"SADLY, PORN": Propaganda for a Future that Forgot History

A Review of Sadly, Porn by The Last Psychiatrist

This is a very strange post for me, even by my standards. “Fun?” Could I call it that? “Tragicomedic?” It is a review of The Last Psychiatrist’s “Sadly, Porn” a book that I promised publicly to review, not knowing what I would get. Despite the difference in format, I think it contains a few crucial ideas that many readers will remember for the rest of their lives. Enjoy!

Part 1: History is Dead

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche announced that God was dead. He did not mean that you could find His body floating in a river somewhere. He meant that the everyday behaviors and organizations of man were completely incompatible with a genuine faith. In modern-speak, someone whose base instinct for dealing with the unknown is to take shoddy models and confidently proclaim them the Rigorous Truth cannot believe in God, or any religion, or metaphysics. You might not like it, but the “Trust the Science” midwits are what peak atheism looks like. Nietzsche was the coroner and the World Wars were the funeral.

Many conservatives, in recent memory Patrick Deneen, noted that progressives and later conservatives replaced God with history. More specifically, the devil became Hitler and whoever was most different from Hitler was God. This is obvious with progressives/Putin calling their political opponents Nazis, but also with libertarians and folk conservatives calling lockdown measures fascist. Even if one or both of those claims are true, it’s notable that we call them fascists instead of Mongols, Maoists, or devils. This has gone on for almost 80 years now and I’m honestly getting tired of it. It just doesn’t resonate with me anymore. I wonder why that is. What would Nietzsche do?

Get his brain treated, probably. But also ask us whether we need our brains treated too, because after he already told us what happened with God, we made history into God and now we wonder what happened to history. The analysis is very similar; we are in fundamentally antihistoric times. The dominant culture, far from respecting history and tradition, has constant antipathy for it. We communicate across millions of microhistories, each bound to a specific time and place, creating an incoherent, unbelievable amalgam. Does anyone still believe that World War 2, the Civil Rights movement, or the American Revolution is the reason he’s trying to steal his semiconductor job back from China / she’s trying to climb the corporate ladder by doxxing a Tiktok star? Our best propaganda narratives are openly revisionist fantasies, the 1619 project and MAGA. And those still can’t help but suck.

So where do we go from here? Trick question. We can’t go anywhere from here, not yet. I just told you a history of why you can’t believe in history. Even if you wanted to believe what you just read, you don’t! What a puzzle. In order to get there, we must turn to something unconventional and dare I say, antihistoric. 

Part 2: Psychoanalysis as Meta-History

History is dead, and it is SPECIFICALLY YOU who killed it. And for that, you will suffer.

This is the thesis of The Last Psychiatrist (TLP)’s Sadly, Porn, a collection of rants, assumptions, psychoanalysis, and enormously long footnotes. Scott Alexander describes the format as “Author vs. Reader.” Zero HP Lovecraft notes that “Everything has this scolding tone, it’s all written in second person, and he jumps to conclusions on your behalf and then tells you why you’re wrong for saying the words he put in your mouth. And he’s pretty good at it, or at least he used to be. “ You’ll honestly have to read it for yourself to experience it. I personally read it as a standup routine. TLP berates the audience to raucous laughter; occasionally a nameless citizen hurls a few words back at him.

The book is not a rigorous treatment of facts or history. It doesn’t pretend to even be close. Neither was Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s a constant, blistering psychoanalysis of real and imagined texts, movies, and of course porn. Many of the stories are simply made up. From Zero HP Lovecraft’s review:

I don’t remember all the little twists and turns that come next—the labyrinthe is long and winding—but one of the next things he talks about, in between footnotes, is some kind of late-night premium cable softcore porn movie called conFIRMative ASSent, capitalization entirely intentional. I tried to google for it, didn’t try very hard, couldn’t find it. I’m pretty sure he made it, Borges style, and then spent two hundred pages talking about it. Near as I can tell, its plot (as such) is about promiscuous sorority girls who freely have sex with every member (no pun intended) of their complementary fraternity, and yet despite this there is some particular guy and girl who are in a relationship, and it’s an open relationship? But they still have some half-baked sense of fidelity or duty to each other. There’s a scene in a hot tub, and another one where the girlfriend is in the shower and her rival comes and blows her boyfriend in order to ruin the sex they are about to have. None of these details are important. TLP uses it as a blank canvas to explore various lemmas and corollaries of the model I outlined above, particularly (5).

