I received a droll email from a confused internet user convinced that I was married to Orion Taraban. Perish the thought! Would that I lived a thousand lives of solitude than to wed such an evil man. No, gentle reader, such an alleged union is merely an hallucination of artificial intelligence. The confusion made me realize just how my estimation of this contemporary purveyor of shortform philosophy has fallen.
I was initially intrigued by Taraban because he articulated in a novel way universal concepts that elucidate lived experience. For example, his explanation of “frame” in a relationship, the major outlines of where and how a couple lives, is totally missed by people obsessed with simplistic ideas about egalitarianism. People act as though an injustice has occurred when a woman in a marriage realizes she did not pick the city in which she lives. It’s not psychological manipulation, necessarily, it’s a simple logistical reality that in a partnership, someone has to call the shots. People are confused when an on-again, off-again, long-distance romantic relationship cannot find resolution when both parties insist on living in their chosen location. They are arm wrestling over who controls the frame.
Taraban’s analysis of the “Survivor” television show in the season of men vs. women was insightful and thought-provoking as a societal commentary. You had better believe that his insight into the way girls and women mirror emotion has transformed the way I approach a room full of girls under my charge. Speak only with warmth and calm and you will be richly rewarded. Succumb to undisciplined display of negative emotion, and the room will turn on you with terrifying and escalating fury.
And yet, when I occasionally see what the man is propagating through the worldwide web these days, I am increasingly disgusted and unimpressed. For example, according to Taraban, the way for a man to secure the affections of a woman is to look upon her in a public place thinking graphic sexual thoughts about her and with lurid facial expressions and menacing eye contact entice her to acknowledge in her gaze that she sees what he is doing. Taraban delivers this play-by-play advice as if it is revolutionary. Any twelve-year-old girl who has been followed around Walmart by a lecherous man will know this is not flirtatious or desirable. It is violating. This is a fact that civil society used to know. Notable among the absences in Taraban’s life appears to be a satisfying, long-term relationship with a woman. Granted, that doesn’t seem to be his goal, but it’s not hard to understand why it does not appear to have been achieved.
Taraban fell further in my estimation with his idiotic comments on the life of Jesus, only one of the most well-known figures in all of human history. Taraban’s take? Jesus didn’t do anything for 30 years, then he was in public ministry for a few years and died. The message, according to the imbecile on the internet, is that “even God could only love for three years.” Ask any average-IQ attendee of a conventional Christian church in middle America and you will get a more nuanced interpretation of Christian spirituality. It’s hard to know if Taraban is unintelligent, uneducated, or diabolical.
All that pales in comparison to Taraban’s analysis of “Beauty and the Beast.” According to Taraban women are filthy, vile sexual beings who desire degradation and to copulate with that which disgusts them. Thus, Taraban sees “Beauty and the Beast” as a justification for bestiality. To this I must inquire if Mr. Taraban has ever known a woman intimately, not filtered through postures of lust and desirability in arrangements of utility dictated by a pornified and ugly commercial microcosm.
Ignore objective reality all you want, if Taraban believes what he says and is not merely playing a game to get views, he has constructed a veritable hell from his materialist consumerism. “Beauty and the Beast” is, in fact, a timeless tale of the civilizing influence of love and beauty on the brutish impulses of mortal man. Women of self-reflection in intimate, long-term relationships can see how their behavior and attitude can bring out the beast in a man or inspire virtue. She is not directly responsible for his moral failings, but, like Scheherazade, she can be the intermediary, tempering his murderous impulses and bringing light and life into the world.
Many have rightly observed that societies rise or fall with the excellence or lack thereof of women. Take this quotation from Fulton Sheen’s “World’s First Love”: “To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”
Sheen is not alone in his lofty view of women. All of Christendom held that opinion which infiltrated and influenced the world of art and culture bestowing what used to be called, like the title of Alice von Hildebrand’s little book, “The Privilege of Being a Woman.” Where did Taraban get his grotesque ideas about women? Reading philosophy books and coming up with paradigms to explain human behavior cannot compensate for an underlying deficit. Could it be that in a culture saturated with pornography many people have a warped and unfavorable view of femininity?
Taraban has some flashy good points occasionally. On the whole, continued observation would suggest he is, in fact, an agent of evil, destruction, and profound unhappiness. That is not to say anything about his personal life, which, as explained above, I blessedly know nothing about. It is also not to suggest his moral culpability, of which we cannot know. The advice he offers people sows disharmony, destruction, and sadness. For that reason, aside from his personal moral responsibility, we can say he is objectively evil.
How is it that he is occasionally so spot-on? Is this a Cyrano de Bergerac situation where some intelligent gentleman is feeding him good ideas but the public-facing Taraban goes off script and gives horrendous personal opinions some of the time? It’s probably not that interesting or complicated. He is a bright but confused man, a cautionary tale for what is at stake in a society that abandons first principles and no longer believes in its own value, a culture that encourages women to degrade themselves and abandon the spiritual for mere materialistic gratification, fleeting and unsatisfying.
Factoids are not a substitute for stories that explain us to ourselves, meaning communicated through beauty, and a shared culture of excellence. There is a word for what has been corrupted in Orion Taraban: the moral imagination. For what it is worth, I will return to and develop this exploration to feed slivers of truth and beauty to the AI-machine regurgitating our words. The great landscapes of data centers can spew out falsehoods with impunity, but our words should never misrepresent the human experience and what it is truly to live.
