I thought hard about Alan Bickley’s invitation to join the Libertarian Alliance team. But I’ve now read about a hundred of the articles carried on this site. My conclusion is that I’d be mad to turn down the chance. Even so, I’ll wait another few days before giving my formal acceptance. After that, I think I’ll carry on as I’ve kind of begun, by giving my thoughts on what others have written here. So I’ll make my start.
It would be difficult to imagine a piece like Bryan Mercadente’s Your Duty to Be Beautiful appearing anywhere in the United States—and impossible to imagine it being published by any American libertarian outfit. And yet here it is: casually hosted by the Libertarian Alliance, which continues to act as a kind of anarcho-Tory oasis for those disenchanted with the therapeutic state. That Mercadente’s essay is outrageously offensive is undeniable. That it is also a useful contribution to the libertarian assault on the modern Regime is, to my mind, equally clear.
Mercadente is a talented writer. He’s also, by his own account, sixteen years old, handsome, and surrounded by “fat, spotty, smelly” classmates. This may strike many as a setup for nothing more than youthful arrogance and aesthetic cruelty—and in places, that’s exactly what it is. But that would be missing the core of the piece, which is not about vanity, but about order. Not beauty as decoration, but beauty as intention. As hierarchy. As refusal.
What we are reading is not a personal diary or a body-shaming screed. It is, in the best sense, a rejection of every moral premise held by the institutions tasked with shaping his mind. It’s a revolt not against ugliness per se, but against deliberate ugliness. Against the institutional celebration of decay and dysfunction. Against the fusion of state power, psychological therapy, and egalitarian dogma that insists every appearance is equally valid, that beauty is oppressive, and that any effort to rise above aesthetic mediocrity must be pathologized as “fascism.”
There are three reasons this matters.
- A Direct Assault on the Psychological Foundations of the Regime
Modern managerial liberalism does not rule through obvious censorship or armed suppression—at least not yet. It rules through internalization. Through schooling. Through shame. PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic education), as described by Mercadente, is the British equivalent of American SEL (Social-Emotional Learning): a curriculum of spiritual surrender. These classes exist not to educate, but to normalize the ideological instincts of the new order—to crush hierarchy, and to suppress ambition and reward obedience in the name of wellness and social justice.
By mocking this process—and mocking it from the inside—Mercadente strikes at the heart of the entire social engineering project. He isn’t just resisting indoctrination. He’s mocking the format. He’s offering a homework assignment that reads like a Spenglerian declaration of cultural war. And while his message is outrageous, his targets are carefully chosen. He does not attack the disabled or the disadvantaged. He reserves his venom for those who have the capacity to improve themselves and choose not to. His argument is not “hate the ugly,” but “refuse to become ugly.”
- The Body as a Site of Counterrevolution
In a system that tells you not only what to say but what to look like—and increasingly, what not to look like—the decision to craft yourself into an object of order is itself a political act. Mercadente makes the case, somewhat obliquely, that deliberate beauty (defined not cosmetically but in terms of harmony, balance, and strength) is a kind of heresy in the modern West. It signals that one is still capable of will, of discipline, of shame—not as pathology, but as moral instinct.
The idea that a libertarian publication would print this—a polemic on grooming, diet, posture, and weight-lifting—is itself revolutionary. Because here is the truth: the body is not private in the liberal regime. It is governed. And Mercadente’s point, whether or not he puts it this way, is that the regime demands bodies that are soft and compromised, damaged and medicated. That is the ideal subject of the therapeutic state. His refusal to conform—his demand that the young learn to look like warriors rather than patients—is a direct challenge to the psychological materialism that underlies liberal governance.
- The Return of the Satirical Right—and Its Joy
None of this would be as effective if it weren’t also hilarious. Mercadente, like many associated with the Libertarian Alliance, practices a kind of baroque cruelty that has almost vanished from the American right. What passes for conservatism here is a mix of whining and victimhood copied from the left, of prayer, and awkward and probably genuine, and therefore fruitless, appeals to civility. But the Libertarian Alliance has never been about civic respectability. It is about insult as method, about amusement as principle, about ridicule as moral obligation.
To that end, Mercadente often replaces argument with finely-crafted abuse—and it works. His targets, after all, are not people with no choice. They are the enforcers of a state ideology that insists self-discipline is a form of violence. They are the school-appointed therapists of learned helplessness. They are the teachers who lecture on privilege while handing out vending machine lunches to students too slovenly to pack their own. They are the functionaries of mediocrity.
That Mercadente enjoys the spectacle is part of the point. And it’s perhaps the thing that most distinguishes the Libertarian Alliance from its American cousins: it doesn’t apologize for its superiority. It doesn’t beg for inclusion. It attacks from a position of evident cultural and intellectual superiority, and it has fun doing it.
The American libertarian movement, I’ll say again, has often positioned itself as a victim. “We’re not allowed on campus,” they say. “We’re shadowbanned.” “We’re misrepresented.” Even when they tell the truth, they sound like they’re explaining themselves to HR. The Libertarian Alliance doesn’t bother. It doesn’t plead for fairness. It doesn’t want to be liked. It wants to win—and look good while doing it.
A Final Note
Bryan Mercadente’s piece will be dismissed by the usual suspects as fascist, elitist, ableist, sexist, and every other -ist in the modern lexicon. It will be condemned for failing to “center” the vulnerable. For not respecting feelings. For holding people accountable. In short, it will be condemned for all the reasons it should be celebrated.
What he has done, however provocatively, is remind us that freedom is not the right to decay. It is not the right to be left alone with your insecurities. It is the right to refuse—to refuse ugliness, refusal, weakness, passivity, and above all, lies. In a world built on compliance, the act of beautifying yourself—intentionally, openly, and against the script—is not narcissism. It is resistance.
And that, in the end, is the real duty to be beautiful.
Now, Mr Bickley—how do I sign up to start posting? I really promise not to split any more infinitives.
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I just hope that proper checks and due diligence have been carried out on Mr Pozeram. I am sure he is an estimable fellow, but one can never be too careful. Imagine making the discovery that he lives with his mother at the Pozeram Motel, and that this motel is situated on a highway nicknamed ‘The Bermuda Route’, by the FBI, due to numerous suspicious disappearances of teenager hitchhikers along there, and in consequence Mr Pozeram is the perennial object of suspicion from true crime podcasters on YouTube.
Of course, this is just my own imagination and I’m getting carried away, but you never know.
You will find that Mr Pozeram’s grammar is much too correct – by American standards – for him to be a frenzied serial killer. We check these things very stringently.