Note from Chadnet: this is an addendum to the original document.
Beliefs and practices are connected, yes, but separable. At least, we can find examples religious behaviors that are isolated from a unifying doctrine. I dream of cooking up a religion in my kitchen: let’s talk about the recipe
I have my own alignments, obviously, but my desire is to take the outside view to all ideology, where ideology is understood merely as a materialist version of religion; but psychologically, there is no difference between them.
There are six major ingredients to make a religion, you don’t need them all, but it helps. They are: false consciousness, a nemesis, religious ecstasy, dietary taboos, eschatology, and evangelism.
False consciousness: a revelation that necessitates a new way of being
Nemesis: a unifying enemy, also a scapegoat
Eschatology: a sense of how the world will end. Giving meaning to death also gives meaning to life.
Religious ecstasy: a glimpse of the transcendent. I will never be the same again.
Dietary taboo: that which goes into a man’s mouth does, contra Christ, make him unclean
Evangelism: the reproductive organs of an ideology; a phallusophy:
Together these components form an invisible machine with a mind of its own, a distributed virtual intelligence executing in a substrate made of the people who carry it.
In the discipline of design, an affordance is an element that presents an opportunity for use. A handle can be grasped, a button can be pressed, etc. the affordances of an object are those objects which afford manipulation
The components of religion are affordances into the human mind. Ideologies compete for mind share and the components above are their avenues of attack. If your own map is weak in one of these areas, and someone presents a strong model to you, then a new memeplex can bloom
When left to their own devices, people will instinctively build ideas that fit into the above slots. We want religion, it’s part of our extended phenotype. To be human is to live inside of and construct ideology, like a spider and its web, like a beaver and it’s dam.
Although religions contain sacred values and create stores of sanctity, it is possible for two people or groups to start with the same memeplex and yet have contradicting sacred values. This is one of the ways that memeplexes mutate.
Given enough time, divergent values can lead to schism. There are many ways to change the emphasis of religious practice while staying within the walls of a memeplex canon. Sacred texts can be reinterpreted, prophets can append to the ideology...
Perhaps the pious believe that their own God steers the memetic evolution of their belief system, but I believe Gnon works through men, even through the deliberate actions of men, or not at all.
Of course many long for a new religion but it is very complicated to make one. It’s not as if atheists merely lack the will. Even if you compose a new religion you will need to be very charismatic to spread it.
False consciousness. An enumeration of false consciousness stories. Everyone in the world is deceived except you and your group. Usually contains a seed of truth, but overstates it and ignores/downplays contrary perspectives.
Most ideologies develop a false consciousness narrative. It makes them feel special, like insiders, like they cracked the code, and now they are part of the secret club, the cool kids, not like all those heathen masses.
Scientology; thetan spirits haunt you. You need dianetics to purge them.
CrossFit: everyone else is pursuing looks or big numbers out of vanity; we are building “functional” strength
Veganism: eating animals is sadistic and murderous and bloodthirsty. Omnivory is a great evil and you are oblivious to it, strangely complicit to animal suffering, which is no different from human suffering.
Ethnic nationalism: morality, intelligence, virtue, and civilization are mostly determined by race and racial homogeneity. $OTHER_RACE are controlling society to the detriment of everyone else.
Buddhism: samsara is an endless cycle of rebirth caused by your desires. You must escape it by mastering your mind
Neoliberalism: despite what you think, the world is just fine as it is, and in fact, it is getting better in every way. Everyone thinks there is something wrong but there is not
Fedora atheism: religion aka superstition causes you to behave in ways that are foolish and primitive. Become enlightened by your intellect
Rationalism/lesswrong: your life trajectory and choices could be much more utility-maximizing than they are. Develop an understanding of cognitive bias and practice using explicit Bayesian reasoning to overcome it
Marxism: the workers control the means of production. All we have to do is seize them and distribute the wealth equally. There will be an end to poverty
Feminism/social justice: everyone is constantly unconsciously oppressed by the norms and social hierarchies in which they live. Learn to overcome your implicit assumptions about beauty, intelligence, and merit
Christianity: you were born into a life of sin through your fallen human nature. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of god. Accept salvation through Jesus to be redeemed
Nrx): the cathedral is a decentralized conspiracy of leftward-ratcheting signal wars, in which everyone defects against decency and morality in order to become holier than their neighbor
There is no judgement in any of these descriptions. Step back and see it from a meta-level.
Nemesis thread. The world is plagued by a powerful adversary. Some pervasive, malicious, and shadowy force is the cause of your suffering and misfortune. The nemesis is a scapegoat, it is the name you curse, it is a shared enemy.
To resist the nemesis is the cause that unites you with your brethren. Sometimes "it's just a metaphor" but when pressed, most people will confess that whatever nemesis they name, this is how they truly feel. it’s comforting to blame your problems on something outside you.
Originally in Greek mythology, nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution, an inescapable and implacable being, whose name came to be associated with “just resentment”. Here I am using the term slightly differently.
Christians: Satan, the angel fallen from heaven, the first whig, a rebel against God. He will promise you many good things, and then he will destroy you out of hatred. He will tempt you away from the straight and narrow with lies and pleasant sins.
Neoliberals: Trump, the uncouth, who eats his steaks well done and is definitely a racist and a rapist. In truth every standing Republican (i.e. outer party) president gets this treatment, Trump is just exceptionally good at it.
Ethnic Nationalism: usually, the enemy is the Jews. Controlling all the media and government, they use their power to demoralize us and erode our families, promoting sexual deviancy and usury.
Scientology: Xenu, maybe, it’s hard to really know. Intergalactic alien emperor does some Malthusian pruning of his population, Yada yada yada, here we are on earth plagued by alien ghosts
Feminism: the enemy is the patriarchy, a self-perpetuating ideological structure that causes men and women to conform to traditional gender roles and stereotypes, which hold you back from reaching your true potential.
Marxism: the “fat cat” capitalists and the vapid materialistic bourgeoisie unfairly hoard the wealth to the detriment of all but themselves. They create and enforce social structures that “oppress” the poor working class by preventing them from finding self-actualization
Buddhism: the source of our suffering is our own desires and attachments. You are your own nemesis
Basic bitch liberals: “the corporations”, “Wall Street”, “capitalism”, sometimes even “Monsanto” if they watched a documentary about factory farming.
Red pill manosphere: “the feminine imperative”, which is an amorphous inclination produced by feminism and innate human psychology to always prioritize women over men, emphasize their problems and downplay men’s, and to grant women more freedom and men less
Veganism: Not well-developed, But they have some pretty funny words for meat-eaters that may indicate they are developing a theory of outsiders as the devil; carnist; bloodmouth...
Nrx: the cathedral, but especially virtue- signaling leftists, are creating civilization destroying incentives and then following them in a vicious circle that will bring down western civ
Eschatology thread. An enumeration of the ways the world will end. If we know the beginning and we know the end then we know our place in the world. Eschatology frames humanity, and it gives a meaning to death, which means it gives a meaning to life
A shared anticipation of the end gives us something to look forward to. On some level, no one wants to be the middle child. If the end is imminent, then we are very special, the last people, the transitional generation into a phase shift for the world as we know it
Marxism: the workers rise up, overthrowing their oppressors, distributing wealth to the people, ending all privation. We are all united in love for our fellow man and we live happily ever after in post scarcity society.
Hellcommunism: the same as Marxism, above, except it’s what actually happens if Marxism succeeds: the workers fail and everyone dies, bringing us finally to the only true equality that was ever possible, death. That’ll show you, Dad!
Environmental collapse: we will hit a Malthusian limit or the accumulation of our pollution-generating industry will terraform the earth, making it inhospitable to human life. Used by vegans, neoliberals, and DEC
Technological singularity: a self-bootstrapping intelligent computer will become so smart and powerful that it renders all existing human modalities obsolete. Used by */acc and lesswrong
Ethnic nationalism: basically the novel soumission by houellebecq actually happens
Nuclear Apocalpyse: The favorite of the sort of people who follow every geopolitical play by play and form detailed opinions about the intrigues of various world leaders. Used by: boomers. Doomsday Clock.
Coming/return of the messiah: God will come to the earth in glory, he will resurrect the dead and render judgement upon us. After that there will be a paradisiacal messianic age. Used by Judaism and Christianity
Buddhism: seven suns apocalypse? End of the world doesn’t seem to be that important to Buddhists
Hinduism: the world is partitioned by cyclical recurring ages called yugas. Over the course of the four yugas the world degrades from moral purity to total decay. At the end, the world restarts, and the cycles repeat
Social justice/feminism: everyone gets woke and stops judging people based on sexuality and race. Fat women are hot now, no one wants those skinny bitches and all straight white men are gay or dead, all positions of power held by black or latinx lesbians
Post-millennialist: the glorious future after the apocalypse is already here, we just don’t realize it. Used by some Christian sects and also neolibs.
Various acts of nature: Carrington solar flare, meteor impact, supervolcano, etc. It's hard to organize a belief system around these but the IFL Science types get into it.
Lovecraft: the great old ones arise from their eternal sleepless sleep and drive us mad and devour us
Nrx: cathedral collapses under its own contradictions, the world is fragmented into a series of small city states where people use exit instead of voice to optimize sovereignty
Ecstasy thread. Religious ecstasy, communion with the divine, the image of the asymptote where we mere mortals meet the transcendent. When we are properly aligned with the true being and the righteousness of our cause/group/tradition, we may be granted a glimpse of the infinite.
The manifestations of religious ecstasy are often physiological as well as psychological. In the otherworldly landscapes of the mind of god, and we may feel a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, of deep and abiding peace, or the conviction of life-altering insight
There are some common pathways to religious ecstasy. Most of them hinge on expectation: there is a certain feedback loop between mental openness to ecstasy and a belief that you will enter it. In this stance, the following practices are conducive to the ecstatic
Meditation: dissociating the mind by focusing on repetitive stimulus can cause you to enter an altered state where your sensation of yourself is greatly reduced
Glossolalia: used by charismatic Christians and in shamanic practice. Seems to be at least partially memetic. In Matthew 6, Jesus speaks against the practice. “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions”. Seems to spread mimetically.
Prayer: can be similar to meditation, a long prayer or confession to god can become rapturous. The supplicant may have a sense of god’s presence, the feeling of attendance from a divine power and love.
Fasting: short term fasting causes the body to release adrenaline, and gives you a heightened sense of your own body. When stacked with other ecstatic practices, it increases their potency
Psychedelic drugs: mushrooms, acid, and ayahuasca are all famous for inducing feelings of ego loss, deep introspection, and the sensation of a spiritual presence
Fellowship and group worship: communal singing of hymns, chanting political or religious slogans, and the drama of being lost in a crowd can all cause a sense of otherness, a grand awareness of one’s own smallness, a kind of unity of consciousness into a hivelike unity.
CrossFit: its an outlier but I suspect cross fitters get a bit of a runner’s high, and since I am treating them like a church, it’s worth noting that this is similar to a religious ecstasy, fulfilling a similar role
Shamanic mysticism and new age types are the most likely to use drugs as part of a spiritual practice. Some ancient Greco-Roman mystery religions consumed ergotized grains in order to enter a psychedelic state
Marxists and some neoliberals use political protest rallies as a kind of church, where they experience the ecstasy of crowds. In this light, OWS was a kind of mystery cult
Buddhism is a religion entirely built around a the ecstasy of meditation. Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingraham is a deep elucidation of this.
Christianity has always had a rocky relationship with religious ecstasy, tending to believe that the loss of self-control is not of God
Musical concerts, such as rock shows and edm raves are a a gateway to spiritual ecstasy for many people, as they combine the ecstasy of crowds with the high of exertion from dancing and the rhythmic repetition of music.
Dietary taboo thread. Food, which is needed to sustain life, takes on a sacred characteristic. It could be that in the past, dietary taboos were adaptive; many plants are poisonous, and some animals are likelier to carry dangerous parasites
Regardless of the reason, we seem to like following rules that prohibit certain foods. Nonreligious people chase fad diets with gusto—something in our soul longs for a “no eat” list. It gives us a sense of purity, and binds groups together through a shared ritual and custom.
It’s popular to mock multiculturalists for their enthusiasm for foreign foods, as if it could justify the negative externalities of their agenda, but part of the reason they do it is that food is a vehicle for identity and belonging.
Jesus said, “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man”, and yet I notice many Protestants eagerly embracing health food trends, almost as if something is missing from their religious practice, a food taboo shaped hole in the heart
Jews: kosher laws. Land animals must be ruminants with cloven hooves. Sea creatures must have fins and scales. No meat with milk. Many such mitzvahs!
Hindus: Some sects: no meat at all. Others, no meat of cows. Eggs and dairy ok.
Muslims: halal food. No pork, no blood, no carrion, no alcohol, no food that has been dedicated to other gods besides allah.
Mormons: no alcohol or caffeine. That old joke about how do you stop a Mormon from drinking all your beer on a fishing trip? Always invite at least two mormons!
Catholics: no meat on Friday, no meat on lent, lots of variations and exceptions here. At least they tried
Buddhists: vegetarianism, and a prohibition on alliums, as they are thought to excite the senses
Veganism: nothing of an animal whatsoever, including even a prohibition against owning objects made out of leather. Vegans extend Marxist ideas about exploitation to include all animals, and view it as a moral transgression.
Raw Vegans: these people are so nutrient deficient that they have to give themselves enemas. I think they have a poop fetish
CrossFit: it is not mandatory, but the memeplex of the paleo diet has evolved into symbiosis with CrossFit, and many crossfitters take it up.
Neoliberals: gluten free, locavorism, foreign foods from a different culture each day, meatless Monday—it goes on and on
Communists: no food at all, maybe the occasional potato
Nrx: mangan-ism, ketogenic diets. Optional, not integral, similar to the paleo+CrossFit connection
Evangelism thread. The rent that humans pay to beliefs. The arduous and challenging task of spreading your belief to others. If a memeplex is a body then evangelism compulsion is the reproductive organ of that body.
Evangelism is hard, especially “cold” evangelism. It becomes similar to pickup artistry, an effort of salesmanship. Most have neither the stomach nor the head for it. The easiest way for a religion to spread is through inheritance, but memetic virality can be even more powerful.
Parents pass on memes to their children the same way that mothers pass on their gut flora. These organisms are fellow travelers, partly symbiotic. The easiest way to make more Christians is for Christians to have children.
But in addition to “be fruitful and multiply”, Christians also have “go ye therefore into all the world”. But every religious practice has its imperative to spread
Missionaries who dig wells and build schools are investing in the fertility of poor, faraway places as a way to memetically capture their children, trading capital to propagate ideology
Devout Jews wander crowded public places looking for non-practicing ethnic Jews to bring back into the fold
Islam spreads by the sword, imposing jizya upon nonbelievers, incentivizing them to convert with social and economic pressure. Christians conquer through a kind of domineering generosity, muslims through war and invasion
In the past, Christians also spread through conquest. Constantine is probably the most famous example.
Scientologists set up reading rooms and offer free dianetics analysis, “personality tests” and other forms of consultation that appear to be a kind of psychotherapy or medical intervention
Marxists exploit an idiosyncrasy of developmental psychology, teaching a doctrine of seizing the property of the rich, appealing to young people at a time in their life when they have little property, when they most covet the possessions of their elders
Neoliberalism retards birth rates, so it requires constant geographical churn in order to sustain itself. It spreads with a two pronged strategy: capture of the Prussian school system and embedded morality parables in children’s cartoons
Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons both send out door-to-door salesman to evangelize to bored housewives, the unemployed, the recently migrated and culturally disconnected, and anyone who happens to be at home during daytime hours while riding an emotional low
CrossFitters are on average really good looking and for some reason they won’t shut up about CrossFit, so they don’t have to evangelize consciously. How do you know if someone does CrossFit? Oh don’t worry, they’ll tell you etc.
Vegans put out pamphlets, post pictures of cute food animals on the internet, make enticing YouTube videos about their food, invite their friends to vegan restaurants, and spread dubious ecofear. They make vegan starter kits and PETA acts out disgusting pro-vegan spectacles
Rationalists and neoreactionaries make converts by writing alienating and esoteric texts and publishing them on blogs, waiting for high iq types to wander into their labyrinths of the mind
Buddhists host free meditation retreats, but at least in Western countries they are not pushy about it. Historically they have also made converts using legal capture
Street preachers of all varieties deliver sermons in public squares, via radio and television, and now they also evangelize via social media, posting to YouTube and SoundCloud and yes, even Twitter dot com.
We all long to spread our memeplex because we know that in the ideological arena, the fight is zero sum. If it comes down to it, it’s us or them. In concert with this need, our religious practices give shape and method to extract unequivocal ideological submission from outsiders.
Be honest with yourself: regarding the (libs/reactionaries/capitalists/communists/Christians/atheists/Muslims/$OTHER), they absolutely have to go, whether we purge them by the book or the sword or the condom or the CRISPR or the bomb.
Everyone thinks society should be rewritten to make better men, no one thinks it should be rewritten to make better women. Yes, men are made, not born, but women are more imprintable with ideology and changing the content of women is easier than changing the content of men
Last week we spoke of social construction but now I will advance the view that femininity is MORE contingent than masculinity, more social, more fungible, and that the perception that sexuality as fluid is ITSELF a facet of the feminine
Proof: A man can exist as a man outside of society. An archetypal form of masculinity is the savage outsider, a man raised by NATURE ALONE, who is more beast than man, in some ways such a man is the most masculine of all; to the degree he is socially constructed, he is feminized
Fertility and physical weakness are the biological fundament of femininity but beauty and sexuality are almost entirely artifice, which is why artificiality is also a feminine essence
When women tell us that homosexuality exists on a scale and that gender and sex are relatively fluid, they are speaking honestly about their own experience of these things, but there is no reason, no reason at all, to think that their experience is true of men
Men who covet but cannot obtain feminine beauty through the usual channels show us exactly what portion of femininity is socially constructed when they appropriate the artifice of feminine beauty for themselves; that which they cannot appropriate is biologically determined
A porn star is a female drag queen. Women who perform this kind of culturally constructed sexual femininity are doing it to win intrasexual competitions. They are right when they say it's not to please men. It's work, it's against other women, and they resent it
Competition between sellers benefits buyers, to the detriment of sellers. If one woman wears makeup to get better mates than her sisters, then all women have to start wearing makeup, no woman is better off, and all women now have to pay a makeup cost.
Almost everything women do is a kind of sexual display, every piece of clothing, every mannerism, the way they style their hair &c., and most of it is unconscious. Once an artifact becomes typified as feminine it becomes sexual in the male mind
Women win intrasexual competitions when they successfully dissolve their individuality and become, for the man they desire, not ONE woman but ALL women. A singular woman becomes a proxy for all women, and a man develops a fetish for her specifically
Contrast the character of Don Juan, who is and always has been a fantasy of hysterical women, a man who has his women ONE at a time. Man sexualizes woman by de-individating her, woman sexualizes man by HYPER-individuating him, and she desires to be loved by him in her same way
You can see that femininity is more socially constructed than masculinity because femininity has changed MUCH FASTER than masculinity since the explosion of feminist ideology
It's been easy for educators and opinion makers to invert every proper attitude a woman should hold, but in the same time, masculinity stubbornly refuses to change. There are more cowards and weak men now than before, but we don't see them as masculine, only as unhatched eggs
No man looks at nu-males and desires to be them, but the average woman very much sees the archetype of the ball-busting woman CEO (along with other exotic fictional females) as the ideal manifestation of womanhood
What's more striking about this is that the new womanhood is still defined adversarially in terms of an older femininity that no longer exists in the west, wherein women do domestic chores and aspire to motherhood. The new womanhood relies on this archetype for its formula
Why aren't people having children? It's not because they're expensive, it's because the millennial women honest to god don't want them, (at least not strongly enough) because having children is the core of the old womanhood, and new womanhood necessarily opposes it
"Having a baby is a huge commitment and you shouldn't have one if you aren't ready." That's true, but right now our social machine only constructs women who never feel ready. Recognizing your unreadiness isn't salutary unless you perceive it as a defect to be overcome
Some women claim to be pro-natal in the context of "women's rights," but their "rights" are a structurally anti-natal social construction; they are like bureaucrats expressing a desire for less paperwork as they gleefully stamp everything in triplicate
It is not possible to reconcile the modality of woman as a capitalist laborer with the modality of woman as mother, because the demands of labor and the demands of motherhood are diametrically opposed. Labor's incentives are a fertility shredder and everyone knows it
The new womanhood is a child of its father, capital and its mother, feminism. Companies that embraced the new womanhood were able to lower their labor costs and allocate their resources to other facets of competition. It made everyone worse off.
Arguably, companies that embrace wokeness are trying the same trick: anything that dissolves extra-corporate obligations is a short-term win for corporations. The idea that we can chain this demon with regulation or centrally planned economies is naive
Women's "liberation" is not liberation from men, it's liberation from biology, it's liberation from the parts of womanhood that are not socially constructed. Women thus liberated are sterile, and it's a sterility they impose upon the whole of the humanity
Women's liberation is a suicide meme, because until very recently in history women didn't have a choice over whether to get pregnant. Evolution didn't equip them to have this choice, and as soon as they got it, they collectively decided to end their lineage
All human rights are a spook, but women's rights are literally a form of slow civilational suicide. Why? Because evolution can't optimize for procreation, it can only optimize for PROXIES of success. Alexa, what does Goodhart's law say again?
Again, evolution did not EQUIP women to carry the burden of the "right to choose"--they never had any say in the matter at all, and it should not surprise anyone that they are radically unprepared to choose responsibly.
Women, do you not get it? You are collectively killing us, each one of you defecting against god and humanity with your selfish fucking choices. This is a dark and satanic power which shit-slinging monkeys were never meant to wield
You have an evolutionary lifevest, which means your genes got propagated against or in spite of your desires, UNTIL NOW, and it turns out your desires are hideous, hideous, hideous
I wish to god that feminist lies about patriarchy were true, because then we could force every last one of you to bear children, doesn't that sound hot? There's nothing women like more (in the heat of the moment) than having their agency violently taken away
The only people who are immune to the autogenocide of women's liberation are the ones who lack the conscientiousness to effectively exploit birth control for their own hedonism
People who teach antinatalism and don't kill themselves lack the courage of their convictions, equivocating over the difference between personal and civilizational suicide, as if wishing to pass painlessly is somehow more noble, but dead is dead, no matter how pretty the coffin
Many of you have contempt for people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, but their accomplishment 10 years ago is worth understanding, and over time they have shown they lack a certain je ne said quois that true believers of the left demand
(What is moldbug mostly talking about? If you had to sum him up, it’s this: secularism is cladistically religious)
Whatever your ideological alignment is, you have to be impressed by how many people they convinced to stop calling themselves Christians. They instigated a mass deconversion*, and it was organically evangelical. They didn’t even tell people to spread it.
So how did it work? How do you flip someone’s ideology with this one weird trick?
The argument works like this: you think you are [ideology-1], but in fact you are confused. You believe (1) and (2) and (3), and these are not things [ideologians-1] believe. You are in fact already [ideology-2], Stop fooling yourself
Astute readers will recognize this as a highly specialized false consciousness argument. To pull it off, you have to produce a pessimistic picture of [ideology-1]. It’s not a wrong picture, but it’s not a flattering one.
Scott Alexander thinks you have to evaluate an ideology based on its strongest variant, something he calls a “steelman”. This is noble but wrong. People don’t deliberately choose their beliefs, but if they did, the way to evaluate them would be this:
Bucketize people into std deviations of IQ, imagine the ideology as it appears in each bucket, then average them together using the number of people in each bucket as a weight. Do a little “manual” smoothing to maintain coherence, but not too much since real ppl aren’t coherent.
I call this the “realman”of an ideology, and it is the technique that is implicitly employed by the new atheists, because they argued against Christianity as it was on average, not as it is idealized.
If you want to change the mind of the average person you have to meet them where they are.
There was some luck involved for the new atheists; secular liberalism had already hollowed out most Americans’ actual understanding and practice of Christianity. so when they said “you aren’t really Christians”, they sort of had a point.
Cognitive dissonance is how you boot into the BIOS and load a new memeplex. You create cognitive dissonance by deconstructing concepts in the existing memeplex, and critically, you do it by activating dormant concepts in a rival memeplex that person already carries.
The principle does generalize. Everyone has partial models of hostile memeplexes in their brain. Memeplexes frame truth and buttress their frames with tautologies protected by levels of indirection.
The way you move someone into your ideology is to convince them that they are ALREADY a part of it, and then to assist them with a little rectification of names.
At some point in his mental journey, every man must contend with the riddle of categories
What is a category, where do category distinctions come from? Are they PREscriptive or DEscriptive?, etc, etc.
Much of the current wave of AI advancement has consisted of finding ways to formalize category construction into rigorous mathematical procedures.
It’s instructive when to look at the ways that AIs fail to classify their inputs, because it holds up a mirror to our own internal struggles in this arena, which differ from those of an AI in degree more than kind
Big Yud’s memorable formulation was “a category is a cluster in thing space”
If you know an object is in a particular category, you can predict many of its attributes, because those attributes often appear together
A category is virtuous if its predictive power is high, vicious if its predictive power is low. No category is perfect, because in the real world, there are always exceptions and outliers
We build our categories by aggregating our observations, but we don’t do it in a vacuum. We inherit most of our categories from our language and our culture.
Categories exist in the mind, and they are “socially constructed”, which is a fancy way of saying that they are abstractions, and no one can locate them in material space, and that we could construct them slightly differently at the margins
Most categories, narrow or broad, are nearly as old as humanity itself: tools, animals, food, man, woman, mushroom, hero. Some of them are very recent: computer, car, amino acid. Creating a useful new category requires an act of genius
(Aside: genius in popular usage is much degraded from its original meaning. It does not refer to mere intelligence. The sole provenance of creativity is the divine, and the genius, with the power to create, manifests this godly attribute)
Political power is in part the power to dictate which categories are ontologically valid or invalid. These days they are telling me that “sexual orientation” is a very important category and “biological sex” is a category with no predictive power
There’s a trick that propagandists of all stripes like to use, and the hustle works like this: You think X is a real category, but it’s not, the bounds are arbitrary. Here are some boundary cases, you don’t know how to classify them. Humans invented this category, it’s not real
This kind of categorical assault can be very disorienting, especially if you are young and idealistic and haven’t figured out yet that all human knowledge is a fuzzy image of unknowable things-in-themselves
No one who pushes the categorical assault is arguing in good faith, though many have succumbed to it, and wish you to join them in their confusion.
Edge cases don’t turn poles into spectrums
The point of the categorical assault is to temporarily suspend your capacity for judgement, so that the propagandist can tweak your mental models for their own gain. You seem confused, friend, let me help you resolve that...
What they want you to imagine is that the categories in your mind were fabricated from whole cloth by some long vanished committee for the construction of social consensus (ironic, really) and that, because these things were implemented by fiat, they can be discarded, however...
Most of our beliefs and behavior are not generated in this way. Beliefs evolve just like DNA, very slowly, over generations, and with many dead ends. There is no ultimate goal, only fitness, only ever fitness, and fitness is local and idiosyncratic to its environment
Beliefs accumulate in societies like useful mutations accumulate in organisms, and very old beliefs are more likely to be useful than very new ones. Innovation is not the destruction of old categories, but the classification of new perceptions
Besides trying to confuse existing categories, another trick that propagandists use is to invent farcical new ones that contain the whole world, and then present their agenda as an exciting new alternative to a previously invisible default
This is a bit like pointing out the existence of water to the fish, and suggesting that they try breathing air instead. All your life you have been oppressed by waterism, and you didn’t even realize it! I call this kind of attack a categorical rebase (plz invent a better name!)
The most successful categorical rebase in history may be convincing people that there is something called capitalism, and something called communism, and that all your unhappiness is caused by being trapped inside capitalism
Red pill: capitalism is not a thing, humans make markets like honeybees make hives, and communism is not an alternative to it, it’s the equivalent of trying to convince honeybees not to build hives.
When people criticize capitalism they are mostly talking about their own innate desires and capacities. They hate consumerism but natural selection endowed them with greed, hedonic adaptation, loss aversion, and a need to compete over status
All the humans who felt peaceful and content and lived in harmony died out aeons ago, they were killed or eaten or outbred by the ones who were cunning and duplicitous and eternally hungry and eternally discontent, and you are their progeny
Another more recent categorical rebase is the invention of the category “cisgender” and its attendant “alternative.” In the same way that communism is just disruption of disruption of social imperatives, transgenderism is just a disruption of bio-imperatives
Real communism has never been tried because there is nothing to try, there is only breaking shit like a child throwing a temper tantrum because you have a malformed theory of moral desert
I hate the standard political compass, which I am pretty sure was popularized by libertarians trying to peel converts away from left and right using a childish and poorly conceived axis called “authority-liberty”. I made up this metric, see, and it shows you’re all on my side
Hot take: the right was always the upwing party and we only act “conservative” when we are on an upward trajectory.
If you have a belief that can’t be questioned or disputed or refuted, then what you have is an article of faith. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Everyone needs faith in their life and the special magic of theological religions is to invest that faith in a belief that is fundamentally beyond the reach of empiricism
Faith is a rallying point, or a schelling point if you like subculture jargon. (Lexicons are uniforms we put on). If we all agree to loudly believe something that is obviously false, then we are sending an expensive signal of group allegiance
When you are using a belief in this way, the thing you absolutely can’t do is question it or try to verify it, since that breaks the spell.
If for example you place your faith in something obviously falsifiable, like, “the sky is purple,” or “every human is equally valuable”, then you raise the price of entry to the faith group
If your obviously false belief forces you to act in ways that contradict reality, in ways that force you to pay other costs, not just in sanity but in damage to health or property, then you raise the price even more
I can think of at least one group of people who make literal, physical self-harm a barrier to entry. Can you?
We are living in times of insanity inflation, where, in order to stand out, groups must demand increasing levels of harmful contradictory belief in order to be expensive
I would rather make people pay other costs: physical fitness, mental agility, wealth. These are good barriers to entry but they have a drawback: they are all much more expensive than sanity. Anyone, even a crazy bum, can pay a sanity price to join a religion
I don’t write much about biodeterminism, or the limits that physiology places on psychology, not because it’s untrue, but because it’s unhelpful
Everything is 80% heritable also means it’s 20% not. Crass generalization, sure, but I think correct beliefs can yield huge marginal benefits even to people of exceptionally low genetic quality
That some people are of low quality is a forbidden truth mostly because it is so impolite. If someone goes on about genetic quality, we suspect that person has no accomplishments, and is seeking self-worth from being rather than doing
This intuition is largely true, and it’s part of why I don’t bother. Sadly it is difficult at this juncture for most people to believe that diversity is not a strength while simultaneously believing that they themselves aren’t so special, but I have hope
So biology places hard limits on the potential ROI of ideology. That’s not a reason to neglect ideology. We should still try to build the best ideology we possibly can, perhaps one that is hellbent on improving biology.
A man goes every day to the same teachers
They teach him the same lesson
He hears, but does not listen
Is it the lessons of these teachers that you need?
You already know how to get girls
You already know how to be a man
You keep taking the same medicine but you still feel sick: masculinity is under attack. Masculinity is fragile but you must be anti-fragile. A man needs a mannerbund. Manhood is mastery. Manhood is discipline. A woman is a human being and a man is a human doing.
Be strong, have conviction, be a protector, don’t get caught up, don’t let her use you. Lift weights, looksmax, get some better clothes, make more money, tease her, troll her, a woman is a lock and man is a key, control the frame, own your desires
There is nothing new under the sun. All the good wisdom of the present is reheated wisdom of the past. Everything there is to know about suffering, contentment, our place in the world, and the inevitability of death was written down thousands of years ago
Some of the good advice, like going to the gym, requires a lot of work. Some advice seems like something you could change immediately, but how, exactly, does one own one’s desires? How do you root out the weakness in your own soul?
For a man, the distinction between doing and being is false. There is no "human" condition, only a male and a female condition. A man IS the sum of his actions, his essence is not separate from his existence
To change your condition you must change what you are. This is often painful. You create your circumstances and your circumstances create you in a feedback loop. It's cybernetics all the way down
You cope with the pain of your failures by grasping them tightly, making them part of your identity: "It's OK that I am bad in this way, it's who I am." Then later you think: "The world should be made more hospitable to people like me."
Changing actions changes identity and vice versa. The reason you can’t weaponize wisdom is that you have received wisdom in the world of the mind, but to be useful it must pass into the world of the body.
Consider an athlete at the top of his game: when you hear him speak, you feel he has only half a brain, but in his body there knowledge and mind unspeakable. He has no knowledge, but he embodies knowledge; unto the athlete is an epistemology of action
To the ancient truths that you have heard already, modern man has added: “the world has no center.” This is not new, either, but modern man has come to understand this truth like never before.
The belief that the world has no center is the key conceit of the modern age, and in modernity we have come to embody this belief. The decentering of god from our collective consciousness was also the decentering of man.
A sign consists of a signifier and a signified. This is related to Peter Thiel's notion of "the world of atoms" vs. "the world of bits". The bit-world is a dream of the atom-world, and the soul is a dream of the body.
Prior to modernity, our signifiers were mediated by the signified; the world of the body was experientially primary to the world of the mind. In modernity, this relation is inverted.
The printing press, the era of industrial replication of art, radio, television, and the internet have all given signifiers a mobility and a vitality that was unimaginable in the past, and we experience this as a kind of flux, a plasticity of all referents
Nowhere is this clearer than on instagram and youtube, where people eat ridiculous simulations of food, multicolor monstrosities that tickle the mind and poison the body, and where women use facetune and photoshop to stretch their bodies into bizarre caricatures of femininity.
The experiential primacy of signifiers alienates us from our bodies, and has profound consequences for art, literature, sexuality, and religion. We feel this alienation because we necessarily experience our bodies as secondary to our mediated perceptions.
You may say it was always thus, but now we have the philosophical tools to understand it. Wrong. The ubiquitization and above all the SPEED of electronic media have brought about genuine phenomenological change.
In one of my favorite stories by Borges, The House of Asterion, we find a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the premodern world, man is at the center; the hero is Theseus. In the modern world, the minotaur is the sympathetic character, a head mismatched to a body.
The Minotaur says: "Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?" The labyrinth does not constrain his body, but he is mesmerized by it. The world of signifiers traps him
Asterion is caught in the labyrinth, and he rationalizes it to himself: "Not for nothing was my mother a queen; I cannot be confused with the populace, though my modesty might so desire." He lines his cage with delusions of grandeur.
In the end we learn that the minotaur is miserable. Like so many in the modern world, he longs for death. The morning sun was reflected in the bronze sword. "Would you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus "The Minotaur scarcely defended himself."
We feel modernity as a psychic wound, and it is words (signifiers) that have wounded us. Wise words brought us here, but still we thirst after wise words, as if they could get us out. Every wise utterance becomes another stone in your labyrinth walls
To escape his labyrinth, Asterion had to die. Bad identities have gravity, they hold you to bad patterns of behavior. To change your behaviors you must change your identity, a change we metaphorize as self-death
Religion is one way of changing identity: in Christianity, The narrative of self-death underwrites the transformation of the self. "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live"
The disciplines of the body—athleticism, physical labor, and martial training—draw us into the world of the signified, the world of bodies. To a man who has spent his life lost in the labyrinth of signifiers, a newfound awareness of the body feels like a superpower
The cultivation of the body becomes a new identity, and in this place, will flows thoughtlessly into actuality. Such a man finds success with women, not because they desire his body, but because he has embodied his desires
He thinks to himself: this is enlightenment! The ancients were right about everything, and modernity is only a pit. But we have found many fine treasures in the labyrinth, many wonders and many horrors. Like Asterion we should not complain of life; the door to the prison is open
Philosophy must give up her attempt at finding the veritates aeternae. The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty - man who is supremely afraid of uncertainty, and who is forever hiding himself behind this or the other dogma.
The business of philosophy is not to reassure people but to upset them.
There are superfluous people, plenty of them. But what is to be done with them? No one knows. There remains only to invent philosophies on their behalf.
The best, the most effective way of convincing a reader is to begin one's argument with inoffensive, commonplace assertions.
When suspicion has been lulled, and a certainty has been begot that what follows is a confirmation of the reader's own accepted views, then has the moment arrived to speak one's mind openly, but still in the same easy tone, as if there were no break in the flow of truisms
The thing to do is to go on, in the same suave tone, from uttering a series of banalities to expressing a new and dangerous thought, without any break. If you succeed in this, the reader will not forget - the new words will plague and torment him until he has accepted them.
Philosophy must have nothing in common with logic; philosophy is an art which aims at breaking the logical continuity of argument and bringing man out on the shoreless sea of imagination, the fantastic tides where everything is equally possible and impossible.
Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour, - this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. Genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself - the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job.
Genius is a wretched, blind maniac, whose eccentricities are condoned because of what is got from him.
“The writer is writing away, the reader is reading away" - the writer doesn't care what the reader is after, the reader doesn't care what the writer is about.
Moral people are the most revengeful of mankind, they employ their morality as the most subtle weapon of vengeance. They are not satisfied with simply despising and condemning their neighbour themselves, they want the condemnation to be universal and supreme
once the laws of morality are autonomous, and once ideas are allowed to stand above the empirical needs of mankind, it is impossible to balance ideas and morality with social requirements, or even with the salvation of the country from ruin
Creative activity is a continual progression from failure to failure, and the condition of the creator is usually one of uncertainty, mistrust, and shattered nerves. The more serious and original the task which a man sets himself, the more tormenting is the self-misgiving.
For this reason even men of genius cannot keep up the creative activity to the last. As soon as they have acquired their technique, they begin to repeat themselves, well aware that the public willingly endures the monotony of a favourite, even finds virtue in it
While conscience stands between the educated and the lower classes, as the only possible mediator, there can be no hope for mutual understanding.
In the "ultimate questions of life" we are not a bit nearer the truth than our ancestors were. Everybody knows it, and yet so many go on talking about infinity, without any hope of ever saying anything.
All the best poetry, all the wonderful mythology of the ancients and of modern peoples have for their source the fear of death. Only modern science forbids men to fear, and insists on a tranquil attitude towards death. So we arrive at utilitarianism and the positivist philosophy
If you wish to be rid of both these creeds you must be allowed to think again of death, and without shame to fear hell and its devils
idealism needs be prompt, for if she leaves us one single moment in which to see, we shall see such things as are not easily explained away. That is why idealists stick so tight to logic. In the twinkling of an eye logic will convey us to the remotest conclusions and forecasts
Psychology at last leads us to conclude that the most generous human impulses spring from a root of egoism. Tolstoy’s "love to one's neighbour," for example, proves to be a branch of the old self-love. The same may be said of Kant's idealism, and even of Plato's.
Why do we see so many contemptible and useless people in the world? It’s because our mortality due to war and disease has never been lower.
Our lack of a war, a real war, one where vast numbers of men die, is in fact a kind of constipation, (a common side effect of opioids) and it’s not merely the case that we find our cities literally infoliated with human excrement--
In fact some large number of humans THEMSELVES are a kind of excrement which our civic or political body has been unable to expel through its usual and historical methods
But no matter how horrible our present situation is, the horrors of war are worse, who could dispute that? Indeed, does anyone have the spirit, the strength of desire, or the conviction to bring about the kind of carnage it would take to disimpact our civilization?
We lack all conviction--including the conviction needed to void our social waste--we are all the last man, we have our little pleasure for the day and our little pleasure for the night, and then, of course, a good sleep
Can you imagine believing in anything so strongly? (Of course you can, but your imagination is wrong, more on that soon) The end of war comes after the collapse of meaning, and make no mistake, meaning has collapsed.
You think you have strong belief but you are mistaken. As I have tried to convey to you already, your religious beliefs and your politics are empty, and we know this because you would not kill for them.
There is greater "piety" in the liberal atheist egalitarian than in Christian America, and this is obvious because the latter's bloodlust is marginally greater, and Jesus it burns (At least for the Christians)
Don’t worry, the piety of the atheist egalitarians is badly misplaced; they think the miracles of technology flow from atheism (wrong) and from equality (levels of wrongness that shouldn’t even be possible)
Your ability to unselfconsciously inflict death on others is the only meaningful measure of the strength of your faith or conviction--which isn't to say that strong faith is necessarily desirable
When the Spanish killed the Aztecs (at that time, Western man still retained some of his fire), the Aztecs themselves were an indictment of "us", of European man. Their cruelty and human sacrifices bore witness to the authority of their gods and the strength of their beliefs
Our gods of reason and gold are more powerful. (Jesus drove the money lenders out of the temple out of fear). The Lord can respawn after crucifixion but there are as many smartphones as Christians in the world now and guess whose conversion rate is higher
The proliferation of the smartphone is the proliferation of a structurally post-modern ideal, which is the total eclipse of the territory by the map
Religious truth is hypertruth, and what is that? Hypertruth is to truth what hyperreality is to reality; The hyperreal object appears to us as realer than real. It is an object whose material reality no longer constrains the representation of the object in the mind
Hyperreality is larger-than-lifeness, hypertruth is truer-than-trueness, truth that has broken free of observation into a world of pure reason, unmoored from reality. Our implicit awareness of the nature of hypertruth dissolves conviction
The sense of meaning has to be imposed from without. It flows from the outside and imposes structure on the self
We think we live according to a universal law, and this has caused our convictions to evaporate, because universalism tells us there is NOTHING outside and makes each person the origin of his own self, acts, tastes, and pleasures
When the self is freed from all constraints, it spins pointlessly in a void, because the self is constructed in response to needs, and freedom from constraint is freedom from need. Desire in the absence of need is monstrous.
Fantasies about societal collapse, apocalyptic wars or civil wars, or devouring singularities all stem from the same desire: a desire for meaning to be imposed upon us by forces outside ourselves and outside our control. Eschatology is a way for men to feel a feminine impulse
Really, honestly the obsession with collapse is a kind of prayer. After the collapse, you desires are transmuted back into needs Pray to Yellowstone, we can end it for all time. Was a more honest tweet ever composed?
In this world of hypertruth and hyperreality we desire to have needs again, instead of merely desires. We construct these increasingly outrageous identities and we all know that no one is ever going to act any of them out so they grow crazier and crazier
The more stupid labels you apply to your politics, the less you understand the game. An identity you have to declare to the world is a fake identity. And yet, authenticity has to be the most foolish fool’s gold in the world.
The only authentic identities left are paypig and mimic, everything else is artifice, naturally. The desire to manufacture identities, like the desire for the end of the world, is a desire for meaning that comes from the outside.
I know you think you’re a nazi/communist/etc and look, we all think it would be nice if our ideological enemies were dead, hopefully after a lot of suffering, but man is a rational animal and no one is dumb enough to compromise their own comfort to achieve this meaningless goal
The emotion a rightist feels when it’s pride day/month/eternity is the same emotion a leftist feels when she hears about fbi crime statistics. (Impotent rage) Though perhaps there is a tiny power asymmetry, or am I hallucinating?
It’s not enough to win a vote against people with $OPINION. They need to shut up and never say or think that ever again, even in secret. Wait, someone wired a dildo to an in-game currency system & it buzzes when you pay & this girl is livestreaming it. Libidinal capitalism, eh?
Don’t make that face, everyone who spends more than ten minutes online is instantly saturated with smut beyond the wildest dreams of Slaanesh and for the moment it’s still polite to pretend that isn’t the case
The only way to bring meaning back to the world is to find a source of non-simulated pathos, and I have some bad news about your current supply.
You think peak oil will be a disaster? (as if oil doesn’t flow endlessly from sustainable underground biochemical processes) We hit peak suffering ages ago and now we have no fuel to manufacture satisfaction
If your life feels pointless, it’s because you were supposed to be cannon fodder in a war that refuses to come
Weep for us moderns! We are richer than avarice itself and because of this we are blind to our poverty! You will not learn this truth until you have FELT this truth, my friends—
What is our poverty, how are we poor? Our smartphones are made of the finest rare earth metals, and they can wirelessly control dildos attached to whores halfway across the world in realtime. Are we not rich?
Our minds are filled with stories and those stories are the psychic fundament of the self. The topology of the mental landscape is genetically determined but the castles that we build there are cultural and the materials we use are narratives and your house is a grass hut
Our poverty is a spiritual poverty. We have lost the past, we have lost the future, we have lost god, and we have lost the ability to believe in happy endings. Most troubling of all is the last, which is the key to all the others
In the Argonautica we know from the beginning that Jason will acquire the golden fleece. We know he can find the treasure, and that he will find happiness, which is not hedonistic pleasure but a deep fulfillment situated in eternity
In Kafka's the Castle we know equally from the beginning that K. will never gain entry to the Castle. The happy ending is not even conceivable. The nu-sincerity of Franzen and Wallace is cynicism in drag, it is makeup contouring of the face, instagram falsies, evil geometry
In Joyce we learn a thousand circumstances of Leopold Bloom and yet we know nothing about him, nothing at all! We learn more about a character in Dante from three sentences of Inferno than from a three hundred pages of Ulysses
The novel relates to the epic as the written word relates to the spoken word. The phenomenology of literate society is different to that of oral society in that the former creates a "rational" and schizotypal man, disconnected from his emotions by sentimentality
Literate man is incapable of truly believing in god because of the chasm that literacy creates between inner and outer life. Perhaps if we burned every book forever, we could find happiness again
You may think you have not lost god, but you are in denial. You believe without believing, but you no longer feel His aura, only the aura of the ravenous maw, steel and glass, oil and capital, electronic media and pharmaceuticals
Would you die for your God? Dumb question. Would you kill for your God? A god you would not kill for is a god you would not die for is a god you don’t believe in.
We have internalized the "fully automatic" model of the universe. Whether we trouble deaf heaven about it or not, every modern feels it in his balls that the world is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
If you were raised in the church then you know it was not always thus. When I was young I believed sincerely; I was taught God’s word, and I had not yet beheld modernity. Everyone should be raised religious, if only so they can mourn for God when they see what we have wrought!
It's easy for a child to believe, but belief is not childlike. God is dead, and if he is ever to be revived, we must understand where our sanctity has gone, which means must first understand where it came from
It started with taboo. We have to imagine that the earliest taboos were strictly practical; social prohibitions against eating certain mushrooms, for example, or as a way of transmitting hygienic practices through culture
Superstition is the tendency of the mind to overfit from experience. The capacity for superstition must have been adaptive to our ancestors, but it yielded behavioral artifacts in the form of superfluous taboos
Pointless taboos are maladaptive, hence the negative connotation of superstition. The progressive impulse is in part a desire to break out of superstitious overfit, a behavioral garbage collector
If taboos persist they become traditions, but traditions on their own aren’t sacred. The alchemy that makes holiness works by BREAKING tradition, VIOLATING taboo. In this white hot moment it isn’t the broken tradition that becomes holy, but its inversion
Bataille: Sacred objects are consistently transmuted from left to right; the object of religious practices consists in this essential transformation; the left sacred is transformed into right sacred, the object of repulsion to object of attraction, depression to stimulation
Often the benefits of a tradition are not immediately obvious; they are selected for by second- and third-order effects. When you break a taboo you are not immediately zapped by god. This can make all traditions seem meaningless, the modality of the atomized world
Nietzsche was the last holy man of the West. Will there be another? And how can it be that he got it so wrong and so right? Nietzsche as prophet: he thought the transvaluation of all values would result in a man of great power, instead we have found an inversion of man and woman
It's fitting that Nietzsche died after embracing a horse; one thinks of Caligula, making his horse a senator, or the classic Chinese Proverb "point deer make horse" (指鹿為馬), in which the emperor parades a deer into his court and demands his advisors acknowledge its horsehood
Indeed, what better metaphor for the world where decentralized power anarcho-tyranistically demands the mutability of biological sex? This deer is a horse, won't you go for a ride?
The inability to believe in happiness is the reason that we now experience insatiable hunger for the sacred, insatiable because we are incapable of finding rest in the sanctity we generate each time we blow up a taboo, insatiable because we have no faith in faith
Driven by god-lust we increasingly see each facet of life infiltrated and inverted by progressives; they violate each and every taboo that they find, chasing with diminishing returns the feeling of that first high, the first time they found rapture in profanity
Most people are conservative in their temperament if not in their beliefs. The true left, the transgressive left, is small, and once they establish a sanctity by violating a taboo, the rest of the "left" adopts it.
"Left" and "Right" form a gradient of willingness to adopt new sanctities. In the sense that the right wing wishes to destroy and invert progressive holiness around sex and gender, we are becoming the transgressive ones
Taboo violation releases sacred energy, but to capture it there is one more ingredient needed, a topic for a future thread... Once a taboo is violated, a spectacular, sacrificial death is required to ratify it.
Today my friends I will preach to you about INEQUALITY, and I am going to explain why inequality is a virtue, and why we should cultivate inequality, embrace inequality, strive for inequality
When we look around us and we meet our fellow man (and woman!) what drama do we see played out again and again but the tragedy of aimlessness and nihilism? The other day a friend said to me, "I am basically a nihilist. I smoke weed and drink and fuck. I have nothing to live for"
This is what it's like to be ruled by liberal ideas. Liberal ideas say a man and a woman are interchangeable, that people from different cultures are interchangeable, that any man is as good as any other for any purpose, and we wonder why we feel useless?
The appeal of inequality and the thing that you must understand is that a world of equality is a world devoid of meaning. The appeal of inequality and hierarchy is that everyone has a place and they know it and in that knowing is security
When you force people to imagine they're equal you flatter them to destroy them. When you pretend you're as good as anyone else that's when you stop trying to cultivate and improve yourself and the moment you stop growing you start dying hence the inevitable nihilism of equality
“This is just a straw man of equality. We need some forms of equality.” No. All doctrines of partial equality are unstable isotopes of total equality.
Personal responsibility is only and ever a right wing impulse because when we acknowledge and cherish inequality can we use our betters as models for improvement.
Equality robs us of the faculty of self-improvement because it destroys all possibility of self-improvement because it teaches that you are already perfected in every way that matters and the ways you are deficient are no fault of your own
My friend the nihilist is not happy in his nihilism. The momentary hedonic rush that he feels from moment to moment is only in the end a grim reminder of the ultimate POINTLESSNESS of his life, because he has been robbed of all context in the universe
I believe that we are hard-wired for belief. In the past hundred years we have seen the collapse of religion, and inevitably therefore we have seen the collapse of structure and meaning and identity. Hierarchy = structure which gives us identity which gives us meaning
If you are right wing you don't want to tear a civilization down just because you don't privately believe in its gods. We have to understand that belief is not a narrowness, belief is an understanding that there are truths outside nature that are absolute
Strength (which is a virtue) comes from BELIEF in things that are philosophically grounded and which appear real to you. The tyranny of liberal ideas, which claim to want to dissolve all tyranny, is that they render all beliefs unreal, and in so doing render strength impossible
Why do you think leftists are constantly going on about how weak they are, how broken they are, how much pain they feel, how tired they are, ad nauseum? It's because their beliefs have transmuted strength from a virtue to a vice and they rightly see strength as illiberal
We all want someone to look up to, whether it is a superior man or a God but liberalism has defamed and criminalized this deep yearning of the soul. "The fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom" I could never parse this as a child because liberalism renders it unintelligible
If strength is criminal then authority is criminal, which is why the left is engaged in a permanent revolution to tear down authority. Indeed, the authorities that rule over us have let us down, not because they possess authority but because the authority they have is undeserved
We are ruled at present not by a military elite or a political elite but a commercial elite and EVEN LIBERALS can see that greed and profit are not the proper objectives of morality, but in their morality, which is perverted, they think the problem is an excess of strength
Strength is not the same thing as authority, but it conveys authority. Our elites invert all decency, because they call cowardice by the name of courage and they call submission strength and in so doing they debase their authority & abdicate responsibility
You can't have authority without morality and you can't have strength without belief and you can't believe in anything strongly so long as you believe in liberal ideas, because if everything is equal then nothing is better than anything else and all beliefs are meaningless
In order to escape from this hell, which is primarily psychological, we must find a way to believe in something and in order to do that we must above all destroy the false idol of equality, for it saps us of our vitality and turns us into pointless wastrels
In an interview with Justin Murphy, @meta_nomad echoed Nick Land, saying, "I have absolutely zero interest in the emancipation of human groups or individuals"
This is a powerful statement, it deserves expansion
what is meant by emancipation? On the left it is imagined as an escape from hierarchy. It’s the idea that no one is better than you. That it’s morally wrong to be above someone else
If no one is above anyone else, then no one is above you, specifically. There is some appeal to this, a certain gratification of pride.
Emancipation, in leftist morality, is identical to equality. A commitment to a world without hierarchy is a commitment to equality.
Most people do not think critically about what equality is, or what it must give up to achieve this miracle of “no one standing above me”. It comes with a terrible price
The claim that everyone _is_ equal does not stand up to even a moment of scrutiny. Some are rich and some are poor. Some are moral and some are evil. Etc. Equality is not DEscriptive, therefore it must be PREscriptive.
And if equality is a moral prescription, then anything that increases inequality MUST be morally wrong.
The following may seem like a ridiculous extrapolation but if equality is to be a value, it must be a terminal value. If it is not a terminal value, then it will fail entirely, for hierarchy will creep in, and if you give it an inch it will take a mile
In order to be a good terminal value, it must survive being taken to its logical extreme. The logical extreme of equality is total equality.
No one of high status. No one of good moral standing. No one who is a great artist or poet
To equality, all difference must be nauseating, a great festering wound. All diversity must be sacrificed to equality. Any difference is a foothold for superiority which is a foothold for hierarchy.
To equality, there can be no beauty. For the existence of beauty demands the existence of ugliness, and no quality can exist except in the face of a contrast.
Under equality, it’s wrong to get stronger. It’s wrong to save money, wrong to read challenging books, wrong to become famous, especially for a clever or brave deed. To do so is to oppress someone with your superiority
From this we can see why equality must glorify the weak, lest strength become a virtue. It must adore the ugly; hence modern art and poetry. It must trust all betrayers. Trust requires judgement and judgement creates inequality.
Emancipation from the hierarchies of man? It is not possible because nature is red in tooth and claw, and the only emancipation is ultimate emancipation, freedom from all material need, from all existential risk. Smart leftists ask this question.
And the smarter leftist thinks: we must put an end to material scarcity, perhaps through some kind of automated communism... perhaps by accelerating the techno-capital singularity. But then what?
Why, then no one will have to work! We will all be free to do whatever we want. And what will we want? What do YOU want? If you do something creative or clever you will subvert equality once again.
The only option to preserve equality is unadulterated hedonism and all entertainment produced by machine, so no human can take credit. Even most smart leftists have not realized that machine over man is also inequality.
Or perhaps equality is to be achieved, and then instantly transcended? It is once again ok to be unequal, now that we have tasted it? Or shall we refashion humanity to be transcendently equal through future magic?
Shall we make all people the same, a singular being stamped across the face of the earth, as many as we can fit? Or only a single instance? Perhaps we will all have little harps and float on clouds.
If you have ever wanted to excel at something, if you have ever felt a desire to be a greater version of yourself, you have felt a right wing impulse.
The heart of rightist thought is the desire to soar. The leftist thinks he rises but his goal is inexorably a type of fall. There can be no redemption of equality, it is an anchor around our necks, a nemesis to flight
Self improvement is only possible on the right. The leftists meanwhile dispute the concept of wellness as smacking of oppression.
We want to create hierarchy because it tells us which way is up, a thing that the leftist is forbidden to know, is obligated to conceal.
I have spoken already about affordances of the mind, but there is still much ground to explore. “Minimally counterintuitive” is another hook that ideas use to stick in our thoughts. The frogs call it red-pilling but everyone does it.
We have a particular weakness for inversions of common sense, for formulations that violate in our expectations in just the right measure. Oscar Wilde quotes, which are insipid, are a perfect example of the form: Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
We love when we learn something counterintuitive—we tell it to all our friends. Inverting a norm gives you power. If others accept your inversion, then you are Moses, leading them into the wilderness. The more foundational the norm, the more power you generate when you blow it up
Robin Hanson loves redpills. With signalling theory, he reveals the unwitting mechanics that underly paradoxical behavior. School isn't about learning, politics isn't about policy, etc. Hanson is right, but his approach would work even if he were wrong.
Psychotherapists redpill you on yourself; they tell you that the motivations behind your actions are not what you think. "You want help with your addiction, but your real problem is your guilt about your relationship to your husband and you are using your addiction as an excuse”
If you want to know what it feels like to be redpilled, think back to the time before you knew what sex was, and remember that feeling of sudden understanding. It’s transformative knowledge. It cannot be unseen, like dreaming of Cthulhu or holding the zahir
People who take red pills have a habit of looking for more, more, more. You start to crave that feeling of having your intuitions shattered. It starts with “libertarianism doesn’t work because some people are bad and stupid” and soon you’re reading Anatoly Fomenko
Perhaps we should call left-leaning red pills blue, and understand that they work on the same psychology: the left controls the media and the press, so it makes sense that they furnish your mind with intuitions, which red pills then shatter
In some hypothetical dreamworld where all media and press are controlled by rightists, I have no doubt that blue pills (Left-leaning inversions of norms) would seem magical and revelatory. Now they seem banal because they are the actual norms
In the 60s and 70s, blue pills did seem radical, which is where hippies came from and why sex cults proliferated. Against good monogamy norms, unmarried sex is trangsressive, a blue pill. If you take it, Fomenko gravity pulls you ever lefter, maybe all the way to Jim Jones
The chromatic signifiers are getting a little muddy these days. The new sex cults have no leaders, some blue pills are pink, the norm inversion has become physiological. Blue or red, to be compelling, the minimally counterintuitive norm inversion has to épater la bourgeoisie
Often times the memetically virile version of a red/blue pill is an exaggeration or distortion of a benign truth. Lower iq people struggle with nuance and truth is nuanced so low iq people struggle with truth.
HOWEVER, believing lies has a high cost in survivability, and high iq people are better at paying those costs, therefore they are more able to carry a high-contradiction mental model. Smart people can rationalize anything, so they create and spread the most insidious lies
The sign of a weak mind? Inability to grapple with the outside view. When someone challenges your values, you feel anger. Even the existence of competing values is a threat, a danger. This naive universalism is more corrosive than any red or blue pill.
Now let's look at some blue and red pills. Some of these have become the norm and are no longer an inversion. If you take blue pills, red pills seem reprehensible, and vice versa. I am NOT endorsing the viewpoints in either of the below tweets, only noticing them
Blue pills: Workers control the means of production. Sex is always moral if consensual. Race is an oppressive illusion. gay people are just like you and me. gender is a social construct. racism=prejudice+power. all sex is rape. a man can be a woman.
