Dumb Angels or Smart Apes? A Manifesto on Success Without Pandering
Dumb Angels or Smart Apes? A Manifesto on Success Without Pandering
Stand Up to the Dumbing Down of Culture
It seems there are two default ways to “succeed” in public life today.
You can become a dancing clown, endlessly optimizing yourself to flatter the lowest common denominator — feeding outrage, spectacle, simplification, and noise.
Or you can become a dictator, coercing attention through dominance, fear, manipulation, or brute narrative force.
I want neither.
I don’t want to placate crowds, and I don’t want to rule them. I don’t want to perform stupidity for clicks, and I don’t want to bludgeon people into agreement.
Instead, I want to be like Miles Davis.
What That Actually Means
Frankly, I don’t care for Miles Davis’s music — But I love that he didn’t pander to audiences.
Nor did he cope by retreating into obscurity or artistic purity without an audience.
He did something rarer: He led taste instead of obeying it.
He assumed more of his audience than they assumed of themselves.
Sometimes they followed., and sometimes they didn’t, but He kept moving anyway.
That posture — not fame, not rebellion, not contrarianism — is the model I wish to embrace.
I Reject Crowd-Dependent Success
If winning or losing depends on placating the low-minded interests of any crowd, however defined, I’m not interested.
At their worst, Crowds reward:
simplification
repetition
spectacle
tribal signaling
emotional manipulation
low-minded Crowds do not reward:
precision
nuance
intellectual honesty
restraint
long-range thinking
I don’t want a career that trains me to erode my own taste in exchange for approval.
The Audience Is my creative Tool, Not my creative Master
I’m not anti-audience; I’m anti-submission. I’m anti-stupidity. my hammer and chisel is audience that seeks to be edified, not underestimated.
People at their best sharpen my judgment
They expose my weak thinking
They reveal what actually lands with good taste
They teach restraint and timing
But an audience in their default, low-brow mode should never dictate taste.
Good art, good thinking, and good communication always meet an audience somewhere, but not by flattering their worst impulses.
The goal is not to entertain people as they are. The goal is to invite them upward. That’s what they want, even if they don’t realize it.
Who I Am For
I create for the best part of people, the part of every intelligent person that is:
exhausted by the dumbing down of culture
allergic to hype, outrage, and motivational theater
unimpressed by mass attention
hungry for clarity instead of comfort
capable of meeting work halfway
I do not create for people who want:
shortcuts
ideological affirmation
easy answers
spectacle disguised as insight
There are plenty of places for that already.
My Definition of Success
Success is not fame, virality, or mass approval.
Success is sustained autonomy earned from voluntary attention given by people I respect, in exchange for work I am not ashamed of.
That means:
enough money to be independent
enough esteem to operate freely
a small(ish) but serious audience
work that doesn’t rot the soul over time
I don’t need more than I need.
What I Refuse to Become
I refuse to become:
a motivational clown
a thought-leader caricature
a professional simplifier
a moral hostage to algorithms
a loud person mistaken for a serious one
I will accept misunderstanding, slower growth, and being less “legible” than I could be.
What I won’t accept is training myself to betray my own standards just so I can have broad appeal for people who have forgotten theirs.
An Invitation
If this resonates, you’re already my audience.
I am sick of hype, “funnels,” and any kind of manipulation (except the fun kind).
I’m here to do work that sharpens judgment, elevates taste, respects intelligence, and EDIFIES THE AUDIENCE.
That is what we are all looking for, even if we don’t know it all of the time
We are to be human in the best sense of the word — Dumb angels, not smart apes — and we want someone to recognize in us the latent potential we have been lulled into ignoring.
