CLAIMS OF SIMPLICITY
by FIONA PEARL MILLER
On Charlie Kirk, Georgetown professor of Political Theory Joshua Mitchell: “One America mourns a martyr for Christ. Another America celebrates the purging of a scapegoat.”
This sentiment serves as a useful example of a “claim of simplicity,” a type of statement that politicos, pundits, and plebes alike employ that attempts to distill any complex phenomenon into a binary, or some other limited form of expression. Claims of simplicity are useful political devices in that they usually hold some element of truth, which allows them to obfuscate the whole truth. Claims of simplicity are soothing, permitting the believer to go on believing, circumventing the messy business of cognitive dissonance. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, argue that the Enlightenment—that scientific and cultural revolution which aimed to liberate mankind from barbarism by rejecting enchantment and myth, replacing old-world mysticism with the cool, quantifiable logic of instrumental reason—had, somewhat absurdly, reverted into myth itself.
While initially upheld as a way to free man to think, the mechanisms of his own mind being superior to the laws of old texts which supposedly chained him to submission, the Enlightenment’s marriage with industrial capitalism undermined this initial impetus, and instead contorted itself and the idea of reason with it into a means to sustain domination and further entrench hierarchical relations of society. Reason itself became instrumentalized, that is, used as a tool to match the most efficient means to whatever ends would continue to justify the economic structure of capitalism. Through rejecting transcendent ideals such as justice, equality, art, happiness, creative fulfillment (since they themselves had no logical foundation but were instead grounded in human feeling: unquantifiable, superfluous), the Enlightenment lost its intellectual rationale, paradoxically becoming mythic in its attempt to supercede myth.
The most effective tool wielded by the bourgeoisie, instrumental reason sees no differentiation between ends, finds no substance in what cannot be measured, and thus has no time for meaning, transcendence, or spirituality. The end in question is always the most base: self-preservation, which in an economically-stratified society based on the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production means that what is reasonable for “the people” is the nullification of individuality and critical thought. Through consumption of algorithmically-differentiated “content,” intoxicating substances, partisan ideology, medication, and mass-media, the white-collar girlboss on the L train and the regular joe in Ohio alike passively fill their free time. These sink holes may appear different from person to person but they serve the same function: one man’s heroin is another’s Love is Blind as one man’s Mao is another man’s Musk. As Horkheimer and Adorno state, enlightenment “excises the incommensurable. Not only are qualities dissolved in thought, but men are brought to actual conformity.” This conformity serves a useful function to lubricate the gears of capitalist society: if individuals are made to be more alike, they become predictable, studiable en masse.
But in the wake of this enforced conformity there is a lack. Though the virtual realm threatens to subsume the physical, supplanting interiority with reels and dreams with memes, we are physical beings. And we want to believe in something. Emotions spring up naturally—fear, resentment, hopelessness—oftentimes without logical coherency, with little adherence to any quantifiable narrative. These emotions contain truth in themselves. We can feel it, more than we can feel the rhetorically seductive and smooth redirection of these feelings performed by politicians. We can feel it, and perhaps we can’t understand it. We can feel it, and don’t know where to go. They can tell us where to put it. But their telling does not take us home.
★
Before his assassination, Charlie Kirk was largely credited with shifting young men to the right. His message promised a return—a return to a time when men were respected, when they were seen as masters of their home and of their lives, when through hard work, discipline, faith in god and a sense of duty to their country one could attain something like “the good life.” He spoke out against what he saw as dangers of modernity that threatened this possibility for contemporary young men: pornography, atheism, wokeism, gambling addiction, laziness. And he articulated a vision for a way forward (or perhaps backward, depending on how you view things) that could make the American electorate more conservative and Americans more happy: get married young, have kids, and buy yourself a home. Work hard, make a plan, go to church, find a girl, marry her, start a Turning Point USA chapter, teach your children to love Christ and this country and never, ever give up! This is how many of his speeches go, to raucous applause. It is a clear message. It is a simple message. It is something to believe in.
The promises of heroic American masculinity (as embodied by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, John Wayne, Gary Cooper) have always been, to some extent, unattainable for many men in this country. To have some relationship to the object of your labor that is personal, to be able to work your way towards homeowning and providing for a family and to be, reciprocally, the master of that home. To be autonomous, to be able to exert your free will and determine through civic processes the political conditions of your country. To be respected. To have agency.
