Two or Three God-Sized Copes

Libertarian Nihilism, Liberal Wish-Casting, and Embracing Limits

It’s five a.m., and I can’t sleep, in part, because I’m wrestling to make sense of the four hours or so of my life I spent over the past day watching a movie and a podcast.

The movie was Everything Everywhere All At Once, the podcast Michael Knowles’s interview with an influencer known as Clavicular (Braden Peters).

The former is an entertaining, if overlong, sci-fi, feel-good romp though an imagined multiverse. The latter is a depressingly dystopic deep dive into the mind of a 19-year-old nihilist who has ridden the wave of the “looksmaxing” trend into Internet stardom.

Together, they represent two versions of what I see as a God-sized cope for a modern culture denuded of spiritual purpose.

“Cope,” by the way, is one of those new-fangled terms all the kids are using, a dark-cousin of “groovy,” and I recognize fully that using it at my age is, well, a little embarrassing. What it means is something like a pathetic rationalization deployed by someone who can’t face the truth, and is a term favored by right-wing youth, like Clavicular, who drops it about every five minutes in the interview with Knowles.

Going on dates, working for a corporation, engaging in politics are just a few of the things Clavicular, labels as “normie copes.”

You see he’s got it all figured out. He has “ascended.”

Oh, no, not that way. It’s not a religious thing. It’s a rationalist thing, a transhumanist thing. He has risen above the ordinary coping normies by maxing out looks, money, and status, the holy trinity in his world.

How has he done that?

Well it started by his ordering testosterone online at age 14, after soaking his mind in body-building forums. His parents tried to stop him, but he took out a PO box and kept going.

But don’t worry, he did his “due diligence and made sure things didn’t go horribly wrong”—though he admits that when he temporarily had to stop using them he went “hypogonadal,” i.e. his body stopped producing sex hormones on its own, killing his libido.

He now uses GLP-1 medications to stay lean, methadone to stay focused, and is planning a $35,000 “double jaw surgery” to lock in his good looks.

None of this is a cope, in his view. It’s a strategy for success in the world he he’s inherited, a world where testosterone is on the decline and where young men are under duress from economics and online-dating apps, which have hyper-inflated the importance of looks, money, status.¹

And, from his POV, the strategy has worked. He’s a good looking lad, getting a lot of attention, and making a lot of money.

And yet, Brandon Peters come across in the interview as an amoral horror show who believes politics is hopeless until things get so bad there’s a revolution, who labels unattractive people as “sub-human,” and who says things like, “if you’re an ugly broad, it’s over for you”—the best you can hope for is to “cope your way into a corporate position and make a little bit of money.”

His is a world of “mogging” (asserting dominance over others) and “slaying” (using women for sex). He doesn’t reject religion outright, nor charity, but sees these things as something to be deferred, presumably until he has maxed out his materialist potentials.

Of course, all this, from a certain perspective, is a perfectly rational response to a world without God. If, that is, you are a sociopath.² Which, I think, is more common than some would like to admit.

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Another option is the liberal fantasy of Everything Everywhere at Once, a fantasy I freely admit touched me, much in the same way as “Imagine,” a song I love but no longer believe in.

EEAO tells the story of a Chinese immigrant, Evelyn running a failing laundry with her husband, who finds herself called to a cosmic quest to save the multiverse from destruction.

The multiverse, for those of you not immersed in pop culture, is a theoretical concept invented by the writer Michael Moorcock in the 1960s³ and largely popularized in Marvel movies like Dr. Strange and Spider-Man: Across the Multiverse. The idea is that there are an infinite number of parallel universes. The idea as articulated in this particular film is that every time we make a significant choice, we spawn another universe, an alternate timeline in which one possibility plays out over another.

Thus our heroine, Evelyn, is a laundress in this world where she married her husband but a kung-fu master movie star in another where she did not, is a hot-dog fingered lesbian in a world where people evolved sausage hands, and is a rock in a universe where life never evolved.

And, it turns out, in one of the multiverses, she is a great scientist who has learned how to travel through all the multiverses and figured out how to channel life experiences from one to the other, so that, for example, she can use the kung-fu skills of that movie-star life in the multiverses where she is not a kung-fu master. The trope is full of plot holes and contradictions, but you learn to get past these sorts of things if you want to have any fun in sci-fi.⁴

Anyway, in the multiverse of the great scientist Evelyn, she has driven her daughter mad with the ability to traverse lives, and that daughter has gone on a wrecking spree through the many multiverses and must be stopped by Evelyn the laundress who, Matrix style learns to channel almost magical abilities for combat as needed.