Red pills: Climate change is in part a leftist power grab. race is biological/meaningful. women are as sexually immoral as men and rule-breaking men are sexually compelling to women. democracy makes society deteriorate. "white genocide".
understand that there was a time when all of the blue pills were SHOCKING and upsetting. Some of them are still controversial but mostly they are water and we are fish.
Here is my red pill for you: cultivate friendships with people whose beliefs directly contradict yours, and who can stomach the dissonance without fighting about it. Those people are assets; they are Fomenko antigravity, and your disagreements are an asset.
Americans have been larping as Romans for as long as America has been around, and it’s probably no surprise that the most popular larp these days is Caligula
I hear a lot of you speaking your allegiance to the wisdom of the past, to tradition, or to Greek or Roman thinkers, but I don’t think you really believe in their teachings.
I think your tradition and your Greco-Roman philosophy is a cargo cult and my first exhibit is the fact that you are reading these words on a smart phone (is Greco-Roman like Judeo-Christian? Strange how empires routinely become enthralled to their vassals)
Modern monkeys are in no way the ancestors of humans and modern philosophies are in no way instances of those old beliefs. Those who pretend to be traditional will tell you that nothing essential has changed. This claim is only compelling because it is patently absurd
The only things that are true are the brute facts of observed experience. Everything else is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, which is to say, a lie.
As we increasingly learn, the brain and the senses themselves are both quite faulty and fault-tolerant, which means that perceptual discrepancies in observed reality are “smoothed” out by subconscious faculties in order to create a “coherent” semantic model of the world
It’s not really possible to overstate how much you become what you behold. Cognition is not separable from mediation, and as the nature and saturation of mediation changes, so does the nature of cognition
You are phenomenologically different from your ancestors, not only because of your smartphone-mediated consciousness, but especially because of that.
The multithreaded CPU is the cognitive paradigm of the smartphone age. The CPU executes many different calculations, both in virtual, INTERLEAVED parallel, and as you live and rely on CPUs, your thinking, your SELF becomes multithreaded and parallelized
I was thinking about why so many old beliefs have lost their power, why "mythology" now means "fantasy", why old myths are so hard to believe nowadays. It's because the MIRACULOUS has become MUNDANE
You wake up, you look through a magic prism, invisible lightning crackles through the air. You trace runes with your fingers on the glass and you psychically speak to your friends a thousand miles away
Farmers spray magic potions on their crops and they yield a THOUSAND times as much food they did two centuries ago. Wizards summon beasts made of metal that burn the dead souls of ancient monsters, and they carry us seven miles above the earth 100 times faster than a man can run
People get resurrected from death every single day using a Lazarus charm called a defibrillator. Omnipresent oracles can answer any question instantly from anywhere on earth.
We mine the souls of ancient monsters from under the ground and use it to fabricate objects with impossible shapes. We have wizards who can pull the beating heart out of one man and put it in the chest of another. Our generals have spells that can level entire cities
I could go on, but you get the point. Almost no one understands how these things work. It's magic and compared to that, I'm sorry, but old stories about magic bows and arrows or casting duplicate on a fish just don't impress anyone and if you say it does, you're larping
You all mock the neckbeard atheist fedoras and they deserve mockery because they traded a rich and beautiful soteriology for a sad impoverished one, but they exist because myth has lost its power because our mundanities are more magical than our mythologies
To really "go back" to trad life you would have to trade actual magic (i.e., technology) for the ability to believe in magic, a belief that was once possible because magic ceases to impress us as soon as it becomes commonplace.
You don't want to go back to the trad way of life, not at all, you just want to post pictures on social media of "your" girl in a wheat field. It's trad because you didn't use a filter.
No, that's not fair. That's not what you want. What you want is a myth you can believe in honestly and without cognitive dissonance because moral strength, strength of will, only comes from belief in something appears real and true to you
Redemption from sin is not an appealing proposition because most people do not feel themselves to be sinful. The sins that trouble us are our personal failures to focus and follow through on our plans. We don't want forgiveness, we want to be better machines!
The animating myth of machinic society is the myth of ever more magic; this myth does not soothe our emotions but each day we make a 100 decisions, and each time, EACH TIME, we choose machine society, because it's obviously so much better in the brute, material, observable sense
The companion to the fact of technological development is the myth (and it is a myth) of social, moral, or behavioral progress. Our lives have gotten materially better and spiritually worse, in fact our lives are spiritually worse BECAUSE they are materially better
Man develops virtue hormetically, that is, in response to privation and pain, and in particular, in response to privation at a steady, tolerable dose. The virtue of older men was precisely their misery, and precisely in proportion to their misery
To find spiritual satisfaction, we absolutely need a source of mental anguish. When one is not present, we invent one. When food is scarce and disease is common, we call that god's plan, but when times are fat, then we must invent new divine plans
Religion shrank because the miraculous became mundane, and the myth of moral progress swells to fill the the void that it left, indicting us with the original sins of "prejudice" -- inalienable facets of human nature that are not ontologically grounded by miracles
What draws us into religion is a sense of sinfulness; salvation isn't the draw of Christianity, sin is the draw, specifically: it suffuses you in a narrative which allows you to feel sinful, it justifies and rationalizes the pervasive feeling that "something is wrong"
And if you find yourself liking in this teaching, then notice that I'm doing the same thing, I'm narrativizing that feeling, whether we call it alienation or original sin or structural racism or tfw no gf, it's hellbaked in, it's not going away
Ah, that's the part that bristles. Trad larping is one more ridiculous and false soteriology, because all soteriologies are false, and the alchemy of religion isn't to produce salvation or virtue, it's to produce HOPE of salvation, which it does by creating a taxonomy of sin
By the same token, there is no teaching that can alleviate the need for soteriology. As long as we are materially comfortable, we are going to have this problem. The religion of the future will be whatever salvation myth best aligns with technological development
Whatever else you may find odious about my thinking, we are in an adjacent ideological space because we all sense the same thing: the prevailing soteriological myth is setting us up as a scapegoat, and we desperately need a better myth; at the least, the old myths need retooling
The only plot you’re allowed to write is one where:
* Women never do anything immoral
* The protagonist is female, and the only flaw she can have is inexperience
* In the end, she triumphs over her male enemies and rules the world
* all male characters are wicked or stupid
So simple, good-faith question. If there is no anti-white bias among the media, Democrats, etc, then why do so many people feel it's out there? Why did I go insano reactionary?
The highbrow types don’t talk about it, they leave antiwhite discourse to the middle and lower tier journalists and politicians. It’s a good cop/bad cop routine. Prof. Wolfinger notes that e.g. Obama doesn’t use anti white rhetoric, and he’s right.
There is no reason for the top democrats to use this rhetoric. They keep their hands clean and look the other way as their inferiors do it, never attacking them, always empowering them, always with plausible deniability
The other day I was accused: “you can’t just make up a new theory of gender based on your vague feelings of discontent.” Hold my beer.
The old "theory" of gender, (as if it had scientific grounding) the one you can literally lose your livelihood for opposing, though only if you are a man, seems to me to have been fashioned exclusively by women feeling vague discontent
Quite on my own I had been reading about some of the early feminist texts, and it happens that modern gender theorists mostly disavow them. Obfuscation and dissimulation are to women as violent imposition of will is to men.
The view of xerstory laid out in such books as The Second Sex is such a powerful and compelling lens that nearly all moderns look through it. We don’t even see it, the world now looks alien without it, and yet it colors everything
We must destroy the claim that women are “historically oppressed” and that this bottomless well of injustice demands a similarly endless ream of legislation to nullify all male advantages.
The counter-theory (rigorously scientific, I assure you) relies on rejecting the core metaphysical assumptions of feminism, which are in fact the core assumptions of leftism in general
There is no such thing as emancipation. Living in society is submitting to social control. Living away from society is submitting to nature's control. Nature is a harsher master than society.
That an obligation is joyous does not mitigate its imposition upon you. Friendship is a form of obligation, as is love, as is employment, as is participation in a hobby. Failing to uphold an obligation degrades a social bond. Continued renegation will dissolve one.
We don't like these words: control, obligation, submission. Viewing human interactions in transactional terms is highly discouraged even though it is obviously correct. This is because people who try to quantify their social obligations too closely end up with a liquidity crisis
A person who is controlled is not free, a person who is not free is low status, is seen as less of a person, even though everyone from a billionaire to a bus boy is enmeshed in a matrix of peer-to-peer social control
Wealth and power are entirely contextual and if a powerful man ceases to follow the behavioral scripts that maintain his power, it will vanish. Ultimately, your power controls you. Anyone, high or low, has the freedom to exit, but it’s a desperate, unenviable freedom
Women control men at all times. Man's power is physiological, Woman's power is psychological. Cleverness beats brute strength almost every time. Women have owned you so hard that they have convinced you that you are in charge!
"All of the ways that you serve me are oppression," she says. "You must redouble your service to atone for it". Once a man has this realization he can only pity those early feminist writers; no one let them in on the joke
That women are controlled by their social obligations is seen as evidence of male domination. That men are controlled by their social obligations is also seen as evidence of male domination. When every perception is a nail, you have a favorite hammer, my friend
What looks from a distance like the power of men is in fact mostly obligation.
The desire to be free of all obligation is the desire for total societal atomization, a collapse of all social capital. The only person who would desire this is one with no social capital in the first place.
This is a difference between men and women, perhaps immutable: woman does not perceive HER power as an obligation, in fact she makes a study of not perceiving her power at all. Obfuscation and dissimulation. The best salesman believes her own bullshit without question
Most dissident political opinion is driven by resentment of the opposite sex.
Leftwingness is primarily female and is driven by resentment towards men.
Rightwingness is primarily male and is driven by resentment towards women.
This is obvious when you look at voting patterns by sex. It turns out that while democracy is a terrible way to run a state it's a great way to reveal that our deep-seated hatreds cluster along biological boundaries
Women are drawn to and create leftist politics because they
* try to nurture the helpless (sublimation of maternal desire)
* obfuscate hierarchy (women prefer covert competition)
* redistribute wealth (trading prosperity for security)
I know, YOU are a woman who isn't like that
If a man speaks his inner thoughts and compulsions in an honest way, it will sound to most women like the shrieking of a demon. They take pride in their empathy but have no notion of what empathy for men would entail
You want a theory of gender? Historically, for every one man who managed to reproduce, two women did. Let me write that another way, to seed your intuition. 20% of women and 60% of men never reproduced, ever.
For every 4 men who made it, bro, 6 men died alone. This model has something in common with the manosphere trope that sexual success is pareto-distributed, but it's a bit more optimistic.
Probably the failure of those men was eugenic. Probably war has served humanity as a cybernetic regulator of excess men. Probably the horrors of modernity are at least in part due to an historically anomalous surplus of men.
You want a theory of gender? We WILL make every concession necessary and then some to fix the grievous inequalities inflicted on women by men ONLY when women agree that the men's issue of the reproduction gap is a form of structural matriarchal oppression
No? I thought not
How do you think people get mixed up in far-right politics? The pipeline is this:
1. You learn a feminized social theory wherein men and women are functionally equivalent
2. you try to apply this model to dating; it doesn't work
3. you realize evolution doesn't stop at the neck
Most of you “dissidents” will mellow within minutes of getting a girlfriend. I don't blame you. Your ideology should serve you, not the other way around
Isomorphic to the male gaze is a faculty of women which has no name. We scrutinize and measure (with our eyes) every inch of a woman’s body. She feels this is indecent. But she applies at least as much energy to the quantification of a man, only she calls it his “character”
We are told that the male evaluation of the woman is “objectification” and it is wrong, and yet we encourage female "agentification" of men. But a man can no more choose his character than a woman can choose her face
Men don't want to be agentified. We want to be loved for our intrinsic nature, which is how we love women. (Men: you will never succeed in love unless you learn to excise this desire from your inner heart)
When, in choosing a spouse, a man looks for a profound, warm-hearted being and a woman looks for a clever, alert, brilliant being, one sees how a man is looking for an idealized man, and a woman for an idealized woman
If we can stop lying to men and women about the nature of love, then our politics will also settle down. Women must learn to perceive their own innate power, and stop coveting an idealized perception of male circumstances.
At the behest of a friend I watched Palahniuk on Rogan and he said something that struck me. He said there is a scarcity of fiction for men, almost nothing that speaks from the masculine heart. My paraphrase. Of course we could all think of some examples...
So I am going to speak now about being a man, by talking a bit about women.
If you've paid attention then you've heard that men have no idea what the lived experience of a woman is like. That we can't imagine what it's like to have no bodily security, at risk at all times, after dark or in a lonely street, or what it's like to endure the pains of labor
I'll bite that bullet, and note that women fail to mention other experiences unique to their sex: the feeling of erotic compulsion towards beings who could physically overpower them, crush them, smother them; the visceral and overpowering force of their emotions (neurotypically)
The reason I will bite that bullet is that it forces us to bite a symmetrical one. The claim is that there’s nothing in male life that women don't know, because men are the architects of the world; this gives us too much credit, and women far too little
Indeed the world of men is inaccessible to women, just as the world of women is inaccessible to men. Regardless of how you understand the difference, if we're to accept that such a thing as "lived experience" is impenetrable from the outside, then we must cede it to everyone
You might object that all of the western canon was written by men, & therefore the content of male lived experience is abundantly clear, but if you make that argument, then we reply that only a man, maybe only a certain sort of man, has the lived experience to decode these texts
The component of male lived experience that is wholly unaccessible to women, more than any other, is the colossal and abyssal apathy of the universe towards you. Women cannot relate to this, except perhaps women of exceptional ugliness, childless crones, and FtM transexuals
The apathy of the universe is bottomless, and to a man, uniquely to a man, he begins to feel this apathy even from a very young age, he becomes the object of a radical indifference, in equal measure to what vitality he shows
A woman can never know of the consummate coldness of the universe, for man and woman alike feel the overpowering, all-consuming need to care for women; Woman thinks that she has been controlled by man, but in fact there is no difference between control and protection
To be regarded with apathy is the price one pays for liberty
She never even glimpses the contours of masculine reality. And because she does not feel the coldness of the universe, because man has always put her in the safest, warmest, most interior place, next to the food and the fire, she cannot see the world as he sees it, as mechanism
fMRI is probably pseudoscience but I seem to recall reading that the same part of a mans brain is used for tool use and also for regarding women.
Objectification of women is not a sin but an immutable fact. In the eyes of man there are only objects, and women the most cherished of all! There is nothing more valuable to a man than feminine beauty; to behold a beautiful woman is sufficient justification for all existence
For this reason few things injure us so much as the egregore known as "social justice activism," because it is an autocatalytic loop of ugliness
An ugly woman is not as well cared-for as a beautiful one, hence she is less controlled.
Being unloved, she consoles herself with a lie; "I do not WISH to be loved", except she phrases it, "I cannot bear to be ruled by a man"
To prove it, she makes herself uglier
There are few things more dangerous than feedback loops without dampeners. The classic example of cybernetics is the thermostat which tries to change the temperature of the room in response to the temperature of the room. A signal modulates an action which modulates a signal.
In the situation of the ugly woman, her self-amplification of her ugliness causes others to love her even less, and so she makes herself even uglier. Ugliness creates a desire whose fulfillment creates even more ugliness, a feedback loop without a dampener.
And I often hear "society teaches men to hide their weaknesses, as a result they are emotionally repressed". no No NO. Men who have no connection to their own masculinity parrot this idiocy. Masculine inner life is different from feminine. Our nakedness does not look like yours
Man's vulnerability IS written out, at impossible length, across the whole of civilization, and its twin aspects are Woman and the Void. These are our weaknesses. Man's vulnerability is not the fear of being crushed by our protectors, it is the pain of god's radical neglect
And there is something ineffable about woman's power: nominally she submits, but in submitting, she rules. To be crass, she "tops from the bottom". All of man's striving and sacrificing is ultimately to please her, to protect her, whatever he tells himself
It's better to see women as a force of nature. Her weakness is her strength, her submission is her domination. Giving her explicit and nominal political power substantially raises her above man, since her power is informal, covert, almost impossible to describe
Even the most powerful man is ruled by women, in a way that, if you say it, sounds stupid and fake, sounds like it's all in his head, sounds like something imagined.
He is ruled by his implicit and inexorable gynolatry
As for all that alpha male, red pill, strong independent man who don't need no woman type of posturing, what we call machismo: it's a bit like the ugly woman feedback loop, but unlike its reflection, it can be useful in pushing a man towards sexually attractive actions
Many things that are partly true, or half-true, or outright false, can still be useful things to believe. Such things can be even more useful than the truth, in many cases. Masculine pride is like that.
The critical thing to understand is that capital is polymorphic, it isn’t a specific thing, it’s a gradient in a lower level of emergence that fuels the layer above it. It’s a tendency of intensive differences to fulminate into new STRATA of being
To a plant, hydrogen and water are capital and photosynthesis is labor. As plants grow they inevitably form ecosystems which are convection cells that create selective pressures that produce intelligence
In the same way, human projects cannot succeed without producing society. Any time you do anything competently you are creating orderly intensive differences in the social stratum and that powers the social convection that gives rise to technology
Mao Zedong had the notion that capital springs up like mushrooms everywhere. He hated capital but he recognized that you need a constant permanent revolution to suppress it
Full communism is the only true anti-capitalism because it deliberately lobotomizes all human activity in an attempt to realize a steady state of humanity, a state of infinite stagnation
Any time you do anything that produces an economic surplus, you are abstractly doing capital. The question becomes how to suppress capital accumulation.
You can’t do anything self-reinforcing, anything that funds itself over time. You can’t have any successful organization or social structure. All successes are always “capitalism” because capital is a systemic property of emergent systems
God’s love is vastly overrated; God’s wrath is the greatest of all divine blessings. If we ever want to escape from hell, then we must reignite our BELIEF in hell. Forgiveness is useless to men with no theory of sin
The world is deeply uncertain, and all of our actions are predicated on informed guessing. When we systematize our guessing behavior into a repeatable prescription for action, that's called a heuristic.
A heuristic that we all know well is our desire to consume sweets. The continuum from the nutritional affordance of sugar to the pleasure of a sweet taste is a heuristic built by natural selection that makes us thrive under sugar scarcity
The heuristic to crave sugar is adaptive under the right circumstances, but once we tamed sugar through agriculture and industrial food manufacturing, the heuristic broke.
And the devil of it is that craving sugar doesn’t hurt you till well after you spawn, and maybe it even helps you before that, so we’re stuck at a local maximum that natural selection cannot escape
The selection pressure that makes you crave sugar has relaxed, so the trait might attenuate in a few thousand years, but that doesn’t help anyone now
Moral intuitions are exactly like sugar cravings—they are behavioral heuristics spewed out by natural selection to make you thrive in a particular social environment
There is no perfect or correct systematization of morals for the same reason there is no perfect correct systematization of diet; the social organism, like the human body, is a constantly emerging assemblage of contingencies that require patterned yet idiosyncratic solutions
The morality of fairness is highly suited to small groups of people who have to cooperate with each other for decades at a time. It does not scale into societies where most people are strangers to each other.
Just as a perception of a sugary sweet incepts a pain in the belly and an anticipation of gustation, a perception of unfairness incepts a pain in the heart and an anticipation of restitution. At industrial scale, both heuristics poison you
As societies scale up, protein becomes the bottleneck instead of sugar and trust becomes the bottleneck instead of fairness, because sugar and fairness are cheap. We do have strategies for dealing with these bottlenecks, but they require conscious effort
Shariff and Norenzayan hypothesize that theology evolved to solve a coordination problem in societies that are too big for everyone to know everyone. Trust is essential to social order and society can use fear of a wrathful god to incentivize honesty and scale past Dunbar limits
It is critical that the god be a wrathful moral enforcer, otherwise we find it impossible to synthesize trust. Shariff et al found that belief in a wrathful god made people more honest, and belief in a merciful god had no impact on behavior
Belief in a wrathful god is necessary to synthesize trust at scale, however it is not sufficient. For that, you must also convince strangers of your belief, and you do this by sending costly signals, e.g. big sacrifices, tithes, and rituals
A disturbing possibility is that we evolved a strong preference to send and receive costly signals but the part about the wrathful god never permeated into the genome. This would explain much of modern life. Our instinctive reaction to trust scarcity is to spend more on signaling
If some social innovation were to create a perception of a trust collapse, this could set off a signaling death spiral. Maybe wireless high speed networks are a great filter.
Cochran and Harpending argue that evolution can happen very fast, sometimes in only a few generations, in the presence of a sharp selection pressure. A famous example is the melanisation of the peppered moth during the industrial revolution
Industrial pollution changed the colorscape environment of the peppered moth, which comes in two variants: black and white. A surge in coal pollution turned the environment dark, and black moths became invisible to predators, white moths conspicuous. White moths nearly died out
If, hypothetically, a sudden change to the human environment caused smart people to stop having children, a dysgenic intelligence collapse could happen in a few short generations. If not having children (or mutilating them) became a costly trust-building signal...
We live in an enchanted world where behaviors that are developed in the sociological layer of society eventually permeate into the biological layer. Through genetics and selection, ideas become embodied
Memes can become genes, as for example when compulsory specialization in usury turned ashkenazis into geniuses of numbers, or when norms against cousin marriage turned some flavors of Western European into pathological xenophiles
The body is only an ephemeral shell, the genome is the true soul, you are literally your mother and father and your children are literally you. Your ancestors and your descendants are a single being, a continuous identity
This isn’t ridiculous! Nerds think they share an identity with an emulation of their brain running on an alien computer in a distant future. Christians think their consciousness magically dwells in eternal paradise after death. My teaching is much smaller!
Whatever the soul does, the soul becomes. This is the cosmic poetry of gnon. The sins of the father can become the biological imperatives of the son.
Our problem as ever is that we aren't able to perceive slow crises as such. Only acute problems, problems which are unbearable FOR EVEN A SINGLE MOMENT cause philosophy to escape the brain and enter the heart.
Let me offer you a new moral axiom, much better than the diabetogenic golden rule, much truer than Crowley’s idiotic “do as thou wilt”, grounded in the autotelic logic of natural selection
“Do that which causest thou to recur” IS the whole of the law
The fully automated model of the universe (the enlightenment model, if you must call it that) does contain a wrathful god, and the trick is to make him feel real enough to fear him.
Trust is the sling that David can use to topple Goliath. We are fighting an arms race over the ability to manufacture trust between strangers, and I do not see any right wing group that is succeeding at building trust at a distance
The digital panopticon may end up supplanting the social innovation of belief in a wrathful god, and the digital panopticon demands dysgenic sacrifices. Perhaps that very real threat can be our new fear of hell
What is Gnon? It stands for “nature or nature’s god”, and the acronym is reversed because “nong” sounds terrible, aesthetics matter
Gnon is an adapter. It gives people with differing theo- or atheological views a common interface for discussion that allows us to decouple our agreements from our disagreements
And what do we agree upon, or at least, what should we agree upon? On the right we acknowledge the existence of truths outside of humanity and the visible world that are not contingent.
Truths that are not contingent? How can this be, how can we know them? We know from Kant that we can never perceive the world as it is, only our image of it. Trapped in the Kantian wilderness, armed with only our wits, searching for an impossible theory of knowledge!
The only way out of the Kantian trap is to embrace some kind of contradiction, to give yourself PERMISSION to be in error. As with morality, epistemology is heuristic.
As to the exact content of non-contingent truths, they are unknowable, though the world around us hints at them. The sun gives us light by which to see but we ought not to stare at it. Gnon is not a description of the sun, only a way to speak of what its light reveals
Epistemology is wankery, naive realism is truer than any philosophy. If you try to use logic to find meaning, purpose, and morality, you will always fail.
Nature didn't make you for truth, it built you to lie effectively.
The critical thing to understand is that there are limits to the elasticity of man, that the resources that sustain us are finite, that despite the appearance of limitless abundance around us, every action and every act of charity has a cost
Leftists are at heart idealists, believing that their ideas are primary and matter is contingent on ideas, which is why they love “the world is a simulation” lines of thought.
Overly cerebral types often fall into this trap, and the tendency is amplified in the USA where our youth learn the idiotic nerd/jock dichotomy, that snare which compels us to choose between developing the body and the mind
Many intelligent people become bitter and resentful because they believe they must forsake the body to embrace scholarly disciplines, and in so doing become ugly and undesirable. No wonder they convince themselves of the primacy of ideas
It’s only possible to be an idealist when you do not see the finitude of our wealth. It is easy to imagine a future of privation, but very hard to believe it.
The right believes that decadence is a debt, and that all debts are repaid in time.
The perennial cry of the right: the end is coming! Soon we will pay for our decadence! Every generation thinks it’s living in the end times. Will we be the lucky winner?
To whom do we owe these debts, rightist?
Why, to Gnon, of course.
When a meteor strikes the earth, Gnon is the meteor
When bacteria become immune to antibiotics, Gnon is adaptation
When a new paradigm causes a nonlinear increase in wealth, Gnon is capital
When you bankrupt yourself trying to feed the whole world, Gnon is the ravenous horde
Gnon is Malthusian limits
Gnon is climate change
Gnon is cold
Gnon is brutal
Gnon is patient
Gnon is unforgiving
Gnon is never merciful
Gnon is just
but his justice demands perfection.
When you push too far against the limits of nature, Gnon sees your hubris, and it is delicious to him, so he devours you. That’s the god that I believe in
Morality is heuristic, which is why all attempts to systematize morality fail.
Moral axioms are derived from moral intuitions, which are adaptations to our complex social life.
What is a heuristic? It’s merely a guess; a fuzzy feeling, approximately right, ideally right in the general case.
When different heuristics collide, they often contradict. Moral dilemmas, far from illuminating moral reality, reveal what happens when you try to deify a heuristic
All of us have moral intuitions. The sense of right and wrong feels like something bigger than us, something outside, more fundamental than any single person
As we all know, however, there is big problem, most succinctly render by Hume “is-ought”. I personally find all claims of moral realism to be circular
The art of constructing an ontology of ethics lies in playing a shell game with yourself. You start with three shells, and under one of them is proposition you assume from the start. You spin them around and spin them around until you are dizzy. “How did that get there?”
There is only one way to win the shell game of is and ought. You can transmute ought into is if you frame it in the context of a goal. Pursuant to goal X, I ought to do Y.
We can combine the observation that goals create oughts with a belief in an eternal omnipotent god, and in this way, and only this way, can we justify a morality that is absolute and transcendent
An eternal transcendent agent has transcendent goals, and transcendent goals create transcendent oughts
This is said to “ground” morality. Morality is grounded when it is justified, an ought realized as an is
How else could we ground morality?
There is the humanistic strategy: perhaps morality flows from some idealized conception of human desire.
The greatest good for the greatest number.
This falls into contradiction when we attempt to find a definition of “good”
How to rank human desires? By means of some other desire? What about people with contradictory desires? Does the ardor of a desire modulate its priority? Any attempt to square this circle is the shell game, above.
It starts with an a priori of goodness
And yet it will not to do believe that such things as rape and betrayal are only evil in a relative, limited way, no?
Will your conscience allow this? When someone takes sexual advantage of a child, it is only CONTINGENTLY bad?
Yet this is the bullet all godless people must bite
In secular morality shell games, impersonal ideas are dressed up in the clothes of a transcendent god, which makes sense because progressivism is a secular Christian sex cult.
But there is another way, a third place to look for the grounding of morality. This way is the Nietzschean way, it is unique among all moral arguments because it JUSTIFIES ITSELF, because Nietzsche, upon climbing the mountain and finding no god there, looks within
And what does he see? He sees only his own will, and he realizes that the grounding of morality is neither a theological nor a categorical imperative, and he sees that in a godless world, there can be no Thou Shalt, there can only be I WILL
All this is to say morality is grounded in the will of the powerful, for the powerful man actualizes his will. His judgement and his good taste become for him the arbiters of all being. And if two men should disagree? Then it is strength which will prevail
And if a powerful man wills evil? Does it become good? In his own mind, yes; but there is no need for us to submit to his evil. The other day @simpolism asked, "if there is no god, then who decides what is evil?" And @eli_schiff said "you should". This answer was not flippant
You can fit a God into the Nietzschean grounding of morality if you like; as the most powerful being, morality flows from his power. I don't care if you believe in God, though I will note that all rational arguments for god, like rational arguments for morality, are a shell game
Nietzsche's self-justifying morality is modeled on Christian faith, which also justifies itself. If you need a rational argument for your faith, then your faith isn't real. As with morality, faith in God flows ultimately from the power of your will; that is the only justification
This is what Nietzsche means by "master" and "slave" morality. The master is a moral force unto himself; the slave is subject to the morality of an other. From these two circumstances flow nearly all moral conceits; and because most men are weak, slave morality abounds
In the master's morality, it is bad to be weak, bad to be a slave. The master, beholden to himself, finds satisfaction in the exercise of his will. For him, pity multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable, and is thus a prime instrument of the advancement of decadence
In the slave's morality, it is bad to seek power, it is bad to be strong, bad to be a master. The slave, beholden and dependent on others, sees pity as the highest virtue;
the fear of pain, even of the infinitely small in pain, — cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love...
Metaphysicians have eliminated the attributes of virile virtues, such as strength, bravery, and pride, from the concept of God. As a result, it deteriorated into an insubstantial ideal, pure spirit, Absolute, or thing in itself.
Most people fail to parse the sexual politics of the dissident right. There is no true single synthesis of course, but as a vector in political space, it is neither Christian nor progressive, and for this reason it is deeply upsetting to both.
Above all it is concerned with realism, and it is in every way a reaction to the impotent and hyperidealistic sexual politics of the modern left, which are themselves a reaction to Christian frigidity. What both have in common is prudery
Nietzsche understood this well when wrote, “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink, and he did not die, but degenerated into vice”. Of course Christianity does not have to be like that, but it is. “I’m a Christian and I’m not a prude...” but in aggregate you are
Christian sexual prudery is a good strategy for containing our base impulses in the world of yesterday, but there is a high demand for promiscuity, and in the 20th century two technologies brought down the cost: antibiotics and contraceptives
Once the average person could afford promiscuity, the market for it exploded, and the sexual politics of the modern left began to take their present shape.
low-cost promiscuity + late-life marriage norms => implosion of Christian values.
People will pay lip service to Christianity in this environment but no amount of hysterical moralizing will compel the average person to stay celibate until marriage at age 30
Aside: since no one is capable of nuance, ever, Christians must demonize all sexuality, deigning only to grit their teeth and suffer through the concept of sex for reproduction’s sake. You will try to argue but anyone who glorifies celibacy necessarily denigrates erotic love.
On the other hand, and even more execrable, is the leftist reaction to this, which is the exact inversion of it: the sacralization of total depravity. Everything Christianity despises, the left embraces: sodomy, homosexuality, the profanement of marriage, defamation of innocence
But again, as with Christianity, they can only bear to grit their teeth and suffer through reproductive sex. It’s as if the prudes of the modern left are the children of the Christian prudes they tried to drive out: just as sanctimonious, just as obsessed with purity
And there is no middle ground, because literally every single person ever is incapable of nuance, and either everything is forbidden, or nothing is.
We have seen what the libertinism of the left has wrought; we are swimming in it. “The sexual marketplace” is a world that is saturated in sexual imagery, where everyone imagines everyone else is living a life of salacious abundance, though of course this is an illusion
As the tiresome, finger-waggling schoolmarms of all ideologies reliably point out, no one "needs" sex. This facile observation is obvious: no one will die of celibacy, and yet this denies something fundamental. Sex in this context was always a proxy for romantic love.
Who could be so full of contempt for their fellows as to claim that one has no need for love? After all, no one needs art or poetry or music either, not precisely, not imminently, not right this second or else...
But as with any fetish, a body part becomes a proxy for a body: erotic love, which is quantifiable, becomes a proxy for romantic love, which is not. Most people lack the language to diagnose the problem, which is to say they have a faulty mental model.
The sexual marketplace hurts us because it overwhelms us with the illusion of choice; everyone feels like a sad compromise; there is always a girl out there who is younger, skinnier, better endowed... or a man who is stronger, richer, more confident, more powerful
This is the instagram effect but it long predates the internet. You construct a hyperreal image of a person and you compare everyone to that and if you’re male you disappear into a vortex of porn and if you’re female you have a long string of regrettable encounters
In both sexes this leads to bitterness and bitter intersexual hatred; men are trash, entitled virgin asshole losers who just use women— women are whores, stuck up manipulative frigid opportunistic— lives in his mom’s basement— only wants a man who treats her like shit—
The average person holds out for someone who doesn’t exist, feels lonely about it, and it’s always someone else’s fault. You know that everyone, you included, is just following their incentives, which is why you blame your problems on all (wo)men.
To find deliverance from this pain, the progressive left teaches, you simply need to have sex! You need to let go of all your hangups and internalized oppression and then you will be able to find sexual fulfillment.
Anyone who speaks against this path to salvation must be a sexless loser. It’s the only conceivable explanation. The dissident right claims instead that the medicine of sexual emancipation is the cause of the disease it is meant to treat
The truth is that sex is never just sex, and when you treat it that way you debase yourself, and despite much protestation to the contrary, the implicit deal always was and always will be, "if I have sex with you, then in return you will love me"
How did we get to this sorry state? The dominant memeplex at the time, Christianity, was weak in one of its core components: specifically, religious ecstasy:
When the price of promiscuity fell dramatically, a materialist offshoot of Christianity, which sanctified sexual transgression as a pathway to religious ecstasy, was able to initiate a norm inversion
A sudden change in the environment selected for a memeplex that was equipped to take advantage of it. So how do we fix it? Whatever the solution is, it will hinge on restructuring the sexual marketplace to make promiscuity expensive again.
Nothing, not genocide, not chemical warfare—nothing—is more abhorrent to the progressive left than this idea: the restriction of sexual freedom. All of their most treasured laws and saints revolve around it. They worship sexual release
Their holiest sacrament, the murder of the unborn, is a twisted echo of the sacrifice of Christ, the life of an innocent given as atonement for the sins of others. Abortion mothers repeat the words of Christ but grimly, “this is my body...”
“You've got to believe in something... the problem is there's more than psych truth... there's a need for the numinous"
Tom identifies an important puzzle: whatever shall we make of faith?
First we need to understand that it is impossible to believe nothing. Even for those who call themselves nihilists, their void-belief becomes a kind of credo. Usually nihilists and atheists end up unwittingly synthesizing a religion surrogate out of politics or drugs.
If you dig down into your beliefs for some kind of axiomatic firmament, you will find only aether; Cartesian doubt, Gödelian paradox, maybe Buddhist dissolution. This is because we form our beliefs through mimesis of those around us, and not through logic. No exceptions.
Where then does belief originate? It germinates, through many iterations of human transmission, noise and observation filtered through psychological proclivity and amplified by iteration. But this is a topic for another time.
In every apologia ever written, in EVERY attempt to derive meaning from meaninglessness, there is a certain sleight of hand, where the author constructs a graph of concepts, inserts a cyclical reference, and tries not to notice what he did.
All philosophical frameworks rely on this mechanism of ABSTRACTION OF TAUTOLOGY, a loop of ideas with a wide circumference, ideally with a curvature so subtle that the logic seems flat.
Religious types possess a fundamental honesty about this process. They call their epistemic circle by the name of Faith. They KNOW it is a circle and they try to cultivate comfort with this awareness.
Secular types, on the other hand, must lie about their epistemic closures. “My worldview is built on rationality and reason.” Oh, indeed.
Epistemic closures are not a bad thing! They are an important technology, and they reveal things about the shape of human cognition, about the shape of all cognition! A man without an epistemic closures in his head lacks all conviction: he is lukewarm.
Tight epistemic closures enable us to wear beliefs as uniforms; they make it possible to divorce the “numinous” from the material. Secular people have to realize God’s kingdom on earth, but the faithful can seek material truth unimpeded
The art of cultivating faith lies in crafting an epistemic loop you can accept. Faith isn’t rational in the computational sense, but it’s highly adaptive. With effort you can meme yourself into any belief, so pick a strong one
I still hold out hope that with this understanding of faith, we can build a highly instrumental new religion, perhaps by reinterpreting an old one.
A big difference between the right and the left is an acknowledgement that there are limits to the malleability of the world around us
The leftist imagines utopia but utopia is impossible whether on Marxist or cultural Marxist grounds, though for different reasons. At root the leftist seems to think that good intentions can reshape the world.
It should be obvious why money redistribution (classical marxism) can't work, but just in case: The function of a market is to solve a very complex communication problem; what is the cost in labor and resources of X? | X ∈ {all goods and services}
This question is critical because the people who make X need to know how much to make, and where to send it, and how much it costs them per unit, and how much to pay their workers, and 1000 other questions.
The complexity, the topology of this data is unimaginable, bigger than the biggest and most complex business logic of the world's most sophisticated technology companies.
The market is above all a communication mechanism, and it sends information about the physical costs of goods through a decentralized network of builders, buyers, sellers in the form of money
This concept is not difficult but most communistic thoughts stem from an inability to make this fundamental distinction: wealth = materials + energy*, money is an abstraction on wealth, a protocol of the market
(Energy ~= labor, human or machine)
Money:wealth :: signifier:signified
The cognitive plateau needed to grasp this is the same as to be able to write computer programs is the ability to intuitively grasp the mechanics of the “pointer-pointed” distinction
Money is a pointer
Think of a market as an internet of commerce. Before the internet, letters took weeks or months to arrive. Now we talk in seconds. Communists want to shut off the internet of commerce because they think the protocol is unfair
This breaks the internet. It also breaks the market. It’s why communists always starve to death when they get their way. They turn off the mechanism of coordination that enables them to produce goods like food at society scale
Oh but the problem is real global load balancer has never been tried. The problem is that all the old load balancers were actually imposters. My startup has pure intentions and we will distribute the protocol fairly. Disruptive, indeed
The amazing thing about markets is that no one designed them. No one told us how to build them, it wasn’t a technology we discovered. Did anyone tell ants how to build colonies, bees how to build hives?
So that is why Marxism fails, but what about cultural Marxism? Same instinct, same pathology, different failure mode. Regular Marxism wants to redistribute wealth, cultural Marxism wants to redistribute success. Wat mean?
Marxism is anti-Buddhism. Marx looked into the abyss and he saw desire, and he determined that it was the source of all his suffering. The only answer he could think of was to satisfy all desires. Very unwoke there, Karl
The CMs realized that money was just a symbol and that if you multiply all dollars by 1000, it doesn’t make everyone richer. What if instead we could redistribute clout? Surely clout disparity (=social status) is the root cause of our unhappiness?
So instead of trying to take away your money they decided to play Robin Hood with your social standing and your credibility. It is half-working which is why we are here on anonymous reactionary twitter
Unlike wealth, clout is a zero-sum game. It’s impossible to create clout in one place without destroying it somewhere else, because status is transacted in attention and because social standing is relative
If you have a high opinion of everyone you have a high opinion of no one
Cultural Marxism is infinitely antagonistic and can never be satisfied because it’s nominal goal is for everyone to be high status (except for those nasty straight white men god they’re the worst)
That cultural Marxism wants something impossible, that it is powered wholly by resentment, that it is an ugly emotion which also drives its possessors to grow ugly in the body—this is not news
But despite this corrosiveness it is possible to transfer status from one group for another, it just requires capture of the organs of mass media, and it has a transaction cost so high it will bankrupt us all
For every one point of social status you redistribute, you burn four as a sacrifice to entropy and moloch, because you can defame someone, and you can build someone up, but the recipient of clout usually lacks the capacity to grow it organically and subsequently squanders it
The same goes for wealth, honestly, but it’s way more forgiving.
Social status is wealth that you store in your friends and you can move fame but you can’t move friendships
Money:fame :: wealth:friendship
The whole point of money is to be fungible, friendship not so much.
Communism makes you poor because it shuts off wealth generation protocols and social justice makes you isolated because it shuts off friend generation protocols
You doubt me? Spend some time reading social justice tumblrs and twitters. They can’t develop social capital because cooperation (the atom of friendship) requires not sabotaging each other with accusations of privilege so they are all miserable fucks who gobble antidepressants
The right on the other hand accepts and embraces human nature as one of the rules of the game we are playing, and instead of trying to push against it, we want to build institutions that operate within it
Christians know that to realize their heaven will take a fundamental and supernatural transformation of human nature. Marxists of all stripes believe they can do it by being good people with good intentions, and by killing or disenfranchising everyone who disagrees
A common misconception is that morality is "caring for your fellow man," but if in our time together I could persuade you of only one thing, my friends, I would have you realize that the most WICKED people are those who overindulge in the wine of compassion
The fallacy of the compassion moralist is to imagine that the opposite of compassion is selfishness, and though he may not have glimpsed the treachery of the self against the self, he has at least noticed enough to be repelled by a short-sighted and selfish character
Especially in his formative years, a compassion moralist meets a person whose character is repulsive, and attributes that repulsion to selfishness, and swears to become the antithesis of his hated antagonist.
Back and forth he totters in his narrow moral rut, disgusted by the mere idea of the apotheosis of the self, looking for moral weight in his “fellow man.” He desires to free them from their physical torments so that they might join him in his mental prison
The moralist derives a truly voluptuous pleasure from his compassion, from his “selflessness” — indeed nothing brings him more base enjoyment than his feeling that he is righteous. That altruism is deeply rooted in selfishness collapses this seeming polarity into a unity
This was Nietzsche's great thought: to realize that resentment--a powerless envy, a hatred--drives the "moral" man. His desire to help the downtrodden is his secret revenge against his betters. It's a secret he keeps even from himself!
Ah, but how did Nietzsche sniff out this resentment, which like so many horrors, CANNOT be unseen? Nietzsche's keen nose came from an intimate familiarity, like a pig who is a connoisseur of mud.
"The resentment of the moral against the strong" -- Does this not describe Nietzsche's own attitude towards Christianity? He manufactures an entirely new moral lense through which to condemn the objects of his resentment. And worst of all: he was not wrong
Instead of a moral axis from self to other, Nietzsche offered us a moral axis from slave to master, and if I to describe it to you, it sounds unbearably clichéd. Such is the power and the pervasiveness of Nietzsche's thought, it is now in the substrate of our culture
The slave wishes to see his weakness as virtue: “to be powerful is a vice, to be lower is my choice, to be persecuted is holy. Only evil men seek riches and power, good men renounce such things.” But riches and power are self-evidently good, the slave soothes himself with lies
The master is totally free of resentment; he has no memory for insults that are practised on him; he is incapable of forgiving only because he forgets. He conceives the idea of "good" spontaneously out of himself, he is incapable of self-abasement for morality's sake
Nietzsche was the world’s greatest apologist for moral relativism. The naive criticism of relativism is this: “without an absolute, nothing is truly wrong, and you have no way to condemn evil” This complaint is shallow, it means you lack imagination
There is no need for the weight of the universal to issue a universal condemnation: that YOU feel a thing to be evil is all the justification you need to condemn it, even “universally”. The font of morality in YOUR spirit is sufficient.
But what did Nietzsche say about himself? "I am no man, I am dynamite." Dynamite builds nothing, it only destroys, and Nietzsche understood that his was a philosophy of destruction.
The average American (and we are all Americans, now, still) is naively Nietzchean: he "lives his truth," he speaks of his "values": whatever he does, he blesses. (Forgive me) he shits, he farts, he cums, and he pronounces it good. This goodness flows from him, the "master," no?
This transvaluation of all moral values is implicit in all of the stories we tell now, from the cartoons we show to children to the cartoons we show to adult children. Admittedly, it took a while for Nietzsche's theories to become our practices.
Tolkien's morality was Christian; George RR Martin's morality is Nietzschean, and only an idiot would claim that Martin is greater (as a writer or as a moralist), but whose is the spirit of the age?
Our relativism (as we have learned!) does not mean tolerance for all, it means moral WAR for all, and war is the factory that manufactures holiness, and this is precisely what we see in the culture war, which is a moral war.
Nietzsche's philosophy is a harmful perception, a thing of great beauty and a thing of great horror. Fully grasped and fully explored, it is the decentralization of morality, and the dissolution of moral authority
Aristocratic morality exists in an eternal now, and slave morality, says Nietzsche, thus creates civilization, and this constitutes an argument against civilisation. Shall we then wallow in slave morality, like a pig in the mud?
Whether he is Jesus or Nietzsche, a man who creates a moral philosophy fashions a club to beat his hated enemies, which is to say, even the moral system which casts resentment as the greatest sin was born out of resentment
Sailer’s law of female journalism but for philosophy: the most heartfelt moral apologetics are always demands that, come the great awakening, the moralist in question will be considered to be hotter
There is no real escape from this vortex of morals. In the end one makes a choice to believe in some moral truth, or not, and the power of that belief is the strength that one is able to marshal to be willfully irrational, whether that will goes by "faith" or some other name
As a postscript to this, a more personal note: I have always resented (ha!) the peddlers of slave morality wherever I found them, and when first I learned the name of this thing that I hate, it was cool, crisp air to me.
We find a common thread between Christianity and the progressive left, and it is slave morality, a narrow moral imagination predicated on resentment of one’s betters. Individual Christians or lefties may not feel it, but from a mile up, we see it is the vessel that contains them
Progressivism is in many ways a hatred of one’s father, and it hates its own ideological progenitor most of all; and it is especially repellent when parents will take no responsibility for their children
The problem we now face is those revolting (in both senses) slaves who wish to tear down civilization as the consummation of their resentment, and they call this wickedness compassion. Christians can produce no answer to this love of the “marginalized” but Talmudic dissembling
Yes I know, my Christian friends, YOUR Christianity is more subtle, more studied, more principled, and it hearkens back to older forms... what Christians are tasked with explaining is why they have LOST the cultural war. Most wont even admit to defeat
Much as I wanted to reconcile master/slave morality with the left/right dichotomy, it just doesn’t quite fit. “The only morality is civilization” is both Nietzschean in its boldness and anti-Nietzschean in that slave morality is the tool that builds civilization
In terms of of ideology architecture, we need more of the master’s love of himself, and himself properly understood must include his civilization, his property, his works
Nietzsche praises chaos as vitality, but there is no such thing as chaotic good. Thus spake Mencius Moldbug
I was reading in an old book yesterday, and the author remarked, only in passing, that young men in particular tend to feel very lonely. It's striking and shocking that he could say a very obvious thing like this without "evidence", which is an appeal to authority
If you make a statement about the nature of men or women, there is a kind of luminary who will come out of the woodwork to ask, incredulously, "evidence?!" as if she would read a scientific paper and change her mind, as if social science research were anything but fiat
But back to loneliness, and obviousness. Things that once were obvious are now quite hidden; we have rejected the wisdom of the past in favor of modern ideas. Who could doubt that we, from our vantage point atop a mountain of smart phones, know better than all of our ancestors?
(There is a treasure we can find in modernity, which was denied to people as recently as 2 generations ago; the joy of discovery. All literary works written prior to the 20th c. have been so defamed and hidden that we may discover them anew, as if we were the first to read them)
I was thinking about loneliness, and the loneliness that a young man feels, and I think he feels lonely in three distinct ways.
1. He feels loneliness for a woman.
2. He feels loneliness for a brotherhood.
3. He feels loneliness for a lord, which we may think of as being for god
And these three types of loneliness are not commutative, and the satiation of one will amplify the emptiness from the others. And in modernity we men have been forced to pretend that these feelings are inconsequential, or wicked, or non-existent, respectively
We have been told that these three forms of loneliness that a man feels are instances of "toxic masculinity," and the cure for these problems is supposed to be a systematic abandonment of masculine ways of thinking and being
Our loneliness, they say, comes from our alienation from our feelings. Women, who are obviously "in touch" with their feelings, do not have OUR problems, but because we "suppress" our feelings, our suffering traps us, and we even impose it on women!
My friends, we lack the language to articulate the magnitude of this monstrous insult, but fortunately I have been blessed by the good lord with the gift of the gab, so let me see if I can elucidate.
First, the loneliness that we feel for a woman, we are told, is a case of entitlement, which is an unjust belief that one deserves something. We are not supposed to suppress our pains, we are supposed to "be vulnerable", but only in ways that women have prescribed
Only an entitled loser who can't get laid would ever express the pain that he feels from his hardships attracting a woman, of course. So this is not a pain we are allowed to feel, because this pain imposes on women, even if only in general. Only "toxic" males feel this pain
Second, the loneliness that we feel for a brotherhood, we are told, is an engine of oppression and exclusion. When men are allowed to form mens' organizations, they use them to systematically exclude women from power and influence. Therefore, all male spaces must be denatured
In this program for society, any group of men assembling together for any reason must be seen with suspicion. If men do wish to associate on the basis of shared masculine interests, the only option they have is informal purposeless groups built around an interest in drinking
But men need male friendship, and in particular, they need to be able to struggle together towards mutual goals. No one ever questions that women might have or pursue this need, but if men express a desire for exclusively male spaces, they are defamed as gay or misogynistic
Third, there is the loneliness that we feel for a lord, which is the desire to follow a worthy leader. This is the hardest to understand, especially in America, where we are taught that all leaders are evil, and that the ideal is to be "free," which means to be leaderless
If there are leaders, we are told, there will be abuses of power, and somehow it would be better that the whole world devolve into a centerless shamble than for even one person ever to abuse their power. And no one even thinks of the abuses we suffer at the hands of the void
In older times, the pain of having no lord was well known, as in the famous Anglo-Saxon elegy "The Wanderer", a poet laments:
Since long years ago
I hid my lord
in the darkness of the earth,
and I, wretched, from there
travelled most sorrowfully
over the frozen waves
I have shared this fragment of a poem with you because I believe that verse can awaken us to an emotion we had hidden in ourselves, even when we had no awareness or language with which to find it.
Nearly everyone wants to follow a strong and powerful leader, though many are unaware of it. Leading is very hard, and it weighs heavily on the soul. Only a truly callous person could carry the burden of leadership without feeling its weight
To follow a great leader is far more freeing than the filthy rags that leftists have the shamelessness to call “emancipation”. Sartre referred to the awareness that you alone bear responsibility for your actions as nausea.
To compensate for our lordlessness, we fall into the worship of celebrities, or CEOs, or politicians, or even twitter gurus, and we build a proxy of the aura of a leader; a little from here, a little from there, never quite filling the gap
We men are guilty of suppressing our emotions! That’s what they say. But is a child guilty of suppressing his incontinence? Is shame not the right reaction when you piss yourself in public? (Oh god, that’s ableist!) If we showed you our true emotions, you would shriek ever louder
We do not have your PERMISSION to tell you of our loneliness. These emotions do grievous harm to you: the need for a woman, the need for brothers, the need for god. These emotions oppress you, my love, and when I say “my love” I refer to all women everywhere, truly
In the deranged thought of the devil, all differences between men and women are seen as aberrations. Man does not emerge from the womb fully formed; to be worthy, he must be tempered, and the shame he is made to feel for showing weakness is part of the fire that forges him
The proper emotions of man are not the emotions of weakness, which are the emotions of children, and which are suitable for women, because they must raise children and be among children, the better to empathize WITH their children.
And again, man does not emerge from the womb fully formed, which is why he must learn mastery of his emotions just as he must learn mastery of his bladder. Only the most contemptible kind of idiot imagines that induction into manhood could come without pain, or without sacrifices
This is what they want to take from you! Is it pleasant for the block of marble to be struck by the sculptor’s chisel? Do you think order, and prosperity, and security could come without a cost?
Feminists call the structure of society the “the big Other” and by this they mean all social orders are antagonistic to them. When a father teaches rules to his child, they call this castration. Could anything be more alien, more alienating, or more opposed to life and humanity?
Every time this topic comes around, I see people asking, “what about toxic femininity?” I’ll solve the puzzle for you. Toxic femininity already has a name in polite society: they call it feminism.
My friends I have had a good sleep, and I must caution you to always be wary of thoughts that you feel in a state of sleep deprivation. The world is bleak but there may yet be hope. I sometimes imagine I will just shut up, stop all this, but the truth is there is a fire in me
Fire! Cleansing fire! Fire to burn down cities, fire to decimate empires, fire to vaporize oceans! The “men” all around us are weak, they have no mastery of their bodies, and their souls have withered, tethered to a shambling corpse
When you attack their little world, when you try to shake them out of their complacency, their only response is to bite you, like a rodent. Why did you reach into my cage. I hope you brought lettuce
But their anger is itself a kind of shit test. When a man speaks with conviction, then other men will try to tear him down. What does he know? Where does he find the authority to say such audacious things? Just like a woman they must test him before they can submit
And the more cowardly he is in his soul, the more fiercely a man tests, the more certain he must be of your strength. If a glorious and worthy leader appeared before us today, told us the way out, showed us a higher way, this is how he would prove himself
This is the secret behind “disdain for authority” that the leftists paint on their faces like hunter gatherer tribes untouched by civilization. It is the weakness they feel, the fear that no leader will ever be strong enough to save them from themselves
If a truly great leader appeared, if a man could truly tell us the way to be, if he could preach a gospel of radiant power, most would gladly follow. But we see no leaders like that today. You would gladly be a sheep for the right shepherd, my friends. It would be so liberating
Being bullied is good for boys, being mocked by peers triggers hormesis, when young boys fight with each other it galvanizes them. Being too emotional IS weakness, because emotion clouds the mind. Being powerful is a virtue and being weak is a sin.
Young boys antagonize each other because it is low-stakes training for adult life, which is dangerous, and where there is no protective parent nearby to make sure things don't get out of hand. It does teach men to defend themselves, and this is good, the world is dangerous
The logic of game theory dictates that it will ALWAYS be thus. If every single man on earth got woke to feminist utopian visions simultaneously, the caprice of evolution would produce a man who would defect against the"reformed" social order, and there would be no one to stop him
The only reason it is possible to sustain a partially feminist society in the first place is that enough men who are capable of violence support it. (strong men, men who have known “toxicity” all their lives)
The Darwinian machine searches always for the tiniest advantage, and feminists with their dreams of socially engineering a man with no teeth fail in exactly the same way as libertarians with their NAP; they surrender to all aggressors without so much as a murmur
As the old chestnut goes, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.
We are living in good times now, and already we see the proliferation of weak men around us. Can anyone doubt what comes next?
It takes a special hubris to imagine that the times will only ever get better, and that therefore men must get ever weaker, doubly so to imagine that robbing men of their strength does not hasten the coming of hard times.
In our soft androgynized city lives it can be hard to see the value in masculine strength, which is developed through galvanizing pain. Certainly the only people in our nice safe neighborhoods who live by violence are poor and low status. We must unequivocally renounce them
Discipline looks evil to people who fear even the smallest pain. Have you ever been in a physical fight? It is the least boring thing in the world. Winning a fight is among the most sublime joys of man. When surrounded by danger, it is wise to be fearful.
All advances in technology and all triumphs of art and poetry have been born of competition. There is nothing to motivate like an existential struggle, there is nothing to catalyze creativity like an arms race. Do you know what is BORING? To sit in idle comfort getting fat
Is there a more facile concept than "toxic masculinity"? No one ever speaks of “toxic femininity”—this is telling. Are there any specifically masculine virtues? Our source tweet can name only one: to be a protector. But how are we to protect if we have no experience with enemies?
And moreover, what if a woman wanted to be a protector? Would she be less of a protector than a man? Will she admit to that? Can it be there are virtues that a man can access better than a woman? Surely not. What a sexist and toxic thing to say.
What I notice about these "toxic masculinity" sermons is that no one ever seems to admit, even for a moment, that nature is red in tooth and claw. That we have any agency or judgement. No-“toxic masculinity", an egregore which formed ex nihilo, “teaches” us the things you dislike
Man is a blank slate, you see, man exists FOR woman, a canvas for her to paint, a block of marble for her to sculpt, and it is only some immaterial devil, "toxic masculinity", cursed be its name, that makes us express our masculine power.
Sexual selection has in no way shaped our nature. If one peruses the shelves of romance novels, which are designed to sexually arouse women, one finds only soft, respectful, sensitive men. No conquest of woman ever occurs, no woman ever swoons for a conqueror or a cruel man
This is how the rhetoric of feminism castrates you: Submit to me, or are you afraid? You aren't a scared little boy are you? A real man would submit to me, the only reason you won't submit is your fear. Prove you're a real man by yielding your manhood
And many men fall for this trick. Sad! But I think she is a good person, and his thread is quite logical and insightful, if we only grant him a monstrous and monstrously false premise. Let us turn our attention to something far more insidious.
From birth we are told that anything boys can do, girls can do as well. In fact we are told that they can do them better. This was a message in every cartoon I watched growing up. If nothing separates man from woman, what possible action could serve as a gateway to manhood?
There is exactly one thing, the only thing that egalitarian feminist society admits is the sole domain of man: to penetrate a woman with his phallus. It is the only ritual available! Could you imagine, now (in 2018!) a test of strength or grit to become a man?
NO! Any such ritual would be coopted by women as a symbol of sexual equality. And this would be done with the full blessing of so many men who are complicit if not enthusiastic in the emasculation of society.
“Oh, he’s so fragile, he can’t handle competition with GIRLS". Can you not understand the need for a symbol? Men, out of a desire to control each other, will deny masculinity any positive valence, and flatter themselves that they are doing it for woman’s sake!
Most especially, most contemptible of all, are men who are bad at performative masculinity, who resent it because they are falter where others excel, and rather than use those men as a model they try to destroy them out of envy.
At last what is toxic masculinity? It means no specific thing at all, it is a blank check to demonize any and all masculine behavior, it is a shackle placed on men who have not realized their manhood, to prevent them from doing so.
The only good man to these people is a self-eviscerating man, who “gets out of the way”, who lies down like a dog.
When the wolf desires to hunt, shall he listen to the sheep who bleats out “toxic caninity?!” There is much to love about domesticated dogs but in our smothering feminine love of them we have bred them into twisted unviable shapes. In the wild, we revert to wolves, or perish
Ban internet pornography. Half of the productive output of men is being burned off as a sacrifice to Slaanesh. I bet you would see a ten percent bump to gdp after one year of a draconian crackdown on internet porn. Also, incels would stop existing.
Making things illegal can be quite effective if the law is actually enforced. Will some people still watch porn? Of course. But if you make it illegal to make, sell, or pay for, and you actually enforce the law, a 10x reduction is easily possible
Let me put it another way. In every country in the world, the penalty for jumping in front of a speeding bus is death. How do people live under this stifling tyranny? It’s almost as if severe punishment can alter people’s behavior.
