“As a man is, so he sees,” wrote the poet William Blake to his patron, the Reverend John Trusler. Trusler had committed the sin of first commissioning Blake’s artwork and then criticizing the result. This is the sort of thing one must never do to a genius unless one wishes one’s name to appear ever afterward in the historical record as the contextual footnote to a series of witheringly brilliant reflections on art. Imagine being remembered primarily as the recipient of a strongly worded email, and let this be a lesson to us all.
This week another name entered the archive of People Known Best for Getting Dunked On: Josh Lekach, who shared a TikTok video to Twitter with the caption “What is this phenotype? Nickelodeon and it’s [sic] consequences.” Featured in the video was a bubbly woman operating a “mobile coffee trailer.” Caitlin Campbell is her name, it turns out, and her business is called Street Brew Coffee.
I feel just a little bad for Josh, though I won’t lose sleep over it. He’s like the guy at the party who heard everyone making “your mom” jokes and jumped in loudly with a tasteless dig at someone’s actual mother. Suddenly the room fell silent, as if to say: dude. Too far.
I can see why he thought he’d get a laugh. Campbell looks like she could be a poster child for a particularly grating faction in the culture war: short haircut, chipper affect, purple clothes, BMI to spare. “You know the type,” Josh was saying, and we do. We know the type—but we don’t know the woman.
Once we got to know her, we loved her: as the Daily Wire’s Megan Basham reported, Caitlin and her dad are dedicated to rehabilitating the homeless with the resources generated by their business. She’s not the person she would be if she were a caricature in a Youtube video.
There’s a problem here. People need to be able to make true and even uncomfortable observations about the way things tend to be. There is a ludicrous cultural prohibition on such observations at the moment, and people online have an annoying habit of answering every population-level claim with the single exception that is supposed to disprove the rule. “You think men are stronger than women?? Well here’s a woman that can deadlift more than you, sexist!”
Not only is this very tiresome, it’s also the opposite of illuminating. It’s a kind of verbal sabotage, redirecting what could be an honest conversation about trends into a petty squabble over details. The intent is to derail any serious debate by miring it in obvious and irrelevant outliers while freighting it with the threat of moral censure. We all know it’s a trap, even the people who lay it.
Since this whole charade is so maddening, one constantly feels the temptation to shatter it by stating the general truth of things in the bluntest and most unequivocal way possible. This has its uses as a rhetorical gesture. Taken literally as a statement of fact, though, it is a piss-poor way of seeing the world.
And that is how you end up jeering at a sweet woman online in exchange for approval from strangers. It’s what happens when you can’t see the forest for the memes, when your online flamewars have become more real to you than the real world. “As a man is, so he sees”: you will perceive things according to whatever picture you have etched most deeply in your heart.
There is no greater self-own than to willfully contort that picture in an act of overcorrection, an ugly lie to replace the pretty lies you resent being told. You are the one who will have to live in the world as you see it. Don’t turn that world into a political cartoon just to spite your enemies: they won’t be the ones who suffer for it.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer