What I find most interesting about Destiny, and what I believe most people don't understand in this thread, is how honest he is about what drives his actions. More than sexual pleasure, more than the desire to appear intelligent, I think Steven experiences the greatest amount of satisfaction in finding truth and acting upon it. One can still call that intellectual gratification, but it's peculiarly aimed by himself towards himself. Sure, he enjoys the pseudo intellectual persona he has crafted online for others to see, but he is undoubtedly his own most privileged spectator. This will become apparent to anyone who watches through the various pop philosophy rants he did throughout his career, there is a consistency in thought and action that is undeniable.
Now, Steven is by no means a genius, he lacks a proper education in any subject really, and at best has above average knowledge in a select few fields. To call him stupid however is just plainly wrong. He has both a quick mind and a natural proclivity towards investigating the root causes of different issues. These talents naturally led him to the field of philosophy. So how is his philosophical understanding? For starters, poor, if it is to be compared with any standard of academic rigor. On a broader societal scale however it is not too bad. Or rather, it is good enough for Steven to ask himself the right questions and give himself answers to the best of his ability. But ay, there's the rub. He only walks as far as his eyes can see.
Steven's pitfall is not being stupid enough to act merely by convention, yet not being intelligent enough to guide his own life towards success. In other words, he is just sharp enough to bring about his own downfall. When you listen to him go over philosophical notions you'll notice that he is more or less able to correctly identify different problems that arise in metaphysical investigations, but when he attempts to offer a solution it always goes somewhat along the lines of "this whole field is dogshit", "there is no rational response", "x position is the most common or easy to adopt". His utter inability (and laziness) to acutally put effort into studying the history and complexity of philosophical thought restricts him to incredibly simplistic positions, often just abandoning himself to the accessibility of ontological nihilism or skepticism, this is most apparent in his position around ethics.
As we've all heard ad nauseam, Steven is an ethical (and psychological) egoist and emotivist. The latter position (and more broadly non-cognitivism) is historically relevant and respected, but the former is usually not taken too seriously. The intellectual merit, or lack thereof, of egoism is not actually important here, there is a more fundamental reason why it isn't prevalent; to successfully orient one's actions around immediate desire requires an especially high degree of self awareness and acumen. Steven convinced himself not only that he ought act in accordance with what maximized his own wellbeing, but he also convinced himself of his full capacity to discriminate between which desires would be more and less beneficial to pursue both long term and short term. As has become apparent in the past few years, this was a categorically incorrect assumption.
Most people don't ponder extensively on how they should lead their lives, they simply play by the set of conventions that dominate their particular Zeitgeist. Thus most people aren't deemed to be degenerates. I am quite certain that Steven's degeneracy is indeed almost wholly fueled by his anomalous necessity to look beyond convention, to try and ground his own understanding of ethics, leading to the catastrophe that his hedonistic carte blanche has become.
This ties back to what I first said about seeking truth. If you recall during the various couple's therapy and relationship convos that occurred with Aba, Britanny etc, Destiny would almost obsessively try to drive the point of his own wellbeing. His arguments always hinged on this insistence that his ethical system was functional, or more precisely, that he was capable of accurately deciphering situations and doing what truly maximized his happiness. From Steven's casino stories it also becomes clear that he's had this sort of utilitarian videogame-like attitude towards relationships for a long time. The problem has never been the nature of this predisposition, it was rather how much he overrated his own skill at the game. This is why the various 'degen-cuck' insults never truly reached Destiny, he doesn't value ethical norms in the same way most people do. What annoyed him the most was always when people insisted he was unhappy, i.e. failing at his own game. This realization might have brought him to question ethical egoism, but then again I don't believe Destiny has the intelligence to overcome ontological nihilism, so where would it have left him? It would've forced him to resign himself to acting by convention, something he actively does not believe in, hence a natural contradiction. Again, it was precisely Steven's necessity to inquire about matters he was unable to properly engage with that sealed his fate.
His obssession with the motif of man being a pleasure, rather than truth, seeking machine is another indicator of this attitude, which I do not believe to be performative at all. In Steven's mind he probably fancies himself as quite clever; by recognizing that his actions are fully (as an ontological necessity) driven by pleasure he is both allowing himself (avoiding contradiction with will) to engage in hedonism and setting himself apart from those who are merely pleasure-driven, by virtue of the very truth he has just recognized. It's not relevant nor interesting to speculate as to whether pleasure at large or truth more primarily drive Steven's actions, what I am merely stating is that within the confines of his self awareness, truth is for Steven the highest order of value. This scheme he's developed allows him to lie in certain socio-political situation while being completely honest with himself. Like when he was reintroducing Lauren into the streams and Pisco confronted him about white washing her image, Destiny's actual position there was completely performative, but that's because he had to be truthful to what he considered to be the primary object of desire in that situation: becoming more intimate with Lauren, rather than maintaining the integrity of his political career.
Blav (I suspect his presence at this time) will forever be Destiny's most humiliating defeat. Blav demonstrated, with supremely greater intellect, that he more than anybody else truly understood what Steven desired. In other words, he pushed Destiny the closest to recognizing the lie he'd sold himself (only a lie insofar as his own ability to recognize it as such).
All of this could have been avoided if Steven weren't so arrogant as to step beyond the pillars of Hercules.
Steven, you got molested