David McElroy

What does it mean to be attractive? Why is one woman considered beautiful by almost everybody and another to be plain or even downright ugly? Why is one man seen as an attractive physical specimen and another seen as woefully lacking?

I’ve pondered this all my life, partly because I considered myself unattractive and wondered why. I couldn’t figure out why one arrangement of sizes and proportions and colors was considered an example of great beauty and others weren’t noteworthy.

I finally came to understand that some of it is biological and some of it is cultural. I don’t claim to have it all figured out, but I see that some standards persist over the centuries and others change with the fashions. And since a great part of it turns out to be subjective, I’ve been concerned about what various forms of media were teaching people to feel about themselves — based on arbitrary and fleeting beauty standards.

And just this week, I’ve realized that we have something new to worry about. With the rise of so-called “artificial intelligence” software, we are hard-coding current cultural preferences into software. And as AI software becomes more widespread and more influential, these subjective cultural standards are being injected into that software.

And more and more people are going to accept whatever this software says as objective truth — when it’s nothing but the collective biases of the people who trained the software. To test how this worked, I asked ChatGPT to tell me how attractive I am. And I was surprised by how it left me feeling.

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Donald Trump is the most effective agent of Marxist economics the United States has ever seen.

Let that sink in.

The president who is beloved by many who scream about the dangers of socialism and wave flags that say “Don’t Tread on Me” is dragging this country further into the economic worldview of Karl Marx than the Soviets ever dreamed possible. And what’s worse? His followers cheer him for it.

I know better than to think Trump is reading Das Kapital in the middle of the night. He probably couldn’t distinguish Karl Marx from Groucho Marx. But his policies — his economic instincts — align with the collectivist, central-planning ideals that defined Marx’s vision of how to run a society. The irony is grotesque. The former host of The Apprentice is becoming the accidental apprentice of Marx himself.

Let’s look at the facts.

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The letter came by email. No name. A subject that said only, “Hello from the Past.” Just a message from a ghost who knew how to open old wounds.

It was only three paragraphs long, but I kept coming back to the final sentences.

“I will always love the man who loved me best, even though you won’t believe that and even though I’m sure you feel nothing for me now,” the letter said. “I miss your love and attention more than anybody knows.”

There was no signature. No clue. Just quiet regret and longing, poured out across an anonymous digital connection. There was no anger. No accusation. I keep reading the words over and over, wondering which woman wrote them — and wondering why she needed to send this.

She said she had run across a photo of me online which had triggered old feelings. She said she tries not to think about me anymore.

“You’re still a fire that draws me and now I can’t touch that fire, so I shouldn’t even look and let myself be tempted,” she wrote. “I feel this mostly when it’s late at night and I allow my brain to stop processing the distractions of my normal life. It makes me feel the almost uncontrollable urge to pick up the phone and call you again, but I know you probably wouldn’t want me to do that and probably wouldn’t answer if I did call.”

But who is she?

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