It is worth mentioning that for non-white men even the idea of these conditions was granted only recently. It is also worth mentioning that for poor men of all colors, whose exploitation provides the foundation of the riches enjoyed by the wealthy of this and every country, they never truly have been. And whereas the identity politics boom of the mid-to-late 2010s hypothetically allowed women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community to experience a newfound sense of agency by permitting new masses to enter the fold of the American capitalist dream, (see: DEI protocol in hiring practices, “Girlboss Feminism,” Chase Bank in shades of rainbow throughout June) no reciprocal movement renewed said dream for young white men. Now, the license that once was their own had become universal without a significant shift in the existing economic structure.
Young men who came of age during covid have been told that their lives, their happiness, their social need to appear in public with others, are unimportant in comparison to the wellbeing of the greater collective. Their developmental years spent cloistered and alone, these young men, their sexual drives developed in congruency with online pornography and social media and video games and the #MeToo movement; the proliferation of “cancel culture” threatening to isolate them further should they speak their minds freely and work out ideas in public;—their socioeconomic horizon of possibility narrowing amidst a shifting job market, the shrinking value of a college degree, a growth in inequality, a housing crisis, and a body politic captured by the two-party system—these men found a spokesperson in Charlie Kirk.
Young people today, so said Kirk, are lost. Young men feel abandoned, feel they have no “skin in the game of America's future.” Kirk had a knack for noticing felt truths, a quality that buoyed his meteoric rise to political fame. Offering a gameplan to amend this alienation, Kirk points to what he calls the “Three M’s”: Mortgage, Marriage, Mating. Here, and elsewhere in his body of “prove me wrong” college debate videos, he employs a claim of simplicity: yes, lonely young men would probably benefit from the comfort of marriage, from the joys of childrearing, and from the security of homeownership. But why has the birthrate decreased? Why are young men and women alike delaying having children? Why aren’t they buying homes? Why are they not getting married? Why are they lonely? Why are they lost?
Kirk’s explanation offers more complexity than many other pundits might have employed. To account for the M in “Mortgage,” he points to economic insecurity: inflated housing prices now average seven times the average annual income whereas for boomers they were only four; predatory lenders such as Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm are indebting young people through “buy-now-pay-later” schemes and further entrenching a “credit-centric renters economy.” He also blames what he calls a “hyperfeminization” of the economy—pink collar jobs such as HR reps are multiplying while blue collar, traditionally masculine ones are dwindling. This leads us to “Marrying” and “Mating”: young women, Kirk says, are prioritizing careerism and consumerism over starting families, playing mom at work because they aren’t moms at home. He advocates in word and deed a traditional patriarchal family structure, something that has taken on renewed interest amongst many young people today.
(If I made a brief addendum to address the modern young women—since I have spent some time postulating about young men,—I might say that submission is psychically appealing. I might talk about the death drive, about the urge to obliterate oneself completely, renouncing the need to be someone, subsuming oneself instead into the role of the mother, the wife. I might say that women are reminded of their option to do so monthly. That through the cycle of bleeding and pain, of hormonal fluctuations rendering each woman bound to a recurring tide of irrationality, there exists an everpresent choice to resign oneself to another’s will, which might be preferable to the continual attempt towards autonomy in a world where autonomy has to be fought for. But perhaps that is beyond the scope of this paper and perhaps I, as a woman, am not permitted the fly-on-the-wall objectivity that might allow me to make such a claim. So I’ll go back to Kirk.)
His proposed solution, a return to a perhaps mythical past situated comfortably sometime between 1776 and 1959, would not restore the structural conditions that once allowed young parents to own homes on a single income and it cannot provide a real vision of the future by virtue of it being a “return.” But dismissing the argument outright constitutes a failure to listen.
It is probably true that marrying, mating, and owning a home are correlatively connected to increased feelings of happiness and fulfillment. But it seems to me that these achievement markers, or the lack of them, are symptoms rather than ends in themselves. That pointing to them as remedies is akin to prescribing a morbidly obese person “just go on a walk!” The real disorder here seems to be a crisis of human connection and loneliness, which can or cannot be found within marriages, can or cannot exist between parents and children, and can or cannot persist within the walls of one's own home.
