Category Archives: Hedonism

Another week down, and five more great new tracks to hear, including hip-hop with nostalgic vibes, shimmering and slightly abrasive alt-rock, and buzzing, sardonic noise rock. Dive into this weeks favorites.

Plus listen to our ongoing 2022 Essential Tracks playlist.

Confession: I really dont like most throwback rapthe kind of stuff that seems to deny the latent futurism and hauntology of hip-hop that makes it so vivid and vibrant. Denzel has never had that problem; even when Walkin cops a laidback 90s flow, its married against a drunken beat that sits just catercorner to the metronome so that it produces a modernist broken-tape machine swagger. When that modern near-trap almost 2000s polished hi-hat beat comes in, totally changing the perceived beat structure of the underlying sample, the image snaps together: just like his half-conceptual works before, this new one is looking to be a post-modern nightmare of the eras of Common and Xzibit. Langdon Hickman

From Melt My Eyez, See Your Future, release TBA

The clanging, clapping beat that opens Blue Nude (Reclined) confirms what weve essentially known for a few years now: P.E. have some honest-to-god dancefloor bangers in them. The first single from their follow up to 2020s Person is a bit more subdued than their industrial-pop early singles like Top Ticket and Pink Shiver, easing into a jazzy noir-groove with a minimalist bass pulse and richly hypnotic saxophone driving this sophisti-skronk track toward pure ecstasy. This is music of a kind of late-night, after-hours hedonism, with just enough light to see your own breath. Jeff Terich

From The Leather Lemon, out March 25 via Wharf Cat

New Hell, Greet Deaths 2019 record, has slowly climbed to being a constant companion for the past few years now. Punishment Existence continues that 90s bummer rock hybrid vibe to my great satisfaction, feeling like a hybrid of emo, shoegaze, alt-rock, and that particular kind of pre-2000s indie rock that was still in touch with hardcore kids learning to work a melody and show their hearts a bit. This is the feeling I was terrified would last forever in the darkest nights of my 20s rendered in firm flesh I can return to forever, my own private hell. Thats beautiful and heartbreaking. Langdon Hickman

Out now via Deathwish Inc

Leeds noise rock group Thank draw from a wide palette, from blistering, cacophonous freakouts to sleazy no wave funk. Dread leans farther toward the latter, carving out a nasty groove with a dirty, one-note bassline and the simmering menace of synth arpeggios. But its the shots-fired refrain from Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe that stands as its most memorable moment: Theres never been a good band from London. That he follows it up with Theres never been a good band from Leeds takes it from outwardly hostile to self-deprecating, but whether topically pointed or simply dadaist, the message comes across as cathartic nonetheless, the song achieving a cleansing climax with the unmistakable bleating of atonal no-wave saxophone. Jeff Terich

From Thoughtless Cruelty, out February 4 via Exploding in Sound

Classic punk rock to a tee. At its heart, this is a bubblegum pop song, the kind that wouldnt be out of place on a 60s girl group compilation, syrupy Motown pop perfect. Here, that same songwriting idiom, an endless series of hooks compacted into a sub-two-minute slab that would fit comfy on one side of shellac, is met with that great, great 90s fuzz and strum. This stuff is simply but pure and hard to deny. The rise of Carly Rae Jepsen may have been confusing to some doddering Gen-Xers who forgot what great pop is, but despite the different sonic palettes Ex-Vid is practically kissing cousins to that Canadian queen. Motown is perfect music and so is this. Langdon Hickman

From Bigger Than Before, out March 25 via Don Giovanni

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This Week's Essential Tracks: Denzel Curry, Thank, and more - Treble - Treble

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Its been just about a decade since we collectively retired our acid-wash skinny jeans, animal print cardigans, oversized hobo bags, and red wayfarer sunglasseswhat in 2009 used to be the style du jour. But if the internet tells us anything at all, its that were on the cusp of a hipster renaissance. This time around it just has a slightly less cringe-worthy name: indie sleaze.

The hipster dominated the subcultural scene from the mid-late aughts to the early 2010s. It was an era of reckless hedonism, non-stop music, and never-ending afterparties. American Apparel was in its heyday, Cobrasnake-style party pics dominated every nightlife blog, Alexa Chung was the fashion worlds It girl, and Bloc Party played every major music festival.

The fashion was eclectic and unpolished, uniting a mishmash of styles from various periods and subcultures. It combined 60s era Edie Sedgewick with 90s era Kurt Cobain grunge while also taking cues from the bright-coloured spandex craze of the 1980s. Colourful tights were worn underneath distressed denim shorts and paired with an oversized flannel and peep-toe sandals. Skinny vests were all the rage. Braided headbands and impossible-to-take-off lam bodysuits were the afterparty uniform (alongside a can of PBR strapped to your hand, of course) and everyone owned a thrifted fur coat that smelled like cigarettes and booze. The style embraced a carefree attitude as glamorous as it was gritty. If you were a hipster, you regularly looked like a hot mess.

In a now-viral Tik Tok video, trend forecaster Mandy Lee (@oldloserinbrooklyn) states theres an obscene amount of evidence, pointing to the revival of indie sleaze aesthetics, citing the reappearance of wired headphones and amateur flash-style photography.

Trend forecast: indie sleaze revival #trendcycle #nostalgia #tumblrfashion #indiekid

Sex and the City (Main Theme) TV Sounds Unlimited

After almost two years of pandemic-related lockdowns theres a collective yearning for IRL interaction and over-the-top exuberance and the hipster represents the last subculture in recent memory that fits the bill. While we certainly dont need to revive everything hipster-related, throwing on some leopard print and blasting The Kills like its 2010 might be exactly what we need. Heres how you can capture the indie sleaze essence in 2022.

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Are We on the Cusp of a Hipster Renaissance? - Elle Canada

SunceBeat (Photo credit: Colin William)

SunceBeat is back this summer with its first wave line-up now released for its 13th edition. It is the longest running festival at the beautiful coastal hideaway at The Garden Tisno.

Nestled in a stunning pine-shaded Adriatic hideaway along the coastline, the idyllic festival has cultivated a global audience. Drawn to its daytime blissed-out beats and sparkling hedonism through the evening and night, all the way through to dawn at Barbarellas a unique open-air club which has no comparison.

Photography by Hannah Metcalfe (www.hannahmetcalfe.co.uk)

The festival also features intimate beach-side dancing, boat parties on the beatific Adriatic, the mesmeric Olive Grove and headline artists on the Garden Stage. Its a vibrant mix of music, energy and pure escapism under the sun and stars, a week-long odyssey with friends and old and new set in a truly stunning location.

