Incels, Evo Psych, and Modern Literature with ARX-Han — #83
The best definition of inceldom is not a young man who can’t find sex. It’s a young man or a man of any age who can’t find romantic love, and who struggles with meaning. I think the deepest and truest definition of the incel is a person who feels that their life is meaningless. And they are a very modern permutation of a, of course, much more ancient problem.
Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is ARX Han, an anonymous author and expert on human relations, the state of literature today, and evolutionary psychology. Han, welcome to the podcast. It’s a pleasure to be here, Steve. I am a very big fan of your work in this show, and I am a frequent listener, so very grateful to be here.
My pleasure. And let me tell the audience why I invited you. Obviously, I became aware of you on the internet, and I, at the time, glanced at your novel, which is called Incel. Well, we’ll spend at least a chunk of time, I think, in this interview discussing your novel, but I want to discuss maybe some broader topics as well. But then following up on your novel, I sort of listened to some other interviews you had given over the years, and I was impressed by your overall insight into topics like literary novels, the state of modern society, and the status of young men in society. So, I found you to be very insightful, and I thought this would be a conversation that my audience would enjoy.
Perfect. It’s my pleasure to get into those topics. Great. So let’s start just by introducing your novel. Hopefully, we’ll goose up your sails a little bit. The novel is titled Incel, and if I had to describe it, like I was talking to my son earlier today, and I was telling him I’m going to interview a novelist, he said, “Oh, what did he write?” And the way I would explain it, in my mind, this may not be the best way to explain it, but to me, it’s sort of like a 2010-ish update of American Psycho, in which the main character is not a psychotic killer, but his main difficulty is in basically getting laid, having sex with women. He views the world in a very mechanistic, sort of autistic way, which is heavily informed by evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology.
Having said it that way, maybe you could react to it, and then maybe you could give the way that you describe the novel to people when you’re constrained to do it succinctly. Absolutely. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that is a pretty good characterization of the novel, given that Brett Easton Ellis, who wrote American Psycho, certainly was one of my primary literary influences. His style is characterized by a sort of literary maximalism, where he really leans into this kind of male-coded, literary-type autism with heavy reliance on descriptive detail and things of that nature.
If I were to characterize my novel in a single sentence, I would call it a biomaterialist tragic comedy about a young American incel of the 2010s era. And I’ll lean into kind of two terms there. By biomaterialist, what I mean is this intense focus on various forms of scientific reductionism applied to intimate human affairs like love and relationships. And tragic comedy because it sort of oscillates by design between the extremes of absurdity and deeply painful experiences that are nonetheless very sad and in many ways existentially wrought.
Now, I found the novel to be very well written, and it’s not the easiest thing to read, I think, for most people, because the narrator, the main character, is himself a graduate student in evolutionary psychology. He explains everything that happens in his life, as you mentioned, from the most intimate to the most mundane, in terms of some analogy which comes from evolutionary psychology, even a particular scientific paper which he might quote in his description of what’s happening to him.
For example, in the opening scene, he’s at a club, and he’s trying to pick up a girl. He’s sort of describing her decision not to go home with him or not to continue the conversation with him. It’s just a flat-out sort of evaluation that his fitness level is too low for her, or something like this. I found it, in a way, to be very stilted to have the main character think and operate that way. But I think you do a very good job of developing that kind of person.
Yeah, thank you very much. I certainly had a lot of fun writing the novel, and it does kind of have this experimental streak to it because part of the thought process that went into writing it came from a place of looking at these concepts in evolutionary psychology or cognitive science, of applying these sorts of abstractions to human experience and then started kind of inserting them into a person’s day-to-day life. He’s sort of hyper-fixated on these things as a way of understanding his social reality.
You know, it’s funny because I’ve had both Diana Fleischman and Jeffrey Miller on my podcast, and I would even account them as personal friends. They are professionals in this field. They do research in this field. You may have even quoted some of their papers in the novel. But you go a step beyond, which is you reach this sort of very online kind of way of using that research to understand life and society, which, starting in the early 2000s or so, you saw this online so often. Like some very online artist writing about his inability to do X or his wish to accomplish Y, describing the whole thing in these sort of scientific terms in terms of evolutionary psychology.
Yeah, and a lot of the book is about creating this polarization between the phenomenology of moment-to-moment lived experience, which of course feels nothing like computation, and contrasting that to the sort of computer science or psychology-based abstractions as to what the brain is doing closer to “ground level.” And I am actually familiar with Miller and Fleischman. I haven’t followed their work very closely. The papers that are quoted in the novel are either kind of inspired by real papers or sort of stylized exaggerations of actual abstracts that I encountered.
With literary fiction, I think the greatest joy comes from experimenting with the form rather than retreading sort of more trope-like styles, for example. One of the reasons that it was so much fun to write was because the current trend right now is a kind of MFA style, literary minimalism. Going in the opposite direction, zigging if everyone is zagging, was one of the things that kind of motivated me to take that very extreme experimental style.
Let me bookmark two things that you just mentioned. One is the idea that at bottom, we might be performing some kind of neural net computation, which has been shaped by evolution, etc., or DNA. But the way we experience it as humans is obviously very different. That’s almost the theme of my podcast. For example, today I released an episode in which I talked to this philosopher and AI researcher, Yoshi Bach. He’s very interested in this phenomenology as well.
The second thing I want to come back to later is your ideas about the current state of literary fiction, which I think I agree with you is pretty problematic at the moment. It’s been super feminized, for example. But let’s do that after we go deeper into your novel because I really want the reader or the listener to actually have some idea of this novel. I think it’s very funny. If you can tolerate the fact that the narrator is this sort of hyper-autist, very online kind of, you know, somewhat racist guy—a kind of guy that I think anybody who’s online has encountered in discussion forums or chat rooms or something over time or on Twitter.
I feel we’re not doing it justice. So the reader, if you’re at all interested, go to Amazon and read the excerpt, and you’ll get a sense of the novel. But I thought we would delve a little bit deeper into what actually transpires in the novel before we go on to those other topics. Sounds good.
So the main character is a white guy, a grad student in evolutionary psychology. I think he says explicitly, “I’m not autistic” during the course of the novel, but how do you think of him? Do you think of him as an artist or just someone who’s too wedded to scientism?
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I would say that canonically, I think this character is kind of in a gray zone, right? The story kind of plays with this idea of what actually even is autism at the margins of a person being what would be considered high functioning, right? Because obviously, when you refer to autism, you’re really using an umbrella term to capture a very broad range of psychological pathology. You know, it’s used in a sort of colloquial sense to describe tech bros.
But of course, there are people who are profoundly disabled by the disorder. When it’s used in sort of online casual parlance as a jab or a joke, in many cases, a self-deprecating joke, they’re obviously not referring to people who are intellectually disabled and unable to communicate as a result of the disorder or a concurrent disorder associated with that. So in the book, the narrator indicates that he doesn’t believe that he has the diagnosis. He’s sort of implying that he wouldn’t meet “medical criteria” for it.
But at the same time, he does exhibit a strain of having tremendous difficulty reading, understanding, and reacting to human social cues. In a sense, that lack of capacity is kind of the narrative engine for the book. He treats this domain of social relations almost like an unexplored continent that he, as some sort of old-style Victorian naturalist, must discover and uncover the secrets of. And that’s why he makes these jokes about being a Darwinian figure in the sense that he sees himself as a scientist.
