Your bag is empty.
In 1973, revered author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sat down for the Playboy Interview, a chance for the Slaughter House Five writer to expound on his writing process, his time serving in World War II, and even his thoughts on the “extremely satisfactory orgasm” that is a space-shuttle launch.
In his interview with Playboy‘s David Standish, Vonnegut also managed to predict a very modern phenomenon: looksmaxxing. The pair got on the subject of drugs, and Vonnegut said that people had started creating community around it. He took that as evidence of human resourcefulness—a solve to the problem of ugliness.
“Thousands of people in our society found out they were too stupid or too unattractive or too ignorant to rise. They realized they couldn’t get a nice car or a nice house or a good job,” Vonnegut said. “Not everybody can do that, you know. You must be very pleasant. You must be good-looking. You must be well connected. And they realized that if you lose, if you don’t rise in our society, you’re going to live in the midst of great ugliness, that the police are going to try to drive you back there every time you try to leave.”
Vonnegut went on to describe how ugliness trapped you, and drugs offered not just mind-altering experiences, but body-altering ones as well. They were a way out.
Vonnegut’s theory on drugs as a way out of ugliness sounds a lot like the practice of those like Clavicular or Androgenic, looksmaxxers who go to extreme lengths to, well, not be ugly. Born from online incel communities, looksmaxxers operate under the idea that conventional physical attractiveness is the only way to achieve success in romance, career, and life in general. As their thinking goes, men can “ascend” from ugliness through a mind-bending series of supplements, drugs, surgeries, and other dubious (if not dangerous) practices.
Clavicular, king of the looksmaxxers, has admitted to using meth to slim down, and often livestreamed himself taking many drugs and supplements, sometimes all at once. In April, Clavicular reportedly suffered an overdose, after which he said he planned to take a break from drug use. In September, Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, was charged with the rape of a 17-year-old girl, and with drugging someone to facilitate sexual intercourse. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in October.
On the surface, Clavicular often claimed his substance use was in pursuit of physical attractiveness, which, he thinks, will help him achieve success. In a July interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Clavicular said physical attractiveness influences “every single micro interaction in your life.” The more content he puts out about looksmaxxing, Clavicular reasoned, the more men would realize that they need to follow suit to get the girl, the job, the life.
“If they’re not good-looking they’re not going to get the job,” Clavicular told Hannity. It sounds an awful lot like Vonnegut’s more eloquent statement: “Thousands of people in our society found out they were too stupid or too unattractive or too ignorant to rise. They realized they couldn’t get a nice car or a nice house or a good job.”
Vonnegut’s thoughts, and by extension, looksmaxxing, aren’t completely baseless. Study after study has found that conventionally attractive people achieve more career success, often out-earning less attractive people. But where Vonnegut and someone like Clavicular diverge on this is in the outcome. Per Clavicular, drugs are a way to get out of ugliness for good, to “ascend” to new levels of attractiveness, and therefore success. But Vonnegut lays out a more likely scenario:
“So what can you do? You can change your mind. You can change your insides. The drug thing was a perfectly marvelous, resourceful, brave experiment. No government would have dared perform this experiment,” he said.” “It’s the sort of thing a Nazi doctor might have tried in a concentration camp. Loading everybody in block C up with amphetamines. In block D, giving them all heroin. Keeping everyone in block E high on marijuana—and just seeing what happened to them. But this experiment was and continues to be performed by volunteers, and so we know an awful lot now about how we can be changed internally. It may be that the population will become so dense that everybody’s going to live in ugliness, and that the intelligent human solution—the only possible solution—will be to change our insides.”
