In this episode we start with an IED-disfigured veteran and King Baldwin IV’s iron mask to ask what aesthetics really are and why they matter. We trace how post-1960s leftism, Marxist class politics, and corporate monoculture flattened beauty into safe, white-walled mediocrity, severing form from function and dissolving hierarchy into platitudes like “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Along the way we talk evolution as an optimization algorithm discovering pre-existing forms, David Deutsch on why flowers are beautiful, obesity and sloppiness as aesthetic externalities, and why a steel mask can be more honest than makeup. The result is an NRX-adjacent argument for aesthetic responsibility in a world that thinks looks are “just subjective.”