The Case for Putting Bentham's Bulldog in a Giant Hamster Wheel
An Immodest Proposal
The year was 2008, it was the requiem knell of Dubya’s America, and the artist eventually known as Walt Bismarck was but a supple lad of fourteen years.
Twilight was everywhere; Emma Watson still hot. The cool kids had iPhones, while the rest of us were mostly terrorizing normies in the Habbo Hotel swimming pool.
Or at least that’s what *I* was doing—that and coordinating 4chan raids to help the spherical daughter of What’s Happening!! icon Fred Berry land a SafeAuto commercial:
Meanwhile the economy was tanking in a nation already traumatized by Katrina and ripped asunder by Iraq, which meant the man of the hour could only be that illimitable Bathhouse Barry—a feller I’d backed resolutely in 2007, if only because Hillary Clinton didn’t like video games and it seemed to thirteen year-old me that siding with black people is kind of cool and automatically makes you a good person.
Thankfully my instincts had sharpened by 2008, at which point I was identifying as an Anarcho-Syndicalist or something stupid like that and instead supporting a crunchy gnome from Ohio named Dennis Kucinich, in no small part because I admired him for his smoldering age gap relationship with that enormous crimson-maned wife of his:
The other reason I liked Kucinich was that he was a committed vegan and staunch advocate for animal rights, much like both fourteen year-old WB and the subject of today’s piece (though in all likelihood not contemporaneously, as Bentham's Bulldog was by my reckoning only four years of age at the time, and no doubt prohibitively distracted by Caillou reruns to extend any bandwidth to dietary ethics).
Anyway believe it or not veganism was kind of my main thing back then, with the other being atheism—though by that point only residually, as even then it seemed a bit pedestrian to define oneself in terms of what one’s not. I’d become a militant atheist in 2006 or so mostly because some contingent of my fundie middle school classmates would talk about e.g. how we should publicly hang gay people and I kind of enjoyed provoking them by reading The God Delusion as conspicuously as possible during free period, but by the time Obama roared to prominence New Atheism already seemed hugely fake and gay, and I realized that to persist in feeling better than everyone else I’d need a worldview with a bit more alpha, as the smart set these days are wont to say.
Hence the appeal of veganism.
Looking back I really was quite insufferable about it, and believe it or not this was actually one of the main reasons I dropped out of high school immediately following Freshman year. One day on the bus ride home I launched into a regrettably scorching Meat is Murder philippic, and following a spirited exchange of words actually ended up coming to blows with my erstwhile BFF—a froggish little Italian named “Kenny.”
Naturally the whole thing rather sucked ass, but if the brouhaha had any silver lining it was that my parents were mercifully amenable to me dropping out to enroll in one of those fake internet schools for anchor babies and pregnant teenagers—though my mom of course insisted on being a tedious woman about it and forced me to attend one class at the local community college so I can “socialize like a normal person.”
The class I chose was Philosophy—mostly because it seemed like a discipline where I could just make a bunch of shit up and coast to a perfect grade because I’m obviously going to be the smartest person in a room full of brown community college students.
The professor was a decrepit old neckbeard named Lee Carter, and in practice the class mostly consisted of him ranting about George Bush and Christianity, while the main reading was his schizo reddit uncle manifesto, which he insisted we physically print out using campus facilities and tested us on extensively during the final exam.
I’m fairly certain the guy has never been formally published in anything the least bit reputable… and yet if Dr. Carter had a Substack I’m also quite confident he’d have at least a triple digit sub count, as the man was a hugely entertaining if deranged writer and genuinely inspired orator. He’s probably the main reason I majored in Philosophy upon starting my fulltime coursework at Arizona State the following year, and seemed to me a vastly more original thinker than any of the polished academicians I studied under within those sun-scorched halls. But he was clearly far too undisciplined for the peer review system (which tbh strikes me as kind of silly in a field like philosophy), and in any case far too neurotic to navigate academic politics at any real institution.
Still, I find myself glad that he got to spend a few decades forcing 95 IQ waitresses to engage with his jaundiced Boomer rants exactly like any other student would engage with Kant or Descartes; there’s something quite inspiring and not a little erotic in that.
Anyway Dr. Carter was a lot like me in that he rarely if ever got to the actual fucking point of any lecture unless it was some stupid pet issue he wanted to kvetch about—I recall multiple days dedicated to Kitty Genovese and Zimbardo’s prison experiment? Still, his rants were always illuminating (if embarrassingly reddit in retrospect), and I never missed anything that couldn’t be gleamed from Wikipedia in under ten minutes. But the point remains that I learned practically zero actual philosophy from his class.
