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Undistorted, Radical Clarity's avatar

Tara, this frames the issue better than any hot-take on shock art: transgression isn’t automatically depth—it only becomes art when it exposes the tension between private desire and the social order that contains it. The humanism of Rabelais works because it unmasks our shared mess without erasing it; Sade fails because his “freedom” depends on turning every other body into scenery. When transgression stops at spectacle, it isn’t courage, it’s market segmentation. What we need now isn’t louder provocation; it’s work that risks real intimacy—writing that lets two flawed consciousnesses meet without the buffer of branding or tribal applause. Anything less is just another micro-demographic hustle dressed up as revolt.

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Michael D. Purzycki's avatar

“To place society as merely some kind of bulwark against the individual is to forget that all parts of society, from laws to language, come from the imagination of human individuals.”

This is my favorite sentence of the essay. I get angry when someone describes a particular historical event or trend as “inevitable.” However likely something may be, it is not inevitable if it depends on the actions of human beings, with all our faults, stupidities, prejudices, arrogance, and vanity.

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