A Year of Cynical Optimism: 5 Key Articles From 2022
Essentials of a year spent digging ever deeper
Seasons greetings, dear readers!
I hope this listicle finds you well. It’s been a wild year of news, from the war in Ukraine to the winding down of the Covid-era (yes it is winding down, shut up). If anything, 2022 has reaffirmed my central thesis: there’s a lot of things worth getting angry about, but the key is to form a dark sense of humor about it all that allows you to maintain a positive outlook. Or at the very least, this sober attitude should make the stakes clear so you can find a productive way to operate in the world.
In 2022, I sought to bring this sense of clarity and perspective to my writing. After spending 2021 focused on the ideas of personal branding and self-commodification (the consequences of which have been a — well, you know the rest), I turned my critical eye to the many manifestations of these ideas. A lot of my thinking in 2020 and 2021 was shaped by the pandemic and my peripheral spot in a certain corner of Twitter. 2022 was shaped by the fading of that “state of exception” and a sort of re-entry into a transmogrified 2019.
Last year, I mentioned that I plan to write my big article about why I left libertarianism behind. I’m still in the process of gathering my thoughts for it, as it’s turned into a much more comprehensive piece on rejecting political labels altogether. Yes, yes, this has been done before in some of the lamest, cringe-inducing ways. But stay tuned for it, I think you’ll like where I landed.
I also wrote fewer articles under this name than last year. 2021 was more prolific mainly because I had so much held up in me from years of keeping my mouth shut. My output this year took more in-depth thinking over long stretches of time. I also picked a couple old projects back up and had some personal matters to attend to. If you know, you know.
Anyway, here are 5 key articles from 2022, along with essential excerpts from each.
Happy New Year!
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No One Likes Radicals
January 7, 2022, Splice Today
Look no further than our present moment. As the US government begins to relax certain Covid restrictions, what does the self-appointed voice of the working class have to say? The left is outraged. They claim these changes merely show our government’s subservience to capitalism. Like a mother bird protecting its chicks, they declare that workers are condemned to die of Covid so that the money and “treats” can keep flowing. And most laughable of all, they’ve become zero-Covid lockdown enthusiasts. If we only had a real lockdown, they say, we could have eradicated the disease right away. They demand to be taken seriously.
No one has benefited more from lockdowns and restrictions than the titans of global capitalism. The legislation that made the restrictions possible involved gigantic upward transfers of wealth. Furthermore, the stay-at-home orders and forced store closures pulverized many small businesses, which played right into the hands of large conglomerates that could weather the storm and come out even bigger and more powerful as a result.
And of course, it gave sweeping new powers to the “Great Satan,” their supposed sworn enemy: the US government. With one hand they point to the state as the engine of imperialism, founded on bigotry, brutality and lies; and with another they demand that exact same state basically declare martial law to keep people in their homes. This is to say nothing of the increase in suicides, substance abuse, family breakdown, and social atomization that resulted from Covid measures—all of which makes most people more isolated and desperate, and thus more vulnerable to the imperatives of the ruling class.
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Ukraine Is as Real as It Gets
February 28, 2022, Tablet — The Scroll
I want to address the “fake country” assertion head-on for a moment. You people sound like leftist idiots who bleat on about everything being “just a social construct.” Every country is “fake” until enough people on Earth agree that it’s real, that its borders exist, and that its sovereignty is legitimate. That has been the case in Ukraine since 1991. “But that’s so recent!” So what? If you were alive in 1952, would you similarly scoff at the idea of Irish independence? Unless you want the world in a permanent state of war, we must be able to draw lines somewhere.
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Against the Sowers of Discord
May 25, 2022, Splice Today
People can make fun of the Kumbaya colorblind universalism of the 1990s and 2000s all they want. It was better than what we’ve got now. I remember my college dorm in sophomore year. We had a Sunni Muslim from Egypt and a Shia Muslim from Pakistan living on our floor. They were practically best buddies. None of the bullshit in the Middle East mattered, because they were here, in America. And between them and us white dudes, our friendship was built on what Slavoj Zizek calls “shared obscenity.” We made hilariously offensive jokes to and about each other, but far from detracting from our bonds of friendship, it helped establish and solidify them. You could never get away with what we did back then, and it sucks.
And that was only 2007. We can still go back. And if we want our society to survive and function, we have to go back. We must elect, support and promote people who emphasize the things we have in common. Wokeness and “based-trad” branded bigotry must never be censored by social media platforms or other entities. Rather, they must be voluntarily rejected by as many people as possible. We can’t go on like this.
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Separating Business From Pleasure
July 18, 2022, Splice Today
This must change. We must make it riskier to punish an employee for a non-offense than to give in to the demands of the emotionally incontinent. People say that it’s inevitable that our private and professional lives will become one and the same. This isn’t a foregone conclusion, it’s a choice. And it’s the wrong choice.
How should workplaces treat employees’ social media activity? In the overwhelming majority of cases, they should ignore it. If the employee isn’t committing a crime, trashing the organization, or directly and intentionally harassing someone, it’s of no practical business concern. Unless the activity falls out of these narrowly defined categories, HR departments should be instructed to look the other way. How should businesses respond to political issues? Unless a company’s business is activism, it shouldn’t respond publicly at all. It should seek to discreetly help employees or their families if they’re adversely affected by a particular issue. Corporations have never been, aren’t now, and must never become the arbiters of ethics and morality.
How should individuals approach their professional lives? Generation X had it right, as symbolized by the movie Office Space. Jennifer Aniston’s character, Joanna, works at a Chili’s/Friday’s/Applebees-esque restaurant at which her boss encourages her to wear pins (aka “flair”) to express herself. Far from adding joy and fulfillment to her work, the requirement to add flair just adds to the misery of Joanna’s job. Her outburst at the end of the film reflects what a lot of us wish we could say to the would-be commissars we have to put up with.
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You’re Not Enough
October 19, 2022, Splice Today
The time of low interest rates has ended. And while there will always be some garbage sold as the key to unlocking the Promethean spirit of Western civilization, I think the wider enthusiasm for this will be muted for some time. This also means that the world of business, media, academia, and other institutions will have to lean down and focus on value and performance. Administration will remain necessary, but largesse will not. As for the arts, after years of discord and tearing things down, we may find ourselves needing to genuinely support great work for its own sake again.
To retain professional and creative value in this new world, you have to show real skills and dedicated years of genuine interest and expertise in a field. Even when money’s tight, it’s hard to dispense with someone who’s good at the job and has long-standing institutional knowledge. But it’s much easier to ditch that one person everyone secretly hates, and now there’s an economic excuse. I’m sure friends and family think you’re very special. But that’s just not enough.