The Hill That I Die On
6-7 minute read: The best pizza in the world
By temperament I do not like to argue. That may be difficult to believe as I am a writer, and writers by definition need to have opinions on the things they write about.
I like to think of myself not as having articulated opinions, easily amended. On the Big Five Personality Test I rank high in openness and agreeableness, meaning I am interested in new ideas and I want to experience zero conflict as I do so.
I give all of this as a prologue so that the strongly-held belief I am about to share can be known as the anomaly that it is. I am not one to argue or debate: I will surrender immediately saying “you have a lot of good points…” I will do almost everything except hold my ground and fight to the bitter end.
So when I tell you the hill I die on, you must understand what a big deal it is.
Little Caesar’s pizza is the best pizza in the world.
The more generous and open-minded readers are now trying to temper how hot-n-ready of a take this is by adding qualifiers: “Sure, for the price…” “Best, if you want a pizza immediately…” “Oh yea, if you want a pizza for the after a kid's soccer game…”
No.
It’s the best. Period.
Why do people hate Little Caesar’s? Not because of anything it has merited, but because of what it represents: it is a cheap, low-quality, and dirty chain restaurant. The best pizza, in comparison? Locally sourced, authentic from Italy, all-natural pizza, obviously.
I argue, however, that a simple taste-test may prove otherwise. It just so happens that my favorite foods are MSGs, GMOs, sugar, fat, salt, butter, and grease. Really any food that’s been heavily processed. Bonus points if it has red dye number four.
I didn’t say they’re healthier foods, I just said I liked them more.
Everything is Moby Dick
My grandfather would famously say “In the matters of taste there can be no dispute.” I am not arguing that more people will or even should have a taste for Little Caesar’s pizza over authentic Italian pizza.
I am arguing that most people aren’t judging Little Caesar’s pizza vs authentic Italian pizza, they are judging the philosophy behind Little Caesar’s vs the philosophy behind the authentic Italian pizza.
The man who hates Little Caesar’s pizza on merits other than personal taste is as mad as Captain Ahab who cries,
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. at inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.1
Does he hate Little Caesar’s pizza because he has no taste for it? Or is he wreaking hate upon a Hot-N-Ready because of the inscrutable thing behind the pasteboard mask of that wheel of pizza?
He hates it because it is cheap, forgetting that cheap merely means inexpensive; that ‘low quality ingredients’ does not immediately mean a low quality experience; that chain restaurants that stretch the world are on local ground with local citizens owning and operating it. Everything one might strike at behind the Caesar’s pie is too large to be hit, so he settles for hating a slice.
This is bigger than pizza
This is not a phenomenon restricted to fast food chains. I call it the Nickelback Effect.
Nickelback is a band that is famously bad. The only thing is, they’re not that bad. It’s just funny on the internet to think they are bad; not funny in a ‘isn’t it fun to dunk on this bad band?’ or ‘isn’t it funny to pretend to hate this good band?’ but in the sense that people really think Nickelback is bad just because the internet overwhelmingly has the perspective that it is so.
The Nickelback Effect makes people think Taco Bell makes them destroy their toilets, despite it ranking highly on lists of healthiest ingredients used in their food.
The Nickelback Effect makes people hate the Star Wars prequels because ‘Midi-chlorians’ are somehow an offense against the casual viewer as if they were a real-life Big Bang Theory character.
The Nickelback effect makes you think that a thing that is fine on its own merits is actually bad for another reason altogether. Usually because the internet wants you to think it’s bad.
The mark of a truly free-thinking individual is not whether she has a taste for that which few others like; but if she can like what is immensely popular.
We look at the world and see avatars of philosophies everywhere, liking what stands-in for what we support and hating for what stands-in for what we dislike.
The world is full of people pretending to enjoy what they really despise because it’s the kind of thing it’s right to like, and despising what is really enjoyable because it’s the kind of thing which must be despised.
Another Food Example
In every situation we may dislike the popular, cheap, poorly made, bad quality thing, preferring some spectacular other thing, but liking the spectacular is not special; liking the common is. Common- not bad.
It does us well to distinguish that common means easily found in abundance, not bad. It’s a later philosophy and horrible linguistic trend to make the two the same. As C.S. Lewis said, “The truth is that words originally descriptive tend to become terms either of mere praise or of mere blame.”
Take, for example, Oreos. Are they good or bad for you?