What’s this all about, really?

It’s all explained in that lifeless multiverse where Evelyn and her daughter are just two round boulders overlooking a desert landscape.

Her daughter opines:

For most of our history, we knew the Earth was the center of the universe. . .We killed and tortured people for saying otherwise. . .⁵ That is, until we discovered that the Earth is actually revolving around the Sun, which is just one sun out of trillions of suns. . .And now look at us, trying to deal with the fact that all of that exists inside of one universe out of who knows how many. . .Every new discovery is just a reminder—We’re small & stupid. . . And who knows what new discovery will come next to make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit.

And there you go.

The daughter’s rampage of destruction through the multiverse is the result of her inability to cope with the materialist world we’ve come to live in. A world in which there is no God, no religion, in which the most rational conclusion is that we are infinitesimal particles of excrement.

That is the world that modernism has brought us to, I would agree. And I think Clavicular might too. But he would see Evelyn’s and her daughter’s solution as just another cope by a couple of ugly broads.

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What is the solution Evelyn discovers?

Unconditional acceptance. Not of our insignificance but of our own weaknesses.

The solution the movie seems to say is not to max out looks, money, and status, but love.

During one of the many fight scenes in the film, Evelyn channels a kind of emotional jiu-jitsu in which she defeats her opponents by giving them what they most need, a loving hug, a happy memory, a ball-gag and a spanking. . . . and, yes, full-throated acceptance of her daughter’s girlfriend.

Violence, the film seems to suggest, is just a cope for not feeling loved, needed, appreciated, validated.

In truth, the film is just a live-action, Beatlesless replay of Yellow Submarine.

An unsuspecting innocent is called to save a civilization from a bunch of not-blue meanies, and the ultimate solution is an assertion that “All You Need Is Love” and flowers go blooming on the noses of the all the bad guys.

I appreciate that. I really do. Much more than the Clavicular nihilist solution. And, yet, I can’t quite help thinking his is the more realistic response in a Godless world.

His very existence is a rebuke to the film. So is October 7 and 9/11.

You can’t love away sociopaths and death cults.

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What can you do?

Besides being a sociopath, I mean.

My cope has been to find a community I can live with and hunker down, a community where meaning still exists and there are answers to questions like what does it mean to be a tiny creature in an infinite universe. For me, that’s the world of religion, of Judaism in particular.

Its answers may be as full of plot holes as a sci-fi multiverse or a 19-year-old nihilist, but they feel to me more human, more grounded, more doable.

The multiverse is a kind of ridiculous plot device that won’t go away,⁶ not just because it’s convenient for generating plots and bringing dead characters back to life but because it reflects our experience of the world we live in it now, a world of seemingly endless possibilities and no right answers.

Such limitless worlds may seem to open a path to happiness, but they can just as easily open a path to paralysis.⁷ At some point, we have to impose limits on ourselves if we’re going to get out of endless spirals of pollyannish optimism and deadened nihilism.

We can’t trust the government to to that. They can’t even stop a 14-year-old from ordering testosterone online to a private mailbox.

We can’t trust capitalists to do it for us. They’ll happily sell a new set of jaws to a perfectly healthy 19-year-old with thirty-five grand to spare.⁸

But we can find creeds and communities that will create holding spaces for our cosmic anxieties. For me, Judaism, for all its obsessive rule-following, has provided a path that feels more livable than these other alternatives.

We’re all, I guess, just trying to cope.

I’ve found my cope, mostly. In this coming New Year, I hope you find yours.

1. At one point, he complains young men have to compete with rich celebrities who use apps like Tinder to locate all the beautiful small town girls and fly them away to be used for their pleasure.

2. I’m using the term loosely, though the recent of video of Clavicular running over someone with his Tesla truck and declaring “hopefully” in response to a cry of “did you kill him?” is suggestive. . . .

3. Props to my friend Chris Bateman for this information!

4. Much as audiences do with time travel stories.

5. This is a New Atheist-style anti-religious distortion both about the history of heliocentrism and the Church’s response to it. Heliocentrism goes back to at least third-century BC, and people were not killed and tortured specifically for declaring the world was not the center of the universe.

6. Spencer Klaven has written and spoken about this.

7. As anyone who has ever shopped for a mattress can tell you.

8. Knowles asks Clavicular if the plastic surgeon in any way reacted to his requesting a new jaw to replaces his perfectly good old jaw. Clavicular said no, it didn’t come up.

And, really, why should it, from a money-maxing perspective, when body dysmorphia is so profitable?