How to Get Better

And, How to Succeed on The Internet

Rule #1 of Content Creation: Everything is Porn.

This is, extreme, slightly, but the overall sentiment is correct and I suggest to you that even a casual scroll through your favorite social media of choice will suffice to prove it. Take, for example, Substack.com. What sells here? What really, truly, sells? What gets the big numbers? The big money?

Porn.

Porn. That’s it.

Now, I grant you, it’s not sexual porn, no, but outrage porn and fear porn are every bit as titillating and emotionally damaging as watching a girl disrobe. Probably even more so. Article after article, headline after headline, all of it some version of “LOOK HOW BAD THINGS ARE!! Can you believe how bad other team has made things!? Everything sucks, it’s going to get worse, and (most importantly) it’s their fault… not yours or mine.”

If you want to succeed as an internet content creator, make porn.

It really is that simple.

Make videos about how awful X people are or how Y political party is going to bankrupt the economy or how Z disease/war/disaster is always imminent and just around the corner waiting to kill everyone.

It’ll do numbers.

Promise.

That’s what the people want. That, more than anything else, is what sells.

Sexual porn also works. As does food porn, etc. You do you.

I bring this up again (I’ve written about how everything is porn before) because recently News Presenter Chris Cuomo went on Sometimes Comedian / Sometimes Libertarian Political Pundit Dave Smith’s podcast recently and made, more or less, that exact same point, just as I was once again noticing it in my own online career.

Cuomo right, Smith left. Until recently Cuomo had a major show on CNN.

Dave Smith you see was trying to pour blame on “The Media” for many of the ills of society and, of course, by proxy also attempting to lay them at the feet of Mr. Cuomo.

In our day and age this is a popular sentiment. Those who hate Trump will tell you Trump started the era of media resentment but he didn’t. He threw gasoline on it, sure, but hating the media has been en vogue in the U.S. of A for decades now. Maybe there was a era when this wasn’t true but, if there was, it was before my time. As long as I can remember each “side” has blamed the other side’s media for “telling them lies.” All that’s happened since Trump is that this tendency has metastasized into a distrust of “The Media” in general, with many people having given up on the idea of journalistic objectivity entirely. Now they don’t even trust their own “side”, much less the other guy’s. Sad state of affairs, but, hey… what can you do? People like to be upset.

And that’s the point.

That was Mr. Cuomo’s point.

Is the media wholly innocent for its current status in public perception? No. Of course not. And Mr. Cuomo agreed. Agreeing with Mr. Smith that The Media could sometimes be a problem, he went on to say however: “It’s not fair to put it all on The Media though. The Media is an echo of society.”

…

And Dave Smith + Audience lost their minds.

Oh, they got so mad.

Booo! Booo! No! Booo!

Dave immediately jumped into the role of Little Guy Speaking Truth to Power and went on a mini tirade about how, no, the current state of affairs is not at all the fault of the public but solely the fault of corrupt institutions and incentives. And people love that, you know. Mr. Rich Guy, bad. Poor little average Joe, good. Americans eat that sorta thing up. Wall Street Bad, Politicians Bad, Bankers Bad… but Farmer John Good! Farmer John Good and, moreover, all the bad things that happen to Farmer John are only and ever solely because of what Washington and Wall Street did. It’s never, ever, his fault. It’s never the fault of the little guy.

Little guys don’t have agency see.

They don’t have choice.

Free Will is an emergent property of cash flow… or, er… something. Before you have 500K in the bank everyone is assumed to be an innocent baby, below of the age of reason. The Rich Men North of Richmond are the problem.

Not you.

Not me.

Oliver Anthony singing “Rich Men North of Richmond.” What a stupid-ass song.

But that’s not true.

Mr. Cuomo’s point was that, any News agency which didn’t cover things people wanted to see… in the way they wanted to see them covered… would go out of business.

He’s right.

I don’t know to what extent Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest have governed speciation on Earth but those two forces absolutely govern the marketplace. People imagine that you have to be some high-level conspiracy theorist to think that healthcare, politics, academics, and so on are all corrupted but, truthfully, you really only have to be a Darwinist. I mean, let’s imagine there are two different treatment options for the same disease, one cheap and the other expensive. Well, the doctors who honestly believe the expensive one is best are going to get more money per patient, be able to afford more students who learn their reasoning, and have more influence over what research gets done than the ones who honestly believe in the cheaper option. Thus, over time, without any explicitly nefarious motivations, competitive medical systems will have a tendency to drift towards higher and higher prices because Dr. Cheap doesn’t propagate his thoughts and practice at nearly the same rate as Dr. Expensive. As an example, yoga is free, and patients could be prescribed biweekly sessions with a yoga instructor for back pain. This is proven to work in many cases but, again, because yoga is free, no institution makes money off it, so those people who believe expensive interventions like surgery and pain blocks are the best route are going to be better situated to propagate their belief to new students and throughout medical institutions. More importantly, those more expensive, more invasive options? That’s what customers want. People don’t want to diet. They don’t want to exercise. They don’t want to stretch. They want a pill. They want an operation. They want someone else to fix it.

