Audio only:
In this episode Trent talks about how to overcome a forgotten “deadly sin”.
Transcript:
Trent:
In the year five 90, Pope Gregory, the Great popularized a list of sins we now call the seven deadly sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. But this developed from earlier deadly sinless, and in the process one sin was left out that we need to talk about because it’s incredibly common and incredibly dangerous. Now the deadliest sin is pride because when we have an inflated view of ourselves, we’re more likely to think as St. Thomas Aquinas might summarize, my will be done rather than thy will be done. But Bo Gregory’s list includes not just pride or superb but kenia, which means vain glory. In the fourth century, Saint Aus Pontus called this sin boasting and his student John Cassian called it Vag Gloria Vanity. A person engages in the sin of VA glory when he has an excessive desire for other people’s praise. This is often linked with pride, but VA glory is not the same thing as pride. For example, some people are so full of pride that they think everyone is beneath them so they don’t care about other people’s opinions or seek VA glory from them. But in many cases, pride and VA glory go hand in hand among younger people. You might call this sin main character syndrome. The term became popular as people who were isolated during the pandemic developed unhealthy inward perspectives as can be seen in this 2020 TikTok,
CLIP:
You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by.
Trent:
People with main character syndrome lack empathy toward others, always talk about themselves and demand other people praise them. Often through attention seeking social media behavior. What matters is how their story turns out, not anybody else’s because why would you care about the lives of extras in the movie of your life or NPCs in the personal role playing video game of your life? I mean, it’s not like those other people in the world are main characters in their own stories because as the 1986 film Highlander taught us, there can be only one and for our younger viewers, yes, that’s Mr. Crab. I ain’t paying you to play dress up. When a person suffers from main character syndrome, he sees other people as existing primarily for his own benefit and their usefulness is often harvested through the like and comment functions of social media. In fact, social media accounts are one of the primary reasons people with main character syndrome think that they’re always on a stage, are always in front of a camera because if they spend all their time on social media, they kind of are even worse.
This kind of vain glory has the tendency of encouraging other attention seeking deadly sins. For example, gluttony is the deadly sin of consuming an extreme amount of food that goes far beyond the good ends of nourishment and appreciation for well-cooked meals and social media tempts gluttons to double down on their eating because they feel good from the vain glory they receive when people congratulate them for their behaviors. The same thing happens when greedy people use social media to brag about their wealth. Wrathful people use it to attack others and sexually impure people use social media to boast about their attractiveness or their exploits. The influencer desire for VA glory also harms their own audience, like when the audience of greedy influencers experiences the deadly sin of envy or the audience of sexually impure influencers engages in the deadly sin of lust. Now, if you really want to be depressed about what sexually impure materials do to people, read the article link below that talks about the expensive gooning rigs.
Some men create that rival large video game or computer stations, but are built solely for solitary acts of sexual stimulation. The article’s called the Goon Squad Loneliness KO’s Next Frontier and the Dream of Endless Masturbation. But while some people turn inward through acts of self-stimulation to distract from the emptiness in their soul, other people turn outward and they seek vain glory to distract from that same emptiness. This is something I’ve noticed when it comes to the increasingly popular trend of look maxing among Gen Z men who go to great lengths to improve their appearance usually to attract women, and that’s okay as long as improving your appearance doesn’t become an all consuming idol. Obviously, many women suffer from this problem as well, and plastic surgery horror stories are a helpful warning about the price of vein glory. But now we’re seeing this disordered behavior among men. For example, one popular creator named Clavicular is obsessed with ranking people’s appearance and he talks about spending tens of thousands of dollars and using illegal drugs to look better.
CLIP:
How much is your jaw surgery? 30 5K Wait, is it true you do meth? I do meth, yes, so I do meth to basically suppress my appetite and try to get leaner.
Trent:
Let’s say you achieve your dream to max out your looks max. Then what? Eventually your looks are going to fade and from your perspective you’ll have nothing. Then a modern rendition of Proverbs 31 30 might say this charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but A looks max or who fears the Lord is to be praised? And of course there’s this piece of timeless wisdom.
