Stop Settling for Less

The difference between less and more

“Can anyone ever objectively quantify things like art or quality of life? Is quality only in the eye of the beholder, or is there an objective standard where even subjective things can be judged? Isn’t all culture valuable in its own way?”

That is an old, relatively annoying, post-modern critical question that has been insufferably shoved at us by every deconstructionist mental midget from the French revolutionaries, to avant-garde spoken word ‘poets’, to the genderless green-haired fatties on college campuses.

Let me help you out here… yes, there is objective truth about the quality of things. No, everything isn’t valuable in its own way. The differences are obvious and self-evident, and if you can’t see them you are either lying to yourself, lying to others, or somehow diminished. I’ll give you an example:

This is La Pietà by Michelangelo. It resides in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and shows Mary holding the broken body of Christ in grief. It was crafted from a single slab of marble by Michelangelo when he was about 24 years old. Not only is it stunningly beautiful, it is religiously powerful as it shows the sacrifice of both Christ and of Mary, in the sacrifice of her child… the greatest thing any mother has to lose.

It took a genius to make it. It took an incredible culture to call for it. It is one of the greatest things ever done with human hands… and it was done by a 24 year old man… back when 24 year olds were men.

This, on the other hand, is a rock that someone scooped some divots out of. It is sitting in a shitty field. It means nothing. It took zero genius to create. It is visually unappealing, and overall quite stupid.

La Pietà is better than the idiotic divot rock. It is not in the eye of the beholder. If you think the stupid divot rock is better, you are either lying or a very special kind of… “special”.

I say that to say this

As a culture we have metaphorically thrown out La Pietà for the divot rock. We have done it in almost every walk of life. We are listening to divot rock music with divot rock art on our divot rock walls. We are eating divot rock meals and having divot rock sex. Our kids are divot rocks being taught in divot rock schools… and nobody is saying the apparently unsayable truth: This all sucks and we should abandon it and go back to something better.

Let’s look at something as simple as air travel. We are more modern now than we were in the 1960’s. There is incredible technology and lots of demand for decent air travel. What has happened?

We went from this:

To this:

As companies get richer and technology becomes more universal, things are supposed to get better and cheaper. Has that happened? Nope… it has gotten worse and more expensive. Flying used to be fun and kind of special. Now it is so thoroughly objectionable, I’d rather drive just about anywhere than take a flight with a connection. From La Pietà to the damn divot rock.

Look at how much we have degraded

We don’t have to go back that far. I am not talking about the Mad Men era. Those of you who have professional jobs such as lawyer, banker, financial advisor, commercial real estate pro; think about what that job was only 30 years ago.

By the time you were in your 30’s you likely had use of at least half a secretary who kept your schedule and answered your calls. Your meetings took place in person and were with competent people, dressed for serious business. You went to lunch without a cell phone ringing and vibrating every few seconds with another email / text / call / notification from that asinine Candy Crush game.

You made enough money to support your family in an upper middle class lifestyle with your spouse (maybe) taking part time work as a school teacher or admin for a little extra. When you went out for date night with your spouse, the children were left at home with a 14 year old babysitter who was told “please don’t smoke in the house. We should probably be home by midnight”. You paid that babysitter 50 cents an hour.

You were a member of a country club and various business clubs. You knew the movers and shakers in your industry and were counted as one of them. If you were a 35 year old lawyer in a middle sized town in middle America, you could earn and invest in ways that would and did make you a gazillionaire by 2024.

The house you bought is now worth many times what you paid for it. Your investment portfolio is through the roof. Your education cost a fraction of what it would today, and came with far more quality connections with higher quality people.

What does it all look like now? Well… not like that. Even the minority of folks that I know who have managed to stay in the arena of making decent money have a fraction of the quality of life of those who came before them. There are no secretaries to keep schedules. They answer their own calls. They have five times as many meetings and all over zoom, mostly with time-wasting incompetents in golf shirts who may or may not be wearing pants. Long gone is lunch in a nice downtown restaurant or business club… now it consists of company provided vegan granola bars in the gender neutral, consultant certified as unoffensive, white laminate break area where you are treated with laminated posters reminding you that even though Tina has chest hair and can palm a bowling ball, she is a perfectly normal ‘woman’.

Speaking of women, how have things ‘improved’ for them? Look at the 25 year old young lady in your office. She has a degree, a good job, and is making as much salary as the young man sitting next to her.

How has that worked out? Is she happy? Is she doing what she wants in life? Almost certainly not. She is childless and in an endless series of relationships with man-children who won’t commit and couldn’t provide a decent life even if they wanted to. She is told that she should be going for that next promotion or taking the lead on negotiating that big deal, all the while her body and soul are screaming at her to do anything else in the world but head into that awful office and try to act like a man. Compared to La Pietà, that is a divot rock.

(Disclaimer: I know not all women are supposed to blah blah blah… I’m not the marrying kind either so don’t take this personally. I am speaking generally, and generally, I am correct.)

While we are on the subject of women… remember beautiful women? Everyone used to love those gals. What happened to them? We used to have Carmen Electra selling us stuff, now it’s bald, morbidly obese horror shows with scowls on their faces. Bitch… I don’t want to buy soap from you.

Our politicians used to be serious. They were always crooked, but between the robbing, most of them actually did take a moment to make sure America was still ascendent. Not anymore… Now it’s a toss-up between pissed off women (everyone’s favorite kind), tick-tock whores, religious zealots, Donald Trump acolytes, people with Alzheimer’s, and former drag queen fraudsters whose real names we don’t even know. Abbodanza! Enjoy!

