I want to make something clear before I start this article. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for you to accept yourself for who you are or even be kinder to yourself as many of us often aren’t. I don’t have a problem with people learning to embrace themselves the way God made them.
But man, do I have problem with the modern sensibility of self-love. Not only do I think it’s incredibly self-destructive, I see it promoted both subversively and overtly everywhere.
In a big way, the demand for “more representation” was the perfect soil for the modern ideal of self-love to grow like a weed. It promoted the idea that even your flaws were perfect, and that any promotion of self-improvement should fall under any category of social sin.
Let me show you a perfect example of what I mean.
On Thursday, I wrote about how the new Star Trek series, “Star Fleet Academy,” is filled to the brim with what look like DEI hires to the point where it was an intentional choice. The characters are clearly a laundry list of leftist tropes that it was laughed off the stage the moment it took to it.
READ: Modern Star Trek Is the Poster Child for Everything Wrong About Modern Storytelling
Case in point, the Babylon Bee created a video making fun of the show’s promotion of a lack of excellence in favor of inclusivity, including being fat.
Are you overweight and completely unqualified? Starfleet is looking for cadets like you! pic.twitter.com/fAKiYtHcOU
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 23, 2026
As funny as it is, it highlights something that drives me up a wall, and that’s the mixing in of traits people can’t help such as being handicapped, to being overweight, unqualified, and purposefully lacking decorum, as if not having scruples and a sense of propriety is a virtue.
The message is that no matter your state of being, it’s just perfect and you should be accepted head to tail. There are no flaws, only personality quirks. You don’t have to be qualified for the job, the job’s standards will be lowered so it qualifies for you.
Criticism is toxic.
Standards are just a form of oppression.
Not validating identity choices is immoral.
Arrested development is virtue.
It’s no wonder that the standards for many business have fallen to dangerous levels, including in places like the airline industry and the medical field. Qualifications that revolve around accepting differences opens the door to a real lack of merit, and as a result, products lose quality at best, and people get hurt or die at worst.
What’s crazy is that, from what I understand of the real Star Fleet Academy, it was a place for the best of the best. In fact, the entirety of the Star Trek universe seemed to be based on the idea that humanity had conquered the worst parts of itself in order to create a brighter future.
Here in this new show, we see the antithesis of that. Humanity has effectively ceased self-improvement in the name of acceptance. There’s literally a part where an overweight woman tells the instructor she “swallowed her com badge.”
If this was a comedic knock off of Star Trek, this might actually work because it’s actively making displaying stupidity and under-qualification a central theme. But it’s not. It’s Star Trek, the brand that used to take philosophical conversations and turn them into compelling storylines.
We went from Aristotle to Ronald McDonald.
This is a mentality that can kill a civilization, and while it’s fantastic that the audience’s response to "Star Fleet Academy" was nothing short of a massive middle finger, it’s indicative of how way too many people see the world, especially in corporate spaces.
Embracing your flaws isn’t the noble thing pop-culture says it is. Just like in the stories, difficulties are to be overcome, not embraced or celebrated. Even in the old stories, personal flaws were either overcome or were instrumental in your downfall. Today, the idea is that if you just accept your flaws, you’ll fail upward. You’ll be rewarded for being less.
This should rub everyone the wrong way, and judging by the rejection of this stupid show, it does for the most part. Failing upward might be a quality embraced by people who ironically call themselves “progressives,” but in the real world, this is a path to destruction both personal and societal.