CLIP:
Did you ever think that maybe there’s more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good looking,
Trent:
But you have some people in this community saying physical appearance is really all that matters. Clavicular even said he’d vote for Gavin Newsom because he MOGs JD Vance, who Clavicular said is so ugly. He’s subhuman.
CLIP:
JD Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom MOGs, he’s got a very short total facial width to height ratio. He’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like six three. Chad, it’s 2028. I’m voting for Gavin Newsom. You’re voting for Gavin Newsom. You can’t be that subhuman
Trent:
First voting for someone because they’re attractive is incredibly stupid. In the third century, the Roman army elevated a gigantic general named Maximus Thax to the role of emperor because he mugged everybody else. However, his awful policies led to the crisis of the third century and became a precursor to the fall of Rome. But clavicular has said even dumber, things like that. Charlie Kirk might not have been assassinated if he had been better looking.
CLIP:
Good looking people experienced something called the halo effect. So it’s quite possible that if Charlie were to be better looking, someone wouldn’t have hated him enough to assassinate him.
Trent:
This is why I was amused to see Clavicular go to a Juujitsu gym where one of the guys who was sick of his content decided to give him a free lesson.
CLIP:
What’s my rate? Clavicular? What’s my rate?
Trent:
Now, some people will say C clavicular is just trolling. People like Michael Knowles when he says JD Vance is subhuman, and it’s true. Many younger influencers will say outrageous things and dismiss criticism as the product of millennials and older generations simply being out of touch. But this kind of trolling is itself another example of the sin of vein glory. You’ve traded speech ordered towards truth for speech ordered towards attention, and in many cases it’s also an example of plausible deniability. An influencer says something the sick and demented members of his audience agrees with, and so he makes that part of his audience happy. Then when someone calls the influencer out for saying these horrible things, he says he’s just kidding LOL to appease the milder people he wants to keep in his coalition. Personally, I’ll stick with what the Bible says about this in Proverbs 26 18, like a madman who throws firebrands arrows and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, I am only joking. The desire for vain glory in the age of the internet has also made us miserable because we spend our time cultivating a persona instead of just living life. To understand that we need to go back in time and take a look at life before the internet.
CLIP:
Hey everybody, an old man’s talking.
Trent:
So yes, youngsters strap yourselves in as UNC tells you about the before times and it’s fitting. I’m using B roll from the 1995 Simpsons episode Lemon of Troy because in the year 1995, only 14% of adults were on the internet and 42% of adults didn’t even know what the internet was. Growing up in the mid nineties and early two thousands, our social interactions were primarily in person screens, supplemented that be at home console games. You played at a friend’s house or movie theaters you communally visited while hanging out at the mall. What are you guys doing at the mall today
CLIP:
Shopping and looking for boys? Same. I was supposed to meet someone looking for cute guys, absolutely nothing. Well, I come here just to scope out the babes, just to look around, see if there’s any girls around.
Trent:
In the early two thousands we started getting cell phones, but we didn’t live on our phones because they didn’t have cameras or internet access, and we didn’t live on the internet for two reasons. First, the internet was 17,000 times slower than it is today. It could take you 36 hours to download one gigabyte of files, whereas today that can be done in 36 seconds. So the real world moved faster than the online world. Second, social media didn’t exist. MySpace was launched in 2003 followed by Facebook for most college students in 2005. Even in my college years during this period, social media was still a helpmate to real world interactions like by seeing if someone was in a relationship or not. We didn’t live on social media. Instead, when we went on the internet, we felt like explorers in a vast wilderness. Some of it was bizarre or hilarious, some of it was scary, but we were the ones peering into the internet and using it.
However, for young people today, it’s the other way around the internet peers into them and us and uses us and going online doesn’t feel like being an explorer. It feels more like being a commuter who trudges into a virtual office and we go there not to get money, but to get dopamine hits from people liking our posts and photos, and then we try to minimize the pain we feel when we don’t get likes or when we get negative comments. That’s why it’s so sad to see women use social media like a diary which often ends up with their struggles being mocked and reposted in other contexts. As a result, we learned to live an insincere calculated online life where we put up a manufactured image for others and we always hide our true feelings so we aren’t considered cringe, and we do all that so we can get that sweet, sweet approval from anonymous avatars.