According to the way that I wrote it, he’s not necessarily falling into a diagnostic box, but he certainly has these characteristics. I think that sort of mirrors how it works in real life because, if you sit down, and you go to a psychiatrist or somebody like that, really they’re just looking at a checklist. The scoring of these checklists can be very subjective.
I would imagine, although I haven’t actually looked up the literature for this, that the inter-rater reliability for something like high functioning autism spectrum disorder at the margin is quite poor. I’d be surprised if that wasn’t the case.
Yeah, you’re probably right. The question that I was trying to get at here is, and you answered it, is whether this guy has poor theory of mind in trying to understand what other people are thinking and feeling, or if his theory of mind’s capability is actually okay. He just insists on thinking of everything in these very evolutionary terms. I know people whose theory of mind is not great, but they’re certainly not in some kind of outlier state. They’re sort of in the average range, but they insist on thinking of the world the way your main character thinks about it.
Yeah, obviously, the meta-critique is very much the latter. To double-click on that, if you look at the prevailing online manosphere consensus of the early 2010s era, what you had was this heavily ideologically warped misinterpretation of evolutionary psychology that was popularized and went through this tumbling of dilution and broken telephone.
Real research was being done that, in many cases, was probably not of very high quality, and then it was spun into memorable memes, stories, and popular books—most of which I haven’t actually read. Then it hit the blogosphere, and by the time you get to that third point, whatever iota of scientific truth that was there has really been degenerated and modified to basically soothe the painful experiences of alienated young men.
You know, the person who’s really good at this is Jeffrey Miller because he knows the literature quite well, but at one point he was working with a guy called Tucker Max. I don’t know if you know that name, but he has direct contact with lots of young men who are like your narrator. In various interviews, you can find him making these subtle differentiations between what could be inferred from scientific studies and the way these ideas are interpreted online.
I think the reason this is salient is that it cuts to the core of the question of meaning. One of the themes of the book is this idea of materialist reductionism being a kind of acid that dissolves meaning in life. To give one of several examples, if you assume what philosophers refer to as the causal closure of the physical world, i.e. that only physical forces can produce causation in the physical world, it starts to look something like a kind of hard incompatibilism where the phenomenological experience of free will is illusory. Therefore, by extension, the choices that a person makes are illusory, and evolutionary psychology lends itself toward a feeling of nihilism.
It becomes straightforward to take transcendental experiences like love, intimacy, and connection to decompose them into cognitive science or psychology abstractions about optimization algorithms for genetic reproduction, which can, in turn, be decomposed into the physics of atoms in your brain and so on. I’m using a philosopher’s language here, not a physicist’s language, of course, but I think my mental model of what makes the young modern incel different from young alienated men in eons past is that there is something historically new about this lens of scientific reductionism applied to human relationships.
It simply didn’t apply previously.
I think this is a good point. The idea of the incel is quite old. For example, in East Asia, the concept that lots of young men will not be able to reproduce, because in those societies, if they lacked sufficient wealth, they would not have a wife. There’s even a term like “empty branches” on a genealogical tree that refers to young men who aren’t able to reproduce. The idea that there are sort of angry, frustrated incels in society at any given time is an old idea. What’s new about your take is that, partially because of the internet and partially just because of the development of fields like evolutionary psychology, there’s a subset of them. I agree with you, that’s a historically new phenomenon.
I wonder, like, I would guess there are a lot of incels in the world today who are just guys who aren’t particularly scientific in their outlook. They’re just not very good with women. Maybe they’re unattractive or they lack testosterone or aggression or theory of mind or whatever, but they don’t necessarily see it the way your narrator sees it. But I found that particular character quite interesting.
When you write a book, you want to examine the part of a phenomenon that is historically novel and departs from the continuity of the past. Certainly, throughout history, there have been men who were unable to find a partner and reproduce. But there does seem to be some particular mix of factors that have really amplified this in contemporary times. It’s a new mutation, one might say, in the West right now.
There’s one thing that’s new, which is viewing your own inceldom through the lens that your narrator does. That is pretty new. The second thing you might be saying is that the way society is structured these days, with women being much more empowered or other factors, leads to a new manner in which people become incels. I think there are two separate things there.
You know, for example, there are different cultural instantiations of the same underlying phenomenon. But I think the way that in contemporary times people self-identify with this as a category of identity is a novel phenomenon. Would you date that to Elliot Rodger?
I’m not deeply knowledgeable about the historical lineage of how the term originated and mutated. My understanding, based on articles I’ve read, is that it originated with a woman. But, of course, Elliot Rodger’s manifesto and mass killing were certainly an inflection point in terms of the meme of the incel becoming supercharged and entering the zeitgeist. Rodger is quite a complex figure and one that provokes a lot of interesting discourse just because the manifesto he left behind was sufficiently detailed and biographical that it presents itself as a kind of psychological autopsy.
There’s so much going on there. A substacker named Michael Crumpison in New York, who’s been associated with Dime Square, has written a number of pieces where he took a literary analysis of that document—not to elevate it, but more as a piece of psychoanalysis. The sociological trends that are driving inceldom in modern society are a complicated academic question.
There are many things we could attribute it to, like economic development—economic trends where there’s more bifurcation between winners and losers in the economy. Material resources are more likely to accrue to a smaller fraction of men. For me, the book was less a commentary about the sociological driving forces and more a qualitative case study of a single individual who may not necessarily be representative of the broader group of incels as a whole.
It’s worth noting that incels aren’t necessarily— the media depiction of the modern incel is that of a young, angry white male who is at risk of political radicalization and terrorism. While that certainly describes a subset, if my understanding is correct, looking at the research—there’s a guy named William Costello who has done research in this area—it actually is a very heterogeneous group that cuts across different slices of society.
I think of it more as an end-state phenomenon driven by the convergence of numerous different factors. If you look at the population of young men who are functionally in this category on a graph, it looks like a hockey stick graph. If you were an investor, you’d invest in that number going up—not that that would be a good thing.
Let me just jump in and say a couple of things. For the listening audience, if you’re not familiar with Elliot Rodger—if you’re a guy of a certain age or very heavily online, you probably know who he is, but for many in my audience, who are older academics, they may not know what we’re talking about. Elliot Rodger was a student at UC Santa Barbara who went on a killing spree. He killed his roommates in Isla Vista, and then he killed some sorority girls. Later, they found his manifesto. He was deeply frustrated, basically an incel.
He happened to be mixed race, half Asian, half Caucasian, had self-loathing over that, real issues with women, etc. The story about Elliot Rodger and what he wrote in his manifesto—or I don’t know if it’s actually a manifesto or more of a diary—but in any case, it’s very fascinating if you’re interested in the subject. I recommend that people in the audience who want to learn about the modern incel phenomenon consider Elliot Rodger as an interesting starting point.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that your novel is pre the takeover of online dating apps, right? The main character is trying to meet women in a bar, which reflects a slightly earlier era. Some people claim that with the advent of dating apps, there’s a phenomenon where an average woman can be the booty call for a super attractive male. You have these males on the apps, and the apps allow them to scale their impact.
So, if you’re an attractive male, you can have booty calls with girls whenever you want. However, they’re not necessarily—say you’re a nine. The girl you’re having the booty call with isn’t necessarily a nine, but women who are fives and sevens don’t want to date male fives and sevens because they can occasionally be the booty call for a male nine. People attribute the rise of inceldom, in part, to the dominance of dating apps and this phenomenon I just described.