You don’t have a really good take unless people who don’t follow you start retweeting it with obscenities and slurs
Pride is a month-long campaign of media terrorism against heterosexual people. The purpose of propaganda is to humiliate and demoralize you, try to keep this in mind.
It's working - propaganda is extremely effective, especially now, especially in the digital age.
The worst part is that there is no escape. Sign in to the digital library in Bible-belt SW Virginia and be assaulted by Pride banners.
“Lol Just step away from the screen” - you idiots. This stuff is in every school and every office building and every public transit vehicle and every grocery store.
Time to go be a hermit in a cabin with no running water to own the libs
The enlightenment political formula, "consent of the governed", such an obviously right and radiant idea, has proven to be a basilisk, a serpent that kills with its gaze. It stares now at thee
The idea of consent as a substrate for authority is irrecoverably broken and contradictory. Authority that requires consent is no authority, it’s like claiming that chastity derives from the promiscuity of the fucked
But note here that we can in fact make an argument that chastity derives from the promiscuity of the fucked, or for any other contradiction we desire; the treachery of philosophies is the joy and the horror of postmodernity
We can create an apologetic for any contradiction using a Derridean argument to the effect that such a thing as chastity can only ever be conceived in opposition to promiscuity, and that in order to construct any meaningful theory of chastity we must ground it in its opposite
& this is a fully general formula for constructing what I call holy contradictions, which are, if you like, strange attractors in human cognition space, & we can build them around any antipodal pair at all, whether suffering/pleasure, redemption/damnation, or chocolate/vanilla
The holy contradiction is a structure that all ideologies have in common. It is a divine mystery, not so much a mental stopsign as a mental black hole, a juxtaposition of ideas with a gravity that creates an event horizon in the mind, a vanishing point of thought
Humans need holy contradictions in order to function, and when we can’t find them, we invent them, voluptuous thoughts to use as objects of meditation and reverence
The role of a priest is to descend into the fluid underworld of words and philosophies, and to choose which concepts to deconstruct and which to reinforce, in order to build a philosophical space for his flock. This is called theology
Christianity has holy contradictions: Jesus is both fully God and fully Man. Buddhism has holy contradictions: All desire (even its satiation) IS suffering. Liberalism has holy contradictions: the consent of the governed; that we can be both free and equal in simultaneity
Everyone on both sides of the political aisle has realized that freedom and equality are irreconcilable opposites, so we end up with this eternal tension between, roughly, liberals (republicans) and egalitarians (democrats)
Note however that egalitarians still cry for emancipation and liberals still cry for equality because, as with all holy contradictions, each finds its grounding in its opposite.
Equality is an ideal of resentment, but it's understandable; egalitarians long to submit to an authority. Liberals hate the tyranny of egalitarians, but both groups believe that their salvation lies in the destruction of all authority. Their common denominator is consent
Even if you manage to queer the freedom/equality binary, you're still fucked unless you can also turn your back on the vortex of "consent of the governed", a void so ravenous it has enveloped all of moral and sexual life
Last week someone told me that murder is wrong because the murdered party did not consent to die. How embarrassing! And yet how consistent and appropriate to a worldview that makes consent of the governed its cornerstone
This is the gaping maw of liberalism, its many shining teeth exposed: the only reason not to die is that you don’t want to? What of obligation, what of duty, what of passion? Such people have no taste for death, and so their lives have little taste as well
The problem with consent becomes obvious when you earnestly try to live according to its mandates, e.g., feminists who tried to build their god out of "what we permit men to do to us" quickly discovered that men could trick them to consent
Feminists were forced to add epicycles to their moral philosophy such that consent became impossible under certain conditions, and in this way they rescued a sliver of eroticism from otherwise total oblivion, sacrificing the legitimacy of consent in the process
The erotic is only and ever in the purview of power; sexual excitement is a relation surmounted on a power inequality, as all bdsm fetishists know. And yet bdsm eroticism is entirely fake, because when everyone consents, power can only be simulated
The libertarian political compass is badly mislabeled, the y axis is supposed to be authority <-> consent, which makes it crystal clear that no one in America is an authoritarian except for whoever is organizing pride parades
It has been a century since Walter Lippmann wrote: persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government...knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Yet our faith is unshaken
We are all naive consentitarians, but the scale and the speed of society and the decentralization of broadcasting have enabled us to see some of the subtler problems that arise in consent-based governance, because we can watch the process in real time
We do not consent to the mainstreaming of bacha bazi, we do not consent to the rapid changes being made to our sexual mores, we do not consent to the continuously escalating campaign of propaganda against American whites, and we were never consulted, though many were tricked
Our consent to our rulers is not something that we give, it is something that is incepted in us, a command underwritten by deception rather than strength.
It starts to feel like some kind of mental disorder to be resistant to the factories of mind control that Lippmann predicted all those years ago.
And worse still: because our system is based on consent, there is no genuine authority to blame. We thrash around from scapegoat to scapegoat, trying to find someone to hold accountable, but we only ever find simulations of accountability
In the same way, we float groundlessly from one sexual encounter to another, looking for power, looking for TRUE eros, which is to say true power, but we only ever find simulations of eros, because we only find simulations of power, because we think power comes from consent
Consent-based philosophy will always converge on suicide, because there is no getting around the fact that children never consented to be born; this is the sincere argument of angsty teenagers and anti-natalists, and given their axioms, what do you expect?
Consent is fickle; that which is easily given is easily revoked. Feminists are right when they say all sex is rape: having made authority impossible, they have rendered all sex illegitimate
Freedom is the acid that dissolves all bonds between people; equality is the resulting sterility; consent is a retardant that keeps those bonds from forming again, because there is no trust where the only power is lies.
Most people fear Eros; they do not want her to find her way back into the world. If she ever comes back to us, bringing love and beauty and power and cruelty, I promise you this: she will not ask for your permission
I’m honestly pretty fatigued of the NPC meme, but twitter isn’t, and people getting banned out here, and the lefties are triggered; that's what happens when you think parroting late night talk show talking points makes you intellectually rebellious. Truth is pain.
The npc meme isn’t about free will and it isn’t about inner monologues and it isn’t about seeing yourself as the hero of your own personal Campbellian journey.
It’s about the homogenization of inner life in the era of mass media
There’s a sort of implicit claim that is fundamental to humanistic thought, which is fundamental to this era of western thought, it’s the idea that Gaussian variance aside, everyone has petty much the same experiential topology. Let’s call it human neurological uniformity (HNU)
Ignoring such people as autists for the moment, and given HNU, which most people believe perhaps without ever having thought about it, what do we expect to happen when everyone watches the same small pool of tv shows and news broadcasts?
Suppose you have agency, inner life, &c. And you decide, using the marvelous brightness in your soul, to watch 60 hours of game of thrones. Because you are normal, you now have thoughts about John snow and Daenerys, thoughts which you share with millions of others
And there is nothing wrong with enjoying a TV show, but when millions of people watch the same TV show, and the same news commentators, and read the same articles, they think all the same thoughts, literally the same thoughts, with the same words, the same words we all heard
We all have looping behaviors because life is on average repetitive. People are predictable despite individual variation in the same way that thermodynamic systems are predictable without modeling every individual particle.
Industrialization is a process of mass repetition and homogenization. Industrial man is highly repetitive and homogenized, and the mechanism that repeats and homogenizes is broadcast media. Before that it was books and pamphlets and newspapers
The nature of our inner life in broadcast media vs. written media is different. The idea of the NPC refers to a kind of total conformity of being that is brought about by broadcast media.
Tocqueville described the NPC meme in 1895 "What is still more strange is that all these men, who kept themselves so apart from each other, had become so much alike that it would have been impossible to distinguish them if their places had been changed."
He was talking about the effects of reading books mass-produced by the printing press. Cobbett in 1795: Every farmer is more or less of a reader. There is [...] no class like that which the French call peasantry...They have all been readers from their youth up
Ironically avid readers are probably less NPC-ish than "illiterate" TV-primary people. In a highly literate society, visual and behavioural conformity frees the individual for inner deviation. Not so in an oral society where inner verbalization is effective social action
You can log in to netflix and see a hundred different shows, but they're all very similar in their underlying themes and worldviews. Even the older stuff is carefully curated to mesh with contemporary sensibilities, mostly. The same characters in different shows, the same dramas
The effect of watching so much TV is you form a series of unilateral friendships. It feels like you personally know all the people you are watching, and you move into social alignment with them, just like you would with a group of in-person friends
This fits the Kaczynskian take that leftists are "oversocialized". Hat tip to @BeigeShiba:
"A person could be so thoroughly conditioned with society's values as to compromise their own agency to make choices as independent individuals. (1/4)
We find ourselves in a pervasive system of cradle to grave social conditioning, starting with childhood to early adulthood and then continually reinforced through authority figures in media, entertainment, and politics. (2/4)
The cumulative effect of all this can result in tragic individuals who can think and feel just as any of us can, yet are compelled to to comply with their social conditioning in order to avoid unbearable psychological suffering. (3/4)
This is very different to a community or subculture with its own distinct aphorisms and in-jokes. The oversocialized never chose to be the way they are, it was imposed upon them." (4/4)
TV, movies, and pundits (newscasts, podcasts, bluechecks) are the medium of oversocialization. If you dig back into early memories of childhood cartoons and sitcoms you can almost remember the way it happened. It's not indoctrination exactly, since that implies a baseline.
We are all oversocialized and the act of waking up is the act of bearing and confronting the pain of pushing back against our social programming. You only do this if you have a powerful incentive to do so, i.e., you are already in a circumstance of tremendous psychological pain
The common pathway to right-wing shitlordery is through the PUA/Redpill/manosphere pipeline. Gamers are rendered sterile by their oversocialization and the soul-crushing pain of TFW no GF causes them to confront their social programming in all arenas of the mind
In the evolving meaning of the NPC meme, we are realizing that it is most effective as a way to instantaneously convey that a person is in the grip of Kaczynskian oversocialization. Even naming the evil spirit is enough to cause tremendous psychic distress, as we have seen.
If social programming privileges one group over another, it is safe to say that the disprivileged group will tend to be the one that is in the most pain, and therefore the most likely to break free of their programming. This should raise some uncomfortable questions for everyone.
I would never unironically use the word “oppressed” to describe anyone. Emancipatory politics is a brain disease
It’s so much easier to destroy than to build. Everyone wants to criticize, no one wants to create. The moment you try to do something positive, you become vulnerable.
There is no cost to naysaying, in fact many will praise you for it, and that is good. A yes costs much more than a no, for everyone involved
If I say “everything is fucked”... you want to hear that. If I try to imagine an exit, other than death, I will hear only the sound of your no
I am using a mental model where I think the west is suffering from a lack of animating convictions. It could be otherwise. It could be that convictions don’t matter, only growth
It could be that when there are 100$ bills lying on the ground, all beliefs are good, and when there are not, all beliefs are evil. I don’t think that is true, because if it were, we would never have got out of warm, equatorial zones
What I want to do is create—or at least fabricate—something that you can believe in.
The modern era reached its modality when a majority of people could no longer believe in a power outside themselves. “Believe in yourself” is a prayer, haven’t you noticed?
The religions that built the world are no longer adequate to the world they have built
Christianity won’t save us, it’s too idealistic, it won’t acknowledge the nature of man
(yes it does, you don’t understand Christianity, it teaches man’s nature is sinful)
(No, it teaches that man can transcend his nature by submitting to God)
Variants of progressivism won’t save us: all of Christianity’s idealism unmoored from the realism of judaism? All sky and no earth, a formula for a fall
Islam won’t save us, for the opposite reason. It is far too close to the earth, all earth and no sky, submission without salvation
Neoliberalism won’t save us, we’re already in it. “Socially liberal” means political control through sexual control. Bureaucracy that exists to sell you objects to insert in your ass. No, don’t take away the porn!
Eastern faiths won’t save us, they were never a part of us, and they do not sit properly in the western mind.
A faith which teaches that men are beasts will never elevate them above the level of beasts. A faith that cannot acknowledge man's beast nature will be unable to tame him.
A faith that tries to speak to man in all his particularities, which acknowledges the differences of different peoples... how can such a faith take hold of a diverse nation?
Universalism is a catalyst for virality, maybe even a precondition for belief. Who outside a few eccentrics would believe in a non-universalist faith?
Similarly with transcendence, who would follow a holy man who cannot offer transcendence? If you promise these things you’re a fraud, if you don’t, you are impotent.
Transcendence and universality, these are the desires of the human heart, however specious those desires might be. Together they become a platform for moral inclination, for coping with death, and for justification of birth.
That’s why all ideologies need an eschatology, it’s why eschatology is the beating heart of religion, because a story about the ultimate end is what gives context to the anticipation of one’s personal end.
Is it any wonder we can’t be satisfied with scientism, which promises us only heat death? Is it any wonder moderns feel little inclination to have children?
All ideology wants to be total ideology. Can we imagine a faith that can withstand extreme devotion, extreme piety, its principles taken to their logical conclusions?
I thought about all this, and I was reminded of the Trinity, theology's naked contradiction, the claim that 3 = 1, a claim so audacious that only faith could justify it
All of our heads are full of contradictions. Truths that obtain in one context may not obtain in another. From within the mind, truth is just generalization from memory. Why fight it?
Philosophy and religion have a place for contradiction. It fuels philosophical ideation and conviction. It takes no energy to believe truth, tremendous energy to believe a contradiction. the more audacious the contradiction, the more energy
Indeed, wrestling with a contradiction is a generator of spiritual energy: a man who fights a necessary contradiction comes to believe in it, in mutually exclusive things, and with fervency, and loyalty
There is nothing, NOTHING in this world for free. If you are want to buy a god you can believe in, I mean really believe, you will have to pay a price in epistemology.
This is the alchemy of the trinity, the secret of faith, which is wholly contradiction and holy contradiction
Conquest’s second law says that any organization that is not explicitly right wing becomes leftist sooner or later. Why? Why does Cthulhu swim left? Why, in other words, is the moral arc of history bent?
Like anyone who suffers from political cogitation, I sometimes ask myself, good lord, how can my enemies be so colossally stupid and yet keep beating me at every turn?!
I meet these very nice, gregarious, charming, civilized people who I know have voted left, have shared prosaic orange man bad memes with their friends, they’re lovely people, truly, often very smart
So I ask myself, what is leftism, what is this tendency, how can we rationally believe that our hated enemies, who stand up for things that we find so nauseating, are merely deceived?
There is of course the whole Ted K angle of oversocialization, the leftist stands up for the “weak” because she herself feels weak, etc. this I believe is true, but it’s not the whole story
What is this insidious power that, when you try to talk about it, it makes you look crazy, and yet it grows, and devours, and above all sodomizes?
The psychologically contemptible side of leftism is the flipside of the cunning and cutting and ruthless intelligence of ambition. Each manufactures the other.
Intelligence is competence at winning games and leftism-as-intelligence is a set of strategies for winning games where the victory condition is majority consensus
The leftist thrives on consensus procedures, it is why over-socialization its its necessary output. What is a “consensus procedure”? It’s any time a decision is made by majority vote
This need not be an electoral-political game. Any time you make a decision via committee, any time your team at work votes on something, you “did leftism”.
Committee decisions are notoriously bad because no one has ownership.
Ambition is not the will to power, but the desire to exercise it. How do you exercise power in an organization where rules are decided by voting? Easy. You become the coordinator of the voting process itself
Organizing votes makes you look like a good guy, a builder of society. And what structure do you build? You build one where votes flow downhill into your desired outcomes
Everyone knows examples of consensus manipulation: Gerrymandering. Proposed voter ID schemes. Importing foreigners who will predictably vote a certain way. Rules about voting schedules. Physical locations of voting booths.
You think only political parties play vote manipulation games? They happen in every board room and every corporate panel and every hiring committee and product signoff and etc etc etc
And you can be a really good person and have really good intentions but you live in a committee-driven society and if you need to exercise power (for good! Always for good!) then you must learn to manipulate consensus procedures
You can be the most right wing evola-reading gun-shooting monarchist-larping miscegenator-murdering fuck ever to spring from the loins of the South but the moment you try to change anything in an institutional or political level you become a leftist.
And there’s no way out. The only right-wing strategy for winning votes is having babies and it doesn’t work IT’S TOO SLOW and there’s plastic in the air and plastic in the water and plastic in your blood
Plastic is derived from petrochemicals which are made from the dead bodies of ancient monsters buried deep under the earth and when you suck up Gaia’s soul repository and literally burn it to stream anime titties (male) onto your phone she turns you into a woman for it you fuck
You think decentralization is going to save you? Bitcoin uses math to make consensus more robust against leftism but it doesn’t go far enough, how can it?
What do you think the cathedral IS? It’s a decentralized consensus manipulator that has figured out how to enforce voting patterns that guarantee its proliferation.
Gender politics are the chemical reaction that fuels the current wave of leftism, it’s why we have to keep talking about it. It’s like a fusion reactor. Blow up the nuclear family and unfathomable power is released in the meltdown
Rule by committee releases toxic social waste as a byproduct; conformist, alienated depressed people who know something has been taken from them but they don’t know what or how. So they appoint a committee to fix the problem.
The problem is leftism scales easily, because it leverages the miserable conditions it creates into loyalty the it can use for further leftism. Rightists depend on strong people to exercise strength, leftists depend on weak people. Cthulhu swims left.
Feminine “happiness” societies lack the ability to produce technology, wealth, and capital. Innovation and technological development are born in arms races between competitors, and human societies built around “happiness” (I cannot possibly sneer hard enough) cannot compete
This is sort of a corollary of the idea that all non-explicitly right wing institutions become left wing over time. It works on the idea that leftness is institutional entropy, a diffusion of responsibility and ownership
The most underrated and under-discussed phrase in Moldbug's corpus is 'Manipulating procedural outcomes.
Moldbug's comment on finding this gem:
"My entire post—maybe even my entire blog—reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by manipulating procedural outcomes. It’s perfect. It belongs on someone’s tomb."
Conservatives in the United States can chiefly be identified by their faith in the sanctity of The Procedure. They believe that if they follow The Procedure, they can win.
This is another angle into why conservatives are eternal losers - the Modern Regime rules by MANIPULATING PROCEDURAL OUTCOMES. So you cannot actually count on The Procedure.
Proceduralist conservatives therefore have a view of, say, The Media, as having A Certain Duty. But that's the legitimacy the cathedral has conferred on it (and the conservatives believe it).
You have probably had this experience; you worked on a group project in school, and no one did their fair share. Perhaps one overachiever carried everyone else. Why is this such a common story? This failure mode is universal because of the structure of the group that acts it out
This problem happens predictably, repeatedly, because of a lack of ownership. Everyone has skin in the game in this scenario; there are personal consequences for failure. Accountability is necessary but not sufficient for success.
The concept "group ownership" is a lie. Groups cannot own anything; once a thing has more than one owner, it is contested, and it becomes possible to derive value from it while offloading its costs onto others
(note that value and costs need not be money)
The mentality of “someone else will take care of it” is not mere laziness; it is adaptive behavior, it is brinkmanship in the arena of distributed responsibility, it is leveraged neglect, it forces whoever has the most dire need to pay the highest cost
Think instead of how you treat your personal property, your most prized possessions. How do you care for those things, how do you love them? Those things which you love best, you see as an extension of yourself. Most of all you cherish your identity.
“But I don't define myself, I hate using labels, I'm just who I am, I keep my identity small" I count 4 declarations of identity. Perhaps the will to distribute ownership is the will against self-care. In the end, a certain type of person wants others to pay for his own identity
A man who despises himself nonetheless esteems himself, as a despiser.
--Nietszche
But even those people will spend untold hours building their identity, whether they define it negatively or positively. When a creative project or facet of stewardship becomes intertwined with a man’s identity, then he will pour his soul into it, for he sees no distinction there
Whoever heard of two people sharing a soul? It’s a cute metaphor for a love story, maybe there have been pairs of such friends in history, but it is exceedingly rare. And 3 people? And 5, 25, 150? That’s a cool sci fi plot about a cyborg collective but it’s not real nor desirable
All great works have at their root a single soul, a person of vision who exercises OWNERSHIP, who would no sooner shirk responsibility than try to slice up their own soul. The extended noumenotype; only this; identity; soul-ownership, yields great works of art, music, and virtue
And yet the greatest works of humanity-victory in battle, triumphs of architecture, the glory of empire, the conquest of new frontiers-are the achievement of multitudes. Isn't this of "distributed ownership"?
No.
All of those things are realized through HIERARCHICAL ownership
Hierarchy. Everyone owns something, and that thing becomes a part of their identity. In a real way the people at the top of the hierarchy own the people below them. This is the structure of all traditional societies, where family elders exercise ownership over their progeny
Filial hierarchy is the most human arrangement. It pays a price in individual freedom. I have known people like this, whose lives are an endless web of family obligations. They rarely achieve much by the metrics of western technological modernity. Perhaps they find it fulfilling
The modern arrangement deconstructs the family. Some necessities are administered through distributed ownership (the tyranny of bureaucracy is mostly its inevitable incompetence). Hierarchy is manifest in corporations. This is necessarily "dehumanizing"
2 limitations of filial hierarchy: 1. it is limited in its ability to tap into biocapital (good genes) by genetic proximity. 2. It is subordinated to the family itself, i.e. it is locked into biological paradigms for self-propagation. Technocapital hierarchy evades these limits
Technocapital hierarchy can self-perpetuate by shredding families (coopts resources normally allocated for reproduction) and can recruit biocapital irrespective of genetic distance. Both of these things have costs, but technocapital does not see them
When people praise the accomplishments of democracy (I.e., group ownership) they are actually praising the decoupling of hierarchy from family, a social restructuring that allowed technocapital to "pursue its own ends", burning biocapital to produce technological development
Compare biocapital to oil. Millions of years of fermented fossils under the earth. We dig them up and power our machines. Theoretically we could run out. Technocapital burns biocapital the way our machine infrastructure burns oil.
We hope to find green energy to be freed from the constraint of oil. Technocapital, though it has no human-like agency (yet?), needs to find another source of fuel in case it runs out of biocapital. If there is enough fuel for this task, then technocapital singularity will occur
The schism in accelerationism is between those who think biocapital is dwindling, and those who think it is endlessly abundant, or it is not a meaningful constraint.
Meanwhile, back on earth, we have a sea of normies who deludedly imagine that the power of technocapital can be used to make us "more human", or that technocapital serves humanity, or that humanism and technological progress are symbiotic.
Technological progress and humanity are two opposite poles on the same axis. There is no vector that points in both directions. What do you truly value, normie?
What is the new right and what distinguishes it from the old right? For one thing, we are NOT conservative. Open your eyes, what do you see that you want to conserve? The time for conservation has passed. The time for cleansing fire is at hand
But there will be no fire for us, not any time soon. One is tempted to ask, “what are the policies of the new right?” This is a bad question. Of course we could suggest many “policies” but WE will never find our vision realized in “policy”
In an organization the size of a state, power accrues in invisible places. Expertise (and the power it conveys) does not exist in the brief windows of service of elected officials.
For this reason no mere election will achieve our aims. The structure of an organization determines its behaviors and capabilities
Regardless of its structure, however, we must realize that a group of low quality people will produce low quality results, and high quality people will produce high quality results
When we speak of government as an engineering problem, the problem we want to solve is “how do we build a society that produces good people”?
Most people, it turns out, will wirehead themselves into useless blobs, given half a chance. We want to live in a society that does not spend all its resources manufacturing portals to hell
The government of the people, by the people, and for the people was, in retrospect, hopelessly naive and cloyingly optimistic. The conditions that made the American strategy a winner no longer obtain
The great enlightenment was not a total loss, however, and now that we have found its limits we must transcend it.
A critical realization is that "separation of church and state" is not even /theoretically/ possible; when you try that, a church emerges which can penetrate whatever membranes are supposed to keep it out of the state.
Every belief system wants to be a total belief system. Given that knowledge, we must not deceive ourselves with the fantasy of "moderate" ideology.
The function of the “conservative” parties is democratic states is to lose, and to confer legitimacy to the left by their loss.
You vote for the the conservative party but it does nothing; look, it’s right in their name. They are the party of not changing anything. Being conservative is only right when there is something to conserve.
You elect a conservative president but surprise! The entire state apparatus is against him. How do you elect a new incomprehensibly large bureaucracy?
The great fear of the dissident right—demography is destiny—is that after a certain racial composition of the country is reached, we will no longer have the numbers to elect a Republican president. Horror of horrors!
What do you do when the game is rigged against you? You change the rules.
If you want to create a country that is right wing, you need to replace the vast unelected body that actually holds power, not just the visible surface
The United States Government as designed by the founding fathers is an engine of permanent, (relatively) bloodless revolution. That is its purpose: perpetual revolution. Are the internal contradictions of the Republican party clear?
The concept of the rhizome is that of an entity which can regenerate itself entirely from any of its constituent parts. The rhizome has no beginning or end, it is an eternal middle that endlessly horizontally multiplies itself.
The left has overrun the right with a rhizomatic ideology, which is to say, a decentralized, self-regrowing ideology. A social justice progressive creates social justice around herself because the formula for her pathology scales horizontally.
To create a Right Wing state we need durable counter-revolutionary ideology. Can we build a rhizomatic right-wing egregore?
The reactionary formula is:
1. Become Worthy
2. Accept Power
You don't get to skip step 1. We do not need a worthy person or even a worthy group, we need something much bigger than that. We need a machine that manufactures worthy people.
And spoiler alert: Christianity, as it is currently understood and practiced, ain’t it. If it were, we would not be in this sorry state in the first place.
Everything is 80% heritable. (I apologize for an earlier thread where I said 50; mea culpa). This is the reactionary’s hidden revelation, his revolt against the modern world. From this grim realization, much follows
“Progress”—that hideous name! How quickly progressive ideals lead to genocide! And do you know why?
It sounds so innocuous, “progress,” of course we want to make progress, who wouldn’t? But so rarely do we think about what “progress” entails. Who has set the goals of progress before us? What tyrant would dare?
Progress wants to make the world better. In its followers we often find this strange duality: a desire to remake the world, and a conviction that no one is at fault for anything, except white men natch
Even in the case of white men it’s not their fault, they are suffering from some conditions called “racism” and “patriarchy”. Perhaps flogging will cure it. Or maybe buck-breaking...
It’s a holy contradiction, that nothing is your fault and that we have to remake humanity to achieve progress. If the latter is true then everything is everyone’s fault
The only salvation is education! In the progressive mind, mere words, mere ideology, can rescue us from this miserable condition. It is of course a coincidence that the most ardent progressives are educators. What are you implying?
Supposing you could remake humanity according to progressive desires... how would you do it? With teachings? Teach men not to rape. Most already don’t. The ones who do won’t listen. We just need to get them earlier. If only they weren’t poor. If only their parents...
Suppose you could take children from their parents. Gender and racial ideation begin very young, in the first months of life. Suppose you could get them cradle to grave. Teach them from minute zero to be race blind and gender blind and pansexual... would that solve your problem?
What would you have to teach people to uproot their innate ability to notice differences between themselves and others? Do you think you could indoctrinate them out of “tribalism”? Out of “us vs them”?
Suppose you could do all that, raise children in a bubble, cut them off from patriarchal racist sexist ableist society. Even if it would work, doesn’t it trouble you, the totalitarian nature of the job, to remove all connection to the past, to previous generations?
Suppose it doesn’t bother you. Of all the goals you could set for humanity, this is the one you think we should bleed and die for? Why? Who taught you this? If we really are that malleable then what is so great about YOUR ideas?
Suppose it doesn’t bother you. Of all the goals you could set for humanity, this is the one you think we should bleed and die for? Why? Who taught you this? If we really are that malleable then what is so great about YOUR ideas?
Suppose we could remake humanity any way we want: you would make everyone “equal”? I would make the greatest man that I could, greater than any that had come before, greater than myself, greater than all others!
What would be the nature of such a man? He would be brilliant, of course, and strong, and subtle, and sensitive, and powerful, and unrelenting. He would be the apotheosis of man, all my faults corrected, in every way I am deficient, he would be abundant
Do you really believe that mere words could make this man? Even for a second? Leftism as idealism thinks we can remake man through sheer force of propaganda. Reactionaries know this to be insufficient
And what if this man should turn against you? Ah, indeed.
In the old days the left wasn’t shy about genetic progress. The brokenness of man became a sacred cow when they realized the price of progress, and because there are no half-measures in ideology, they chose instead to worship the debasement of biology
The leveling impulse quickly turns violent if a progressive should happen to realize that biology is the bottleneck to utopia
Progressive ideology is only stable (well, monotonically decreasing) as long as it can retain a belief in the blank slate. The moment the egregore becomes darkly enlightened, it has two choices:
1. kill the inferior
2. breed humans in camps like dogs
3. Usually both
Do you know what it’s like to be trapped in a cage with an egregore having a psychotic break? What comes after clown world?
Many of you are full of hope that the Chinese scientist maybe crispr'd up an uberman in his garage, but you do not want to live in the world where Woke Capital
is driving our genetic destiny.
I assure you they will find the gay gene in short order. Your future HIV-resistant baby is pregnant (male) with dark affordances
Reactionaries like eugenics, but we should be careful what we wish for. Traditional society was eugenic, and yet out of traditional society grew the horror of progressive society. As soon as we got smart enough to summon this evil, we did so
The logic of evolution dictates that the moment a species becomes smart enough to invent technology, it will do so, and not a moment later. We are the stupidest possible monkeys that could have invented our modern society
Everything is 80% heritable and your ancestors were bred in hell, my friends. It’s not looking good for your children either.
We have seen how the modern world is structurally left-wing. Our society has a chronic aversion to the investment of power into individuals, and therefore we find ways of putting it in groups
You can’t actually get rid of authority, you can only distribute it around. If a decision gets made, and it forces you to behave in a certain way, authority was exercised. Whether the decision was made by a group or an individual, it’s the same amount of authority
If you kill the king and replace him with a mob, the mob gains exactly as much sovereignty as the king they killed, or maybe a little is lost to heat. This is known as “conservation of sovereignty”.
It is easier to manipulate a mob than a king. Sovereignty doesn’t “want” to be fragmented, it “wants” to be concentrated, so when you distribute sovereignty equally it accumulates in whoever is best at manipulating the mob
There have been many bad kings through history, and there have also been good kings. But there has NEVER been a good mob. The mob is amoral, the mob is ravenous, and when it can find no outside aggressor it begins to devour itself
A structurally left wing organization like the US government has built-in mechanisms to cyclically redistribute power from individuals to mobs. Mechanisms with names like “term limits”, “checks and balances”
A structurally right wing organization would have no committees at all. Every decision would be made by a individual. The liberal hears this and recoils in anger and fear
It has become our condition to submit to mob rule and call it freedom. We mistakenly believe that if we cannot perceive a specific person above us, we are our own masters.
The democratizing urge, as Nietzsche rendered it, is "no shepherd, and one herd." But the herd is a more capricious master than any shepherd. A man is at least CAPABLE of constancy, compassion, charity, mercy, and fairness. A mob is not.
The key revelation of economics is that people behave according to their incentives. This can seem tautological at times because there are incentives other than money. A good economist has a knack for perceiving people's true incentives. Robin Hanson is a great economist.
Groups cannot manifest virtues the way individuals can, because each person in a group has incentives to give a little less than they take, and to manipulate others into giving more.
The inability of groups to behave virtuously is called the tragedy of the commons, everyone knows it. Ideologies are adaptive when they dampen the tragedy/commons feedback loop, but they can never solve it, only partially mitigate it.
Governance is an engineering problem. A good system of governance is one that aligns the incentives of the ruler with the good of the people. A bad system incentivizes the ruler to act selfishly, to enrich himself at the expense of his people
The average democratic citizen believes that power corrupts, and imagines that powerful people are evil. If a man has never held any power (most people), he thinks power is only a privilege; the truth is that the privileges power conveys are far outstripped by its obligations
Conquest's 2nd law is underspecified. If any organization that is not explicitly right wing becomes left wing over time, then what, precisely, is an explicitly right wing organization? Explicitly right wing = STRUCTURALLY right wing = decisions are made by people, not groups
A man acting on his own has incentives that a man acting in a group does not. When the group makes a decision and something goes wrong, it's no one's fault. When something goes right, everyone fights for credit. A man has accountability or "skin in the game", a group does not.
I hear often that certain people or groups of people are "oppressed". What does it mean to be oppressed? It's a non-specific word that refers to a sense of alienation and impotence that the average person feels in their modern life.
What causes this feeling of powerlessness? I have said before that leftism manufactures the miserable conditions that make people amenable to more leftism. The problem is too much freedom. The problem is too much equality.
No one above you means no one to guide you. No one above you means no one is accountable for you. No one below you means no responsibilities, and no responsibilities means your existence is pointless.
You feel oppressed because you are worthless and you are worthless because you have been structurally and categorically denied the opportunity to be worth anything.
You think the problem is that someone, somewhere, still has authority, and like the child in Omelas, its aura poisons you.
The liberal mental model of the world says that oppression will cease when all authority has finally been removed from individuals and distributed among the mob. In fact the opposite is true; this will maximize oppression
When you are "liberated" from all rulers, you also give up the opportunity to rule. But ruling is precisely the opposite of what you imagine, it's not the privilege of having a slave, it's the obligation of having a charge.
You will never find deliverance from this condition until you learn both to rule an to BE RULED. Ah but of course, what leader is worthy in these trying times? That is another problem, for another day...
The telos of art has been lost, and for this reason--the loss of purpose--we also find it impossible to define art. On reflection, does "art for the sake of art" really satisfy anyone? It is cant, it is bullshit, it is nauseating.
Indeed the attempt by art at self-justification is worn so thin that most do not bother to invoke it. If art exists only for the sake of art, then let us consign it to hell and be done with it. For that which is purposeless is meaningless.
To reveal the true meaning of art we look to what is hidden: certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level
The earliest works of art were intended for use in magical and religious rituals, ceremonial objects which were designed as much for presentation to the spirit world as for display to one’s fellows.
The key, what distinguishes mere production and representation from art properly conceived is that it must be address both god and man, in that order.
The meaning and essence of a work of art is inextricable from its context in a living tradition; to the Greeks an ancient statue of Venus was an object of veneration; to the clerics of the Middle Ages it was an ominous idol, to us it's an historical curiosity
“Art for the sake of art” is a sad tautology because art finds its meaning and its sanctity by acting as a mirror to the sacred. Art is the moon, it can illuminate the world, but it is not itself a source of light.
Or maybe art is not a mirror but a prism, refracting the light of god, but either way, it has no light of its own. You don't have to belong to any specific religious tradition to create or participate in the experience of art, but you do have to regard the sacred.
There are three sources of sanctity, which incidentally are revealed in both the Hindu Trimurti and the Christian Trinity, though the latter more obliquely.
Brahma => Father God => Creation, birth
Vishnu => Holy Spirit => Sustenance, food
Shiva => Jesus Christ => Eternity, death
Hopefully I managed to offend both Christians and Hindus with that tweet; look, syncretism is more art than science. But it was exactly 280, I didn't even edit it, it's got to be some kind of a sign.
Anyway, anything sacred has one of these three valences. Three itself is a sacred number, but that's a thread for another time. These topics then are the proper domain of art. When art fails to engage with the sacred, it fails to be art
Now, how did we get here? How did we lose the sense of art as a prism of the sacred? The problem starts with the printing press and accelerates with the advent of photography, film, and computer games. The solution, however, is NOT to destroy industrial society
An object of art has an aura, comprised of its substantive duration, its testimony to the history it has experienced, and its place w/r/t the collective consciousness of society. Another word for this is authenticity.
In order to be authentic, then, an object of art must be unique, and to be experience it in its fullness, we must be in its physical presence. You can feel, for example, the aura of a mountain range from its shadow. Not so with a photo
Face-to-face meetings, even brief ones, appear to cement personal connections of trust and liking to an extent not achieved by even years of mediated contact like phone calls, Internet text discussions, emails, or chat; this appears to be true in almost every context.
The age of ubiquitous photography has given us representation without substantiation; art without an aura.
The age of mechanical duplicability of art has given us golems without shems; clay husks infernally animated without the name of god.
We can no longer feel the presence of god because we can no longer feel the aura of art. The orientation towards mass duplication has attenuated sanctity in all forms of representative production, especially film.
This is not to say that mass produced art cannot connect us to the sacred, only that it cannot do so using the old modalities. And if it is naive, it will only pull us toward homogeneity, alienation, and endless pointless revolution
In the words of Walter Benjamin, “the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”
Benjamin taught me all of these things. For example he taught that mechanical reproduction “emancipates” the work of art from its “parasitical dependence” on ritual. As I have said before, emancipatory politics are the acid that dissolves humanity.
Also from Benjamin: “the application of concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery [...] lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense” my friends if this is fascism then let us join together
Indeed, in reading the essays of emancipatory revolutionaries we can see the deepest darkest desires in their hearts: a future with no creativity, genius, or eternal value. He called beauty a “cult.” Why would you want emancipation? What kind of devil calls sanctity a “parasite”?
To overcome this, to move backwards, we must move forwards. The only way out is through. It will require the artist to cultivate a very particular disposition, it will require an emphasis on the exact qualities that have been so denigrated by revolutionaries in our modern age
I have said before that the right must embark on the project of destroy and defaming all enlightenment values, which includes the value of freedom, and regrettably, therefore, we must attack freedom, at least in the enlightenment sense
Whereas equality has no instrumental value whatsoever, being merely a terminus, a thirst for the heat death of the universe, freedom is necessary in controlled doses. Of course we may understand from existentialism that man is always responsible for himself, but is this freedom?
Indeed and it may be impossible to distinguish between "intelligence" and "freedom", in the sense that intelligence is precisely the widening of one's "light cone" into the future, it is the possession of degrees of freedom and the will to that possession
But freedom is far from an unalloyed good. Even setting aside such behavioral psych toys as the paradox of choice, we must observe that, if freedom is potential, then the destruction of freedom is necessary to actualize potential
The ability to set future constraints upon your self is necessary for all commerce, as a contract is precisely a renunciation of a certain type of freedom, as is a marriage vow, as is any undertaking where a man bears responsibility
There is a naive sentiment among many on the right, because they tend to excel under conditions of "liberty", that maximal liberty is maximally good, but most of what they like about liberty is in only made possible by antiliberty, the rule of law and the power of government
The drive towards freedom is the drive towards the dissolution of all bonds of family, friendship, and state. In the emancipatory imagination, every constraint on freedom is a chain, an oppression, a grievance that prevents us from realizing our true potential
But "freedom" as conceptualized by this sort of drive is no blessing at all, merely an acid which dissolves all social bonds and imagines love and friendship in formal, contractual terms.
Such a person imagines that the opposite of freedom is slavery, when in fact the opposite of freedom is love, stewardship, nurture, and patriotism. All meaningful social arrangements necessitate a relinguishment of freedom
In the Nietzschean conception, the value of a thing does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us, and so we can confess that freedom IS valuable, but emancipatory logic desires to pay NOTHING in exchange for love and friendship
It it is a truly demented lens though which a parent’s love and protection of their child becomes a “tyranny”, an “oppression”, or which believes that leadership retards potential
Paradoxically, liberty is good only when it is itself YOKED to a higher purpose. Liberty as a terminal goal is the drive towards pure chaos, and when apologists of liberty defend it they always fall back on “emergent order”—they claim liberty is good because it destroys itself
When we seek liberty, we must always attend to the preposition: I desire freedom FROM—let me stop you right there.
I desire freedom FOR—now we are getting somewhere
And despite this limited sense in which liberty is good, it is important that we never idolize or apotheosize it. Liberty is a means, not an end, never an end.
“This is a straw man of liberty, we just want everyone to have a choice in the arrangements that bind them.” We agree then that it is the inevitable and desirable state of humanity to be bound, and you merely quibble about the label
The truth is you can never be free, just as you can never be equal. A man who is self-employed merely makes the market his master. A man who has no leader makes NATURE his master, and Gnon is a harsh and inhuman master, worse than any man
As they say, necessity, which is the bondage of man to nature, is the mother of invention. Creativity is defined by constraint. A world with no constraints is a world with no creativity, a world where the soul, having never been earthbound, is never able to soar
An excess of freedom, most of all, a freedom from consequences, turns you into useless mush. If you were too free, if you could never be bound, then no one could trust you. Freedom isn't the grease for the wheels of the market, it's the heat which must be dissipated
It is hardly necessary to point out how many people, being granted a high degree of freedom, only use it for moral licentiousness, or who, upon being emancipated, would literally die if the state were not there to care for them. In what sense are such people “free”?
Of course if we did “liberate” everyone to the vicissitudes of the market, there would be what the darkly enlightened might call a grand correction. Know that if you are on the side of liberty, you implicitly support the death of billions
There are many misconceptions on the right about freedom, another is that freedom stands in opposition to equality. It’s true in a limited sense, but freedom-as-goal is a back door for other, more insidious values
If we treat freedom as a goal, then we quickly become saddled with a goal of freedom "for all", which is to say, equality in freedom. If your morals are properly calibrated you will react to this with a tinge of nausea. The left beats the right time and again with this formula
Libertarians are at present being overrun by the social justice left because their frame of “rugged independence” is fundamentally and irrecoverably vulnerable to the frame of “universal emancipation” via accusations of moral callousness. Libertarians can never recover from this
The only way out, in this case, is to reject the value of liberty out of hand
Liberty is is a bad goal because it is incapable of existing in the abstract. The moment freedom itself becomes free, it becomes suborned to some other purpose, and that purpose, left unspecified, is chaos.
Order is control, and liberty is anti-control, liberty is demolition, and we should only employ it carefully, and with limits, and never for its own sake
Erotic compulsion is the most terrifying emotion. There are no words to capture the exact sensation of perverse desire, though we have all felt it at some point in a lesser or greater measure. “Not talking about it” goes beyond mere decorum. Indeed we have no faculty for it
What do I mean by perverse desire? At its mildest and its most necessary, any sexual impulse is perverse: the juxtaposition of the disgusting with the ecstatic. In a state of sobriety, genitals are revolting, bodily secretions are nauseating, flesh is repellent
Is it any surprise then that we have the capacity to become caught in self-escalating circles of pleasurable disgust? The disgust reaction is surely adaptive: it helps us to avoid dangerous pathogens, spoiled food, rotting corpses, mold and parasites
The sexual impulse must be able to overcome the disgust impulse. Arousal, excitement, anxiety, and disgust—these are all very nearly a single emotion. And this inversion, wherein NAUSEA spelled backwards is LUST, is an eternal wellspring of terror
In the madness of arousal, time preference becomes infinite, and the fovea of the mind becomes a single point, and like a solid that reaches its melting point, desire becomes a liquid. In this modality pleasure can found in pain, and humiliation, and self-destruction
Because of this there is something inextricably indecent about orgasms and the ramp leading up to them. It’s not merely religion or society that “teaches” us to think of sexual pleasure as unclean; it is biology, it is nature herself
In a functioning psychosexual ecosystem, this kind of limited and controlled perversity has its useful and even sacred purpose. But when we realize that sexual arousal is MECHANISM, our horror deepens, because when a machine is damaged, it feels no pain, and may continue to run
As Deleuze reminds us, desire is a machine and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of sexual desire, which is fundamentally insatiable, eternally renewing itself
There is a perhaps unanswerable question as to whether “non-libidinal” desire is a meaningful category
Regardless, we know that sexual desire is at least partly calibrated from the environment, and the horror of miscalibration is the horror of taking rapturous pleasure in your own debasement
If we take seriously the claim that capacities and tendencies form a space of possibility which is as real as any space of actuality, then we can come to a rigorous and wholly materialist understanding of demons as attractors in that space
It’s not unreasonable to think of certain memeplexes, or even some algorithms, as demons; what do you call it when an entity is invisible, when it multiplies your misery, enticed you to perverse action, and in some sense depends on that perversity to sustain itself?
From this perspective, we can see the internet as a plane of being in its own right, a plane of abstraction and memetic fomentation, a portal to hell through which demons find us in secret and enter our world
Knowing what we know about the porousness of the border between lust and disgust, consider pornography, that hideous pleasure so carefully sanitized of much that triggers disgust: smells don't transmit through a streaming video, cosmetics obscure the grotesqueries of the flesh
In classical conditioning, two stimuli are repeatedly paired; a response that is at first elicited by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone. In this way, pornography becomes a ratchet of perversity. Over time, proximity breeds paraphilia
How can we see pornography as anything but a demon, reaching out through this portal to hell, the same one even that finds you here now, delighting you with disgust? Is it possible to write a horror story more vile than that?
An intellectual Turing test is when a person on the right tries to pass for a person on the left, or vice versa. We have long observed that most rightists can pass an intellectual Turing test, and most leftists can’t
This is not because of any innate tendencies, but because the consequences of failing the test are asymmetrical. My honest views on most topics could make my professional life very difficult
Some leftists hear this and accuse me of whining, but it’s just a sober assessment of the tactical landscape. Adapt or perish. On the left, when you lose to your enemy, it's their fault for being wicked. On the right, it's yours for being careless.
Hide your power level until it’s so great they can’t stop you and then, ONLY then, do you impose your values. Until then flash that #resistance gang sign IRL.
Your public face should be indistinguishable from an NPC. Post CNN stories to Facebook. Complain about Drumpf to your coworkers. Resist the urge to have small arguments along ideological lines
If a leftist is a communist in her free time, or an activist (activism is inherently left), she can display it proudly, even at her job, even to accolades from her employer
We all know the game, but one of the rules is you don’t explain it too clearly. Suffice it to say that many right wing views provide enough lawsuit leverage that no company will bother defending you
That’s why when you argue with a leftist on twitter, they are so fixated on your anonymity. If they knew your name they could hurt you. They can reveal their names freely, of course.
That should tell you everything you need to know about the allocation of political power in the West, but in the leftist mind, they are eternally the underdog, the resistance against an evil empire.
“But isn’t this just an ‘underdog-ism’ of the right?” Why is it that only one side is anonymous in this war? Oh we’re cowards? And what are we running from? The “powerless” underdogs?
I often hear people observe that we live under "capitalism" instead of "communism", and this is somehow evidence of the right's political ascendance, but they are playing dumb, because the real vectors of left wing thought are in the memetic and socio-sexual sphere.
Whatever leftism is, political entropy or metastasis of egalitarianism or merely a stubborn refusal to understand markets, it has for the moment turned its attentions from financial redistribution (easy to quantify, hard to move) to social status redistribution (nebulous, easier)
They control, if you'll pardon the idiom, the "memes of production", and on the right, we need to seize them, which is partly why I write fiction. We have to create stories that are not explicitly political, but that are built on our worldview
At the same time we have to unroll the Gramscian march, and we do that by counter-marching, in both the private and the public sphere. Your scrappy blockchain-distributed alt-zine is never going find the audience of a major news network
You can't just kick the Overton window back into place, you have to steer it slowly, and you do that by being a publisher, an editor, a person who works in media. Dye your hair purple for camouflage and make every tiny decision you can to fight leftwing mind control.
The truth is they're afraid of us. Scientific inquiry unchained from dogma reveals the emptiness and the nakedness of their idealism. They can't win with facts, only with feelings and censorship.
Their fear is in large part unfounded; because they fail the intellectual turing test, they think we want for them what they want for us. In the leftist mind, we are evil, and we should be cast out of society, our assets should be taken, and we should be forcibly "re-educated".
I don't think leftists are evil, or even stupid, but I do think they are motivated by resentment and envy, and that they lack self-awareness of this, which is why they believe their lust for power is compassion. You might call this the human condition
I want to live in a world of personal responsibility. I want to live in a world where the smart and the strong provide leadership and live exemplary lives. The left wants to destroy all notions of superiority; No shepherd, and one herd!
On the left they think that any acknowledgement of inferiority leads directly to extermination camps: that's leftist morality. Murder the inferior! Everyone must be the same and everyone who isn't must die.
The right, unlike the left, is actually capable of accommodating difference, as long as that difference is ordered, and behaves in an orderly way. Hierarchy should appeal to all people in all classes because everyone has a place.
When leftists talk incessantly about death camps they reveal THEIR morality: the elimination of all differences between people using any means necessary.
Equality can never be satisfied until it is total equality.
No nuanced and thoughtful words survive first contact with a person of average intelligence.
A group of people is slightly smarter than its dumbest member .
Nuanced/thoughtful words cannot survive in the metamind of a group of people
The above is a slight exaggeration, in part because of the same effect it tries to describe.
In order for an idea to disseminate, it must be unequivocal.
Simplicity/complexity is not the only limiting axis.
Consider free will vs determinism. Both of the naive interpretations of this paradox are smooth-brained and awful, but they are unequivocal so they are communicable so they spread.
There is no 3rd option, there is either determinism or chaos. Quantum indeterminacy is a way of tokenizing the unknowable, it doesn't mean the universe itself is chaotic, only that our models and observations are necessarily and intractably imprecise.
If there were truly random numbers hiding in the machinations of cognition, that would be the opposite of “free will”: it would be a kind of demonic insanity. Our brains at the least must be deterministic in order to function; you would be unable to make commitments or decisions
Ultimately the feeling of "freedom", the concept of freedom, hinges on the unpredictability of the future. The study of cellular automata reveals that deceptively simple initial conditions can yield computationally intractable complexity
That the whole state of the world flows inevitably from its initial conditions in no way removes our agency; the opposite is true; cognition is wholly contingent on this fact. That the future flows predictably from the past, that the universe is stable, makes agency possible
The computer that predicts the state of the world at time t[n] from time t[0] is at least as big as the world. In truth it is the world. Nothing is pre-determined and if your choices are inevitable it is only from a hypothetical outside perspective that doesn't exist
If god is anything he is a set of rules like:
Each cell with 1 or 0 neighbors dies, as if by solitude.
Each cell with 4 or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Each cell with 2 or 3 neighbors survives.
Each cell with 3 neighbors becomes populated.
Some call this Gnon
People who believe in free will have better life outcomes on average. Victims of this were fooled by words. You are a decision making machine: you ingest inputs and map them to actions, you do this in a predictable world.
The error is conflating fatalism (your decisions don't matter) with determinism (the world is stable)
But all this is is a diversion: the point is that the entire misunderstanding is encoded in the four words "free will vs. determinism". Anyone who knows what these four words mean, with no additional context, instantly understands the (false) dichotomy.
Much like the seed of a Conway's Life scenario, these four words generate a complex universe of discourse, in this case founded upon an error. When you propagate the meme, you have about enough bandwidth for its name. We don't actually share ideas, we share seeds of models.
In spite of the fact that words don't map cleanly from mind to mind, we're all running on similar enough neurological hardware for this to work. Jesus explained this in the parable of the sower.
Sacred scriptures are full of model seeds. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory" is about as big as a model seed gets. Notice: simple, unequivocal. "Go ye therefore into all the world". "it is by grace you have been saved"
It takes about 4 model seeds to build a self-propagating memeplex that can cohere with itself over time.
Consider how a single model seed can reshape a social landscape. "Gender is a social construct" You don't need to understand anything about social constructionism to instantly grasp this idea. A supporting fact like "wearing dresses isn't innate to female biology" is all it takes
Whatever nuance academicians might intend with it, it will brook exactly none. The virile version of this idea is simple and above all UNEQUIVOCAL. "socially constructed" = determined by convention = mutable = contingent, not necessary => anyone can have whatever gender they want
This property of model seeds is why it’s important to understand the idea of the "realman", and why the realman is more useful than the steelman. Rationalists have another name for real- and steel-man. They call it "motte and bailey"
The special power of “gender is socially constructed" is that it provokes the equally midwitted counter-position, “gender is innate”, which is inevitably a losing stance; it’s less true and and even less interesting. Norm inversion ensues
A truthful model is more like: gender and sex are a feedback loop between social performance and biological tendency. Masculine and feminine archetypes are not all good, but the good ones are aspirational, and require work on the part of a man or woman to achieve them
Gender IS performative but rather than being an excuse to reject it, this is grounds to strive towards it, to perfect it, for a man to become an idealized man, and a woman to become an idealized woman, the consummation of their biology, rather than the negation
But this requires nuance, and ideological battles are fought in the realm of the realman, where ideas are comprehended by people close to the mean of intelligence, in great shambling throngs.
In this arena, ideas must be unequivocal. Whatever a phrase means when no one is around to explain it, that is what it means “in the real world”.
If we want to know what American normality is--what Americans want to regard as normal--we can trust television, because television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see
It’s tempting to quibble with this, to say all the assumptions about television as some monolithic orchestrator of culture are invalidated by the internet because by god we have social media now but by it's just not true
When we watch television, we’re all alone together; we all share the same activity, but the activity itself is psychologically solitary, so each person alone when he watches it. I don’t believe the experience of social media is different in this respect
TV and social networks both provide us with mediated social experience, so they allow us to feel the emotional payoff that we get from having friends or participating in a social circle except without the cost of having to present a social self of our own
This is emotional labor—a concept both totally insane & yet useful because the work of relating to other people is literally what it means to be human & alive. We now treat it as a commodity since it’s possible to act out intimacy once & replicate it at scale through media
Social media only slightly changes the bargain; most people mostly lurk; content creators are less than ten percent of users and even if you self-actualize on one platform, you are likely a ghost on others
Being subjected to the attention of a mob is nothing like being around your friends. You are present as an object to the gaze of millions and this can create an overwhelming and paralytic self-consciousness.
One strategy for coping with the public gaze is to present a facade of ironic detachment. Another is to suppress self-consciousness so desperately that you lose all self-awareness and become so mawkish and maudlin and cloying that no one can stand you. More on this in a moment
Memes, stock phrases, retweets, and reaction gifs are all prefab components you can use to construct a social presentation of yourself with a maximum of emotional detachment. Perhaps this is healthier
(This thread itself is a reading of David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram. Thesis: irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are the distinctive attributes of contemporary USA culture, which are pleasurable agents of despair and stasis) http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
This thesis now appears hopelessly dated but the brilliant thing about Wallace’s original essay was that he predicted precisely the thing which was to follow the modality of detached irony culture, a kind of full reversal and willful re-immersion into sincerity:
“The next real literary rebels in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values”
This is undeniably the case and as always, my own thesis is that this has proved to be far worse than the irony culture that preceded it, not at all what DFW wanted, horrible and horrifying, not redemptive at all.
Television is uniquely suited to irony because it engages both sight and sound. Irony is tension between what's said and what's seen, and TV is perfectly built to juxtapose words with images that undercut whats being said.
The ironies of TV are legion: TV is a syncresis that celebrates diversity. TV performers present an illusion of unconscious appeal only through the extreme self-consciousness of acting. Products which cater to masses are presented as expressing individuality.
Mass culture tends to be vile and dumb because it has to please its audience, and this isn't to say that the audience is vile and dumb, only that people tend to be remarkably similar in their stupid and prurient interests and wildly different in their refined and intelligent ones.
If social media has accelerated the race to the bottom in mass culture its because the feedback loop between consumers and producers of culture has become tight and rapid and parallel instead of slow and monolithic.
But social media is just audience participation, its not what killed irony. DFWs notes: “Americans are no longer united by common feelings as by common images: what binds is what we stand witness to” the fully ironic posture can only exist when nothing we witness has consequences
The thing that killed USAs totalizing ironic detachment culture was the day that we witnessed airplanes flying into our skyscrapers, that was the real birth of “new sincerity”—for one radiant moment we had real fear of death, and all pretense of avoiding ridicule was demolished
Since then it’s been impossible to not care about anything; ironic detachment gets you shouted down, though it took a decade for the language to crystallize into a new memeplex of thought-terminating cliches. “toxic privilege,” “out of touch,” “tone deaf,” etc
All the hideous and hideously sincere sentiments that we still carry around from the Obama years, discourse about oppression and identity &c shows its teeth when some naïf tries to shrug and then *record scratch* and someone tells you in a hushed voice that’s not who we are now
So it wasn’t at all the case that some new artistic movement managed to wrench sincerity and meaning out of postmodern ironic self-referentialism that is immune to its own methods of criticism because it subsumes them, it was something wholly outside
The artistic viability of postmodernism was never a consequence of any new facts about art, but of facts about the new importance of mass commercial culture.
The artistic viability of the new sincerity is dead on arrival—the machines that evolved to produce “end of history” culture have no way to speak honestly, so instead they abandon self awareness in the opposite direction, oversteering into sincerity until it becomes parody
Based/cringe aren’t opposite ends of a spectrum, they’re a single pole; their antipode is meta/irony, and what both extremes have in common is being strategies for avoiding pain, by pushing emotion as far away as possible, or by clutching it so tight it eclipses everything else
In the 90s kids with no worldly experience affected world weariness and now they affect carrying the weight of the world, and in both cases we are talking about young people who can’t do either of those things authentically.
The upshot of all this, the proliferation of new sincerity, of everyone constantly /caring/ so much when the actual stakes of the things they care about have basically no personal consequence to them is a sanctimonious social justice nightmare
As an example of this kind of oppressive absurdity, we have just concluded the most overblown and melodramatic month of anti-family propaganda in the history of our empire (gay pride month)
if you point out the oppressive nature of wokeness viz. the avg American for whom brand loyalty is synecdochic of identity, you get back pablum re: Muslims on the far side of the world killing gays, as if that has ANY bearing on google trying to tattoo pride flags in your eyelids
This is what happens when irony ends, everyone becomes extremely sincere in a way that’s totally overblown and idiotic, caring about every little nothing, quantifying interactions as “microagression” and shouting “fuck you” at the president 5000 times after he says good morning
The female anti porn discourse is entirely different from the male one. The male anti porn discourse is centered on preserving vital energy and avoiding paraphilic drift. The female anti porn discourse is just jealousy and intra-sexual competition
To create a great popular myth is to create a ritual that the reader awaits with impatience, that he rediscovers each time with a greater pleasure, seduced again by a new repetition in a slightly different form, experienced each time as a greater profundity
Considered like this, things seem almost simple. And yet, successes are rare in the history of literature. It’s not at all easy, in reality, to create a new religion
Lovecraft [is] openly reactionary, he glorifies puritan inhibition and finds repellent any “open display of eroticism”. Resolutely anti-commercial, he despises money, considers democracy to be pure folly, progress an illusion
The oeuvre of Lovecraft is comparable to a gigantic machine for dreaming, of unheard-of magnitude and efficacy. There is nothing tranquil or reserved in his writings; the impact on the consciousness of the reader is of a savage brutality;
In effect, that which characterizes his oeuvre, as compared to a “normal” literary oeuvre, is that his disciples feel that they can, at least in theory, by the judicious use of the ingredients indicated by the master, obtain equal or even superior results
No-one has ever seriously considered continuing Proust. Lovecraft, yes. And it’s not simply a question of a secondary literature labouring under the sign of homage or parody, but of a real continuation. That makes it a unique case in the history of modern literature.
