Published on November 28, 2019.
This article introduces an excerpt from the sixth installment of Furuya Hiroshi’s Fighting Epicurus, serialized in the monthly magazine WiLL, discussing how television requires “beautiful people” and “beautiful stories” and cannot properly portray inconvenient realities.
Through references to Kaji Nobuyuki’s Biographies of Media Hypocrites, the PC fortress of modern “good people,” the lingering influence of Hegelian and Marxist thought, and the mocking insight of Helvétius, it exposes the structure of media hypocrisy.

November 28, 2019
Television is a troublesome medium.
Unless it lines up beautiful people and beautiful stories, it does not become a picture in the first place.
The stories of “people who are not like that” can only be wrapped up as documentaries, or as human feeling on the cliff at the end of a drama.
Furuya Hiroshi, one of the finest scholars of our time, serializes Fighting Epicurus in the monthly magazine WiLL.
The following is an excerpt from an essay published in the issue of WiLL released the day before yesterday, under the title of the sixth installment, “Even If All Things Are Accidental, That Is Perfectly Fine; Necessity Itself Is Evil.”
I burst out laughing at the final passage.
The mocking prophet.
Television is a troublesome medium.
Unless it lines up beautiful people and beautiful stories, it does not become a picture in the first place.
The stories of “people who are not like that” can only be wrapped up as documentaries, or as human feeling on the cliff at the end of a drama.
As a result, the “evil of necessity” increases more and more, and Professor Kaji Nobuyuki’s pen in Biographies of Media Hypocrites, published by Asuka Shinsha, becomes sharper and sharper.
In this way, modern “good people” crouch before television, and while their roots remain soaked in the filthy water of Hegel and Marx, they turn themselves into a fortress of political correctness in order to protect themselves.
There are good people, too.
Those who ask me to appear are looking for someone.
But when I say, “I do not say pretty things, so I will not make a good picture,” they all hesitate.
They ask, “Is there someone about one step below you, Professor?”
It is not even a laughing matter.
But when I was young, I ate river shrimp in a Cambodian river that were so delicious I could have died, and now that poison has gone around my body; in any case, because of irritable colitis, I cannot appear.
The lesson is that one should not eat things from primitive rivers.
This time, I tried speaking a little frivolously, like the eighteenth-century French hedonist Helvétius (1715–1771).
Helvétius was fiercely suppressed by the scholastic theologians of his time and by the dynasties of the divine right of kings, and in order to lessen the pain of fear and disappointment, he deliberately mocked with his pen.
“In civilized countries, stupidity is the normal condition of human beings because it is the result of contagious education, because people are educated by false scholars and made to read foolish books.”
On Man, Tosho Shuppan, 1966, p. 18.
Is that not exactly right?