SunceBeat mixes a holiday and festival seamlessly as one experience there is a wealth of restaurants, beautiful beaches and idyllic old towns to explore, around Tisno and further afield. Pellucid waters shimmer and the national parks like Kornati are wonderful to escape to.

Photography by Hannah Metcalfe (www.hannahmetcalfe.co.uk)

The first wave or artists for SunceBeat 2022 has been revealed and its an intoxicating mix of debut talent and festival favourites making a welcome return spanning underground house, disco, Afro, soul, R&B and funk. Artists in the first wave include: The Blessed Madonna, Kerri Chandler, Kenny Dope, Dave Lee ZR, Dam Swindle, Miguel Migs, Mark Farina, Horse Meat Disco, Natasha Diggs, Mike Dunn, John Morales, DJ Spen, DJ Spinna, Sadar Bahar, Terry Hunter, Children Of Zeus (live), Lukas Setto (Live), Djeff, Dan Shake, Ash Lauryn, Hyenah, Marina Trench, Lakuti, Elkka, Rich Medina, Boo Williams, Mafalda, CinCity and many more.

Ash Lauryn

Children Of Zeus

The Blessed Madonna

Debutants include MYD (DJ Set), Colleen Cosmo Murphy, Kings of Tomorrow Ft Julie McKnight, Arielle Free, Ultra Nate (live and DJ Set), Ash Lauryn, Demuja, Emmaculate, Holly Lester and many more across the week.

Collen Cosmo Murphy

The festivals founder, Alex Lowes, says: We cant wait to get back to Tisno this summer for our 13th year in Croatia. Theres no better place for some pure escapism on the coastline and our soundtrack from some of the worlds finest performers is set to be magical. We have been working hard to curate what we feel is our strongest line-up to date. We have lots of new names who we know will fit in perfectly in Tisno and capture the magic. We remain committed in continuing SunceBeats diversity in everything we do and feel our first wave of guests embodies this, with many incredible female artists and DJs across the festival, some of the most exciting new young talent breaking through and of course some SunceBeat icons back with us, part of our journey as the longest running festival at The Garden Tisno.

Horse Meat Disco

During the festival, DAM Swindle celebrate their 10th anniversary hosting Barbarellas one night and a boat party, Paris iconic DJoon Club hosts the Beach Stage and a boat party, then Sadar Bahar and Friends and Chicagos Chosen Few have takeovers during the festival, assembling ten legendary artists for SunceBeat.

Alex adds: Its a huge year for festivals in general, both in Croatia and around the world, so we are hoping its a good year for everyone in the scene as the industry continues to recover. We cant welcome everyone for what is going to be a brilliant summer in Tisno.

Dave Lee ZR

Mafalda

SunceBeat 2022Thursday 21st July Thursday 28th July 2022@ The Garden Resort, Petrica Glava 34, 22240, Tisno, CroatiaThe Blessed Madonna, Kerri Chandler, Kenny Dope, Dave Lee ZR, Dam Swindle, Miguel Migs, Mark Farina, Horse Meat Disco, Natasha Diggs, MYD (DJ Set), Mike Dunn, John Morales, DJ Spen, DJ Spinna, Colleen Cosmo Murphy, Sadar Bahar, Terry Hunter, Kings of Tomorrow Ft Julie McKnight, Children Of Zeus (live), Lukas Setto (Live), Djeff, Dan Shake, Ash Lauryn, Hyenah, Marina Trench, Lakuti, Demuja, Elkka, Ultra Nata (live and DJ Set), Arielle Free, Rich Medina, Boo Williams, Mafalda, Cin City, Holly Lester and many more.

Sarah Main

Week-long tickets including club access from 205.00 + booking fee (boat parties are extra)www.suncebeat.com / @suncebeat

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SunceBeat 2022 in Tisno first wave of artists revealed - Croatia Week

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them, wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). Last week, a tall, moustachiod 25-year-old serial shagger in New York City became Exhibit A for this claim and also for mens defence against it.

West Elm Caleb reportedly slept with a lot of women via dating apps, and wasnt very honest with any of them about what he was doing. Then some of his dates compared notes via TikTok and the result caused so much arguing it was even reported in India.

Why all the noise about some two-bit Lothario in a city a long way away? Well, in one sense, this is as old as humans: the ongoing resonance of mythic figures such as Helen of Troy show weve been quarrelling about men, women and sex for a very long time.

But the contours of the argument are also uniquely modern. It concerns a dream of hedonistic freedom that blossomed in the mid-20th century, and that Greer herself helped to articulate. And it also captures the way that dream has soured in the hyper-mediated 21st-century world.

In The Female Eunuch, Greer argued that men have, since time immemorial, stuffed women into a domestic role, in which were treated variously as drudge and sexual object. In Greers inimitably pithy terms: a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon.

In turn, she thought, women have internalised a stunted image of our own desires. While our bodies are different, supposedly immutable differences in our inner lives are really imposed by stereotype. And this stereotype serves to castrate women, replacing a fully engaged and emancipated female energy with a weak and artificial femininity.

Greer argued that women should abandon this self-imposed prison. Instead, we should pursue revolution meaning the freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood.

Five decades later, how is Greers vision working out? Well, the Anglosphere rejection of suburban domesticity and motherhood is now advanced. The average age of marriage has been rising steadily since the Seventies, while the total number of marriages has declined steadily. Over the same period, birth rates in the US and UK have fallen steadily and are currently at their lowest ever level.

Childbearing was never intended by biology as a compensation for neglecting all other forms of fulfilment and achievement, Greer argued. And now that women have more choices, claims feminist Jill Filipovic, were voting with our feet (or, perhaps, wombs).

So Greers vision of swapping compulsory domesticity for greater female choice, self-realisation and empowerment has been realised, at least for some. But how far did she really swim against the tide in setting this out?

When The Female Eunuch rocketed Greer to international fame, the Anglosphere had already seen a decade of counterculture, centred on the rejection of tradition and the pursuit of freedom and desire. And one crucial text for this was Jack Kerouacs On The Road (1957) a book that, like The Female Eunuch, celebrated the freewheeling pursuit of passion over the humdrum everyday.

The central character, Dean Moriarty, is a drifter, a slacker and a hedonist. He floats from place to place, leaving a trail of unpaid debts, disappointed friends, damaged cars and chaos in his wake. Hes also a prolific and faithless shagger, taking up with (and sometimes impregnating) lover after lover before abandoning them in one case with a newborn baby.

