You Will Find “It” Corrupting

A response to David Pinsof's "You Will Find This Interesting"

This is the first of a two-part response to David Pinsof’s You Will Find This Interesting. It is not interesting, but it is instead corrupting. Which I show in this and the corresponding essay.

Now you might not believe the Bible as Christians do—nor do I ask you to. It suffices for my purpose here that we take it as a myth or divine fiction, some powerful literature that captures and conveys the human condition. For in it, and in the first human characters in the play, we see corruption enacted in its finest form: a man and his wife, being innocent, were naked and not ashamed. That changed when they received something they ought not to have.

Peter Paul Rubens, Temptation of Adam and Eve; The Fall of Man

Given all other pleasures in paradise, given all liberty, God gave them an instruction. They could eat of all the trees in the garden except one. The one peculiarly named “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” (let’s call it KOGAE as we proceed). For the day they eat of it, they will die. The tempter arriving, tempted the man’s wife. Genesis records that she looked and “saw that it was good for food.” She ate it and gave it to her husband. They ate of it, and while we do not see them drop to the ground like it would be the case if you took a teaspoonful of arsenic, we discover a reaction —they went and hid themselves when God came looking. God beckoning to Adam, Adam says he hid himself because he was naked. God asks, “Who told you that you were naked?” It is in this sense that the essay is corrupting. In other words, reader, how did you come to make something that was not a problem into a problem for yourself?

For corruption in Adam was the knowledge of his nakedness. A loss of innocence first and freedom second. And corruption in us readers of that essay is an assaulted motive. For corruption is about staining that which was pure. Adam was pure and innocent, moving freely in the garden, doing whatever he wished. His nakedness was no problem; this was good. Not knowing evil, he didn’t have to revise his every move. Thus, introducing the knowledge of evil assailed his ability to do anything without watching his back. And this is innocence: freedom and —as well as in—rightness. Confidence. Self-forgetfulness. The absence of self-absorption. Not naivete, but freedom from guilt. And this is corruption: guilt being awakened in the most abhorrent of manners. 

Once you taste this kind of guilt, it takes work to free you of its haunting power which haunts even your purest motives. Whereas Adam, innocent not naive, was unashamed in his nakedness, was now assailed by the fruit of his actions. Myself and other concerned readers on the other hand, innocent not naive, delighting in our everyday ‘interesting’ things, are now assailed by the fruit of our actions; of reading the so-called essay.

Like Eve who saw KOGAE was good for food, readers saw an essay promising them that “you will find this interesting” and turned in to read. No one knew what awaited them on the other side of reading.

So, like Adam, who afterwards lost his confidence, I and others have lost our confidence in the seemingly trivial things we did out of healthy motives and are further paralysed by endless questioning as to how good and disinterested our motives are.

Can you possibly send a TikTok right now without double-checking if you are craving to look clever, signal your superiority or whatnot? For there is no way to take the idea that “Our brains weren’t designed for solitary contemplation; they were designed for arguing, rationalizing, politicking, rule-following, covert rule-breaking, and excuse-making. We are homo hypocritus” as truth —if it is a thing—and not consider which of these features you are operating in your mundane dealings. Can you look at your Capital In The 21st Century on your bookshelf and not question yourself if you aren't trying to signal your sophistication?

Even as I write this, which I hesitated to write, I revise, paragraph after paragraph, if maybe I am writing this to seem clever and rancourous. Or if I genuinely want to say what is true and; to as well offer a voice and argument for those who face the same predicament but lack either the time or sophistication to cobble together a response. Which is which? I don't know anyone who, having read this essay, hasn't second-guessed a good and innocent move; asking whether an act is kind or it is politicking disguised. This is what loss of innocence looks like.

It looks like excessive consciousness. Being too aware of yourself. A morbid introspection which now afflicts those who placed a premium on their good motives and have learned not to take themselves too seriously. It is a dark brooding weight that drags you down like millstones to your navel. It is what Adam experienced in our myth and what readers experience and ought to experience after reading the essay. It is no benign explication of the workings of the human mind. “To be too conscious is an illness,” Dostoevsky said, “a real thoroughgoing illness.” Which is the expertise of hole pokers. As such, the author in his essay, achieves removing the required self-forgetfulness that makes true connection possible, contra his desire to see people connect more. And that is exactly how it corrupts; that it plants the seeds of, and aggravates the thing it claims to be exposing in the readers and the human lifeworld at large.

And suppose it was naivety, and the author claims that we ought to understand the inner workings of our consciousness; that we ought to poke holes in our stories, it will still not hold that this is the way to go. Just as sexual naivety in both children and adults is not cured by pornography. Pornography only corrupts. This essay being only pornography in a varied sense.

So far I have described the essay’s effect, not yet arguing whether its contents are in fact true. This I have undertaken in the second part, which takes a longer time to read. I can only hope that you find the time. Vale!