Later, closer to the end of the novel, he drops even the pretense of analyzing third party stories, and says “let’s imagine a halloween porno movie where a man and his wife go to a costume party, and he makes her wear a slutty nurse outfit, and he wears a mask, and she ends up sleeping with another man who is wearing the same costume as her husband, but she’s off the hook because she thinks it is her husband until it’s too late, i.e., until his dick is inside her.” I’m summarizing. He calls it TrickX or Treats. The last thirty pages of the book are a screenplay, complete with a music score, for the trailer, which I mostly skimmed because lmao, and because he actually printed it twice, once with just dialog, and once with stage and camera cues and music.

Upon the mention of psychoanalysis, a reasonable reaction is to complain that it’s almost always vague, self-contradictory and arbitrary. It’s whatever interpretation of the story is convenient to hear. TLP not only gives you whatever interpretation of the story he wants to hear, but whatever interpretation of whatever story at all, even ones he made up himself. This is an example of what Curtis Yarvin called “Aggressive Modernism”, flaunting and melting the implicit rules of argument and performance to mask their overthrow. Not only is psychoanalysis a form of sophistry, but so are almost all engagements with contemporary storytelling. TLP is daring you to admit what you care about is meaning, not truth. Otherwise you’d be reading a stats book instead. If you still aren’t convinced, pick up the book right now and have him berate you for 300 pages. He mocks not just the implicit demand for rigor, but the explicit one:

What is pornography?  We should probably finally define our terms.  “I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”  So you're the one who decides?  “No, it's subjective, porn could be different things to different people.”  So everyone gets to decide?  “No, there's no objective criteria.”  So no one gets to decide?  Thank God. 

Pornography: n.  An imitation of a sex act that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the performance; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing lust and anxiety, in order to accomplish a catharsis…

 “Why don't you cite your sources?”  Why, so you can pretend that counts as reading them?

I think he expects this not to be met with understanding, but with anger and repulsion. He’s not necessarily wrong. Here’s ZHPL again:

He says no one reads primary sources, only secondary sources, because primary sources are merely text, whereas secondary sources are “knowledge” —and the word knowledge here has a special meaning in his epistemology, it means something you believe that gives you permission to not take action—and he goes on an on about the importance of reading primary sources, but then when he actually engages with those sources, he bungs it up so badly that you almost suspect he’s doing it on purpose so as to make the case that primary sources should be left to the experts. He can’t even fucking interpret the gospel of Mark, and you’re going to trust him to tell you about the Peloponnesian War? 

But enough shitting on the man (for the moment,) I also want to talk about the good things, because there is plenty here to like. His analytic lens is well-suited to modern pop culture, where there is no ground truth underneath, but it only distorts and lies when he turns it on anything with substance. Maybe this is crazy but what if the theoretical framework you use to interpret Fifty Shades of Gray and Devil Wears Prada isn’t equally applicable to Thucydides and Jesus? Really I’ll stop, until we get to his political views. Enjoying this book (which is different from feeling satisfied by it) requires the reader to engage in Gell-Mann amnesia, but fortunately, you have a lot of practice.

And here’s Scott Alexander:

Does he claim that the books/movies/pornos he analyzes really mean what they say he means? That the author intended those meanings? That the authors’ unconscious minds did? That those meanings were a fortuitous and coincidental reaction between the authors’ unconscious minds and ours? Or is he using them the same way postrationalists use tarot cards - as a semirandom canvas that gives an excuse to speculate about ideas that realistically come entirely from your own mind? It has to be the latter, right? He doesn’t really think The Giving Tree means all that stuff? And yet when bringing up the anagram with I Get Even, Right?, he calls it “a solid example of the return of the repressed assuming it wasn’t on purpose”.