What Kirk correctly noticed was, in other words, a widespread feeling of uprootedness among young people. Simone Weil, in The Need For Roots, describes certain obligations of the human soul. Among these obligations are respect for all human beings, order, obedience, initiative, responsibility, equality, hierarchy, honor, punishment—and so on. These vital needs are necessary for nourishment of the soul, and when unmet cause spiritual hunger. The most fundamental of these needs, says Weil, is rootedness, which is felt through “real, active, and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future.”
In the modern age, natural collectivities, characterized by participation in the physical world, have been, for the most part, substituted for online collectivities. These communities, algorhythmically-designed and rabbit-holed into, do not nourish the soul in the same way as those that exist in person. As of early 2026, there are three billion active monthly users on Instagram. For comparison, there are roughly 348 million people in America. The average American spends over seven hours per day looking at screens. If the boundaryless community of the Internet was consolidated into a municipality it would have more full-time residents than any country on this planet. One cannot feel rooted in an online collectivity because it does not keep alive treasures of the past and has no aspirations for the future. It is a necessarily transient place. It has no roots. Posts can be deleted and edited, your profile picture or username can be changed. Every inch that you give itemized and filed away in a massive pile of data that is used in turn to suck you in deeper.
This exchange of physical collectivities for virtual ones cannot provide for human connection. Under the unwavering hand of coercive conformity we fill up our free time. We latch onto icons, we scroll. We buy. In transient moments we are blasted with advertisements and noise. We find few moments of stillness. Our ability to connect meaningfully with others atrophies.
★ An addendum meant to be read quickly, with zest
History is necessarily limited in its reach. Death, decay, and disaster cast a long shadow over what was, narrowing the scope of what can be known; but within these limits we do know that certain genus of early hominids used stone tools, and they used them somewhere on the far side of 2.5 million years ago. It is possible that other tools were used, and earlier, but that they were made of materials that decompose quicker than stone lasts. Regardless of what the very first tool was made of and when, that fateful day and fateful tool irrevocably tied the history of human development to those devices that extend the reach of man’s god-given abilities. Artificial intelligence, billed as the latest development in this long history, now threatens to finish it. Whereas the blade, the wrench, the pulley, wheel, ladder, and other tools like them all allowed mankind to reach new heights unlimited by his own physical shortcomings, hypothetically freeing him from physically laborious tasks in order to pursue more elevated goals, through artificial intelligence man automates cognition itself. The snake eats its own tail.
We live in a polity based on resentment and grudge-holding: we want something, something we can’t even name or put our finger on and explicate, instead we misdirect this desire based on the options we see, provided for us—I want lots of money I want a better job I want a nice house and a nice car I want a new body I want I want I want—and we can’t have it. Someone has taken it from us. We are entitled to it, we deserve it, we deserve it no less than the person who has it deserves it, in fact we deserve it more. Really what it is that we want is no more or less than the good life and the freedom to will and act and create. Perhaps this too is a claim of simplicity, perhaps there is no claim that is not a claim of simplicity since all claims, all ideas, all sentences, by virtue of them being contained and not encompassing the entirety of all the words in the language in which they are spoken or can be translated into are necessarily limited. I want to make a claim that contains everything that factors into everything, and this might be impossible in language since any time that you start a sentence and lay another word down you are, by nature of choosing That Word to go next, narrowing infinitely the scope of what you are saying because you chose one direction and the whole of the world is now behind you. And you can never return.