Our cities have become hell holes. Our stores are filthy and they don’t have attendants anymore. Restaurants serve overpriced trash on paper plates and demand you tip for counter service. You can’t watch a movie without a lecture about society, and you can’t take in a nature documentary without an every 30 second soliloquy about climate change.

“You like this picture of that cool tiger? Well too bad! Because of your selfishly insistent need to exist, the tiger and all the other things you like are going to be gone forever… and it’s your fault, jerk. Hey, check out this pretty bird! You like that bird? …” ad nauseam

Even comedy, which was pretty good until only a few years ago, has devolved into a group of 20 somethings standing on stage for 30 minutes talking about themselves… “I’m Chinese so my Chinese mom says ‘ping pong ping ping’.” And bobble headed crowd members erupt in laughter because the comic was naughty about race, but it was his race so it’s okay (vomit). Even the great Dave Chapelle has fallen into doing semi-politically incorrect lectures about how the gender cult people are mean to him but he’s black and black black black. I know… hilarious. Hey! Did ya’ll know Dave Chapelle was black? So funny!

Even our emergencies are second rate these days. We had a pandemic that didn’t even kill anyone who wasn’t already half dead, and we had an insurrection that even the crappiest South American junta would call a disappointment. Gasp! Our democracy hung by a thread! (eye roll)

Damnit, we need to demand better. We are capable of better. We have done better before. We can do it again.

How can we do better?

The solution is not complicated, but it is difficult… both politically and in practice. We have to find a little self-respect and stop lowering standards. Instead, we need to raise them.

We must stop taking that which is exclusive and making it open to everyone. Some things are exclusive for a reason… that reason is to exclude dolts, morons, trashy people, and those who would work against the mission.

In the political class, we have to stop bathing ourselves in virtuous, self-congratulatory, expectorate because we took someone who is completely unqualified for a job and gave it to them for one societal reason or another. AOC was a bartender with a relatively nice rear-end and a Twitter following. Let her stay that way, and don’t have her make an ass out of all of us by sitting in a congressional hearing room repeating slogans she got from a 12 year old on tick-tack. Donald Trump was a real estate developer and television personality who doesn’t even know how many branches of government there are. Let him stay that way instead of making him President and making us all look like immoral star-struck hicks who think bad TV negotiations are how the real machinations of state are run.

We must stop lowering our standards. Do you want to know why there weren’t that many black people at Harvard in 1985? It’s not because Harvard was racist. Despite what grifters continually go on about, Harvard of the 1980’s was actually not 1930’s rural Mississippi. The reason they didn’t have more black students is because there weren’t very many qualified black people who applied. How was that problem addressed? Did we, as a society, deal with the fact that black education wasn’t very good? Of course not, Harvard (along with everyone else) just started admitting unqualified black people.

What was the result? Well… black K-12 schools have gotten exponentially worse and Harvard has become a shell of its former glorious self, and offers very little of anything useful to the world anymore. Well done.

We keep being told to accept less. The apartment is just a little smaller, but think of the energy savings on a global scale. The car is just a little uglier, but think of the global gas savings now that it’s more aerodynamic. The toilet doesn’t actually flush everything away anymore, and the lightbulbs don’t actually look good or work anymore, but think of the water savings and the… why did they screw up the light bulbs again?

The washing machine doesn’t actually clean the clothes or rinse out the detergent anymore and the low flow shower head sucks (how the person who came up with that hasn’t been publicly flogged is a mystery)… but we just need to accept it all for one reason or another. It’s the climate religion, or the idiotic idea that we are all going to run out of water. It’s racial equity, or women’s rights, or the gender cult, or just general whining… Whatever the reason, there always seems to be some virtuous nanny-state do-gooder explaining why we need to accept less.

The solution to this crisis is to take anyone who tells us we are just going to have to accept less and run them out of office with a vengeance. The solution is to dump party politics and ancient alliances along racial or economic lines that no longer make any sense, and ask our regulators and politicians one question: Are you contributing or are you taking away?

If those people start complaining that they don’t have enough money, just tell them to ask Raytheon/Northrop Grumman/Lockheed Martin to start working with less. Change the incentive structure. Make them more afraid of us than they are of them.

It is okay to demand more. A toilet that uses enough water to actually work is not a moral failing. A city that isn’t strewn with bums shooting heroin in the street between rape sessions is not less virtuous than a city that is.

We simply have to take every single soulless bureaucratic demon who tells you that you can’t pursue happiness in the way you know you should and send them into the wilderness and not look back.

Can we do that? Yes.

Will we do that? Probably not.

The corruption runs deep, the propaganda is effective, and people love power. The large private equity firms control the actions of most of the S&P 500. As a voter, customer, or client, you are no longer the driving force on how the powerful act.

Let me spell it out as clearly as I can. Disney isn’t making movies for you and your kids anymore. They are making movies for State Street, BlackRock, and Vanguard. Washington is making laws for the same folks. That’s the problem… and until the people are willing to hit them in their wallets or withhold their vote for making you accept less, it will not stop.

In conclusion… there is hope. Some people are waking up… but it may be too little, too late. Far too many people can’t tell the difference between the divot rock and La Pietà anymore… but maybe… just maybe… it’s because they’ve never actually seen La Pietà. We should start showing it to them.

Either way, God bless all of you!

—Virgil

Three things I like

It was suggested to me that this article might be a little negative… so I’m going to end it with three things I like.

I like puppies, fine cigars, and sunsets over blue water… and all those still exist!

—V