Although I’m impressed by Teach’s erudition, I’m - let’s call it “not as impressed as he is with himself”. It’s impressive how many facts he knows, but he warps them into Jenga towers of speculation that can’t possibly be true, almost compulsively, without bothering to justify himself. There’s an analysis of fishing-related words in the Gospels where he mentions he ran it by a bunch of Greek scholars and they all said it was nonsense. He seems to accept they’re right and his analysis is wrong, but - doesn’t care? Makes us read it anyway? Maybe it’s the semirandom canvas thing after all?

The reason I’m including all these secondary sources is because I think they’re much more similar to how my readers will react than how I did. Once you get that History is Dead and TLP is trying to announce it, the rest of the book feels extremely clean and sensical. “You” is the man in denial that History is dead, like the Priest from the prologue of Zarathustra. It’s also possible that I’m completely missing the mark, but considering how well I was able to guess where his analyses were going I think there’s something here. I also wonder if I missed anything by jumping over the first hurdle so quickly, — the second quarter of the book seemed unnecessary to me —  but it’s preferable to never jumping over it at all. 

Part 3: Envy and Fantasy

Despite his (mis)directions, there are two clear grand narratives to the book, both historical in nature. The first tracks envy and the obfuscation of desires. The second follows knowledge, power, and fantasy, relying on points from the first.

On envy, Rob Henderson (a two-time From the New World guest) gives the clearest rational perspective:

A common belief is that people turn to porn because they can’t find sex or intimacy in real life.

Teach turns this logic on its head: people don’t want sex or intimacy in real life.

Thus, porn.  

The idea is that while porn is usually thought of as a means to orgasm, this is actually a lie people tell themselves. Porn is in fact a means to deprive someone else of pleasure.

Teach writes from the perspective of a married man who uses porn rather than have sex with his wife:

“Why should she get the house and your income and also satisfaction from you?  Is she satisfying you? Doesn't seem fair, the ledger is unbalanced. If some random woman wants to have sex with you, of course you'll try and satisfy her—that's a fair trade, tit for fat.  But the women in your life—'you know what I mean’—scheme to get the ledger unbalanced in their favor.  So the rage gets masked as a sexual fantasy and you imagine that she can only get full satisfaction with other people—which means, in real life she isn't satisfied.  Ledger balanced. Her fantasy orgasms show you just how very much she is deprived of by staying with you in real life, and it makes you cum so hard.”

The knowledge of his wife’s deprivation in real life is the real payoff of the cuckoldry fantasy, not her being pleased by another man.

…

His desire to deprive her is motivated by the feeling of the ledger being unbalanced. The man feels deprived, and therefore he has to deprive her (at least in his own mind) to rebalance the ledger.

But why does the man (according to the book) feel that his wife has deprived him?

Because he sees her as she is, not as others see her.

The book makes a distinction between sexualized fantasy versus mundane reality by invoking two archetypes: the econ major and the sorority girl.

Of course, an econ major can be in a sorority. But the book states “She can only be a fantasy if she stops being an econ major” and instead becomes a sorority girl.

And if you do fulfill your fantasy by being with a sorority girl, and eventually marry her, the excitement wanes as you discover she is just an econ major. Even if she really is/was a sorority girl.

Others see her as a sorority girl, they see an idealized image of her. They don’t see the mundane reality that you see, of her as an econ major. Thus, you feel deprived that only others get access to this idealized fantasy version of her.

You restore balance to the ledger by depriving her (and others) in subtle and devious ways.

The idea that desires have shifted from positive (wants) to negative (deprivation) is not novel. From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

...the Jews achieved that miracle of inversion of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination - their prophets fused "rich", "godless", "evil", "violent", "sensual" into one, and were the first to coin the word "world" as a term of infamy. It is this inversion of values (with which is involved the employment of the word for "poor" as a synonym for "holy" and "friend") that the significance of the Jewish people resides: With them, there begins the slave revolt in morals

Nietzsche observed this inversion within morality. What he calls the slave morality defined evil in terms of positive desired, and empowered resentment (not too different from envy) as its inverse. This slave morality is not even hidden anymore in today’s state religion, social progressivism, which substitutes US slaves for Jesus and holds envy as its primary virtue. This take sure aged well. Many similar philosophical insights exist, but this one is particularly relevant given the context. 