In Kerouacs telling, Moriarty is depicted both as a walking disaster zone but also an ecstatic, spiritual figure. Far from being abusive, his womanising seems animated by an intense desire to drink deeply from the cup of life, love and desire:

He darted the car and looked in every direction for girls. Look at her! [] And dig her! yelled Dean, pointing at another woman. Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!

Kerouac celebrated Moriartys unthinking and often-callous spontaneity as a kind of saintliness. Greers innovation was to lay claim, on womens behalf, to a countercultural movement whose main characters had hitherto been mostly male.

For her vision of revolution also involved women becoming more Dean Moriarty-like. Women, she claimed, are not by nature monogamous. Rather, we should be deliberately promiscuous, reject domesticity as an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquillity and love and (again, frequently, like Dean Moriarty) run away.

But footloose emancipation on the Greer and Kerouac model has not been cost-free. Greer the libertarian argued that what gets called rape is mostly just bad sex, and shouldnt be severely punished. But the angry and aggrieved women of the #MeToo era seem far from her breezy confidence that bad sex should simply be shrugged off, especially where it feels coercive.

And were witnessing a steady re-evaluation of past attitudes to sexual liberation, too.It turned out, in practice, that no sooner was sex liberated from reproduction than it was re-ordered to commerce in enterprises such as thePlayboypornographic empire.Despite Greers disapproval of this development,Playboy was for decades a byword for egalitarian, libertine (and commercialised) sexual empowerment. Nowa recent documentary has compiled allegations of abuse and even bestiality, by dozens of the Playmates Hugh Hefner brought to live in his mansion. It turns out that the brave new world of free agency and personal responsibility can mesh uncomfortably with real-world imbalances, whether of power, money or beauty.

Meanwhile, the female sexual emancipation Greer pursued has delivered a bonanza for every live-in-the-moment modern-day Dean Moriarty with the looks to enjoy it. In the world of online dating, sex is even more abundant than it was for Dean Moriarty: one twentysomething friend tells me that photogenic male friends find female attention so abundant that some are quite sick of the attention.

But not everyone lucks out: among those neither married or possessing the charms to game online dating, sexual access may be difficult to come by. And among these involuntarily celibate or incel men, this uneven erotic liberation has spurred a boiling rage, much of which is directed against women. Over on the other side, too, its the other teams fault: every woman exploited in a #MeToo situation, or running afoul of some other sexual asymmetry, points the finger at patriarchy (ie men) for her distress.

But the common factor in both cases is a culture in hock to the libertarianism of Kerouac and Greer. For while this worldview was lionised as freedom, in practice what it delivered was a kind of marketisation of the heart, that imagines we can love according to principles of rational choice and utility maximisation. Rooted in mid-century liberation, this paradigm powers much of the hostility between the sexes today.

When a man claims that we shouldnt empathise with Hefners Bunnies as they were adult women who should have known what they were getting into, thats not misogyny. Its just what it looks like when you apply the market logic of freedom and personal responsibility to sex.

The same market logic suffuses the manosphere fixation on sexual market value and concludes that West Elm Caleb did nothing wrong. For in market terms, were all independent, rational adults; why shouldnt a man treat women as human spittoons, should they make themselves available in this capacity?

On the other side of the ledger, we find the same mindsetin the women who share first date evaluation spreadsheets with their friends; in the supposedly feminist claim that sex work is work; or in the bleak assertion that all men cheat, so you might as well hold out for a rich cheater. Or the claim that mens loneliness is mens fault, for male loneliness is caused only by a surplus of high value women and a surplus of low value men.

Instead of questioning sexual market liberalism, all were offered to make sense of this mess is a schizophrenic feminism wholly in thrall to the same fixation on autonomy but only for women. This worldview celebrates Greer-esque radical autonomy and sexual permissiveness, while dismissing observable normative differences between the sexes as stereotypes and blaming any negative side-effects of this approach on patriarchal revanchism.

Beneath this officially sanctioned surface, meanwhile, lurks an increasingly embittered male resentment, that reacts with gleeful schadenfreude whenever a woman acknowledges that there can be tradeoffs between female empowerment and motherhood.

Yet neither side is willing to see the field of courtship as anything more than a low-trust, radically individualist, structurally impermanent market a grim perspective both reinforced and accelerated by the dating apps that now dominate courtship. And under that cloud of suspicion and impermanence, its easy to see how the prospect of an 18-year commitment to a dependent child (and hopefully also to his or her other parent) might well seem wildly implausible, or just unattainable.

Where autonomy conquers solidarity, children are psychologically (and, increasingly, literally) inconceivable. But its precisely when we get to children that the persistent asymmetry between the sexes becomes most difficult to deny, as poignantly illustrated by the lives of both Greer and Kerouac themselves.

Kerouac is an object-lesson in the wider shock-waves caused when men refuse to move on from sexual hedonism. He married three times, and only grudgingly paid child support for Jan, the daughter he fathered in his eight-month marriage to Joan Haverty after a paternity test. He met his daughter only twice; her life was marked by poverty, trauma, sexual abuse, drug-taking and finally death at 44. Greer, meanwhile, never had children. Her biographer recounts how she struggled and failed to do so, before eventually taking solace in her animals.

Team Kerouac and Team Greer are both really the same camp, then. But depending on your sex, the costs of liberation are inescapably different and if we just point fingers at the other sides selfishness, we miss the deeper truth that beneath the pervasive tone of cynicism are real humans of both sexes. And no matter how loudly disappointment curdles to bitterness, nearly all in truth still long for intimacy, companionship and (in most cases) kids.

Such a craving for solidarity is now nigh-on impossible to square with contemporary norms or social infrastructure. Hard as it may be to admit, this is not the exclusive fault of one sex or the other. And yet compassion for the opposite sexs predicament is ever more difficult to muster.

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The cost of sexual liberation - UnHerd

Dan Bilzerian, the playboy gambler often hailed the King of Instagram, hasnt posted in months. His most recent Instagram post at time of writing, dated November 11, 2021, is a regram of a photo he originally shared to the platform in October 2018, reposted three years later in promotion of his new book, The Setup.

Bilzerian rose to Instagram fame in the mid-2010s, when social media stardom was the most novel, increasingly coveted kind of fame there was what reality TV was to aspiring stars in the early aughts. Documenting his enviable if often controversial lifestyle of sex, drugs and money to tens of millions of followers, Bilzerian successfully parlayed the niche notoriety and fame-adjacency of his poker career into full-fledged fame (or infamy, depending whom you ask) of his own.

