Exfoliating Shampoo for Apes

According to Urban Dictionary, there are a few definitions for an "ape." One is "GEORGE W BUSH," in all caps. One is maybe a bit more defined: "any person succumbing to to [sic] fits of irrational, reckless, stupid and lazy behavior." The third is "A common soldier, a foot slogger. Similar to cannon fodder." The fourth: someone who posts on r/wallstreetbets.

Keep scrolling down the first page, and notably absent, of course, will be the actual definition of an ape, a superfamily of animals. But really, humans too are apes. In fact, we are not only apes, but we are great apes. Some of the most intellectual, thoughtful, and sophisticated of all them apes. So, as any good species of ape does, we have built up the pillars of virtue and the most important of technology: the Crusades, the земство, PEZ dispensers, geocentrism, TunnelBear VPN, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and ostensibly the most important: skibidi toilet.

As the greatest bastion of apes, we must, of course, have the ability to differentiate between the apes and the apes. A total ordering of apes, if you will. So of all the apes in the world, there is a least ape and a greatest ape.

This is not an easy problem to solve, but one we must arduously overcome. It may be worth looking at a few schools of thought.

One school of thought may rank the apes of highest IQ. Another may rank the apes of highest Gaokao score. Another may rank the apes of number of use-after-free bugs in their computer programs hand-written in DEC Alpha assembly. Another may rank the apes by their performance on auditions to an orchestra, or theatre, or the like. Yet another may rank sit down and painstakingly rank the beauty of their poetry. Many apes will rightly reject this sort of quantification as bogus bullshit. The greatest ape, after all, has the most obvious answer: the ape that made the most money investing in Bed Bath and Beyond. No enlightened, intelligent, and educated ape is as apeful as the ape that makes one hundred million. After all, all the enlightenment and spiritual pursuit of academics will afford you a thirty minute rough-and-tough ape experience with a high-class escort from Vanuatu. And of course, the greater ape would never stoop so low as to hire an escort, when she could charm the most beautiful of men and have him for free. Again, this is simple to quantify for ape-ranking: we may look at the number of offline conversations a social ape has a month, or perhaps if online, the number of conversations on a reputable messaging platform such as Reddit.

But really, who cares about a walnut-sized lump; that twig of an ape with a hundred million or all the social prowess in the world could never handle a true ape experience like that. What really matters are the monkeys swinging on trees. In this vein, truly the best way to rank the apes is again simple. The timer starts, the ape runs one hundred yards, not meters, and we stop the timer, and we rank. We simply repeat this, timing their ability to hang on to a pull-up bar, and who the fastest ape to swim across the English Channel while surviving is. We may also factor in other important characteristics, such as length of fully erect phallus or the exact pre-childbirth volume of the mommy milkers.

The truth is, the optimal method is to maximize it all. The supremest, and greatest of all the apes, clearly, is one who has won theatre performance awards with an IQ over 200, gained admission to Tsinghua, has 45,134 total conversations online and offline per month, is a tenure-track professor in quantum mechanics at Cambridge, made two hundred million dollars in wise stock investments found on r/wallstreetbets, was a part of the NFL, has slept with high-class escorts from Vanuatu, Mongolia, Ghana, and Norway. These are the apes of greatest importance, significance, and the greatest apes of all. Greater than the lesser apes, the orangutans, the gorillas, the chimpanzeees and bonobos, and the majority of humans. The crème de la crème, if you will.

Once reaching this point—the upper rungs of apefulness—it is hard to perform a total order, certainly possible. The time is ripe, as a member of the great apes, to find who the greatest of them all is. I am confident the uppermost of apes will determine this, however. They are the wisest, after all. Perhaps our measure will come in the world of a weighted mean of our measurable characteristics as apes, where every increase in score contributes to a Pareto optimal outcome for the world, and finally answer the open question of ape worthwhileness.

What I have just discussed on the importance of the total ordering of apes was something I first realized years ago. Around the same time, I realized one thing was true. I was in the least of apes, as there would always be an ape more enlightened, more wealthy, more toned in biceps, more artful and eloquent, more powerful in the wrestling ring, more worthful to the great society of apes than I. And this was truly one of the worst things to hear, that I was not amongst the upper rungs of the great apes, and would never know the formula that the uppermost of apes used to compute their rankings in the total ordering of apes. It, at this point, came to a branch: I could try to ascend the rankings of ape society, trying my best to improve my capabilities, or give up and accept my fate as a worthless ape that could never be amongst the greatest of apes.

Thus I began performing a deep inspection on myself, to understand how to improve myself in the total ordering of gorillas, gibbons, monkeys, chimps, and apes. As any true ape would understand, I spent years in the Himalayas, I rode a polar bear shirtless in Russia, and of course, the most crucial of them all: I spent the last few months grinding trophies on Clash Royale with my Hog Rider + Baby Gronk wombo combo.

It is for these reasons that I am announcing my first product: Exfoliating Shampoo for Apes. As any intellectual ape would know, my product does exactly what it says it does; if you do not understand what exfoliating shampoo is, you are clearly not amongst the greatest and most intellectual of apes anyway. And truth be told, as an ape myself, I must conclude that it is truly the "city upon a hill" of innovation; the most meticulously crafted of sticky white liquids. So, after careful evaluation, I have concluded something very simple. I have won. And let tell me you why I have won.

I have won, because I don't care about the activities of even the greatest apes anymore.

I don't care if you read Papa Rudin fifty times, that you're Challenger in League, or that you're a string theorist at CalTech, or you're a chimpanzee that plays Minecraft, or that you are more enlightened about the shape of the Earth, or that you make sure OpenAI meets their SLAs, or that you do cancer research, or that you voted for the correct party in the election, or that you are a manager of a Food Lion that delivers real impact to real people, or that you're a random person thanklessly maintaining an open source project since 2003, or that you proved P != NP, or that you know what the capital of Mayotte is, or that you're the rotund dictator of a nation-state. I don't care that you have a more refined taste for music because you appreciate the intellect and theory poured into fine Romantic pieces from Chopin and Philipp Jakob Riotte over that squalid filth known as pop, rock and rap, or that you're actually a superior human being because you use Gentoo with musl Libc, or that you committed murder and justify it by proclaiming yourself an Übermensch, or that you do more for the environment than me because you're vegan, or that you're a literal gorilla and stronger than all the impostor apes on American Ninja Warrior, or that you're not an idiot and you know the ducks in the park are free and you have 458 ducks, or that you make more money than all of the aforementioned combined times two because you're an actual fucking ape and invested in $GME.

I don't care, because I sell Exfoliating Shampoo for Apes to every single aspiring and self-fellating ape; I make sure every greatest ape has a chance at being a rizzly sigma, a based alpha, and the best beta soygirl. And I know, I know that without Exfoliating Shampoo for Apes, my fellow intellectual apes, that my fellow social apes, that my fellow apes of great strength and power, and that my fellow intellectual and apes of great strength and power would simply not be achieving their fullest potential.

Thus, I have eschewed the total ordering, and proven my worth beyond even the greatest of the apes.

And as such, I am the greatest ape.

QED, motherfuckers. □