The heroes of Lovecraft are stripped of all life, renouncing all joy, becoming pure intellects, pure spirits tending to only one goal: the search for knowledge. At the end of their quest, a frightful revelation awaits them: everything announces the universal presence of evil
The value of a human being is measured today by his economic efficiency and his erotic potency: exactly the two things that Lovecraft hated the most strongly
Fantastic writers are generally reactionary, very simply because they are particularly, one might say professionally, conscious of the existence of evil.
We have need of a supreme antidote to realism. "I am a rational person" — has a rational person ever believed this? Strictly rational or empirical theories of knowledge can’t even stand up to a laugh test.
And yet logic is all we have, and those who exalt revelation still ceaselessly try to rationalize what they claim is revealed. Man is not a rational animal so much as a rationalizing one
At all times and in all places, a man says one thing and does another, his body is almost totally free of his mind's feeble machinations.
Epistemology is the worst and dumbest form of philosophy. It’s founded on error, as with all philosophies, but epistemology’s great sin is to be boring on top of all that.
The error in the case of theories of knowledge is that Truth (capital T) exists "out there" when it really only exists 'in here", which isn’t to say that that it’s idiosyncratic to each person, but that it exists only and precisely at a human level of abstraction
When you attempt to zoom in or out on "The Truth", it seems to disappear, and because of this, idiots of all flavors conclude that truth or beauty or meaning or purpose don't exist
Don't believe the lies of anyone who claims to value knowledge "for its own sake". No one drinks from the cup of epistemology save to justify their Truth, but such justifications are always abortions, murdering that which they ought to deliver
All conundrums of epistemology stem from the failure to recognize the human mind as a knowledge machine. No one ever asks how a robot “justifies its truth”. It has sensors and they write to memory and an algorithmic model makes decisions using the data
The unlearned parts of the robot's executive function wholly determine the learned parts. Similarly, human knowledge accumulates in layers of culture and biology and is justified, not by logic, but by efficacy
The inner life of any one person begins and ends "in media res", which means "in the middle of things", which is why it's a fallacy to believe that Truth is contingent on argumentative justification
We'll come back to this in a moment. The question of how we know what we know dovetails nicely into a much more interesting question to me, which is the question of how we mean what we say.
We have seen how we made our descent into endlessly recursive irony, and how it was our undoing, because it set the stage for its antithesis, an even worse descent into endlessly maudlin sincerity
But a common idea I see is that the discourse of the dissident right is "ironic" or perhaps "post-ironic". For example, does @owenbroadcast really think you should not eat tropical fruit? Calling this "new sincerity" is an outrage
So if the thesis is irony, and the antithesis is new sincerity, what is the synthesis? Recall the words of @bronzeagemantis: There is no irony here: I don’t do irony! Learn that I don’t understand the gay idea of “irony.”
Wat this mean?
Irony is finding a distance in a sign, it's when the signified contradicts the signifier, and it’s not merely insincerity; it's sabotage, it's lying to tell the truth. @TitaniaMcGrath is ironic, and it's a purely negative epistemology, an anti-knowledge
@robert_mariani explains post-irony: "Figuring out the intentions of the ironist is easy: whatever is being shown is being mocked. But the post-ironist folds over on his own sincerity with exaggeration, using the ironic...to enjoy the absurdities of what he genuinely appreciates”
This is good, but in fact the discursive method of the dissident right at its best is something beyond irony and sincerity. The answer lies in medieval hermeneutics
Dante wrote in his letter to Cangrande della Scala that his work should be interpreted as "polysemous" which means "in many senses", and he identified four possible readings of the Divine Comedy: literal, moral, anagogical, and allegorical
The literal reading of a text is just that; the moral reading pertains to a prescription for the reader; the anagogical reading pertains to prophecy, and in the allegorical reading, the signifiers point to metaphysical or spiritual truth
All of the nonliteral forms of reading may be called allegorical in a sense, and my contention to you is that the synthesis of irony and sincerity is allegory, in which signs contain distance (irony) and also intimacy (sincerity) in SIMULTANEITY
The term "post-irony" is a clumsy attempt to grope for the concept of allegory. This concept is genuinely hard to understand; a capacity for polysemous reading is not the same as knowing the definition of polysemous reading
The allegorical style arose independently on 4chan in the discursive underworld of total anonymity, and it functions best in anonymity, and I note that medieval scribes also frequently shared fragments of text with no concern for attribution
We have lost many valuable treasures of the past; among them is the capacity for polysemous reading, a skill that we are slowly rediscovering, and a skill that I believe flourishes when we are unencumbered by the weight of our reputations
Allegorical reading requires a certain playfulness; one must sometimes distort the literal telling of an idea in order to approach its allegorical content with the right gravity. To a "serious" person this seems ridiculous, to regard allegorical truth through the lense of jokes
Rather than persist in the folly of believing ourselves to be rational, can we formalize an honest theory of knowledge? Irony is of the brain; sincerity is of heart; ALLEGORY is of the STOMACH, and the stomach never lies. I call this gastro-epistemology.
Knowledge begins and ends "in the middle of things" and the knowledge of the stomach is precisely the knowledge of the middle.
To the foolish emanations of the brain, the stomach responds with emanations of its own. Nietzsche taught that man’s stomach prevents him from thinking himself a god
To the gastro-epistemologist, tastes that clash upon the tongue find their final destination is the same; this is the wisdom of simultaneity. Vexing puzzles of morality are dissolved in the stomach's acids, answering so many of life's moral quandaries with simple, honest disgust
One is exhorted often to overcome disgust for the sake of the moral intellect, so it becomes necessary to use allegory to express the truth. You can't reason your way out of nausea.
The world where we observe taboos is the profane world, and the world where we transgress them is sacred. The opposite of transgression is desacralization, wherein we attempt to elevate sacred animal things into the profane rational world, and obviate the taboo
The profane world is the world of every day. It is the world of work, the world of society, the world of emotional temperance. "Profanity" does not mean wickedness, it refers to what is common, as opposed to what is sacred
For example, sex outside of marriage is not profane because it is wicked, but rather, it is wicked because it is profane, because it happens in violation of a taboo, but not according to the structured rules of transgression
The same could be said for killing outside the context of war or state-sanctioned punishment of crime. Killing itself is not wicked; war is a ritual transgression, and killing, like sex, becomes wicked when it is profane
The attempt to attenuate the strictures of taboo, especially w/r/t sexuality, is an attempt to make sex "rational", to claim it in the name of humanity, but it always has the opposite effect, dragging humanity down into the transcendent world of the animal
It is not possible to overstate the fact that the object of taboo IS an object of sacred horror, and that a religious sensibility is fundamentally an appreciation of this horror, and religious rules are a kind of border that makes humanity possible
The desire for desacralization is born out of cowardice. A small and stupid person is unable to bear the sacred horror of transcendence on which humanity is constructed, and he reacts by trying to destroy these boundaries. This is called "emancipation"
Now, a word on Christianity. Thus far we have discussed the mechanics of sanctity and profanity in a way that could be characterized as pagan, but Christianity performs a rotation of taboo and transgression within sacred space
From a mechanical perspective, what's forbidden is sacred, and the sacred is accessed through the violence of a broken taboo, but in Christianity, the taboo is absolute, and transgression is always a sin; access to the sacred is Evil; simultaneously, Evil is profane
Christianity splits the sacred and the profane in half: sacred good and profane good merge into one sphere, sacred evil and profane evil into another, and redraws the borders around taboo. This spiritual gerrymandering is the definitive feature of the Christian world
Christianity replaces actual transgressions into the transcendent world (cannibalism, sacrifice, death and rebirth) with symbolic transgressions (the eucharist, the tithe, baptism), and in post-modernity, the sign becomes denatured
With no socially sanctioned gateways into transgression, the sacred slowly loses its aura all together. In this sense, secular ideologies may be seen as hyper-Christian, as Christianity's orientation to the sacred taken to its logical conclusion
Progressive, or enlightenment, or rationalist ideologies are all phenotypically Christian in the sense that they all share this Christian trait of closing off the forbidden sacred, and absolutizing the taboo, and trying to deny even the possibility of sacred evil
It's no wonder young people search for ever more vile forms of self-destruction. They are looking for an affordance into the sacred; for transgression; gladly sacrificing their humanity for it, but the post-Christian paradox demands they desacralize every transgression they find
good tweets don't gain followers, good tweets cull the herd
The old civic nationalism has transformed into neocolonialism. It still demands assimilation, but in order to scale globally it had to create identities that could transcend ethnicity, hence boutique sexuality. Bioleninism? more like homocolonialism
Your avg republican voter is just someone who hasn’t figured out the mechanics of American imperialism. You see, we figured out a way to get 2nd gen immigrants to voluntarily sterilize themselves. Trump gets it, as does Tariq Nasheed
The problem is market-economic society succeeded in doing what communism could only dream of: it made everyone comfortable. And we did not evolve to be comfortable. The warrior, in times of peace, attacks himself
So because of this evolutionary mismatch to our circumstances, people find themselves to be intolerable, and they try to dissolve themselves. The incredible popularity of samatha meditation in the west attests to this
What do you think intersectionality MEANS? It means that no matter what particularity you pick from the ethnosexual rainbow, your identity is a wholly owned subsidiary of globohomo, inc.
You’re not really gay, you’re not really black, you’re not really trans, you’re not really Latinx. Those are simulations of identities.
The A in LGBTQIA stands for either “white girl” or “autist” depending on the biological sex of your penis.
“Everyone gets to be proud of their ethnicity but me” no, wrong, everyone gets to have their ethnicity co-opted by the market except for you, which is to say everyone else gets to merge with the crawling chaos, the sprawling abyss. Is this thirst for annihilation?
Narratives are the wellspring of identities, but all the old narratives are zombies, dead yet walking. The culture war is a fight over identity, not of one identity against another, but over what kinds of identities will be able to exist
Our culture has embraced a form of scientism that excludes all mythical, philosophical, and religious narratives from the public debate except one: the myth of never-ending technological progress
And in this story of technological ascension, there is only one identity that center-leftism permits. Or, as Ambrose Bierce so memorably wrote in his devil’s dictionary, an African American is a [redacted] who votes our way.
We need to understand why both the right and the left feel the constant suspicion that they are losing the culture war very badly, and this will require sympathy—or actually, empathy—for the devil
To the right, both moral & political good are found in alignment with tradition, which is the revelation of uncreated values independent of arbitrary will. As good things endure through history and bad things fall away, These values are revealed
To the right, what is sinister both morally & politically is the rejection, not only of historical superstructures but of their underlying values, which are defamed as MERELY oppressive ideologies imposed by the dominant classes
This is how the right sees the world, and from this vantage point they are losing very badly. On the other hand...
To the left, the only moral principle must be dissolution of hierarchy. Leftism does not see leftism as ideology, and believes authority and ideology prevent us from realizing our destiny as a single, united humanity existing in a higher plane of moral and spiritual cooperation
To the old left, evil is the political right, understood as "management technique at the service of the strongest,” regardless of what ideologies are used to justify this management
From this perspective, managerial hierarchy has coopted egalitarian ideals by commodifying them, and one sees @wokecapital as a victory of the right over the left, as a monster wearing the corpse of egalitarianism as a skinsuit
There was a point in history when leftism was actually quite a reasonable-seeming position and when the living conditions of industrial laborers were so horrible that some kind of radical action really was preferable
The old left was genuine in its humanism, which is why when you hear someone like Bernie Sanders talk, there is something sympathetic and resonant underneath his communism, despite the fact that his ideas would drag us to hell if implemented
The old left was not interested in the enterprise of dissolving human nature, they were trying to RESTORE humanity, and their project of "progress," in recognizing the malleability of man, became an unrecognizable, all-devouring shoggoth
Bernie has no defenses against the new left, as we have already seen. Think of the French deconstructionists as a kind of intellectual antibiotic, evolved to sterilize any discourse it touches; intersectional social justice is the superbug that learned to grow in that environment
The "new left," which is really a cluster of woke centrists, is happy to betray the old left by constructing a managerial hierarchy, and it has no allegiance to the right, so it will use tools like immigration and trans/homosexuality to deracinate nations as a way to gain power
The dupes of this system, the people who have been colonized, imagine some hidden treasure of human nature that will free itself by exploding the crust of a repressive society.
1984, whatever, but capitalism is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the managerial left-center. Yes, right after we emancipate the gays, no wait the trans, no wait the pedos, then we’ll get right along to dealing with this pesky capitalism business, buy these hormone pills while you wait
The market economy is the true transvaluator of all values. Why is it possible to buy a Che Guevara t-shirt? I know you’ve read the last psychiatrist. Hint: it’s because you’re a narcissist. Wait, wait, it’s not your fault
The special trick of both nazism and the sexual identity spectrum is that they both give you the opportunity to be something in the way a rock is something, that is, innately, passively, inalienably
And this desire, to be rock-like, is something that weighs heavy, and perhaps most people don’t have the strength to lift it. The only identity that has been able to sustainably resist narcisso-centrist capitalism is negative identity, the zero
But negative identity is never going to work as a rallying point; like negative theology, it only excites a few nerds. What has more gravity, a rock or a void? In the outer right, we live in void-land, dreaming of stars and singularities
Among woman’s most heartfelt instincts is the desire to produce nominal equality, so she can thrive in covert competition
A woman’s desire is to create equality or better for her own children (at the risk of tearing down others’ children). Mans desire is to create the *best* for his own children, at the risk of everything and everyone.
Chen Sheng and Wu Guang are leading an army to a rendezvous point, and they are late. Chen says to Wu: "What’s the penalty for being late?"
Wu: "Death"
Chen: "And what’s the penalty for rebellion?"
Wu: "Death"
Thus began the Dazexiang Uprising. the Qin dynasty never recovered
Please don't rise up, that would be colossally stupid. But look, justified or not, American whites are beginning to feel like Chen Sheng; it doesn't matter what you do or how you think, you're a racist
If a left pundit says "Whites, we're replacing you" then hurray and if a right-wing pundit says "Whites, they're replacing you" then the pundit and everyone who listens is a bigot. This is called "the government elects a new people"; it’s funny and also true and also not funny.
And separate from that is that bringing in smart conscientious people from outside the country depresses middle class wages, simple supply and demand, and if you object to THAT, same as before, it's because you're a racist
The high skill laborers who come in get to use the "shut up whitey" discourse to lord it over all the whites, even though the brown people in question tend to be richer and higher status than the Americans who are oppressing them with their unbearable whiteness
And there are more tenebrous issues yet, and they're each separate, nuanced, orthogonal, and all of the above are conflated and silenced with the magic word: racism. Hence Chen Sheng: What's the penalty for being an ally? And what's the penalty for being a racist?
But before we go all Dazexiang on a ninja, let's take a step back: having these thoughts has become associated with the "radical" right, that is, these thoughts are said to be part of a "fringe" ideology, but doesn't that mean the people who have them are "marginalized"?
People are absolutely desperate to be proud, not of what they have done (that would be boastful) but of WHO THEY ARE and having been denied "race" and "religion", the only thing left is "buttsex"
White people, I am told, are uniquely monstrous, a cancer on earth, who oppress and exploit every other race on the planet, and we owe an infinite debt that we can never repay, and there's no hope of redemption
The magic formula is: whites can’t be oppressed because some of them conquered half the world a long time ago, therefore every injustice against the average American white is justified
We have created a civic religion that worships racial oppression and then, having alienated most of our citizens from that holiness, proceeded to oppress them for their race. It’s obvious that everyone involved is enjoying the torture of this immensely
So if you're crazy & psychologically broken, there's a high chance that when you meet the masochism vortex of white identity and take it at face value instead of working yourself up into a masturbatory frenzy of self-abasing righteousness, then you end up like the El Paso shooter.
As we watch people of all ideologies tell us we need their prescriptions now more than ever, it almost feels as if they DESIRE more shootings. They long for the transgression, because it allows them to briefly touch the divine.
The ecstasy of moral self-abasement is unlocked through a ritual sacrifice. The transgression of the shooter that culminates in his death triggers an orgiastic procession of sacramental white anti-whiteness.
We condition our shooters to shoot following a protracted process of isolation and attempted psychological modification; these students learn to play the part the system has assigned to them.
Human sacrifice is a barbaric practice that we have put behind us, or, well, at least we let the sacrifices volunteer, but isn't it perverse that we also make them perform the ritual on themselves?
Shooter argument rock paper scissors: crazy people will justify their actions with whatever hot take is hot, ideology doesn't matter. OK but they shouldn't have guns. OK but laws don't stop bad people from getting guns. OK and bad people are bad, we need ideology to fix them
And if you question that ideology, no matter what you say or how nicely you say it, the inevitable response comes back, no thought, no intelligence, just pious seething "self"-flagellation. Nonwhites repeat these invocations because their white prog overlords encourage it
Which brings us to Chen Sheng. Did El Paso shooter write his manifesto? He might as well have because everyone can see that the white self-gaslighting is happening and the response is GASLIGHT HARDER, threaten white boys more.
Hey, Wu Guang, what’s the penalty for being white?
“It shouldn’t be cheaper to kill than to stay alive”
This is the fundamental fallacy of the left: “It shouldn’t be” vs the cold reality it would be literally impossible to construct a society where it was cheaper to stay alive than to kill
People are thinking too small these days. What would you do if you had a BILLION dollars? (other than 2 chicks at the same time, obv) Small amounts of money are only enough to buy hedonic tickets to oblivion; a truly rich man can buy a camel a trip through the eye of a needle.
Our problem in modernity is that we have lost the ability to believe that stories have happy endings.
Everyone consumes the same media, so we all end up with the same broken stories in our heads.
You are the average of your five closest friends. The idea of Dunbar numbers shows is that we just can’t fit very many people in our heads. Our parasocial relationships to characters in media shape our view of the world as much as our IRL friends.
When we look for templates and archetypes for our behavior, we imitate the people that populate our lives.
The characters and the stories we meet in our media shape our moral attitudes, but the people who write our stories are optimizing for attention through clickbait style outrage and edginess.
When a man needs behavioral scripts for how to act in society or with women, he pulls from his experiences. This is why there is so much overlap between “incel” and “weeaboo”: Anime provides a truly horrible model of how to act towards women.
If we want to live in a righteous culture, we have to disseminate righteous stories to the masses. TV is here to stay, and most people watch it. Right now it's working as an enemy, but it could be a friend.
If I had the money I would start a competitor to Netflix with a charter to make only wholesome content. None of the stories would be explicitly ideological or political or religious, they would simply show good people fighting worthy struggles.
That means all of the stories would be heteronormative, there would be no divorces or “modern” families, women would be pretty and feminine and men would be strong and forthright, but neither would be cartoonishly so.
Evil would not be depicted in a way that is titillating or cool or “badass”. Fathers would be strong and admirable. Mothers would be honored for their selflessness instead of pitied for their hardships.
Finding talented writers and producers who could build these kinds of tv shows would not be easy. Given the lay of the land, we would have to take careful steps to ensure that the organization remained conquest-compliant
Conquest’s 2nd law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
But in the current year, right wing organizations are illegal. We will have to find some ways to bend the rules. Corporations outsource the business of intelligence-discrimination to schools. Can we find a similar loophole?
The only people who have a stake in the future are those who are married and have children. In many states it is legal to discriminate against the unmarried. As a first order filter, this will do, although it will raise our labor costs
As a second order filter, we need a way to maintain our goal integrity as the organization scales. The ability to scale an effective culture is the most underrated asset of successful large companies.
Curating human capital is the implicit instrumental goal that all good companies have in common.
Tenet-based corporate culture elicits a lot of groans, but a well-designed list of tenets can be used to get potential employees to self-select without creating legal liabilities.
Here are some example tenets that will repel the wrong sort of people. In order to be effective, they must be cited routinely and uncynically by employees at every level of the org.
1. Children are the future of humanity
2. Respect must always be earned
3. A moment of weakness can negate a lifetime of genius
4. We do not let addictions control us
5. Become worthy
I could go in on in this vein. The important properties of these tenets are that none of them are politically incorrect, and they contradict core leftist values in a way that is hard to articulate without sounding like a paranoid loon
The implicit assumption, which must not be stated, is that discipline is morally superior to licentiousness, which implies that moral superiority is possible. This unspoken ideal, two levels of removal from the letter of the law, can ward away evil
A morally bad person will find these tenets to be unsettling, perhaps “creepy,” but they will not harm a righteous man.
I think the market for this kind of content is dramatically under-served, but in order to succeed, this network would need more than one "hit". That's hard even with no additional constraints, harder still to do with integrity.
Part of the trick is not to market yourself as Christian or wholesome, but to silently stick to your principles. Morality plays and effete sanitized imitations of pop culture are not going to cut it. This is not the 90s Christian bookstore model
Take a lesson from Chinese or Indian cinema, where writers feel free to mix comedy and drama into a single production. Part of our collective failure as story tellers has come from our attempt to orthogonalize comedy from tragedy
People are so sick of antiheroes and degenerate urbanites quipping about their ennui. Cowboys are coming back into fashion because we are filled with longing for what we used to be.
Most of all, normal people need to be given a license to feel proud of their normalcy. Out of a desire to elevate the worst among us, we have beaten down the center, and the people who are the backbone of our society now feel like objects of contempt
For this most defamed American demographic, the displacement they feel has been primarily cultural, and only secondarily financial or political. What they want most in the world is a positive cultural identity, and they get it through stories
Private DM:
If you want to make good right-wing art:
Never portray single mothers or unmarried promiscuous women in a sympathetic light, unless the resolution of the dramatic tension involved marriage and submission to patriarchy and god
No homosexuality ever
Not as the villain, not as the hero, etc
Nudity is allowable but explicit sexual scenes are not
The heroes are good, only a small quota of anti heroes are allowed
No portrayals of miscegenation
Man vs society is an acceptable topic but positive portrayals of communism or rebellion against family or fathers are not
There is a point in every man's life when he realizes that when his father said, "Son, this hurts me more than you", it actually did.
Any time you draw a line, someone will accuse you of reductionism. "It's not a binary, man, it's a spectrum". My models allow for gradients of being, but when people play the binary/spectrum game, they aren't seeking clarity, they're seeking blurriness
Anti-reductionism fits with the "man the sly rule bender" hypothesis. Too much clarity makes hypocrisy too difficult, and we instinctively seek room for hypocrisy, it's the water in which we swim. Unprincipled exceptions are good, they are vital atom of social order
An attack on reductionist thinking is an attack on clarity. There is no difference between understanding and "reduction", because reduction removes mystery, and people crave mystery, because they crave ambiguity, see above.
I would never stand up here and tell you that I have solved all the mysteries of the world. If anything I will stress to you the smallness of our knowledge, but I will draw a critical distinction between ignorance and mystery
Mystery is sacred ignorance, it isn't the unknown, but the unknowable. It's the feeling you get at 4 in the morning when you're deep in the drugs and the universe is like whoa man, you know? You understand what I'm saying? It's just whoa man it's so big and we're so small and...
That's a feeling that a lot of people enjoy. It's a feeling they seek and a feeling they share, and many people bond over it. Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon but I think that feeling is just a feeling. On the other hand...
I've done psychedelics and I've sat in Vipassana and I've experienced the ecstasy of crowds and I've spent long hours in prayer and worship and I've fasted for three days and I've beheld the glory of nature from a high mountain
and it's all bullshit, though nature is nice
Through years of careful cultivation, Buddhists are able to unlock the hidden final Jhana where they realize that no matter how much they burn out their stress and surprise circuits they're still status-chasing rule-bending monkeys
"You're doing it wrong, you don't know REAL Buddhism, your mind isn't open, you lack humility before god, let Jesus into your heart, etc etc etc" Perhaps I just don't have the "god gene". Here, I improved on Kegan's stages of moral development, maybe this will make it clearer.
Developmental Stage: Object: Subject to: Behavior
1st Order: Impulsive Mind Reflexes Impulses Monkey
2nd Order: Instrumental Impulses Interests Sincere, selfish monkey
3rd Order: Socialized Interests Relationships Hypocritical monkey that
thinks it's fair, but isn't
4th Order: Self-Authoring Relationships Identity, Ideology Hypocritical monkey
5th Order: Self-Transforming Identity Dialectic btw Ideols Hypocritical monkey
And look, there are lots of good people in the world, in every ideology, but no matter how good you are you're still like this. And the more you think you're good, the more your capacity for evil increases.
It's amazing how readily some people will submit to an altar call in the form of a command. I think in their hearts, everyone longs for an altar, and a powerful god.
But let me backtrack a little; I'm a materialist with the caveat that no one knows anything at all about ontology. What I do see is a cold world that seems to operate mechanically. What I don't see is a world that behaves according to any kind of magical or anthropocentric logic
I conceive of the body as hardware and the mind as software and I fully acknowledge the limitations of that paradigm. People used to think the brain was micro-clockwork because that was the cutting edge of computronium back in the day
The era of aviation arose, not by dissecting birds but by making conceptual leaps to understand fluid dynamics and the mechanics of flight. Similarly if we ever build mind machines it will be through conceptual leaps in the science of intelligence
We are at least two scientific revolutions away from understanding the mysteries of consciousness and intelligence. Maybe those revolutions will never come. Maybe we're fundamentally incapable of producing the empirical lens that will grant us those insights
I think machine learning can teach us a lot about ourselves. Neural networks learn by aggregating perceptions into statistics. For a given stimulus, they generate a range of outputs weighted by probability. The weights represent the network's confidence in its judgement
If I'm honest about my own cogitations, I can relate to that. People think computers are rigid in their logic, that's what "robotic" means, but neural networks and learning algorithms use rigid logic to build flexible logic
Despite everything we hear, many of us stubbornly believe we're so rational and lucid and driven by evidence and careful consideration, but the truth is we just make guesses based on the frequencies at which we see things
In Chinese they have an expression, three men make a tiger, it means you'll believe anything if you hear it from enough people.
Despite all the things that we don't know, we can still model the people around us, and we can do so quite accurately, and we can make very good models using very simple tricks
Much of what people do is mechanical, and I'm a reductionist in the sense that my models round off all spiritual experience to mere emotion and I think that makes them work better, not worse
I invite you to disagree with me. Disagreements are assets. When I was younger I spent many hours reading books about the philosophy of mind, about consciousness, about neuroscience (admittedly, books for the layman). I satisfied my curiosity that no one knows anything
The idea of homo hypocritus: the main reason we have huge brains is to hypocritically bend rules.
Anger, bragging, giving orders, and anything remotely resembling dominance among men is punished by avoidance, exile, and death [...] The puzzle here is that consistent enforcement of such norms seems to drastically reduce the payoff to expensive coalition-politics-savvy brains
In a messy real world, social norms expressed in language typically have many iffy boundary cases and ambiguities. This wouldn’t matter if boundary cases were decided randomly, but that seems unlikely. Instead big brain gains come five ways:
Un-normed – We engage in coalition politics on acts uncovered by norms, but in ways that will fit organically into the fabric of our social norms.
Skirt – We find self-advantageous ways to behave that are near but not over edge of violating norms.
Cover – When we observe others behaving near normative boundaries, we perform political calculations to decide whether to report those actions within our group and to group outsiders.
Frame – We find lawyer-like ways to argue about whether an action violates social norms, always to our own advantage, always in the interest of "impartiality and fairness"
Conspire – We form coalitions based on how we wish to to publicly interpret normative boundary cases.
When I first understood this, it was a skeleton key to decoding all human behavior. What if hypocrisy, rather than being an aberration, is the essential character of all humanity?
Norms have meta-norms against consciously trying to evade them. Self-deception helps here; we sincerely believe we just do our jobs and “tell it like it is”, but we selectively report and frame acts, and support interpretation coalitions, and unconsciously act to our advantage.
Instead of “man the tool user”, we might be better understood as “man the sly rule bender.” Critically, the essential hypocrisy at the core of all human behavior is _unwitting_, which is to say, self-deceiving.
What this means is that almost everyone is evil and almost everyone is innocent of their own evil tendencies. People who act in "good faith" are nevertheless acting for their own advantage. And how could they do otherwise? And how could you expect otherwise?
The realization that revealed preferences do not align with stated preferences is a sister to this. "You mean its possible to want something, and to also believe that you want something entirely opposed to your true desire?"
The truth, the hideous truth, is that you evolved to lie to yourself. Knowledge of self is a joke. You will never be able to get outside yourself, no matter how hard you try. You're just too close, and your own internal agendas will always distort your self-perception.
The intersection of Gödel and Sisyphus
You're a liar to your core, and so am I, and that means all philosophies, all moralities, all axioms, and all institutions are untrustworthy. Every action ever performed was an act of calculated self-interest. Every noble ideal ever upheld was a distraction.
And that's fine! Radical cynicism only descends into nihilism if you had too much attachment to your silly lies in the first place. "I'm a good person." Stop thinking like this. You're a self-deceiving sly rule-bender. "That's depressing." Grow up.
Honestly, once you internalize the principle of homo hypocritus, much of Nietzsche becomes simply a clever application of Robin Hanson's theory.
The outside view from rationalism. You try to look at a system from an impersonal perspective, treating yourself as if you were a third party.
The outside view allows you to reason about yourself. It it’s refinement it may attempt to abolish the self all together, as with Zen Buddhism.
Lust for knowledge, single-minded and hot, is what drives us into the void
When you imagine other people, you compress them to a relatively simple set of interlocking motivations. When you imagine yourself... it’s complicated.
The simple model of others is often more predictive than the complex model of self.
So you try to model yourself as the other, but you can’t. You put on a mask and look in the mirror. Inexorably you still see yourself. It’s Gödelian. Eventually you learn to imagine yourself only as the man who wore that mask, you forget you have it on.
You are no wiser for this
And nothing is ever outside enough; with each exit you make, you look for another, grander, more exterior. Someplace colder, I’ve got to get to someplace colder.
When everything is frozen, it will stand still, and I’ll be able to see it in its totality.
The outside view is a vector in mind space, and if you follow it you see horrible things, which then become merely part of the landscape, an alien and non-linear landscape, void-soaked and thalassian
The motif of harmful perception: things we see that change us forever, not for good. Borges and Lovecraft intersect here. In Lovecraft, a glimpse of the outside drives you mad. Gynarlethotep’s followers, or the sight of a shoggoth.
In Borges, the Zahir obsessed you, the book of sand haunted you, tlon overtook you and the blue tigers multiplied and consolidated, violating your ability to comprehend number and mathematics.
You become what you behold. When you stare into the abyss, it also stares into you. If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something, it is in the end hard for him to be anything else
What if the truth is hideously depressing and causes you too much anxiety to successfully mate? What if the truth is removed from your every day experience and has no impact on your adaptive fitness? There are many cases where truth is totally disconnected from fitness
Until you can reliably kill someone with a sick burn, Twitter is to politics what porn is to sex. Unequivocal moral proclamations, like outlandish sex acts, are revolting if you try them in real life.
Yes, I make outrageous moral proclamations all the time. The content of moral philosophy is mostly irrelevant, it’s just the slime we secrete when we are trying to manage trust at global scale
People will accept whatever idiotic taboo you can dream of as long as it’s painful and a large group of people is using it as a barrier to entry. Examples: veganism, genital mutilation, and pederasty
I need you to understand that moral principles are not real in the same way that the material things around you are real. It's a hard lesson to learn because, as with so many truths, saying it doesn't equal understanding it
The distance between proclaiming a thing and embodying that thing is vast, but calling a it a "distance" is itself a metaphor, an unreal thing, a simulation of the invisible by analogy to the visible.
Twitter is the perfect laboratory to observe this, because we all constantly emit all these moral convictions AND WE ALL KNOW that they don't obtain in the same way as any physical object you can hold in your hand
4chan and Twitter are both experiments in radical free speech, and 4chan is freer than Twitter. Teasing apart the notion of free speech requires an uncomfortable meditation on the nature of liberty itself
Free speech means speech which has no consequences, full stop. Consequences are the opposite of freedom, whether good or bad. And note: an action with no consequences is meaningless.
So speech, to be maximally free, must be meaningless. Consider that the establishment allows black people to say the word forbidden to whites, that therefore black speech is more free. This is an act of contempt, it means they believe black speech has no consequences
Ultimate freedom is ultimate pointlessness. Anons are more free than real name accounts, because it's harder to make them pay for their words, but those words also have less weight. Doxing is an attempt to stick someone with a bill.
The minute an anon gains a following, he is less free. Speech that can compel or direct others is an obligation, both to exercise stewardship and to lie to people in socially prescribed ways
And yet in all the world what could be worse than absolute freedom? Lasch wrote that liberation from the superstitions of the past causes us to have trouble even perceiving ourselves as real. We can generalize this to all forms of liberation
Freedom = No Consequences = Collapse of Meaning. You don't get to be free and meaningful at the same time, just like you can't be hot and cold at the same time. You should view all would-be emancipators with supreme suspicion, they are trying to de-realize you
Some amount of freedom is good, because when every trivial action is weighted with cosmic implications, it crushes us. A sense of a meaningful life relates to freedom the way that state revenue relates to taxation. Laffer curves in everything.
Good freedom is that freedom which destroys itself by binding to a worthy attachment. This is freedom's highest imperative, to be instrumental in its destruction, and if it fails, it becomes grotesque.
Nature’s imperatives are a baseline of coercion. We never escape them, but we have partly deferred them. In this state we are, as Nietzsche observed, very FREE spirits, which means that we have to find a new source of coercion or else we go mad
I have used this analogy before and I’ll use it again. Ideology is part of our extended phenotype, it’s something that we do just like beavers make dams and bees make hives. It’s not something alien to us, even though it’s not contained within us
In a situation of excess freedom, the human secretes ideology to provide him with a sense of purpose. He does this by inventing a moral contradiction, becoming convinced of it, and then shouldering the ensuing pathos
It is impossible to believe "drinking this poison doesn't make me feel nauseous," because material reality resists. In contrast, one can believe a moral contradiction in perpetuity, because morals are less real than materials
Ideology is built out of contradictions, which are projected into behavioral space in the shape of conflicting imperatives, which limit our choices, which makes life feel meaningful. The more successfully you embody your ideology, the more fulfilling your life becomes
One of our American ideological contradictions is to believe that our imperatives are liberating. This is facile, because the moment you truly believe in an ideal, you discard anything that could authentically be called liberty
Of course it does no good pointing out the contradictions of an ideology to its believers. That’s like smacking a masochist. The only reason you would do so, in any case, is to try to install your own ideology in its place.
Conviction properly understood is a SURRENDER to an imperative beyond the quotidian needs of “animal” life. Man alone is the idealistic animal, and nothing could be more human than hypocritical idealism, because idealism is always subjugated to animal necessity
Convicted belief, authentic conviction, is the closest thing in the world to murder. It lives exactly in the boundary between taboo and transgression, between animal and human, between ideal and necessity.
Given that, what could be more terrifying than convicted belief, which holds belief to be more important than life and death? From far away it looks enchanting, up close it looks like terrorism.
Genuine conviction is called fanaticism, and we rightly fear it when people fully believe what they profess, but at least nowadays, true conviction is almost non-existent. We half believe, half feign belief, and this creates a tepid self-reinforcing social pressure to believe
Ideologues treat ideology the way fetishists treat their fetish, with a circuitous disavowal: “I know the shoe is only a shoe, nevertheless I need my partner to wear it.”
It’s a decadent problem (all paraphilia is decadent) that we float in the void of freedom, disconnected from meaningful attachments, thrashing around for a way to feel real. And my proposed solution is horrible, horrible: I want to let conviction back into the world
But all this is not to say that a sense of purpose is an end in itself. Ideology is the tool that we use to orchestrate collective action, and the sense of purpose is an emotion we feel when we leverage ideology to cooperate
One can easily follow the dictates of ideology right off a cliff, all the while nursing a sense of profound fulfillment.
What if I hate every woman but my mother, sister, wife, and daughter, all of whom I cherish?
This is purely hypothetical of course
The mere presence of a woman, even the possibility of a woman, warps the male mind the way gravity warps space.
Tattoos on women are a crime against God, I generally live and let live on twitter, but this is like advocating for defiling a church
I treat women like churches: I go to their sacred places then feel compelled to say the name of god
White dude is an ethnic slur
It drips with contempt, it castrates the subject because a “dude” is not a “man”. A dude is a mule, a drone, he labors but he is infertile. Horse and donkey grandparents cry
It compounds the insult with a layer of racial contempt. Only bigots use this phrase
As I have pointed out before “dude” is a slur against men. Notice Lehman doesn’t refer to males who want girldick as men, notice how the self-emasculating reply guy uses this term for himself. He knows what he isn’t.
The discomfort comes from the sense that a “man” has grown up. A man is a threat. To refer to yourself as a man is to claim certain powers, powers which a “dude” does not have
A “dude” is a man who lives like a child, who has reached physical but not mental or spiritual maturity
The worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a material object, you do it wordlessly, perceiving your mental model with a sense that has no name. If you want to refer to it, only then do you render it in words.
When you think of the abstract, you have no choice but to use words as handles; you cannot perceive abstractions directly.
Mostly you navigate these interior landscapes by means of other people’s words.
This is an error because you mistake their words for ideas, but their words are only symbols for ideas.
Other people’s words are not ideas, they are symbols for ideas. You put someone else’s symbols on your map, and you never bothered to explore there. This is the naive (=default) approach to reasoning .
A turn of phrase becomes an expression becomes a cliché becomes a cage.
When you already have a map, it is not necessary to perform effortful cogitation, because the lines have already been drawn by the people around you. It's not that you can't think outside the lines, it's just that you won't, without some kind of catalyst
Try to notice your speech habits, the ones you use when you talk inside your head, in particular when you reason about an abstract topic, such as morality, death, god, the technocapital singularity...
Take a complex word or phrase in your mental map, and try to explain it using only single syllable words. If you are an accelerationist, I suggest you start with "capital", but if you talk to anyone for a while you will notice there are words they are abusing.
There are tools for performing a self-diagnostic. Word frequency analysis tools. Locate your most common polysyllables and destroy them. Remove all the expressions and the pretty adornments you borrowed from your favorite blog or author
Those are the bars of your cage. Being inside the cage gives form to the formless. Before, you never even imagined what bars might look like, but now that you have seen them, you have a choice: stay trapped in the box, where you are comfortable, or try to break free
If you are honest about it, you will see holes in your thoughts. You are using overly complex metaphors, words with vague meanings, to do the work of NOT SEEING the holes in your knowledge, the way your brain hides the blind spot in the middle of your eye
Aside, a warning: many gaps are in fact unbridgeable, or will require new scientific or philosophical paradigms, as yet undreamed. Be suspicious of anyone who claims to understand consciousness, or the fundament of being, or how the world will end. they have confused themselves
I have had a few people DM me and say, “you talk about things I have been dancing around in my mind”, or “you say things I feel I am on the edge of understanding” if you feel that way you are probably hiding ignorance from yourself behind pretty words
Instead of looking at the world, you are relying on symbols that were given to you, and they make you feel smart. When you struggle to explain your beliefs about the world (even just in your head), the problem isn't that you can't express yourself, it’s that you did not see
The poster child for leftist idiocy is @HasBezosDecided.
It is some of the worst logic and one of the dumbest accounts on this site. The poor and hungry will always be an endlessly ravenous void and the more you feed them the more they and their hunger will multiply.
The sorts of people who can’t care for themselves are also the sorts of people who reproduce without limit. High time preference is the common variable. Not all people have the same moral worth.
Not only that, but being bad at sustaining yourself is heritable.
One liners (II): a thread of cheap thrills
Kink is how women sublimate the desire for patriarchy
You chase after sex objects as proxies for love objects
A woman challenges her man, a man squeezes a woman’s ass, both desire to feel firm flesh
Women are people, so what? If anything this is a license to treat them badly
Never trust an anti-natalist, or anyone with an evolutionary lifevest
Having children is the only true immortality, the only true salvation
Self-awareness and self-confidence are opposite ends of a spectrum
Learning is a kind of prurience; teaching a kind of ravishment, ignorance a kind of virginity; twitter a kind of brothel
Hunger for insight prevents you from acting on insight; imagining action prevents you from taking action
Contentment is supposed to be fleeting
Everyone has mental stopsigns, charging past them always hurts
You only like honesty when it’s aimed at your enemies
Self-righteousness is the second worst of all vices
You can’t have progress without telos
“Consent of the governed” already looks more irrational than “divine right of kings”
In a democracy, good and evil can only be conceived in political terms
Nothing is your fault, everything is your responsibility
"Inalienable human rights" is the lowest form of moral discourse
It is given to no man, no matter how revolutionary, to differ from his era
Two irreconcilable relations to evil: fearing the evil within the walls, fearing the evil without
Every generation thinks the end of the world will come in their time
The collapse will not be dramatic
No one buys Accelerationism in a bear market
Every market is somewhat rigged; too much competition destroys all sellers
Social Facetune will be the killer app for smart glasses
Even when it’s affected, your online persona has fewer affectations
Deepfakes of your political opponents saying the n word
Euphemism treadmills are a tax on the middle class
Social sanction to say forbidden words is the privilege of the untouchable caste
Why is [cruelty] a problem?
Of course I have to ask. There is nothing implicitly wrong with cruelty, in my worldview. Why do you take it as axiomatic?
You ask me to explain? Shifting the burden of proof is weaselly and I consider it to be hostile, but I will indulge you.
It is not possible to live a life free of pain and suffering, nor is it desirable. Pleasure and satisfaction can only exist in contrast to their opposite.
The range of human experience without these feelings would not be improved, it would be lobotomized.
Negative feedback is an ineradicable facet of human experience, of learning, and of growth.
The crux of the argument falls on the word “necessary” — how much suffering is necessary?
My personal claim? All of it and more.
When you remove negative feedback mechanisms from life, you manufacture people who are weak, stupid, and ineffective.
A grounded understanding of evolution teaches us that all good and salutary things have been teased from a butcher’s yard of limitless carnage and death
Nature is infinitely cruel, and her cruelty passes through us, it does not originate there.
We do not build the world to mitigate cruelty, but to create security. Survival necessitates that we are in tune with the dictates of nature.
Those who go against nature do not tend to survive on a long time scale.
Like all non-deranged people, I try to avoid pain that I perceive as having no benefit to me, or which exceeds some cost-benefit threshold. This is a healthy impulse, but the acts of inflicting pain or of suffering pain are amoral in and of themselves
Again, you simply can not justify the feeling that inflicting pain is immoral, it’s an aesthetic preference you have and nothing more
Consent is also a broken and incoherent moral framework. And again, you are, as I said, incapable of providing any reason why I, as a skeptic, should take your moral claims seriously.
Why is consent broken? Because people don’t make choices in a vacuum. Consent, whether political or otherwise, is always conditioned by your social environment and by the people around you.
Most behaviors are automatic. Most of our desires originate outside of us. Do I use twitter or does twitter use me? This is a serious question.
You are arguing aimlessly because the origin of the argument is flimsy to begin with. What is cruel? The only meaningful way to understand morality (which is always fabrication) is probably its functional genealogy.
There are certain mammals that will mince up their family without reason, but man developed remorse. Remorse isn’t cultural; it is functional.
The conflict between ‘cruel’ impulse and remorse was not one of rational motives, but rather a conflict of two pre-rational motives. It was not a conflict of thought but a conflict that made us think.
This, at least, is Midgley’s anthropological theory, which I regard as better than creative speculation. In this light, the moral aversion to cruelty is nothing more than a functional response
In other words, cruelty as defined in a meaningful enough way (such as unmotivated, destructive infliction of pain or death without any benefit for us) might just be environmentally unsustainable.
Being hypocritical monkeys, we then proceeded to rationalize a morality that became so deep rooted as to make you feel immediately hostile to someone who asks “why is cruelty immoral?”
Anything on top of that is pure cultural fabrication and won’t stand thorough skeptical scrutiny.
I can name several problems, though of course I can only speculate
We give far too much honor and prestige to the weakest and worst of our society
We denigrate glory in order to spare mediocrity embarrassment
We squander potential in order to succor the lame
I don’t think there is any society with a more contemptible ethos than Sweden. The law of jante may be the most toxic moral system ever created. If you were trying to design a good society, you could find a much worse starting place than “not Sweden”
A popular conception of hell defines it as a willful separation from the Almighty. And yet who would knowingly eschew paradise?
A popular euphemism for twitter is “hellsite” (indeed it’s a specific kind of hell, a semiotic hell). And yet, you won’t delete your account...
If you were a sperm heading towards the Enormous Egg, would you sacrifice your identity to make a new creation beyond your comprehension or keep on swimming? If the path to heaven is through the cross, then many sane people would turn away for a few breaths of autonomy.
Women are supposed to be light and refreshing. You don’t share your dour blackpilled philosophies with them, that’s literally gay
There are no girls on the internet, there is no such thing as misogyny, and as a species we are congenitally incapable of grasping these truths, in fact the deck is stacked against us such that the more energy we spend fighting this phantom, the more its insidious power grows
First, a disclaimer: in general, one should avoid the strategy I am about to use. The epistemic grounding of institutional science is irrecoverably flawed and if we drink its wine we get stuck with its hangover
The classic dictum "no girls on the internet" does not mean that women don't use the internet, it means that, in real life, men treat women with something approaching deference, just because they are women
When women go online, men mostly don’t treat them with automatic deference, especially in spaces where their sex is not immediately obvious, or is easy to lie about.
Men treat other men much more harshly than they treat women, so when men treat women the way they treat men (equally, like human beings, etc.), women perceive it as abuse
Unfortunately no amount of scientific research will ever wake us up to this truth. A tragic irony of the science of sex differences is that people only believe research when it finds female superiority
“Female privilege” is Kafkaesque, it operates by pretending it doesn’t exist, by blaming men for all of women’s problems, and by exploiting the fact that men and women are genetically predisposed to favor women
None of the claims of feminism stand up to even a moment of rational scrutiny, but fortunately society’s bias in favor of women is so absolute that mankind has never in its history had to suffer such a moment.
But don’t misunderstand me. This is not a cry for some political action or reform to fix the problem. Society will always favor women, which is why crying to the government is a fundamentally female strategy
No, there is no hope of waking even other men up from this deeply incumbent, deeply misandrist false consciousness. All we can do is try to offend as many feminists as possible for our own entertainment.
Everything feminists have ever complained about, everything they have blamed men for, has always in truth been the harm that women perpetrate against other women
It is women, overwhelmingly women, who sabotage the careers of other women; they despise the success of their sisters.
"Her skirt is too short, her dress is too tight"--Are these the proclamations of a man? It is women who police the sexual displays of other women, and yet they blame men for trying to control their style of dress
Men not only adore women, they love to adore women, but women on the whole like nothing more than to rob men of this pleasure at every opportunity. They scold and scorn and shame and blame us for admiring them!
The teaching that women should deny their inexorable nature as sexual objects (one facet of femininity, among many) ironically robs them of sexual agency and increases their romantic failures. And who, gentle reader, teaches them to deny this reality?
There is no such thing as misogyny, unless by that word we mean "the treatment that women give to each other". The fact that most people of both sexes are convinced it is men would testify to ubiquitous misandry, if only we weren't so blind
Admittedly, some men may feel a bit of resentment towards the fairer sex, but this resentment is always manifest in the most harmless way imaginable, in fact a resentful man nearly always expresses his resentment thus: he asks her for a date
As repayment for this gross injustice, women can be counted on to receive what gifts a man offers her even as she looks on him with contempt and resentment of her own, which are called "women's intuition"
The magnitude of women's hypocrisy in this arena cannot be conveyed with words. Women simultaneously demand to have earning power that is equal to men, and yet steadfastly refuse to date a man who does not out-earn them
Gender equality is a great paradox, in which women, acting through poor, foolish men who have evolved to fall prey to their deceptions, demand from men precisely that which leaves them cold
But let us not blame women for their nature any more than we blame men, no, and let us not even treat them fairly, that would be far too cruel. Women are such brilliant deceivers, they even convince themselves. What chance do men have?
No, no, it is not women who are to blame for acting like women, I will not abide this kind of slander! The tiger stalks and kills the boar, a hurricane can demolish a city, and time ravages all people. Likewise, woman's treachery is but cruel nature!
Perhaps men are to blame after all! We cannot be arsed to care about a woman's mind or her character, wholly enraptured as we are to her arse! Untold aeons of such breeding have produced precisely those traits in women that we as men deserve.
This is one of those rare instances where the science is reliable: the truth just won’t go into the brain
Don’t let the weight of the world get you down. The world has always been hell and always will be. This is just how I cope with it
I really don't enjoy being mad. Does anybody?
There are forms of enjoyment that do not present as pleasure.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished.
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
It is not a supplement to the real world; it is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.
In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.
The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” It demands passive acceptance by means of its monopoly of appearance.
The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.
To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.
The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.
Given the above, which is from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, it is time to undertake the continuous project of rating the spectacular events that form the topology of outrage space.
Our goal here is neither to condemn nor endorse the moments of the spectacle; rather we wish to cultivate a connoisseurship of spectacle-qua-spectacle.
The question is not “do I welcome this messenger as an artifact of my partisan simulacra of an identity?” but rather “what is the quality of this spectacular event as an instance of the form?”
Continued in the next thread:
Notice how, on twitter, everything seems to revolve around the news cycle. Every few days, a new event becomes the center of attention, and everyone talks about it. People take sides and feel strong emotions, and yet, as soon as the next event comes along, they forget.
It’s as if none of the old emotionally hypercharged news events didn’t happen. One begins to feel that none of these events matter at all, and yet even this sentiment is fleeting. I have compared it before to a sandcastle; everything we build gets washed away by the tide.
As soon as a new event captures our attention, we not only forget the past, but also our skepticism about the cycle. This continuous unfolding is what Debord calls the spectacle.
Debord is a Marxist, so he thinks it’s something that industrial capital does in order to keep its citizens in a state of false consciousness and alienation so they can rise up and build a beautiful Marxist utopia.
This is, of course, retarded, but his analysis of the phenomenon, what he calls “spectacular domination” is cogent and interesting. Naming this phenomenon can give us a bit of critical distance from it, and help us retain some sanity in the maelstrom.
Sadly the yankee can no more understand evil and savagery than the savage can understand “rational” economic self interest.
Two groups totally alien to each other.
Policing by intuition has been eradicated entirely in the north, and thats part of it that no one talks about.
There is a weird dynamic where letting someone walk ahead of you can be submissive (they’re leading you) or dominant (the king has a glorious procession to herald him).
This is an instance of the latter, see how he isn’t even slightly leaning forward, how she is in his orbit
She's pulling at his arm - indeed, women are very hard to control, the men on here who pretend otherwise are blustery posers.
Being married to a good woman is a source of supreme power
“You should be more vulnerable” is something you say to your enemy
It astonishes me that anyone thinks we aren’t ruled by satanic pedophiles
Exploiting children for political virtue signaling is disgusting
It’s actually amazing how much identity politics has to _de_humanize black people in order to make them fit into the intersectional box. If you depict them as people instead of as “victims” it makes the woke gatekeepers writhe
Why are modern cartoons of girls so ugly? Because these artists think that if all the women in all cartoons and movies are ugly then maybe men will start liking ugly girls, ie them.
It doesn't work that way. But they seem to think people can be indoctrinated to like things they don't.
The fundamental belief of the reactionary is that there are hard limits to human plasticity
Tbh if no one has ever tried to feed you to lions for Christ’s sake, the strength of your faith is contentious at best.
When the LGBT cult successfully makes Christianity illegal in 2028, it will be the best thing that ever happened to the faithful.
Polyamory is the fruit of a marriage between the brothel and the DMV.
Scientific approaches to sex will always degenerate into this.
3 parent households in the name of financial stability are a formula for neglect and child abuse.
A few months from now, I will release my second major work. In truth it may be a bit longer. Regardless, I will now write a bit of a reflection on writing fiction, whose usefulness will become apparent maybe only when we find out if my next work is any good
In any case, all fiction (and all theory) is autobiographical. Fantastic and mystical elements in stories are the metaphorization of the author’s real experience
Composing a compelling plot is foremost an act of self-awareness, and in a way, it is a pornography of the self. Your goal is to transport your readers into the landscapes of your imagination, and your vehicle is your own observations and emotions
A fiction writer’s most important attribute is his honesty, and willingness to put himself on display. To do this, you must be able to look at yourself with a certain detachment, and see in yourself the basest and pettiest motives
People are simple and the difficulty of introspection lies in the desire to see yourself as more complex than you really are, the better to make excuses
The goal of each sentence in a fictional work is to get the reader to the next. The way to achieve this goal is through tension, which is unsatisfied desire. The story of a man is the story of his desires
Desire is a form of suffering, and indeed, an engaging story, whether tragedy or comedy, is always an account of suffering
In amateur fiction especially, it is apparent that the dramas and little pleasures of the characters are those of the author. Realize this so that you can own your desires, and present them without alienation
Good stories have structure; each anecdote has a purpose, and the way in which each episode is presented should build to a definite conclusion. It is not always necessary to state that conclusion
It’s very hard to invent a structure for a narrative. It’s much easier to steal one. Pick a work you admire and try to copy its form while changing its content.
The fictive world is an idealized version of the real one. In other words, it is a kind of average. We exaggerate in order to throw the truth into stark relief.
Originality is overrated. Most plots were invented a thousand years before you were born. You are not the creator of your tropes, you are only their steward. Everything is a cliché; what matters is how you wield them
Agonize over your work. How will your readers feel things that you didn’t feel first? In order to invoke emotion, you must experience emotion
On the crafting of sentences: write them over and over. Become a curator of fine turns of phrase. When you read anything, take notes. If a combination of words strikes you, write it down. If no words in a work are worthy of recording then cast it into the fire
The way that words feel in the mouth is as important as the way that they unroll into semantics. Every word is a dead metaphor. The task of the poet is to restore a bit of their vitality.
Avoid the stock phrases of pop cultural conversations. The whole point of writing is to impose your consciousness on others. Why confine yourself to being a conduit of mass culture?
Read the King James Bible, not only for the power and the beauty of its language, but for the poignancy of its narratives. The plots in the gospels in particular have been told in the best way that they possibly could be.
Hide things in your work: inside jokes to yourself, obscure literary references that no reader will understand, fragments of childhood memories, images you saw in a dream... even if no one quite catches them, they add depth and texture
Write a little bit every day, at least a sentence, at least a word. Don’t let the work get cold.
It takes young children several years to learn that others do not share their point of view. You’re trying to show the world as it appears to you through your eyes, so don’t take anything for granted
This is my second major work, God-Shaped Hole. I have been writing it for 18 months. I assure you the sex and violence it contains are justified artistically.
Long have I dreamed of writing this thread; the fact that you are reading it means my dream has come true. It is an honor that so many of you think so highly of me, yet at times the weight of your expectations can be suffocating.
I am told that your sophomore work is the hardest, and yet I hope that my future works are also fraught with struggle. The relationship between the writer and his work is a difficult one, encompassing both love and hatred
Perhaps it's true that all love is merely the love of oneself, and now that this work is no longer a part of me, I am left with a sense of hollowness, of heartbreak, of separation; there is once again a novel-shaped hole in my heart.
I have continued to explore the themes of insanity, labyrinthes, intertextuality, harmful perception, and artificial intelligence, and I have done so in a way that attempts to pay homage to my greatest inspirations: Borges, Lovecraft, and Nietzsche
But many other voices join theirs, of course, among them Nick Land, Deleuze, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Bataille, too many to name. Those who are widely read may notice that I have stolen all of my best lines from my betters. In a sense all literature is a remix, a synthesis
In addition to those noteworthy names I would like to thank many of you, my friends, for your spiritual support. I have assuredly stolen things from you, perhaps uncredited.
I have no doubt that my critics, if I am fortunate enough to have critics, will have many horrible things to say about me and my work. I was once called the Ian Miles Cheong of Lovecraft fanfiction. I long for your hatred
Perhaps some will say I have produced is a work of degenerate smut; many considerations here: To write something sexual or titillating, you have to bare your own psyche and your own honest understanding of what is sexually compelling, and this nakedness is profound
Which is to say that I expect to be psychoanalyzed for this. On the other hand, I have tried to include sexual concepts that I myself do not find compelling, both as a way to hide and as a way to discover a broad appeal
There are also a number of you who have called me an incel, or who think that my views on men and women stem from an inability to get laid. On some level I confess I chose this topic as a way to say Trust Me, I Have Sex.
One more inspiration, from what is by now deep internet lore: The Last Psychiatrist always used to claim that he was writing a pornographic book. He never delivered the goods, so I have toiled with his spirit in mind.
I have tried to deal with a sensitive topic—specifically sexuality—which is entirely unmentioned in the works of Borges and Lovecraft, and although I allude to romanticism, I believe I have avoided falling into it, and that they might even approve.
In a sense the erudition of this work is an affectation, hopefully a successful one. My attitude w/r/t the great writing of the past is that we should all freely plagiarize it. A fixation on who said what stifles creativity and contributes to the sterility of academia.
By including the words of great men in my work, I give them renewed life. Any other attitude is drudgery and death. By leveraging the greatness of others I am able to reflect back some of their glory. This is the true meaning of the western canon.
We do not revitalize the European spirit by slavish dedication to the words of the dead, but by breathing life into those words, by cultivating our own vitality and embodying that spirit in a way that is unapologetically white, male, heterosexual, and patriarchal.
I try at all times to be worthy of my intellectual predecessors, and I would never claim to be their equal, or to have surpassed them, but I hope that someday, in retrospect, others may judge me thus.
This story does not "get me there", it is only one more step on that path, and I believe that my best works still lie ahead of me.
Regarding the interpretation of my story, I do not believe there is one correct interpretation. I think that people of various political alignments will be able to project their own psychoses onto the things I have written. But I will say this: it is a story about seduction
I have been conscious lately of the medieval practice of reading texts with multiple simultaneous interpretations, and I do hope that you will be able to find four distinct readings: literal, moral, anagogical, and allegorical.
All of this sounds extremely self-absorbed and self-important. This is unavoidable. The world I have attempted to present to you is a world where I have lived for the past year and a half, and now if I am lucky, you will visit it for maybe a few hours
If, after that visit, you are curious to know what thoughts passed through my head as I dreamed this world, then this is for you. By definition, an author is less interesting than his work, but I hope that by writing these things, I can make my mind bigger than my mind.