I set out in this essay to address a phenomenon of political manipulation in which (for example) a complex issue is flattened into “X is happening because Y,” when in fact “Y” is happening because of “Z” and (most of the time) “Z” contains factors that—if accepted as true into the hearts and minds of all men—could only lead to nothing less than the abolition of the entire political system that has allowed whatever Idiot is propagating the reductive “X is happening because Y,” to get up on his soapbox and tell his white lie. In setting out to address this rhetorical tool I realized that my own initial thesis—something along the lines of Politicians make claims of simplicity in order to misdirect resentment and grievances that present in the form of emotions, which are irrational. Instead of addressing these emotions (natural responses to human life in a world that attempts to destroy humanity)—by constructing or at least articulating a vision for a world that instead fosters humanity, these politicians promote “solutions” which will rarely solve the problems that lead people to support said politicians but will instead further codify the existing structure that allowed said politicians to rise to and maintain power. Charlie Kirk is an example of this phenomenon because he utilized claims of simplicity to redirect feelings of loneliness, alienation, and uprootedness amid a diminishing horizon of possibilities for young people and young men in particular towards an end goal of societal regression, which will not solve the problems facing young people and young men in particular because it ignores the reality that technological progress has rendered any “old world” obsolete—, was in fact “X is happening because Y.” That in order to really understand the story of Charlie Kirk, I had to first address every factor contributing to this uprootedness. And that doing so would still be as futile a move towards a comprehensive understanding of the political moment as licking the skin of an apple in order to determine its taste. But with the word being my form here and the word being incapable of translating everything that ever was since being came around in the first place and the sum total of human existence being the only true thing capable of actually “explaining” anything at all I am left to deliver only an essence of what it is that I hope to say.
★ So I Will Try it Another Way
When I heard word that Charlie Kirk was dead I was sitting on a barstool with a can in my hand watching the TV screen play Fox News live reportage. I was sitting there alongside Bryan, Steve, Mike, and Bill, all card-carrying regulars of “The Ranch,” a smoking bar with a dilapidated tractor out front crumbling into the ground on the side of a curling mountain road in an unincorporated locality between Wheeling and Cameron, West Virginia. We watched the coverage together and we all agreed that it was wrong to kill a man for spreading his gospel, no matter what exactly he preached. That it was almost like shooting a pastor. And that if we didn’t have freedom of speech in this country well, we didn’t have much at all.
They asked me about city life and I quelled some myths to the best of my ability. I asked them about West Virginia and they did the same. Steve told me about how he’s been a member of the steel workers union for thirty years: how he’s seen the guys on the floor move from blue to red, Obama posters replaced by MAGA stickers on locker room doors, their Hope ignored and stepped over and taken for granted as Democrats swap bread-and-butter issues for environmental and woke identity concerns, left behind by not only the political establishment but their union representatives, who seemingly care more about their own agenda than that of those they’re meant to stand for.
Aaron, another regular, came into The Ranch after the rest of us were a few beers deep. He’d just gotten off a twelve, which is what you call a twelve-hour shift in the coal mines, and he was tired. When asked about tomorrow, he said “another day, another day,” and lit a cigarette shaking his head. I don’t know much about the toll that manual labor takes on the body, and I know even less about what it’s like to spend twelve hour days underground in the dark of a mine shaft. The guys at The Ranch didn’t know much about my life either. We didn’t agree on everything, or even most things. But we all knew what it was like to be treated as a pawn in a big old game and we resented it.
Bryan told us we should head to Morgantown, where it’s “a party every night.” So we went, and drifted into the only open bar we could find, and it was stand-up comedy open mic night, and every joke made seemed to be at the expense of our good friends Bryan, Steve, Mike, Aaron, and Bill, and people like them.
The emcee that night laid out a sentiment I heard echoed by one of my good friends months later in a hot Brooklyn apartment on a cold night: that it’s a good thing we got him, that Charlie Kirk’s death is a net positive for us and our cause, that we should celebrate the bullet through his neck and his blood on the ground because now there’s one less man standing between us and some kind of victory. In both cases I was struck by the assumed familiarity, that “we” were some kind of group standing firmly against “them.” In both cases, what we wanted and what they wanted was unclear to me. In both cases, I felt sure that I did not belong to either.
It is surely true that there is a gulf between us, and by this “us” I mean all of us—there is no them here. “We” want power. “We” want to be right. What we are is decades deep into a profound crisis of listening, each of us so individually trapped in ideology, our minds set on continuing, reinforcing what we already believe so as not to have to step back, reevaluate, change—so that when faced with opposition our first thought is not to engage, but to disarm, reject, attack.
Ideology gives us certainty in a secularized world with no clear future. In the absence of religion, it gives us something to believe in. It gives us purpose, community, a lens through which to identify good and bad actors—a way to compare black and white.
