I hate people stupider than me

Ima need y’all to let me rant in peace

Somewhere on this app, right now, somebody’s daughter is one semester deep into a degree and reading my latest essay the way a meter maid reads a windshield. She couldn’t summarize the argument with a gun to her temple, and she doesn’t have to, because she’s waiting for something smaller. A date. A page number. A middle initial. A casualty figure rounded the wrong way. Eventually I’ll slip one, because I’m one woman at a kitchen table with no fact-checking department, and when I do, she gets to spend a whole afternoon as the smartest person her family has ever produced (which is to say not very intelligent.)

I write for Substack crumbs. Still, every essay I post gets received like a submission, marked up by people who need me to be the intelligentsia so that catching me can make them intelligent. Bro. I’m a girl who explains the lesbian sex wars for rent money. The standard being enforced in my comments was built for institutions with endowments, and the person enforcing it is a nineteen-year-old with a highlighter and something to prove to a professor who doesn’t remember her name. I’m autistic, so even my rants come out in complete sentences with the clauses filed in order, and to a certain kind of reader that register smells like tenure. It’s wiring. I went back through this essay and installed the contractions by hand. My prose sounds like it has an office because my brain builds sentences that way, which means I’m getting peer reviewed over what is basically an accent.

The economics of the exchange are what actually make me insane. I have to hold the whole essay, every claim in it and every receipt behind it. She has to hold one page. If my hand shakes once across ninety paragraphs, her one page buys her the status of my entire essay, and it costs her nothing, because she never put a sentence of her own on the table that anyone could catch her on in return. Her intelligence is motion-activated. It switches on when I move wrong, and it’s never once turned on by itself.

And because I’m obviously bpd splitting let me invoke my bpd king, Fredrick Nietzsche: in 1872: he publishes The Birth of Tragedy, twenty-seven years old, professor of classical philology at Basel, and the book commits the one sin his field could never forgive, which was being interesting. A few months later, a twenty-three-year-old named Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff answers it with a pamphlet called Zukunftsphilologie!, and the pamphlet does exactly one thing: it counts errors. Mishandled sources, liberties with the Greek. It meets the book’s argument nowhere. Wagner published a defense, Erwin Rohde published a defense, and none of it mattered: the next winter, Nietzsche’s philology course at Basel drew two students, and neither one was a philologist. The guild couldn’t answer what he was doing, so it graded what he was doing. Grading is the one game the guild never loses.

He then spent fifteen years building a taxonomy of the man who did that to him. On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887: ressentiment, the condition of people who are denied the real deed and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. That’s my comments section in one sentence. She can’t write the essay. She knows she can’t write the essay, and the knowing is unbearable, so her mind waits at the roadside for mine to break down. The correction is her imaginary revenge: one afternoon where the deed feels like hers, purchased with a single date, looked up on a phone, while I did everything else.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883, has a chapter on the flies of the marketplace that reads like he wrote it after checking his mentions. The small ones swarm whatever is visible and sting in perfect innocence; they want your blood without even hating you, because their bloodless souls crave blood. Then the line I think about weekly: “They punish you for all your virtues. They forgive you at bottom only your mistakes.” The mistake is the one part of me these people can love, because it’s the one part of me that happens at their altitude. Ninety paragraphs pass through her without leaving a mark. Then a wrong date: finally, a doorknob, something shaped for her hands.

The comedy is who the correction is for. It’s addressed to me and performed for a faculty lounge that exists only in her head. Neither of us has ever been inside the academy. Harvard doesn’t know either of us is alive. I’m simply the closest thing to an institution she can reach, so I get audited like a journal by someone auditioning for a guild that’s never going to call. The audition doesn’t end. The guild doesn’t know she exists.

So, for the record, since the title is doing a lot: I don’t hate these people. Nietzsche again, obviously. The man is basically my DBT workbook at this point. Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, aphorism 173: you can’t hate what you look down on. Hatred is reserved for equals and for betters. Hate would be a promotion,

Somewhere between the self-esteem curriculum and the creator economy, the line between people who make things and people who watch got declared elitist, and what we lost in the trade was the old understanding that creatives are strange, that the work comes out of a temperament nobody would order on purpose: neurotic, up at four in the morning about a comma. That strangeness is the tuition, and the herd citizen doesn’t believe in tuition. She believes she could write my essays. She just hasn’t. For some reason. And the sentence always stops there, because finishing it would mean naming the reason, and the reason is everything about me she calls crazy. The prologue to the same book saw her coming: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star, and the last men, who want their comfort and nothing else, blink up at the stars and agree that everybody is the same, and that whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse. I feel differently, and I have the meds to prove it. The chaos writes the essays.

The comedy is who the correction is for. It’s addressed to me and performed for a faculty lounge that exists only in her head. Neither of us has ever been inside the academy. Harvard doesn’t know either of us is alive. I’m simply the closest thing to an institution she can reach, so I get audited like a journal by someone auditioning for a guild that’s never going to call. The audition doesn’t end. The guild doesn’t know she exists.

What I feel is what anyone feels about a fly in the apartment in August: a sincere wish that it would go land on somebody else’s food. This is a petty essay about a petty annoyance, and I stand on it, because pettiness is at least honest, and because the man wrote some of the greatest books of the nineteenth century while still visibly mad about one pamphlet. The genre has a distinguished history. Let me rant in peace.