Welcome to Beautiful Losers Episode 6! 

We decided to take a break from our usual format and offer a more extemporaneous episode. With only a handful of notes and a couple random articles, your beautiful losers examined their intellectual scars from graduate school, considered how “genius” is a word that should be returned (especially as it relates to Elon Musk), and mused about some of the empty rhetoric of comfort provided by both corporations and politicians.

One theme that cuts through most of this episode is the cost of an intellectual life. Your beautiful losers share a certain melancholic spirit. In the medieval period, melancholy was the disposition of the intellectual, so it’s fitting that our own self-assessment can lead us down this path. For us, melancholy describes a state where one is burdened with two knowledges. First, the knowledge of the workings of the world and its shortcomings. Second, the knowledge that our first knowledge is inadequate to provide any substantive change. 

The first half of our conversation is an honest examination of some of the difficulties of graduate school training set against some of the glaring blindspots that are present within the modern university. We have trained ourselves to be among the very best critical thinkers and writers that this society and its institutions can produce, but was the cost of such training worth it? We find ourselves at a paradox: our intellectual prowess was hard-earned and difficult, but what does it matter if it can’t be better integrated into a more expansive concept of a career? This tension is felt acutely in the humanities, not only because the job prospects within humanities departments are grim, but more importantly because the humanities are stewards for the modes and means of thinking that underpins all social frameworks, including business, politics, and culture. We not only study the arguments, claims, systems of logic, and practices of society and culture; we provide the language to communicate these ideas to different audiences.

The conversation about our education is foundational and incomplete. While we both believe there is an invaluable resource found in the intellectual tradition that we come from, we also believe that the institution does a very poor job of preparing people to take that tradition out of the academy itself. This is a problem that is quickly coming to a head, as departments shrink and tenure track lines disappear, there will be more and more humanities PhDs that are looking to enter the professional business community. We would all be wise to consider the role that the humanities will play in these non-academic contexts. For us, part of this work begins with acknowledging the strange history of the modern university. While it has layers of 21st century corporate and non-profit business design and performance metrics, it also has flashes of historical aristocratic privilege and is also, at its heart, a medieval institution based around an ascetic and monastic version of “the life of the mind.” These contradictory forces make for a confused and confusing social and business ecology, one that must be seriously reexamined and ultimately reformed. We also feel it would do most colleges and departments well to understand the basic dynamics of a supply/demand-based economy. 

This episode is marked with doubt, self-examination, and careful consideration. Those traits are curiously absent when it comes to a figure like Elon Musk, a “genius” who is hailed as a “real life” Tony Stark and now rebranded as an anti-coronavirus crusader. For us, Elon is just another person. Not a genius, but not a fool. While we strongly believe that the word “genius” needs to go away, we also take some time to point to the specific business incentives that Elon is working toward. For us, the work of intellectuals is not to be swayed by a public-relations media blitz, or to be seduced by the siren song of the handsome entrepreneur. Similarly, we should avoid demonizing or vilifying these individuals. We are all motivated by various incentive structures. Understanding the systems that motivate individual action is more productive than arguing from a place of emotional fervor. In this light, Elon is a merely person that is trying to hit certain corporate benchmarks in order to make a lot of money. His moves in welding public sentiment remind us of other populist political figures, and he has a canny way of positioning himself as an outsider of the state, while it is the state’s subsidies that have allowed him to grow a vast personal fortune. If these behaviors are odious, then one should work to change the incentive structure; the rest is just noise. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com