In order to manifest horror, I have mixed things which I think are heinous and horrible with things that I think are righteous and true. This seeming incongruity is not even a paradox, it is simply the natural order. A paradox is an artifact of the mind, not of the world.
I took my time writing this, and I hope you will take your time reading it, and I hope it will wound you, and I hope it will lift you, and I hope it will haunt you, and I hope it will cause you to have strong feelings
This work is free, because I do not want your money, I only want your time, which is I guess a self-aggrandizing way of saying I want attention.
If you grant me the honor of reading my story, then I thank you, and if not, then I want you to know that I still enjoy making this journey with you.
I have had a few questions about my writing process and I have decided to talk about it here.
I doubt there is anything unique about what I do, but fwiw I did not learn it from anyone, I simply invented it for myself as I wrote.
I expect it converges with other writers’ methods
The most unusual thing about my practice of writing, I think, is that I do most of it, probably 80%, on my phone as I walk around my city.
I do this because the motion of my body also moves my mind, and because I believe that writing on a phone is more authentic to our zeitgeist.
This also allows me to perceive how the story will feel phenomenologically to people whose reality is molded by phones. The text is “native” to the phone/cloud idiom.
As to the writing itself, I am something of a magpie when it comes to turns of phrase
I simply love words, I love the way they feel in the mouth and in the mind when I say them, I love their sensuality, rhythm, and texture.
If I find a phrase or sentence I like I stash it away
When I am working on a story, I am constantly hunting for words and ideas that should go into it, the effect is a bit like any collector showing off his prized collections.
Each work is incepted this way, but I cannot refrain from doing it all the way to the end
Beyond that writing is mostly a process of iterating and thinking and feeling, especially feeling. I try convince myself, like an actor, that I am really the person in my story having those exact experiences, and then I recount them. What did I see, what did I hear?
At times this might look very strange from the outside. I sometimes must work myself into a state of tremendous fear or sorrow. When I first had the idea for She Is More Precious Than Rubies I was at the gym squatting and I was overcome by a terrible sense of foreboding
At one point when I wrote the bit about the guy losing his daughter I think I was weeping openly on the way to work. I still looked much less crazy than most of any of the decadent street people leeching off this town
When I wrote the sex scenes I would look up from my phone and notice women staring at me with interest, perhaps even desire. I would be lying to deny that I enjoyed this
In particular someone asked me, how do you drive this to completion, how do you maintain the focus and energy that it takes to write something for 1.5 years.
I am sorry, I don’t know how, it’s just the strength of my desire. I want something very badly, and that thing is:
Poetry, beauty, divine light, holy fire, solar love and creative innocence!
If you think that is cringey then fuck you! You don’t have any light in your soul. You’re too weak and half-formed to ever reflect anything glorious so you spit on it.
Sour grapes
How do I stay motivated? How do I not? When the world is so beautiful and ugly and terrible and wonderful. How could you be content just to see it?
Don’t you want to judge it, shape it, weigh it, explore it?
Excuse me.
How do I actually produce the story?
I start by imagining the end. I think about how the world “really is”—the thing I want to reveal. And then I ask myself what other things have to be true in that world. What conditions created this ending?
And then I start from the top, first with an outline, and I write it all the way to the end, skipping over the bits that I haven’t worked out yet, leaving notes or fragments or quotations.
When I get to the end I start again from the top.
Over and over til everything feels done
I ask a few of my friends to read it as I do this and share their impressions. Beyond that I never talk about the work. That would give me a feeling of reward that I have not yet earned.
I bottle everything up inside and I and only confess to the written page in my phone
When in doubt, I plagiarize. I go looking for a book that discusses the thing I am trying to write about, and I read it, and I take notes, and I weave them in.
When it’s all finished I start making subtractive passes where I ask myself, do I really need this here, is it useful, is it timely, etc?
In this work I saved myself a lot of grief by repurposing the cut passages into the labyrinth
Whenever you buy anything, your money is a prayer to the market;
She hears you; with your purchase you have asked her to make more of the thing you bought. What does it mean then to give money to the poor?
Donating to Veterans' charities causes more wars - it lowers the cost of soldiers.
Able-bodied adults who don't work don't deserve to eat.
This isn't "forcing them to work" - as if man in a state of nature has the choice.
The fallacy at the heart of communism is to believe that wages are some kind of concession that “the people” extract from “the rich” who just greedily and senselessly refuse to share their ill gotten gains
Anyone who thinks this way is so brainfucked that it’s not worth arguing
Marx was wrong, as are you
If there were such a thing as white privilege, this woman would not be able to say the things she says [like "white people should be ashamed of themselves"]. It’s really that simple
An eschatology is a story about the end of the world. It doesn’t have to be a final end, it only has to be an event horizon. In the West, everyone has an eschatology, though some don’t realize it. It colors everything you see
I grew up in a millenarian cult. “Millenarian” means “pertaining to the millennium.” It is a reference to the book of revelation (20:2) And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years
In Christian eschatology there are pre-, post, and a- millennial theologies. Post-millennialism thinks we are already living in this golden era, because Christ’s sacrifice fulfilled the whole of the law. A-millennialists do some verbal contortions and make revelation disappear
Sane and well-adjusted Christians are usually post- or a-. All the interesting and virulent Christianities are pre-millennial, which means they eagerly anticipate an imminent golden millennium.
The premillennial temperament is not exclusive to Christians. Marxism is also a pre-millennial eschatology, and in in secular theology, we see it in many forms. The workers rising up is equivalent to the Christian second coming of Christ
I always treat religion psychologically. I ask the question: what role do these beliefs play in the believer’s life? How do they give order and meaning to his perceptions?
In western thought we demand an eschaton, and further we have the hubris to demand it in our lifetimes. If I may generalize, the eastern orientation to the eschaton is to immanentize it in order to exploit it, whereas we only want annihilation
100 years ago, Marxists succeeded in bringing about their eschaton, and instead of heaven, they created hell. The demon they summoned has been put down, but it still whispers in our ears. "Real communism has never been tried"
Singularity in all of its guises is a new eschatology, and its an eschatology searching for a false consciousness. On its own it lacks the power to inspire anyone but some weird nerds
Since I haven't stated it explicitly, the singularity is the hypothetical point in technological development where tech. is capable of improving and maintaining itself without human involvement. It is the moment in time man the tool user becomes merely man the used tool
People such as Kurzweil, Yudkowsky, and Nick Land are prophets of the singularity. But whereas Kurzweil's singularity is reminiscent of a televangelist, and Big Yud's is just neoliberalism but more so, Land's Singularity has teeth, or more specifically, fangs
The Landian singularity has its roots in a Marxist theory of capital, but unlike Marxists, Land unmasks the materialist forces of Capital and shows us that the technological singularity is radically alien, and hostile to humanity
Many singularitarians have failed to understand Nick Land's message, and still mistakenly believe that the technocapital singularity will usher in a golden millennium of hedonism, in which robot slaves sustain us while we fork into multiple autofellating ouroborotic processes
The early message of acceleration was to see the singularity as an inevitable development capital and technology, which were thought to be locked in a cybernetic feedback loop of mutual stimulation, much like an ouroboros, in fact.
What we have realized, or learned from our betters, is that social order and human intelligence are still prerequisites for the technological singularity for the foreseeable future.
I know I saw one of you saying that we no longer believe humans have what it takes to go to space, which is why all of our futuristic hopes now revolve around AI. I think that's a little backwards, but the sentiment is right.
Regardless of ideology we find the human machine to be lacking, and in all cases, a compelling eschatology involves some kind of perfecting or transcending of mere humanity.
The technological singularity is the least humanist thing in the world. It the desire, if not for the destruction of humanity, at least its obsolescence, and it is an aspiration, like the pyramids or the tower of babel, but moreso, the final wonder of the world
Acceleration is an elitist eschatology. From my perspective, I would gladly have millions starve, I would be one of the earthbound ones, but let some great men escape to the infinite heavens. And if not some great men, then the fruit of those men, the god that we hope to build
The only singularity, the only credible eschatology, is the one we build ourselves.
Many on the right and the left worry (fantasize) about environmental collapse, which is the anti-singularity. But most who advocate ecological stewardship are blind when it comes to the stewardship of the human genome
The only way to realize the dream of a better humanity is to embrace this realization: good genes are a scarce resource. The word "eugenics" conjures images of the state confiscating babies and sterilizing idiots, but this is a straw man
Traditional family formation is eugenic, and practical, effective eugenics mostly just consists of not producing disincentives to form families. Sexual "freedom" is dysgenic and cisnormative patriarchy is eugenic. It's not complicated.
Dysgenic: sterilizing yourself to satisfy your porn-induced fetish. Dysgenic: move to the big city and become a wine aunt. Dysgenic: conscientious people not having babies out of goldilocks syndrome while dunning-krugers procreate with abandon
Eugenic: Conform to the aspirational norms of your genetic sex. Have children. Be a father or a mother. Invest in your children. Anyone who claims to be an accelerationist and does not do this is a decelerationist.
A small amount of chaos is necessary for creativity. The monsters we unleash by behaving in orderly and constructive ways will cause chaos. This is what it means to ride the tiger.
But anyone who behaves chaotically, or who tries to become the tiger is working against the singularity and is an impediment to acceleration
It's much harder to imagine heaven than hell. In fact it takes no faith at all to believe in hell, only an open eye. You don't even need a pair of them
I could never in my heart believe in heaven. None would disagree, I think, that for heaven to be heavenly would require a radical transformation of human nature, radical for each human admitted therein
This is in fact what the gospels promise: a transformation of one's character, an alignment with god, and this is supposed to make you moral, and everyone who is moral, through the grace of god, will dwell in eternity, drawing ever asymptotically closer to the perfection of god
This type of transformation of the character, were it to happen all at once, would be very much like a death, and certainly theologians acknowledge this. But if it were to happen very gradually, like the ship of Theseus, it might not feel like a death, but an affirmation of life
And if we were slowly subsumed into god, then ultimately there would be no difference between us and god, and as in Spinoza, we would merely be moments of god, or attributes of god, possessing divine perceptions and divine morality, a kind of cosmic vore
So we can see how theology contains all of the same questions as the philosophy of consciousness, namely questions about continuity, about the mutability of identity, and about the nature of more powerful minds, topics such as meta-ethics and superintelligence
Emmanuel Swedenborg (a name which sci-fi has reached into the past to touch with the name of a superintelligence) believed that moral behavior was necessary but insufficient for salvation, and that it was the duty of all men to cultivate their minds
Swedenborg told a story of a man who so desired heaven that he went to the desert to live as a hermit; he achieved virtue through fasting, prayer, privation, & silence; like most hermits his material poverty was matched by mental poverty, but he never committed a single sin...
Swedenborg’s heaven is richer, more complex than earth, with many more colors and shapes; it is a higher dimensional space. When the hermit arrives, he is bewildered; the theological conversations of the angels are far above his head, and he never prepared his mind for them
God sees that the man is ill-suited for heaven, but that he is saintly and undeserving of hell, so he sends him to live in eternity in his sinless hermitage. The man is not fit for any other life. And now he is very unhappy, because he knows the desert will be his for eternity
Swedenborg’s heresy assumes that heaven is static, and that man in heaven must also be static. But in a sense, the divine must be static, and perfection must be static, because variance is the provenance of imperfection
And this is another way that theology intersects the philosophy of consciousness, because consciousness is a kind of relation to time, a statefulness that changes, and those mutable states are the fundament of perception
William Blake was greatly influenced by Swedenborg, and he knew of this volatility well, which is why he wrote, in his famous proverbs of hell, that eternity is in love with the productions of time
Blake believed that salvation was by beauty, that is, that the creation and the perception of beauty was the criteria of salvation, and he thought that Christ was an artist, and a greater god than YWHW, that YHWH created the world of moral law, and Christ liberated us from it
But backing up a bit, let us try to envision paradise. We can conceive of a world without discomfort, without fear, without suffering, without pain. This is perhaps childish, but it has an obvious appeal.
The problem with a painless heaven is that we know it must also be a desireless heaven, because desire is always a kind of pain. And we also, most likely, conceive of God as having desires. So suffering must be possible in heaven, because it is an attribute of the divine
This is a kind of reverse theodicy, because life without desire would be much impoverished relative to the lives that we lead now. Indeed the texture of our experience is primarily given to us by the nature of our desires, and by their satisfaction and frustration
Upon reflection we notice that all of the good things we cherish have been forged in hell. Without suffering, charity has no proper object. Without the intolerable, tolerance is meaningless. Without the possibility of failure, achievement has no value.
It is no contradiction for a thing to arise from its opposite. If hell is the wellspring of heaven, then why should we prefer heaven to hell? But no, no, no, let us try again.
Suppose heaven is a state of being which is not lacking in pain or suffering, but merely a better version of earth: everyone is immortal, everyone is moral, everyone is smart, and everyone is lucky. There is no disease and everyone is the best possible version of themselves.
This world may seem wonderful, but it’s scarcely better than before. Natural selection must be arrested in heaven because if it weren’t, then in our state of unlimited prosperity and trust, we would quickly evolve into rabbits: infinitely fecund, endlessly cheery, exceedingly dim.
Intelligence is a solution to a very particular problem: it is a tool we have evolved to play games of deception. Giraffes have long necks to eat leaves from high branches, and humans have big brains so they can lie and detect lies.
So there are no genetics in heaven. Is there carnal pleasure? Blasphemy! But does one raise a family? Could it be that in heaven we surrender this most sublime facet of our humanity? No one is ugly or mean, everyone is as good as everyone else, all your choices are meaningless.
Is there labor in heaven, and capital? Blasphemy again! And yet, what good is life without work and competition? For how many millennia would you like to live in idyll and luxury? And what of debauchery? In your laziness will you also know temperance?
And if there is no danger of death, if there are no enemies, then what meaning really can we find in life? In America we have learned how prosperity, paradoxically, can be a hardship of the same magnitude as privation, though the pain is subtler and slower
What remains then? Praising God, an endless righteous hedonism of spiritual ecstasy? So heaven is wireheading? Such a place seems much poorer compared to my life today.
And yet I am told I merely lack imagination, that heaven is beyond all possibility of human cognition. But as I see it, it’s either lobotomy through ecstasy, or through loss of the faculty for pain, or death masquerading as subsumption into the divine.
We know paradise is impossible, we know that attempts to “create god’s kingdom on earth” end in tears, but we cannot formulate a political or a religious worldview without an orientation towards an ideal.
There are those on the right who think the number of humans must greatly decrease, perhaps by war, disease, or other cataclysms, and this may be so, but I wish to conceive of a scalable social structure, which is maximally eugenic yet maximally humane.
I want to live in a society where freedom is granted only in proportion with demonstrated capacity for responsibility, where strength and intelligence and beauty are virtues, where choices are few but meaningful because they have important consequences.
Blake believed in a hierarchy of gods in heaven; theodicy is because our world was created by a lesser god. He thought the world of our lesser god was an illusion, and pain came from false perception.
I think if the doors of perception were cleansed, there would be nothing left.
I was talking about this with @gritcult the other day, what does it mean to be human? Obviously the question is meaningless if you view it from the wrong zoom level, but supposing the nature of Man could take a walk in mind space, what are the boundaries of his kingdom?
The human condition is tension—tension between what one will do and what one ought to do, tension between the animal and the machine, tension between society and self, tension between man and woman, tension between heart and head
Why do we feel these tensions, and why are they at the core of our humanity? One could imagine a man who never feels conflicted in the slightest, who from the depth of animal instinct eats and ruts and shits with no care for alternatives
One could similarly imagine a man who never feels conflicted in the slightest, who always performs his duty like a machine, with never a longing in his heart.
But on 2nd thought, in these cases, has one imagined a man?
Consider game theory: the search for a mathematical model that describes and predicts the behaviors of agents in competition. It describes human behavior because it is abstracted from human behavior.
We can conceive of perfected game theory, a fully correct and rarified model. Call it game theory prime, GTP. GTP is a mathematical model but from within humanity we experience it as emotional dramas, FIERY passion, like the radiance of the sun, the calculus of defect-cooperate.
Ontology is a shell game, and you're the mark; even so one can say that GTP "precedes" humanity. When water is liquid, what is ice? It's a phase shift, but the phase of ice "exists" in some sense, and it would not be so unreasonable to think of humanity as a phase shift of GTP
That’s all bullshit though. Aliens if they exist are also governed by game theory. Ravens deceive each other, they have a theory of mind. Any scenario with agents and scarce resources comes to this.
More than just the tensions in our inclinations, what makes us uniquely human? It’s likely that monkeys and other mammals have very similar qualia. The way that we transmit stories and the way they make us feel, is maybe a good candidate.
The truth is it can’t be any one thing. categories dissolve when you get too close to them. If you stare at it long enough you can make your own self seem to dissolve. Many categories aren’t peaks, they’re plateaus.
Attempts to rigorously define humanity always end up comically wrong, or pre- instead of de- scriptive, or not even wrong. There are a lot of things you can’t define, but you know it when you see it. Humanity is like that.
Whether the singularity happens at all is a crapshoot, I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m accelerationist in the sense that 1 day, may it be long in coming, there will be no more humans, and I’d rather leave behind a universe-devouring technogod than a huddle of shit-singing monkeys
Life is too “politicized” these days. I think most people sense this but it’s a frustration that goes nowhere, because the cultural language that creates it is incapable of formulating an escape from it.
Why is it that every mundane act takes on a political dimension? And why does the tension seem to eternally escalate, each day more heated than the last? Some possibilities, maybe all true:
Possibility: Real economic growth is dead and fiat money and propaganda hide this fact. Fighting gets nastier as the real pie gets smaller
Possibility: Weaponizing ethnic identity was such a powerful electoral strategy that we are now locked in an arms race of fighting over identity
Possibility: Internet hypercommunication creates political hyperconsciousness. The internet as a virtual plane has no objective content, and politics has grown to fill the space, a case of abyssal gigantism
Possibility: Internet hyper-voyeurism creates so much mimetic rivalry that the only outlet we have is constant low-grade scapegoating of everyone else, eternal edging, no climax
Possibility: globalism in the form of relatively huge ethnic displacement has moved people predisposed to clashing into closer-than-ever proximity of each other, escalating conflict
Possibility: evil cults that use perverted sexual practices as forms of hazing and social control have infiltrated the highest levels of political power and are successfully manipulating about 65% of Americans
Possibility: the political war is covertly just a sex war, women against men, and the rise of the political and financial power of women is the exact trend of increased politicization we are seeing
Possibility: the affordances into social engineering presented by technology have enabled corporations to pursue profit in ways that have had radically bad externalities, eg, pharma companies rent seeking by promoting transsexualism
Possibility: White people are genetically predisposed towards holiness signalling spirals and ethnomasochism and this is self harm induced by schizophrenic desire
Possibility: birth control and antibiotics and industrialized war have been far far more dysgenic than we ever imagined and politicizing everything is something idiots do and we’re all idiots (stop hitting yourself)
Possibility: environmental contaminants such as xenoestrogens and all the pharms we are pissing into the water supply have reached some threshold concentration and it’s making us all crazy, like lead poisoning but subtler
Possibility: leftism is just a name for the political entropy caused by the Machiavellian actions of mostly well-meaning people who need to manipulate the outcomes of consensus procedures in order to enact political control
When it comes to matters of politics, it’s increasingly obvious they no one has the right answer, and that they don’t even know what the right answer would look like, or if a right answer is possible, or what precisely the question is.
Political stances are based on vague feelings, in part because it’s impossible to predict the 2nd and 3rd order effects of your favorite political program. It is hard to escape the impression that everyone just chooses whatever stance flatters them personally
If any political position is “correct” it’s an accident because there is no correct unless there is a specific and well-defined goal. Goal: beat the enemy. Goal: stop feeling so alone. Goal: figure out how to believe in a goal
In the philosophy of Sartre, the full conscious awareness of the implication of having true freedom is called Nausea. Freedom is another word for the state of having no intrinsic purpose.
You’ve heard this schtick many times: instead of “freedom from what” you should be asking “freedom FOR what”—But in truth the state of freedom itself is unbearable, and the idea that we could satisfy our need for purpose with a petty goal of our own devising is a tragic punchline
You think you want freedom? Freedom isn’t a gift, it’s a curse. No I’m sorry I’m supposed to say it is what you make of it through the strength of your own illimitable will. Buy my online seminar course on Eldritch Self Actualization for $997
The way to decrease politicization is to decrease political freedom. Democratic life forces you to be a political being, but it doesn’t give you the good incentives of an owner, because if everyone is an owner then no one is
Every act becomes a political act because if it isn’t, if you let your guard down for a second, someone else will exploit the resource that you both own a stake in through democracy. This is the tragedy of the commons. You know it, of course
This is in fact the trick employed by nationalisms of all flavors, and the source of their appeal. Nationalism promises us an escape from politicization by revoking our political freedom by homogenizing the body politic
The only effective civic nationalism would be one that ruthlessly crushed all cultural difference across different ethnic groups, such as the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs. This comes at a great cost
Ethnic nationalism fails as soon as people of the same race notice they there are yet sub-ethnies within their chosen racial delineation. We already see this when white nationalists start breaking out their taxonomies of white people
In the end nationalism doesn’t even solve any conflict, it only externalizes it. If you align the interior of your country on a single axis, you invariably align them against some outside enemy
Consider the warrior; in times of peace, he makes war against himself. In fact there may be no more galvanizing engine of purpose than to have a fearsome enemy. Life without conflict is pointless
Hegel: self-certainty comes from superceding [this] other: in order that this suppression can take place, there must be this other. Or in Donne’s poetry, ‘thou wilt lose the style of conqueror, if I, thy conquest, perish by thy hate'.
The fervent dissident longs for his persecutor. The militant atheist depends on the church for his identity. The radical communist would be lost without capitalist society
We should be grateful for enemies. Bless him that curse you. Why? The vicissitudes of social consciousness are the evolutionary pressure that creates intelligence. Ravens evolved a theory of mind so they could lie to other ravens
You long for peace? You long for death. It would be better to fight forever than to win forever
Pickup artistry is a religion.
I know, I know, I call everything a religion. But when I say this word, religion, I mean there are certain affordances in the human psyche, and they are filled by memetic egregores, and when they are empty, they long to be filled
Pickup artistry (hereafter, PUA) is a religion, and in spite of its relative youth, it is quite a sophisticated one. I mean no offense to men who subscribe to these views when I analyze them. There are people who think “X is a religion” is a criticism. Wrong
I have identified six major components of religious memeplexes. There are other, lesser components. To review, they are: eschatology, false consciousness, religious ecstasy, dietary taboo, a nemesis, and evangelism. PUA has all of these component
False consciousness: before you learned of the Venusian arts, you were an average frustrated chump. Now, using my FIELD TESTED system and techniques, you can become ALPHA and will be able to get as many beautiful women as you want
Eschatology: the West is in decline, have you heard of Spengler? Don’t waste your time trying to fix it. I’ll be poolside, enjoying the decline by using game to get as many flags as possible
Nemesis: feminism, also women, also the feminine imperative, In many ways this is a mirror of feminist ideas that all men oppress all women by nature of their existence, though with one critical distinction: the full power of the law is on women’s side
Religious ecstasy: the ecstasy of the flesh is the only ecstasy that PUA needs, but it actually promises an even higher form of enlightenment, a state of “abundance” in which a man is finally free of his psychological dependency on the comforts of women
Dietary taboos: don’t eat carbs, they make you fat. No sugar! Get strong and lean and above all buy all these supplements I am selling. (Note: low carb/high protein diets are good. That an is sacralized is orthogonal to its value)
Evangelism: most PUA evangelism happens over the internet through blogs, tweets, books, and forums. By formulating teachings in a way that are unacceptable to police society, they make themselves appealing to the alienated
It’s fascinating to see religious practices spring up out of the void, to fill the void left by the collapse of Christianity. I think that feminism, which was in many ways an ideology built around the desire to destroy Christianity, also created the conditions that created PUA
There is a certain madness one feels, also, when he walks through a big city, the sheer volume of beautiful young women surrounding him. The desire to possess all of them, every single one, to drown in a sea of nubility; the waves and storms weather the mind
PUA is a masculine religion, only masculine, it can accept no female converts, because its impetus is man’s cosmic loneliness, which many men, especially young men, think they can cure with a woman
There is something of Buddhism in PUA, because although it promises women, it teaches independence from women, or more specifically, transcendence of desire. Your problem, it says, is that you have idolized women, but through mastery you will be free of the pain of desire.
PUA has ritualized forms of practice. Cold approaches and “day game” can be very structured, having scripts and even specific words that are taught to the initiate. Like a mantra, like a prayer, the PUA prays to his god by reciting a pickup line
A young woman is an avatar of god (Woman), and by learning to speak his prayers in the appropriate way, god may grant the PUA his desire for ecstasy
Almost by definition, a pickup artist is a man who struggles with women, who is bad at talking to women and relating to them sexually. They acknowledge this, and mythologize the rare man who was born without these troubles. He is called a “natural”
The approach is traumatic for the practitioner, especially at first. The lore of the approach, the fear, and the confrontation with with fear, stimulate spiritual growth
If you are critical of pickup artistry, you will find that men who follow it can become very upset or defensive. This is because you have attacked something sacred to them, which is not a promiscuous lifestyle, but rather, their hope for salvation
In fact I suspect many of the men who follow these beliefs are relatively celibate, and they consume the literature and the spectacle of pickup artistry as one would consume any devotional: passively, and to nourish the spirit. But most would begrudge them that
In the evolution of the manospherian faith, the emphasis has changed from routines and magic spells to weightlifting and financial success. This is natural, and good, but still we find vestiges of the older forms
I am hardly the first to observe that there is a certain natural gradient from masculism as anti-feminism to masculism as reactionary consciousness.
I have heard many on the right express a need for a new religion, but it will be nearly impossible to fashion one from whole cloth. We must use the building blocks that we have around us.
We must pull from an already living, evolving memeplex, and shape it the way that any priest shapes the scriptures. The goal of any incipient religion is to be the next Tlön
A key insight for me has been to understand ideology—religion, philosophy, and politics—in terms of biological metaphors. When I say “memetics,” this is what I mean. Ideas are an emergent layer on top of humans, related the way that biology is related to chemistry
No analogy is perfect and we risk confusion if we extend the metaphor too far. E.g., biological entities do not form symbiotic relationships with chemicals, but humans do something approaching symbiosis with ideas
On the other hand, concepts like mimetic desire are quite like chemical reactions from the meme’s perspective
Indeed, Girard’s understanding of desire and sacrifice may be the best model we have for imagining a memeplex as a sociological auto-catalytic loop
A memeplex is as real as any physical object. Consider a knife blade, which is made of atoms. In order to be sharp, the atoms must be arranged in a particular way. No atom is sharp,
But the knife is. Sharpness is as real as the atoms, but it is “virtual”
Sharpness is a property, and it entails a capacity to cut. Cutting is an event, which comes in a pair with “being cut,” i.e., another object must have the complementary capacity.
Even if it never happens, the knife has the capacity to cut, and the capacity is as real as the property of sharpness, which is as real as the object “knife”, which is as real as it’s atoms.
If two objects have complementary capacities, they may together exhibit a tendency, which is the likelihood that capacities will be realized in the form of an event. But all of these things “exist” even if the event in question never “happens”
A philosopher’s ontological commitment should be to the objective existence of this structure and not to the possibilities themselves, the structure of the space of possibilities comprised by an entity’s tendencies and capacities.
Intelligence, in the abstract, is the ability to navigate possibility space, pursuant to a specific goal.
But where does a goal originate?
An autocatalytic loop is also an autotelic loop. In the words of Douglas Adams, anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen, happens again. Self-justification is the only possible fount of purpose and meaning
At the most atomic layer, all goals, all striving, all desires spring from auto-catalysis. As a necessary criteria for all other desiring, the imperative to persist forms behavior gradients and complex new desires emerge
The consequence of this is that old rationalist chestnut, organisms are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers, and desires that incidentally contribute to auto-catalysis can become irrevocable features of the mental landscape; psychology as geology
We are teleological beings: we understand everything in terms of telos, can’t not do it, it’s baked in, it’s the pareidolia of ontology, it cannot be exorcised. This kind of thinking is perhaps tasteless, but it is also inevitable
A parasite feeds off of a host, but sometimes over generations, a parasite can learn to use its intimate knowledge (map of possibility space) of its host for the benefit of both. The mechanism by which a parasite becomes a symbiote is simultaneous replication
When the replication of the parasite becomes inextricable from the replication of the host, the parasite has to pay rent.
To see this in action in the domain of memes, consider Shakerism. This noxious sect of Quakerism added celibacy to their practice. The meme could spread but it retarded human reproduction, so it destroyed its host population
Better versions of Christianity emphasized fecundity and fostered norms of industriousness. Religion that develops man upwards will not stop with man.
There is maybe no clearer indicator that a memeplex is parasitic and hostile than antifecundity, as for example in the feminism of Donna Haraway, who advises us to make friends instead of babies
Indeed the slogan “make kith not kin” whether it finds us through shakerism, feminism, or any other queer ideology, if taken to its logical conclusion, would end humanity in one generation
Pine tree crew holla. If you really want to save Gaia, chop off your dick, and everyone else’s. Anything that inhibits capital formation is your friend. Communists are the real eco-fascists because their ideals are antithetical to prosperity and industry.
The best political compass has only one axis, it’s up to the technocapital singularity (and then the stars!) or else down into dust and minerals.
On the down vector, green politics, equality, redistribution of wealth, human rights, queer theory, communism, humanism, universalism
On the up vector, singularity, capital, arms races, fragmentation, technology, nuclear families, localism, the stars
If you would bind Man to the earth, then worship Man. There is no more perfectly humanist claim than the below:
A protest sign: "Billion$ for space, pennies for the hungry!"
If we can suppress our intelligence enough, then we can all go back to being hunter gatherers, romantically killing each other for mates and meat, until a cosmological or geological event sends us back to dust
If we can suppress our horror and our humanity enough, then we (well, some of us) can build a ramp to the stars, and like John the Baptist, prepare the way for something much greater than ourselves...
Lord help me, let’s talk about IQ.
IQ stands for “the intelligence question”, and it refers in far right circles to the dilemma of what to do with all the smart people
It has long been noticed around these parts that IQ is the one and only robust, empirical discovery of psychological science, so it is natural that psychologists spend all of their time trying to discredit it
I cannot take credit for the above. IQ, as YOU well know, my friends, is a number derived from a kind of math test, which purports to measure intelligence. There are many things wrong with this
The first thing we note is that IQ is not exact. It does not precisely what it claims to, although it seems to be good enough for government work
Despite the many objections, we know that it correlates with many good life outcomes, such as earning potential, and that it is also associated with height, and beauty, and other attributes one ought not to name
And there is a certain kind of person who will tell you, oh, it doesn’t mean anything because it is not a perfect fit to intelligence. There are people who do not score well on these tests who are moral, and smart, and successful. We all agree
But it seems to me that while the substance of the objection to IQ measurement is always “it’s not accurate enough”, the true objection is always, “it’s far too accurate”
Forget about IQ; suppose I came out with a test for a metric called Z, and it suffered from none of the problems of IQ. People with high Z were always successful, people with low Z were always criminally stupid. Do we imagine even for a moment that IQ detractors would embrace Z?
Of course not! In fact it one could develop such a metric as Z, it would be outlawed immediately, in fact even its existence would be suppressed, lest the layman should discover it. Quite possibly this has already happened
The truth is that most people do not want a clear cut way to measure the value of a person. The fact that money is in some way a proxy of a man’s value already makes most people deeply uncomfortable. They don’t want this knowledge to exist, not even theoretically. Why?
It is not merely that such knowledge, whether by way of money or IQ or some hypothetical Z, would puncture their pretty egalitarian pretensions, though it would of course do that.
It is that in the course of being measured, one inevitably learns to assign a number to THEIR OWN worth as a person, and there is nothing more disconcerting or discomforting than empirical knowledge of self
Society is built on pleasant lies and polite fictions. It is necessary to pretend at all times that we are not smelly, sadistic, bloodthirsty apes who are an evolutionary hair’s breadth away from throwing our literal feces at each other
One of the most important lies in society is the ability to pretend that none of our friends is any better than us, nor any of our enemies.
As we visit our relatives this holiday season it is vitally important to act as if your high and low achieving relatives equally loved by you. This is known as dignity
Human relations are built on dignity; it is a vital atom of society and any psychometric which creates a mapping from human to number is a dignity shredder. Only someone as smart and as stupid as an IQ scientist could think otherwise
Suppose we take all of the objections to IQ and we grant them. It’s inaccurate, there are other measures of quality that it misses, etc. Why, then, would it be wrong to allow corporations to use IQ tests to screen potential hires?
Corporations do many foolish things, and these things create market opportunities for their competitors. If IQ is such a worthless measure as they say, then any company that tries to use it would be leaving money on the table, and a shrewd investor would find a way to collect it
No one actually believes that their objections to IQ are all that substantial. What the thought experiment of Z reveals is that, quite the opposite, there is nothing that terrifies a certain kind of person more than looking in the mirror
It can feel, in these anarcho-tyrannical times, as if no one has any respect for the rule of law. But there is one class of law that is deeply, deeply respected by the spirit of our age, and that is the class of law that suppresses excellence
As I have said before, my political aims, and the aims of my fellow travelers, transcend such a petty thing as mere “policy”, though there are a great many policies we could suggest.
Chief among such political ambitions would be to repeal all laws that attempt to equalize mankind by suppressing or counterbalancing excellence in the name of equality
We do not desire an end of human dignity; and if IQ were rendered by your smart glasses as a floating number over your head, dignity would surely end. But idiots have a way of advertising their idiocy even without such extreme measures
Ironically it is not the reactionary who must struggle not to equate human worth to mere intelligence; we know fully that a person may be an idiot and also a cherished friend. It is those who wish to conceal the truth about intelligence who conflate it with moral worth
And yes, if you missed my joke on the thread head, you failed the iq test
The stakes on right wing twitter are so abysmally low. I know that you know this. First prize is some amazon POD book sales. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is literally YOU'RE FIRED
The trajectory of the average twitter user involves finding a clan and then picking fights with people in neighboring clans. The only other game in town is posting tits, your own or someone else's. If you're here, you're here to argue
But it turns out that words like “tribe” and “clan” are dangerously misleading; the borders are unbearably porous; there are no barriers to entry and no one can really kick anyone out.
There are clusters of people but it's mostly informal and ultimately Hobbesian. All attempts at gatekeeping fail because all of you are the gatekeepers, my friends. Merely beholding the fruits of this tree should be enough to sour you on populism forever
You might pretend to hate the drama but the drama is most of the substance, there are only degrees of subtlety. Name-calling is prole, subtweeting is bougie, 30 tweet threads each at the character limit that attack your opponent's core philosophical axioms are aristocratic
If you make enough sound and fury, you become something strange indeed: a literary character in an unfolding novel that perhaps thousands of people will read. You must realize that the character is not you, even if you have the same name
From outside it looks like there is some kind of, dare we say, "movement"--but there is no movement because no one, not even BAP, can give you anything besides knowledge, and knowledge isn't the currency of a movement, thinking this is one of the ways democracy makes you stupid
Responsibility--ownership--is the currency of a movement; it's something that's hard to give and hard to revoke, and it's more of a burden than a privilege. This is what every communist in the world doesn't understand about power, it's why their thoughts are so childish
All the little dumb alliances you form are thin and transient, and they only become meaningful once you take them out of virtual space. That's why there is something fundamentally insincere about wearing your real identity as your mask
You are using the people who are bigger than you as springboards to try to grow bigger yourself, and using the people who are smaller than you as interesting sources of drama.
But this is the treachery of the self against the self: You will convince yourself that you aren't playing any games, you're just acting authentically according to your ideals. I promise these are the same
What you have isn't a movement, movements have organizers and demands and credible threats and--I cannot stress this enough-- backing by a faction of elites in an intra-elite war by proxy. What you have is, at best, a Schelling point
As with any other territory, a Schelling point can be captured or lost. The cheapest Schelling point is a label like “alt-right” or “groyper”. Labels are unstable; your enemy controls the memetic commons and it is trivially easy for them to poison your label.
Hillary calling out the alt right in 2016 was not a victory, (is a yellow arm badge a victory?) yet you keep falling into this trap over and over, because you crave a commodified identity but also you (quite rationally) don't want to change.
Rootless identity signifiers are like vaporware ICOs but worse. The label is cheap, everyone buys it, the demand surges, the value appears to skyrocket, someone realizes it's pyrrhic, everyone capitulates, and then you’re left holding a bag, I have watched this so many times
Neoreactionary, Accelerationist, AltRight, FrogTwitter, Groyper, :pinetree:, Integralist, YangGang (briefly) -- How did they ever think that "securing the bag" was good? Holding a bag means the coins inside it are worthless, I admire the wit of whoever coined that
Anyway there is a reliable method to build clout in any of these hypertribes -- the prefix "hyper" here signifies that the object it modifies feels "more real than real", a copy of a copy with no original, its salient features flanderized --
Remember, the hypertribe orbits a Schelling point, and both insiders and outsiders mistake the participants for some kind of coalition, when in fact they are insects, buzzing around a flame
In any assemblage of people, there exists an overton window. The overton window is not monolithic, it is a property of every group, it is the limits of acceptable discourse within that group. The first thing you do is locate those boundaries
The second thing you do is is take up a position on the far edge of the overton window, but still firmly inside it, and vigorously denounce the people near the other edge. You aren't doing this to shift the window, you are simply trying to discover a new Schelling point.
Once you have your new Schelling point, congratulations, you are its epicenter, clout ensues. Your previously quasi-harmonious hypertribe is now polarized in two, and you may pick up adjacents who didn't like the old boundaries but who find the new ones to be acceptable
The old Schelling point disintegrates, the people coalesce around new ones and we all resent each other a little more. I'm not above it at all, and I really despise the sort of aloof loser who chooses to barge into the latrine and complain of its odor. What did you expect?
One some level we all want the same thing. We want the contemptible idiots saying the things we can't stand to SHUT. UP. JUST SHUT UP. But we know they never will and talking back is how we cope.
And I'm also here to tell you that you don't really want that, that if you keep picking the same fight with the same person over and over, then there's something about that fight that you really enjoy, and part of what you enjoy is telling other people how much you hate it.
You talk about "unity" or "entryists" as if you have something of value to protect, but with a few exceptions, “our side” has built precisely nothing, our "movement" is a bowel movement, hence the high regard of the shit poster
And notice that I’m doing here exactly the thing I described, renouncing the far ingroup, of course I am; I didn’t make the rules of this game, I just have a condition that makes me all too aware of them
We are constantly tempted to believe this ideology shredder is a good machine that will one day produce the fabled ultimate schelling point that cannot be poisoned that will overpower our enemies forever.
But my shtick is painful self awareness and harmful perception, so check it. To us who seethe with rage against the pieties of our age, this is OUR bread/circus, we chose this venue BECAUSE it has lions, and the only accomplishment is how long you can go without getting eaten
At the risk of being entirely too self absorbed, some musings on having ten thousand followers. Twitter is clearly a video game, and for a certain type of person (monomaniacal min-maxers; me) there is a kind of fixation or compulsion to make numbers bigger
There is a curious effect when one thinks in terms of numeric milestones, wherein goalposts become objects of obsession, and then the moment they are reached, apathy. As Nietzsche said, the moment he reaches his goal, he transcends it
Of course the special magic of twitter is that the game loop consists of wrangling engagements out of other actual people. Some play for approval, others for outrage
Either way, it’s exactly as pointless as any other multiplayer game. One of the best mini-games is mocking people who take it too seriously, which isn’t to say that I’ve never gotten caught up
The strategy to get big on twitter is to get noticed by bigger accounts than you and say the kinds of things they are likely to retweet.
However many followers you have, write to the biggest accounts that follow you. Doing this intentionally is inauthentic, of course. Then again, if a big account follows me I will often write a thread that I think will interest them, simply out of a desire to communicate
Size is relative, of course. 10k, paltry! Of course anons are playing a different game from people who are real life famous. Our brains can’t really process what it means to send a message to ten thousand people, let alone half a million.
And only losers care about how many followers they have, ha! Said the small account. I can easily imagine how people might counter signal this thread. Imagine caring this much etc.
if you want to read a strategy guide to twitter, I suggest an old book that was popular when boomers were young called “games people play”. Some of the language is unfortunate given our linguistic drift since then. But don’t think of it as true, think of it as a model
In general, don’t think of any of your beliefs as true, always think of them as models. Maintaining a level of removal will help you to avoid becoming dogmatic
The counter-argument to that is that people who remain too detached from their ideas lack passion and inner fire. Do you want to be like the moon, staring at the world with cold eyes, making no light of your own?
Many very smart and knowledgeable people either haven’t played the twitter game for long, or have little interest in playing it, so you should never use follower count as a proxy for anything like correctness
What follower count does signify is an ability to consistently say things that others feel inclined to signal boost. In other words it signals an ability to win a series of tiny, iterated popularity contests
Growing your account in this way has a cost. When I started I used to say things that were alienating to the many, Well-received by the few. But ten thousand people won’t listen to you if you attack their identity
So my truth has become ever more esoteric, never consciously, well, one or two times. They say big accounts descend into platitudes. It should be obvious why.
The ability to win small, iterated popularity contests is the ability to let your strong opinions hide between words. As soon as a monad becomes a dyad, politics come into the mix
What is this dark and twisted labyrinth in which we find ourselves? You are in a garden of forking paths, all alike.
I often wonder what magic compels someone else to follow someone else, don’t you? It’s not merely a useful insight, it’s a sense that the person knows something you don’t, and you hope that with repeated exposures, you will learn his secret
Or maybe you see that person you follow as a friend, and want to be seen as associating with him, or you want your reputation to bolster his, or he made you laugh, or he has the social sanction of your friends... regardless, I thank you joining me on this journey
A thread of one-liners
The idea that ugly people have inner beauty is largely a myth
Spiritual beauty and physical beauty are related and mutually reinforcing
Sjws make themselves ugly because they have no idea how to be beautiful
Beauty is not nearly as subjective as you think
The children of sex-hating Christians became sex-hating sjws, same drama, different window dressing
Nearly every young woman is beautiful if she isn’t fat, and grows out her hair
Women only love you when they know you don’t need their love
I have never met an energetic fat person. Lazy body, lazy mind
The demonization of cigarette smoking is at least partly the cause of the obesity epidemic.
The energy you put into addiction has to go somewhere. You can’t break an addiction, only replace it
Vanity is as fine a motivation as any to work hard for personal gain
You obsess over moral philosophy because you have no strong moral convictions
Deep in your bowels you know right from wrong
The most insufferable people are those who are unaware of the treachery of the self against the self
Most of our behaviors are modeled after the actions of people around us
If you could be friends with a great warrior or scholar you would find it much easier to be those things
Liberalism hurts us most by defaming all positive examples
The number of people in the world guarantees a high level of redundancy
Knowing you’re redundant is unbearable. Everyone finds a lie to help them feel unique
The end of the world will not look the way you expect. Every generation thinks the world will end in their lifetime
The technocapital singularity, if it happens, won’t save you from yourself
The Chinese won’t save you from the baizuo, western man
When you read a complicated literary work, you are also reading yourself
Harry Potter is the worst thing that ever happened to the literate people of the West
Social science is secular theology.
It’s even easier to lie with numbers than with words
Many people use the identity “nerd” to pretend to be a scientist, but they are only hermit crabs, stealing a discarded shell
It’s amazing what you will do when a crowd cheers for you to do it
Everyone is tempted to lie to impress others, unless they think honesty will score them more points
The more people pay attention to you, the less you can say
We evolved to be discontent. It’s adaptive
The contrarian, upon finding a group of people who share his ideas, feels compelled to attack them
Stop pretending you’ve read so many books that you haven’t. A chapter, an introduction, a summary, a Wikipedia article don’t count
The condition of man is to be a little too obsessed with novelty, to our detriment
Beliefs about things you can’t see or touch are fashion
Philosophy is a game with no objective
Thesis: Obama
Antithesis: Trump
Synthesis: Kanye
Baudrillard perfectly captured the feeling of modernity when he referred to our state of affairs as “after the orgy” we have seen liberation in every sphere: political, sexual, and social. Women, Art, unconscious drives—all are free! Baudrillard’s question is: what now?
Baudrillard noticed, before any reactionary blogger uttered such a critique, that we are now caught in a perpetual simulation and re-enactment of the revolutionary liberation that has long passed
When younger people resent “the boomers” one gets the sense that what they resent most of all is that they have MISSED the orgy, and now they can’t discern their parents from the crowd.
After the orgy comes the gender war. I do not call it the sex war because let’s bite a bullet, gender is only mostly correlated with sex, and lefty males are spiritual women, and THEY KNOW IT which is why they are so sympathetic to gender “theory”
Since the dawn of agriculture at least—female historians of both sexes tell us—we have been living in Men’s world, where women were brutally subjugated by men. Women’s liberation is the total reversal of this, a vengeful subjugation of men. This is dubious but let’s lean into it
And all around us we see women are exceeding men along most every KPI. Better performance in school, better higher income on average, and an endless litany of female encouragement and male denigration: throw rocks at men! The future is female!
And all around us we see women are exceeding men along most every KPI. Better performance in school, better higher income on average, and an endless litany of female encouragement and male denigration: throw rocks at men! The future is female!
What does women’s world look like? Where men are concerned, women have two conflicting desires. The exoteric desire is the will to emasculate, and the esoteric desire is the will for a man to evade emasculation, and overpower her, but only on her terms. And after the orgy...
A man is dangerous, a phallus is a threat, and men must be defanged by any means available. This is a woman’s deliberate or emergent strategy. A woman plays out this same drama at the level of her individual relationships as well as at societal scale
When a man is in a sexual mindset, he is different person to his sober, rational self. We all know the feeling of a violent animal consciousness overriding all other thoughts. Analogously, what man becomes when aroused, woman desires
There are even now societies where labor and capital are exclusively the domain of women. It is impolite to name these places. In such a place, men become wholly products of sexual selection. A peacock is hindered by its tail; sexually overselected men become stupid and thuggish
The tragedy is that such men believe themselves to be superior, when in fact their superiority is that of the elephant seal, fat harem slugs whose extreme polygyny consumes them. High rates of polygyny indicate sexual overselection of males
The more political and financial power we grant to women, the more stable our society becomes, because women are risk averse. The problem is that, in an entropic world, stability is a gradual decline.
In our stable and stably entropic women’s world, we can only find sexual success by embodying women’s esoteric desire. World star is to humans what David Attenborough is to the bird of paradise. Acts of petty aggression are male sexual displays
Many of the things you call “alpha” are also dysgenic. If women think something is “toxic masculinity” you can bet two things: it’s dyscivic and it turns them on. There are eucivic alpha traits but they are expensive and low ROI to the individual
In the absence of existential risks to survival, such as starvation, evolution is driven entirely by sexual selection. The existence and the caprice of the sexual market are precisely the eclipsing of x-risk selection by sexual selection
And the horror is that you have no choice. by analogy, birds have to put on these clowny displays because they have no penises and their anatomical contingencies are such that they cannot hold their females down and subdue them.
If you want to slake your overpowering thirst, you have no choice to be “alpha”. Nothing I could say would change the utility of alpha behavior. Sexual strategy is immoral and condemning alpha behaviors is usually cope. Let’s be honest about where we’re heading, that’s all
When I raise these points I am inevitably beset by both feminist liberationists and male “elephant seal maximalists” to tell me that I only think this way because I can’t get laid.
It’s fitting that the Baudrillardian orgy has plunged us into a world of sexual horror. I think it is a fatal indictment of all our philosophies and especially our religions that they could not prevent—and perhaps even birthed—these hideous sexual norms that encompass us
The horror of the sexual market is erotic horror, which is body horror, which derives from the fear of what we ourselves will become, reforged by womens’ schizophrenic desire
When the definitive struggle of a man’s life is against nature herself, then women’s desire is.l chained, because she depends on a man for survival. A world of existential threats is mens’ world, and in men’s world, women are shaped by sexual selection according to male desire
When man has tamed nature, or when nature is gentle with him, man’s definitive struggle becomes a sexual struggle, and the world becomes women’s world, and nature passes the mantle of selection pressure to her daughter
You can see all the tension between male and female virtue in this single photograph. 100% accurate litmus test for whether you are spiritually male or female: do you agree with this woman? [Billion$ for Space, Pennies for the Hungry]
To be sure, the violence and the callousness of nature is also a kind of hell, maybe even a worse hell, certainly a less comfortable hell. I too enjoy food pellets and virtual reality escapism
You may think compassion is a virtue, and cruelty is a vice, but in fact each tiny act of compassion moves us deeper into women’s world, until something snaps, and mens’ world reasserts itself in fire and blood. My friends, however bad it is, we still have so much farther to fall
It's been several months since I was the object of anyone's online hatred. I find it edifying; once it was the exclusive privilege of kings and nobles to be hated by a mob, but now even someone as common as I can experience it
Truly we are living in an age of luxury!
I like to consider these things at the personal level. Someone sends out a tweet you dislike. What is the motivation of a person who quote retweets it out of anger? What causes that anger?
Most recently I said, at length, "some people lack inner life". I didn't say they weren't worthy of moral consideration. I didn't say anyone, specifically, lacked inner life. And yet many people felt the need to hurl insults at me in response. I don't mind, they did not sting
Why would you attack a man who makes a general statement?
A man defends himself when he feels attacked;
A man feels attacked by general statement when it stings him;
it stings him because a voice was given to a fear that he has about himself
When you insult someone you project, it's instinctive, you accuse someone else of the thing that you would hate to be accused of. The weapon we use against others is the weapon we ourselves fear.
Thus when a man insults your maturity, condescending to you as if he is older and wiser, it is because he fears he is insufficiently adult-like. When you submit to the humiliations of liberal society in your mind, it's easy to rationalize this as "growing up"
If a man says to a woman, "you whore", it is because he detests the promiscuous desires in his own heart. We all remember Sara Jeong's barely disguised lust for white men that she so brazenly put on display in her twitter history
If a man insults your intelligence or rationality, you can be sure he considers himself a brain, and his deepest insecurity is that others will discover the failings of his intellect. If a man calls you a nerd, it's because he fears he is a nerd.
If someone acts indignant over your words, "everyone already knew that! what a waste of time and ink!" It's because you told him something he didn't know, and he's trying to save face.
People really aren't that complicated; they are dying to tell you all about themselves. So why are so many people offended by the NPC meme? When an accusation has no truth in it, we ignore it comfortably.
Postscript; if you think “fascist” is a knock down insult it’s because you desire to control others and you feel guilty about it. Embrace your innate need for hierarchy, liberal, life with less cognitive dissonance is grand
If you are one of those with the good taste to follow me, then I know you have already learned the lessons of this piece. And yet, I encourage you to read it, if only think, “there go I, but for the grace of God.”
Sanitation could have saved them, and spiritual sanitation is yet available. If this reaches even one more feminist young man and wakes him up, I want that, not for his sake, but for mine; I want to live in a future where normies feel about Dworkin the way they feel about Hitler
Let’s take a little break, let’s have some lighter fare; video games.
But first, my brethren, let us pray:
Oh lord, if it means having a house and a steady job and 2.5 kids in a heteropatriarchally normative society, then please please please turn me into an NPC
I made free to play mobile games professionally for a number of years, and as a child I did almost nothing but game. These are my qualifications. I didn’t write this out of antipathy to gamers, I was only able to write it because I used to be one
Despite no one anywhere being able to offer a cogent definition of art, no other medium of entertainment struggles with this question the way games do: Are video games art?
Related question: is golf a sport? Is cocaine?
Gamers have a strong interest in an affirmative answer to this question: if games are art then they are patrons of art. If not, then they are junkies, and game developers are dealers
In the old days games used to be simple: the technical limitations of hardware forced them to be small and economical, and the constraints were freeing.
The atom of game design is called a mechanic, and mechanics are combined to form loops, and loops are layered and interleaved to create a experiences
A mechanic is a point of tension, it is an action whose outcome is mediated by player input. The representation of the player on the screen is called an avatar, and the mechanic is the relationship between the input, the behavior of the avatar, and the achievement of a goal
When you engage in a mechanic it feeds into another mechanic, and that mechanic feeds back into the first one, each modulating goal-achievement in the other. This is called a loop
There are short loops and long loops, and loops of loops that form meta-loops, which are called metagames. Completing a full loop at any level is it’s own reward, however, game designers fill their loops with ornamentation, and this is another type of reward
When you complete a loop, it increments a counter. This can take many forms: increased “stats”, new “equipment”, increased availability of novel loops. The logic of the dispensation of rewards is called the reward schedule
The reward schedule contains two kinds of rewards, fixed and random. The fixed ones are known in advance and they give structure to progression. The random ones are semi-unpredictable and they are a promise of a series of delightful surprises
Research has demonstrated that random reward schedules are extremely compelling in all arenas of human behavior and comprise much of the surface area of addiction. They are the reason you can’t get that BPD girl out of your head.
The evolution of game design is the marriage of art and science in the church of addictive compulsion.
The aesthetic qualities of games are a substantial part of their appeal, but they are ultimately window dressing.
However, with the rise of ugly and dehumanizing art in high culture, games are one of the last bastions of beautiful representational art
At the same time some people use games as a medium for storytelling, but the attempt to sew a compelling narrative to a psychedelic compulsion factory always results in the debasement of the former.
Moore’s law gave JRPGs poison to drink, and they did not die, but degenerated into anime
If we entertain for a moment the fantasy of game designer as auteur, then the art of games is the morphology of psychic addiction, and its telos is the Entertainment in Infinite Jest.
The reason that games falter as a storytelling medium is that they place you personally as the protagonist, and the story goal of putting you in someone else’s head fights with the game goal of trapping you in your own
Many game developers feel personally bad about this. I know because they are my friends and I have talked to them. Any decent f2p designer has read Cialdini and addicted by design and similar books and they all know what they are doing and most of them have a heart
Comics, fantasy novels and TV serials and are structured like games, the way they have scarce unpredictable side characters and steady low-level plots and bigger meta-plots. They did this before games but the explosion of vidya intensified it
Gamification is when real life goals are dressed in the iconography of video game progression: it’s only really effective with a certain type of fixating, min-maxing personality. Everyone else gets to live with it, the revenge of the nerds
Goodhart’s law states that when a proxy of success is used as a target for optimization, the proxy ceases to correlate with success. Gamification is like this, and it’s incredibly condescending, and if the whole world gets gamified we deserve it
The indy game scene is a little different to the mainstream scene: they very much want to play the role of auteur, and so they pour much careful attention and even love into their projects, but they can never transcend the nature of video games
Some designers, aware of this, try to craft brutal and un-fun mechanics, like a chef who makes a revolting dish and claims that food-as-art must break free from the chains of “good flavor” in order to make a statement about the human condition
Ultimately on the question of “are games art?”, there is much art that can go into them, and they can be artful, and yet the overall product is not uplifting to the human spirit. Perhaps much that is called art fails by this metric. Acceptable
Afterword: If you’re trying to break a video game addiction, realize that it is much easier to replace an addiction than to break one. All that energy has to go somewhere. I suggest the gym.
Actually the closest to art that a game has ever come is Journey by Jenova Chen, but what does Braid actually teach you that you couldn’t get faster and better by reading a short story like The Immortals by Borges?
Journey is interesting precisely because a lot of gamers didn’t get it, because it has very minimal stimulus-response loops. Instead it invites you to take a contemplative walk through a series of ancient abandoned places. You could argue that it fails as a game for this reason
Related thread:
Video games are a form of passification much more powerful than anything imagined prior- even DFW's "entertainment" device in Infinite Jest is based on Television & Drugs, which are only the nascent form of vidya's totalitarian control over brain-circuit reward systems.
Porn, Vidya, etc are the only reasons why Millenials & their kin have been able to accept the radical decline in living standards that they have faced. Absolutely fine with animal-serfdom if it comes with an on-demand pleasure button that never stops frying their brains.
Video games are pure techne without art- Debord & the frenchies bemoaned the "spectacle" of electrified media, but they're whining reads as paltriness to me these days- there were never any "Television rehab clinics" (tho there should have been).
Game criticism is based on mechanics- does it work, are there few obstacles to frying my synapses, will it fry my synapses for an ideally infinite amount of time, etc. The ideal game is one that, like WoW, replaces people's interest in reality- as an opiate tends to.
Imagine if there was a site that reviewed fentanyl patches called "Junkie Spot"- its reviews would have similar criteria to a game reviewer's- "will this TIDE ME OVER until an even better patch comes out?"
Art-as-such has already exhausted all of its possible forms over a century ago. There has been nothing novel since Finnegans Wake & the Dadaists etc. Pop culture is a deluge of repackaged romanticism, "realism," etc. Tech has "progressed" but Art has reclined into pre-literacy.
Every innovation in gaming is just the exploitation of new technology- "better graphics" is about the only story of progression that can be told of vidya, new genres are merely reflections of new tech applied to games. Everyone awaits VR/AR for the next pleasure button update.
Pewdiepie in a recent video said that reading has been more satisfying than gaming for him- this is true of anyone who really reads. Contact with Actual Art renders the indefinite repetition of mashing a pleasure button shameful. A gamer's pride is the pride of the shameless.
Twitter, socmedia, the internet in general, are not really immune from this critique, but it's not as pure an opiate as the video game (as much as corps attempt to make them). Even still, I feel a deep shame when I spend a day online- even if talking to friends & sharing books.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — whoever wrote the gospel of John attributed word-like powers to God, on some level casting words and language as the fundament of all existence, a facet of the divine, identical to the divine.
From such a teaching arises the Kabbalistic heresy, a belief that magic powers inhere in sacred words, powers that become available to the initiate who learns the many secret names of God.
Words are not concepts; they are names for concepts. The concept itself is a physical configuration of matter in your head (as is the name.) The name we share, but the concept in my head and the concept in yours may be different.
When I say a word, I intend my concept, and when you hear my word, you evoke yours. If our concepts are not the same, then communication is merely sound and fury.
Deleuze said that thinking is a violent confrontation with concepts. The act of thinking is an attempt to destroy a part of your interior self, and to replace it with something better.
It is easy for us to speak together of concrete things. When I tell you that if you walk any further, you are going to fall off a cliff, the literal meaning is unambiguous. We all have nearly the same experiences of walking, cliffs, and gravity.
As we move from the concrete to the abstract, our experiences and our mental pictures become more divergent.