To say Bilzerians time in the social media spotlight hasnt been without controversy would be an understatement; one might argue shit-stirring is his raison dtre. In addition to proudly showing off his sprawling collection of guns and nearly nude women on Instagram behaviors that would be enough to get much bigger celebrities barred from the limelight a series of unsavory incidents have defined Bilzerians career from the beginning. There was, of course, the time he was accused of kicking a woman in the face at a nightclub in Miami back in 2014. Then there was that time he got sued for throwing a model off of a roof, just to name two of the most notable episodes that have become Bilzerian legend. (Bilzerian, for his part, has repeatedly claimed that both incidents were misconstrued and misrepresented, and says he hopes the version of those events he details in his book will finally set the record straight.)

More recently, Bilzerian has faced accusations of financial ruin after stock prices in his lifestyle brand Ignite weathered a sharp downturn following the companys public debut in 2019, posting $50 million in losses that year, according to Forbes. But, then, of course, the origins of his wealth have been disputed from the get-go. While Bilzerian, the trust-funded son of an exiled corporate raider, has long maintained he made his money gambling, accusations of generational wealth and even illegal funds funneled from his father have long plagued his independently wealthy image.

Despite (or perhaps thanks to) all the controversy, the 41-year-old still boasts nearly 33 million followers who are presumably waiting for their king to return with another glimpse into his aspirational lifestyle. So where is he?

For one thing, hes been busy writing that book, a process he compares to a two-year therapy session. A nearly 500-page tome, The Setup is Bilzerians self-published ode to himself and the philosophy to which he attributes his success. Part memoir, part guide to achieving the Dan Bilzerian lifestyle in the spirit of Neil Strausss pickup artist bible The Game, the book is essentially an unexpurgated version of Bilzerians Instagram in print, complete with full-color photographs of the author surrounded by celebrities and a revolving cast of scantily clad women. Finally released late last year after several delays, the book was an arduous project (one the author candidly admits he did not find overwhelmingly enjoyable) that kept him busy for the better part of the past two years.

Also, he needed a break. It turns out that even those whose only job is the pursuit of hedonism are not immune to burnout.

I just lived in the circus for so long that I kind of just I really needed a break, Bilzerian tells InsideHook. If theres one thing hes learned over the course of his high-octane lifestyle, its that every high be it money, drugs or social media stardom eventually burns out.

For Bilzerian, social media was only ever a game. He likens his initial pursuit of Instagram fame to a social experiment, and its a game hes already won. Ive said this before, but I feel like its like a video game that I beat five years ago and Im tired of playing it, he says.

Instagram, the platform largely responsible for his rise to mainstream fame, gets a barely two-page chapter in The Setup, in which the social media star recalls making his now-famous account in May of 2012, originally for the purpose of attracting more sex with less effort. (One thing readers of Bilzerians memoir will learn, if they somehow werent already aware, is that his primary motivation in any endeavor is almost always either sex, money or power typically one in pursuit of the other, occasionally one at the expense of another.)

A few years later, growing increasingly weary of the gamblers lifestyle, Bilzerian decided to launch his growing Instagram presence into full-blown fame. But fame, too, was just another game for him.

I just wanted to see if I could become famous, he says. It was like a mountain I wanted to climb. I was getting out of poker and I felt like this would be a good transition to open doors, to do other things.

Flash forward a few years and several million followers, and Bilzerians reached that summit. I feel like Ive done everything. I feel like I did all the things that I wanted to do that people would find impressive, he says. So Ive been more focused recently on just kind of living in the moment and having fun versus trying to show everybody that Im having fun.

The downside of fame is you have to keep feeding the beast, and doing anything thats not explicitly for the sake of his own pleasure has always been the antithesis of the Dan Bilzerian brand. If Bilzerian wanted money which he freely admits he did, does and to some extent always will it was mostly because he wanted freedom. (And women, yes, but also, by extension, the freedom to fuck the women of his choosing.) One of my life aspirations was to have that freedom, and I felt like money was a pathway to get that, he says. I felt like the more money I had, the less I put up with, the more personal freedom I had and the less impact anybody else could have on me.

The Setup is, of course, the unabashed tale of sex, drugs and wealth Bilzerian fans and detractors alike would expect you dont have to look too far on the internet to find someone claiming the mere thought of a Dan Bilzerian book is enough to make them want to unlearn the English language but it is also a philosophy. The setup, as Bilzerian defines it, is strategy, the act of stacking the odds in your favor. Life is a game, he writes in the epilogue. Like any game, you must have a good strategy to win. The implementation of that strategy is called the setup, and it paves the road to success.

That strategy, as Bilzerian demonstrates throughout his memoir, can be applied to everything from the pursuit of pussy to the pursuit of wealth. Its fundamentally self-centered and self-serving, and it works, because Bilzerian understands how the world does. Like so many of its most successful inhabitants including many of the fellow unfiltered antagonists with whom Bilzerian has crossed paths hes not trying to fight the system; hes just trying to play it to his advantage. His methods may not be particularly well-received in todays social climate entire listicles have been penned advising women to avoid dating men who even follow Bilzerian but it does work. Bilzerian and his lifestyle are certainly proof of that, which is precisely what makes him so annoying.

Image Courtesy of Dan Bilzerians Managing Team

But if Bilzerian is an antagonist, that too seems to have been by design. Thats part of the setup he employed in building his particular brand of celebrity. Because Bilzerians platform has always been based on unfiltered, devil-may-care displays of authenticity, he was fundamentally uncancellable before being canceled was a thing.

Why? Because I dont need anything, he says without a hint of arrogance, because its true. Bilzerian doesnt have to put up a front of security or confidence; he has everything, and somehow nothing to lose.

Compared to a celebrity like The Rock, whom Bilzerian himself offers up for comparison, he has nothing at stake thanks to the aberrant nature of his fame, wealth and personal brand. I dont work for anybody. Im not going to work for anybody. I dont care if I dont get a movie role, says Bilzerian. I made my money in such an unorthodox manner. When youre making your money gambling, its kind of like, nobodys your boss. Nobody can tell you what to do.

Combine that kind of no-strings cashflow with the antagonistic, tells it like it is persona Bilzerian rode to fame, and he remains virtually untouchable: If youre independently wealthy and youve got all your money, then what the fuck does it really matter? If you accept the fact that people are going to hate you or whatever and you just want to live your life, then people cant really affect you.