One thing does stand out, though—on the day that Dr. Carter was explaining to us the difference between various ethical systems he savaged Utilitarianism as self-evidently ridiculous by appealing to an old short story wherein a futuristic utopia persists in a state of untrammeled abundance specifically by perpetually torturing a small child.
Looking back it seems odd that Dr. Carter had such deontological intuitions when it came to this story in particular, as more broadly he seemed fairly low in the Sanctity moral dimension—I suppose he himself must have been severely abused as a child.
At any rate, I myself registered a volcanic disgust response at the old man’s cloying sentimentalism, insisting to him that torturing the child was the straightforwardly obvious choice—an intuition that’s persisted to this day.
To be clear, though, for me it’s not even remotely about the utils of it all, as my own approach to ethics is all about jettisoning all pretensions of universalism for an overtly transactional honor culture (see my essay Against Morality for the deets).
Rather I support torturing Omelas Kid for the following reasons:
There’s a profound human need to pick out scapegoats and bully / abuse / torture them as a means of achieving social catharsis. Basically life isn’t fair in a whole host of painfully obvious ways, but if we’re allowed to take that out on a select subset of the population (most ideally niggas legibly complicit in some mutually exploitative power structure) it lets us move forward having shed some of that onerous psychic energy. Simply put we need our Two Minutes Hate—hence the perennial existence of witch hunts, inquisitions, Red Scares, pogroms, racism tribunals, #MeToo, lynchings, Down Syndrome guys on Twitter being pedo baited, etc.
In a more genteel social order you ideally deploy religious or civic institutions to keep this process somewhat legible and predictable (think gladiators or Tlaxcalan prisoners of war) or even purely symbolic (foreskins / cows / frowning at a cross on the wall). But with political instability—or postmodern decadence—you instead have that impulse turned towards James Damore / Jesus / Louis CK / The Jews. Such chaos leads to paranoia / conspiratorial thinking and then to tribalism and finally to a totalistic epistemic divergence that makes fragmentation inevitable.
The Omelas Kid as described is like a perma-Jesus: an immensely potent social technology that lets you channel sadism into a single concentrated focal point.
Crucially, this is a role of sacred martyrdom which deeply honors him.
I’m reminded of that classic playground game Smear the Queer—my cohort was no doubt the last to call it that, though a Mishima or Paglia or even a Foucault would likely think you a dolt if you tried to flatten the enterprise into mere homophobia.
Consider, for instance, that the entire point of the game is to become the Queer.
It’s a childish social bloodletting ritual which by its most fundamental character encourages all participants to inhabit both the eldritch scapegoating mob and the Sacred Victim—the Other, the Martyr, the Excluded—teaching young men both to extend a real embodied empathy toward the queer being smeared and to enforce the hard and brutal lines of civilization when circumstances actually call for it.
In that sense Smear the Queer is nuanced, loving, and profoundly Christian.
From the moment I started this publication I’ve been inescapably drawn to the idea of Semiotic Arbitrage—creating a positive sum outcome for ostensibly adversarial parties by framing things such that both sides feel like they’re getting the better deal.
To describe what I mean by this I always come back to this old tweet by Noah Smith:
It’s always seemed to me that an arrangement like this is especially workable between Effective Altruists and their adversaries given both the deep chasm in values and the fact that EAs are annoying and many folks would likely pay top dollar to harm them—just one reason I’ve suggested that Bentham’s Bulldog support effective charities by e.g. becoming a gay prostitute or engaging me in a legally sanctioned prize fight.
But looking back these suggestions weren’t just too cute by half—they were far too inefficient for a mercurial young mensch like BB to take especially seriously.
So today I’m proposing something orders of magnitude more ambitious.
Bentham's Bulldog should make himself the Omelas Child.
My proposal is simple and to my mind eminently actionable—BB needn’t even get seriously injured for us to pull this off. Instead we’ll rely on good old-fashioned monotony and public spectacle—think a Mr. Beast episode, except it’s right wing crypto guys and tech entrepreneurs donating enough money to make it morally untenable NOT to Omelasmaxx. The thing is we’ll also make it sort of benign and wholesome chungus coded so he can’t get out of it.
To that end what we’ll do is construct an enormous hamster wheel fixed to a treadmill.
Then each time BB completes, say, a hundred rotations of his wheel, a predetermined amount of money will be disbursed to his shrimp and black people fund.