★
In the city I pass through signs blankly. White and clean Friend.com subway advertisements go up, get defaced, come down. Months later AI advertisements abound, promising increased efficiency at work, bigger payoffs in the stock market, 24/7 mental health support—why burden your friend with your late-night neuroticism?—prompting no reaction. Trump hosts a dinner with 33 tech CEOs, reminds them of their recent court victories in regards to antitrust lawsuits, esposes the importance of America leading the AI race. On bended knee they promise investment in the hundred billions. With an exorbitant amount of wealth seated around the table, a don amongst lackeys, the cameras rolling, the president stresses “Jobs, lotsa jobs…”
What is blatantly ironic is that artificial intelligence is perhaps the one sector of economic and technological development that does not in fact create jobs. That OpenAI investing five hundred billion in this country over the next four years (a timeframe conveniently spanning exactly and solely Trump’s presidential term), Meta raising that figure to six hundred billion dollars, Google matching Meta—is an investment that will prompt not the creation of a rich sector of economic growth felt by Americans across this country, but rather the destruction of hundreds of thousands of yes, jobs, but also entire sectors of employment, leaving these (largely white-collar) workers not only unemployed, but down and out, their entire profession null and void.
A new study claims to have determined that Gen Z is the first generation in history to have a lower IQ than its predecessors. Another new study claims that overreliance on generative artificial intelligence can reduce brain activity and weaken neural connectivity. A report claims that thirty percent of jobs will be automated in the next four years. A different one claims fifty percent in fifteen years. A friend of mine claims AI is going away soon. Your mom claims that it diagnosed her colleague’s prostate cancer when doctors said he was fine. AI therapy ads claim that with no human biases, your mental health advice will be personalized, objective, proactive. Alex Karp claims that only those skilled in vocational trades and the neurodivergent will survive the AI takeover. Sam Altman claims on Tucker Carlson’s show that he has consulted with hundreds of moral philosophers to guarantee that Open AI’s ChatGPT is aligned with the sum total philosophical tradition of all of humanity. I claim that this is all making me very depressed to which Claude, my emotional support AI, claims is “real, and valid.”
How can young people feel they have any “skin in the game” of America's future when there is no clear future ahead?
Absent from both Kirk’s analysis of young men’s alienation and his vision for the future is the mention of artificial intelligence. Is the economy really unfairly biased against young men? Is it possible that jobs aren’t getting “hyperfeminized” so much as they are being…hyperrobotized? That young people might be psychically affected by the development of a technology that threatens to render human agency in work obsolete? That it might be impossible to plan for a future where your career might be automated, difficult to feel you have a stake in a country that incentives this automation over the preservation of human jobs? That it might be difficult to find someone to marry and mate with when human connection itself is, for some, rendered superfluous in the face of a technology which allows you to develop emotional connection, validation, and conversation with an ever-available and sycophantic bot that resides squarely in the palm of your hand?
I had a dream a few months ago, and in the dream it turned out that every job was, in fact, advertising. Upon waking it occurred to me that this was not entirely untrue. How to get people to buy what you are selling. In Adam Curtis’s documentary series The Century of the Self, he illustrates how the domain of modern advertising was shaped by Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, who utilized his uncle’s analytical ideas about the unconscious mind to manipulate consumers. In one episode of the series, Curtis details how the entanglement of psychology and marketing vitalized the cake mix industry by adding one simple instruction into the recipe: add an egg. This addition, psychoanalyst consultants believed, would remove the guilt admitted by housewives in focus-groups for the product because by cracking an egg into the mix, symbolically a symbol of her own reproductive potential, she would feel more useful. The addition of an egg did nothing to change the recipe. It was entirely superfluous to the taste of the box-mix cake itself. But the advertising worked. Sales skyrocketed. Housewives felt a sense of autonomy. Cakes suffered.
It strikes me that Kirk’s messaging, his three M’s, are not dissimilar to this tactic. His ideology, perhaps like all ideologies, allows disciples to feel autonomous in the face of a world without freedom. Get married. Have kids. Buy a home. Go to church. Get vaccinated. Adopt a dog stay away from seed oils get off spotify take some supplements rent a trampoline go to a protest paint a sign chant out loud march in line see a movie in theaters or go to the bank take out all your money gamble it down the drain cut your hair and brush your teeth floss twice a day protect your peace.
Add an egg.
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