Six Seven and Human Nature

Posted on Monday 17 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What does “six seven” say about human nature? Brain rot, or something else?
  • Morality: what should we wish upon people who despise us?
  • Short pieces about cattle, single mothers, Obergefell, Trump’s lying about the economy, Christian nationalism, and Trump’s itch to start a war with Venezuela
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What does this say about human nature?

The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman, 14 Nov 2025: Is “Six Seven” Really Brain Rot?, subtitled “The viral phrase is easy to dismiss, but its ubiquity suggests something crucial about human nature.”

I’ve been hearing about this “six seven” phase for some weeks now. Popular, apparently, precisely because it’s meaningless. Using it means you’re one of the cool kids. But to the essay:

Recently, my wife was texting with a friend who lives in Singapore. The news from the other side of the world turned out to be that kids there had discovered “six seven.” On Halloween, our friend reported, a boy with a handmade “six seven” jersey had earned applause as he made his way through her neighborhood—a place that’s a long way from Sixty-seventh Street in Philadelphia, which the rapper Skrilla may have been referencing in his song “Doot Doot (6 7),” which came out last December. Since then, kids of all ages have been inexplicably entertaining themselves by saying “six seven” at every opportunity, ideally with a lilt on the “seven” and a little wiggly hand motion. My son Peter tells me that kids have been saying it so much in his second-grade classroom—not just during math instruction but throughout the day—that it’s been banned. (He’s under the impression, certainly erroneous, that “six seven” has been prohibited at every school on Long Island.)

“What is ‘six seven,’ anyway?” I asked him, not long ago.

“It’s brain rot,” he said, confidently.

I followed up: “What’s brain rot?”

“It’s random stuff from the internet that fills up your brain,” he said.

Then with some background about the origin of the phrase. And noting that it’s not used online, only used in person.

The senselessness of “six seven” contributes to the impression of brain rot. “It’s absurd and random,” the actress Elizabeth Olsen said recently, on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” This is certainly true—and yet linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists have long known that much of what we say is meaningless. In 1923, in a seminal essay titled “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski observed that, whenever people get together, they talk about a whole lot of nothing. “As much among savage tribes as in a European drawing-room,” he wrote, social life involves a lot of conversation in which meaning “is almost completely irrelevant”: “Inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things—all such are exchanged, not in order to inform,” and “certainly not in order to express any thought,” but just to create “ties of union.”

I’ve noted this before. What is it people need to talk about so incessantly? “Ties of union”? Hmm…

Could meaninglessness itself be a message? In a recent exploration of “six seven” in the Times, the style reporter Callie Holtermann argues that the phrase might be seen as “a kind of gleeful obfuscation, an effort to be unknowable by a generation that has, virtually since birth, been relentlessly on display.” A writer tells Holtermann that “six seven” is meant “to frustrate the olds”—it’s a way of saying, “Let us exist in our own space.” These ideas sound plausible, but might be too centered on the concerns of adults. When a busload of elementary schoolers shouts “six seven!” between the sixth and seventh stops, are they really trying to say something to the bus driver? “There is in all human beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company,” Malinowski writes. Childhood and adolescence are socially challenging. Maybe kids love “six seven” because it makes togetherness easy.

Togetherness easy, hmm..

In “Interaction Ritual Chains” (don’t judge a book by its title!), Collins lays out a holistic theory of human nature, centered on rituals, into which “six seven” fits nicely. A ritual, Collins explains, “is a mechanism of mutually focussed emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality.” There are big-time rituals, like communion, and small-time ones, like shaking hands, or dapping up, or standing at the front of a conference room and clearing your throat. These acts—which often involve a physical component—help make gatherings of people cohere. Rituals are “everywhere,” Collins writes, because social life is ultimately “a string of situations” which must be inaugurated, conducted, and concluded.

Rituals! Now we’re getting somewhere.

