Dimwit: Soccer players don't deserve to be paid that much for what they do. They just provide (lousy) entertainment, they don't do important things like what teachers, or garbage collectors, or plumbers do.
Midwit: Noooo you don't understand!! It's not about the usefulness of what they do, it's about network effects! It's about advertising and merchandise visibility! It's about the leverage of money! Investments are about what you get out of them, not what they are intrinsically worth!!
Highwit: The economy is utterly bullshit and doesn't favor real value. Soccer players don't deserve to be paid that much for what they do.
I had a brief stint as a teenager where I would defend soccer players for being paid that much, but then later on I realized that it was bullshit, and the dimwit opinion is indeed the correct one. Perhaps they cannot give satisfying defenses to their opinions, which is why the midwits end up winning the arguments, (something true in general) but they are right nonetheless.
The truth is that the economy is largely bullshit, especially in our times of late-stage capitalism where providing utilitarian value has given way to extracting as much money as possible from customers. The system could never promote real value, such as loving relationships, meaningful work, conscious freedom, health and artistic truth, just to name a few, but at least the early capitalist model led to products that were genuinely good and could easily last for decades. Now we have a system which is fundamentally unfulfilling and alienating at the foundation, and shoddy stuff that gets worse but adds more and more useless 'features' as a way to cover its gradual decline at the top. The worst of both worlds.
There are two main types of bullshit jobs: the ones that a lot of people have, which consist in pretending to do useful work in an incredibly bureaucratic environment, and which are on the way out, due to the inevitable decline on return on investment that complexity has, as Joseph Tainter argues in his book on collapse.
Then there are the bullshit jobs that are the subject here: the ones that don't provide any real value, but are dependent on the racket world that we live in to maintain themselves, which itself is contingent on the source of all rackets: the fact that the self-informed self cannot distinguish between real value (quality), and its surrogate versions. Hence, sports as a surrogate of meaning and belonging to a group. Hence, pornography as a surrogate of intimacy. Hence, social media as a surrogate of real relationships.
Advertising and marketing are about getting as much attention as possible on a given product and service, which is why they never appeal to the conscious, higher self that can steer our lives and make us truly mature, but rather appeal to the lowest common denominator, which is useful for both reaching a larger public, but also because inherently, you can only advertise what is legible. Qualities, as Darren Allen describes them 1, are inherently non-literal, which implies that they are non-legible. You cannot reduce beauty, freedom, love, or meaning to literal descriptions, though you can provide metaphors for them, or any other non-literal modes of expression, which express qualities through their paradoxical temporality, like how an entire story can express a higher form of morality than what mere formal statements can.
Thus, the things that are the most popular in their times are, with very few exceptions nowadays, the most legible, and the most salient to the unconscious self—pornographic essentially—which thereby guarantees that they contain little to no quality. This means that the jobs which pay the most are essentially the ones which have the least conscious quality to them: they are either in positions of power in the unconscious technological system, or they are high-ranking members of our "cultural" industry—actors, movie directors, top-level athletes, etc.—which necessarily favors popularity over artistic Truth. 2
The more undiscerning and unconscious our world becomes—a condition for the growth of complex technology—the more this void in quality grows at the top, but worryingly, becomes less and less apparent, because people equally become less and less discerning.
1 See his book Self and Unself for instance, though he describes that in much of his work too, for instance, his essay on Panjectivism
2 I have a frame which I have yet to write which would make this observation fit in quite nicely actually. On one side we have what I call the 'Pattern', the aspect of society which is focused on control, self-organization and efficiency. And on the other we have the 'Swarm', the aspect of society focused on hedonism and distraction. The former is the Orwellian type of dystopia, and the latter is the Brave New World type. The richest people are those who sit at the top of either side: the people who manage the systems of our world, or those who sit at the top of the pleasure-distraction complex. Both of those sides are fundamentally anti-consciousness and thus anti-good, their main concern is—whether the people taking part in them know it or not—the maintenance and perpetuation of the system, and the self-informed self which builds that system.
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Economics Sports Bullshiteconomy Racket
2026-05-28