Now, for obvious reasons we’ll need a pretty decent sum of money for him to agree—I’d hazard at least six figures to start. It needs to be enough that A) it’s plainly morally indefensible for BB not to do it by his own logic (the lad’s nothing if not principled); and B) he can’t avoid biting the bullet by way of some vague and shiesty appeal to intangibles / opportunity cost. We need an Indecent Proposal that obviates his agency by nullifying ANY future where not taking the offer means more utils than taking it.
The medium term idea is that BB’s Hamster Wheel turns into a provocative work of metamodern performance art interrogating semiotic arbitrage and the possibility of positive sum interchange between overtly adversarial sets of moral foundations.
The long term idea?
We actually create Omelas
To begin with we’ll procure a cheap suburban venue in Austin or Tampa or something and get the lad set up. He’ll be proffered comfortable lodging with total privacy after hours, but will need to commit to working the wheel for a specified portion of every day for at least a few months (obviously with breaks and such built into each day).
All food and drink will of course be provided gratis, and BB will be permitted to listen to any podcast or audiobook he wants, or just chat with IRL visitors / livestream fans.
It will also be permitted for fans to offer specified bonus pledges if BB for instance chugs a bottle of tabasco sauce, or scarfs down a cockroach hoagie, or listens to the entirety of Mein Kampf on audiobook as narrated by AI Vivek Ramaswamy
Of course, BB would at no point be obliged to agree to any such offer should he find it personally objectionable—observe that he can always make the wholly credible case that it would be ethically short-sighted to impede his own long term ability to persist in Omelasmaxxing for an immediate bonus. Still, the option would be there. Waiting.
Also during certain cordoned-off sections of the day IRL visitors will be permitted to purchase a nerf gun or water gun and playfully shoot at BB while he’s inside the wheel. If he wants he can also let them make it a paint gun for even more money to the shrimp, but this obviously wouldn’t be required.
Additionally, we can experiment with milking remote viewers for microtransactions—they could for instance shoot water at him with a tiny remote squirt gun (and in his eye costs 10x as much, as does on the crotch area) or maybe feed him a peanut (he only gets the money if he catches it in his mouth). Or he could agree to say silly things for extra (but again, only if he wants—it’s important he stays comfy).
Now it goes without saying that a LOT of right wingers would part with many a shekel to engage in a fun social experiment like this.
But what I haven’t mentioned is tons of current EA donors of a libtard or centrist bent would at once see young BB not merely as the precocious thought leader he currently is, but also as a real power broker—and perhaps even kingmaker? Within weeks of starting out all the cutting edge effective charities would be courting him for sure.
It’s also worth noting that if the chudkorps gets too mean tons of libtards would likely start flooding the chat and e.g. pay him to eat cupcakes they send him or promote their Substack on stream. In short order there’d be a bidding war for his attention and the dollars would start flowing in faster than he can count them (tbh he might actually want to stage a bunch of especially mean events on stream to Gulf of Tonkin this).
Also to help drive libtard traffic I myself would be happy to participate in the venture; as you can likely tell from the preamble to this piece, I’m quite irritating when I want to be and by all accounts preternaturally talented at offending people.
I wouldn’t do the wheel, of course—I’m far too dopamine-poisoned for something that monotonous. But I could easily handle being electrocuted, and wouldn’t mind slitting my nose or even pulling out a few chompers if the price were right (obv I’m keeping the money, but it would funnel loads of spectators into BB’s wheelhouse).
Now, torturing me is likely outside the price range of most of my current Substack hatereaders—but who knows? They can always pick up a couple more forklift shifts or write a few more tomes about Satanic Sex Magick to make up the difference. In the meantime the real money will come from the outside; in light of median Bantu time preference and aggression there’s for sure at least one rich black dude on planet earth who’d gladly offer up a couple million smackers to pull out all my teeth if I call him nigger a few times. And per Google the cost to replace all your teeth is only $30k, so not taking such a deal is patently ridiculous if we’re just being realistic.
You’re probably starting to see the logic now.
Once we start bringing in the real simoleons we’ll have loads of eyes on us, and can maybe even get Aella involved… she’ll likely feel hugely liberated and free to talk about not showering / virtual CP all she wants once people can indulge their disgust reflex in a way that benefits her super straightforwardly both as a prostie and masochist.
Which actually reminds me of a crucial point BB and I discussed when he appeared on my podcast last year—the essential role of status coding in limiting one’s practically available routes of argumentation.