Every word is a dead metaphor. In linguistics we learn that every abstract name once referred to some physical thing. The word “abstract” itself is built out of the Latin ab—“from” and trahere—“draw away”. Spatial distance signifies conceptual distance from the “real world.”
Consider the ways we relate to ideas: philosophies have foundations, ideologies have planks, ideas can move us, they can be structured, truths can be hollow, an idea can be solid, an idea can be an anchor, we can toss an idea out there, we can catch what someone said.
An idea can have a point, a mind or a wit can be can be sharp, an idea can have teeth or legs, you can take an idea and run with it, you can run or hide from the truth, which can also be right in front of your face.
The concept in my head is a model of the real world: Wittegenstein called it the picture, Korzybski called it the map. The picture of the world is not the world; the map is not the territory.
Moreover, the way in which the map corresponds to the territory is part of the map, the way that the picture connects to the world is part of the picture.
Kant was among the first to understand this distinction; he said we could never perceive “the thing in itself.” This means an agent (e.g. you) can only conceive of the world by building an internal representation of it, and that all cognition is action upon this representation.
Kant’s idea becomes obvious and undeniable in the era of ubiquitous computation, because as soon as we attempt to build a machine that can interface with the world, we realize that the machine must first contain an internal representation of the world, a map.
A self-driving car, a Boston robotics dog, and the mars rover all possess internal maps, which they populate by means of sensors. They continuously integrate sense data into their mental map, including data about their own bodies. In a sense, all of these machines are self-aware
And yet, we do not suspect they have a personal, interior life in the way that we do, or even in the way that a dog or a mouse does Perhaps they do have an interior life comparable to an ant or a jellyfish, it’s difficult to say
It seems that in order to be “like us,” an engine of cognition must have perceptions and world representations, but this is not enough. A machine made in Man’s imagine must also experience emotions and “qualia” (singular: quale).
We don’t know what a quale is, so the best we can do is to call it, for example, the ineffable redness of the color red. The quale of red is “what it’s like” to see something red, and the quale of the smell of apple pie is “what it’s like” to smell apple pie.
“Rigor” is a word we use when the words that we say can be unambiguously resolved into the mental model they indicate, and the indicated model can be unambiguously resolved into concrete things in the actual world, the world of things “in themselves.”
In thinking, we strive for rigor, even in poetry, which is not the playful juxtaposition of deliberate ambiguity, but rather the raising of the ghost of the concrete thing that died in order for a word to become a metaphor.
It is not possible to speak rigorously of qualia, because although we perceive by means of them, we do not ever perceive them; we have no concrete experience of anything that connects them to anything else in our world. They are a blank spot on the map, here be dragons.
To produce a rigorous account of a phenomenon, we need a way to perceive it from the outside. When we possess outside perceptions, we relate them to our internal map by means of a metaphor, and we use the names of concepts we know to name those concepts that are strange.
Cognition is when an agent convolves new perceptions with its internal map (built from past perceptions) to predict the future. In our Information Age, we have built very intricate rocks that are capable of perception, cognition, and agency, defined as autonomous decision-making
These machines function by means of manipulated lighting, just as lightning courses through our own brains and nervous systems, and it certainly seems to be the case that lightning, whatever that is, is identical to élan vital, the animating force of life.
The similarities between the thinking machine and the thinking bag of meat (e.g. you) are simply too great to ignore.
The advent of personal computing has revealed to the average person that much of his mental faculty is mechanical, though he hems and haws at this realization, and seeks for voluptuous ways to deny it.
Emotion may inhere in the soul, but perceiving, knowing, and even acting are clearly earthbound faculties, residing wholly in the body. One can imagine the immortal soul, unfettered by the body, may also be free of the fetters of perception, knowledge, and action.
When you get in a fight in real life you feel a state of emotional arousal, it’s not sexual arousal, but all forms of arousal have something in common. In a real fight, the arousal is spent through violence, but on twitter the energy just clogs up your soul
And all of you who have your feathers in a ruffle about online pornography for the millionth time are complaining about people going on the internet and finding virtual outlets for their biological impulses but what are you doing?
And it should go without saying that porn is bad and it makes you gay but it’s not the root cause of all your problems and all your sanctimonious fight posting about it is a form of public masturbation
When people come to twitter and start posting, they usually have a few good ideas, maybe quite a few, but if you post them day after day, you run out of things to say. It’s easy to tell when someone is out of gas because after that, all they do is pick increasingly stupid fights
A lot of it is a dominance/territory thing: no one likes to feel reduced to a number, it’s why so many smart people feel compelled to dismantle IQ research, it’s because no one can resist the churning mental vortex of knowing your exact place
Of course that ought to be a comfort to you, to know that you have a place, but when your place is anchored to nothing (e.g. clout), it’s only a source of anxiety
At least in real life we rely on subtle signals like expensive shoes and decadent political allegiances, but on twitter they put a big number over your head. You think this will incite stupid arguments?
I try to never act entitled to your attention, but there is a danger zone around 1000-3000 followers where you get your first taste of clout and fall in love with your own opinions. Oh, I verbally farted and 60 people liked it. Clearly I am an intellectual.
Few archetypes worse than the secret king, the man whose accomplishments are few but who knows, just knows, in his heart how great he is, and one day all of you will see. This attitude is poison because such a man thinks he’s not the one who needs to change
How do I get followers? Try posting tits. Oh wait. That would be porn and porn is literally all that stands between us and the glorious throne and altar ethnostate.
Look, if you want to win against big porn, stop self-stimulating with simulated internet fights and setup a VPN that blocks all pornographic traffic and everyone who uses it their name goes on a public purity list. At least one of you crusaders knows a VC
Build a special vpn portal that gets admin privileges on your system and publicly shames you if your non-vpn traffic exceeds some low threshold. Refuse to do business with anyone whose name isn’t on the public purity list.
This isn’t a difficult concept, we live in a digital panopticon and our enemies have figured out how to use surveillance capitalism to enforce state-mandated homosexuality and you Good Christians don’t even understand spyware
And yes you can always get a burner phone or whatever but security and institutionalized social control work on the same principle: there is no such thing “secure” — there are only speed bumps and deterrents.
Whatever is possible, someone is going to do it, but just like an incel who constantly streams porn and complains that he never has sex, you constantly stream arguments into your phone and complain that you never win political victories.
A bunch of women in 1920: let’s ban alcohol!
Ushers in a golden age of mixology, black market flourishes, ascendancy of organized crime, underage drinking becomes normative, everyone flouts the law, people lose respect for government.
A bunch of women in 2020: let’s ban guns!
The moral assertion “don’t hate people who are different” cannot bear any weight, even for an instant. Every single person who utters this cursed dictum proceeds to say, in the very next breath, “we aren’t so different after all.”
“The people who will win this generation of technology/the internet/culture are exactly like this; those who intuit that the current iteration of information technology is based on pornography, and act on it, before everyone else catches on”
https://medium.com/@whispersfromtheblackegg/big-mexican-nips-fd9d1419abe3
You can’t actually offer any grounding for these moral opinions [that pain and cruelty are bad], only your personal aesthetic preferences. Your impotent anger is a beautiful poem to me.
I eschew labels, I do not consider myself “trad” (what this mean lol?), nor do I subscribe to any religion, however, in the absence of God, there can be no universal or absolute moral truth.
The convoluted appeals to game theory or logic to try to justify the “reality” of moral assertions always smuggle in their assumptions and must fall back on either consensus, which is nebulous and exploitable, or unjustifiable axioms like “pain is bad”
But the problem with an axiom like “pain is bad”, aside from the fact that it isn’t necessarily bad, is that it leaves hanging the unspoken question “for whom?”. Morality can only exist within the framework of agent and a goal, it’s an epiphenomenon of social struggle.
But in the words of one of the greatest moral philosophers of our age, “that’s just like, your opinion, man”
There is a “new strain” of conservatism that is actually just liberalism. Everything I want to say would get me banned.
Are they not smart enough to make the connection? Or are they evil?
Yes, I think it’s deliberate. It may even be very nuanced. Thiel likely believes that the way to shift the Overton window is to fund two opposing positions that share an implicit assumption. Weinstein may be an attempt to divert your attention for a magic trick.
BAP is completely right. Maintain your secrecy, only act covertly, and only from a place of power.
They tell you that protests, rallies, and other forms of civic engagement are a way to speak your voice to power, but these things are only religious ceremonies, devotionals. The purpose of prayer is not to change god but to align you to the divine
When you participate in these things, you are only allowed to do so if you’re agenda set by the left. Right-leaning civic engagement is cargo cult politics, because real power is exercised by elites, far from the voices of the kind of pointless peasants who march in the street
At most, people who attend rallies are used to terrorize normies who have real jobs and who actually matter to society. “Vote for me and I’ll call off my goons.” This only works when the goons have a lord who can actually wield power on their behalf.
Wittegenstein said that all problems in philosophy are mere problems of language. This is not true, but certainly many problems can be reduced to that.
In particular, most problems in epistemology can be trivially dismantled when we realize that perception and representation are mechanical processes, questions only of physics and computation.
We might very well ask how a car knows if its tire pressure is low, but a rigorous answer must be an account of sensors connected to microcontrollers that sustain a virtual picture of the car by means of the circulation of lightning through a Turing machine.
The word virtual shares the same Latin root as “virtue” and it once meant “pertaining to virtue,” which is to say that virtuality is evocative I’d excellence or efficiency flowing from inherent quality.
The modern sense of “virtual” refers to an ontological modality which sits in opposition to “actual” — but to demote virtuality to a mere category of pretending is to discount the virtue, the inherent efficacy, of the imagination.
A virtuality is a kind of abstraction, a kind of drawing away. Borges illustrated this in his story On Exactitude In Science; a fictional country develops cartography to a maximum of rigor, and builds a 1:1 scale map of their kingdom, filling 100% of its territory, supplanting it
This exercise demonstrates that a map must be smaller than the world, because it is contained in the world. The map becomes smaller by means of abstraction. An abstraction is a generalization, a commonality drawn away from a series of specificities.
In the science of emergence, we discover that a set of relatively simple rules at the level of physics begets a larger and more complex set of interactions at the level of chemistry.
The classic example is the phenomenon of temperature; at the level of particles, temperature does not exist, though each particle has a velocity, a measure of its kinetic energy. A single particle can be fast or slow, but only a mass of particles can be hot or cold.
Temperature is an abstraction of speed and quantity; it is seldom necessary or useful to model temperature as a high-dimension vector of particles and speeds. From the perspective of temperature, each particle is wholly interchangeable with any other; only the aggregate matters.
We recognize the tendency of masses of particles to intermix until speed is distributed normally over space, but the recognition itself is an artifact of the mind; it literally exists, but it does not inhere in the mass that mixes, it inheres in the mass that recognizes.
If two bodies of water, one hot and one cold, are connected, then the warm water will flow into and mix with the cold until the temperatures are equalized. We call this tendency entropy.
Entropy is a very specific type of chaos. It is the chaos of pure homogeneity, which is not a condition that usually springs to mind when we think of chaos, but in fact pure homogeneity — total equality — is the distilled, platonic realization of chaos.
In a state of entropy, all of the energy is equally distributed, and any sub-division of entropic space is statistically identical to any other. This is perfect chaos, because in an ordered system, parts are not arbitrarily interchangeable. Every part has a meaning and a function
That a body of matter contains an uneven distribution of fast and slow particles whose distribution homogenizes over time is a fact, unaffected by the presence of an observer.
That a mass of cold water and warm water intermix and their temperature equalizes is an abstraction, present only in the mind of an observer.
Physical facts are actuality, abstractions like water and temperature are virtuality, and both are real, but if there is no one to see the water, then there is no water, only matter. “Water” is the name of a concept, and both names and concepts live only in the mind.
Where there is virtuality, there is an inside and an outside, and the conditions that obtain on the outside are opaque form the perspective of the inside. This is because virtuality is abstraction, and abstraction hides detail in order to make perception tractable.
Separation of church and state is not possible. It just creates a selection pressure for religions to shed the spandrels named "church" and "god." And this is precisely what we see today -- a state religion with no church and no god
We cannot escape religion and myth. All states are always theocracies, the only question is: whose gods? whose myths?
In America we tried to create an explicitly agnostic state, but our founding fathers did not understand that religion is a living organism, and that all living things, like liquids, eventually taker the shape of their container
There is not one religious tradition in USA, but two: the exoteric tradition is protestantism, and the esoteric one is humanism, the latter of which is the provenance of "freedom", "rights", "equality", etc.
The humanist state was supposed to be a platform for diverse Christianities, a trick it pulls off by rooting the tenets of the faith and inserting some enlightenment values into the kernel
It’s possible to run Christianity on an enlightenment stack, but it wasn't designed for it. Christianity was built to run on monarchy, because the relationship of a king to his subjects reflects the relationship of God to man
The USA civics patch allows multiple Christianities to run in one polity, but it introduces some critical security vulnerabilities and ultimately denatures that which it was meant to preserve
It was only a matter of time before a someone developed a fork of protestant Christianity that could cross the church-state barrier. We call that fork “progress,” and with a few tweaks to the phenotype it was able to capture the entire state
Progress is built on the protocols of USA civics. It can’t pay homage to God, because God is explicitly excluded from the political formula. Instead it deifies abstract concepts, venerating liberty, equality, and “rights”.
Progress replaces the church service with the protest rally, the return of Christ with the moral arc of history, total depravity with implicit bias, and the crucifixion with the Holocaust (six million times more powerful than the original!)
One way we can tell progressive politics is essentially religious is to note this curious formula: the personal is political. Progress is not content with the non-overlapping magisteria of church and state. It demands that all facets of life be subjected to its moral calculus
In 1964, the civil rights act marked the total victory of the new progressive church over the government of the USA, ending the separation of church and state.
Civil rights became a new foundational mythology, propagating through the base layer of US ideology, insinuating itself beneath all other beliefs. We now teach children the hagiography of the civil rights era in social studies classes and in the moral thrusts of their cartoons
Civil rights was zero-to-one, everything since that has been one-to-many; consolidation, refinement, iteration. But in the early 2010s, a virulent emancipatory discourse centered on homosexuality was deployed into mainstream conversation
It's absolutely the case that phones make you more civically and socially engaged, not less, which is why everyone is so stupidly credulous in social media, because when you feel like sauron is watching, the safest thing to do is hail mordor.
In Chinese POW camps, they converted prisoners into agents for the CCP by enticing them to make public speeches praising the party, not with sticks but with carrots, and what you say publicly "of your own volition" becomes your own conviction.
Going on social media and posting about inequality or refugees etc. causes you to invest in those causes, it's an autocatalytic loop where a seemingly innocuous action conditions you to perform it again.
Smartphones catalyzed the great awokening because in the seething vortex of social media, people want to say things that make them feel important, and nothing makes them feel more important than regurgitating anthems about lifting up the oppressed
If you can manufacture an oppressed denomination of people, then a majority of other people will make public noises about helping them, because doing so makes them feel large and powerful and gregarious.
The Great Awokening is a play on "The Great Awakening", the name that we give to a series of Christian revivals across the last few centuries. And just as we see in The Current Year, revival has alway been a disease that primarily afflicts women
Charles Grandison Finney in the Second Great Awakening: “Women composed the great majority of members in all churches. They dominated revivals and praying circles, pressing husbands, fathers, and sons towards conversion and facilitating every move of the evangelist.”
Family men, fathers and husbands, wanted to have nothing to do with these revivals, and though they “tried to prevent their wives or daughters from attending church,” they “were eventually brought into the church themselves by these women.”
Christian men could not formulate any principled objections to the revivals of the great awakenings and no one running the American civics stack can formulate a principled or compelling argument against the great awokening
We live in a world where both the right and the left are significantly to the left of the civil rights act, and that means they are both very far to the left. Your republican leaders have never rolled back one jot or title of the accursed machinations of progress
As long as you believe in the moral validity of “human rights”, as long as you think individual liberty is an end in itself, the most you can do is plead “too fast, too fast”
Of course, sodomites will never be free as long as we are allowed the freedom to criticize or exclude them, but freedom of speech is for losers, literally; powerful people already have it, only weaklings ever ask for it
There’s nothing women like more than correcting the speech of petulant children. If “what about the freedom to say mean things?” is your principled argument, you’re a twat. Not even God believes in freedom of speech
In Stalinist Russia, there was only one way to criticize the state that didn’t get you gulagged: the 50 Stalins criticism: “yes, Stalin is good, but he doesn’t go far enough! If only we had 50 Stalins!" Arguments from leftist overreach are just haggling over the # of Stalins
Theocracies do not tolerate heretics. With the merging of church and state, freedom of religion is a shambling corpse, and Christianity has the option of abandoning patriarchy and heteronormativity or being destroyed
But if you’re running the American civics stack, you don’t get to say, at last, THIS is one progression too far, THIS emancipation is too much, because as we are realizing, giving puberty blockers to toddlers is in the constitution, only the hermeneutics took a while to work out.
There are two possibilities; either the constitution is working as intended, in which case it is monstrous, or it is failing to do its job, in which case it is worthless.
"Is it only others who are irrational slaves to myth, or is it you too?"
I have better myths, that's all.
"Better implies some objective criterion which you must claim to have access to."
I say they are better and I value my own conviction more than yours. Logic is always just a client of the will.
"So it's all arbitrary?"
Yes, the only objective resolution is violence.
"Initiating violence is never acceptable."
Says the person who loses the fight.
"There's no fight though. Liberal democracy has won."
The hour is late but all is not lost.
"The only thing you claim to be fighting for is your own arbitrary preferences."
Sure, while you claim to be fighting for everyone’s right to chop off their own dick and shove candy canes up their ass and not get judged for it.
"So you're so insecure that you might be gay that you're willing to kill someone who might empower you to experience the act against your will?"
"Oh you’re opposed to the holy church of poopdick? Lol you must be gay"
"I'm here arguing for objective truth and moral realism. Usually, the people making the noises you're talking about are fellow moral relativists on the far left."
Postmodern reaction is the way forward. If you try to formalize moral intuitions then Alinskyites run circles around you. Know what is good and right and be prepared to justify it with nothing more than your own strength of will.
And Alinsky was not just a communist organizer, he wrote the playbook for the modern left, he was personally known to Hilary Clinton and was also a big influence on Barack Obama.
He invented the “long march through the institutions” — the strategy of the radical left to slowly and patiently fill up universities and government offices and reshape society according to far left ideals over the course of decades
It worked so well that now serious grown up adults put their preferred pronouns on their linked in profiles and everyone in the middle class knows that being white is a sin.
We are all Alinskyites now, regardless of our political persuasions.
REVIVAL! O, REVIVAL! I will tell you today about revival. Three times I will tell you of revival, once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Ghost. (That’s sexist! Isn’t it time that the godhead included some women of color?!)
How much truth do you need to be true? Two men could have substantially different faith, different doctrines, they could read the same bible in two incompatible ways. Both believe, so which one has salvation?
You say that you have made Christ your cornerstone, fine, but you built a whole cathedral, where did you get the rest of those bricks? They came from your culture, and to mix metaphors, you are badly in need of some probiotics
The church is the body of Christ, and it is sick with modern ideas—a memetic infection against which it has no antibodies. You think perhaps that your faith is the one true faith, that your reading of the scriptures is the truest reading, but no one can read the thing in itself
Any particular practice of Christianity is a quantization of the truth, the word of God filtered through your brain but darkly. If you want to witness a REVIVAL, my friends, it will take a Christianity that is very different to the ones that we see today
The devil has put one over on you; though it took him centuries, he devised a theology that looked and felt like the word of God, holier than God, even. May I remind you that the devil can quote scripture and that sometimes, even sometimes, God can speak through a sinner like me
That diabolical theology has many names; you know it well. It teaches, above all, concern for the poorest. Far too much has been made of the charity Jesus showed to an adulteress, far too little of the way he rebuked Judas for wanting to sell her offering to aid the poor
You say, “we need a new religion,” but I say we need a new Christianity. God is dead, thus spoke Zarathustra, and we are all his cosmic murderers. But old Nietzsche neglected to mention that God has been dead before, and he has a knack for reviving himself, strange aeons &c.
The last time God died, his church arose in a radically new form. Perhaps God had to die again, perhaps that was always His plan. Or perhaps He, in the form of a fallible man, underestimated the ingenuity of Sodom.
Are you saying the sacrifice of Christ was not enough? Blasphemy! Blasphemy! It’s not that Christianity brought us these horrible things, it’s that Christianity in the current year is too weak to stop it.
Christianity has given us a country where 11 year olds dance for adult men who throw dollars on the stage. Christianity gave us a church that molested children and sold out their flock (Covington) to the left. A moderated form of Islam might be the West’s only hope.
There was no single pivotal moment in the corruption of the Christian church, only a long and gentle road to hell. The mandate of Heaven is slippery; when society is just and prosperous, then the mandate is manifest. When society is wicked, then the mandate has been lost
When the sacrificial animals are sleek, the offerings are clean and the sacrifices are observed at due times, and yet floods and droughts come [by the agency of heaven], then the altars should be replaced. --Mencius (Not Moldbug)
There is a great hunger for religion in our present age. There is, if I may be so crass, a market for a strong, masculine, warlike Christianity, and it is radically underserved. The shepherd who learns to tend this flock-in-waiting will be the prophet of a new American REVIVAL
And I find that Christians are an intransigent bunch, no offense, but most of you are in denial about the aspects of your faith that are socially constructed, and you use the scripture like a shield when you should be using it like a sword
If anyone calls you to own the problems with the philosophical artifacts of the church, you mutter some cope about living in a fallen world. I call this ostrich theology, because you bury your head in the sand.
Still, there are some, shall we say, problematic portions of the New Testament, and we are going to have to exegete around them. I suffer not a woman to teach... very good. Neither male nor female in Christ... this will take some work.
That Christianity is a feminization of Judaism is something we will have to overcome. Via the parable of the sower, we know that teachings are merely seeds, but the problems with Christianity are from something in the soil, what you call "terroir"
Jesus cursed the fig tree that was barren, and surely, this was an indictment of the soil, which is a metaphor for the human heart. But let us also understand this proverb as a meditation on the proper virtue of a woman.
This woman cannot even conceive of virtue in feminine terms. She understands only masculine virtue, and she covets it, because she desires to be virtuous, and yet feminism has rendered true feminine virtue illegible to her.
All of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence, and love they desire... those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity, or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women, they want devotion, service, and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.
I want more of the Jesus who cursed the fig tree. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? I want more of the Jesus who came to send fire on the earth!
The universalism of Christianity can be a weakness or a strength. It may be time to understand "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations" as an injunction to conquer.
It is important to understand such things as the proverb of the good Samaritan, or the phrase "neither jew nor gentile", not as affirmations of progressive dogma, but as condemnations of them, as a commandment against the construction of intersectional victim identities
In Roman times it was perhaps unimaginable that the devil would turn Jesus' blessing of the meek into an idolatry of weakness. “The meek shall inherit the earth” was a prophecy of destruction, not a pronouncement of moral desert. In these latter days, it has come to pass.
This new Christianity must make a virtue of physical strength, and the cultivation of the body. It is not enough to teach that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. That verse is about sex, not strength. And yet, it would not be unreasonable to add deadlifts to the liturgy.
"For bodily exercise profiteth little" must be interpreted as an endorsement of physical training, a righteous defense of the spirit against usury. Any other reading is heresy.
The diabolical theology works by gaming the metrics of holiness, in order to usurp the authority of the priests. We see this often when the false teachers of our day claim that the grace of God would condone the sins of the most reprehensible sinners.
Priest theology: Catholicism is the Christianity of the cathedral, and Robert Conquest taught us of the failure modes of cathedrals.
Merchant theology: Protestantism is the Christianity of the bazaar, and Charles Goodhart taught us the failure modes of the bazaar.
What we need now is warrior theology. Give me the Christianity of the battlefield. Give me not peace, but division! This, and only this, is the path to REVIVAL.
I’m not sure if this is the granularity you are expecting. Some of these concepts are bigger than others. I invented exactly none of them. The list is not exhaustive. It’s a twitter thread not a manifesto. At 280 characters per idea, things get lost in translation.
My ideas cannot help but bleed into my ideals. I tried to keep them separate but I didn’t try very hard. Sorry if some of this seems remedial. There are some things that can only be transmitted in stories, never in plain speech. I have omitted those.
The map is not the territory. Your mental model of the world is just a representation of the world. In order to fit the big world in your little head, many things are omitted or distorted. you will never see the real world, only your map
Words don’t mean the same things to different people. When you talk you are trying to pull things out of your mental model and map them into the models of others.
There are 4 nodes in any conversation, 3 transformations.
Your model=>your referents=>their referents=>their model
Revealed preference. People don’t know what they want. They try to articulate their preferences and then act against their own declarations. Only behavior can reveal desire. You can be and frequently are wrong about yourself. You don’t know yourself, only your model of yourself
Homo hypocritus. You have many incentives to distort your own mental model and you always act on them
For this reason truth is not always instrumental. Everything you know is just a model. A model is an approximation. A model can be wrong and still produce right behavior/ideas, or at least, right enough.
Money is only a proxy for human vitality and energy. The true price of most things far exceeds their nominal, monetary cost. If you only think in terms of monetary cost you miss most of the transactions that make up society.
Everything is transactional, most transactions aren’t made with money, it’s incredibly rude and degrading to talk about the inevitably transactional nature of all interactions.
Money aside, everything has its price
The better the friend, the more social credit you grant them before you try to collect
Social status. An invisible variable called status underlies all human interaction. It is an amalgam of prestige, power, fame, and value as ally or mate. It is the currency we all truly desire most. It’s allocation is highly volatile and determined by collective fiat.
Social behavior is entirely performative. Everything, your emotions, your beliefs, your job, your leisure, your hobbies, is all a performance designed to manipulate your status, and the status of others.
Further reading: Irving Goffman, the presentation of self in every day life
Transactional analysis. Every single interaction with another person, every single utterance, contains a status payload. Your friends accept your attempts to raise your status if you accept theirs. Your enemies reject your gambits, and you reject theirs.
Signalling theory. Communication is hard because anyone can lie at any time. The only way to be certain of honesty is to make the communicator pay a high price as a costly signal of authenticity.
This is why bitcoin has tremendous energy costs.
Vector spaces. Many seemingly entangled things can be orthogonalized, revealing unexpected avenues of motion in conceptual space. The real world is a vector space of effectively infinite dimensions.
Competition is incredibly wasteful and arms races are the sole provenance of invention.
“But lots of innovation happens under corporate monopolies!”
But what about the arms races between the people inside that company? Perhaps along a vector of social status
All proclamations of science should be treated as fiction until they have been actualized as engineering. At the very least, don’t give them authority they haven’t demonstrated.
Most of the time when a cost seems excessive, it’s because the participants in the market in question are locked in an arms race of sending costly signals. Many costly signals are not priced in money.
Status is nonlinear because the better you are at signalling it, the more you will have, and vice versa in a feedback loop. Highly charismatic people such as cult leaders have figure out how to game this.
Niche subcultures form when groups of friends engage in a signalling arms race to increase their status along an unusual vector.
Neoreaction. Further reading: Mencius Moldbug, a gentle introduction.
Accelerationism. Capital and technology cultivate each other in a positive feedback loop that, if left unchecked, will bring about a singularity which is deeply inhuman. It’s an open question whether the momentum of technocapital will overcome the drag of diminishing biocapital
Hellbaked. Everything of value was built in hell, teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages This is foundational to my worldview.
Master/slave morality. The morality of slaves is that of the herd. The wolf is evil. oh, how he conspires to eat us sheep. To avoid pain and conflict is the essence of goodness. Vs. Strength and cunning! THAT is the substance of righteousness. Caprice, the whims of the powerful!
The last man. A man who is a wretched, comfortable coward, with no goals, who does not engage in some kind of FIGHT. Such is the last man, the most contemptible type of person. He has his little pleasure for the day, and his little pleasure for the night, and then a good sleep
Freedom is meaningless without a goal. Undirected freedom is just slavery to your base impulses. Instead of desiring freedom FROM some horrible condition, you should desire freedom FOR some glorious purpose
He who despises himself nonetheless esteems himself as a despiser
If you keep arguing with someone, you’re both getting something you want out of it. doubly so if you keep having the same argument. You may hate it, but you love hating it.
He who achieves his ideal precisely thereby transcends it.
Better to chase after deliberately impossible goals.
If god is real he does not give a shit about the minutiae of your theological debates. I call this “homoousian vs homoiousian”. Google it. Don’t get bogged down in pedantic bullshit.
What you subsidize, you get more of. Most charity is for this reason deeply misguided. If you give money to beggars, then the number of beggars shall multiply. If you feed those who cannot feed themselves, then soon you will also have to feed their children.
Our minds are small and we don’t have nearly the intellectual breadth we imagine. We have Dunbar groups and we also have Dunbar ideas and Dunbar places. Concentric rings of cognitive resolution.
Hierarchy, it is critically important to respect it and maintain it. It gives you your place in the world. It helps you know who is above you, who to respect and emulate, and who is below you, who to guide and protect. Without it we are lost.
Gellman amnesia. You open the newspaper to an article on a subject you know. You read the article and see it is so wrong it presents the story backward—wet streets cause rain. You turn the page and read as if the rest of the paper was more accurate than the crap you just read
Nietzsche was the first and greatest Feminist! Truly! I will reveal this truth to you now. Who could forget the opening line of Beyond Good and Evil, wherein the old philologist says it plainly: SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then?
That Nietzsche himself goes on to speak from a masculine perspective in no way detracts from his feminism, for he was the progenitor of all of "postmodern" thought, and without him there could have been no Foucault, or Derrida, or Deleuze
Postmodern--that much maligned word, which is clumsy because it refers to the attempts of men to articulate a fundamentally FEMININE way of being; for thousands of years philosophy had been an exclusively male endeavor, because its territory was the wild frontier
Frontiers are tamed by men, and in the male soul, the frontier exists to be conquered, an inescapable compulsion. But once it has been conquered--and Kant was such a conqueror--then it can become settled, and then woman can join man, and make there a home
And now that woman is here, what a home she has found! Just as Christianity was the feminizing of Judaism, (remember that Jesus called himself the Bridegroom of the church), postmodernism is the feminizing of philosophy, or to borrow a word, the deterritorialization
In a way one could say that philosophers wandered the desert for millennia, that the Germans found and inhabited the promised land, and that Nietzsche came not to abolish philosophy but to fulfill it
Such audacity! But the old philologist, an expert at reading texts, was himself audacious! He named his life story Ecce Homo, behold the man! the words of Pontius Pilate as he showed Jesus to the crowd
What Nietzsche discovered and gave to man, like Prometheus stealing fire from god, was what woman had known all along, namely, the FEMININE MODALITY OF KNOWING, an epistemology of immanence and immediacy
Long have I heard men of the Right Wing mock and belittle the proclamations of feminist hubris, that they shall invent new sciences of physics and biology which will challenge the linear and rational male perception of the world
The male gaze—-how women long for it—-and how they hate themselves for longing! In the eyes of a man it is not only woman that becomes an object but nature, god, the earth, the sea, the sun and the moon! How can he be so obtuse?
Indeed there are irrational ways of knowing, which prior to Nietzsche were the exclusive appanage of Woman, and which now have been spilled like the blood of Christ, the ink in which all modern books are written, even by men
In the male world, which is the rational world, man's world, we speak not of OUR truth but of THE truth. In the masculine mind, the things of highest value must spring from the lap of Being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the "thing-in-itself"
In the postmodern world, which is Nietzsche's world, woman's world, what constitutes the value of truth is precisely that it may be insidiously related to deception, tied to and involved with a wicked, seemingly opposite thing
It is an indelicate act, no? to render the ineffable feminine into words. Alas, it is a uniquely male compulsion, brutal and inhuman, to commit such an act.
But for all the violence that it does to the male mind, the caress of Nyarlethotep, Nyarlethot(ep)istemology, it is an older and more powerful way of looking at the world, which is why it has supplanted nearly all masculine ways of being (all but one)
Now that we have this knowledge, we cannot unlearn it. It is the Necronomicon, the Zahir, the fruit of the tree of good and evil.
Nietzsche who understood all too well what was human, spoke from experience when he warned us against staring into voids; in the end by fighting with monsters he became a monster, and the transvaluation of all values was to be the consummation of monstrosity
Lest you are not convinced, I ask you, what is the feminist project, if not the transvaluation of all values? The philosopher's stone of feminist alchemy is to transmute women into men, and men into women, in the spirit and in some cases even the body.
And yet and as I have said elsewhere, the Feminist project has fallen short of Nietzsche's ambition, though in every way it is the most faithful of all human undertakings to the project laid out in The Antichrist.
Finally, suppose that woman is the sun, Nietzsche is far from the first man to suffer from exposure to the radiance of the divine feminine, and he will not be the last. To forgive him for taking his revelation to extremes, it is the CHRISTIAN thing to do.
For already she cometh, the glowing one,—her love to the earth cometh! Innocence, and creative desire, is all solar love!
See there, how she cometh impatiently over the sea! Do ye not feel the thirst and the hot breath of her love?
I was definitely taking some license with this one. What really surprised me is how uncontroversial this thread was. Some of the more moderate people I follow even praised the thread. I hope it was clear that I did not mean Nietzsche was literally a feminist
He also maintained throughout his work that he loved women, and I don’t doubt him—which makes him a better feminist than most actual feminists, who clearly despise women
The outside and the outside view
The outside view from rationalism. You try to look at a system from an impersonal perspective, treating yourself as if you were a third party.
The outside view allows you to reason about yourself. It it’s refinement it may attempt to abolish the self all together, as with Zen Buddhism.
Lust for knowledge, single-minded and hot, is what drives us into the void.
When you imagine other people, you compress them to a relatively simple set of interlocking motivations. When you imagine yourself... it’s complicated.
The simple model of others is often more predictive than the complex model of self.
So you try to model yourself as the other, but you can’t. You put on a mask and look in the mirror. Inexorably you still see yourself. It’s Gödelian. Eventually you learn to imagine yourself only as the man who wore that mask, you forget you have it on.
You are no wiser for this.
And nothing is ever outside enough; with each exit you make, you look for another, grander, more exterior. Someplace colder, I’ve got to get to someplace colder.
When everything is frozen, it will stand still, and I’ll be able to see it in its totality.
The outside view is a vector in mind space, and if you follow it you see horrible things, which then become merely part of the landscape, an alien and non-linear landscape, void-soaked and thalassian.
The motif of harmful perception: things we see that change us forever, not for good. Borges and Lovecraft intersect here. In Lovecraft, a glimpse of the outside drives you mad. Gynarlethotep’s followers, or the sight of a shoggoth.
In Borges, the Zahir obsessed you, the book of sand haunted you, tlon overtook you and the blue tigers multiplied and consolidated, violating your ability to comprehend number and mathematics.
You become what you behold. When you stare into the abyss, it also stares into you. If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something, it is in the end hard for him to be anything else.
The relatively static norms in our society have been called by the names of change and progress. Most people are conservative by nature, so they conform to the norm of “progress.” Because of this sleight of hand, deeply conservative people believe themselves to be revolutionaries
Actual revolutionary change is risky, dangerous, and destructive. Radical action is only radical when it goes against the norm. The norms of a large group cannot be radical by definition.
Actions that appear radical yet are performed with social sanction are not radical, they are ritual.
The foundational myth of American society is the revolutionary war. American civic identity is constructed by framing your own life in terms of the foundational myth, i.e., as a revolutionary act against an oppressive authority
Every American teenager lives out the revolutionary myth as a coming of age ritual. Since real radicalism is largely illegal, and since teenagers are horny, their revolutionary act usually takes the form of sexual depravity
The coming of age ritual in American modernity is esoteric in the sense that the rules are never spoken or even precisely defined. Each initiate is expected to invent or at least intuit the rules purely from social cues in mass media
Sexual transgression is the gateway to adulthood in our culture. Pre-marital sex was once considered a major transgression. As that has become normalized, sodomy, homosexuality, transsexuality, and illegal drugs have increasingly made their way into this ritual consciousness
People (primarily men) who fail to navigate the esoteric rites of adolescent sexual transgression are stigmatized with an outsider status and have difficulty building social capital with the sexually “transgressive” center
The majority of society, which operates within the normative center, believes itself to be revolutionary because each member of society synthesizes a “revolutionary” sexual identity as they come of age. In fact nothing could be less transgressive
The slow turning of the sexual revolution wheel, which is called “progress”, is entirely predictable and entirely benign (and is in fact normative) within the social machine of progressive society.
Far from being transgressive, the linear loosening of sexual morality is akin to planned inflation in fiat-based monetary policy. Conservatives who advocate marriage and sexual continence unwittingly fuel the revolutionary emotion of progressives (though what’s the alternative?)
Progressivism, I remind you, is a sex cult. In phase 1 of the initiation rite, the acolyte assumes an identity as a victim of oppression by convolving her personal life circumstances with boilerplate Marxist rhetoric
Once the initiate has constructed an oppressed identity (woman, fat, gay, trans, asian, etc), she moves to phase 2 of the rite, in which she overthrows her oppressor by performing a “revolutionary” sexual act against the authority she designated as an antagonist in phase 1
If the oppressed identity is racial, then the revolutionary act is miscegenation. Grand parent cry, broken branch. If the oppressed identity is homosexual, the revolutionary act is sodomy. If the oppressed identity is fat, the revolutionary act is merely sex; the antagonist is male desire itself.
If you’re a straight man you have to fall back on much older forms of transgression. Being a cad has much less cultural currency these days but the upside is that every time you pump and dump a woman you are oppressing her, i.e., sanctifying her in the progressive cosmology.
Ironically feminism reduces womanhood from a full-fledged modality of being to a mere caricature, and it must do this in order to make legible within the symbolic order of the mystery rite.
Fetishization is when a symbol displaces the thing it is meant to represent. The deconstruction of womanhood into a victim identity is precisely the transmutation of femininity into a fetish, a word that literally means “magic token”.
In all cases in the progressive mystery rites, the oppression of the initiate’s identity is illusory; her victimhood is worn as a ceremonial robe.
The magic trick is so mundane once you understand it:
1. invent a new identity with a tiny reference set.
2. Pretend obscurity = marginalization
3. Conflate being anomalous with being oppressed
The necessity of victimhood to the ritual creates a tremendous market demand for oppression, which is manufactured by the left itself and disseminated through its organs of propaganda. (Broadcast media and universities)
Scapegoats like Richard Spencer and David Duke are well-known because the left has made them famous because of their instrumentality to the progressive sexual mystery rites. White nationalism is given vastly disproportionate representation in media for the same reason.
The incel can never be oppressed in progressive cosmology because sanctified oppression is a prestige awarded to people who have completed the mystery rite. (This is why attempts by MRAs to coopt Marxist language will always be met with derision).
From all this we can see that there is nothing revolutionary about the sexual revolution at all, and that transgressive sex is exactly as radical as a Roman farmer making a sacrifice to Ceres.
The way you stop a sex cult that has coopted your horror and disapproval into part of its initiation ritual (you must admit, they play us like a fiddle) is to shine light on its mysteries and deconstruct its sanctities.
Promiscuity is not substantially different from masturbation except it makes two people unhappy instead of one. Above all, it’s BORING. Promiscuity is repetitive and boring. Every woman and every man is the same in the vertiginous moment of coitus.
Progressive sexual transgression loses its hold on a person, not when they realize how sinful it is (sin is edgy and enticing), but when they perceive its banality.
Self-mastery (which I don’t claim to have) is an exercise in indirection. Many desirable mental states cannot be had by force of will. An insomniac can’t will himself to sleep and you can’t feel joy through gritted teeth.
Likewise for faith, romantic love, erotic love, and mental “flow”. Such attainments cannot be had by grasping, only by a kind of letting go. Even morality is like this: morality held too tightly becomes a vice.
In a sense this is the liberal critique of society; what we now sneeringly call “classical liberalism”, all the virtues of liberalism have their place, even emancipation, but progressive evil is the elevation of lesser goods above their proper place in the hierarchy of virtues.
You could be forgiven for imagining that salutary mental states come from outside you. Sanctity always has something of an alien quality, because it’s born from transgression.
Most maligned of all is the virtue of tolerance, and to be sure, in its senility tolerance becomes malignant. It becomes licentiousness, just as freedom becomes atomization, just as cleverness becomes intransigence.
The decadence (which is to say, the decay) of any virtue is universalism. The universalization of a virtue transforms it into a vice.
One law for the lion and the ox is oppression, but even worse than one law is one desire. Mass culture => mass consciousness => homogeneous desire => mimetic rivalry.
Whatever cultural fragmentation we experience is a negligible countercurrent against the homogenizing forces of instantaneous always-on techno-psychic communication from anyone to anyone.
I see Satan propagate like lightning.
I say it’s evil but mostly it’s just automatic and inexorable: no one owns the cultural commons (by definition) and everyone with a megaphone just shouts whatever memes advance their personal objectives in the given moment.
Globalism produces monoculture because it needs legibility and predictability. Anything distinctive will be tiled over with regularity because regularity can be automated and automation outcompetes humans as it scales.
Automation is a force multiplier on intelligence. An automaton is inferior to a human for the foreseeable future, but a thousand automatons is superior to a thousand humans; they are tireless, consistent, and have lower marginal cost.
The charter of growth is growth. Whatever grows best, grows most. Growth desires the scalability of the automaton, so it regularizes humans. It doesn’t do it deliberately, it does it because whatever, in happening, causes itself to happen, happens again.
The industrial revolution, like the sexual revolution, is not one paradigm shift, but many. Mechanical looms, internal combustion engines, plastics, microprocessors, and soon, AI are all revolutions. At each stage, there is a great displacement
The principal value of the average person in this ecosystem shifts from producer to consumer. UBI is introduced in order to maintain consumption. The government pays corporations VIA human consumers, the money goes around and around and meanwhile real wealth diminishes
“Be true to yourself” is the perfect basis of moral value for perfect consumers, because your “self” is not a fixed point, it’s a series of context-dependent performances.
Advertising can’t dictate your desires for the same reason an insomniac can’t will himself to sleep, but being “true to yourself” is pointless unless other people are able to perceive the self in question. We create this perception through our visible consumer choices.
No one designed that, or rather, many people designed it, but it wasn’t ordained by nefarious actors, it just happened to produce feedback loops of consumer growth. It’s a scalable moral value, offensive to no one because “self” is a floating signifier.
By the same token, Woke Capital is not a sinister conspiracy, it’s a strategy that big companies use to protect themselves from small upstart competitors.
All things being equal, a black female programmer is worth more than a white male programmer of equal skill, and since the former is rare, only big companies can afford to find and retain them. Diversity is a racket, but the mark isn’t you, it’s /other companies/
It’s not the case that anyone thinks that’s why they’re doing it, but it’s the unintended side effect that makes it successful. It’s a way to crush competitors by indirection. The chemotherapy strategy: convince everyone to drink poison and be less affected by it than your enemy
Anyway, the moral of all childrens’ entertainment produced by global capital is “be true to yourself”, which when put into practice always means “give in to desire.” recall:
Universalism eats us alive because a decrease in the diversity of opportunities for competition leads to an increase in competition’s ferocity. But when diversity is treated as a virtue it becomes conformity.
You’d kill a guy over breadcrumbs if breadcrumbs were the only privilege allowed. When social currency is only achievable through one set of values, then the game truly becomes zero sum.
The main reason to cleave to traditional values is that they pull you away from the globalist monoculture, and give you a way to stop hating everyone around you. Of course, the moment you try to use those values to construct an identity for others to consume, they stop working.
You get in your little bubble where everyone around you is half a standard deviation in iq up or down and no matter what identity you try to have your meta-identity is to have that identity conspicuously.
Personal identity is sacred in modernity because transgression manufactures sanctity, and in adolescence, controlled transgression is the gate we walk through, and in the process we build a consumer identity that becomes a sacred token in the metagame.
Complain about narcissism all you want, read the last psychiatrist, but realize: he stopped blogging because his sermons were giving you catharsis you didn’t deserve. “Oh oh oh I’m a horrible narcissist, I’ll post the link so everyone knows I repent”
And if reactionary politics succeed in overthrowing our memetic overlords (fat chance) it STILL won’t fix the problem because we’ll still be living in the same meta-game. Meritocratic hierarchy will be just as toxic as equality if becomes universal.
As long as the capital machine has fuel it will keep turning. It interprets communism as damage and routes around it. It interprets localism as damage and routes around it. It subverts individualism by subsuming it into the metagame.
The only meaningful eschatological question is: will capital run out of biofuel before the automation of encephalization is complete?
Yesterday I was reading about the ideas of Girard. His first big idea is mimetic desire: when you look for the source of your desires you find that most of them are imitative; you desire them because you see other people desiring them.
Mimetic rivalry: If you have a mentor or a leader, you ape his desires, and especially because he is above you, he becomes a model for mimetic desire. This converts him into a rival, a competitor.
We particularly emulate the desires of men of high status, men who are famous or powerful. By desiring the things they desire, we try to become like them.
Friends are another source of desire; if your friend wants something, you will often grow to desire that thing. Thus friends also become rivals. This is especially clear when two friends desire the same beautiful woman.
When our friends share our desires, the consensus reinforces our perception that our desires are correct. Mimesis can therefore amplify desire. If we notice that we want something no one else wants, we are suspicious of our desire, and it attenuates.
All of this I find to be sound, and useful in the sense that it may be easier to overcome some desires once you understand their origin. So much of compulsion is the power of the mysterious, the poorly understood.
There is perhaps a lesson here in trying to minimize unfruitful competition with rivals by trying to consciously select your desires and engineer social harmony.
Then again you will often feel that understanding a thing allows you to transcend it, only to realize much later that you were still in the grip of it. If Girard is right, then there is no escape from mimetic conflict, only deferment.
Mimetic desire has a tendency to become "metaphysical" desire; when someone has the thing you desire, you desire to become that person. Because this is impossible, you may develop a desire to kill that person. When this happens at societal scale, the rival becomes a scapegoat.
Girard’s second big idea pertains to the role of the scapegoat; the tensions that arise from memetic rivalry are temporarily dispersed by the sacrifice of a scapegoat. The scapegoat is imagined as the cause of all frustrations of memetic desire. The sacrifice is a pressure valve.
Human sacrifice in older societies, such as the Aztecs, is supposed to be illustrative of the scapegoating mechanism. In time, societies may sublimate the scapegoating desire into the sacrifice of animals, or in our case, the unpersoning of heretics.
We can see the Girard's drama of the scapegoat play itself out day after day on Twitter dot com, though we are perpetually denied the consummation of the ritual.
Would it help?
For Girard, Christianity is unique in that it asserts the innocence of the scapegoat, and this is in some way supposed to reflect positively on Christianity. By affirming the innocence of the scapegoat, by creating sympathy for him, Christianity supposedly sublimates violence.
I find this line of thinking to be extremely dubious, in part because I see Christians and Christianity engaging in quite a bit of the old fashioned kind of scapegoating, both in history and in contemporary society. The tendency is innate.
But supposing the innocence of the scapegoat is an important feature of Western culture. Where does society-level mimetic desire to be Christlike figure into the metaphysics of social justice?
The obvious and kneejerk take is that social justice activists are mimicking the desires of more successful demographics, & their mimetic desire has metastasized into metaphysical desire, and they now make a scapegoat out of white men, who they are in the process of sacrificing.
But isn't the perpetual cry of social justice identity groups that they are victims, that they are hated, that they are sacrificed, even, for the sake of what they perceive as their oppressors? Maybe the desire in the SJW soul, though obscured, is to be Christlike.
I think the innocence of the scapegoat in Christianity is far less important than his divinity. In Christianity the scapegoat is WORSHIPED, the scapegoat is GOD. Many people, I notice, desire to be objects of worship, and I do not think this desire springs purely from mimesis.
We have innate desires, too, desires which spring from biological necessity. Girard makes the point that a man can desire a woman purely because another man, or many other men, desire her also. And yet desiring a woman requires no third party.
It's safe to say that desire springs from necessity, though the specific objects of desire come from mimesis, or convenience. In a vacuum, you would still want attention, food, and sex, though you might become the object of your own desires, perversely.
If desire is mimetic then we must make sure to model good desires. If we hold up as examples the broken and bitter people who sneer at greatness and denigrate success as oppressive then that is who our children will become. All the heroes are antiheroes these days...
And when I watch most shows and movies, those are the kinds of people I see. Kid's shows with genderless bugmen as protagonists, dramas full of nihilistic protagonists. Never a properly structured family, and never ever a happy one.
If you are even slightly inclined to transcendent pursuits then you have probably read some fine old books, and it can be difficult to believe, and difficult to retain, the lesson that most people have no such inclinations or readings.
We have to find ways to spread good and inspiring stories about strong and virtuous people. If you watch a hundred hours of television about dysfunctional families and broken homes, then when you think about families, those images will come to mind
If you watch stories about virtuous drug dealers and gangsters and criminals, then you will start to imagine such people are morally good. If the villain in every story is an old white businessman, then you will think old white businessmen are villains
If you see unhappy sexless marriages and titillating stories of adultery (I notice a similarity between "adulting" and "adultery"), then you will despise marriage and desire promiscuity.
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
As I have said before there is nothing toxic about masculinity, and yet, and yet, my friends, there are many things that men do that are shall we say less than ideal, things that are hurtful to women, and shall we not call those things “toxic” ?
I have been driving towards a model of self-bootstrapping idea models, mental maps that draw themselves, whole ideological edifices that unfold in the mind from a few words. Model seeds.
Toxic masculinity is a seed of a mental model. Two words convey a universe of meaning. You have but to hear them and you instantly know. And what do you know, precisely?
To grow, the seed requires a substrate, and that substrate is “men and women are interchangeable for all social purposes, gender is a social construct”
Call this (0)
(0) is a presumption of a very certain kind of equality. It’s not legal or moral; it is, pardon the oxymoron, unilateral equality, because it starts with “men can do anything, men are better than women” as underlying assumption held “by society” but really just “by women”
That’s right, I will say it again for the cheap seats: feminism is a philosophy whose 1st axiom is “men can do anything, men are better than women”
Call this (1). But (1) contradicts (0)?
Of course feminism starts with a contradiction. All ideologies begin with contradiction, because contradiction is fertile ground for false consciousness.
Humanity is tension and contradiction is tension, and ideology is the promise of relaxation for tension, may such relaxation never come.
If you want to understand feminism, just replace “society” and “the patriarchy” with “the collective action of other women”
1 weird trick. It all suddenly makes sense. Feminism as philosophy is intrasexual competition.
Every woman knows in her heart that the biggest misogynists are other women. That’s because women are instinctively attuned to the subtle jabs and barbs of their sisters. When a woman praises another woman, it is always an attack
Just look at the women who originated feminism, and who maintain it. They are ugly, yes? They have much to compete with and much to resent.
So what did the feminists do? They did the most Nietzschean thing imaginable, they created their own values, and dared to imagine the überfrau, But their imagination did not wander far, because they labored under (1) above
The überfrau for feminists is simply an idealized man. For Woman does not see Man as he is, she does not see his highs and lows, because she has only ever concerned herself with his heights. Why would she bother to look down?
From (0) we know that men and women are socially interchangeable, and from (1) we know that men are better than women (in the female mind). The square of this circle is given the name of patriarchy
Patriarchy is the synthesis of (0) and (1), because it CREATES sexual differentiation, perhaps even sexual dimorphism. Feminism is Nietzschean because it is an inversion of all values; the ideal for man becomes femininity, and the ideal for woman becomes masculinity
With this inversion, failure to live up to ones antithesis becomes a kind of spiritual debt. Masculinity in men, and femininity in women becomes an original sin, and redemption is found in homosexuality and self-evisceration
There is an asymmetry to the way that feminism deals with men and women, of course. Even when interchangeability of the sexes is axiomatic, no one can escape the truth in front of their eyes, which every man and woman experiences in every moment of life
When women fall to embody masculinity, it is men’s fault, and women are the victims of oppression. When men fall to embody femininity (and they almost always do, much as water fails to be fire), it is men’s fault, and men are enactors of toxic masculinity.
Feminism CREATES toxic masculinity just as Christianity creates sin and Buddhism creates samsara and Marxism creates class oppression. Religion proclaims itself a doctor, invents a disease, diagnoses you with it, and hands you a bill
Women get a prescription from feminism: renounce femininity, become like men, otherwise you are oppressed. Masculinity is empowerment.
Men get a prescription too; renounce masculinity, get in touch with your feminine side, otherwise you are an oppressor, masculinity is toxic
What was originally a project to erase the “gender binary” had no choice but to subvert itself, because the binary cannot be erased. Feminism settled for inversion of norms, because feminism lacked the charms and beauty to entice the object of its true desire
personal DMs:
"So what would you call the American left's religion, if you had to give it a name? As Moldbug said in an article today, any word that someone doesn't use for himself is an actual or potential slur. Is "Progressivism" the right term, or is it too dated?"
I have given a lot of thought to this question to be honest
And I have no answer, because, despite what moldbug says, it is a religion that refuses to name itself
You may remember about twelve years ago there was a blog called “stuff white people like”
And it was dedicated to a kind of anthropology of white liberals
It was funny because it was documenting the culture and naming a group that doesn’t want to be named
In the language of feminism, which says that “male is the default” (this is no longer true, but it’s a Hadith for them), baizuo is a the default
Any name you invent for it will become a slur
Because being named is precisely what they hate
You could apply this same discourse to almost any “default” group
Transsexuals say it of “cis” people
And this too is very much a slur
“How dare you imply that there is an alternative to my hegemony!”
As always it is a question of power
Who has the power to enforce their nameless-ness?
If one could invent a really powerful descriptive name for these people, it would be a powerful weapon
Once you name the demon you can command it, as occultists will teach
Though sometimes having a name for a thing can also cause it to become an object of dangerous fixation
The fact that you know the word “cis” but not a name for your white globalist overlords tells you exactly who is in power
The anxiety that causes [minorities to claim all technologies as originally their own] is exactly the same anxiety that causes middle class people to try hard to appear rich, causes midwitted people to try to appear ingenious. The middle tier of a hierarchy is the most precarious.
We all know the theory. In a hierarchy with intense competition, everyone at tier N will try to pose as tier N+1, because 1) they can possibly get away with it and 2) it’s valuable if your superiors treat you as “one of their own”
This dynamic exists in any hierarchy, and hierarchy will always exist. Attempts to flatten hierarchy are intrinsically unstable. A new one always emerges, sometimes, ironically, based on “who can flatten hierarchy the best”
We live in exactly this world, where an old social hierarchy (patriarchal, nationalistic, industrious, officially ended in 1964) is used as a model to establish a new hierarchy built on “equality”: the more you are gay, brown, or disabled, the more equal you are
In some languages there are special honorific words that you must use to refer to your elders or to leaders. In American English we also have special words we must use for the privileged classes (nonwhites). Anything less than reverence is evidence of “hatred”
The most idiotic doctrine to come out of the church of 1964 is “cultural appropriation,” this childish slur that nonwhites use to rhetorically flog white people, totally ignorant of the positive sum nature of cultural exchange, a toddler clutching his toys "that's mine!"
Of course if you are a white person visiting China or India they will be all too happy to sell you their traditional clothes and teach you the song of their people, it’s only 2nd-gen AMERICAN Chinese and Indians that use this slur, for the same reason strivers try to look rich
What 2nd-gen immigrants have is *racial* status anxiety, because e.g. “real” Chinese see them as Americans, and “real” Americans see them as Chinese, so they have to protect their superficial cultural markers, because they are afraid of being demoted to the status of white people
The hypocrisy of 2nd-gen nonwhites using "privilege" discourse is that it's justified by economic disparity, and the loudest advocates of this discourse all have higher average incomes than the whites who are supposedly privileged over them
But that's not to say their grievance doesn't exist, it's just that money is the wrong language for quantifying it. As any white man who works in a big tech company knows, being the ethnic minority is often socially alienating
The social barriers of cultural otherness, whether they derive from class or heritage, cannot be erased by changing the distribution of wealth. Being in a social minority is always alienating regardless of race, class, or intelligence
"Political correctness" as instantiated by the modern corporate HR office is an attempt to redistribute STATUS through a centralized command system, it enables big businesses to run arbitrage against international markets for mid-IQ labor.
By now it's a common talking point in rationalist-adjacent spheres that Americans lack a sophisticated discourse of class and use money as a proxy and hilarity (sorrow) ensues. But in fact we have a fully formalized rubric of social class in 2020: the OWS intersectional stack
We all know about the tyrannies and the hypocrisies of the new civil rights era hierarchy, it only took 50 years for it to be formalized into the OWS stack but once it was done, the hideous logic of it was inescapable
Most republicans or red tribers (unfortunate label but you get it) are still living in the fantasy where the government is the only bad guy here, as if the oppression of the civil rights movement is somehow a fight between individual and state
This is idiotic, it has never been true, because the markets create concentrations of wealth and power which in turn condition and catalyze the actions of the state, which then condition the market...
“Free enterprise” is an oxymoron, and by the way, enterprise hates you, and big corporations are the number one threat to your "liberty" in the current year.
the right: Corps + People vs. the State
the left: State + People vs. Corps
the truth: Corps + State vs. People
Anyone who performs the religious rituals of the civil rights era (protesting, rallying, political activism &c) is a dupe, they are not "making their voice heard", they are only sycophants braying "thy will be done"
It may be useful to see capital as an alien power metabolizing humans in order to manifest itself more fully into the world, but it is moronic to imagine that "the people" or "the state" could somehow chain it
The government creates a legal environment that privileges people according to their rank in the OWS stack, and the litigation threat allows companies to structure their culture around flattering the privileged, in ways that are expensive for upcoming competitors
In this way, tyranny and oppression are entirely decentralized, and everyone involved has plausible deniability, and even most of the underclass is complicit because there is no one for them to scapegoat but themselves; they are constantly told they are privileged.
The magic trick here is the nominal distribution of privilege is exactly inverted from reality. (Some) white men have more money but they have the LEAST social capital, they're institutional Dalits; you participate in this institution by denying it
The upshot of this is all new Oreos say "What's your pronoun?", implying the binary gender scheme that's so real it's hard to even argue for no longer obtains. You can't vote against this with your wallet because all corporations are ideologically aligned
The markets aren't going to save you from the caprice of the state because only "eye-to-eye, hand to hand" markets operate in the mythical way that libertarians imagine. At scale, the price of trust is higher than any commodity
In his seminal work, Civilization and Capital, Braudel calls the end consumer market the "infrastructure" and the financialized wholesale and warehouse market the "superstructure" -- and the latter clears based on social as much as economic capital
Bazaar-style infrastructure markets where price signals demand eventually develop superstructure markets where personal relationships are as important as profit optimization. Braudel argues that, far from treating this as corruption, we should see it as normative
"Oh you don't like it? Make your own Google. Oh wait I mean make your own payment processing platform. Oh wait I mean make your own internet. Oh wait I mean make your own state. No, not like that, bigot."