Of course, whether or not Dan Bilzerian is actually independently wealthy remains a topic of perennial debate. In The Setup, he attributes the cash he used to start his poker career to disability checks and GI Bill money he had on hand after being honorably discharged from a four-year stint in the Navy between high school and college. According to the author, he used the spare cash to get into online gambling as a college student, briefly went broke, then got back on his feet during a make-or-break trip to St. Petersburg. After winning $10,000, he bought a one-way ticket to Vegas, and the rest is history.

It remains a somewhat vague, ultimately unprovable account of his wealth, one that will undoubtedly still leave its origins subject to skepticism. But wherever his money came from, be it his father or his gambling, its certainly not a form of wealth that depends on public approval.

Even in an era of cancel culture (to whatever extent one is inclined to entertain or acknowledge that term) that sees far bigger stars condemned for far fewer and less egregious indiscretions than the ones that made Bilzerian famous, no one is going to bother asking him for an apology.

I dont think you gain that much in this society by apologizing. I see a lot of these people, they apologize and then the mob eats them up anyways, he says. They havent really asked me for an apology, but if they did, Id tell them to go fuck themselves. Unless it was something that I legitimately felt sorry for, and then I would happily apologize.

But even while the kind of uniquely untouchable fame Bilzerian has cultivated can be a conduit to certain forms of freedom, it is still, as Lady Gaga once said, a prison. While the independently wealthy Bilzerian may not have any wolves at the door to stave off, he does still have obligations to a devoted fandom and the brand they support.

After reaching a certain level of social media fame, Bilzerian branched out into business as the founder/CEO of Ignite, a lifestyle brand originally specializing in cannabis before pivoting to focus on CBD, nicotine and alcohol. And with a lifestyle brand based on your own life comes pressure to maintain that lifestyle. At this point, Bilzerian knows there are certain things fans and consumers expect from him, whether or not theyre things hes still interested in himself.

I do think that a part of what people respect about me is the fact that Ive been able to really succeed with women and have this lifestyle that most people cant attain, says Bilzerian. Thats kind of what I built my following on. So its tough because Im in this spot where its like, do I want to give people what they want and further the brand, or do I kind of want to be more true to myself?

For someone like Bilzerian, its a harder question than it would be for most. On the one hand, his brand has always been about unapologetically advancing his own personal gain. On the other, its also always been about authenticity. If Dan Bilzerian is no longer personally interested in promoting that lifestyle on Instagram, then his brand falls apart.

My Instagrams always been based on being authentic and doing what I want to do. And so I dont really want to sway too far from that, he says. So I just havent been posting, honestly.

In The Setup, Bilzerian devotes the first half or so of the book to his childhood and pre-gambling years, including his pre-collegiate stint in the military. Its a bit of a riches-to-more-riches story, though Bilzerian does seem to attempt, at times, to downplay the wealth into which he was born. (His parents may have had money, but unlike their neighbors and fellow country clubbers, they didnt necessarily waste funds on looking or acting the part. His mother drove a Jeep even though she could have afforded a luxury vehicle, so Bilzerian was bullied by his more obviously rich peers. And, sure, he had a trust fund, but he didnt even have access to it before his 30s, and by then it had depleted by several millions thanks to his fathers multiple brushes with white-collar crime.) But if theres one thing Bilzerian seems to have learned throughout a privileged yet certainly challenging childhood that saw him frequently shuffled between different schools, its the power of anonymity and reinvention. Constantly starting over at a new school gave Bilzerian the opportunity to repeatedly reinvent himself, a superpower he carried into the many iterations of his adult life.

Readers of The Setup watch Bilzerian evolve from rich kid to military piss-on to man about campus to millionaire gambler to social media star. But once he set his sights on that final goal, fame, its possible Bilzerian may have forfeited the power of reinvention that anonymity fosters.

Well see where we go from here, he says. I think I have to do certain things to promote Ignite, to kind of give people some of the aspirational lifestyle stuff that they want. But at the same time, I have a little burnout on the circus aspect of it.

The Setup ends with Bilzerians final party (for now) in October 2019. By that point, after years as Instagrams reigning king of hedonism, My plan to go bigger was over, he writes. Id finally hit the ceiling.

It turns out even Dan Bilzerian or, perhaps, especially Dan Bilzerian cant escape the bottomless pit that is human desire. The less you have, the easier it is to believe in some threshold of enough-ness, some magic number or amount of whatever it is (money, love, fame, success) that will transform the agony of want into perpetual satisfaction. But want is a void; the more you feed it, the bigger it gets.

Having objectives like money, pussy and power will never lead to happiness, Bilzerian writes toward the end of The Setup. No matter how much you have, you always want more. Its like trying to fill a black hole. You cant fill a black hole. These things are infinite and endless traps.

It may not be a terribly groundbreaking moral for a story to end on, but its one Bilzerian feels hes in a unique position to convey. I got to a point where I eventually realized that, like, okay, Ive got all the girls and all the money. But it was just pleasure spikes, it wasnt happiness, he says. When youre chasing something thats never going to make you happy, the sooner you can stop, the sooner youll probably find happiness.

Since taking a step back from the pleasure void, Bilzerian has maintained a relatively lower profile, despite still navigating some bad press. He posts less. He spends more time with friends. He wrote the book. And the infamous womanizer says he even dabbled in monogamy for a couple of years.

Still, hes got an image to uphold and a brand that depends on it. Fame may have only been another game for Bilzerian, but its proving a difficult one to walk away from, even if hes already won it.

Once the genies out of the bottle, you cant really put him back in, he says. But at the same time, look, I made my bed. I got to sleep in the motherfucker.

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Where Has All the Dan Bilzerian Gone? - InsideHook

The simplest theory of human nature is hedonism we pursue pleasure and comfort. Suffering and pain are, by their very nature, to be avoided. The spirit of this view is nicely captured in The Epic of Gilgamesh: Let your belly be full, enjoy yourself always by day and by night! Make merry each day, dance and play day and night For such is the destiny of men. And also by the Canadian rock band Trooper: Were here for a good time / Not a long time / So have a good time / The sun cant shine every day.

Hedonists wouldnt deny that life is full of voluntary suffering we wake up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, take the 8.15 into the city, undergo painful medical procedures. But for the hedonist, these unpleasant acts are seen as the costs that must be paid to obtain greater pleasures in the future. Challenging and difficult work is the ticket to survival and status; boring exercise and unpleasant diets are what you have to go through for abs of steel and a vibrant old age, and so on.

Plainly theres something right here. Nobody could doubt we possess drives for food, sex, status and much else and that much of our suffering is chosen with these ends in mind.