And then, if it doesn’t work?

Then they want to be able to complain. They want to be able to shift all the blame for their situation onto the doctor or the surgeon. Call him a quack for cutting open their back and fusing the vertebrae together, when they themselves specifically asked for that crazy procedure rather than try to have a diet coke.

See, the doctor has 500K.

You’re allowed to think of him as bad.

Cast your problems onto him. Make him your scapegoat.

Same thing with The Media. Same thing everywhere.

Whenever I write a post that’s not absolutely fawning over Donald Trump, as I did in my last article, I see it happen. Because my readership skews conservative, every single article I write that in any way casts blame or responsibility for the faults of the world on a conservative leader, I get to sit back and watch my subscribers go down. I get to open angry emails from disgruntled people who suddenly, magically, realized “I’m not worth paying for”, demanding refunds for subscriptions, calling me names, all kinds of things. I don’t care, I’m not reliant on this blog as my only means to feed myself but…

Imagine if I were.

Imagine if I were a Catholic blogger, or a conservative YouTuber, or a liberal Tiktok guy with a decent following. What if I, as a Catholic blogger who buttered his bread by writing, had honest problems or concerns about the state of the Church? What if I, as a conservative YouTuber living off ads, thought maybe Trump wasn’t the best choice or that, perhaps, The Democrats were not pure evil? What if I was a liberal Tiktok influencer who had genuine concerns about how the country was going under Joe Biden? What if I were Chris Cuomo? Or anyone else working at CNN, NBC, The New York Times, or FOX?

What would I do then??

Would I voice such concerns?

Would I tell my followers the truth, what I really thought, if every single time I did so I could pull up a graph showing how much money I lost?

…

Would you?

…

See, you’re the problem.

I’m the problem.

I’m not saying The Rich Men North of Richmond are saints or anything but they truly have far, far, less impact and control over your life than you give them credit for. Agency actually doesn’t have a price tag. Free Will is not something you unlock only at a certain tax bracket. You really do have control over your own life. You do. And the collective morality of the people will be made manifest in the institutions. Always and forever. This actually is a Democracy and this actually is a Free Market and however people vote, whether with their ballots or their wallets or their attention, is what gets manifested into the world. And, right now, what people want, what most everybody seems to want…

Is to be able to blame somebody else.

White men. Immigrants. Jews. Democrats. Republicans. Bankers. CEOs. Big Pharma. The Military Industrial Complex. Wall Street. Blacks. Mexicans.

…

Everybody under the sun but themselves.

That’s what we’re asking for.

So that’s what gets delivered.

Page after page of “Look at what so-and-so did. Can you believe how bad this is? This is all terrible and it’s all this guy’s fault.” Scroll scroll scroll. Doom doom doom.

Well.

Rule #1 of Content Creation: Everything is Porn.

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I try not to make porn.

One of the central ideas of Worldview Repair is to try and help you to stop these destructive behaviors. To stop looking for scapegoats and to take up your own agency as a Living Man or Woman, a child of God. To realize that you are where it’s at… not the institutions, and that the institutions are merely reflections, or, as Mr. Cuomo said, echoes of the people who make them up. If something sucks your first instinct should be, “Well… it must be because I suck. What could I do to stop sucking?” and then try to do it. Try to do it honestly. Not by making stupid symbolic shows of change like posting on social media or marching in a protest but actual, tangible differences in how you live that might have an effect on things.

And what’s the first step?

Be Grateful.

That’s how you start getting better.

You look around at the world and you decide, you choose, for maybe the first time in your life, to focus on everything that’s good in it and stop amplifying all the bad. You shift your source of motivation from a place of hate and anxiety and fear and begin to run towards the things you love instead of away from the things you don’t. You trust God. You say to yourself, here I raise mine Ebeneezer, and recognize that despite every damned odd in the universe you are alive, having lived X many years on Earth, and have had, largely, nothing to do with your own success. What? Did you make your own feet? Did you grow your own skin? Are you in charge of the beating of your own heart? Did you make the air, or the food, or the water, or the sun? How many times should you by all rights have died, or lost it all, or become destitute and yet, somehow, miraculously, you did not?

It’s all gifts.

And so why are you afraid that tomorrow the gifts will suddenly stop?

Why the anxiety?

If God so clothes the grass of the field… will he not much more clothe you?

Trump isn’t going to save you. And neither will Biden, and neither will marching in a protest or identifying with a group or agitating for communism.

But… you can choose to be saved right now.

You can choose to stop being afraid. To stop hating. To stop imagining the worst, both in other people and in Tomorrow and in yourself. You can choose to stop feeding the Beast and to stop watching whatever form of porn most gets you off.

You can.

And that’s how you get better.

Or, if you want a career online, also you can do the opposite.

Or, maybe, Video Game walkthroughs. Those are pretty popular too.