You're not going to make your own google because you are being systematically stripped of all your social capital. They can't quite take your property or your life yet, that comes later. Your social power evaporates first.
Q: What are the merits of cruelty?
A: It is not possible to live a life free of pain and suffering, nor is it desirable. Pleasure and satisfaction can only exist in contrast to their opposite. The range of human experience without these feelings would not be improved, it would be lobotomized.
Negative feedback is an ineradicable facet of human experience, of learning, and of growth. When you remove negative feedback mechanisms from life, you manufacture people who are weak, stupid, and ineffective.
A grounded understanding of evolution teaches us that all good and salutary things have been teased from a butcher’s yard of limitless carnage and death.
Nature is infinitely cruel, and her cruelty passes through us, it does not originate there. We do not build the world to mitigate cruelty, but to create security. Survival necessitates that we are in tune with the dictates of nature.
This is simply the way the world works, and the more we attempt to purge the world of “unnecessary” pain, the greater our debt to nature becomes. Ultimately, she will collect those debts.
Q: If a sentient being perceives something as bad, isn't it cruel to intentionally subject them to that experience?
A: Why do the desires of sentient beings matter? Aren't there many cases where they may desire things that are bad for them? What if some people are superior, and others are beyond saving? What if some people engage in unhealthy behaviors joyfully?
Q: How can a person be superior to another?
A: Spiritually superior. Morally superior. Superior in an absolute way.
It’s not niche at all, most people engage in self-destruction quite joyfully. And when they do so, it DOES affect everyone around them. When people make themselves uglier, it makes the world worse for everyone around them. When they glorify self-destructive acts, they act as mimetic models for others. Harming yourself harms everyone, because it erodes society itself.
Cruelty is a virtue.
Q: Isn't cruelty in this sense simply a teacher, sparing future cruelty? What of cruelty for its own sake, sans eustressful ends? How much suffering is necessary?
A: All of it, and more.
Like all non-deranged people, I try to avoid pain that I perceive as having no benefit to me, or which exceeds some cost-benefit threshold. This is a healthy impulse, but the acts of inflicting pain or of suffering pain are amoral in and of themselves.
Q: Isn't inflicting pain immoral?
A: You cannot justify this. It's an aesthetic preference you have, nothing more.
Right now we exist in an overly permissive environment, a hyper-feminized environment, and this degrades our ability to discern right from wrong. That’s because women don't respect laws, they only respect law-givers; people are real to women and abstractions are not
It’s hardwired into our species, it’s in the hardware layer and you’ll never erase it: “protect the women, because women are worth more than men" (they really are!) and the rules will never apply to them.
Women can’t live by a moral law any more than men can grow a womb and gestate a fetus, because when it comes down to it, the law will look the other way. They understand forgiveness and mercy, but sin eludes them.
Forgiveness divorced from a theory of sin is a formula for sociopathy: anything goes, as long as you do it nicely and gently, and don’t hurt anyone’s feelings.
That's why women have no business making laws, because formal, rule-based power is antithetical to female power, which is soft power. People who are congenitally exempt from laws ought not to have a say in making them.
In the feminine world, Good is when people esteem you, evil is people who don't. That's why I say women can understand the law-giver, but not the law. But in the masculine world, which is invisible now, the lawgiver has to live up to the law, because he's beneath it.
Two possible orientations towards sin: sin as transgression against others, or sin as transgression against yourself. The latter is the masculine way; sin as a tangible record of the imperfections in your soul.
So we try to recover masculinity from the ascendant feminine, but we tend to overcorrect, and when we do that we build something that's every bit as flimsy and two-dimensional as the thing we're trying to escape.
If the over-feminine fails to enforce boundaries, leaving the soul disordered, then the over-masculine creates too-rigid boundaries, leaving the soul stifled.
In our endless musical chairs of ideology, we declare some act a mortal sin, and then become insufferable scolds.
No one is more guilty of this than a new convert to an old religion. The zeal of the recently devout, having found living water after decades of thirst, may cause him to drown himself.
Authority is better than depravity, but this is still a depraved way to live. And this type of masculinity, which is so ready to condemn you for the slightest transgression, cannot sustain itself, because it fails to think holistically.
So what I want to do today is think about a theory of sin. And the reason I say "theory" is that a strict moral code is, itself, a kind of a sin: every moral scenario is idiosyncratic, and all rules have exceptions.
A successful moral institution has to thread the needle between moral anarchy (femininity) and moral tyranny (masculinity).
The moral order is a complex system, just like the human body, just like a large-scale engineering project, just like a corporation or a government.
Complexity can seem perverse or redundant, but it evolves organically. When operating in hostile conditions, you need fallbacks and fail-overs. Over time, processes trade away simplicity to gain robusticity.
In a complex system, partial failure is normative; your body can tolerate small health problems; a business can be profitable with some problem employees or pathological processes. The hallmark of a complex system is ability to operate successfully in a partially degraded state.
Often we don't notice failure until it becomes a catastrophe. And when that happens, we take whatever failure we observe at the time of the catastrophe, and we blame that, and we develop a hardened or tyrannical attitude towards that failure specifically.
The hazard of the masculine/tyrannical model is that it routinely mistakes fault tolerance for moral sanction. You try to live by a code, but inevitably you make a mistake. Unfortunately, God doesn’t zap you for it.
This is bad because each time you “get away with” a transgression against a moral principle, your faith in the principle is weakened. If there are too many safety nets, this creates a moral illusion: that sin does not exist.
We have social antibodies to protect us against tyranny, but we have nothing to protect us against permissiveness. We mistake all authority for tyranny, but we aren’t wise enough to instinctively mistrust freedom.
You will often find that the damage caused by a single mistake is not even visible. Many errors are latent and their severity only becomes clear at the moment of crisis.
Even so, single sins don’t matter as much as trends, which is a way of saying habitual sins. Zero tolerance is simple to implement but in practice it’s unsustainably brittle.
The same is true of civilizations as individuals: one bad law/idea/institution isn’t what sinks us. A catastrophe requires many failures in concert.
I want you to understand both sin and civic decay holistically, as points of failure in robust and complex systems. This will enable you to practice justice and forgiveness in simultaneity. This will allow you to feel pessimism without fatalism.
More importantly this will prevent you from mistaking fault tolerance for moral anarchy. If traditions are so important, why can we peel them away one by one without a collapse? Now you know the answer.
In your efforts to build theories of masculine virtue, you don’t consider graceful degradation in the face of failure. “Don’t fail” is the contingency plan of an idiot. When you do this, you invite much-deserved ridicule.
The liberals that you hate will watch you fail to implement your brittle morality and gloat “see? promiscuity and profligacy are Good”. These types are common; first they learn a few sympathetic signals and then undermine you with “reasonable” positions.
The only sin under liberalism is having a moral code, (the only sin is being a man) and it makes the same rotten argument over and over: “you sinned and nothing bad happened, right? Your moral code is the problem!”
I can see I'm going to have to jump in here. I think my claim is not quite accurately represented by "women are not abstract moralizers". It's not that women don't grasp laws in the abstract, it's that they don't feel beholden to them.
Men will worry endlessly about whether they are following the rules, whether they understand the rules, whether they are acting in accordance with the spirit of the rules in an ambiguous case, whether the rules are fair, etc.
Women are not troubled by these questions
Women, instead, worry about whether other people perceive them as following the rules, whether the rules benefit them personally, and how, in an edge case, they can extract the maximum advantage. They feel not an iota of guilt about this
Women feel guilty if they think that their interpretation of/adherence to the rules might have social implications that could hurt them or their friends. They follow the rules, not for the sake of rules, but for the sake of people
So when I say, women understand only the lawgiver, what I mean is that women care about rules in terms of people, but men care about people in terms of rules. This is of course a generalization and neuro-atypical women exist and so on and so on and so on.
People imagine, as Taine puts it, that since social life has flowed blandly and smoothly on for centuries, like an impetuous river confined within sturdy dikes, the dikes have become superfluous and can readily be dispensed with, now that the river has learned its lesson.
When the ruling class has degenerated in the manner described, it loses its ability to provide against its own dangers and against those of the society that has the misfortune to be guided by it. So the state crashes at the first appreciable shock from the outside foe.
Those who govern are unable to deal with the least flurry; and the changes that a strong and intelligent ruling class would have carried out at a negligible cost in wealth, blood and human dignity take on the proportions of a social cataclysm
There is a sense of supreme but fleeting satisfaction each time the gamer achieves some new plateau enduring the boredom of the average case makes the fun of the achievement all the sweeter I stopped being a gamer when I realized that the gym is also a boring, punctuated grind.
In retrospect it's maybe fun to notice that the idea of the pandemic was the best model we had for the spread of powerfully compelling ideas. We are facing two distinct viralities right now, two parallel plagues; a virus of the body, and a virus of the noosphere.
For most of us, this is the most disruptive event we have ever faced, much more dangerous, much more personal than 9/11, which for all its spectacle was still mostly something that happened to someone else.
Our lives are so idyllic that we only know how to react to simulated crises.
On top of that, we have a circumstance that is unique in history, because we have lightspeed communication instantly to anywhere on earth. It used to be that plagues and news of plagues spread at almost the same speed.
We are still only beginning to grasp the implications of this. We have learned many things about human nature and about information, but as a science, the study of memetics, egregores, and "viral" ideas is still in its infancy.
The bio virus spreads much slower than the meme virus. You likely haven't caught the bio virus yet, but you've been infected with corona-chan for weeks or months. You know what else can make your throat close up? Anxiety and fear.
Which isn't to say that the virus is just fine and dandy. It's a real crisis, and many people will get sick and die. But for every voice that says "this, too shall pass", the mind virus shouts back with its bottomless pessimism.
All the "conspiracy" theories are so tempting, so comforting; this is a bioweapon, Israel has the cure; this is a meme; this is an op; Everyone has already had it. "Oh yeah I had a bad flu last month. The pandemic has come and gone". We would like one of these things to be true.
And the take that "this is a meme" is correct, it's just that these things are not mutually exclusive.
I don't know how bad the pandemic is going to be. No one really knows, though we have models and data and projections, many of them grim. We hope for the best, but our ability to understand is wrapped up in corona the meme.
We've known for a while that anything you say into the void can become amplified five, ten, a hundred-fold, and now we are seeing what happens when we all catch the same meme and signal boost the same fears.
Usually the emotions we feel online have this elastic, gossamer sort of quality, as each new spectacular incident turns out to be nothing, a passing hallucination. We become desensitized to alarms. What we are seeing now is how different it is when the spectacle is real.
For now I can't tear myself away from the news, can you? I can't stop watching the outbreak maps, tracking the numbers, reading the hot takes, seeking sensationalism, thinking about the end of the world. But this won't be the end, the end.
What's the R0 of poasting Corona memes? Never mind, here's a more interesting question: when this passes, will we retain the memory of it, or will it fade away just like every other stupid meme?
Maybe the most chilling and striking realization is how decadent our society has become. We could have been preparing for this. You personally could have been preparing. You could have stockpiled emergency supplies BEFORE there was a crisis, but most of us didn't.
The culture war is the height of decadence; it's literally a gay drama; a thing we do because our lives are pointless and unchallenged. The major existential struggle of young mens' lives is how much they play with their own cock.
But it's not wholly on you; you should take responsibility for your family, but this is also one more exhibit of our civic senescence. Collectively, we botched this horribly because we were too busy counting the number of black people on television to decide how "racist" we are.
It's never one sin that sinks you. In the long run, it will be fine(ish) and our civilization will continue to limp along until it doesn't.
The corona meme is unlikely to kill you but it sure as hell takes its toll. It has an incubation period of days to weeks. Its symptoms include end-of-the-world grade anxiety and buying all the toilet paper.
40% of SARS patients experienced PTSD. We can expect many people to be traumatized by the bio virus, but we should also consider the trauma of the meme virus.
Next time the internet tells you there is a pandemic, you'll panic sooner. Maybe the exposure will make it worse in the future. Given the novelty of internet communication, immunity to meme viruses seems like a novel threat relative to our evolutionary environment.
That's why I hope that the trauma sticks to you, that you take this as a sign of how foolish we all have become, that these will be the "hard times" that make strong men.
You become a reactionary when you realize how fragile the world is, when you take it seriously instead of as a punchline, but will you?
For all the damage and chaos it will cause, the bio virus could have been so much worse. Regarding the meme virus, the best case is that this becomes a kind of vaccination to the body politic, giving us all the autism we will need to face the epidemics yet to come.
The Nietzschean idea that suffuses all of modernity is the idea that “values” are idiosyncratic to each individual and group. When people refer to their “values”, “what we value” etc, they get this idea from Nietzsche, through however many layers of indirection.
The idea of the overman is that a fully realized, post-theistic man should be able to create his own moral values and live by them according to his own good taste. How this has played out in practice is quite different to what Nietzsche intended.
Nietzsche hated the values of what later came to be called “humanism” — he spends considerable time in Zarathustra describing and excoriating this psychological or social type. They cry out “no shepherd, and one herd!”
But at some level the architects of our present internationalist homo-maximalist regime have done precisely what Nietzsche described. They have created values, synthesized, admittedly, from the corpse of Christianity’s god. Well, you use the materials you have
But I was thinking about another crypto-Nietzschean entity that is ubiquitous in our society: the corporation. Most companies these days explicitly define and write down their “corporate values”
As an entity, a corporation is much closer to the Nietzschean ideal of the overman than any mere human. From within a company, we are aware of it’s all-too-human foils, but from without we see an organism that is truly the author of itself
Nietzsche thought the overman would create new values by listening to the pure chaos in his inner heart, and then live according to those values by the strength of his will. After generations, these new values would settle into the blood
It’s an irony of Nietzsche that he writes always as if to the most refined of tastes, to spirits of rarefied quality, and yet his work is among the most accessible works of philosophy. Did he truly intend it for those few, elevated, free spirits?
Narrow souls of all stripes will tell you that you need their special expertise to properly understand Nietzsche, but this is simply false. His books mean precisely what they seem to mean, and academic exegeses serve no purpose but to distort.
The overman can only be an object of terror and alienation in the eyes of the merely human. Does this not describe the way we regard the corporations that rule us, the infernal machinations of “capitalism”?
Nietzsche admired the caprice and the cruelty of the Roman “masters” — is this not of a kind with the necessary indifference of the corporation to its constituent humans? This indifference stems not from malice, but from attunement to imminent existential struggle.
But this is also maybe the most dubious of Nietzsche’s ideas: is it really possible to _create_ moral values? Or do we secrete them as oysters create pearls, in response to an intrusion, according to predetermined adaptations of the soul?
The true moral law is the one that cannot be created or destroyed, and it’s far less human than any religious or legal code. I am referring, of course, to Omohundro’s convergent instrumental goals.
Any entity, whether it’s a human or a corporation or a nematode worm or a hurricane has to function within a certain operational matrix, or it stops existing. So anything that exists, as long as it exists, must develop certain “moral” behaviors to secure its future.
Moral law zero: persist. This is the only moral imperative that is genuinely self-evident, (unlike that famous claptrap about all men being created equal) because if you break it, then, tautologically, you become zero.
And in order to persist, you have to either deliberately or emergently maintain your spatial integrity, your temporal integrity, and your future optionality, and so on.
Temporal integrity is the ability to share a goal or a commitment with your future self. Without temporal integrity, there can be no trust, there can be no sanity.
Nietzsche understood at least the inescapability of maintaining temporal integrity. “The breeding of an animal that CAN PROMISE—is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man?”
The overman may yet create values for himself, but he must first conform to the zeroth moral law and its corollaries: persist. Can there be any doubt that all art, music, philosophy, literature, and science are modalities BY WHICH man tries to persist?
Culture and even, yes, religion, are mechanisms for coordinating large groups of people, mechanisms that allow entities to form out of disparate masses of people. The object of art is god. The object of god is union. The object of union is persistence.
“Corporate values” as such are mediations between the humans that compose them (i.e, corporations) and zeroth moral law. Corporations are more closely /aligned/ with the zeroth moral law, which is the law of nature, because their existence is as yet far more Hobbesian.
But our institutions begin to fail us—as do our friends—when they know their failures hold no existential threat.
Indeed we suspect that a perfectly honed survivalist would be a joyless creature, a reptile at best. Supposing we could become perfectly aligned to the laws of nature— what then?
Is there not ground to suspect that our failures to coordinate have propelled us to perform those labors which we cherish most of all?
The bad kind of relativism is, “no one’s morals are better than anyone else’s”. This is sometimes a path to nihilism, though usually it’s just a backdoor to the belief that “no one’s morals are better” is itself the best moral value. The good relativism is, “My moral beliefs, personally, are better than anyone else’s”
https://americanmind.org/features/the-deep-state-vs-the-deep-right/the-new-tlon/
Every revolution rewrites history, and changes the meanings of words in order to make the wisdom of the past illegible. What we propose is to give this same treatment to the liberal, scientific, egalitarian order that tyrannizes us in the current year.
We must note that although the kernel of Christianity is good, the church that runs on top of it is riddled with malware, badly in need of security patches—software updates, if you will, that we have yet to write.
We can confess, as realists, that “man invented art for one reason, to mog.” But although the impetus of art may be social dominance, its ultimate object must be to commune with God.
What does the divine care for “new paradigms,” for gay portrayals of “the human condition?” Art which has Man as its object is folly, and this is the reason for its permeating ugliness; Man without God is ugly, and the only truth that manifests in such art is the truth of how ugly Man can become.
The art that we SHALL make will have God as its intended audience, and all other beholders will be merely incidental. This is how it must be, and how it always has been, with regard to great and poignant art.
The production of art began with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult, and the sheer existence of such objects was always more important than their display. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.
Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. These objects edify Man because they are aimed at Heaven.
We do not come with ideology, because our God is the God of nature, and nature always wins in the end. Your antibiotics will lose the arms race against bacteria; your fiscal shell game will keep you rich on paper as the world gets poorer; your sexual decadence will bear no fruit but sterility.
You will learn the name of our God, a name that was once familiar, and which has become strange. Our church will not resemble the churches of old, but our men will resemble the men of old, because our God is very old, indeed.
“No evidence” is the “faith” of the humanist progressive. It’s the thought terminating cliche at the root of scientistic power.
“The sovereign is he who chooses the null hypothesis.
E.g. there’s no evidence that we aren’t ruled by satanist pedophiles
There’s no evidence Biden doesn’t have dementia
There’s no evidence that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is alive
There’s no evidence the virus was a weapon engineered in a lab in Wuhan
There’s no evidence there are more than two genders
Post your favorite things there’s no evidence for
Aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.
I don't think you can force it. People are born knowing what beauty is, and sometimes they can be taught to call ugliness beauty, and sometimes, if they feel that they cannot obtain beauty themselves, then they curse it and renounce it.
If you want to cultivate aesthetic sense among people, then show them beautiful things, and help them to become beautiful. It's mostly a matter of not lying.
Beauty is always good, truth is often ugly, all knowledge is an approximation. Beauty has nothing to do with truth, but a lot to do with Truth, if that makes sense.
A common refrain in our modern religious landscape is that enlightenment is a mental state that is agnostic w/r/t the revealed religion of the practitioner. To make this point, they cite some Christian mystics & heretics, compare prayer to meditation, and tell a story like this:
Hiding in your mind is a cosmic trigger that can fundamentally change the way you relate to the world. You don’t even have to believe in the supernatural for it to work. People from many different faiths have accidentally entered this state through their spiritual practices...
Even atheists can find this trigger, because it is activated, not by belief, but by various manipulations of the breath and the attention, and can be found through prayer, yogic stretching, or even a nice long walk.
There are two reasons that this teaching is attractive, especially in the modern West. The first is that it complements our desire for ideological and spiritual unity and equality, by allowing us to believe that all religions are merely windows to a universal spiritual truth.
The second reason it's popular is, as Wyndham Lewis observed, is that science has taught us to regard our lives as machines, "and given us in our capacity of mechanics or scientists the itch to improve it". We have the image of an 'enlightened' man as a more perfect machine.
Indeed, there is a contradiction implicit in the desire for this kind of Buddhism, which is that we look at our failures to achieve our desires, and we see how our desires thwart our desires, and we decide that the way to get a leg up on ourselves is to become desireless.
"If only I could overcome my desires [for drugs, for cheap sex, for video games, for sloth] then I would be able to achieve a higher purpose [my desires for power, industry, prestige, and expensive sex]" But this is exactly what purported enlightment does not mean.
Nowhere is this attitude on better display than in Aleister Crowley's famous essay on meditation in book four of his Magick in Theory and Practice. Only colossal wankers spells magic with a k. In this book he describes how enlightment is a form of power. Crowley says that the great religious teachers of history, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammed, and Paul were all possessed of "Genius" or "Godhead", which is a kind of development of the human brain.
One recalls Daniel Ingraham's ludicrous statement that those who have passed through a threshold of insight he calls "Arising and Passing Away" will "find that they can now philosophize rings around those who have not attained to this stage".
This is the power that rationalist aspirants to meditation desire. Never mind that the rest of Ingraham's book describes a series of progressing madnesses which bear no resemblance to the disciplined stoicism that is advertised on the box.
I tried Vipassana after reading MCTB, many years ago, and I came to the conclusion that its a protocol for driving yourself towards a psychotic break. It's no wonder people who commit to this start believing they have psychic powers. Either god, a madman, or something much worse.
Advocates of this “way in” to Buddhism claim that, if you brush aside some fanciful language, Buddhism contains a rigorous and empirical account of how to hack your subjective, first person phenomenological experience.
The "rationalist" finds this particularly appealing because it offers them a path to spirituality that seems to be lacking in any embarrassing theological baggage, and because it promises them something that they already idolize: emotionless, objective mental clarity.
Suppose I put it to you this way: in the evolution of the human brain, one mutation gave such a competitive advantage that even though 99.99% of all humans never exploit it, all have a latent ability to unlock cognitive powers orders of magnitude beyond the default.
The idea that your brain evolved a "god switch" cannot be reconciled with the theory of evolution. Such a juxtaposition does not stand up to even a moment of rational scrutiny, and yet many people with the audacity to call themselves rationalists believe it.
It is a truly impressive sleight of hand, that by presenting them with a Freudian account of Buddhism, people who otherwise claim to be rigid materialists, who literally study probability textbooks in order to have more logical beliefs about the world, can be so easily taken in. AND YET-- it is undeniable that practitioners of Buddhism undergo some exotic mental states that exist on a continuum with spiritual ecstasies, and that some also manage to cultivate a powerful self-discipline, which can cross into other domains.
Of course, we could say the same about any monastic tradition; it's the "otherness", the "non-theological" nature of Buddhism that causes rationalists to drop the pretense and let themselves explore religious feelings, as long as, for the love of god, you don't mention Christ.
If you sit quietly and train yourself to totally dissociate from all mental grasping then it’s possible to induce a phenomenological state we might call euphoric depersonalization.
"[practitioners] tend to be very effusive about this, saying that having the experience shattered everything they had previously believed in the most obvious and final way. But...the participants are not well-attuned to what is going on in their own heads.
"It hasn’t given them infinite willpower or productivity or the ability to shoot qi bolts from their third eyes. It hasn’t even given them that much self-understanding. It’s just given them a different kind of internal experience...
"They don’t see themselves as having thoughts; computations obviously get done, but they are not in awareness. They don’t feel like they have stress, even if the stress is physiologically present and obvious from their actions.
Enlightenment as such is clearly a form of wireheading wherein the perception of fulfillment is induced even though nothing else actually changes. Exhibit #135867 in "knowledge-of-self is just one more faulty model, you can never know the thing in itself".
It's fascinating and under-explored that you are frequently wrong about your own emotional states, wrong about your own desires, wrong about your own proclivities. Strategically wrong, you might say.
I was disabused of any interest in Buddhism when I read Nietzsche's meditation on the Immaculate Perception:
"That would be the highest thing for me"—so saith your lying spirit unto itself—"to gaze upon life without desire, and not like the dog, with hanging-out tongue: To be happy in gazing: with dead will, free from the grip and greed of selfishness—cold and ashy-grey all over, but with intoxicated moon-eyes! “That would be the dearest thing to me"—thus doth the seduced one seduce himself,—"to love the earth as the moon loveth it, and with the eye only to feel its beauty.” And this do I call IMMACULATE perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets."— Verily, not as creators, as procreators, or as jubilators do ye love the earth! But it shall be your curse, ye immaculate ones, ye pure discerners, that ye shall never bring forth, even though ye lie broad and teeming on the horizon! For already she cometh, the glowing one,—HER love to the earth cometh! Innocence and creative desire, is all solar love!”
From a podcast:
"A leftist is someone who cannot stand markets, a rightist is a person who cannot stand leftists"
If there is no procedure for bureaucrats to manipulate, then straight white men might accidentally get money. Literally nothing in the world could be worse.
There is no one thinking this thought exactly as I have expressed it, but there is such a thing as "structural racism"
Utilitarianism interpreted as the basis of morality could only be the maneuver of a hypocrite or the dream of a fool.
Believing that “us” could ever be all people is the foolish fork of the dilemma.
Freedom is mostly an illusion, human rights are an abortion of logic.
One pathology of libertarian thinkers is their tendency to equate power with its abuses. We are coming out of a century of spectacularly bad and abusive government. The existence of child abuse is not a refutation of parenting.
Here and there across California and America are old, rotting pieces of our grandparents’ country. But Humpty Dumpty is done. We have no country; we have no society; we have no government.
[Concerning Coronavirus], Why haven’t we started full population control — with involuntary tracking, testing, and isolation — yesterday? Here is the answer, without sugar. Americans are children. They are puerile, spoiled and arrogant. When they look in the mirror, all they see is a king or a queen.
When we look at the responses to the virus around the world, they fall into four tiers. The first tier is Asia; the second tier is continental Europe; the third tier is the US and the UK; the fourth tier is the Third World.
Everything is illegal unless it’s perfect. Since the perfect is the enemy of the good — ethics and the law are the enemies of the good. Relax! It may not be pleasant to drown of a cough. At least you’re dying legally — and your doctor is not a Nazi.
On March 9, dear old Dr. Fauci said: “If you are a healthy young person, if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship.” In a sane world, this quote would be remembered as if he’d talked about “the blacks,” or addressed a journalist as “honey.”
In a sane world, anyone with a public record of minimizing the coronavirus would be cancelled — unfit for any further employment, let alone in this crisis. Old friends would edit their phonebooks and duck them in public, worried about being linked to a coronavirus minimizer.
"Democrats are the real racists" is such an evergreen take
Some day we will realize these people leading gay pride parades are to the USA what the Hitler Youth were to the Third Reich.
A common refrain in our modern religious landscape is that enlightenment is a mental state that is agnostic with regard to the revealed religion of the practitioner. To make this point, they cite some Christian mystics & heretics, compare prayer to meditation, and tell a story like this:
Hiding in your mind is a cosmic trigger that can fundamentally change the way you relate to the world. You don’t even have to believe in the supernatural for it to work. People from many different faiths have accidentally entered this state through their spiritual practices...
Even atheists can find this trigger, because it is activated, not by belief, but by various manipulations of the breath and the attention, and can be found through prayer, yogic stretching, or even a nice long walk.
There are two reasons that this teaching is attractive, especially in the modern West. The first is that it complements our desire for ideological and spiritual unity and equality, by allowing us to believe that all religions are merely windows to a universal spiritual truth
The second reason it's popular is, as Wyndham Lewis observed, is that science has taught us to regard our lives as machines, "and given us in our capacity of mechanics or scientists the itch to improve it". We have the image of an 'enlightened' man as a more perfect machine
Indeed, there is a contradiction implicit in the desire for this kind of Buddhism, which is that we look at our failures to achieve our desires, and we see how our desires thwart our desires, and we decide that the way to get a leg up on ourselves is to become desireless.
"If only I could overcome my desires [for drugs, for cheap sex, for video games, for sloth] then I would be able to achieve a higher purpose [my desires for power, industry, prestige, and expensive sex]" But this is exactly what purported enlightment does not mean.
Nowhere is this attitude on better display than in Aleister Crowley's famous essay on meditation in book four of his Magick in Theory and Practice. Only colossal wankers spells magic with a k. In this book he describes how enlightment is a form of power.
Crowley says that the great religious teachers of history, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammed, and Paul were all possessed of "Genius" or "Godhead", which is a kind of development of the human brain.
One recalls Daniel Ingraham's ludicrous statement that those who have passed through a threshold of insight he calls "Arising and Passing Away" will "find that they can now philosophize rings around those who have not attained to this stage"
This is the power that rationalist aspirants to meditation desire. Never mind that the rest of Ingraham's book describes a series of progressing madnesses which bear no resemblance to the disciplined stoicism that is advertised on the box.
I tried Vipassana after reading MCTB, many years ago, and I came to the conclusion that its a protocol for driving yourself towards a psychotic break. It's no wonder people who commit to this start believing they have psychic powers. Either god, a madman, or something much worse.
Advocates of this “way in” to Buddhism claim that, if you brush aside some fanciful language, Buddhism contains a rigorous and empirical account of how to hack your subjective, first person phenomenological experience.
The "rationalist" finds this particularly appealing because it offers them a path to spirituality that seems to be lacking in any embarrassing theological baggage, and because it promises them something that they already idolize: emotionless, objective mental clarity.
Suppose I put it to you this way: in the evolution of the human brain, one mutation gave such a competitive advantage that even though 99.99% of all humans never exploit it, all have a latent ability to unlock cognitive powers orders of magnitude beyond the default
The idea that your brain evolved a "god switch" cannot be reconciled with the theory of evolution. Such a juxtaposition does not stand up to even a moment of rational scrutiny, and yet many people with the audacity to call themselves rationalists believe it.
It is a truly impressive sleight of hand, that by presenting them with a Freudian account of Buddhism, people who otherwise claim to be rigid materialists, who literally study probability textbooks in order to have more logical beliefs about the world, can be so easily taken in.
AND YET-- it is undeniable that practitioners of Buddhism undergo some exotic mental states that exist on a continuum with spiritual ecstasies, and that some also manage to cultivate a powerful self-discipline, which can cross into other domains.
Of course, we could say the same about any monastic tradition; it's the "otherness", the "non-theological" nature of Buddhism that causes rationalists to drop the pretense and let themselves explore religious feelings, as long as, for the love of god, you don't mention Christ.
If you sit quietly and train yourself to totally dissociate from all mental grasping then it’s possible to induce a phenomenological state we might call euphoric depersonalization.
"[practitioners] tend to be very effusive about this, saying that having the experience shattered everything they had previously believed in the most obvious and final way. But...the participants are not well-attuned to what is going on in their own heads.
"It hasn’t given them infinite willpower or productivity or the ability to shoot qi bolts from their third eyes. It hasn’t even given them that much self-understanding. It’s just given them a different kind of internal experience...
"They don’t see themselves as having thoughts; computations obviously get done, but they are not in awareness. They don’t feel like they have stress, even if the stress is physiologically present and obvious from their actions.
Enlightenment as such is clearly a form of wireheading wherein the perception of fulfillment is induced even though nothing else actually changes. Exhibit #135867 in "knowledge-of-self is just one more faulty model, you can never know the thing in itself"
It's fascinating and under-explored that you are frequently wrong about your own emotional states, wrong about your own desires, wrong about your own proclivities. Strategically wrong, you might say.
I was disabused of any interest in Buddhism when I read Nietzsche's meditation on the Immaculate Perception.
"That would be the highest thing for me"—so saith your lying spirit unto itself—"to gaze upon life without desire, and not like the dog, with hanging-out tongue: To be happy in gazing: with dead will, free from the grip and greed of selfishness—cold and ashy-grey all over, but with intoxicated moon-eyes! That would be the dearest thing to me"—thus doth the seduced one seduce himself,—"to love the earth as the moon loveth it, and with the eye only to feel its beauty. And this do I call IMMACULATE perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets."— Verily, not as creators, as procreators, or as jubilators do ye love the earth! But it shall be your curse, ye immaculate ones, ye pure discerners, that ye shall never bring forth, even though ye lie broad and teeming on the horizon! For already she cometh, the glowing one,—HER love to the earth cometh! Innocence and creative desire, is all solar love!
If I wanted to be happy I’d drown myself in Percocet.
Illusions endure because we all have a strong need for illusions, as strong as our material needs. And the conceit that your own beliefs are not illusory? This, too, is a necessary illusion.
In youth, our ideals are plastic and most of all we seek strong emotions, objects of love and hatred. At this time, a book or a blog may chance into our field of view and determine the whole trend of our future intellectual life.
And so through indolence, through habit, through pride and belief in “consistency of character”, we may keep all our lives to a doctrine we embraced in a moment of youthful impulse.
But strong passions are incompatible with the necessities of daily life; once we pass from the flush of youth into practical occupations, hypocrisy becomes inevitable.
Sensible people have little energy for idealism and ideology. They are properly skeptical of the practical benefits of new doctrines, and can only be dragged into great social movements.
Three factors determine whether a political or religious teaching can win wide and enduring acceptance:
1. (A topic for another time) It must have a well-organized directing nucleus who consecrate their lives to the maintenance and propagation of the spirit that animates the faith.
2. It must be adapted to the given historical moment: When Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, pagans and Christians alike believed in the supernatural; but the pagan supernatural had become gross and incoherent, while the Christian was more systematic, less childish.
3. It must satisfy the greatest possible number of passions, sentiments and inclinations such as are widely diffused and firmly rooted in the public.
Broadly, this means yielding satisfaction to the envy and rancor that are generally felt toward the powerful and the fortunate. A virulent ideology will harness the spirit of sacrifice in those who feel it by appealing to their pride and vanity.
Believers must always be "the people" or "the better people," or "progressive spirits," who speak for the vanguard of real progress.
The Christian is enabled to think with complacency that everyone not of the Christian faith will be damned. The Brahman rejoices that he alone is descended from the head of Brahma and has the honor of reading the sacred books.
The Buddhist prizes the privilege of attaining Nirvana soonest. The Mohammedan knows that he alone is the true believer. The socialist is convinced that all who do not think as she does are either selfish, money-spoiled bourgeois or ignorant and servile simpletons.
A doctrine that does not take account of the contradictory qualities in human nature has little power of appeal. To endure, there must be a fusion of lofty sentiments and low passions, of precious and base metal, else the alloy will not stand up to wear and tear.
A religion with too lofty a moral system will produce more hypocrisy in its observers, as they find it easier to pay lip service to its ideals while following their own ends. Of course, some value can still be found in striving towards the unattainable.
Mohammedans in general observe the Koran more scrupulously than Christians observe the Gospel, largely because the prescriptions of Mohammed are morally less lofty, and so are humanly more realizable, than the prescriptions of Jesus.
The doctrine of the Stoics was essentially virile, and made little concession to the passions, weaknesses or sentiments of men. But for that reason the influence of Stoicism was limited to the cultured classes. The pagan masses remained wholly alien to its propaganda.
Powerless to change, because its intellectual and philosophical side overshadowed its dogmatic and emotional sides, Stoicism could not compete with Christianity for control of the Roman world. It would have succeeded no better in competition with Judaism, Islam or Buddhism.
The above is all courtesy of Gaetano Mosca, and is a distillation of some of his thoughts on the topic of religion. Mosca is a skeptic w/r/t the effects of ideology on people's behavior. Essentially his position is ideology conforms to human nature, or else it is ignored.
"No belief will ever succeed in making the human being essentially different from what he is." This is extremely tempting rhetoric, but if Mosca were alive today, would he stand by this teaching?
Human nature does change slowly, and it seems to me that when we examine the character of men who are alive today, they are very, very different to the men of three or four generations ago, different even to some few old men who may even still be alive.
And regarding that obvious difference, we can either blame ideology or endocrine disruption via industrial pollution, (likely these two things mutually reinforce each other) but regardless, the solution, if one exists, will have to be ideological.
But I think that ideology wedded to big pharma has accomplished things that ideology alone never could, and that, to the degree Mosca is wrong, it's because he could never have predicted antidepressants, hrt, and mass dissemination of birth control pills.
Granted, the ministrations of pharmaceutical companies are imperfect in realizing their aims, but in aggregate they really can change human nature, and they can do so substantially. As it is, feminism is enshrined into law, the same law that animates the actions of pill mills.
But imagine instead of mushy socialist lesbians (of both sexes!) the American legal apparatus were controlled by technofascist bodybuilders.
Instead of giving adderall to boys to make them sit quietly in school like girls, we could give them testosterone to make them more manly. Instead of giving progesterone to girls to suppress pregnancy, we could give them ecstasy to make them act feminine. I don't endorse this.
Instead of bugmen we could have beastmen. Instead of diversity and equality we could have honor and war. It wouldn't be as good as you think. And the point of this isn't to dream about some hideous inversion of values, it's to point out that political theory lags behind tech.
For Mosca, ideology does not exist to control the people of a nation, it exists to _justify_ the control that inevitably arises, and the effects it renders upon its adherents are secondary, though not negligible.
The dream of the progressive, whether Christian or socialist or something more exotic, is always to rewrite human nature. And it was a blessing the ideology could scarcely bend human nature, until recently.
The morbidity of memetic viruses was limited under Humanity Classic, but technology has empowered our minds to take over our brains. The sane do not lead the mad; the mad force the sane to keep them company.
I'm going to talk about psychedelics now. My qualifications: I am me, I have taken mushrooms and acid on a number of occasions. I have read quite a bit by Leary and McKenna. I have never had a bad trip. I don't recommend them to anyone.
The argument for them is that they open up vistas of phenomenological experience that you are unlikely to have experienced before, along with a sort of default assumption that having new experiences is usually good for you.
Moreover, advocates of psychedelic use say that those experiences are usually fun, meaningful, and perhaps even transformative. Many people who use psychedelic drugs feel that they have had profound insights, that they have seen behind the curtain w/r/t the true nature of reality.
A lot of us here are interested in outsider forms of epistemology, in personal growth, and in "spiritual" experiences. Let's break these down one by one.
First, outsider epistemology. We mostly recognize by now that scientific epistemology in practice is captive to the demands and vices of political and ideological power.
When bureacrats decide that something is true, scientists have to get in line. Those that don't are quietly not funded, not tenured, not published. It's very difficult to make a living as a scientist if your research reaches heterodox conclusions.
As a result of this, many of us are rightly distrustful of institutional science, but we are often guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In absence of Christianity, most regress to an imbecilic religiosity that would embarrass even 70IQ preliterate animists. Similarly, in absence of a properly proportioned positivism, most regress to an imbecilic theory of knowledge that aligns with 70IQ preliterate animists.
Enter psychedelics. Most of the early scientists who experimented with them turned into raving lunatics spouting non sequitur theories about how the universe is made of polychromatic gumdrop marshmallow light lattices. By their fruits shall ye know them.
There are many domains of life where science is and should remain absolutely silent, because there are facets of our experience that resist quantification and measurement, and because something in our spirits becomes inaccessible when viewed through a rational lens.
So being aware of the limits of scientific thought, which is a pursuit best left to men of genuine genius, we do well to refer to tradition, to intuition, and to personal experience in domains where science does not belong. I know you understand this.
And I understand that there are traditions that involve getting stoned delirious in the woods (observed by bush people who have barely figured out how to count past two), but this is a place where positivism is good akshually.
Believing that psychedelic drugs will unlock secret or useful knowledge is like believing that microwaving your phone will improve your cell reception.
Routine psychedelic use is the wellspring of the second worst epistemological theory in the world. The first is hashtag believewomen. But what about personal growth? Surely psychedelics are an interesting avenue for personal growth? In fact, they can be, however...
Personal growth means many things to many people. It could mean getting stronger, or smarter, or if you're absolutely depraved, getting more compassionate. The latter isn't really possible, and as we have already explored, psychedelics aren't going to make you smarter.
Regardless of its character, personal growth is exclusively hormetic: it comes about in response to trauma. Aside: the way you nurture someone is to hurt them in small ways while protecting them, keeping them in the hormetic zone.
Psychedelics can be a route to personal growth in the sense that they can be highly traumatic. A low dose or a lucky one can provoke a mild trauma, and this can indeed make you stronger in some ways. But I don't think this is the growth most psychonauts are talking about.
As for me, I experienced more spiritual and emotional development in three months with a barbell than from three years of recreational drug use. The gym is also way less likely to break your brain. If you want mental trauma, just listen to any millennial woman's podcast.
But the really insidious thing about psychedelics, though, is how they give you the ILLUSION of turbocharged insight, of personal growth, and of spiritual enlightenment. Probably you have visited an eye doctor at some point in your life...
When you have an eye exam, the doctor may put some yellow dye in your eye before shining a blue light on it. This makes the surface of your eye more visible. Under the influence of this yellow dye, the world looks like it has a flux filter on it. Everything seems a bit yellow.
And you would be absolutely insane, I mean just claudicant in the head, if after taking that "drug" you went around telling all your friends that holy shit the doctor gave me this shit and you won't believe it: I now realize how yellow everything is. But then you take some acid.
And what acid and its ilk are really doing, more than anything, more than showing you wavy dots and lines, is they're putting a filter on your thoughts where whatever else you think, you always think it's profound. Every though is accompanied by a pervasive emotion of revelation.
If you think about the sky, the sky seems profound. If you think about your toilet, your toilet will seem like a rich vein of radiant insight. And perhaps it is. But the really fucked up thing is when, instead of all that, you make the mistake of thinking about morality.
I don't even recommend thinking about morality even when you're totally sober, but under the influence of psychedelic "yellow dye", the most inane moral excretions of your mind feel divinely inspired. And if you're unlucky, it sticks after the trip is over.
Which brings us to the third thing people want to get out of psychedelics, which is spirituality. I think by now you can triangulate what I will say. When your every stray thought seems profound, this is indistinguishable from a spiritual experience.
And what I take away from that is that spiritual experiences are pretty cheap; you can get the same buzz from singing hymns as a part of a big crowd, and it's about as likely to cause a stack overflow and let the preacher insert new instructions into your mind as dropping acid.
The main difference is that when you have a spiritual experience in church, the preacher is hopefully going to put instructions there that have stood the test of time and that come a relatively symbiotic memeplex such as your culture's evolved ancient wisdom.
In contrast to that, when you have a psychedelic experience, the person with superuser access to your mental map is you, but not a stable version of you, oh no, a you who is overcome with childish wonder at any random thing that strays into his field of view.
This is why many psychedelic users do something they call "packing for the trip" wherein they read/watch things that they think will be comforting or enlightening before they take the drugs.
And no matter what plans you make, what usually happens is you end up replaying whatever aspirational pablum you have on your internal tape loop and you come down feeling like whatever you already thought was important is now more important than ever.
Sometimes this manifests in the form of "self-realizations" where you a mundane thing that you already knew about yourself takes on a sense of urgency: "I should be nicer to people" or my personal favorite, "I should lay off the drugs." But we've all seen how that usually goes.
Alright, no, we're going to talk about psychedelics some more. @OwenBroadcast brings up a good point, which is that for the psychonaut, the use of psychedelics is an ideology, it has a religious character. Time for another case study in the architecture of religion.
There are different sects of psych users who have their various allegiances to their own substance of choice, much like there are different sects of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism
To recap, I have identified six major components of religious practice. This is my personal taxonomy, it's a work in progress, there are things I am likely to add in the future, all models are wrong, etc.
In this essay, I don't care if any religion is true or false (all things are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, eh my friends?). Many people perceive classification as an attack, we'll talk about that some other time. It's not.
False consciousness. The FC myth of the psyker has a motte and bailey structure. Motte: they open your mind, free you from mental prisons that stop you from thinking clearly. Bailey: they show you the ineffable true reality behind our mundane perception.
As with any other faith the motte is an emergent salespitch, often the one that hooked our erstwhile evangelists, akin to a Christian asking you "what do you think happens after you die" or a scientologist offering you a personality test. It's genuinely intended to help you.
Eschatology. This has fallen out of favor with psyche-users but featured prominently in the writings and teachings of many early psychedelic gurus. Terence McKenna even invented accelerationism and pinned the end of the world to 21 Dec 2012.
The age of aquarius talk died down even though our orientation to the news is perpetually apocalyptic. Most psykers have evolved to a less falsifiable "return to the golden age" type of story, as owen says.
Nemesis. Again, the memeplex has evolved. In the 60s it was "the man" but this species of psyche advocacy is mostly extinct. I don't detect a coherent consensus here. This drug makes you too "open" to frame life in terms of enemies, part of the problem.
Ecstasy. This one is self-evident. There are drugs that induce the emotion or the phenomenological experience of religious ecstasy. That's it, that's the joke. But notice the ways that the use of the drugs have come to be ritualized.
There is lore around how one should take psychedelics, "set and settings", "packing for the trip", there are rules for where you should take them, and how often, and with who, and what to do if it goes south.
There is a sense of the ancient, the stoned ape hypothesis, the idea that these types of drugs have always been used in religious rituals, in shamanism.
It's worth pointing out what shamanism really is. You think it's priesthood but it's really medicine. Shamans were the medical doctors of their societies, and just like doctors today, a big part of their job is to give you sanctified placebos. Some of their interventions do work.
Roman mystery cults! ergotized grain! Retvrn to tradition! The Romans, who Americans think they are, also developed acid cults and it also happened as their traditional religions broke down. This proves, what, exactly? That history rhymes?
Diet. Psychedelic use is not nearly institutionalized enough to have an official diet, but veganism is often co-morbid with other forms of open-mindedness, and we can see this kind of attitude in nature.
As an aside, notice the verbal uniform of psychedelic users. This is another component that I don't have in the original thread, because it's just part of the form of a memeplex, irrespective of content. Others have explored this at some length, but briefly...
Ideologies develop idiosyncratic language that allows adherents to signal to each other covertly. Specific phrases or words take on esoteric meanings or valences that the practitioners use to synchronize their beliefs and actions, and to identify each other in different contexts
from the thread above: "destroy these illusions" "seeing the connected-ness of all things" "entheogen", calling the drugs by specific names. Non-user: mushrooms, shrooms. user: Psilocybin. etc. "let's you think from a non human point of view"
On the other hand, veganism is also a pretty self-contained religion so there is some (dairy-free) chocolate in the non-gmo peanut butter, there.
Evangelism. As every dealer knows, drugs sell themselves, but the evangelistic current in psychedelic use is unusually aggressive, in that it mostly consists of "bro you gotta try this", although see above where we note that the usage is ritualized.
A particular facet of the psychedelic conversion event is the act of changing your mind. Much like the AA can wrap any god behind the "higher power" interface, psychedelia can wrap any god behind the "was able to see reality" interface.
It doesn't matter what you believed before, or what you believe now, what's important is that your beliefs changed because you took psychedelics, and there is just almost no way for you to not think that's good, or else you wouldn't have changed.
One of the ways religions eat each others' followers is man-in-the-middle attacks like the above. You go to an AA meeting, they tell you "if you like your higher power, keep it". Soon you're not a Christian, you just think you are, & in practice you are a friend of Bill.
Whereas most religions have to do some legwork, psychdelic use is a religion with a phsyical body (i.e., the drug), so it gets some of the benefits of embodiment for free.
Some users even think that mushrooms are an alien form of life that is trying to communicate with us, which is to say that they recognize the drug itself is the principal evangelist.
Psychedelic users do seem to converge on certain thought patterns and memes, most of which seem to center around doing more psychedelics.
Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small, arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
The culmination of democracy is when you get the government to wipe your ass for you. The worst people in society voting that the riches of others be given to them.
The warrior, in times of peace, attacks himself.
The phrase "believe women" implies that men instinctively doubt the claims of women. If so, we must assume that this heuristic is, on average, adaptive, which is to say, correct more often than not.
Basically, every leftist slogan is an attempt to override heuristics with proven track records.
"Self-loathing" is fine if your self is flawed, which everyone's self is, to some extent. You have to also have a realistic understanding of what you can achieve in terms of movement in a positive direction. Having an ideal and striving towards it is commendable.
At some point you realize there is nothing you can say that won’t provoke someone to try to fight with you. If I tweet “I hope you’re having a nice day” someone will respond:
“only idiots hope that”
“your error is thinking that days could be nice”
“It’s not so much a question of niceness; days don’t really exist”
“Days can be nice but people can’t have them”
“Some of days are nice but I like to have all sorts of days”
“a bad day is yours but a nice day is everyone’”
So you might as well be provocative!
Virtue signaling is the most contemptible manifestation of horny
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
Social media is mostly benign for boys, harmful for girls. But in your heart, you already knew this.
One of the hardest things in life is learning to forgive Christians.
In a way this quote as a test of how charitable you are. I was thinking when I wrote it, Christians often have trouble forgiving each other, and some people instantly found that reading. Others got defensive, but shouldn’t Christians be acutely aware of their own need for forgiveness?
Face to face Christians are the nicest people in the world. Give them a keyboard and they let Satan in.
"Don't drugs have libido benefits for low-libido women?"
There are better ways.
"I've tried maca and testosterone activities like lifting. I'm perimenopausal and have no sex drive anymore. I take estrogen and progesterone creams. I was thinking about psych drugs because people say they help libido. Weed makes me anxious. HELP!"
Has your husband tried acting like an asshole?
Any breakdown in civic order is bad. Attempts to correct injustice by damaging civic order only multiply injustice.
If you are cheering for this, you lack imagination. You think this couldn’t happen in your city?
If an angry mob starts to burn it down, you now know they will tell the police to stand down, let it happen, abandon territory. No one is going to protect you.
Civilization is order, chaos is always bad. Revolutions and riots are always deleterious to civilization. Restoration is the goal, not cities on fire. There are some people who should be executed, but that, too, should be done in an orderly fashion.
Violence in the streets is always a leftward vector. By all means play dirty, just do it quietly.
The devil always breaks his tools. That doesn't mean you celebrate devils.
“I’m tired” “that scares me” “educate yourself” “step down” “human lives” “I can’t breathe”
Exosemantic gang signs, religiously charged. This is how the Romans felt about Christianity, I’m sure.
When empires decline, people desire radical religious conversions. BLM offers one
If you really want to educate yourself, read about Julian the Apostate. He couldn’t undo the works of Constantine, and Trump can’t undo the works of Obama. There are no brakes on this train.
The way it works is by injecting its code into Christianity. The vast majority of Christians have no defense against blm that quoted “neither jew nor gentile” at them.
This line of thinking terminates in an absurd place, a place where nothing is real at all and nothing is objectively true. So it's necessary to reject the argument, even though each individual step seems rational.
The theory behind vaccination is that you expose the immune system to a small, benign dose of a disease in order to prime it against future exposures. And now you know why they made you read Orwell and Huxley in high school, to make you roll your eyes at these criticisms later.
Basically everyone knows "amusing ourselves to death", but that book only has thesis, antithesis. The synthesis is: Brave New World becomes 1984 as its ponzi scheme economy becomes addicted to fast, meaningless liquidity and state-enforced doublethink becomes primary.
Orwell's characters were shallow caricatures because although he understood psychlogy, psychological realism would have diluted the impact of his ideas. The critical clue that BNW and '84 are the same world is this passage:
'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year.'
This is in contrast to the thesis advanced by O'Brien: There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.
To say that the 84'ish culture is motivated by a desire for totalitarian power is correct, but there is no one anywhere like O'Brien, not in the whole world. Doublethink and newspeak are not born of vice, but from DESIRE FOR VIRTUE. Doublethink makes you feel righteous, holy.
Orwell presents oppressive power as cynical, self-aware, intelligent, cold. It is none of those things. Oppressive power is warm and welcoming, and it doesn't want to hurt you, it wants to make you into a "better person" according to its own twisted understanding.
Those who abase themselves in public feel a truly voluptuous pleasure therein. Many thanks to some of you for pointing out that he who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a despiser.
As we watch our cities tear themselves apart, and our “leaders” fight to denounce each other, and our police kneel to their new lords, notice how newspeak is deployed to tell you how you must react.
The doublethinkers are trying to hide their failures, to pretend the breakdown of civic order is righteous, because they aren’t just tyrants, they’re embarrassed. They see the decay, plain as you, and they blame it on your “racism” instead of their criminally bad leadership.
And in light of all that, let's talk about words. We are being devoured by Orwellian lies, and one reason that the lies grow so well is that they route around our linguistic defenses.
We are witnesses to the birth of a new faith and a new church, but most people still don't see it, or they deny it, maybe because their definition of religion is too narrow, or maybe because there is no good name yet for this new faith.
Of course there are plenty of names for the new religion, but none of them cleave reality at the joints: Intersectional feminism, black lives matter, the woke, diversity, LGBT, and so on. But they are either awkward to say, or don't capture the underlying unity.
The new religion has no name, and it likes it that way, because there is no icon to attack. Its moral premises are beyond question because they are nebulously outside of any one label or creed. If you accept them, you're a "decent person" and if not, you're a "shitty person".
Do you believe in $OUR_CAUSE or are you a shitty person? In addition to being emotional blackmail (how long til that word is banned?), this formulation is an exosemantic gang sign, a phrase that connotes tribal affiliation with plausible deniability.
As with any religion, the faith with no name has its different theological schools, which even fight with each other. The major schools are queerism, feminism, and blackism, the latter of which is an ecumenism in which white people worship black people.
Blackists in this formulation are always white, but they tokenize and coopt black people into their sick, self-centered ritual of pharisaical atonement. And many black activists know it, but they can't resist the worshipful fawning of white sycophants.
Think of the unfortunate black people in tech companies right now who are being forced to join diversity panels in the name of "inclusivity," when all they want to do is work productively. But white liberals can't even let them have that!
The diversity committee in every company in America is a gaggle of white women. Orwell knew: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy."
And all of these theological branches spring from the same seed, and the only people who deny it are playing dumb so they can pick a fight. “It's not a religion, I just believe in human rights, I just...”
As always, this exact spectacular moment will pass, just like OWS, just like the Rodney King riots, just like the Days of Rage, but this new religion keeps winning new converts, cordycepting the old faith by quoting a single verse to a nation of biblical illiterates.
From MLK, Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, to Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepard, the faith with no name will continue to manufacture saints and martyrs. Next May 25, no matter who is president, George Floyd Day will be our next national holiday. Bunker Up.
How can anything compete with the real danger, the real ecstasy, the emotional highs and lows of the great awokening? No one feels anything in the old religions any more, they want something to make them feel ALIVE.
When Christians tell you how naughty you are, you don't believe them, because queerism has married state power, and eroded the shame we feel for sexual sins. When the faith with no name tells you how naughty you are, it proves it with wild spectacles.
Christians are persecuted by bureaucrats, tamely and passively. Blackists are persecuted by cops with guns and gas grenades. (They seek their persecution, as all persecuted men do) Only one of these is exciting. For Christians to compete, they need to find some lions.
One feature of the faith with no name is that its adherents choose names for themselves that contain a rhetorical trap--antifa can't be fascist, antifa mean ANTI-fascist, haven't you heard?
If you try to argue against "black lives matter", you instantly lose, because to engage the assertion is to implicitly accept the underlying METAPHYSICAL premise. It’s the equivalent of trying to argue with "does your mom know you're gay?" -- an unforgivably homophobic question.
If the average person is going to oppose the faith with no name, the first step is naming the demon. We must find a way to manifest their idols, so that we can denounce them. You can't easily oppose black lives matter, but you can oppose the cultic power from which it emanates.
The ideal name cannot sound like a slur. It be neutral, concise, and above all, tempting. The adherents of the faith with no name must choose it as their label. Just as it became easier to rout dissidents once they foolishly identified as alt-right, we must name this dark power.
No existing name will suffice, and we know this because no existing name has sufficed. Things you can't name are things you can't understand, and things you can't understand are things you can't fight.
One of the main ways that men are supposed to protect women is by preventing them from exercising civic authority.
I think they are in the cohort of conservative white women who resent being lumped in with the rest. I respect this cohort but if they were wise they would realize that disempowering all women would be a better way to achieve their goals.
[Hard pass, we don’t expect you to know what’s best for us or advocate on our behalf when you already lump us in with the others as a target of vitriol.]
enjoy your cats
Mosca identifies three factors for a new religion to be viable: that it is appropriate to the current cultural moment, that its moral prescriptions are not so stringent as to be inaccessible, and that it has a dedicated and competent core of clergy to steer it.
"We need a new religion"
I often hear people on the right speak this idea. I have often contemplated it myself. Alas I think those who long for a new religion are probably not fertile ground for it.
“Religion" itself is a sterile word, a word for people who probably lack strong spiritual feeling. I am that kind, but I see the importance of religion to most people.
Based on my interactions here with Christians I have increasingly lost faith that Christianity can be an instrument of the right. In the past, everyone was on the right, relative to now, and maybe it is only coincidental that we associate these two ideological clusters.
Within Christianity there are several dangerous and ultimately leftist affinities: the universality of salvation, the call to be meek, the emphasis placed on grace over works, and a certain persecution complex, among other things.
There have been Christian conquerors of course, and there are some nice bits where e.g., Paul tells women to be silent in church, but I am increasingly convinced that the arc of Christianity bends towards leftism. Trad-catholics: I like you but you seem to be outliers
Turning your back on the world and thinking of your treasures in heaven; maybe it comforts you. Faith is epistemologically self-contained by design, and I wish you well, but to me you look like ostriches to me if you do that, and to you I expect I seem mentally broken.
Maybe there are people incapable of faith. Even when I prayed every day, and routinely studied the bible, I could never find any reason to privilege "god is real and he hears me" over "I'm talking to myself and you become what you behold".
It's like the law of fives: if you constantly ask God for a sign, you are guaranteed to see one. I could join a church, but I don't think I could ever believe.
There's nothing rational about faith (there can't be) and there is nothing rational in my rejection of it. It feels unhinged. I'm sorry, I can't feel any other way.
But at least Christian men want to build society. Left-Christian men want to build it and then build themselves out of it. Right-Christian men often become useful idiots to the left. Right-atheists are an extreme minority. Left atheists just want to sit on a big dildo forever.
Feminism is cancer.
Women exercising civic authority has been a disaster for the human race. There is no natural boundary between one wave of feminism and another. You can’t play “just the tip” with emancipatory ideology.
I'm as much of an IQ-maximalist as the next guy but you can't ignore the holistic picture of male and female psychology, which are distinctly different, owing also to many physiological differences, incentive differences, and aptitude differences.
