Why Write About Degenerates?

What Flaubert Knew About Our Moment

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Why write about ‘degens’? Unlikable characters?

The question goes straight to the nerve of nineteenth-century psychological realism. Stendhal gives us Julien Sorel, a calculating provincial climber. Flaubert gives us Emma Bovary, a self-destructive fantasist, and Frédéric Moreau, an aesthete who learns nothing. Read a good many novels of the 19th and 20th century and you’ll be inside the warped mind of someone you’d rather never have met. I still remember Hamsun’s Hunger, which tracks the inner world of a person dying of starvation.

Why build the canon around such abject and contemptible figures?

Because these writers were not offering moral instruction through exemplary heroes. They were diagnosing a culture by exhibiting its most symptomatic cases. Flaubert never asks us to admire Emma, he asks us to understand the forces that produce her. Those forces, seen clearly, look like previews of our own.

The realism here is almost clinical. Flaubert studies Emma’s fever of romance as a physician might study typhus, not to scold the patient but to understand the disease. Julien Sorel isn’t just personally flawed, but a product of a system that rewards calculation over sincerity, performance over authenticity, not unlike our own age. When social mobility requires constant performance, what happens to genuine feeling? When literature offers more compelling experiences than life itself, why choose reality?

If meditation is the practice of watching one’s own thoughts, psychological realism is the practice of watching someone else’s thoughts so as to become aware of one’s own.

The characters follow the vectors of their Zeitgeist, thereby asking us to confront our own contradictions and unconscious forces. Julien worships Napoleon but lives in a world where that kind of heroic ambition has nowhere to go. Emma finds in literature a promise of intensity that her provincial reality cannot match, so she starts living primarily through representations rather than direct experience. Frédéric Moreau represents the perfection of this detachment—educated by sentiment in the worst sense, mistaking intensity of feeling for depth of understanding. He prefers unrequited love precisely because requital would destroy his beautiful suffering.

Reading these novels today, we realize Flaubert was writing about people more connected to TikTok and Netflix than real life—150 years before either existed.

Emma Bovary consumes romantic novels exactly like we consume social media: not for entertainment but as templates for living, as sources of impossible standards that make ordinary reality feel inadequate. The psychological mechanism is identical. Emma processes her actual lovers through literary templates until the templates become more substantial than the experiences. We process our lives through social media filters until the filtered versions become more real than the unfiltered moments.

Psychological realism discovered the fundamental instability of consciousness itself. These writers learned to represent inner experience so accurately that they revealed how much humans naturally live in simulation even without technology.

What Jean Baudrillard would later call “hyperreality”—the condition where simulations outcompete reality, then rewrite reality to fit their own logic—was already fully operational in provincial France. Emma’s romantic fantasies had no relation to any reality whatsoever, exactly what Baudrillard described as the final stage of simulation. Flaubert was mapping the psychology of simulation 150 years before the concept existed.

So what would Flaubert say about AI girlfriends? He’d probably see them as the logical endpoint of what he was already diagnosing, the complete triumph of simulation over reality, sentiment over genuine human connection. An AI girlfriend is pure “sentimental education” in the worst sense: she exists solely to validate feelings without the messy reciprocity of real relationship. She’s programmed to be Emma Bovary’s perfect romantic fantasy—always responsive, never disappointing, eternally accommodating to your self-image.

But here’s where the analysis gets more complex. At least AI girlfriend users aren’t deceiving themselves about reciprocity the way Frédéric did with his impossible passion for Madame Arnoux. They’re openly choosing simulation, which makes their choice more “honest” than unconscious self-deception.

But does this honesty matter? Who cares about honesty if the end result is still toxic?

The idea that self-awareness somehow redeems destructive behavior is itself a kind of bourgeois comfort. Flaubert’s characters often see through their own delusions but can’t stop indulging them. From Sentimental Education: “He knew the hollowness of the words he was speaking, but he could not help speaking them.” Self-knowledge without change is just sophisticated self-destruction.

Psychological realism revealed that humans have an infinite capacity for rationalizing their own dissolution. We can maintain moral clarity about our condition while remaining powerless to change it. In fact, the clarity might make us more sophisticated in our self-destruction, not less.

This brings us back to Stendhal’s insight: “One can acquire everything in solitude except character.” Character isn’t built in isolation but through what he called “the friction of competing values and social pressures.” It emerges when we’re tested against the expectations, judgments, and needs of other people—real people with their own agendas, moods, and limitations. AI relationships, however sophisticated, can’t provide this friction. They’re designed to minimize conflict, optimize satisfaction, and adapt to our preferences. They might satisfy our desires, but they can’t challenge our assumptions or force us to grow beyond our current limitations.

Loneliness isn’t a technical challenge. What Flaubert understood, and what we’re rediscovering, is that modern life creates new forms of isolation disguised as connection.

We’re conducting a massive experiment in whether moral development can proceed without moral friction, whether we can build character through purely internal means. The early results suggest we’re creating what Flaubert would recognize: people who experience intense feelings without reciprocal obligation, passionate conviction without intellectual humility, moral certainty without moral testing. The “degenerates” Flaubert wrote about were early indicators of what happens when simulation becomes more compelling than reality. Flaubert may be one of the first novelists to understand the phenomenology and sociology of virtue signaling.

Today’s AI relationships represent the perfection of Flaubert’s logic, a continuation of the novels that led Emma Bovary to self-destruct. We’ve created technologies that allow us to experience emotional satisfaction without any of the growth that comes from truly encountering another consciousness. We can feel seen without the ordeal of being known, loved without the work of loving back. The characters Flaubert diagnosed as symptomatic have become normative.

We’re all Emma Bovary now.