Why are you talking shit?
This is a blog that criticizes popular, contemporary preferences, culture, concepts, and works. It holds the originating party accountable, if only by shame. While originally motivated by the absurd content of some best-selling books of my age, this criticism repository moves beyond the written word to highlight anything garnering unwarranted acclaim.
First, I would like to express that I would never hope to convince anyone that I am qualified to render judgement on any craft outside of my field of expertise, the identity of which is irrelevant, suffice it to note it is not directly related to literature, writing, or philosophy. However, credentials or namesake should not serve as a surrogate for earnest formulations and reasoning. You will not find me throwing around any degrees, colleague names, or tangential anecdotes. Further, regardless of rhetoric, I have no absolute conviction; this is important when you find yourself in a purely subjective existence. Maintaining certitude as an “expert” is irresponsible when writing within the medium of scientifically and deductively unverifiable speculation. Avoiding this is even more crucial when your writing might reach the eyes of tens of millions of readers, the scale of which is capable of significantly influencing societal discourse and displacing more interesting or dire topics.
Enter: Bestsellers are to information what TED talks are to information. If the Enlightenment was the cusp over which modern society surmounted and leapt necessarily to grasp at reason, the 21st century is the plunge back into the abyss under the guise of progressing enlightenment. Subtle evidence for this is bore out in the masses of shallow, templated bestsellers of our age.
My main aim herein is to produce unrelenting criticism originating from a source without form, an ambient resistance to magisterial writers that may be practitioners of fallacy. I hope to reveal to myself and others the extent to which some popular, contemporary works, otherwise seen as sacrosanct a priori fact, are inundated with contradiction, unfounded speculation, and recapitulation or misinterpretation of ancient profundities, of which the latter is touted as novel truth. I believe these ready-made, artificially ubiquitous works significantly influence societal discourse without many checks. My concern is less about validity of low-level assertions and more about the construction of thought frameworks and their subsequent widespread injection into society’s collective mind; although, it should be noted, many times, such frameworks are built up from compounding low-level fallacies.
Some criticisms found here may hinge on recurring, despicable motifs of which may be necessary to attain bestseller status. I acknowledge this but do not accept it. Whether used mechanically, genuinely, or nefariously by the authors is of no concern or bearing. In a way, the views I share are not my own and may very well contradict one another and my moral or ideological framework, if I harbor such things.
To what end?
Hopefully, conceptions herein will motivate readers to value less attractive base works on which some contemporary ones are lazily derived, to hold popular works of any form to a higher standard of scrutiny rather than happily swallowing them in hopes of making topical conversation in the break room. The motivation for this has something to do with too much bullshit being spewed into the atmosphere by narrow, deluded minds, and subsequent celebration and amplification of such bullshit…
The entirety of this work may also fall in that category, so I’ll keep it short. Anyway, no one will read this. If nothing else, an exercise in not drinking the Kool-Aid.