And it’s not just individuals doing this, it’s our entire culture. I watched a great YouTube video recently about why modern Christmas movies have not become classics like older Christmas films. That’s because a good Christmas movie must be sincere and even a bit cheesy. At the very least, it has to be vulnerable and the internet is not the place where you want to be vulnerable. Just compare the 2021 Home Alone sequel to the 1990 original, and you see how the modern sequel needs to rely on well, that happened. Humor whereas the original can shamelessly enjoy slapstick while dwelling in tender moments without any sense of irony. As that video noted in recent years, movies have embraced a Deadpool esque kind of humor that tries to beat critics to the punch by sarcastically being self-aware of things like cliche plot devices. Something similar happens to people who spend a lot of time on the internet where they use irony, sarcasm, or detachment from others to protect themselves from inhuman online behavior.
But after a while, this can lead to irony poisoning where the ironic front we put up to protect our self-esteem slowly begins to take over who we really are until we can’t tell the difference between our genuine beliefs and the ironic ones we post to own the haters. In extreme cases, evil, ironic humor can be fatal as can be seen in the New Zealand mosque shooter who started with sharing racist memes and devolved into killing 51 people, and now there are people who ironically play Roblox recreations of mass shootings like this one, thus perpetuating the cycle of irony poisoning. So how do we overcome the sin of Van Glory? Well, we shouldn’t run to the other extreme of vowing to never care what people think of us at all. St. Thomas Aquinas said, it is not a sin to be willing to approve one’s own good works.
For it is written in Matthew five 16, let your light shine before men not carrying what anybody else thinks can lead to the sin of pride and thinking you don’t need anybody else or at minimum it can just make you really weird or off-putting. Instead, we should prioritize the kinds of praise we receive and devote little attention to trivial praise, especially on social media. Instead, it’s a good idea to have a close circle of offline friends, mentors, or spiritual directors whose praise we should be proud of because it helps us stay the course in our spiritual life. And if we have a rich relationship with God where we care what he thinks above what creatures think, then we’re better able to put human praise in its proper place. But the devil is cunning. When some people turn to God to grow in holiness, they end up using religion to receive human praise.
That’s why our Lord warned about people who boast about fasting or prayer before men saying they have their reward. I like this quote about counterfeit piety attributed to Pope St. Leo the I counterfeit piety then walks in, he has his hands classed in apparently devout prayer and has multiple sets of rosary beads hanging from his belt, which jangle noisily. Despite his evident attempts to maintain a pious demeanor, his eyes constantly move about shiftly as if he’s keen to see whether or not anyone is looking at him. The problem of vain glory is that goodness is attractive and God wants us to do good, to be holy as he is holy. So when we are truly holy, people will praise us because they recognize God’s goodness on display. It’s why even secular people are drawn to the lives of the saints and praise them even if they might mock their theological beliefs.
We just have to be cautious and not hang onto the praise for too long, lest we become addicted to it for its own sake. For example, when people say a nice thing about a book I wrote, I usually say in response, praise be to God for how he used that book to bless you because God is the one doing the real work. I’m just along for the ride. Remember that our human accomplishments will be forgotten in the near future, but God will be known forever. St. Paul says in one Corinthians that God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not to bring to nothing, things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness, and sanctification and redemption.
Therefore, as it is written, let Him who boast, boast of the Lord. If people praise you for something joyfully receive the praise. It’s okay to feel good about it, but then immediately give the praise to God. Thank him for the thing you’ve been praised for. Pray for those who could be blessed by God. Do it all so that you don’t seek the praise for its own sake. Besides doing this makes us happier in the long run because then we aren’t trapped on a vainly glorious treadmill, always trying to get the next round of praises. Enduring joy comes from God’s praise to us as his obedient children, the joy that comes from hearing the only words that matter in this life. Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little. I will set you over much enter into the joy of your master. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.