But I think hedonism is an awful theory. My latest book, The Sweet Spot: Suffering, Pleasure, and the Key to a Good Life, makes the case for a different theory of what people want. I argue that we dont only seek pleasure, we also want to live meaningful lives and this involves willingly experiencing pain, anxiety, and struggle. We see value in chosen suffering.

After all, people willingly climb mountains, run marathons, or get punched in the face in gyms and dojos. Others, mostly young men, choose to go to war and, while they dont wish to be maimed or killed, they are hoping to experience challenge, fear and struggle to be baptised by fire, to use the clichd phrase. Some of us choose to have children, and usually we have some sense of how hard it will be; maybe we even know of all the research showing that, moment by moment, the years with young children can be more stressful than any other time of life, (And those who dont know this ahead of time will quickly find out.) and yet we rarely regret our choices.

Strangely enough, then, we often choose to suffer. A better story of our nature was nicely expressed in the movie The Matrix, where Agent Smith tells Morpheus how the world they are experiencing a simulation created by malevolent computers came to be: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the programme, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

Why would we ever choose to suffer? Sometimes, as a hedonist would tell you, its for the sake of tangible goals. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and even help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals it can display how tough we are or serve as a cry for help. Unpleasant emotions, such as fear and sadness, are part of play and fantasy and can provide moral satisfaction. And effort and struggle and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow.

But theres more. The economist George Loewenstein gives the example of serious mountaineering. The pleasures here are not obvious, to say the least; rather, it seems to be unrelenting misery from end to end. Diaries and journals by climbers talk about relentless cold (often leading to frostbite and loss of extremities, or death), exhaustion, snow-blindness, altitude sickness, sleeplessness, squalid conditions, hunger, fear There is constant craving for food. And there is boredom: On a typical ascent, the vast majority of time is spent in mind-bogglingly monotonous activities for example, being weathered out for many hours in a small smelly tent crammed in with other climbers. Climbers describe their experiences as lonely and alienating, spending days and weeks in bitter silence, with disagreements that dont get smoothed over. And yet people do it, and then do it again and again, getting some satisfaction that doesnt reduce in any real way to pleasure.

Apparently, then, for at least some of us, a life well lived is more than a life of pleasure and happiness. I side with the economist Tyler Cowen, who wrote: Whats good about an individual human life cant be boiled down to any single value. Its not all about beauty or all about justice or all about happiness. Pluralist theories are more plausible, postulating a variety of relevant values, including human wellbeing, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy, and the many different and, indeed, sometimes contrasting kinds of happiness. Life is complicated.

Alongside pleasure, there is a desire for meaningful pursuits. If this motivation is unsatisfied, life feels incomplete. This tweet, from Greta Thunberg, captures a pretty typical reaction to finding meaning in ones life: Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didnt speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.

Viktor Frankl came to a similar conclusion. In his early years as a psychiatrist in Vienna, in the 1930s, Frankl studied depression and suicide. During that period, the Nazis rose to power, and they took over Austria in 1938. Not willing to abandon his patients or his elderly parents, Frankl chose to stay, and he was one of the millions of Jews who ended up in a concentration camp first at Auschwitz, then Dachau. Ever the scholar, Franklstudied his fellow prisoners, wondering about what distinguishes those who maintain a positive attitude from those who cannot bear it, losing all motivation and often killing themselves.

He concluded the answer is meaning. Those who had the best chance of survival were those whose lives had broader purpose, some goal or project or relationship, some reason to live. As he later wrote (paraphrasing Nietzsche): Those who have a why to live, can bear with almost any how.

As a psychiatrist, Frankl was interested in mental health. But his plea for a life of meaning a central part of the therapy he developed once he left the camps wasnt merely based on the notion that this would provide happiness or psychological resilience. He believed that this is the sort of existence we should want to pursue. He was sensitive to the distinction between happinessand what Aristotle described as eudaemonia literally good spirit, but referring to flourishing in a more general sense. It was eudaemonia that mattered to Frankl.

How do we get from meaning to suffering? There is a wealth of scientific evidence suggesting a connection. Individuals who say their lives are meaningful report more anxiety and worry and struggle than those who say that their lives are happy. The countries where citizens report the most meaning tend to be poor ones where life is relatively difficult. (In contrast, the countries with the happiest people tend to be prosperous and safe.) The jobs that people say are most meaningful, such as being a medical professional or a member of the clergy, often involve dealing with other peoples pain. And when asked to describe the most meaningful experiences of our lives, we tend to think about those on the extremes, very pleasant and very painful.

Its not that we seek out suffering. Rather, we seek out meaning and purpose. But part of meaning and purpose is difficulty anxiety, stress, conflict, boredom, and often physical and emotional pain. We choose pursuits we know will test us training for a marathon, raising children, climbing Everest because we know at a gut level that these are the pursuits that matter.

After all, wouldnt a life without some suffering ultimately be boring? Ill end with another origin story, this one from Alan Watts, the British philosopher and popular interpreter of Zen Buddhism.

Watts begins by asking you to imagine that you are able to dream about whatever you want, with perfect vividness. Given this power, you could, in a single night, have a dream that lasted 75 years. What would you do? Obviously, he says, youd fulfil all your wishes, choose every sort of pleasure. It would be a hedonistic blowout.

Then suppose you can do it again the next night, and then the next, and the next. Soon, Watts says, you would say to yourself: now lets have a surprise, a dream which isnt under control, where something is gonna happen to me but I dont know what its gonna be.

And then you would continue to gamble, adding increasing add risk, uncertainty, ignorance, deprivation. You would put obstacles in your way, obstacles you might not be able to overcome, until finally you would dream the dream of living the life you are actually living today.

Is your life right now with its difficulty and struggle, worry and loss the best that life can be? Probably not. But Wattss fantasy is close enough to the truth to be profound.

The Sweet Spot: Suffering, Pleasure and the Key to a Good Life by Paul Bloom is published by Bodley Head at 20. Buy it for 17.40 at guardianbookshop.com

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Hedonism is overrated to make the best of life there must be pain, says this Yale professor - The Guardian

Were already three quarters of the way through DIYs Hello 2022 - a dizzying four-night run through 16 buzzy new artists destined to give you ultimate I was there cred in years to come - but the vibes arent letting up at Londons Old Blue Last. In fact, tonight, the venues live room is packed to capacity before the first band even steps on stage, with a queue steadily snaking through the venue for the rest of the evening.