Rob uses evolutionary psychology to provide an alternative explanation to TLP’s envy narrative, but what I’m surprised he didn’t include is that evolutionary psychology is very consistent with this deprivation hypothesis (which funnily enough makes TLP’s point about arbitrary interpretations for him). A simple way to increase desirability is to increase status. However, attempts to increase status are policed by social norms, since status is relative and competitors would rather not have you out-compete them. What is much more difficult to police is sabotage, making it economical to increase status by depriving the other, which can be done in various covert, ambiguous ways.

You might have noticed I did a bit of sleight of hand there. While attempts to increase status are certainly policed against in current times, the degree to which this occurred varies wildly across history. This is precisely Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality. Many historical cultures had clear, acceptable ways to increase status, at least within the ruling aristocracy. These were known as virtues. 

To me, the most important tipping point is the transition between two default assumptions about human relationships. These two forms of relationships are defined by Francis Fukuyama in the coincidentally titled “The End of History and the Last Man”. The first is “isothymia”, a desire for a relationship of equal dignity. The second is “megalothymia”, a desire for a relationship where one person is elevated above the other in dignity. In Fukuyama’s telling, isothymia is a major historical driver, moving the countries of the world towards liberal, egalitarian democracies. This shift accompanied economic liberalization to create the postwar shift to a “final” state of history. 

A frequent topic of this newsletter is that of individual differences. With the power of modern science, it is beyond obvious that individuals differ greatly in physical and mental abilities. We have not made significant changes to orient our society around these obvious facts because an overwhelming majority of people are incapable of believing in statistics, and therefore cannot believe in science. A consequence of this unpopular fact is that megalothymia is always true and isothymia is always false. Then, we should not interpret nominally equal relationships as equal. Instead, they are the most unstable relationships: unsettled hierarchies of implicit social competitions (as opposed to explicit competitions like war, math, or entrepreneurship). These implicit social competitions are the locus of envy and deprivation. This is a repetition of the most well-known idea from this newsletter, so if you’re new perhaps listen to this or read that. Allow Scott Alexander to explain the consequences:

Since everybody wants everybody else to be worse off, refuses to act openly on this, but dreams of having someone make them act, there’s widespread support for any limitation on human freedom, simply because it’s a limitation on human freedom. We are ruled by a bunch of psychopathic vampire elites, but it’s hard to be really angry at them. Society found some psychopathic elites sitting in vampire castles and basically begged them, “PLEASE take our freedom and make us worse off!” The psychopaths answered “I dunno, seems like a lot of work and we’re already pretty rich”, and Society was like “No PLEASE we are begging you!” and the psychopaths shrugged and said okay, you can have a little oppression, as a treat.

Tyrannical government is an imperfect solution here; our government occasionally resembles democracy, which makes us complicit in its actions. What people really crave is domination by corporate HR departments. The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments and things like them.

To me, Nietzsche and Fukuyama tell the explicit history which TLP implicitly smuggles into his psychoanalysis. The second historical narrative in the book is how societies centered on envy form themselves. Here’s ZHPL summarizing it well:

• Omniscience and Omnipotence are mutually exclusive, not in a theological way, but in a psychological way, in the way you conceive of and relate to authority. If something or someone has knowledge, they don’t have power, and vice versa. 

  • Therefore you use knowing difficult things as a substitute for doing difficult things

  • “The purpose of the conspiracy is to defend impotence by knowing something”

  • And when something is difficult or unpleasant you gladly retreat into knowledge of that thing

  • And this neutralizes your need to do it

  • Primary sources are facts, secondary sources are knowledge

    • “The” media — i.e. the news is always a secondary source.