Long story short there are certain positions one isn’t allowed to hold—a good example being BB’s stance that non-offending pedophiles are treated too harshly by society— without making dumdum normgroids despise you and think you should be tortured.
Now, BB has opined on many an occasion that I traffic too much in rhetoric and not enough in arguments. The thing is almost no one changes their mind on substantive matters of public morality because of ‘arguments’, as basically all politics and moral reasoning are downstream of neurotype, which is largely just genetic. You can’t derive an ought from an is, nearly all normative argumentation is just callow manipulation or gaslighting, and oughts and shoulds are uniformly fake and gay. And so if you want to meaningfully shift someone’s moral intuitions the proper way to do it is through art.
Art is the only way to tickle the amygdala and shift that all-powerful Human Want, let alone make the terrible vicissitudes of another being’s cognition even remotely legible. Basically nothing else works and all your flaccid moralisms are giant wastes of time.
But most of us aren’t artists, and must operate within the extant social architecture of disgust and empathy. That means ethics is in most contexts best grasped as a matter of game theory, which in turn means that if you actually care to propagate your views you need to game around status coding, treating your low status positions like debits and high status views as credits. This in turn behooves you to realize that defending MAPs is the sort of position that eviscerates your status unless you’re Pete Buttigieg on literally everything else. And so the upshot is that if you’re optimizing for influence on anything you genuinely care about you simply can’t be interesting and honest across the board—even attempting such a task is pathetically self-indulgent.
And I myself am nothing if not pathetically self-indulgent.
Yet it seems to me that if one is going to be like this he ought to create streamlined and monetized avenues for folks to torture him. Not doing so will result in him being attacked, ostracized, blacklisted, and denied opportunities in all sorts of covert ways, whereas if he simply e.g. lets someone fork over a bunch of cash to pull his teefers out they’ll likely be way too lazy to write some entire-ass letter trying to get him canned.
So what’s the long term vision here?
Once the BB’s Wheel / Torture Walt venture has sufficient capital I’d like to gradually acquire plots of cheap land sub rosa in and around the city of Cairo, IL—a strategically positioned ghost town on the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, which you may or may not remember as my proposed location for America’s new capital.
In Cairo / Omelas (or mayhaps Omadelstein so as to avoid litigation risk) we’ll reify LeGuin’s vision, the main difference being that we’ll make the vibe based and vitalist instead of dystopic and tragic, installing BB’s Wheel as a Hellenic-inspired temple smack in the middle of the town as a sacred monument to Sisyphean Agency for rightoids and crustacean pleasure for libtards. It will also be our polity’s main cash cow (we’ll convince BB to let us tax him a bit to subsidize infrastructure).
What starts purely as performance art will ritualistically evolve into an entirely new religion that agentically leverages semiotic arbitrage to unite hitherto antagonistic neurotypes, recognizing Difference as sacrosanct and positioning racism, sexism, and so forth not just as generative wellsprings of productive tension but as the assumed, destigmatized, and thoroughly eroticized basis for virtually all social interchange.
Imagine the venture as an agorist commune-cum-art collective financed by half-ironic sadomasochistic temple prostitution, except instead of fucking you’re shooting nerf guns at a spergy Zoomer doing laps in a hamster wheel while debating Nick Fuentes on live stream so he can buy malaria nets for Liberians.
But obviously there’d be loads of fucking too.
Just, like, unofficially.
And on that note we’d obviously make the whole thing no kids allowed from the onset.
The community would sort of look like a mix of Epcot and Las Vegas, only positioned exclusively for heterodox intellectuals. You could have Rationalists and Libertarians and Neoreactionaries and Spencerians and Hananiacs and Waltrightists all living side by side and airing out any stinky smelly low status opinions entirely freely while (legally) torturing each other to extract catharsis and soothe our screeching amygdalas.
To me that’s just about the truest vision of paradise there is.
But even if we never get halfway there, I think we can EASILY pull off the first part as a monstrously fun lil publicity stunt. If you agree and want to brainstorm (or are a rich guy who’d be interested in donating to something like this), feel free to give me a DM.
And obviously all of that applies doubly to Bentham's Bulldog himself.
My man—I suspect the two of us could have lots of fun collaborating on this.
That said, if any other Effective Altruists would be interested in signing on as my Backup Hamster please feel free to reach out as well—it goes without saying that BB will always be the best candidate, but tbh most of you guys kind of look the same.
Have a blessed week, gents!
- Walt
It was still called Smear the Queer when I was growing up, but there was one kid whose mom made everyone say "kill the carrier."
Goddamn Walt's outdoing my own EA war again.