Map-maxxing: The Metaphysics of Right-Wing Aesthetics
Reality-mogging: Maps are pretty, but reality's complex relational terrain is where true beauty lies.
The amount of serious shit going down at the moment has made writing feel a little like the Simpsons bit where Mr. Burns' doctor shows him how all the oversized novelty germs trying to get into the door of his body at the same time means that no single one gets through. So here's a short writeup on some somewhat unserious shit, which just happens to shed light on all of the serious shit as well.
There have been several, rightly horrified articles and media pieces lately on the "looksmaxxing" movement and its most prominent advocate, the influencer known as "Clavicular." A relatively short one in The New Yorker is particularly excellent at drawing out how this movement fundamentally misunderstands how reality works. As readers here but few others know, the broad ways people (mis)understand how reality works are a matter of practical comparative metaphysics. It's well worth taking a look at these looks-obsessed losers through that lens. The kind of conflict over reality that they illustrate so vividly is a hidden key to understanding how many if not most of our world's crises, and solutions, hang together.
Becca Rothfeld
(Here's an archive link if you're not boring enough to subscribe to The New Yorker.)
The looksmaxxing movement, for those still blessedly unfamiliar, is "the latest permutation of an ideology developed by too online misogynist misanthropes in the twenty-tens." It gained prominence on Tiktok and has become distressingly popular among teenage boys and young men. Looksmaxxing has its own eyeroll-inducing vocabulary, like "brotox," botox for boys, and "scrotox," botox for balls. A core concept is the pseudoscientific PSL scale, which purports to measure attractiveness in terms of components like "dimorphism" (how distinctly un-feminine you look) and "angularity" (sharpness correlating to low body fat). "Mogging" is dominating someone in terms of appearance on this supposedly objective scale. The New Yorker article summarizes that "the nominal aim of all these tactics is to increase the maxxer’s S.M.V., or sexual market value, to women, but in fact the whole enterprise smacks of barely suppressed homoeroticism." Looksmaxxers and adjacent ideologies insist that women are status tokens with little interiority, programmed to chase only the top tier of men on this superficial intra-male competition.
In a Vox interview, Charlie Warzel describes the core purpose of looksmaxxing as "dominance in general. This idea of mogging comes from this alpha male of group acronym: The 'alpha' part of that, and the 'male' part of that are both extremely important. And so going out in public as an extremely hot person is not just to show how beautiful you are, but it's to be dominant over other people. You want to make other people look bad. You want them to feel bad about themselves based on how unbelievably attractive you are, and you also want to basically conquer women."
As the New Yorker author, Becca Rothfeld, notes, "the moral objections to looksmaxxing are numerous, severe, and obvious." It is virulently misogynist, racist, eugenicist, narcissistic, and "proudly anti-compassion." The ideology also contradicts itself logically, even on its own terms, defying its genetically deterministic myths around natural beauty through the intensely unnatural extremes it encourages followers to pursue in search of high S.M.V. But the aesthetic objections matter too. What I appreciated about the New Yorker piece in particular was its framing of looksmaxxing in terms of its reality-based contrast: the "jolie laide (literally, pretty-ugly) [whose] features are strange and unexpected—and all the more compelling for their divergence from the usual tidy symmetries." Real beauty is vibrant, contextual, relational, unpredictable, unmeasurable. Looksmaxxing flips this into laide jolie: "people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful, people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma ... sculpted and faultless ... wooden and sexless."
The problem is not that looksmaxxers want to become beautiful but that they are wrong about what beauty consists in. ... [W]ho wants to be analytical about rating people? What is beauty if not precisely the property that provokes us to abandon all pretense of analytic remove in our desperation to draw closer? ... Looksmaxxers are in search of an invariant formula for beauty, a rule as reliable as the algebraic injunction to perform the same operations to both sides of an equation, but there is no such thing.
"Clavicular is probably unaware of the phenomenon of jolie laide—and, in turn, of his own anti-eroticism—because it is anathema to his thirst for simple, if draconian, guidelines. It cannot be calculated and therefore cannot be easily mastered."
This is a clear manifestation of the kind of overly left-brained metaphysics that takes processes, relations, and context to be secondary to static essences, isolated units, and mathematical absolutes in terms of what makes things real. Many worldview attributes tag along with this fundamental sense of reality: either-or binaries, zero-sum ranking along supposedly universal essentialist ideals, reductionism, determinism, fear-based aspirations of total control and certainty. They're all grotesquely evident in looksmaxxing ideology.
Crucially, this sense of reality is wrong, and it's not up for debate. Processes, relations, and context are primary and give rise to things' attributes and defining boundaries, not the other way around. In every domain of human knowledge from quantum physics to every subfield of biology to economics to general relativity, not to mention arts and aesthetics, process-relational metaphysics explains far more than its converse (sometimes known as substance metaphysics or substance ontology) ever can. The broad, open, integrating lens can incorporate understandings derived from isolating things from temporal and relational context, but the latter's narrow and oversimplifying lens always carves away vitally important aspects of reality.
Unfortunately, the simpletons who get reality maximally wrong in this way are in charge politically at the moment. They're bringing dominating violence to domestic occupations and international wars for the very same foundational reasons that looksmaxxers bring hammers to their own jawlines.
On the bright side, literally everyone who's not a fascist nutjob can unite around opposing their unreality, whatever our other differences. The process-relationality of the universe is essential knowledge like germ theory or climate change or the Earth not being young and flat. If those of us in the metaphysical majority truly understand processes and relationality as what makes the world go 'round, if we truly understand how undebatable it is that their ideology is not just morally or practically but ontologically wrong, we can put that understanding to work winning a future that's actually better than our present.
The difference between chasing a singular, white-male-defined, quantified and commodifiable ideal and appreciating the beauty in diverse and enigmatic uniqueness is, as I envision it, like the difference between a singular vertical line in a model and a complex networked eco-social-system in reality. Euro-Western patriarchy's dominant intellectual traditions have polished rigidly vertical (heh) map-world thinking into a command, while discrediting holistic process-relational thinking into an unrespectable taboo, to a degree that makes it an outlier among cultures worldwide. Getting back to reality requires recognizing where these battle lines lie. It's not right versus left or up versus down. Apart versus together gets closer to the truth, or my personal preference, map versus territory. However one describes the most important axis, it runs from isolating, abstracting, deterministic, passive, and vertically hierarchical and competitive unreality to relational, contextual, open, generative, and multi-perspective realitymaxxing. That understanding of basic comparative metaphysics can be instilled early as protection against attention hijacking by bullshit ideologies like looksmaxxing. Wouldn't that be beautiful?