I’m wondering if you find that to be plausible at all. Well, there are many interesting threads to pull on regarding modeling these intergender dynamics. I think broadly speaking, in terms of online gender discourse, this model of the modern dating app being a perfectly efficient distribution mechanism for the top echelon of men to access any woman makes sense. Women tend to imprint on this top echelon of men as a standard bearer, which creates an increase over time in what might be considered an adequate mate.
Certainly, the story makes a lot of sense. However, I have seen that data contested online, but I can’t recall who did the contesting or how weak the empirical grounding was. My recollection is that the amount of “hook-ups” taking place through these apps was held to be overstated.
I do think there’s still some controversy about to what extent that’s happening and other mechanisms might actually be depressing dating and mating overall. Many people go on these apps, and it provides a kind of simulation of companionship—a simulation of going on dates—which leads to flaking on the dates or not going through with them at all. It whets an appetite without leading to any physical connection.
My understanding, when I look at writing or tweets from people like Marko Jukic at Palladium Mag, is that nobody really knows why fertility is being depressed so dramatically. It seems like the whole thing is an open empirical question where incels represent a subset of the issue of depressed fertility. I think you can arrive at highly intuitive explanations, but my sense is that the world is more complex than the answers we would initially assume.
Yeah, I agree with you that we don’t really know the reasons for either the fertility decline or the rise of inceldom among young men. I don’t think we fully understand what’s happening. This phenomenon of hypergamy amplified by dating apps—I had guest Rob Henderson, who might be younger than you, who lived through that era as an undergrad at Yale. He has at least anecdotal stories about friends who did shockingly well on the apps and other friends who couldn’t get a date on them.
At least anecdotally, I think that amplification of inequality in the dating market seems to be true. The best way to look at this would be to examine data from OKCupid or other sources to see what these male nines are up to versus the male fives. I always thought this marked a plausible, but not high confidence assumption about how it’s working out. But, anyway, I would love to have a day at OKCupid, looking at their data. Yeah, they pulled that famous blog post from 2013 where they published all the data around race and dating. They keep that close to the chest now, I’m sure. I think there were two impactful analyses; one was obviously very impactful in the meme space. The other one is that when men rate women for attractiveness, the peak attractiveness, even as the male gets older, is around age 22 or so.
But, whereas it doesn’t work that way with women. Women rate older men who are roughly their age as being either the most attractive or the ones they think they have to settle for. That was another bit of data analysis that was very damaging for feminists.
Okay, coming back to the book, the main character’s best friend is an Asian American. He’s Korean American, sort of hyper-masculine, a big, strong guy who participates in MMA and gets into fights and things like that. Now, I think you yourself are Asian American. I’m curious what you were thinking when you wrote it, as the main character is white but the best friend is Asian American.
There’s a certain amount of racism, a kind of HBD racism that would have been common for men, maybe still is common for highly online men of this type. What were your thoughts in terms of formulating that relationship?
Yeah, for me, that’s actually the most important relationship in the novel, I think, right? Because it’s a way of showing a couple of different things. The first thing that was of interest to me was depicting an Asian American male character in literary fiction who is not only sort of masculine but almost kind of, to an extent, one might argue, pathologically hyper-masculine. That simply isn’t the type of literary character that you really see represented in fiction.
One of the things that compels any writer to write a novel is to write characters and stories that just haven’t been done before. I’ve met people like this in real life. I’ve met large, muscular, domineering Asian American men who racked up extremely high partner counts and look like characters from Dragon Ball Z.
I’ve never seen that either on screen or in the domain of high culture that is literary fiction. Part of that is, of course, merely a representation problem where most Asian American writers who write in literary fiction—a kind of high culture version of the word cell universe—are wildly underrepresented, particularly if they’re Asian males. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a novel like this that has a character who fits into that box.
I’m actually racking my brain, as someone who’s read a lot of literary fiction, to think of a counterexample for you, but you’re right. It’s very rare. It’s funny because on Twitter, if I ever post a photo of me wearing my football uniform in college or something, people go nuts because they think, “Oh, this guy’s some pointy-headed Asian American guy,” but wow, there he is, you know, playing linebacker or something like this.
It’s very weird how people react to it because they’re just not used to it. The thing is that people like this and people like you exist in real life, right? So why shouldn’t they exist in a fictional story? Anytime you present a character who isn’t frequently depicted, you have the opportunity to do something interesting, to say something interesting, and to present something interesting.
What I didn’t want to do was the inverse of what typically happens. I didn’t just want to do the inverse of what typically happens because what typically happens, historically, has been that kind of 16 Candles style long duck dong presentation of the Asian male as sort of this clownish, asexual figure. That’s boring; it’s uninteresting. We know that’s a trope at this point.
But I also didn’t want to present a racial power fantasy. A writer creates a narrative universe in which they are a kind of God. The writer has the power of creation, and I think the easy subconscious impulse is to present a stronger, more beautiful, more powerful version of yourself that fulfills all of these fantastical and narcissistic self-conceptions that may exist in your mind.
Then it becomes this narrative for wish fulfillment. If the character is in any way racialized, whether white or non-white, it becomes almost a racial power fantasy. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to present a character who was more complicated.
His arc throughout the story begins with this sort of hyper-masculinity, but as time goes on, it becomes apparent that actually this character is quite disturbed. This hyper-masculinity is a sort of reactive response to both trauma and this extraordinarily deflating sense of scientific reductionism, even depersonalization. Toward the end of the book, he achieves a sort of neo-Buddhist style dissociation from human affairs altogether, simply by virtue of saying that everything is just the movement of particles.
So the contrast between this character and the main character, Anand, who is a white American male, allowed me to present a contrast. In the main character, Anand still holds on to hope for something transcendental, while somebody else has really just kind of gone beyond the horizon and dissociated almost completely.
It may not be apparent when you first pick up the book or look at the cover that really the story is about the search of the main character for something beyond this scientific view of human existence.
I think the best definition of inceldom is not a young man who can’t find sex. It’s a young man or a man of any age who can’t find romantic love, i.e., who struggles with meaning. The deepest and truest definition of an incel is a person who feels that their life is meaningless. They are a very modern permutation of a course, a much more ancient problem.
When you were writing the book, were you thinking specifically about novels like American Psycho or books by Houellebecq? Absolutely. They were both strong influences on me. There are some other more marginal or peripheral influences, but the pairing of them was my two primary literary reference points.
At the same time, I wanted to inject a lot of that quasi-autistic, hyper-analytical cognitive science analysis into moment-to-moment social interactions because the contrast of that felt very interesting and kind of funny. The core polarization of, yes, maybe I’m looking into the eyes of my lover and we’re experiencing this deep connection, but am I troubled by the idea that this is all just computation instantiated in neurons? Does that degrade the meaning of that experience?
While Bret Easton Ellis does have that very detail-rich maximist style, he doesn’t lean into a lot of these ideas around science and philosophy that I found fun to play with. Wilbeck, on the other hand, does talk overtly about materialism and the collapse of meaning in this age of liberalism.
One of his novels, The Elementary Particles, includes the title in French as Atomized. This idea of materialist reductionism is a persistent through line through many of his works. I recall, I think it’s from one of his novels, The Possibility of an Island.
There are these two characters who are discussing the idea of killing a beautiful young woman who has witnessed a crime that they need to cover up. One character notices that the other one hesitates to do so, and he says, “I know why you’re hesitating. It’s because she’s beautiful.”