…

• Fantasies are precursors to action when they organically and authentically come from within your own mind

  • But none of your fantasies are actually your own, because you now get all of them from media, and all media is porn

  • All media is porn BECAUSE it causes you to have other people’s fantasies instead of your own, so you never end up taking action because step one is fantasizing, and you never even fantasize, because porn does that for you

In other words, the sanctification of envy and the demonization of original desire/fantasy leads to a desire to conform, achieved by second-hand fantasy like porn and media. 

Maybe you believe, factually, in this historical telling. I don’t think TLP justifies it well, or even tries. My own writing provides a factual justification for a far narrower version of the envy argument, and I still think TLP is stretching it. This kind of vaguery I would normally react negatively to. But the blatant way those expectations are subverted make me reconsider. Remember the original problem. In a hypothetical world where TLP writes a rigorous, factual justification, you might believe the claims factually, but you certainly won’t act according to these principles. That would force you to invert the function of most institutions and social relationships in the western world. This telling is incompatible with your way of life. In fact, any factual historical telling, bound to a time and place, is incompatible with your way of life. Hence why History is Dead. Hence why TLP chose to write the book that he did instead of writing the article that I did. 

Part 4: Guiding Narratives of the Future

People don’t care whether culture war stories are made up or not. They are fiat stories, made valuable solely by their usefulness. Here is a good example:

I don’t know if this post is made up. It in fact doesn’t matter at all if this post is made up. The random woman and her dog doesn’t affect your life in the slightest. And so it goes with most culture war anecdotes, from George Floyd to Libs of Tiktok. The reaction to the story IS the story. The ability to chant a few syllables and rally a partisan army is the story. Without that power, George Floyd and the random LoTK teacher would matter as much to you as the 100th car crash victim this year. Know his or her name? I didn’t think so. 

This is somewhat postmodern, but it’s important to understand there is an underlying reality, even if it is less powerful in affecting media or politics in the short term. Even if the general population cannot believe in history or statistics, those exist in reality. Inflation, geopolitics, supply chains, and technology are real things with real impact, whether media covers them or not. It is the duty of people who understand this to also understand the first point. It is our duty to align truth and media power. It is their duty because they are, tautologically, the only people who can. 

The first instinct upon realizing this is often to start from the truth and simplify it. It was my instinct. If you dig up my earlier, (and quite bad!) podcast you’ll find me explaining regressions and exponential probability curves. This, obviously, did not work. The second instinct is to tell a historical narrative which contains the statistical truth within it. This stitches together real major events into something with a bit more power behind it. This is the compromise if you still think the public can handle scientific rigor and empiricism, but recognize other factors in motivating them. The third and final choice is to resort to, sadly, porn. Let’s revisit TLP’s definition of porn.

Pornography: n.  An imitation of a sex act that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the performance; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing lust and anxiety, in order to accomplish a catharsis…

He goes on to say that all media is porn. This is a kind of optimized sophistry. Start with the end goal, and embellish each and every feature of the story to maximize its impact. Note that this is currently being done, subconsciously (or maybe not). The trajectory of George Floyd from bad dude kills less bad dude to national spiritual movement was a series of iterated embellishments, passing through social media, multiple news outlets, and activist groups until each and every point in the story was pornographized. Floyd is the best recorded execution of this strategy, but we can without loss of generality replace Floyd with the French schoolteacher beheaded by an ISIS terrorist or the Dominion voting machines. It’s porn on all sides, all the way down. This type of narrative warfare is exactly what TLP hits you with from the first page of Sadly, Porn. 

This is not a moral judgement on this type of narrativizing. My initial reaction was one of disgust. Overcoming that instinct is difficult. I don’t know if I would have finished that journey without reading this book. I would wish for a population that understood stats and did not fall for transparent emotional manipulation if I could. That ideal population is as much of a fantasy as TLP’s cuckold porn. The collective twitterati subconscious is “learning” to compete on this front whether you like it or not. Right now, they are absolutely dominating any kind of conscious effort. If you want to direct the world towards rationality, this is the bottleneck. 

This is not the world I wish for. But it is the world that is.