Trick question. They are not bad for you, they are merely unhealthy for you. We’ve just conflated the two terms. In some cases, however, I find that unhealthy food is quite good, and I mean that in the literal sense.
But often good and bad come to mean ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ or ‘preferred’ and ‘not preferred.’
By all means, hate Oreos. But hate them because you don’t like them for them. Don’t wage a proxy war against an ideology where the only casualty will be that you miss out on delicious dessert.
And that’s what’s entirely sad about this entire thing: people miss out on things that are enjoyable. What’s even sadder? They had to learn this.
It very well may be that those who call Oreos bad no longer have, by indoctrination or degeneration, a taste for sugar. But I tend to believe the former happens more often than the latter.
It’s entirely possible I dislike things simply because I am not educated enough; but generally I find people are educated into disliking things far more than they are into liking them.
The Enjoyment Conundrum
I. TikTok
The great puzzle Luddites try, and fail, to solve: if technology is so awful, why do I enjoy it so much?
If TikTok is ruining my life, why do I always have so much fun, connect with friends, learn fun facts, life hacks, and helpful information, and more?
I happen to have deleted it because I felt I was spending too much time on it, but I didn’t delete it because it was bad, only because too much of a good thing can be bad.
People can rant and rave and bemoan the death of civilization, of which TikTok and technology are surely harbingers; but it always misses a very real point that their argument never addresses: if technology is such a burden, and TikTok an avatar of so much wrong with the world… why do I not experience that when I use it?
II. Vegetables
It’s like when we, as children, all hated eating vegetables because they were vegetables; now we hate food because they aren’t vegetables.
It’s easy to forget children, at first, didn’t like them because they tasted bad, and only learned later from media, TV, and the internet to dislike them as a category. Now people like them as a category, or like them for health reasons, or like them because locally-grown organic food is cool to like.
There’s nothing wrong with liking vegetables, but like vegetables qua vegetables, don’t like, or hate, the inscrutable thing beyond the pasteboard mask of broccoli.2
III. Classical Music
One can argue that Bach is better, or more beautiful, than any of the current Pop Top 40 songs; and history will remember his work longer (I can’t even pick one song out as an example because it’ll already be an out-dated reference from when I post this to when you read it) but the impossible argument remains that I may very well find Bach boring to listen to and find myself immensely moved to emotion, memory, or dance by the popular song of the summer. It may be worse in every measurable way, but still found preferable.
Until my enjoyment for trash is answered for, I refuse to adopt the perspective that the trash shouldn’t be enjoyed.
Conclusion
If it sounds like I am open-minded about a lot of things. I’m not. But if I dislike acapella or country music, it’s because I don’t enjoy the music, not because it’s funny to dislike it. If I don’t eat food, it’s not because it’s cheap, it’s because I don’t like its taste. In all of this I am not saying that one must like every example I have shared. What I am saying is that I’d prefer it if these things were all disliked on their own merits, rather than being hated for the entirety of the idea that we think they represent.
So there are essentially two options and this is the fight I will always fight: you can walk around hating almost everything and loving very little, and consider yourself a smart, informed, and free-thinking individual. Most of your enjoyment can come from the arrogance about how you are better than most of what you encounter; or you can cast out the demons from behind the thing you hate, look it squarely in the eye, listen to it, eat it, and enjoy it purely on its own merits, and find a lot more in the world is better than you had previously thought.
The hill that I die on is the hill that God looked at the world and called it ‘very good,’ but we have been trying our best ever since to find exceptions to that rule.
Little Caesar’s, please sponsor me.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, CHAPTER XXXIV. THE QUARTER-DECK
Which also happens to be why I find answering the question “Who’s your favorite musical artist?” so difficult, because I generally like individual songs. Just because someone wrote a song I like it doesn’t mean they’ll write more. I’ll certainly try them out, but it doesn’t earn automatic points simply for being categorized as being by the same artist. I like song A for being song A, not for being written by Singer Y.
It’s also why I find liking Music in general to be so odd: because you can like the general idea and existence of music, or you can like specific music, but to carte blanche love all music is insane. It’s like how people love books. I myself am an avid book reader, but I like specific books for the books that they are. Most books, in fact, are uninteresting to me. I even despise some. I don’t just automatically love every book because it’s a book. Sure, you may like books because you enjoy ink-stained bounded sheets of paper; or you may like music because any syncopated sounds at different tones is fun for you; but that’s generally not how we like things.