Then he continues, “But all you need to understand is that she’s nothing more than a temporary arrangement of particles, you know, that pleases the eye.” Wilbeck famously predicted the phenomenon of the modern incel decades ago in his original novel, whatever, which is about a middle-aged disaffected computer programmer who is friends with a young incel.
It’s an absolutely wrenching novel about both characters and this modern ailment that afflicts these depressed Frenchmen. His whole body of work is very good. I want to come back to Wilbeck when we talk about the state of literary fiction today.
But I do have to relay this anecdote to you, which you might find amusing: I’m old enough that when American Psycho first came out, I was hanging out with derivatives traders in New York. A lot of my former physics colleagues had become derivatives traders and lived in Manhattan when the book came out. My friends found it really amusing, and the main character’s obsession with designer labels and the quality of business cards made it incredibly fascinating for them.
But ultimately, it’s kind of just a single note gag. For you, it’s deeper because the equivalent obsession with these markers of elitism becomes, for you, this quasi-scientific way of viewing humans as computational machines or DNA engines. It’s a deeper mechanism to inject into the book, I think.
It’s both a running joke and an expression of existential horror. That sort of tension between those two things carries throughout the book from beginning to end. Being able to release that hyper-analytical lens and accept the direct, veridical experience of meaning is ultimately what moves this character toward the end of the novel.
I think everything about our modern world pushes us away from being deeply present in a way that would build and cultivate meaning. What’s insidious about scientism or reductionism is that it presents itself as a scientific argument when really it’s actually a philosophical argument.
Whether or not the brain is doing a form of computation, most people would agree doesn’t have a simple linear relationship to meaning. Examining that from different angles takes up the bulk of the novel from chapter to chapter.
As a literary gimmick, it’s much deeper than the one that Ellis used in American Psycho. As someone who is mostly a materialist and accepts that we live in a universe governed by natural laws and mathematical equations, I’ve always believed that meaning is, as you said, philosophical.
Your brain can decide what meaning it wants to give or extract from life’s events, regardless of whether it’s all being instantiated on a background of atoms and photons. I agree with you; that’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
You sort of gave the spoiler away, which is that initially, you pick up the book thinking it’s going to be some amusing tragic comedy about this incel guy and the weird way that he looks at the world. But in fact, you’re addressing one of the deep philosophical problems of our time: if you accept science, how do you extract meaning?
One question that I have for you, Steve, if I hope you don’t mind, is, what’s your take on the hard problem of consciousness? I’m always curious about this because it’s not often that I chat with a physicist.
Well, there are many parts of information processing in our brains that we’re not consciously aware of. Our consciousness is this thin, foamy layer at the top of all the computation going on in our brains. Quite often, things are happening that the conscious layer isn’t aware of and only becomes aware of after a decision is made.
The conscious layer perceives it as an active decision it made, when in fact it might have been determined by lower-level processes. You might ask, “Why do we need this conscious layer?” It may have evolutionary advantages for the brain to perceive itself as an autonomous organism that makes decisions with consequences.
There isn’t a simple answer. I think consciousness is some kind of emergent property of all the computations going on in our brains. One of the big concerns is, could we build an AGI that isn’t conscious, one that doesn’t have the perception of perceiving itself thinking? These are deep questions. Whether we’ll have clean answers is very unclear.
Thank you. I was curious about it because I know you have an opinion on every important question of our time. One way your characters actually have a conversation about free will and determinism, and I think at one point, many worlds quantum mechanics, which I like.
In terms of free will and consciousness, it’s possible that we only have the illusion of free will and consciousness. Nevertheless, those are very powerful things in the phenomenology of our lives.
Oh, certainly. Without free will, it’s hard to maintain moral responsibility. That’s one of the topics that ricochets around the narrative. My own thinking about this, which is very personal, is that I might accept that I’m an almost deterministic machine responding to inputs.
That sense of morality or purpose or meaning is emergent from aspects of me that I don’t control. They’re almost aesthetic choices of what represents a better world or a worse world. I don’t think nihilism is a necessary consequence of realizing you’re a machine.
I would agree with that. You can have a deterministic account of people being agentic and non-agentic comparably. So I’m totally aligned with that view.
Good. The last thing before we turn to literature as a broad subject is to stick with philosophy for one second. Did you say you had not read Nick Land when you wrote the book?
Funny enough, it’s 99% true. I wrote the vast majority of this book before I read any Land. The one thing I read was a very famous essay called “Hellbait,” which appeared on his blog. It’s a potent rhetorical account of what we might characterize as Darwinian nihilism.
He refers to human beings as genetic survival monsters born out of an infinite cauldron of suffering. What I respected about that essay is that it takes the problem of suffering seriously and places it within the philosophical context of evolution.
It is very easy to be disturbed by the quantity of suffering produced by biological evolution. How many conscious animals have been torn apart or died hungry and alone? My fixation in the novel on this question of Darwinian nihilism was a case of convergent evolution, as I did not read Land with any depth until I finished the manuscript.
I’m not deeply familiar with Land even now. I have a number of his books that I intend to read, though I understand that a lot of his work is rather esoteric.
Unfortunately, I’m not a level 10 word cell Steve, so I couldn’t understand Baudrillard. But Land is mostly legible to me. I think a lot of society and scientists didn’t come to terms with the apparent built-in nihilism of a Darwinian account of human origins and behavior.
Land confronts it head-on, saying, “Look, just look into the void. This is where we came from. We came from eons of pain and suffering.” There’s something quasi-theological about that, which I think is very powerful and profound. If you just say your paper is very impressionistic, it means you haven’t clearly defined things and it’s sharp and crisp.
But I like land, and this conversation just brought to mind something, which is that land and I interacted a fair bit over the internet about 10 to 15 years ago. And I always meant to look him up when I was in Shanghai because I think he lives in Shanghai now. I was just in Shanghai and I didn’t look him up. So anyway, I just suddenly realized that I feel bad about it.
But yes, your book evoked certain aspects of land’s thought to me. That’s wow. What a small world. I mean, who do you not know? At a certain level of interesting people, it’s kind of a small world.
He followed me when his handle was ‘systems,’ and he would often quote tweet stuff that I tweeted. I think that’s how we got to know each other.
Well, sorry, just to interrupt you and go on a bit of a tangent. You know, in, I don’t know if you’ve read his famous essay “Meltdown” from the early to mid-nineties, but there’s this famous line in there where he says, “Neo-China arrives from the future.” He was sort of predicting the rise of China.
I find that very interesting because my memories of the nineties, although I was quite young at the time as a millennial, it’s inconceivable to me that it never even occurred to me that China could achieve technological parity with the West until maybe a couple of years ago. Frankly, I didn’t.
So it was quite an interesting prediction for some random obscure British philosopher. That might be the point of convergence many years ago that we both saw this coming or the possibility of it coming well in advance of other people.
I don’t think we converged on issues like nihilism or the horrible suffering caused by Darwinian evolution. I usually don’t comment on that stuff, but for your interest, I’d point out that the white racialists who wrote in the early 20th century were most worried about the rise of East Asia.
At that time, they were mainly talking about Japan. They thought Japan would become the dominant power in the East and that they would raise China to an advanced level. Together, that civilization would threaten the white world. There are explicit writings about this from the 1920s by Madison Grant and other people like Lothrop Stoddard.
