerning free speech.1) The discussion in question was largely concerning the easily traumatized—and how we should respond to them within educational and media settings: should we try facilitate their fragility or demand that they toughen up? This segment is a good example of a classical liberal arguing (rightly) that if one can’t handle the minimal emotional conflict which rational discourse can cause, they should deal with this lack of discipline before engaging any further. What the classical liberal is noticing is that a lack of character is commonly missing from people whom have the sorts of backgrounds and educational history which we once believed would create rational, civic minded people of good standing.
Yet, Konstantin (classical liberal)even suggests that the emotionally fragile could get therapy before engaging further in these sorts of debates. His opponent, which we can label what Philip Rieff called ‘psychological man’, as much as he attempts to conduct himself rationally and with emotional self control in this segment, seems to be arguing for an educational and media space in which ,rather than one which asks the emotionally fragile to get help before entering the life of public discourse, wishes that public discourse itself becomes a primarily therapeutic mode. This is the main distinction between the two—and reflects most of the conservative/progressive tensions of our time. One believes therapy can fill in the lack of character development needed, which seems oddly missing in contemporary civic life, and the other thinks civic life and all its social and institutional spaces should be essentially therapeutic in nature. Obviously I agree in principle with the former, as the transformation of all civic, intellectual and political space into elite-therapeutic forms of day care, is (I mean this) worse than a gulag. Yet, what the conservative and classical-liberal side refuses to contemplate is the question of why elite social and educational spaces are not only failing to cultivate people of real character—they have become by far the worst at it then other social groups and classes. What changes are more common in elite social circles and institutions? The short answer is the aggressive de-construction of masculinity, and it is something which the elites have actually done to themselves far more aggressively than they’ve even been able to do lower rungs of society. The problem is that classical liberalism or conservatives in general have absolutely no idea have to reverse this, nor are most of them willing to challenge the commercial empowerment of those who have benefited from the deconstruction of masculinity and the consequential destruction of the very idea of character which follows it.
The result of this, ends with the suppression of linguistic codes necessary for cultivating reason, and even the re-structuring of logical realities in a manner which fits into an educational and civilizing model which is primarily commercial and medical, and leaves no room for anything of other purpose — not a civic/scientific/political(and certainly not philosophic) end.
Again, the implicit claim from censorial advocates is that educational and media spaces should be restructured as medical spaces to treat the mentally ill. Within this destruction of boundaries between therapeutic and civic/scientific/political, there is the secondary aim of liberating therapeutic treatment from the objective of forming characters which can allow humans to exist within social relations and activities which are at least somewhat in tune with a good life. Now that civic life is purely therapeutic and commercial, the irony is that therapy in its traditional form also becomes impossible.
This is what I’ve been arguing is the main function of the decline of academia and other civic spaces for a long time. It’s nice to see it advocated for so openly by advocates of therapeutic mass social reconstruction.
And as much as I admire the classical liberal for their effort, I believe the task at hand(cultivating a character with the capacity for reason and/or civic virtues) is a far more complex task than their ideological boundaries allow them to realize. They act in amazement when people who have psychologically and socially developed in a era totally liberated from the most minimal forms of character development necessary for even low standards of reason, fail to be shepherded by the very basic logical conclusions proven in front of them.
This problem perhaps even became inevitable when classical liberal notions of human nature falsely argued that reason is an abstract, purely mindful cogito. Reason became genderless, separate from virtue or more particular character traits and developmental experience. It was also argued to be capable of abstracting from particular political and economic interests. I’m not saying that some sort of prioritization and commitment to truth is not possible due to particular interest or identity, yet this is a much more difficult task—and the rational universal subject posited by early liberalism seems to be flabbergasted when they constantly realize this subject doesn’t seem to exit. The abstraction of reason to cognitive rational capacity has facilitated the abandonment of reason and virtue in the classical sense.
The more we falsely believe in a universal rational subject, the more those who wish to turn all civic spaces into spaces which have a medical and commercial end, rather than a philosophic, political or even artistic end, will predominate. They already have.
When the classical liberal asks the advocate for censorial care (the ‘woke’ subject) to take responsibility for their own emotional state in order to properly engage in civic or philosophic discourse, he is basically dismissed as some sort of superstitious barbarian asking townspeople to perform a rain dance or goat-sacrifice to ensure a good harvest. This reaction is likely because these institutions have already changed in such drastic ways that are so different from what they were just a few decades ago, yet the classical liberal is yet to come to terms with these changes, as negative as they are—they have occurred.
The classical liberal fails to ask the advocate for therapeutic censorship ‘But what do you believe the educational and civic space is for? What do you believe is its ‘end?’ When this question is answered honestly, he will realize debate has already been disallowed long before he sat down with his debating partner.
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