There’s a Tide Pod Challenge kind of reckless stupidity to the internet steroid ethos exemplified in the Tren Twins, whose most popular videos include “Anabolic Grocery Haul and Workout” and “Mogging at Planet Fitness” (mogging is from AMOG, or alpha male of the group, and means “to dominate”). As of this writing, they’re in a spat with Canadian bodybuilder, fitness coach, and fake-natural-physique-debunker Greg Doucette. The twins allege he wrote them a shitty diet plan and sold them fake steroids. To observe influencers at work is to observe a living metaphor of civilization meeting its ignoble end, and you can only take so much before you need to click on the accounts of reply guys and wannabes, to console yourself with the thought that there isn’t that much worth saving. The libertarian principle is that people should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t harm others; the reality is that indulging idiocy debases society and is harmful to all; the deeper reality, to quote Paul Celan, is we really don’t know what counts, and getting your panties in a wad about these things is probably a waste of time.
With steroids, as with Covid-19, as with the factuality of the Holocaust or the shape of the earth, the superabundance of information available on the internet seems to have encouraged rather than inhibited error. As Adorno noted in his writings on astrology, individuals’ awareness of their dependence on knowledge systems that exceed their grasp is closely associated with authoritarian conformity; for the same reason, young steroid users, faced with the complexities of organic chemistry, are likely to turn away from the hundreds of studies on PubMed and seek out some loudmouth with nineteen-inch arms who tells them what they want to hear. Perhaps this is an occasion for harm reduction, for accepting the reality that some people want these drugs and will take them, and that society’s duty is to keep them safe as they do so. But harm reduction often errs in treating drug users as a static community, and in failing to acknowledge a relationship that would seem painfully obvious between increased tolerance and increased usage. Moreover, the harm reduction model ignores the depressing congruity between massive drug consumption and massive everything else in America. The painful truth is we are a gawdy, grotesque, gluttonous, self-destructive country that watches Botched, dips Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in Velveeta, rolls coal, and responds to the mass murder of children by buying the same gun they were killed with in record numbers. No amount of education, social spending, or rehab will make us behave. Not with steroids, not with anything else.
With steroids, as with Covid-19, as with the factuality of the Holocaust or the shape of the earth, the superabundance of information available on the internet seems to have encouraged rather than inhibited error. As Adorno noted in his writings on astrology, individuals’ awareness of their dependence on knowledge systems that exceed their grasp is closely associated with authoritarian conformity; for the same reason, young steroid users, faced with the complexities of organic chemistry, are likely to turn away from the hundreds of studies on PubMed and seek out some loudmouth with nineteen-inch arms who tells them what they want to hear. Perhaps this is an occasion for harm reduction, for accepting the reality that some people want these drugs and will take them, and that society’s duty is to keep them safe as they do so. But harm reduction often errs in treating drug users as a static community, and in failing to acknowledge a relationship that would seem painfully obvious between increased tolerance and increased usage. Moreover, the harm reduction model ignores the depressing congruity between massive drug consumption and massive everything else in America. The painful truth is we are a gawdy, grotesque, gluttonous, self-destructive country that watches Botched, dips Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in Velveeta, rolls coal, and responds to the mass murder of children by buying the same gun they were killed with in record numbers. No amount of education, social spending, or rehab will make us behave. Not with steroids, not with anything else.
. I am in agreement with you but so what in (add amt. Of millions of years) we will be here again! Cheers!