Not to rub it in for the latecomers left outside, but the nights line up - from more cerebral beginnings to full on club-ready bangers by the end - is a four-for-four winner that overflows with audible potential. Its opened by Manchesters Mewn, who might not be the most bolshy band on the bill but create a more mature kind of confidence - singer Daniel Bluer helming a set that nods to the sweeping, emotional crescendos of Arcade Fire crossed with a sort of earthy Elbow-ness. The likes of twinkling closer Im Only Talking are more likely to waltz you around the floor than create a mosh pit in the middle of it, but Mewn still experiment: not least via their guitarist, who sporadically begins playing her guitar with a screwdriver for optimum tremor.

Old Blue Last, are you ready to rock?! Im on top form tonight baby! declares wild-eyed Keg frontman Albert Haddenham midway through the bands following set. He may not be humble, but hes also not wrong: a madcap bunch that come on like Squid channelling the reckless abandon of Sports Team, tonight the Brighton band and their irrepressible leader are utterly magnetic. Contorting and punching his way around the tiny portions of stage not filled by the six other band members, Haddenham spends the next 30 minutes lyrically lambasting Michael McIntyre one moment and seemingly speaking in tongues the next; musically, theyre all yelping, loose-limbed indie-art-punk fun. Keg, you sense, are going to have a very good 2022.

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Night 3 of Hello 2022 delivers hits & hedonism from The Umlauts, English Teacher & more - DIY Magazine

Bless Olly Alexander. Its not easy to be the newly-minted emblem of queer activism in mainstream pop, while also keeping a legion of teenage girls giddily bopping along to your every tune. Doing this while charting a credible creative trajectory that will ensure longevity is a heavy lift, even for the most seasoned and confident of artists. Emboldened by considerable swagger, the talented but still evolving 31-year-old takes a bold swing at all three on the third Years & Years album, Night Call, a trend-savvy dance-pop collection,with results that succeed and confound in equal measure.

After the 2021 departure of Mikey Goldsworthy and Emre Trkmen, Y&Y is no longer a band, but rather a brand for Alexanders solo musings. Its a wise move that not only allows him to trade in on the established familiarity of Y&Y, but also to conjure an image that matches the sonic bombast of Night Call with Alexander cleverly casting himself as the charismatic, larger-than-life frontman.

This album marks Alexanders return to recording after a four-year break that included starring in the acclaimed television drama Its A Sin, which told the story of Aidss impact on 1980s Britain. Its a role that merged his sizeable pop following of over nine million monthly Spotify listenerswith a larger audience. Y&Y was formed in 2010, coming into prominence in 2015 with the chart topping album Communion, which was the years fastest-selling debut by a band. It spawned the No. 1 smash King, as well as Shine, which peaked at No 2 on the charts. The 2018 follow-up, Palo Santo, was a top 10 success that included the hit singles Sanctify and If Youre Over Me.

It seems that the experience of fronting Its A Sin has matured Alexanders lyrical point-of-view. Songs such as the stand-outs Immaculate and Make It Out Alive meditate on the experiences of hedonism and sex through a knowing lens of consequence and danger. On Communion and Palo Santo, elements of sexuality often felt like extraneous interludes of titillation.

Here, Alexander is palpably aware that his community of LGBTQ+ people are now paying close attention. The margin for getting it wrong with a misstep is smaller, and hints of timidity can be felt on the notably self-conscious tracks Sweet Talker and Crave, both of which employ empty-calorie clichs instead of the primal seduction that both songs imply. That said, when he gets it right, as he does on Reflections, with its cynical negotiation of a one-night stand, Alexander proves his skill as a writer and vocalist of formidable power.

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Years & Years, Night Call, review: Olly Alexander turns the hedonism up loud - Telegraph.co.uk

Without decadence, the bulk of our most beloved rock icons would have dressed, behaved, and created very differently. This short-lived 19th century artistic and literary movement celebrated an aesthetic founded on an ideology of excess, hedonism and intentional artificiality employing a combination of juvenile humour, subtle eroticism, and scepticism to rupture Victorian conservative attitudes. A century later, this iconoclastic and yet strangely elitist group of writers, poets, and novelists would go on to inspire the creative world view of some of rocks most innovative performers, and none more so than the late great David Bowie.

In the 1890s, the decedent movement was burning with the utmost intensity in British culture, largely thanks to its iconoclastic and scandalous central figure, Oscar Wilde. Decadence rejected the didactic Victorian view that art should serve some moral purpose and instead celebrated the intense sensations that art and creativity invoked. This belief led to the formation of the central mantra at the heart of the decadent movement: Art for arts sake. This stance earned the likes of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and others a reputation for sexual and moral degeneracy, and, before long, the bright green flame of decadence was extinguished, leaving in its wake some of the most subversive worked of art and literature ever to emerge from the British isles, including Wildes The Picture Of Dorian Grey, and Beardsleys illustrations for The Yellow Book which itself was revered as something of a handbook by followers of the movement.

So how did this group of Fin de sicle artists inspire Bowie and his contemporaries? Well, in order to answer that question, its important to remember that it was only in the 1980s that decedent literature began appearing on the school syllabus. Such was the scandalous legacy of Wildes famed homosexuality. As Kate Hext, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter explained in the In Our Time podcast: The decedent movement wasnt part of the formal syllabus until the last couple of decades or so. And I think that allowed decadence and decedent writers to retain this image of bad boys and bad girls of literature. I think the fact that writers like Wilde werent claimed by the burgeoning English literature degree problem in the 1960s and 70s allowed them this sort of image as being outside the establishment.

For ambitious young creatives like Bowie, the likes of Wilde and Beardsley were inextricably linked to the notion of Bohemia. Their outsider status made them the perfect archetypes for the fledgling pop generation of the 60s and 70s providing a model of subversion in this tumultuous era of social and artistic upheaval. Bowies earliest incarnations especially his Ziggy Stardust alter ego saw him embrace not only the artifice of the decadent movement but also the dandyism of its most essential innovator, Oscar Wilde. While they belonged to completely different societies, their fashions served the same dual purpose: to draw attention to themselves and to undermine perceived gender norms.

Like the decedent writers and artists, Bowie also embraced popular culture while simultaneously treating it with contempt. While writers like Donald Firbank whose favourite record was, famously, Yes, we have no Bananas -found early jazz to be a well of inspiration, Bowie drew on everything from novelty records and music hall to funk and disco to shift his style into new and exciting directions. As Kext, notes, the Decedent writers embrace what other people would see as popular degenerate culture, using it as a means of exploring and expanding high art.