They were very clear-eyed about this, and a lot of the anti-immigration sentiment, keeping Chinese out of America, was because these people thought they would be outcompeted by the Chinese. In fact, they were being outcompeted by the Chinese in California, with people building railroads or running small stores, restaurants, or laundries.
They realized these guys were formidable economic competitors and didn’t want them. So it’s interesting because by the time the 1990s rolled around, you wouldn’t necessarily think this was possible. But people almost a hundred years before that thought it was definitely a possibility.
That’s fascinating. I wasn’t aware of that particular history, although I was broadly aware of things like the original yellow peril. Part of yellow peril was that these people are horrible and their civilization is very different from ours, but part of it was that they were actually going to outcompete us.
In fact, if you go even further back, around the time of George Washington, all the silver in the world was accumulating in China because China could make porcelain and would sell tea to the West. The West didn’t have much to offer.
A very lucrative trade for ship captains around that time in the United States was to bring furs to China in exchange for silver and porcelain and other goods. You can read writings of sea captains from the time of George Washington, the American Revolution, who would write that China was much more advanced than European civilizations.
All of this has been suppressed; you wouldn’t know this unless you really looked at the source material. There wasn’t very recently a time when Europeans thought the Chinese were more advanced than them.
Oh, that’s incredibly fascinating. I didn’t know that it had occurred with that level of recency. I thought the previous point of parity was centuries removed or multiple centuries removed rather than maybe two or three.
Actually, it’s only been since the late 1700s or early, I would say early to mid-1800s that the divergence really happened between the East and West. Prior to that, Europeans thought the Chinese were more advanced. Another guy who wrote about this a lot is Leibniz.
Leibniz was a mathematician and philosopher, a big polymath. He was a huge advocate of Chinese civilization, even though he never traveled to China. What he knew about it, he liked, and he was a big advocate for it.
Oh, it’s incredibly interesting. I had no idea Leibniz had any opinions on China at all. If you just type in “Leibniz China” into Google, you’ll find tons and tons of material on this.
So back to the state of literary fiction. I’ve heard you talk about this. I agree with your diagnosis. Just to summarize for the audience, the gatekeepers for who can publish a “serious” novel these days tend to be super woke, super feminized, and very uninterested, if not outright hostile, to novels about a kind of very masculine male experience.
Consequently, there’s a whole set of fiction that would have found its way into prestige publishers in the days of Hemingway or even much more recently but now just can’t be published. I think you’ve spoken eloquently about this.
I think it’s a really interesting sort of empirical question to theorize about because the change has been so stark. Up to a certain historical point, you can almost identify each literary era by various prominent white male novelists.
Then, it’s hard to be precise about this, but roughly 20 or so years ago, with the possible exception of Welbeck and Cormac McCarthy—who I guess now has been canceled after his death—they all sort of seemed to disappear, to recede.
It seems that the androgenic male writer, the male writer interested in examining male interiority and presenting a sort of unvarnished examination of that, just gets shut out of the literary ecosystem. There are multiple different analytical lenses that can account for why this shift has been so dramatic.
It certainly wasn’t historically always the case that bookstores in general were female-coded in the broad sense. I have a couple of different theories about why this has happened. The easy diagnosis is that there was a demographic replacement in the upper echelons of these elite literary publishing houses, where affluent white female liberals ascended the ranks.
There was this tipping point where they became more of a majority demographic. Naturally, when you have any gatekeeping function filled by a more culturally or class-homogenous grouping, that naturally narrows the aperture, the type of filter.
The term I use rather than feminization is “psycho-demographic class capture.” I don’t think it’s merely a question of feminization; it’s the result of a confluence of multiple intersecting factors. It’s not just that the gender balance in these institutions went beyond a certain tipping point. There is a broader kind of class element to it, defined by a sort of PMC-style tight consensus on secular progressive morality.
Certainly, it’s possible to call this wokeism, but because of how dynamic that term is, I kind of use my language to describe it. The way I would describe this is that one notion of creativity is about positive expression.
So one notion of creativity is that I have a character or story I want to tell, and I’m interested in sharing that with the world, placing that in the minds of a group of recipients. Another version of this process is a more defensively oriented process. My theory is that we go through cycles of comparative libertinism in the creative fields and comparative strictness.
Whether a field is comparatively free or comparatively strict takes on whatever the contemporary prevailing system of morality and culture dictates it to be. We just happen to be in an era where leading-edge secular progressive morality is ascendant and has effectively captured this class of PMCs who are the gatekeepers.
They’ve greatly narrowed that aperture in terms of what can be published because any sort of brutal or unvarnished description of male interiority can’t get through these gatekeepers. The experience of the modern male novelist today is that his manuscript, his story, is almost like a political campaign where he feels compelled, due to institutional incentives, to minimize the attack surface of the story, to minimize the attack surface of the novel.
Eric Howell, a prominent blogger on Substack, writes about this idea of minimizing attack surface. The dynamics of living in a kind of purity culture mean that people are searching for transgressions. The concept of microaggression is interesting because it contains a sort of logic; it contains a search function. It’s like, “Oh yes, I need to locate and destroy the aggression, even if it’s microscopically sized.”
Funny enough, I say that as a person who believes in the concept of microaggression as valid. To summarize my points, I would say a couple of things. First, the zeitgeist and culture oscillate between periods of libertine and strict attitudes. Second, we’re currently in a sort of secularized purity culture in literary institutions, where manuscripts must pass through sensitivity readers who actively search for impurities or moral infractions.
Third, the end result of this tight system of restrictions is to collapse the literary artist into a sort of tight and narrow box, a ‘purity coffin,’ where they feel compelled to analyze their own story for moral flaws that need to be excised as if they were impurities. This imposes too much fear upon the working artist, constraining them from being their best selves and producing the best possible work.
Sorry for my extended rant, but it’s such a rich topic with many interesting layers within the broader cultural context we’re all living in.
Now, from a market perspective, these publishing houses are ostensibly businesses, although, as we all know, for ideological reasons, often the gatekeepers will damage their own businesses. Why aren’t there emerging other presses that sell to the demographic that wants to read these androgenic novels addressing male interiority?
Are we seeing presses like that start to appear, or are artists like yourself able to sell directly on Amazon to that readership? How will this equilibrate? I think broadly speaking, we will see this equilibrium restore itself, but there are additional considerations to take into account.
So, to answer your question, yes, there are alternative presses popping up. For example, Skyhorse Publishing has an imprint called Arcade. They’re publishing writers like Matthew Gazda and Noah Kuhlman. There are notable examples like the minimalist autofiction writer Delicious Tacos, who has achieved a not insignificant level of success just selling books directly on Amazon.
I’m also aware of guys like Dan Baltic and Matthew Pegas of the New Right podcast who are starting a press called New Ritual. These things are happening, but notably, the absolute figures are still, in comparison, quite small.
It could just be that in the previous 20-year period where it became very difficult for androgenic fiction to be published, that market has shrunk because men are now conditioned to video games and pornography as their primary sources of entertainment.
Lastly, the latest data shows that Generation Z is somewhat sub-literate on average and really only can engage with short-form or long-form video. They’re watching video essays rather than reading. It wouldn’t surprise me if literary fiction becomes a sort of conservatory art form in the age of dopaminergic hyperstimuli, especially as entertainment becomes AI-optimized and increasingly delivered through AR and VR experiences that approach photorealism.
