Mr. Beast Quasi-Religious Experience UWU
I’m on the L train looking at a poster advertising a Mr. Beast sweepstake. I study his chipmunk face and the background photo of cash. There is a QR code to enable swift registration.
This ad breaks me; it breaks me for no particular reason.
The despair that swallows me feels too extreme a response to Mr. Beast. I have few opinions on him; his name sits among the others from pop culture, there for no other reason than as proof that I too wade through the mainstream.
I wince at the callousness, the unabashed showcase of the money. It seems gladiatorial: wealth offered to anyone who could withstand his trials, but my despair feels apolitical. I’m revolted more by the aesthetic: it’s gaudy.
The baby blue backdrop makes the ostentatious brightness of his teeth unflattering.
The thought of him getting his teeth whitened attains visceral clarity; I can see him bejeweled with pink sunglasses, his teeth basking in the ultraviolet.
I can’t fathom why Mr. Beast has an ad on the L train. What market does he pursue? Why such an intimidating photo? Why does Mr. Beast, even when signaling amicability, look empty?
No one else notices his persistent stare. I envy them. Mr. Beast watches me and me alone.
It is deeply alienating.
The subway feels immaterial, a backdrop for this dialectic: Mr. Beast and me… me and Mr. Beast… revolution and reaction, push and pull, wax and wane… ad infinitum.
Around 1st ave, Mr.Beast’s stare began to lose its malice. The gaze becomes passionate. It fixes me - wants me as a sunbeam. I, the believer, recognize the sublimity in-scripted on the tablet before me; I too may choose to join the herd, for, as I recognize now, he acts as a Shepard of the weary and lost. All I need to do is perform the communion, embrace the sacrament and enter my information. Mr. Beast, as a true egalitarian icon, assures us purchases made through the Mr. The Beast website will not affect our chances of being selected. His brilliance alters the bleak, stuffed cabin. I want
Most importantly, I feel that, through the vessel of this ad, he truly sees me. He sees the homesickness settled in my stomach, knows my shower has no hot water and my room has no heat; through this intermediary, Mr. Beast wants me to know everything will be ok. Housing will approve my petition, my move will proceed smoothly, I will regain my finger strength, and he promises my semester will unfold like a warm quilt. In his munificence, he has utilized his divine omniscience to imbue me with his charity.
The PA system announces Third Avenue. I leave, but do so begrudgingly. Mr. Beast's warmth follows me up the stairs. It grows faint as I move away from the subway. By the time I reach my room, it is a dream misremembered.
The introductory passage typed itself. Delirious and stressed, I intended to write a scintillating indictment of consumerist culture by detailing the despair I often feel while bombarded by advertisements on the subway. What I typed, however, veered from the vindictive to the passionate. I had, however, felt drawn to writing about a Mr. Beast ad. The way I describe it above retains the reality of what I saw. Mr. Beast with buckets of cash, inviting you to join some sweepstakes. His smile pulsed with affability.
If Mr. Beast didn’t exist, he would need to be created. I mean this literally. The niche Mr. Beast created gives a type of visibility to philanthropy. Billionaires give, but the actual act of giving takes place with ceremony but little spectacle. If George Soros filled a vat with 100,000 dollars cash and asked some random head to search for the counterfeit bill in order to receive the real money, it would violate the principle of aesthetic: it would be uncouth. Mr. Beast has created an industry around philanthropy. Philanthropy feels like poor diction, but I can’t think of a more accurate term. More important than the semantics is the way Mr. Beast markets his brand as tangential to philanthropy.
The argument could be made that despite the disingenuous origins, the fact that Mr. Beast is donating the money that he does indicates a virtuous character. I would disagree. The form can not be separate from the content. How and why Mr. Beast donations can not be separated from the actual act. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle shows that an excess in a type of virtue can become a vice. He rights of liberality (his terminology for generosity):
But virtuous acts, we said, are noble, and are done for the sake of that which is noble. The liberal man, therefore, like the others, will give with a view to, or for the sake of, that which is noble, and give rightly ; i.e. he will give the right things to the right persons at the right times-in short, his giving will have all the characteristics of right giving (101).
Charity, when adulterated by spectacle, becomes more nefarious. The intentions behind the charity must be aimed at an earnest attempt to do good, to act in the interest of another. Mr. Beast only gives in order to bolster his persona as a philanthropic content creator. If the success of his industry relies on philanthropic work, then that philanthropic work will always emerge from self preservation. Mr. Beast does charity in the hopes of actually creating the sensation I explore in the initial paragraphs. By marketing himself as a “nice-guy Millionaire” he hopes to convince you that he does care about actual humanity and wants to use his funds to better the world; conveniently forgetting the gross profit he earns while “fixing” the world. Let’s not forget the intensity with which Mr. Beast pursued fame. In recounting his genesis, Mr. Beast regales us with his early obsession; his earliest foray into youtube began with hours spent understanding the algorithm:
There's a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm. I woke up. I would Uber Eats food. And then I would sit on my computer all day just studying shit nonstop with [other YouTubers]. (Dickson, Ej (April 19, 2022). "Is MrBeast for Real? Inside the Outrageous World of YouTube's Cash-Happy Stunt King". Rolling Stone. )
His attention to the algorithm indicates the root of Mr. Beasts viral pathology: generation, production, aggregation of views; this early obsession with notoriety and the nitty gritty of how the algorithm promotes viewership could be read as a “work-smart, not-hard” acuity, or it could read as a cynical obsession with fame. I’m drawn to the latter. His canon explains the form of his content. In its earliest connotation, he uploaded videos in which he subjected himself to arduous and admittedly avant-garde tasks. One of his earliest videos was quite literally nothing more than him counting to 100,000. It took him nearly forty hours to complete. In another he attempted to spend twenty four hours underwater. Health complications (Skill Issue) forced him to abandon his aquatic adventure. After he gained a devoted following he was able to find no shortage of people willing to endure ingenuous and gladiatorial events to provide substance for content. Let’s not forget: one of his most popular videos was a recreation of the Netflix hit “Squid Games.” This man uses the guise of philanthropy to stage modern day gladiatorial matches. I had a close friend read an earlier iteration of this piece. My fear, as I told him, was that this piece was pointless as nobody really saw Mr. Beast as a benevolent figure. Quelling this fear, however, was an episode of the Young Turks (cringe I know sorry please forgive me) in which the anchors were discussing the potential sale of Tik Tok. Mr. Beast, at the time, had floated the idea of him buying Tik Tok to prevent it from being banned. One of the anchors (I’m not a devoted listener so I don’t really know their different casts) implored the listener not to group Mr. Beast and Elon Musk together. He said he was appreciative of Mr. Beast's philanthropy. I’ll ask the obvious question: What philanthropy?