The Rise of the Un-Intellectual

How irony, mediocrity, and intellectual cowardice took over the art world

This past week, a group of pseudo-intellectuals with cheap fedoras, poorly groomed mustaches, and wannabe artsy black-and-white profile photos collectively published a string of hate posts about me. Their self-indulgent chess game went on for several hours until I reposted their incoherent ramblings to my thousands of followers—and watched them immediately delete their posts from everyone’s feeds.

Check… and mate.

I don’t know what their beef with me was or why they went after me. I only know that they were saying out-of-the-blue nasty things about me without once ever engaging with my actual ideas. My guess is that they got upset that I’d built a platform almost overnight—while their years of intellectual masturbation have gotten them absolutely nowhere.

I won’t tell you their names because people with ugly souls deserve only obscurity, but I will tell you that never once has it ever crossed my mind to insult another Substacker behind their back for no apparent reason. Sure, I’ve disagreed with a lot of people or taken issue with their arguments. But I will always tell you what my issue is with your ideas—and usually to your face.

This is called intellectual honesty.

So while I’ll never know what I did to those losers with 200 subscribers, I do know that they are not only cowardly but also deeply intellectually dishonest. Unfortunately, however, such is the way of useless men coping with intelligent women—or intelligent anyone else, for that matter. Incapable of producing contributions of their own, they can only mooch off the accomplishments of others, attempting to make the lives of their more successful counterparts as difficult as possible—perhaps because of jealousy, but also out of mediocrity, resentment, and utter stupidity.

And while I could not give two fucks about the specific men in question, the greater anti-intellectualism that they represent has unfortunately become ubiquitous in our society—and especially in the art world.

You might think I’m referring to the men of the “manosphere”—the sorts of incels who subscribe to the masculinity influencers featured in Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere—but I’m not here today to talk about that particular group of leeches. Instead, I’d like to address an equally useless but perhaps far more insidious group of human parasites.¹

We shall call them the un-intellectuals—or “unctuals” for short.

The unctual and the incel have a lot in common. They both rage against a system that has supposedly wronged them. They both live in their parents’ basements while making zero useful contributions to society. They both spend their days on the Internet because they lack the moral courage to find meaning in the real world. But where the incel retreats into misogyny because he is unable to secure female companionship, the unctual retreats into performative irony because he is too stupid to attain real intellectual fulfillment.

Simply put, the unctual lacks the capacity to form real, original ideas.

Once you’ve seen the unctual, you can’t unsee him. He’s usually on Substack posting out-of-context insults or replying “lol” to serious ideas, too busy calling things “derivative” to produce a single paragraph of his own worth reading. According to the unctual, anyone who stands for something real is “cringe,” and ironic commentary is his weapon of choice—because taking an actual position would require him to use his brain.

Thus he remains in a permanent state of irony and detachment.

This would bother absolutely no one if the unctual were doomed perpetually to rage at his computer screen from his parents’ basement. The problem, however, is that in our fraught digital culture, the unctual recluse is occasionally given the opportunity to venture into the mainstream art world—which has embraced un-intellectualism itself.

From there, it takes just a handful of unctuals to destroy the art world from within.

Last week, I wrote about the emptiness of modern cinematic culture. Several weeks ago, I commented on the soullessness of the contemporary novel produced by the traditional publishing industry. The same critique can be made of the visual art world, which routinely peddles art that looks like it was made by robot toddlers (human toddlers are typically more creative), or the algorithm-driven music industry. In other words, the mainstream art scene has suspiciously adopted the nihilism of the unctual, giving him a home not only in one particularly noxious corner of the Internet but also in our cherished institutions. Because where a normal society would ostracize the unctual loon, our deranged art world has not only welcomed him with open arms but also crafted an entire manifesto out of his repulsive teachings. As a result, the unctual’s perpetual dissatisfaction with the world around him becomes dogma in publishing, Hollywood, the music industry, and the gallery circuit alike—and our culture, in turn, becomes increasingly performative and ironic.

Meanwhile, bathing in the waters of mediocrity, the unctual himself maintains a pervasive hold on the trajectory of art in our society—and all without ever once having created anything worthwhile himself. Thus the Good, the Beautiful, and the True collapse into nihilism. Novels that once grappled with morality—think Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment—have given way to cheap autofiction depicting banal daily routines—such as the following masturbatory opening to a popular novel:

Similarly, the work of transcendent filmmakers—e.g. Andrei Tarkovsky or Stanley Kubrick—has been replaced by self-referential exercises in repulsion à la Yorgos Lanthimos. By the same token, the New York art gallery that once sought Klimt paintings now displays literal piles of trash (accompanied by a paragraph of text explaining why you should care, of course).

In other words, people with zero use in our society have not only been given a mainstream platform but have also insisted that all other voices be shut out—and all in the name of supposedly “good” art.

Slowly yet decisively, the unctual thus destroys the tradition of artistic creation as we’ve always known it, replacing it with moral degeneracy and intellectual cowardice. What results is a total erasure of meaning—because a culture that cannot take its art seriously relinquishes the ability to take anything seriously at all.

But there is one way to stop all of this.

Because the unctual is too dense to think critically about the world around him, he lacks opinions of his own. He is therefore most threatened by people with actual ideas and opinions—and brains to show for it. Thus he hides behind empty posturing—because he has no tradition of his own.

But we do.

If we are to wrest the arts and humanities from his clutches and restore them to their rightful place in the tradition of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, then we must counter his nihilism by finding meaning not only in our books, films, and music, but also in our own lives. We must fight the unctual with sincerity and conviction, finding meaning in our world by forming coherent ideas and standing behind them—even at the risk of being wrong.

Because what’s missing from our society is the courage of taking a moral stance—the very antidote to the unctual.

That is, after all, why the unctual reacts the way he does—nothing threatens him more than a person who believes in something real and builds something tangible.

And that, my friends, is precisely why those men deleted their posts the moment I found them and argued against them. Because true intellectuals put their names on ideas they believe in. Unctuals, believing in nothing, can only delete theirs.

Enjoyed this post? You can Buy Me a Coffee so that I’ll be awake for the next one. If you are a starving artist, you can also just follow me on Instagram or “X.”

1. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, Rob Henderson has a fantastic review of the documentary in The Wall Street Journal.