I think we word cells have to accept that. I love literary fiction. I think it’s a beautiful art form. I sometimes wish I could live in absolute poverty and just write novels all the time. But I think we just have to accept that this is probably going to become something like a conservatory art form consumed by a cognitive elite able to get through long-form text.
Maybe that’s okay. In 15 or 20 years, the machine god will give you a pat on the back and say, “Hey, this is a really good book, man. By human standards, this is excellent work.”
Let me close with something related to that. You mentioned AI. You are a pseudonymous author. No one knows whether you used any AI in writing your novel, but nobody knows for sure how your novel was written. Why couldn’t I, as a publisher, train AIs with very specific personality and literary tastes to write novels under a pseudonym or a real-sounding name?
For the subset of readers that particularly like the fiction generated by that AI, why couldn’t I establish that AI as a highly esteemed writer with a broad following? It doesn’t seem implausible to me.
The only barriers to that would be technical barriers; marketing is a solved problem. There’s some ability for publishers to construct these literary personas. But to answer the real meat of the question, which is can you train a model to write high-quality literary fiction? I would assume it’s possible.
Someone, it might’ve been Sarah Constantine, trained a model on her prose to mimic her style, and it was actually very good. If you use an off-the-shelf model like Claude or GPT-4 and say, “Hey, write me a description of this room in the style of David Foster Wallace,” the output is very obviously not in that style; it feels average.
But nobody has cared enough to tune these models toward literary prose yet. On a technical level, it’s possible. It’s just that nobody’s tried to do it yet, but it would be possible to have a model that produces prose in a consistent style with a consistent viewpoint. That AI could be known as a “writer of renown.”
So I think that’s technically possible. It’s just that in the list of things to AI-ify, this is kind of far down the priority list. My friend Ayla told me that most big OnlyFans presences have been using AI to farm simps. If they can farm simps using AI, I think they can eventually write good literary novels.
I agree. Probably my next novel will incorporate a reaction to that because I do think we are in for not just mass technological unemployment but also an enormous crisis of human meaning, particularly for artists. I think we’ve only just begun to see that.
If writing is distilled thinking and thinking is computation, a writer’s meaning in life comes from computation. When we arrive at the inflection point where machine prose can meet or exceed human skill at the upper echelon of literary writing, I think it will be a true crisis for the word cell.
In the same way that the loom was a crisis for those who did it by hand, I think the role of the AI here is, in one sense, just making very obvious the problems which the narrator of your novel already understood through abstraction.
Through abstraction, he realized, “If I’m in a machine built out of atoms, how could I possibly have any meaning?” The fact that I can build a thing out of silicon that writes as well or better than you, or writes as entertainingly as a great human writer, will just make the whole thing viscerally real for many more people.
I’d be lying if I didn’t think that was a tragedy. Of course, at the same time, I’m sure this technology will produce all kinds of incredible breakthroughs. I think it’s going to be very weird.
I have a personal goal: I want to get my next novel out before these LLMs are tuned to high-quality prose so I can say, “I got it in before the gate closed.” We’ll see if I can write fast enough.
In the past, it’s been very hard for Chinese or Japanese scientists to write really good English in their scientific papers. They would have to be heavily copy-edited. If a collaborator who was a native speaker worked on it, that person would spend a lot of time editing the paper to ensure it read well.
However, what’s happened in the last year or two is that the models have gotten so good that I now routinely read papers with all authors from universities in Shanghai. I was reading one an hour before this podcast; all the authors were Chinese scientists.
It’s written extremely well. I know exactly what they did: they wrote it in Chinese and then passed it through an LLM, so it reads well in English as if written by a native speaker. Just that change has occurred in a couple of years.
To take that and run with it a little, one of the most fascinating things about your podcast is your contrarian predictions about PRC techno-capital acceleration based on your calculation about their human capital pool.
That model has proven much more empirically correct than a lot of mainstream commentators’ opinions. It will be interesting to see the evolution in Asian American identity if and when the PRC reaches parity and perhaps even exceeds our rate of development.
I enjoy following the conversation between that TR Taxis fellow and you on Twitter; it’s fascinating. Although I’m not a technical guy, I find it interesting and entertaining. We are living in history, and it’s incredible.
It’s a special time with the rise of AI and the rise of East Asian civilization, maybe back to its place historically as one of the leading centers of knowledge and innovation. Thank you for joining me on this podcast. My guest has been ARX Han. His novel is called “Incel.” Please buy it.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
This is an experimental rewrite
The best definition of inceldom isn’t simply about a young man who can’t find sex. It refers to a man of any age who fails to find romantic love and grapples with feelings of meaninglessness. At its core, the true essence of an incel is someone who perceives their life as devoid of purpose. This modern phenomenon reflects an ancient struggle that has transcended generations.
STEVE: Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is ARX Han, an anonymous author and expert on human relations, contemporary literature, and evolutionary psychology. Han, welcome to the podcast.
HAN: Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m a big fan of your work and a regular listener, so I’m grateful for the opportunity.
STEVE: My pleasure. Let me explain why I invited you. I first came across your work on the internet and, at that time, glanced at your novel titled Incel. While we’ll spend a portion of our interview discussing the novel, I also want to explore some broader topics. After listening to several of your interviews over the years, I was impressed by your insightful perspectives on literary works, the state of modern society, and the experiences of young men today. I thought my audience would appreciate this conversation.
HAN: Perfect. I’m eager to dive into those topics.
STEVE: Fantastic. Let’s start by introducing your novel. To give you a sense of my interpretation, I was talking to my son earlier today about interviewing a novelist, and he asked, “What did he write?” I described it as a sort of 2010s update of American Psycho, where the main character is not a psychopathic killer but rather a man struggling to connect with women. He sees the world in a mechanistic, almost autistic way, heavily influenced by evolutionary biology and psychology.
HAN: That’s an interesting comparison. I think you’ve characterized the novel quite well. Brett Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, was indeed one of my primary literary influences. His writing embodies a kind of literary maximalism that leans into male-coded autism and relies heavily on descriptive detail.
STEVE: How would you succinctly describe your novel?
HAN: If I were to sum it up in a single sentence, I would label it a biomaterialist tragicomedy about a young American incel navigating the 2010s. The term “biomaterialist” refers to an intense focus on scientific reductionism applied to intimate human experiences such as love and relationships. The “tragic comedy” aspect reflects the oscillation between absurdity and deeply painful, existential experiences.
STEVE: I found the novel well-written, though I suspect it’s challenging for some readers. The narrator, who is a graduate student in evolutionary psychology, explains his life events—from the most intimate to the simplest—in terms of evolutionary psychology concepts or specific scientific papers.
HAN: Yes, I appreciate that observation. I enjoyed writing the novel and it has an experimental undertone. I aimed to apply concepts from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to everyday experiences, inserting those abstractions into a character’s daily life. He’s hyper-fixated on these ideas, which shapes his understanding of social reality.
STEVE: You’ve mentioned having guests like Diana Fleischman and Jeffrey Miller on your podcast. You’re familiar with the academic side of evolutionary psychology, yet your character seems to take that research into a distinctly online realm, often using it to interpret his experiences.
HAN: Exactly. The novel creates a contrast between the immediate experience of life, which feels nothing like calculation, and the computer science- or psychology-based abstractions about how the brain functions. I reference Miller and Fleischman and draw inspiration from their work, but my character’s approach takes it further, interpreting life through a highly online lens.
