If I wanted to maximise clicks, I could suggest this piece is subtitled something like “How the Regime made your Ideas into Porn”, make frequent mention of the WOKE MOB, and then position the argument around how an anti-woke position is better for real anti-racism/feminism/LGB rights (“all identitarianism is bad, but some identitarianism is better than others”). 

I’d then just need to pepper the mix with just enough spiciness to offer a plausible chance of cancellation of some sort, and then, if that doesn’t happen, claim the ideas herein are a “gateway drug” bringing readers a little closer toward a widening of the Overton Window.

This sort of discourse closely mirrors the logic of pornography. But ideas are not images, and cognition — the means by which we conceive knowledge — isn’t meant to function like sexual desire at all, especially not sexual desire in one of its most deleterious expressions.  

When I say “the logic of porn”, I am extrapolating from a pattern of engagement confirmed by the empirical evidence. In the first place, there’s the frustration of the itch some might expect porn to scratch. On the most superficial level, studies show that sexual fulfilment is lowest among those who view porn most frequently, and highest among those who never partake. More significantly, there is a direct correlation between loneliness and the frequency of porn use. No, correlation is not causation, but at the very least this shows that porn doesn’t help with loneliness, while strongly suggesting it makes it worse. 

Then there’s the tendency toward dehumanised views of others. Pornography changes people’s perceptions of others – it is an understatement to say it tends towards objectified and demoralised representations of human beings, and this means impressionable minds have extremely unedifying imagery implanted on their minds, threatening to become normative in sexual encounters. This has numerous impacts on real relationships, of course. 

Most damningly, there’s the disruption of the neurological reward circuitry by which dopamine is released in response to apparent satisfactions. Levels of dopamine similar to those associated with cocaine use are released by viewing porn — hence its tendency to be highly addictive. Even more damningly, there is evidence that a more impactful “hit” is needed to release dopamine, the more that porn is used. Regular viewers then have their own Overton Window widened the more they look at the stuff — slipping further and further into viewing more obscene and extreme content. 

Such are the well-known talking points that begin with the words “studies show…”. It is typical of the self-centred age in which we live, however, that mention is rarely made of the people whose images are actually being viewed — often millions of times, in the throes of incomprehensible demoralisation. A wise priest once told me that, having heard hour after hour of confessions from young men in the grip of porn addiction, he recommends that his penitents pray for each of the individuals whose image they have seen. He thus shows them a path to re-humanisation, so they might once again view people as something other than a vehicle for stimulating dopamine release.

Although many centuries old, St Augustine’s writings offer a convincing rationale for addiction. He struggled with the desires of the flesh, and wrote that having indulged those desires, such indulgence became his “custom”, and that “custom” then became a “necessity”. After his conversion to Christianity, he argued that each human being is fundamentally characterised by a thirst for God. People seek to quench that thirst through finite things which offer short-term pleasure. Driven by a desire for that which is infinite but has been projected onto finite things, people spiral into an ever-worsening decline, trying to quench an infinite thirst through proliferating volumes of consumption which never bring true satisfaction.

To apply St Augustine’s insights to the matter at hand, images should be configured to genuine beauty, and they get increasingly estranged from the beautiful the more they are misdirected. Ideas, similarly, should be configured to genuine truth, and if misdirected they also slip into self-perpetuating estrangement from the true.  

Most people living in a heavily fortified edifice of confirmed presuppositions find themselves in a solitary place

This brings me to the porno-logic of much of today’s discourse. In the first place, we need to ask if the takes we’re consuming serve to frustrate and intensify our pre-existing commitments, or open our eyes to seeing things in a new light. Self-righteous indignation, however wittily and ironically expressed, serves only to perpetuate confirmation bias. Most people living in a heavily fortified edifice of confirmed presuppositions find themselves in a solitary place. The moral high ground is lonely territory, where the air gets thinner the higher you go. 

Ideas then start to behave like images, altering perceptions of others as exhaustively categorisable as belonging to this or that group. Human beings are complex creatures, though, and apportioning them as belonging entirely to this or that viewpoint shuts down the range of the encounter from the outset, vastly restricting the possibility of learning anything from another. The Discourse can dehumanise in a way which mirrors what happens with porn. To be internet-brained or very online means ultimately that the embodied brain that only functions properly when very offline is reduced to a dog being wagged by its tail. 

Then we get to the reward circuitry of the brain.  Yearning for truth and stumbling upon snippets of things we consider superficially true brings little discharges of satisfaction, and people chase after more. As Ross Douthat has written, “the two genres that currently dominate online are political polemic and pornography — because both are ideally suited for a click-here-then-there medium, in which the important thing is to be titillated, stimulated, get your spasm of pleasure, and move on”. 

Like most conspiracy theories, the myth of endemic “online extremism” has a valid meaning behind it. People need a little more each time to get the desired spasm of pleasure — but this needn’t mean more extreme ideas, as such, but rather a more and more overly dramatic and apocalyptic presentation of everything which is increasingly estranged from the world in which people actually live.  

In all of this, the ideas presented to us become as estranged from the truth as some grim pornographic scene is estranged from genuine beauty. To speak of “hot takes” rather makes the point. Saying something is “spicy”, similarly, uses a metaphor of sensory stimulation. To claim someone’s ideas are a “gateway drug” is another example — because it implies that ideas that aren’t quite true should be treated as if they are true because they’ll bring people closer to some other truth. This perpetuates the pleasure and titillation paradigm, and, strangely, implies genuine truth functions like heroin or crack cocaine — that is, as the most egregious form of isolated hyperconsumption. Ideas are being mistaken as things intended to please, and the Discourse deteriorates into yet another form of binge-consumption.

Statistics then function as First Philosophy. As Byung-Chul Han writes, when “information is no longer informative but deformative” then “communication is no longer communicative but merely cumulative”. The accumulation of data to support views is mistaken for insight — “one accumulates information and data, and yet does not attain knowledge”. 

The masturbatory effects of algorithmic reading are aptly described by Eli Pariser as “autopropaganda” — a strange process by which we are indoctrinated by our own ideas. Maybe the metaphor of cognition porn contains its own remedy within itself — suggesting we take a stance of modesty before that which is genuinely true.