However, decedent artists often treated popular culture with disdain, Wilde especially. His work frequently celebrates elitism and spurns the mediocrity of the masses; portraying their culture as a den of sickness, rottenness, decay, and amorality. In this sense decadence, like rock, and, perhaps more obviously, punk, is founded on a self-devouring impulse. Perhaps the most prominent example of this paradoxical aesthetic Bowies work is his 1976 album Station to Station an album recorded when the star was living the sordid and strangely glamorous life of an archetypal Decedent man. In that album, he seems to recognise his own inflated ego, equating it to the bloated state of modern rock. In many ways, Station to Station is Bowies most Decadent record, painting a portrait of a man whose artistic pursuits look ridiculous when contrasted with the ongoing recession pulling the real world limb from limb, but who cannot quite detach himself a desire to escape that world and flee into a realm of fantasy.

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How the debauchery of the decadent movement inspired David Bowie - Far Out Magazine

Sir Julian Brazier is a former Defence Minister, and was MP for Canterbury from 1987-2017.

In the background to the unhappy struggles in the Conservative Party today is a philosophical clash in which the voices of libertarians are loudest. While (mostly) still supporting the man, their accusation is that the Johnson government has abandoned liberty.

These voices call for much that traditional small c conservatives should agree with a smaller state, lower taxes, less regulation but their message carries at its heart a deeply unhelpful strand which would be bad for the country, and calamitous for the Partys prospects of staying in power.

Our most important domestic challenge today is reining back public expenditure so we can lower taxes on struggling families. Government spending is the highest proportion of GDP since the aftermath of the Second World War.

Where I part company from my libertarian friends is that I believe it is time we acknowledged that one of the hidden drivers of runaway public spending is libertarianism itself and its left-wing cousin, the human rights lobby. Both stress freedom and gloss over the responsibilities and consequences which should come with it.

John Stuart Mill formulated the paradox of hedonism: those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.

Similarly, the paradox of liberty is that we can only attain true freedom and a smaller state, if we focus not on selfish individualism but instead on nurturing and rebuilding those natural structures and attitudes which reduce the need for the services of the state. This requires active citizens, robust families, stronger communities and a sense of nationhood. These were themes of the late, great, Sir Roger Scruton.

One of his favourite examples were the American laws which allowed people, in most places, to build freely where they wanted, but then required the American taxpayer to expend huge sums taking roads and power to them. This has created a nightmare of ever-expanding suburbs with social black holes in town centres and heavy government spending.

More broadly, he attacked the growing wish for extending freedoms without accepting any corresponding responsibilities, even crucially where there are heavy costs to the taxpayer and wider community (including later generations).

There is a parallel with Britains NHS. The cost of NHS and social care has exploded to the point where some are claiming Britain is becoming a health and social care system with a country attached. The Party is buzzing with ideas for reform of the NHS and social care from pruning expensive bureaucrats and tackling GP contracts, to moving towards an insurance-based system. Yet there is one way we could reduce NHS spending dramatically and improve productivity in the economy: by persuading millions of obese people to lose weight and the nation to become fitter.

Scandinavian countries adopted a wide range of contrasting approaches to Covid but, with their much fitter populations, all suffered far lower rates of Covid deaths, and lower pressures on their health systems. Indeed, the Swedish approach was never an option here because our large population of obese people would have brought the NHS down.

The impact of Britains obesity, the worst in Europe (apart from Malta), goes far beyond Covid. A range of illnesses from cardiovascular conditions to arthritis to diabetes are made both more likely and more dangerous by obesity and also drive up the cost of the NHS.

Yet libertarians oppose measures to incentivise fitness, from sugar taxes to public health campaigns (what they call the Nanny State). Meanwhile the human rights lobby screams against fat-shaming even in professions (such as the Army and the Police) where fitness is self-evidently important.

So, yes to lower taxation in general. But yes also to taxes targeting unhealthy foods and to tax breaks for gym subscriptions.

A parallel example is opposition to so-called Covid passports. Most of the Covid deaths, for some time now, have been among the unvaccinated. All Conservatives should wish to raise restrictions as quickly as possible. Indeed, the noisy lobby calling until recently for the re-imposition of Covid restrictions was mostly on the Left, but the circumstances which have underpinned their case the existence of large numbers who refuse to vaccinate and get sick is ignored by libertarians and the human rights lobby.

By contrast, millions of Britons saw nothing wrong with those who choose to be refuseniks paying some price (in terms of minor inconvenience) for their potential impact on the NHS. Even as we manage to ease out of the last parts of lockdown, protecting the short-term liberties of the refusenik minority has consequences, not just for public spending, but also for many who have other life-threatening conditions over which unlike the refuseniks they have no choice. Sick refuseniks are occupying beds desperately needed by other sick people.

A broader example is attitude to the family. Individualists on left and right campaigned successfully a generation ago for the virtual end to restrictions on divorce and the end of allocation of fault as a factor in child custody and the division of assets.

Today, attempts to reinforce traditional families are bitterly opposed by many the same people. Iain Duncan-Smiths radical reforms on social welfare reintroduced incentives to work, but he was consistently blocked in trying to remove disincentives for traditional families to stay together.

Yet the result of the decline of the traditional family is not just growing misery among children, with mental health, suicide, self-harm and drug-taking all on the rise and mostly higher than other European countries. It is also extremely expensive for the taxpayer as social security spending and the requirement for police officers, social workers, prison officers and childrens mental health staff grows. Studies consistently show that stable two parent families offer on average the best outcomes for children and family breakdown has an immediate cost to the benefit system.

If the state can encourage responsible personal choices and the rebuilding of those Burkean structures, from the family to the community to a sense of shared nationhood, expenditure can fall as the use of the safety net declines. If, on the other hand, choices which lead to mounting bills for the taxpayer are protected on the basis that We are not a country which asks to see papers, the size of the state will expand as the safety net gets more and more crowded.

Scruton once commented When government creates an unaccountable class it exceeds its remit, by undermining the relation on which its own legitimacy depends. In courser terms, people hate a freeloaders charter; rights should be balanced by responsibilities.

Boris Johnson led us out of the European Union. The next moves we take should seek to re-establish that balance. So, yes to reducing regulation (such as the Clinical Trials Directive which destroyed East Kents biggest employer). Yes to making strategic choices to cut public spending and taxation (a smaller university sector, an end to the triple lock for pensions?). Yes to forging new global trade and wider partnerships.

But lets have an end to the suggestion by so many of the Prime Ministers critics that a combination of offering freedom, alongside state-funded protection from the consequences, will capture the hearts of the British people.

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Julian Brazier: Meet a hidden driver of a bigger state, higher taxes and more regulation the libertarian movement - ConservativeHome