STEVE: It’s fascinating that this novel discusses how modern lives are informed by scientific reductionism.
HAN: Right, and my goal is to illustrate how this framework can dissolve meaningful experiences in life. For instance, if one subscribes to the idea that only physical forces can cause events in the world, it leads to a form of nihilism where feelings of free will and personal choices seem illusory.
STEVE: This idea is closely tied to the young modern incel experience.
HAN: Yes, the contemporary interpretation of inceldom differs fundamentally from the concept’s historical roots. While young men have always struggled to find partners, today’s challenges are amplified by factors like the internet and developments in evolutionary psychology.
STEVE: Interestingly, there are likely many incels who simply struggle with attraction without necessarily having a scientific framework for understanding their situation.
HAN: That’s true. It’s essential to focus on the part of this phenomenon that’s historically novel. There have always been men unable to find partners, but the current mix of factors that amplify this struggle adds complexity to our understanding of inceldom.
STEVE: Two aspects stand out to me: the lens your narrator uses and the influence of societal changes that shape contemporary inceldom. Would you trace this back to figures like Elliot Rodger?
HAN: I’m not deeply versed in the historical evolution of the term, but I know it originated with a woman. However, Elliot Rodger’s actions and manifesto significantly affected how inceldom entered the public consciousness. His manifesto serves as a detailed psychological exploration of an individual that sparks ongoing discourse.
STEVE: For those unfamiliar, Rodger was a mixed-race student who committed a tragic act of violence fueled by his frustrations with women. His story is captivating for anyone looking to understand the modern incel phenomenon.
HAN: Exactly. It’s crucial to recognize that the media often portrays incels as stereotypical angry young men at risk of radicalization. While that describes a subset, research shows that incels are a diverse group crossing various societal boundaries.
STEVE: Your novel predates the rise of dating apps, correct? The main character seeks women in traditional settings like bars, which feels reflective of an earlier era.
HAN: You’re right. The dynamics of dating have shifted dramatically with apps, allowing attractive men to easily find partners, which creates disparities in dating experiences. This situation may contribute to rising feelings of inceldom among young men.
STEVE: Do you find this explanation plausible?
HAN: Yes, it’s a compelling perspective. While some argue dating apps efficiently connect the top echelon of men with women, I think it’s important to consider alternative explanations regarding the overall impact on dating and mating trends.
STEVE: It seems we still lack a complete understanding of these phenomena, particularly when it comes to factors influencing fertility decline and the rise of incels.
HAN: That’s true. While anecdotal evidence suggests a noticeable amplification of inequality in the dating market, detailed data analysis would provide deeper insight.
STEVE: Returning to the book, your main character’s best friend is an Asian American who presents a hyper-masculine image. Considering your own background, what led to the formation of that relationship in the story?
HAN: That friendship is central to the novel. It highlights the representation of an Asian American male character who embodies not only masculinity but a kind of pathologically hyper-masculine persona, challenging stereotypes common in literary fiction. HAN: One of the driving forces for any writer when creating a novel is the desire to craft characters and stories that haven’t been depicted before. In my experience, I’ve encountered large, muscular, domineering Asian American men who have had extremely high partner counts, resembling characters from Dragon Ball Z.
However, I haven’t seen such representations on screen or within the literary fiction domain. This is largely due to the representation issue, where most Asian American writers in literary fiction—a more sophisticated version of the word “cell” universe—are grossly underrepresented, particularly those who are Asian males. I genuinely can’t recall ever coming across a novel containing a character who fits that description.
STEVE: As someone who’s read a lot of literary fiction, it’s strikingly rare, isn’t it?
HAN: Exactly. It’s amusing because whenever I post a photo of myself in my college football uniform on Twitter, people often react with disbelief. They think, “Oh, he’s just another pointy-headed Asian American guy,” but then they see me in a linebacker pose, and it’s a completely different narrative for them.
STEVE: It’s interesting how jarring that is for people, likely because they’re just not used to seeing it.
HAN: Right, individuals like this—like you—do exist in reality. Why shouldn’t they exist in a fictional story? Every time you introduce a character who isn’t frequently depicted, it provides a unique opportunity to create something original and intriguing.
What I wanted to avoid was simply flipping the script on typical portrayals. Historically, the default has been the 16 Candles style depiction of the Asian male as a clownish, asexual figure. That’s stale and uninteresting; at this point, it’s become a cliché.
STEVE: So you aimed for something more complex then?
HAN: Yes, I wanted to steer clear of creating a racial power fantasy. As a writer, you essentially create a narrative universe in which you play a God-like role. There’s a tendency to craft a stronger, more attractive, more powerful version of oneself, fulfilling all types of fantastical and even narcissistic self-conceptions. That kind of narrative can morph into a racial power fantasy, regardless of whether the character is white or a person of color. My goal was to present a more intricate character instead.
His journey starts with this hyper-masculinity, but as you delve into the story, it becomes clear that he’s quite disturbed. This hyper-masculinity is a reaction to trauma and an intensely deflating sense of scientific reductionism, straddling a line of depersonalization. By the end of the story, he reaches a kind of neo-Buddhist detachment from human affairs, merely viewing everything as a movement of particles.
STEVE: So there’s a stark contrast between him and the main character, Anand, who represents a white American male?
HAN: Yes, exactly. Anand still clings to hope for something transcendental, while the other character has completely dissociated, effectively moving beyond the horizon of human connection. It may not be apparent at first glance, but the story centers on Anand’s search for something beyond this scientific interpretation of human existence.
STEVE: That’s a fascinating point about inceldom. You define it not merely as a young man who struggles to find sex, but rather as someone grappling with the deeper issues of meaning and isolation.
HAN: Absolutely. The true essence of an incel is someone, regardless of age, who wrestles with the lack of romantic love and ultimately feels that their life lacks purpose. It’s a modern manifestation of a much older, more profound problem.
STEVE: When you were writing the book, were you influenced by novels like American Psycho or works by Michel Houellebecq?
HAN: Without a doubt, those were significant influences. Among other writings, they represent my two main literary reference points. However, I aimed to infuse the narrative with a quasi-autistic, hyper-analytical cognitive science perspective into everyday social interactions, which adds a layer of depth and humor.
STEVE: So you aimed to juxtapose the overwhelming experience of emotional connection against a backdrop of rational, scientific thought that may diminish that experience?
HAN: Exactly. This tension between emotional richness and analytical reductionism was intriguing for me. While Bret Easton Ellis captures that detailed writing style, he doesn’t venture far into discussions surrounding science and philosophy, which I found compelling to explore. On the other hand, Houellebecq openly critiques materialism and the existential void we experience in modern liberalism.
STEVE: What strikes me is how the theme of materialist reductionism is woven throughout your narrative, similar to Houellebecq’s work.
HAN: Indeed, and that theme is crucial. It delves into how this viewpoint can overshadow meaningful experiences in life, leading to nihilism and a feeling of insignificance when one believes that only physical forces govern life events. HAN: People recognized these individuals as serious economic competitors and wanted to exclude them. It’s intriguing to note that by the time the 1990s came around, this sentiment seemed almost unthinkable, yet those living nearly a hundred years prior certainly felt it was a possibility.
STEVE: That’s fascinating. I wasn’t aware of that specific history, although I had some general knowledge about the concept of the yellow peril. It seems part of that sentiment was the belief that these people had a civilization vastly different from ours and posed a real competitive threat.