Rituals do more than lend structure to our days, Collins argues; they also create “emotional energy,” which is something we crave. We want to feel alive, valued, connected, “charged up.” On Sundays, in church, we experience something special when we’re all together, praying; we have “feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action.” We can’t stay in church forever, but its rituals attach their emotion to “cognitive symbols,” which we might later use to extend the good vibes. Church ends; you go home; ordinary life resumes. But, later, you see the steeple above the treetops, and you feel a surge of energy flowing from your fellows and God. “What holds society together?” Collins asks. The answer is “groups of people assembled in particular places who feel solidarity with each other”—and who then find ways of sustaining that solidarity across space and time, using symbols and rituals that help them feel it even when they’re not together.

Religion! Not nonsensical “brain rot” exactly, neither “six seven” nor religion, but both ways of binding, if only superficially, with others.

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A moral quandary. The solution, it seems to be, is to wish on others only what you would have them wish upon you.

OnlySky, Tom Krattenmaker, 17 Nov 2025: Should we want the best for MAGA voters?, subtitled “What are our moral obligations toward people who despise us?”

While chatting with a fellow attendee at a humanist meeting a few years ago, I said something that sparked quick disagreement. Some of my friends were serious Christians, I pointed out, and I had no wish to see them deconvert.

Their faith was important to them, I explained. They practiced it in ways that made them better and happier people. After investing so much in it, losing it would be devastating for them.

“I want the best for them,” I said.

My conversation partner wasn’t having it. Surely, he said, belief in a non-existent God could not be in their best interest. If I wanted the best for them, wouldn’t I want them to know the truth?

Then addressing Charlie Kirk, his wife’s forgiveness of the murderer, and Trump’s disagreement, that he hates his opponents and doesn’t want what best for them.

It’s a cold slap to hear the president speak of me and my ilk with such contempt. Yet can it be said that we want the best for him, and his supporters? And if so, what does it even mean to want the best for one’s adversaries?

Good answers will go a long way toward determining the future of democracy in this country.

The essay goes on. The problem is dealing with what different people think is “best” for them, and for other people. Believers want skeptics to accept Jesus; rationalists want believers to understand the world as it actually is, and how their beliefs are myths and multiply-retold stories.

The writer concludes by advising: stay in touch.

On a personal level, if we interact, stay in touch, and listen to the legitimate parts of our rivals’ stories and concerns, we might even influence them in the long run, as they influence us (gasp!) in our understanding of who they are and where they are coming from with political and cultural stances.

It doesn’t mean we excuse a Nazi tattoo or a Confederate flag, or nod in assent to incoherent conspiracy theories about climate change being a hoax and Democrats stealing the 2020 election. If we “want the best for them,” we want them to be free of toxic falsehoods.

And if we want democracy to have a chance in the decades ahead, we need to understand that no one can be scorned and abandoned. What do we think “deplorables” do when they’re forsaken and normal politics fail them? Quietly acquiesce and crawl under rocks?

A quarter-millennium of American history says they do not—and what they do instead might not be the best for any of us.

In my case, I’ve already been cut off by a relative who did not want me to challenge him about his MAGA-inspired conspiracy theories.

So what would I want for MAGA voters? Not what is “best” for them. But something like: I want for you the understanding that stories, no matter how old, are the products of generations of oral retelling and print translations and re-translations and so are almost certainly not literally true; but what is true is best derived from observing the world through systematic investigation and repeated corrections via evidence.

It’s a neutral strategy. Say that back to me, and I’m fine.

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Today’s briefly noted items.

  • Boing Boing, Jennifer Sandlin, 17 Nov 2025: Arizona pastor says “single mother whores” aren’t worthy of church help

    Welp, Phoenix, Arizona-based far-right “Christian” pastor Steven Anderson is at it again, spreading the kind and generous word of the Lord. That’s pure sarcasm, in case you wondered, because, in fact, he’s been out here doing what he does best — spewing venom and hatred for anyone he deems unworthy of Christ’s love. His list of the damned is long, but this week he’s highlighting everyone’s favorite scapegoat, “‘single mother’ whores.”

    — — As with ICE, you have to wonder what kind of people are drawn to these kinds of jobs.

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