An Introduction And Conclusion To My Essays
My essays address the intersection of three main themes: everyday aesthetics, social delusions, and the perils and possibilities of technology. Here I’ll introduce them by showing how these themes tie the majority together into a single, unified body of work. My philosophical essays do stand apart from the rest, so I’ll discuss them last and separately.
The forms of beauty we experience in our everyday lives have heretofore been neglected by honest and intelligent analysts, who’ve devoted themselves instead to prestigious commentary on great works of art. While much ink has been spilled, it has consisted almost entirely of trend-following doggerel distorted by perverse incentives. Feminine beauty is the worst-served such topic, and therefore the lowest-hanging fruit for improving our lives. For these and other reasons I deemed it the best place to intervene.
To solve the problem I developed a new method of analysis. Namely, sidestepping social dishonesty by studying idealized imaginary women instead of polls and centerfolds. I then carried out this analysis in detail over a period of five years. I present the results of my labors in Dispelling Beauty Lies, an essay that surpasses all previous writing on the topic by a large margin. I wrote it to last, and I am confident it will stand the test of time, to the point that it is eventually seen as mere common sense. Dispelling Beauty Lies also includes extensive practical recommendations for both beauty and seduction. 101 Ways To Be Prettier, Sexier, and More Seductive summarizes these concisely; Thirty Favorite Images is a brief personal reflection.
While it’s easy to see how Dispelling Beauty Lies addresses the first two themes mentioned above, most readers overlook the third. From the very beginning, I conceived it as a particular instantiation of ultrahumanist ethics. That is why it bluntly and directly advocates for cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, and rejuvenation, though this was a very unpopular stance at the time of writing. My essay Ultrahumanism explains the titular concept in detail. There I argue that we should use technology to become the best humans we can be without becoming inhuman. In other words, I advocate for a middle path between traditionalism and transhumanism. The third chapter of Ultrahumanism elaborates on the connection to feminine beauty.
Amor Fatty is a brief essay that also ties Dispelling Beauty Lies to ultrahumanism. It explains how wishful thinking prevents us from becoming all that we could be, especially but not only with respect to beauty and rejuvenation technology. Against Good Taste and Milgram Questions are two more brief essays that demonstrate how particular mechanics of social delusion contribute to widespread belief in wrong answers, both in the realm of feminine beauty and elsewhere.
AILOM addresses the social dangers of AI, a technology that was then just emerging. The AI companions I discuss in it are worth highlighting here, because they connect diverse branches of my oeuvre. I reference them in Dispelling Beauty Lies, the two short stories that preceded it (“The Hokkaido Incel Gulag” and “Natural Encounters”), the song “Custom Angel,” and Ultrahumanism as well. They are not a science-fictional joke, but rather the locus classicus for weighing fundamental questions about what it means to be human and to meaningfully connect with other humans. While some passages of AILOM will soon be outdated, its central questions will only become more relevant over the next few decades.
The Illusion Of Dominance explains the psychological basis of Dispelling Beauty Lies’ key seduction recommendations, and critiques the modern ideologies that prevent us from making the most of our relationships. This essay is not only useful to women. It dismantles the faulty self-understanding men have unwittingly absorbed. “The Pleasure Gap” is a substantial appendix one should not overlook. How To Trick Your Girlfriend Into Being Hotter is an essay compiled in part from men’s responses to The Illusion Of Dominance, and addresses, in a humorous style, the perplexing difficulty of communicating effective seduction techniques.
The second-lowest-hanging fruit for improving everyday beauty is analysis of residential architecture and design, both urban and interior. Here I’ve contributed two essays. The first, End Attached Garages Now, criticizes the worst blight on our neighborhoods in a thorough and definitive way. The second is a more substantial work titled GIMBY. That essay explains why the popular campaign to increase urban density is wrongheaded. It makes the case on economic grounds as well as aesthetic ones, presenting several novel arguments that range from the externalities of spatial agglomeration to the urban geometry underlying rents. GIMBY is my most underestimated essay. Readers have been distracted by the large quantity of pretty pictures and overlooked the economic arguments entirely. I encourage closer attention.
Trust Networks is an extended and wide-ranging analysis of how social knowledge is really formed and why it is so often distorted. It draws on epistemology, finance, and propaganda techniques to make its case. Several sections are devoted to aesthetic trend-following in particular, both in residential design and feminine beauty.
How To Seduce A Billionaire is half essay and half short story, and comedically ties the seduction lessons from The Illusion Of Dominance into the ponerological themes of Trust Networks and my contemporaneous novel, Memoirs Of An Evil Vizier. Again, my body of work is interconnected to an extent not obvious on casual inspection.
My early philosophical essays are Critique of the Mind-Body Problem, The Computer-Simulation Theory Is Silly, and A Pragmatical Analysis of Religious Beliefs. Their topics are self-explanatory. These are short, entertaining, and easy to read by philosophical standards, and I particularly recommend the second to those casually interested.
Optimalism is my culminating and best work. It systematically deduces a novel religion. The three philosophical essays just mentioned amount to studies that precede it and are superseded by it. It’s important to make clear that Optimalism is a product of reason, and not prophecy or even wisdom. The author is obliged to learn from the logic discovered there just as everyone else, and its completion is a beginning rather than an end. Although Optimalism is challenging, most readers can grasp the main points if they attend to the pathways laid out in the introduction. Do not hesitate to consult LLMs; to minimize misunderstandings, be sure to use the recommended prompts.
I began keeping a Journal in the final stages of revising Dispelling Beauty Lies. But by then most of the essays listed above were already complete.
The present text is titled “An Introduction And Conclusion To My Essays” because I will not write any more of them. Several are groundbreaking and first in their class. However, I’ve been punished for them rather than rewarded, both socially and financially. No, it’s not surprising that the most intellectually substantial have been ignored. But what I found particularly galling is that the women to whom I addressed my work on beauty were happy to abuse me, even as prostitutes and AI-girl-app designers wrote me of the money they were making from my ideas. All gains seemed to flow to the dishonest or the vicious. This abuse of my warm-hearted generosity went on for years while I was living on offal in a ghetto, with returns only covering server costs. Eventually one decides that “You can hit me all you want to, but I don’t love you anymore.” Generosity in the face of persistent mistreatment becomes a sin.
Although I composed long psychological analyses about exactly why women in particular and the public in general kept choosing falsehood over truth no matter how lucidly I presented the latter, I came to see them as a distraction. A spade should be called a spade. The real problem is not stupidity and unconscious bias, but the poor character of people in our present society. Basic virtues are lacking. It’s ponerology all over again, just writ small this time. In other words, the feedback loop between perverse incentives and poor character has handed the field to the latter; and this hidden variable tilts our entire epistemic topography so uncomfortable truths are simply unable to propagate. That’s something I haven’t the power to change. And given the preceding paragraph, I’m not willing to add the missing chapter to Trust Networks either. The facts await future generations of better quality.
Be that as it may, I’m very proud of my nonfiction oeuvre. I came, I saw, and I spoke the truth. Optimalism is a giant achievement, and will be recognized as such someday, presumably after I’ve left the planet. To my few readers: I am thankful for your continuing support, and I hope you stay on for the fiction and music I write in the future.
J. Sanilac, September 2026.