HAN: If you dig deeper into history, even during George Washington’s era, the majority of the world’s silver was flowing into China. This was because China was producing porcelain and trading tea with the West, which had little to offer in return.
STEVE: That trade must have been incredibly lucrative for American ship captains at the time. They were bringing furs to China in exchange for silver, porcelain, and other goods.
HAN: Exactly, you can find writings from sea captains from George Washington’s time, during the American Revolution, expressing the viewpoint that China was far more advanced than European civilizations at that point.
STEVE: It’s remarkable how much of this history has been overlooked. It seems like many people wouldn’t know this unless they actively sought out the original source materials.
HAN: Right, there was a time not too long ago when Europeans genuinely believed in the superiority of Chinese civilization.
STEVE: That’s incredibly surprising. I assumed the last point of parity was separated from us by centuries, not just a couple of hundred years.
HAN: In reality, the divergence between East and West really began in the late 1700s to early to mid-1800s. Before that, Europeans considered the Chinese to be more advanced. A notable figure, Leibniz, had much to say about this.
STEVE: Leibniz, the mathematician and philosopher? I didn’t know he held such views on China.
HAN: Yes! Despite never visiting, he was a strong supporter of Chinese civilization, appreciating what little he learned about it.
STEVE: That’s incredibly interesting. I had no idea Leibniz had any opinions on China at all. I’ll definitely look that up.
HAN: You can find a wealth of material by just searching “Leibniz China.”
STEVE: Shifting gears to literary fiction, I’ve heard you talk about the state of publishing today, and I agree with your assessment. The gatekeepers for “serious” novels seem to be overwhelmingly woke, feminized, and often uninterested—if not outright hostile—toward stories depicting a masculine male experience.
HAN: Yes, that’s exactly right. As a result, there’s a whole genre of fiction that would have had a place in the prestige publishers’ portfolios in the days of Hemingway but now struggles to find a home.
STEVE: The change is striking. Historically, we could easily identify literary eras by prominent white male novelists, yet it seems they have not only receded but nearly vanished from current discourse over the past couple of decades.
HAN: That’s precisely what I’ve noticed. It feels like the male writer interested in exploring male interiority and offering an honest portrayal has been largely sidelined.
STEVE: There are various factors to consider regarding this dramatic shift.
HAN: For sure. Historically, bookstores were not always coded as female in the broader sense. I have a couple of theories. The primary one is that there’s been demographic replacement within elite literary publishing houses, where affluent, liberal women rose to power and became the majority.
STEVE: That represents a tipping point, doesn’t it?
HAN: Absolutely. When any gatekeeping role is filled by a culturally homogenous group, it naturally limits the diversity of what gets published.
STEVE: So instead of just feminization, you believe it’s a broader phenomenon?
HAN: Yes, I call it “psycho-demographic class capture.” It’s a confluence of factors, with the shift in gender dynamics being only part of the picture.
STEVE: That’s an interesting perspective.
HAN: Right, and I think it’s crucial to view it through the lens of contemporary morals and culture. We’re in an era where secular progressive values dominate, capturing the gatekeepers in literature.
STEVE: That dynamic must significantly narrow what can even be attempted in fiction.
HAN: Exactly! Today, a modern male novelist often feels like he’s running a political campaign with his manuscript. Institutional pressures compel him to minimize any potential backlash that might arise from his story.
STEVE: Eric Howell, the blogger on Substack, often discusses this idea of “minimizing attack surface.”
HAN: Yes, with the dynamics of living in a purity culture, there’s this constant search for transgressions. The concept of microaggressions exemplifies this—it’s all about locating and eliminating even the smallest infractions.
STEVE: It’s a paradox since you’re acknowledging the validity of microaggressions but also highlighting the culture surrounding them.
HAN: Precisely. To summarize a few key points:
- The cultural zeitgeist swings between libertine and strict attitudes.
- Currently, we exist in a secularized purity culture within literary institutions, where manuscripts must be vetted by sensitivity readers looking for moral flaws.
- The end result of these tight restrictions is a profound limitation imposed on literary artists, forcing them into narrow confines where they have to self-censor.
STEVE: That’s a harsh reality for many writers out there.
HAN: It is, and I apologize for the lengthy rant. But it’s such a rich topic with many layers within our broader cultural context.
STEVE: Shifting focus again, these publishing houses are businesses. Why aren’t there emerging presses catering to those who want to read these androgenic novels about male interiority?
HAN: Good question! Yes, alternative presses like Skyhorse Publishing with its Arcade imprint are emerging, focusing on writers like Matthew Gazda and Noah Kuhlman. Plus, we have examples like Delicious Tacos, a minimalist autofiction writer who’s found success selling directly on Amazon.
STEVE: That’s encouraging to hear. But it still seems like these figures remain comparatively small.
HAN: Right. The past two decades have made it increasingly challenging for androgenic fiction to be published, and that market could have shrunk. Men may now prefer other forms of entertainment, like video games and pornography.
STEVE: Interesting thought!
HAN: Also, current data suggests that Generation Z is somewhat sub-literate on average and often engages more with video content rather than reading. It wouldn’t surprise me if literary fiction becomes a niche, conservatory art form amidst the rise of AI-optimized entertainment delivered via AR and VR.
STEVE: It’s a transitional time for literature.
HAN: Exactly. I adore literary fiction and the beauty of the form. Sometimes I wish I could solely focus on writing novels without any external concerns. However, we may have to accept that literary fiction could become a rarefied form enjoyed by a cognitive elite who can still engage with long-form texts.
STEVE: It’s an intriguing perspective to consider, especially with the evolution of technology.
HAN: For sure! Imagine in 15 or 20 years, an AI might acknowledge a writer’s worth by saying, “This book is excellent by human standards.”
STEVE: That leads to an interesting question regarding authorship and creativity. You’re a pseudonymous author, and nobody knows the extent of AI involvement in your writing. Could publishers create AIs designed with specific literary tastes to generate work under a recognizable name?
HAN: It’s certainly possible! With the right technical framework and marketing, a well-trained AI could generate literature that resonates with readers, assuming these systems can be developed to that level.
STEVE: I know some have trained models to mimic their writing styles with impressive results.
HAN: Exactly! Yet, despite the potential, very few have invested in tuning models for high-quality literary prose. While technically feasible, it’s still uncharted territory for many.
STEVE: It’s an unexamined area for now.
HAN: Indeed, but if we can teach AIs to produce consistent, quality prose, we might see the emergence of AIs recognized as capable writers.
STEVE: That certainly raises more questions than it answers.
HAN: Yes, and to add to that, writing has often been a challenge for non-native English speakers. In recent years, I’ve noticed that even papers authored solely by Chinese scientists are being produced in excellent English, likely thanks to LLMs.
STEVE: That’s an encouraging development.
HAN: It is! This evolution could have significant implications for academia and beyond.
STEVE: I’m interested in your thoughts on the relationship between technological advancements and national development, especially regarding the PRC.
HAN: Absolutely. The trajectory of East Asia, especially with its advancements in technology, could reshape Asian American identity once the PRC reaches or exceeds parity with the West.
STEVE: It’s a thought-provoking observation.
HAN: We are indeed living through a historical moment with the rise of AI alongside the resurgence of East Asian civilization as a vital center for knowledge and innovation. Thank you for having me on the podcast. My novel is titled “Incel,” and I hope people consider buying it. HAN: Thank you very much. Thank you.