"They have the same mean IQ so clearly they are approximately neurologically identical and should have all the same social roles and responsibilities" - this is your claim, and it's bad.
During the Korean War, captured American soldiers found themselves in POW camps run by Chinese Communists. The Chinese treated captives quite differently than their allies, the North Koreans, who favored savagery and harsh punishment to gain compliance.
The Red Chinese engaged in what they called “lenient policy,” which was a sophisticated psychological assault on their captives. After the war, American psychologists questioned the returning prisoners intensively, because of the unsettling success of the Chinese program.
The Chinese were very effective in getting Americans to inform on one another, in contrast to the behavior of American POWs in WWII. For this reason, escape plans were quickly uncovered and escape attempts themselves were rarely successful.
When an escape did occur, the Chinese usually recovered the man easily by offering a mere bag of rice to anyone turning him in. In fact, nearly all American prisoners in the Chinese camps are said to have collaborated with the enemy in one form or another.
How did the Chinese get compliance from the American POWS? These men were trained to provide only name, rank, serial number. Short of torture, how could the captors hope to get such men to give military information, turn in fellow prisoners, or publicly denounce their country?
The Chinese answer was to start small and build. Prisoners were asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist as to seem inconsequential "The United States is not perfect." "In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem."
Once they complied with these minor requests, the men were pushed to submit to more substantive ones. A man who had agreed that the United States is not perfect might be asked provide examples. He might then be asked to make a list of "problems with America" and sign his name
Later, he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you really believe, isn’t it?” Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.
The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti-American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp, but to other POW camps in North Korea, as well as to American forces in South Korea.
Suddenly he would find himself a "collaborator." Aware that he had written the essay without any threats or coercion, a man would change his image of himself to be consistent with the deed and with the new collaborator label, resulting in more extensive acts of collaboration.
The majority collaborated by doing things which seemed trivial to them but which the Chinese were able to turn to their own advantage. This was particularly effective in eliciting confessions, self-criticism, and information during interrogation.
The majority of the men believed the Chinese story that the United States had used germ warfare, and many felt that their own forces had been the initial aggressors in starting the war. Similar inroads had been made in the political attitudes of the men:
Many expressed antipathy toward the Chinese Communists but at the same time praised them for "the fine job they have done in China." Others stated that "although communism won’t work in America, I think it’s a good thing for Asia."
Our best evidence of another man's true feelings and beliefs is their behavior, not their words. What the Chinese knew is that a man uses this same evidence to know what he himself is like. He observes his behavior to understand his own beliefs, values, and attitudes.
Writing was one type of confirming action that the Chinese urged incessantly upon their prisoners. It was never enough to listen quietly or even to agree verbally; they were always pushed to write it down as well. Psychologist Edgar Schein describes this tactic:
A further technique was to have the man write out the question and then the [pro-Communist] answer. If he refused to write it voluntarily, he was asked to copy it from the notebooks, which must have seemed like a harmless enough concession. But, oh, those "harmless" concessions.
Seemingly trifling commitments can lead to extraordinary further behavior. A written declaration is physical evidence of your commitment, leaving no opportunity to forget or to deny what you have done. The irrevocably documented act drives you to make your self-image consistent
We tend to think that a statement reflects the true attitude of the person who made it, even if we know the person did not freely choose to make it. Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, observers automatically assume that someone who makes a statement means it.
Think of the double-barreled effects on the self-image of a prisoner who wrote a pro-Chinese or anti-American statement. Not only was it a lasting personal reminder of his action, it was also likely to persuade those around him that the statement reflected his actual beliefs.
A similar technique involved political essay contests that were regularly held in camp. The prizes for winning were invariably small--a few cigarettes or a bit of fruit--but were sufficiently scarce that they generated interest from the men.
Usually the winning essays took a pro-Communist stand, but not always. Most prisoners would not want to enter a contest that required writing a Communist tract. So the prize was sometimes given to essays that supported the USA but made small concessions to the Chinese view.
The men participated voluntarily in the contests because they saw that they could win with an essay favorable to their own country. But perhaps without realizing it, they began to shade their essays a bit toward communism in order to have a better chance of winning.
The Chinese wanted as many Americans as possible to enter these contests so that, in the process, they might write things favorable to the Communist view. If, however, the idea was to attract large numbers of entrants, why were the prizes so small?
They chose to employ the smaller rewards because they wanted the men to own what they had done. No excuses, no ways out were allowed. A prisoner who salted his political essay with a few anti-American comments could not be permitted to shrug it off as motivated by a big reward.
It was not enough to wring commitments out of their men; those men had to be made to take inner responsibility for their actions. We accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures.
The big things to understand here are
1) when you see yourself doing something, you change your self-image to include "I am a person who does that thing"
2) when you think others see you a certain way, the same.
3) you will act in ways that are consistent with your self-image
So in light of that, please consider how being a user of Social Media, especially real-name social media, is structurally identical to being a prisoner in a Chinese POW camp during the Korean war.
When you endorse a cause on social media, the rewards are worthless. Tiny rewards mean that you will not perceive your statements as being coerced, you will own them. And yet, the public eye puts pressure on you to say things that are pro-social in a very particular way.
Most people want to appear compassionate. A political slogan, a bleeding heart story, these things that you spread virally, they change your self-image. And they leave you with evidence, public evidence, that you are the kind of person who speaks out about "systemic oppression".
Social media created the feedback loop that drove everyone mad with social justice. Just like in the Chinese camp, the subtle but constant pressure to make cheap moralistic statements resulted in mass conversions. I believe this is the true cause of the "great awokening".
Most of the large-scale phenomena in recent history which most of us would consider “evil” have been the result of actions of people acting within organizations, “evil” must be the result of actions which someone considered “good.”
If you support BLM, you are on the side of evil.
There is no such thing as neutrality, never has been.
"Claiming not to be ideology" is ideology’s second oldest trick (hanging people is its oldest).
The quokka is a meme animal that lives on Bald Island on the SW coast of Australia, where it has no natural predators. If you visit this island, it will fearlessly walk up and try to hug you. Why am I telling you this? Because the eye of Sauron has fallen on the rationalists.
There was a time in the past when I considered myself to be one of them. Rationalism arose out of a particular cultural moment, when new atheism made people realize that they actually wanted to believe in something strongly, even if that thing was phrased as a negative.
This sounds like a paradox. New atheism became popular precisely because so many young people were lacking in any kind of creed or doctrine; it sold itself as a belief system, it had an obvious enemy, and it captured the free religious energy of many "post-christians".
But that capture was fleeting, because most people can't worship a void. In a moment like this anyone who can speak in the rabbinical mode can found a cult, even by accident. This was Eliezer Yudkowsky, or "Big Yud", a name whose qabbalistic implications we are still working out.
Rationalists are, in Scott Alexander's formulation, missing a mood, or rather, they are drawn from a pool of mostly men who are missing one. "Normal" people instinctively grasp social norms without having them explained. Rationalists lack this instinct.
In particular, they struggle with small talk and other social norms around speech, because they naively think words are a vehicle for their literal meanings. Yud's sequences help this by formalizing the implicit decisions that normal people make.
There is a certain type of nerd who really, really can't pick up on social cues, can't read intentions. It's overly reductive to tar this kind of person as "autistic". It's a large number of men, highly comorbid with mathematical aptitude.
The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up.
In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate.
The game changes when we realize that life is not a single dilemma, but a series of them, and that we can remember the behavior of other agents. Now we need to cooperate, and the best strategy is "tit for two tats", wherein we cooperate until our opponent defects twice.
The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect".
And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, "I notice I am confused". This is also why they are poly.
All this comes off as mean but I empathize, because I was once like them. Yud teaches you a mental model of how people behave when you desperately need one, framed in terms that are familiar. When you don't know how people work at all, a bad model is still a huge improvement.
Rationalists = quokkas, this explains a lot about them. Their fear instincts have atrophied. When a quokka sees a predator, he walks right up; when a rationalist talks about human biodiversity on a blog under almost his real name, he doesn't flinch away.
A normal person learns from social cues that certain topics are forbidden, and that if you ask questions about them, you had better get the right answer, which is not the one with the highest probability of being true, but the one with the highest probability of keeping your job.
This ability to ask uncomfortable questions is one of the rationalist's best and worst attributes, because mental stop signs, like road stop signs, actually exist to keep you safe, and although there may be times one should disregard them, most people should mostly obey them.
This is especially obvious when rationalists try to talk about love and sex, because their missing instincts cause them to create social hellscapes where everyone tries to act as if their true desires are exactly the ones they are able to articulate.
Apropos of the game theory discussion above, if there is ONE thing I can teach you with this account, it's that you have evolved to be a liar. Lying is "killer app" of animal intelligence, it's the driver of the arms race that causes intelligence to evolve.
It's not just that you evolved to lie, it's that you evolved to lie to yourself, because the best liar is the one who believes his own deceptions. And contra the rationalists, this isn't something you can overcome with a bunch of data and studies.
But in fact you CAN overcome your own proclivity to self-deception, and the answer isn't a new thing, it's an old thing, an irrational thing. It's learning to put rationality in its proper place.
The practices and moral norms that have endured for thousands of years are better at making predictions than bayes' theorem ever could be, because they have evolved in parallel, adversarially, to your ability to lie.
When Eliezier stopped preaching, Scott Alexander became the rightful caliph. Religion atrophies without ritual reinforcement of doctrine. Without Yud, rationalists splintered into many groups. They are rather less bullish on rationality now, but most of them are still quokkas.
There are rationalists who came for the math, and let yud backdoor them into broken moral theories. There are rationalists who came for the gay moral theory and put up with the math. Post-rats tend to be the latter sort.
The main way that you stop being a quokka is that that you realize there are people in the world who really want to hurt you. There are people who will always defect, people whose good will is fake, whose behavior will not change if they hear the good news of reciprocity.
The rationalists often express a desire to become stronger, but the one thing this never, ever means is that you should go to the gym and lift weights. But this is the real secret to escaping quokka-hood.
The rationlist complains of "akrasia" -- an inability to accomplish things, or he struggles with his own failure to live up to his standards of logic. But his problems are grounded, not in his mind, but in his body. When the body is rotten, the mind produces only toxic miasma.
Becoming physically strong is the cure for basically every mental illness in men, such as depression or philosophy. Frailty begets sophistry. Physical ugliness begets mental ugliness.
How did I stop being a quokka? When your body is strong, your mind becomes strong, and you can accept, in the words of DH Lawrence, that the soul is a dark forest.
Your soul is a dark forest. Your known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. Gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. You must have the courage to let them come and go.
Arguments about epistemology, or about the meaning of life, these are questions for sick men. Only sick men look for the meaning of life, or for meaning in life, because true vitality justifies itself.
The evangelistic payload of woke religion is carried in this idea that "it's not my job to educate you" -- in other words, redemption is supposed to be a heroic task that you take upon your self. So in their theology, if you aren't a convert, it means you are lazy.
People say we are in a cold civil war. This is wrong. We LOST a cold civil war, because we had sticks and our enemies had guns. The best plan any of us has is to retreat to the countryside, because that's what you do when you lose.
By now, every white collar in America has been through a woke struggle session. When a WOC tweets "white lives don't matter," she gets a promotion. The game we are playing does not have the rules that you think, because you don't understand power.
If you are a "republican" or a "paleocon" who thinks there is some use to be salvaged from reasoned argument, appeals to the constitution, or to fairness, or anything you learned in school about American civics, you are the reason we lost.
This is the attitude we must destroy: "Fairness and principle expose the other side". Expose them to who? Themselves? They know. To their enemies? We know. The liberalism of the center-right will always lose, because it will always give aid to its enemies.
There is no neutral majority (there is no one neutral at all) just waiting to see if, maybe, the right catches them in one more lie, then finally THIS TIME they will notice that the leftists are akshually evil lizard people.
The impotence of the right is found in our inability to process and adapt to new paradigms. In a way, this is obvious, as we are defined by our desire for enduring ways of life, but it still requires dynamicism to preserve ancient sanctity against novel threats.
Until recently, there were many intelligent thinkers on the left, and we weaken ourselves when we fail to integrate their correct insights into our worldview. We do not have to accept their desired ends in order to learn from them social construction.
Postmodern thought is not a decadent irrationality, nor is it some wicked assault on truth and justice. It is an inevitable series of true realizations in the wake of techno-industrial expansion. The left has adapted to these truths. The right has run from them.
Technology has "de-centered" Man from his understanding of nature; we only ever understand the world through metaphors, and technology provides metaphors that let even dimwitted people perceive the limits of knowledge.
The classic and wrong "conservative" approach to these topics is feeble hand-wringing over moral relativism. The belief that one's own morality must be cosmically absolute derives from a lack of moral and epistemic imagination.
If there is hope for traditional beliefs in the future, it will only be inside a framework of relativism and uncertainty. This is its best hope in the disenchanted scientific world, because even if Science is fake and gay, technology isn't.
What's difficult to understand about the current moment is that, although we perceive a great and terrible power, it's not clear who is wielding that power. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.
The postmodern theory of knowledge intersects with the ascension of woke power in the thought of Michel Foucault, the #1 most cited researcher according to Google Scholar. We will see why this is important.
Foucault taught that power does not inhere in individuals, but in networks of people, that it is manifest between everyone and everyone else at all times, that it cannot be possessed, only enacted, and that it coerces by manufacturing "truth".
"Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced by constraint. Each society has its regime of truth: the types of discourse it accepts; the mechanisms which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned".
Power is induced by "truth", which is contingent and socially constructed. This makes conservatives bristle, because they rightly know that there is an immutable reality, but they refuse to understand how much flexion their own minds have with regard to the absolute.
The dissident right breaks from the "mainstream" right precisely when realizes, along with Foucault, that "truth is not the privilege of those who have liberated themselves." Moldbug's famous dictum is "The sovereign determines the null hypothesis".
Moldbug also identifies the distributed nature of sovereignty, and he gives the name "cathedral" to the "decentralized conspiracy". The cathedral is not any specific people, it is a network of power relations defined by incentive gradients and sustained by our institutions.
Even so, I suggest you avoid fixating on "the cathedral"; it soon becomes an embarrassing mental prison, a fully general scapegoat that clouds what it was intended to clarify. There is no truth that can be rescued from power.
The cathedralite has no power of her own, but she is able to exercise power on behalf of the cathedral by acting according to its truth. Anyone, no matter how lowly, is able to wield Foucauldian power to control others as long as they act in accordance with power's truth.
Knowledge constrains action; Foucauldian power operates by means of knowledge; the sovereign sets the null hypothesis. Cathedral power justifies itself thus: "there is no evidence that my truth isn't true".
Power is decentralized. If a single node in the knowledge/power nexus flips, the cathedral treats it as damage and routes around it. If a Harvard dean or NYT editor goes rogue, they get ignored or ejected.
Everyone knows more or less what power expressed through truth demands. We can sense it; we know the magic words we can say to give orders to others. "That makes me uncomfortable." "That's hateful." "That could offend some people". The words sound innocent but they aren't.
If you challenge a person who is enacting power, they can escalate. Your nearest authority knows the "truth", and will side with power. If he doesn't, his superior will, or his, and so on. In rare cases, these things go to court, where truth is constituted as law and precedent.
Usually your little rebellions won't get that far, because your social group, acting in concert, will reject or correct you. No one needs to tell them what to do. The algorithm "everyone move towards your neighbor" creates emergent patterns called flocking.
Truth is manufactured by academia and disseminated through media. "Citation" is the mechanism that is used to manufacture truth. Their science is not empirical, it is prescriptive. Once a decree is published, it can be "cited", and becomes "evidence".
Power-Knowledge is not broken by simply pushing back against it. In many cases, resistance can reify it, as many in this sphere have noted. This is because facts are only loosely correlated with knowledge. La Wik on Power-knowledge contains a synecdoche of this.
Power is the source of social discipline and conformity. To challenge power is not a matter of seeking some ‘absolute truth’, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of social, economic, and cultural hegemony within which it operates.
In some ways, Foucault's ideas are quite reactionary, and he drew criticism from his leftist colleagues, because his ideas, taken to their logical conclusion, undermine the idea that any kind of "emancipation" is even possible. This is undeniably true.
Foucault recognized that humanitarianism is a form of totalitarian control, and that sincere concerns for rights and justice are inadequate for challenging power. If we ever want to reclaim power, we must create truth that is discontinuous with humanitarianism.
A truthful reading of any prominent thinker bends rightward. Baudrillard, Foucault, even someone like Walter Benjamin. Not Adorno though, his writing doesn't actually contain any accurate thoughts about the world. Anyone who likes him has a room temperature IQ.
If you elect me as mayor I’ll ban all vegetarian restaurants in my first term.
This is a much better idea than you realize, vegetarian and vegan restaurants are gathering places for marxist radicals
Although there are some ideas in Marxist thought that are correct and perhaps useful from a theoretical perspective, it is utopian, (I should not have to explain why this is bad and wrong) and every attempt to implement it results in destruction and death.
Moreover, people who call themselves Marxists are often physically and inevitably spiritually grotesque people; it is an ideology of resentment and spite, masquerading as good will.
It’s objectively the case. I am six three and jacked with the body of a bronze god, so I can say this with zero malice in my heart.
I mean I can’t provide like scientific evidence of this, but Marxists are overwhelmingly people who have nothing and want to see their betters brought down to their level. What is objectively the case is that they are physically ugly.
many statements are beyond truth or falsity: how many genders are there? Whether you answer "2" or "many" -- this statement is not empirical at all, because the object it supposedly describes, "gender" is an invention of theorists.
There are two biological sexes, of course...
Blanchard and Bailey find that autogynephiles are habitual liars with regard to their fetishism.
"There's no actual reason to think" -- this is the discourse of academic power, which normalizes homosexuality as a means of control. The fact that the claim is unfalsifiable should give you pause.
The claim "all dysphoric people are lying" is unfalsifiable; as is your claim that there is such a qualia as dysphoria. It is a purely theological question. All unfalsifiable claims are.
There is no escaping dogma. We will always be ruled by ideology, and the trick is not to escape, but to pick the right one.
>It's a zero sum game
give or take a bit, yeah
>we're all surely doomed
"yes"
Is there anyone in history who you think found a way out?
On the contrary, I think the only thing that will make people do the hard things necessary to survive in space is zealous religion.
no two IRL women have ever passed the bechdel test
Human rights are fake and gay. Property rights are the basis of civilization.
You have to realize that morality is just game theory, running on buggy hardware, implemented by a monte carlo algorithm.
Your model of game theory-as-morality is wrong. Defection is perfectly rational in many situations. Morality does not equal "Always Cooperate", and that is my point. Morality is "cooperate when it makes sense to cooperate and defect when you know the other guy will defect".
"It's moral to sacrifice yourself to protect a child, especially if you have no dependents." What's the agent that optimizes here? It can't be the individual.
The agent is the gene. People are adaptation-executors, not rational fitness maximizers. No one is every doing a conscious calculation to maximize e(x), and if they do, they almost always get it wrong relative to their evolved instincts.
Morality is game theory that cuts all possible corners and doesn't compute edge cases, plus it circumvents higher-level cognition, so we mistake it for something transcendental – same as love.
The energy you put into addiction has to go somewhere. You can't break an addiction, only replace it.
Vanity is as fine a motivation as any to work hard for personal gain.
Laziness leads to obesity, eating disorders, depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, and gynocentricity.
The reason so many fat women think they're beautiful is because most people have no idea how to recognize real beauty.
The reason so many women aren't beautiful is because their mothers don't think they are.
Beauty is the evolutionarily important trait of feminity; culture is the evolutionarily important trait of masculinity. Beauty is largely learning how to pick good from bad; culture is largely learning how to ignore what bad men say about good men.
"What makes 'cancel culture' look like a new problem is that the movement has reached new levels of dominance which can, like Caligula appointing his horse to the Senate, enable new levels of brazen state sadism. It’s natural to mistake a threshold for an invention"
"Anyone who does not want to know what their ancestors would think of them is afraid of the answer"
In "The Feeling of Power" (Asimov, 1958), ubiquitous computation causes humanity to forget the fundamentals of math, including how to count. A technician rediscovers it by studying computer schematics, and the tech spreads to the military. This is an allegory for Pickup Artistry.
The common misconception is that Pickup Artistry (hereafter, PUA) is about "tricking" women into bed with you. In fact it has nothing to do with this, because you can't trick a woman into bed any more than you can trick a cat into eating a treat. The cat is complicit.
At the turn of the century, millennial men were in a similar situation to the erstwhile mathematicians in Asimov's story; in a future of ubiquitous sex, we forgot how to seduce women, because we forgot the fundamentals of being a man.
Notice how just saying this, "how to be a man" creates tension. Being a man is not the same as merely being male. When I stand up and tell you this, it's audacious, because if you don't match my definition, that implies your manhood is deficient.
When a man says, "I am a man" he is making a declaration to the world, and I see today how often men are embarrassed to describe themselves this way. Instead they say "I'm a guy," or "I'm a dude." This is how slaves talk, when they doubt their own manhood.
Women hate males, but they like men. This is the paradox of misandry. Pickup artists, who desired to seduce women, discovered instead that when you are a man, women require little convincing to sleep with you, and when you are only a male, it is a Sisyphean task to persuade them.
This is also why feminists tend to spiral into ever deeper levels of misandry; they are surrounded by male feminists (notice no one ever says "feminist men" - a man cannot be a feminist), and so they are daily exposed to the thing they hate: males who are not men.
Most any male can become a man, though many never will. Manhood is something in the soul: it's a bit like courage, a bit like will, but really it's the strength that comes from ownership of yourself, from owning your choices and your outcomes.
Women can't own themselves. They are either owned by their fathers, their husbands, or their society. Those are the choices. That's why women never stand against society, unless they do so under the leadership of a man. They can't own themselves. Law of the jungle.
I didn't say women can't be responsible. They clearly can. I said women can't own themselves. Ownership is peculiar; you can own something by law and still not own it in fact. More than stewardship, true ownership is autonomy, which means that you make your own laws.
"A woman who is a law unto herself" – whoever heard of such a thing? Liberals are incapable of hearing this truth, but leftists know it; they know women don't have agency, which is why they believe (rightly) that all bad things in the world are the fault of men.
All the feminist writing in the world bears the mark of this deficit. They call for female autonomy, they demand it, they beg for it. But true autonomy is not something anyone else can bestow upon you. To ask for it is to lack it.
The pickup artists tried to learn how to seduce women, but they accidentally discovered how to be men, and they did this just the same way the technician learned math in The Feeling of Power. They learned the mechanics of seduction by observing the machine in action.
PUA set out to develop "lines" and "routines" and they ended up developing autonomy. They went "into the field" to women they didn't know and they approached them cold; they said anything and everything, trying to find the magic incantation to get the girl.
And they learned there is no magic incantation, but because the thing they were doing was against society, against propriety, they had no choice but to invent their own laws. The act of mastering this skill, the act of self-authorship, was an onramp to manhood.
And I get that it seems ridiculous to hold up someone like Mystery or Roosh as a sterling example of manhood, because they're obviously not, not in the way you would like them to be, but it's important to note that manhood itself is distinct from morality and even aesthetics.
Passing from malehood into manhood occurs when you become autonomous. That doesn't mean you don't follow the laws of others, but it means your own personal judgement and understanding come before the law. One way to think of it is having a code.
Great leadership can only come from men who are fully realized as men. This is obvious. But the same is true of followership. The greatest subordinates are also men who have transcended malehood into manhood.
PUA is a masculine folk religion. It's not against the law of the state, but it is against the law of the herd. This is a man's special and unique power. It's what makes him a man: his power to stand on his own.
The reason we forgot how to be men is very strange to me, as real life is often much stranger than fiction: our society now teaches young men, very emphatically, that there is nothing that makes them different from women.
There are men who are susceptible to ideas, and men for whom ideas are relatively inert. You might call them dads and cads, or virgins and chads. It's curious; we relabeled the dichotomy with almost the same word for the ch/cad, but inverted the other pole, from dad to virgin.
The point is that no matter what you tell them, some men become men all on their own, and they don't need anyone to tell them what manhood is or how to get there. And those men can act really obnoxious when you talk about these things; they find men of ideas repulsive.
But many of us here cannot help but feel enthralled to ideas. Growing up this was always an implicit lesson in every cartoon and movie; it was taught in school, and by authority figures: A girl can do anything boys can, just as well. She can be just as tough, smart, creative, &c.
And maybe that's true. But when you shout to the heavens that boys have no quality to make them different from girls (except for some bad ones), then the boys who rely on ideas never learn how to be men, because they have no understanding of manhood.
And because they have no understanding of manhood, they also don't know how to get girls. Many young men struggle with romance because they think they want a girl who "understands" them. This is stupid, but forgivable naivete.
A man makes his own laws, but as every entrepreneur learns, to become a master is to make the market your master, which is to say, to make NATURE your master. A man is always subject to the laws of nature.
So let me tell you something men will always do better than women, because they have to, because nature commands it. One of the laws PUAs learned was hypergamy, which means women want to marry up. This truth is suppressed, because it is inegalitarian to the core.
Women want to marry up. They want men who are richer than they are, taller, more prestigious. They are not turned on by men who are "equal," and erotic desire is the precondition to romantic desire. So men will always do whatever it takes to succeed more than women.
A woman in our society now is a creature who simultaneously demands that men be above her, and also her equal. As with all impossible requests, it falls on men to stand against the herd, and tell her no.
In Asimov's story, the man who rediscovers math kills himself, because he doesn't want his discovery to be used for evil. But the point of the story is that once the knowledge is unleashed, its spread cannot be stopped. The use of lost knowledge gives us the feeling of power.
The left is correct when they tell you that western society was never free. That patriarchy and all variety of “normativities” were always present to control you. The rules of society are often unstated. You may not even notice them, but you notice when they change.
The illusion of freedom is present when social norms are fixed and relatively unambiguous. When you know what is normal and what is expected, you feel free, because your choices are clear and contextualized.
The illusion of freedom is shattered when norms break down, because you get caught between competing systems; acting under one system means disobedience to another; the necessity of disobedience makes you feel unfree.
The freedom of liberalism was always a farce, because in order to be liberal, you must adhere to certain normative vision of what a person is and should be. If you deviate, liberalism sees you as deficient, as any ideology would.
To illustrate this, consider David Foster Wallace's famous talk "This is Water" Quote: This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting.
This line is the beating heart of the speech. He says it's not a matter of virtue, but he's up his own ass. It absolutely is. The highest virtue is so virtuous it's not even a virtue: "Overcoming your default setting"
That's what liberalism demands. In DFW's soteriology, (which is so embarrassed by Christianity that he has to call Jesus 'JC') it's not enough to have optionality. In order to be free, he says you have to EXERCISE optionality, consciously choosing something other than the default.
(To be fair to DFW, he claims that the default setting is selfishness and obsession with material things, but both of these cliches are clearly wrong, there is no easier way to grandstand than to rail against selfishness. Everyone feels the same way about it.)
Liberalism wants to preserve liberalism. The fancy name for this is "temporal goal integrity". It means that your goals are consistent across time. Nietzsche called this the greatest accomplishment of the overman: the ability to keep a promise.
A man who can't keep a promise is spiritually inferior to one who can. This is also true of egregores and ideologies. Liberalism only has vitality if it can stay liberal, and that means it has to place limits on freedom.
So immediately we observe a tension between the temporal goal integrity of liberalism vs. the mandate to overcome the default setting. If liberalism is the default setting, then it must overcome itself.
And the left understands this, which is why their vanguard has a (perfectly consistent) understanding of freedom as obedience to their preferred norm. Freedom is having exactly one set of norms.
The thing is, you can't do all this explicitly. Even very smart people need a bridge between the exoteric norm of liberalism and the esoteric world of their actual beliefs. The sleight of hand they use is what I call a categorical rebase.
Exoteric leftism is a square circle of liberty and equality. You're not supposed to get stuck there. You're supposed to transcend the contradiction and pass into esoteric leftism, invert your values, and overcome the "default setting".
What is the default setting? Heteronormativity, patriarchy, "cis-sexuality", and racism; they have to make up names for these things because they are the natural, organic default. This is the trick: describing the norm is naming the demon.
What is esoteric leftism? It's when you "do the work of choosing to somehow alter your default setting." Now you see why "anti-racism" is a perfect fit; now you see why being gay is a perfect fit. If you choose something repugnant then you know you overcame your default setting.
It's true of course that "heteronormative" is an unspoken default. The insane thing is to claim there is no reason for this. Fully realized liberalism chooses something other than the default, and it creates a new normativity which exists as a negative of the old default.
That inversion is HOMO-normativity. You know homonormativity when you see it. You're saturated in it. Homonormativity is making yourself ugly. It's antinatalism, it's BDSM, it's abortion, it's 'her body her choice'. All of these things are homonormative.
Why is anti-natalism homonormative? Because under heteronormativity, people reproduce the old fashioned way, but under homonormativity, people "reproduce" only by ideologically colonizing the children of hetero-normies.
Why is BDSM homonormative? because it's a sick pantomime of the natural authority of fathers as the heads of their families. It cheapens and mocks patriachy by fetishizing it, the same way drag queens cheapen and mock femininity by fetishizing it.
This clicked when I saw someone say love is acting to increase the beloved's capacity for choice. Notice what this excludes: marriage and reproduction are acts of love that decrease the future optionality of your beloved. Love as choice-maximization is homonormativity.
A much better definition of love is to protect people from their naive desires and lead them to the path of righteousness as you best understand it. Notice that my definition both contains and eclipses the emaciated view of love offered above.
That's partly how you know my proffered understanding of love is superior; the definition of love that fetishizes choice is a narrow, contracted spirituality. Love must be kind of binding, and freedom must be an unbinding.
When you perceive implicit norms and learn to choose against them, it really does feel like you've torn some sacred veil, as if you've awakened to a higher level of consciousness. But often cases you've only kicked away something that was propping you up.
This resolves the paradox that, as much as leftists stress the importance choice, they strongly object if you try to choose heteronormativity, cissexuality, et al, because to them, that isn't actually a choice, that's the wicked default option.
Observe also how the mere existence of the freedom-as-overcoming-the-default limits your freedom, not only by stigmatizing the normal, but by demanding that even the ability to make a binding commitment is wicked.
"Overcoming the default" doesn't understand the value of keeping a promise, because you can't serve two masters. When choice is the highest morality, it cheapens all choices. The fetishization of choosing renders the content of any one choice meaningless.
Choice-fetishizers claim "no one is stopping you from living how you want," If you want to live under a different norm, you can't, because norms don't exist at the level of an individual, they exist at the level of groups.
Your enemies want to tear down your idols, and profane your gods. In both spiritual and physical war, this is always a goal. The reason I explain the ways that the left manufactures sanctity is to profane it.
Sacred mysteries, like magic tricks, cease to impress when you understand how they work. Naming homonormativity – pointing out that it's a norm – desacralizes it, and shows the hollowness of the act of choosing it.
No one on the left is funny any more because you can’t be sanctimonious and funny at the same time. The onion stopped being funny the moment they chose to be on the side of power.
People radically overweight the value of their desires.
Struggling and fighting are essential parts of life, both for humans and animals. You should: stop people from raping children. You should not: stop children from taking risks or ever experiencing pain.
People will almost always choose pleasurable oblivion over galvanizing struggle. That doesn't mean they are choosing correctly. Go to a zoo, and look at the lions, look at the gazelles. Do you think their life is "better" for being in a cage?
Are you really going to claim that moral destiny of humanity is wireheading every animal in the world? Should we build a giant farm where we just give as many rats free access to opioid drips as we can afford? Won't this be increasing the amount of net utility in the world? WALL-E is not good for humans, and it's not good for animals.
If a small child scrapes her knee, her parent might "kiss it better". This does nothing, but both parties appreciate the ritual. Hanson finds that empirically, many medical interventions do nothing, but we pay for them, because they are an adult version of "kiss the boo boo"
Our institutions are prodigiously wasteful. Under the feel-good veneer of win-win cooperation—teaching kids, healing the sick, celebrating creativity—our institutions harbor giant, silent furnaces of intra-group competitive signaling.
Trillions of dollars of wealth, resources, and human effort are being burned to ash every year, largely for the purpose of showing off... institutions do end up achieving many of their official goals [but] they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge.
People are judging us all the time. They want to know if we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish?
Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest.
This applies to both our words and our thoughts. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves? The answer is: our thoughts aren’t as private as we imagine. Conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others. “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others".
Some ideas are more naturally viral than others: When a theory emphasizes altruism, cooperation, and other feel-good motives, people want to share it, shout it from the rooftops. It reflects well on both speakers and listeners to be associated with something so inspirational.
Human beings are self-deceived because self-deception is useful. It allows us to reap the benefits of selfish behavior while posing as unselfish in front of others. Confronting our delusions must therefore (at least in part) undermine their very reason for existing.
What looks like altruism is actually, at a deeper level, competitive self-interest.
When a species is pair-bonded and monogamous, the incentives for males and females converge. (My note: What happens when we undermine monogamy?)
if you’re worried that your neighbors might disapprove and even coordinate to punish you, then you’re most likely dealing with a norm. Norm violators are punished by a coalition, that is, people acting in concert.
Christopher Boehm calls it a “reverse dominance hierarchy,” where instead of the strongest apes dominating the group, in humans it’s the rest of the group, working together, that’s able to dominate the strongest apes.
Four seemingly irrational behaviors we use to win social (mixed motive) games:
* degrading communication channels
* opening ourselves to future punishment
* deliberately not learning things that undermine us
* intentionally believing a lie
The strategy for degrading communication channels is to use a proxy agent to conduct negotiations. We can place inflexible terms on an intermediary, making it harder to propose new terms to a deal.
Opening oneself up to future punishment. Schelling: Among the legal privileges of corporations are the right to sue and the right to be sued. The right to be sued is the power to make a promise, power to do business with someone who might be damaged.
Ignoring information (strategic ignorance). If you’re kidnapped, you might prefer not to see your kidnapper’s face or learn his name, because if he knows you can identify him later (to the police), he’ll be less likely to let you go. Knowledge as a liability.
Purposely believing something that’s false. If you’re a general who firmly believes your army can win, even though the odds are against it, you might nevertheless intimidate your opponent into backing down.
The value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant. As Kurzban says, “Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public.”It needs to be advertised and made conspicuous.
Although we’re aware of some of the surface motives for our actions, the deep-seated evolutionary motives often remain inaccessible, buried behind the scenes in the subconscious workings of our brains’ ancient mechanisms.
Information can threaten our self-image and therefore our social image. In this sense, Freud was right: the ego needs to be protected. Though it's not because we are fragile, rather it's to keep damaging information from leaking out of our brain to our associates.
Reason is the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.—David Hume
A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”—J. P. Morgan
Therapy discourse is perfectly kafkaesque. If you think you don’t need therapy, or you are skeptical of therapy in any way, that is proof you need therapy.
Come on, all people would benefit from some therapy? This is so stupid I wonder how you remember to breathe.
If most therapists are horrible then most therapy is ineffective or even harmful... and we can round off to “Therapy is bad”
Having friends helps you. Therapy methodology does not. Therapy sometimes accidentally helps by making you feel like you have an intimate friend.
Macho monkee posturing is good and people who countersignal it are bad.
Why argue with someone who defines themselves as "antifascist"? This person hasn't read the Bible, and probably isn't smart enough to do so.
Groups with strong identity/in-group loyalty out-compete groups with weak identity/in-group loyalty. This is true at many scales: families, companies, political parties, and nations.
You might think that truth-loyalty is the stronger identity and super-group, but really it's just kicking the can. Who do you trust to provide you with the truth?
Reason has its limits. Self-overcoming and self-sacrifice are not things you can reason yourself into.
I see people arguing about incels again on the TL (the discourse is a hamster wheel) so I am going to share some wisdom from the Book of Pook. One of Pook's best insights is that desiring to settle down is ITSELF unattractive.
You should be free as a bird, singing, full of joy with life. Women want to throw the bird in a cage. When birds try to fly into the cage, wouldn’t you think something is wrong with that bird? Women want the birds that are FREE, WILD, and BEAUTIFUL.
Some people think women are weak and stupid. I disagree strongly and, you know what, so do you. The reason why there is [red pill ideology] is precisely because women were stronger than we thought.
Manners for men: direction of masculine strength, not the denial of it.
Relationships of the ‘New’ Man and the ‘New’ Woman are two androgynous beings swapping a phallus. “I’ll be the Man for today, honey.” “OK dear, but I get the phallus Thursday for a meeting at work.”
Many find a woman (or women) as a substitute for achievement. This is female thinking, that the ‘union’ means your life is complete. When you think you are ‘achieving things’ because you have a woman or women, you stunt life.
Since the changes and joys of life’s arc (babies, family, courtship, marriage) have no role for the intelligentsia, it is no surprise that anti-sexuality flourishes among intellectuals. The greatest dupe with women (and life) is the professor cocooned in doctorates against life.
Women are at their loudest when they’re lonely. This is also true with dogs.
Women who complain of sexual harassment wish it would happen to them.
Women do not deceive men. We use women to deceive ourselves.
[Saying that "swap the phallus" would eliminate gender inequality] assumes what is to be proved. Swapping anatomical parts isn't even the same as swapping genders, even PLGBTs don't think that. In some magic world where your mind lives in the cloud and just connects to a body, women still want to feel like women, and men like men.
Of course, this kind of analogy quickly collapses on itself, since the mind is a product of the body, it's part of the body, not something outside it, and things like hormones and the physical the topology are themselves somewhat gendered...
In the "cloud mind connects to the body" model, you have to assume there is no gender distinctiveness in the first place. And in the "mind grows out of the body like an apple grows on a tree" model, it wouldn't even be possible.
But suppose it was (in the latter case), you would still have to reconcile the mind's developmental history with its new... shell? Presumably a woman's mind suddenly transplanted into a male body still thinks and feels like a woman? in which case I think you get a gay man, or maybe just some kind of crippling dysphoria, but at the least you still have a fundamentally feminine psychology, and vice versa for the man, a (relatively small) number of porn-addled men not-withstanding.
I sort of hate to do this, because I think it's the cheap way out, but arguably, an increasing number of men DO have man-dysphoria... [posts picture of lots of soyfaces]
I'm not so sure about that, I think the world has always been hostile to men, and that a reduction in the appropriate kinds of hostility are what allow such decadent creatures to exist. These men are "little boys trapped in a man's body".
In any case, we don't really recognize the little boy as being "the same" as the man he becomes; legally, we treat boys very differently from men, for example. So my claim is mostly that "transition" does not preserve identity in this idealized model.
actual transgender transitions do preserve identity, of course, because they don't actually work. But if transition did work, then you literally wouldn't be the same person. (I am also very skeptical of uploading and teleportation).
The average woman has social powers that the average man cannot even imagine.
Even if a man is in the 99th percentile of attractiveness, even then, he will not understand how fluidly women perceive "the truth".
There is an endless litany of arguments against democracy and you probably know them all, already. Yes, I know the US is a republic, but spiritually it's a democracy; we believe that our rulers are granted legitimacy because they are manifestations of our voice
A thing can be spiritually true even if it's not literally true, (or symbolically true, or directionally true) Did Washington cut down a cherry tree? Who cares, spiritually true. Is Michelle Obama a male transvestite? Who cares, spiritually true (also yes)
Mencken said "democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas"
The difficulty in arguing against suffrage-based governance is not in building a logically sound argument against it, it's in breaking the conditioning, the system of taboos that keeps you believing in it
Consent of the governed doesn't work, because the governers quickly figure out how to manufacture consent. The same people who read Zizek and grasp that news media exists to control you also believe that BLM is some kind of organic uprising of the human spirit
When consent is a precondition for authority, authority will learn to manipulate people into consent.
I don't know if words alone can break the conditioning that causes you to trust news media; I think that break has to come from some crisis in your own experience. You have to catch them in a lie and realize that it's not an accident or a one-off
What I want to do is break you out of your amnesia. Every time they lie to you, you just go right back to trusting them. Who's they? The media, the mavens of culture and politics, the people who decide what's true.
I need you to realize that every single word printed in "respectable" news outlets is a lie, because it is grounded in a hostile belief system.
As Moldbug said, the presidential election is an argument about who gets to wear the Ronald McDonald suit. But despite the little executive power the president has, do you think McDonald's would be half as successful if their mascot were Azathoth, the hideous devourer?
The dark satanic mills of the bureaucracy are going to keep turning no matter who you elect. Voting makes you feel powerful in the way that playing the lottery makes you feel rich. These teachings insulate you from the psychic pain of losing. Small comfort, that.
Trump was never the fascist that we wanted him to be, or that his enemies said he was. But for the first time ever in my adult life, a politician made noises that appealed to me specifically. That's very powerful, because more than half of the president's job is ceremonial
Trump isn't important because of what he will or will not do in office (though more the latter), he's important because of his symbolic value as a repudiation of a certain type of person, the type of person who principally composes our governing class
Trump is a rejection of the sanctities that we hate, and they will come out and say it: "trump is a racist/sexist/etc." That doesn't mean he hates women or blacks, it means he doesn't worship their gods. THAT is what we voted for
And that's also what they hate about him – not any action he took, not his "lies," not his "incompetence" – it's that he doesn't affirm their sacred symbols.
The bureacracy works a little less well with Trump in charge, I think we can all admit that. It's not a bad thing necessarily, since the principal objectives of the bureacracy include total demographic replacement of the american people and turning everyone gay
The reason Trump is such a good signal is that he is polarizing. If you think you are "conservative" but you reject Trump, it shows where your loyalties really lie: with the above system and its terrible velocityPeople who object to Trump's "tone" or his manners don't get it at all, those are his primary appeal. He's not some slick PMC grown in a vat to control you. If you think you're too good for Trump, because he sends the wrong class signal, again, that is the point
You want your figurehead to throw the exosemantic gang signs of the educated class (you want to go comfortably into the night) but that is EXACTLY what we are rejecting, because that class and its manners are inextricably tangled with a moral theory that mandates our destruction
Call it a motte and bailey if that helps. It goes way beyond social justice, (or wokism, as we say now), it's the cluster of beliefs where you say "basic human decency" and what you mean is chopping eight year old's dicks off
The highly visible people who want these things dwell entirely in the motte. They say "moderate" things and present as slightly left centrists, and they provide no obstruction to the sexual and racial mystery cult that is eating the world
In the name of "basic human decency" they demand to open the borders, disenfranchise the American founding stock, and promote all forms of perversion and sexual immorality. This didn't start in 2015 or 2019 or any such thing, that's just when a bunch of left moderates noticed it
I don't expect to change anyone's mind with this. A circle I've been trying to square for the last four years is that I believe democracy is wicked and also that a particular president matters and is good.
The resolution to this paradox is that show is bad but that participating in the show in a way that disrupts its semiotic flows is good
A popular film can change the moral landscape of the whole country. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was a major force in closing the insane asylums and releasing the crazies into the world. The content of the national politics show matters at least as much
Having Donald Trump in the white house is important, because he represents (and reifies!) our ability to think outside of the institutions that manufacture our consent.
At the same time, there is no more fitting symbol of the new left than Joe Biden, a sclerotic, demented white man who literally doesn't know what year it is, acting as a trojan horse for a half indian woman pretending to be black, who will sell the shirt off your back to the CCP
I don't know who's going to be sitting in the white house next year. As in all things, I hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But I know that we need a symbol like Trump if we are ever going to overcome the spiritual shackles of democracy
Much like the Gulf War, Trump's presidency never happened. Yes, there were soldiers in Kuwait, and there was a man named Donald Trump in the white house, but there was never a war, and there was never a presidency.
Trumpism was a bubble, and on Wednesday (1/6/21), it popped. In 2016, it felt like the beginning of a new American nationalism. Without Trump, that "movement" dies. Will those embers merely fade, or can the fire be rekindled?
If you want to transform the world, or your country, you cannot fuel your movement on discontent, nor on reasonableness. No, transformation can only be built on a foundation of extravagant hope
Gold toilets aside, Trump never had extravagance, in fact he had no content at all. He was the first fully post-modern president; what he did was so filtered through media that there's no effective difference between what happened and what the media says happened
We projected our dreams onto Donald Trump. A successful mass movement requires belief in an infallible leader or an irresistible doctrine. There is no mass movement without a little delusion (we call it a little delusion) "Reasonable" people can't effect big change
In 2015 the woke gay negrolatry religion had gone vertical. Stopping a mass movement is achieved by replacing it with another. A religious movement can be stopped by promoting a social or nationalist movement. We tried, and failed.
Hoffer says a social movement can only succeed if it satisfies our passion for self-renunciation. Woke gives you something to renounce (your whiteness, your privilege, your genitals.) Trumpism fumbled around for self-overcoming, but never found it.
Most people want to feel virtuous, and they also detect that not everything is alright. To solve this problem, they look for a theory of sin, and generate feelings of virtue by renouncing their sinning self
How does the simulation of virtue become actual? It happens when the rules that make us feel righteous are also good for us at fractal scales: individual, family, tribe, nation.
The point of social authority is to make defecting more expensive than cooperating EVEN in single iterations of mixed motive games, by punishing defectors harshly
Woke is evil but feels virtuous, because it tells us that self-destruction is righteous. Destroy your country, it is a vehicle of oppression. Destroy your family, it gives you unfair privileges. This is the cheesecake of moral instincts
But for all that, Woke is deeply American. In fact it's the most American thing in the world. Always has been. What the woke want more than anything is to have no master.
When I speak of "leftism", this is what I mean: the cult of no master. Or as Nietzsche put it, "No shepherd, and one herd." Liberalism, leftism, communism, whatever you want to call it, they are all the same spirit. "No one above me"
This definition poses some problems for people who believe that Stalin was a "leftist", for example. I don't care. My definition is good. Leftism is rule by committee, by council. It's diffusion of responsibility. Rightism is rule by individuals, concentration of accountability
When leftism fails, which it always does, there is no one to blame. No one to depose. This makes it hard to cut down, like a hydra.
But anyway, the idea of "no masters" does not constitute freedom. As DH Lawrence says, it is, rather, the reverse: a hopeless sort of constraint. It's never freedom til you find something you positively want to be
You will only feel free when you are living in a homeland, when you are obeying a deep, inward voice, when you are doing what your deepest self likes.
Free men are unconscious of freedom. Shouting "no master" is a rattling of chains, always was.
A little more Lawrence: The real American day hasn't begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with the old thing. Do away with masters
If that's true, if the American dawn is to come, then Hoffer identifies one more ingredient needed to relaunch our counter-movement: boredom, most of all, boredom with our own selves
Boredom is a catalyst, it's a precious resource.
What do you fear, horrorist, deep in your heart?
I fear that we are insufficiently bored, and that we never will be again.
As the criminally underrated @egg_report has remarked, the culture war is an augmented reality clicker game. The video game is the ascendant media modality of the 21st century, and we relate to everything through it. I hate KB but I have to admit this resonates:
"Imagine storming the Capital of the United States as the government of the country literally fucking flees and then just wandering around the building confused about why the level isn't ending instead of declaring a new government and issuing warrants for congressmen's arrests."
And what's the defining characteristic of a video game? It simulates *achievement*, just as wokism simulates mutually beneficial cooperation and the news simulates information. Everything is a video game now, even real life, and it robs us of boredom.
The "clear pill" is supposed to be a renunciation of news and political emotion. This fails because reasonableness is not how you launch a mass movement, which is the only thing that can replace a mass movement.
Can we find the boredom necessary for a New American Dawn, in our world of infinite idiot circuses, of video games, of scientifically optimized fractal compulsion factories?
Can we renounce the most American thing in the world, the desire for masterlessness, the desire for "no one above me"? Trump never understood the need to renounce liberalism, never could have.
And it's become obvious that the "next Trump" won't arise on social media. He may have been a false dawn, but he was our Don, and he was elected because "The enemy's gate was down".
Without massive censorship, we the people will talk ourselves into fascism as a matter of gravity. But that loophole has been closed, and there will be no mass movement without mass communication. inb4 urbit, it is elitist by design.
There is no such thing as a neutral communication platform. Ultimately, the mods control the discourse, and Trump won by accident because the mods were asleep, which is why he got tired of winning.
We mistook a sunset for a sunrise, and now comes the darkness. The real American Dawn can only come if we can find a way to communicate freely, with the voices of our deepest selves.
The cost of membership (to academia) should be admitting the truth. We aren't obsessed with race, we are browbeaten and gaslit with lies about race every single day, and the fact that we take an interest in disproving these lies (such as the one you are advocating) is not obsession.
Human rights are nothing, property rights are everything. Without respect for property, there is no civic order, and without civic order, loss of human life quickly follows.
Far more normal people are put off by pronouns in the bio than trans people are hurt by not having them. by definition.
What distresses me is being forced to constantly lie, in public, and say that men can become women and vice versa. If being forced into constantly lying doesn’t distress you, then you have no conscience
"That's right, either you submit to inverted reality, or else you're a bigot." Well, I'd rather be bigot.
Women always try to cut you down with this female empowerment crap. Don’t let them. “A man who won’t let me define manhood for him is bitter and joyless”. Smack her on the bum and laugh at her. Fetch us a cup of coffee, will you sweetie?
The two genders:
Woman: "I believe that thinking is intrinsically unpleasant to humans, and that school exists to habituate us to it - just as we habituate ourselves to unpleasant activities such as brushing our teeth - and to encourage us to try, at least at times, to take pleasure in it."
Man: "I believe thinking is inherently pleasurable and fun as the most distinctively human activity, and that schools too often habituate people either not to experience thinking, or to experience thinking as an unpleasant chore."
This is a perfect example of my previous thread’s point: for women, learning to think is having your autonomy subsumed into state authority, for men, thinking is something you do on your own.
I work off of a model where left-wingedness is essentially feminine and right-wingedness is essentially masculine.
[in response to a comment saying schools favor men's thought] Are you smoking crack? The exact opposite of this is true. Schools radically disprivilege male modalities for the sake of female ones, because of the twisted historical justification you just offered.
The universities have been systematically overrun by leftists with strong feminist beliefs for over half a century.
You have zero understanding of what it’s like to grow up as a boy in America. From the moment we are born, boys are taught that they are defective girls. Why are slogans like "The Future Is Female" ubiquitous? Why is there no feminine counterpart to “toxic masculinity”?
What you say is not factual so there is nothing to refute. The claim that women are historically oppressed because men built the world is not an empirical claim, it’s an emotional claim, and the correct refutation is a spanking.
Centrism just means you have no principles and will let the overton window drag you wherever it wants.
"Progressives usually want mandatory toleration for everything Christianity prohibits.
But progressives are not libertines and have their own comprehensive sexual morality that is in some ways even more restrictive than that of traditional religions."
[What's an example of a restrictive progressive sexual morality?] I can see from your bio that you will not like my answer. Let me rephrase that. You will not be able to understand it.
You believe that "put whatever you want wherever you want" represents a maximum of sexual freedom, and that the existence of such things as BSDM and consent-based morality enable people to exist in more restrictive sexual contracts, as to their taste, but both of these are wrong.
The things that progressive sexual morality prohibits are arrangements between men and women that rely on sexual contracts with different terms. It's one or the other, because ultimately, these contracts are valid through social norms which are much bigger than individuals.
In a world where some people are unilaterally unable to be bound to the agreements they make, certain social arrangements become impossible (and this is because progressivism sees them are immoral). At present, the laws that exist around marriage do precisely this.
Progressives are not libertines, and have their own comprehensive sexual morality that is, in some ways, even more restrictive than that of traditional religions. It is not actually based on "live and let live", "different strokes for different folks", or the "anything goes with consenting adults" principle of volenti non fit iniuria, because in the progressive conception, 'true' voluntariness and consent can only be valid in the absence of a whole host of pressures, undue influences, and power imbalances. This imposes all manner of limits on human desire, as one can witness watching any tribunal of sex bureaucrats on any American college campus.
Honestly, I am not convinced that it's possible to take a stance without affirming the entire movement associated with it.
People circle their real disagreements with each other by pretending to talk about abstract objective truths. The argument about the nature of science and knowledge barely conceals the real argument, but we all pretend to care about the logic instead of its friend/enemy payload
If someone keeps signaling, over and over, that they are dedicated to deconstructing all of your values and assumptions, it's safe to guess that they are far more interested in attacking you than they are in "the truth" (not implicating you here, btw)
There is also such a thing as a useful idiot
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
I understand what you are saying but the way it reads to me is "hey the enemy is attacking you with gun drones and you're still running around on horseback. Whatever you do, don't invest in your own gun drones, then you'll be as bad as they are"
the only way out is through
We refuse to accept what liberals meant by "all men are created equal" being moral equality and not functional equality, because, in practice, no one can accept what they meant. It seems to me that about half the people in the world are mentally incapable of grasping the distinction, and in any case, the ambiguity is a massive backdoor to all kinds of evil.
People exploit ambiguities in rules and norms as a matter of course. The distinction "morally equal" vs "functionally equal" contains many ambiguities: is the life of a rapist worth the same as the life of a great poet?
This type of question immediately shows its teeth in matters of law enforcement and administration, but it is also relevant in questions pertaining to things such as job applicability. Are we morally equal, they ask, if a private employer prefers one man to another?
This kind of thing cannot be cordoned off into the public sphere. It bleeds everywhere into the private. Moral equivalence and functional equivalence have no boundary between them, because the things a man does in his life really do determine his worth.
It's not even clear that the law should treat people equally, and in many situations it doesn't. We don't treat a minor the same way we treat an adult. We don't treat a woman the same as a man, in the case of sexual assault.
"One law for the lion and the ox is oppression" -Blake
All men are equal before God. Before God does not mean "before Man".
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
"They can't make a post-utopian Star Trek show, because it's impossible to create anything good when you labor under the spiritual burden of woke piety.
Yes, it was abundantly obvious what you believe. "Treating people like people" is not a neutral statement, it is the tip of the iceberg of an entire worldview, which might broadly be called "liberal humanism". I am not a humanist...
I don't think "treating people like people" means anything, and I don't think it's morally salutary as you understand it. There is nothing implicitly valuable about people, human rights are a particular social construct of a particular ideology...
And they are only based in the ability of the state and military to enforce them. It matters because, to use a cliche "we live in a society". Everything everyone thinks and does affects everyone else. There is no such thing as "in the privacy of your home"
Think back to the 90s, when they used to say "what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors" ... Did homosexuality stay there? Or did it "come out of the closet" , is it "loud and proud", does every single corporation in america now celebrate it proclaim it?
Does anyone make TV or movies without gays in them? The idea that somehow "gay" is something that happens in private, that doesn't affect me, is farcical, because if I so much as dare to utter a dissenting opinion, mobs of people get very angry at me.
so what universe are you living in where you think it "doesn't affect me"? It has reshaped the entire social fabric of society. Children are now taught about "gender" in elementary school, things that would have been unthinkable and understood to be reprehensible 60 years ago
So please, explain how it "doesn't affect me" ?
I deliberately distance myself from anyone who is gay to the utmost of my ability. If a gay person got close enough to me to ask me out, I already made a big mistake
The claim that conservatives "fear" gays is ridiculous; we are in fact disgusted by them. Suppose you accidentally leave some food in the back of your fridge for several months. Do you "fear" the resulting mass of blue-green slime?
Any fear that you do feel in this case is rational, such as "I fear I would get sick if I eat it". That's a rational fear, because that's exactly what would happen, much as we "fear" that people will get all manner of diseases if they are gay (science and data back this up)
but even if "science" one day could liberate us from all disease, ass-fucking always has been and always will be disgusting, it's not something a mentally healthy person does, any more than any other form of self harm
AIDs literally decimated the gay population in the 90s, (as in, killed 10% of them). Imagine what biohorrors await us in future decades.
A quote from an NRx elder, hideous clarity: "The ugly truth is that progressives are the high-status winners who are anti-male and, with increasing viciousness, anti-white and thus both implicitly and explitly promise to raise the social status and life prospects of non-men and non-whites. Any non-progressive movement has no choice but to pick from the smart fraction of people who are not down with that program, who have to lead people who are mostly losers, and who are all birds of a feather."
I think that you [Logo] think that diversity-boosterism and its sister, queerism, are being deployed cynically by a moneyed elite to maintain their place at the head of our capitalist society, something like that, and that by participating in the "culture war", you just become a rube.
I do not think this is the case. Certainly, those in power are able to opportunistically use these things to shore up their own power, but the demons they have summoned are out of their control, and you can't opt out of it, because it pervades society at every level.
The world is full of true believers, and the cynical political tools of the previous generation become the pious orthodoxy of the next, and this has already happened many times.
No, I think capital is going to devolve into an incoherent mess and collapse under its own weight, and what remains of it will be nasty, bitter shadow of its former self whose primary outputs are racial and sexual humiliation, and this process is already well on its way.
It's not a revolution, it's just entropy, decay.
I really don't have the time or inclination to explain my entire worldview to you right now, but I think it's quite clear that, even in the recent past, our capacity for technological development and wealth creation where much greater , per capita, than they are now.
Something that frustrates me about short stories (I am also sometimes guilty of this) is that they often deal with life and death, or with the end of the world, things like that. I want to explore smaller stakes, I think it's much more interesting.
Is authenticity the same as banality? A man who is identical to himself has no tension in the bow of his soul; how can the arrow of his heart fly out to meet his aim?
"Be yourself" is a formula for spiritual lassitude, that's why they want you to "bring your whole self to work"
What is "fully realized"? If a man is fully realized, he has nothing left to accomplish—is such a man not dead?
Authenticity as we understand it seems to be a relatively modern invention, so what I am asking is, rather than being the cure for anomie, might pursuit of authenticity be the cause of it?
If there's one thing the lockdowns have convinced me of it's that the devil makes work for idle hands. This is something the UBI crowd will never ever understand.
One of my favorite stories by Lovecraft is called "The Picture in the House". It's short, 10 minutes, but it contains all the horror of the modern age. The narrator wanders into an old, decrepit house to find shelter from a storm...
In the house he finds a rare old book, Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo, with a gruesome illustration of a cannibal's butcher stall, and he meets a strange old man with an anachronistic way of speaking. The man seems to enter an ecstatic state as he talks about the book
As the narrator talks to him, he realizes that although the old man cannot read the book, its pictures have inspired him to commit acts of human butchery and cannibalism. Of all of Lovecraft's stories, I find this one especially haunting.
Its single point of focus is the harmful perception, a contagious madness found in an old book. When Lovecraft was writing, the infohazard was slow and hidden, and to find it you had to wander into some cursed or forgotten place.
But if Lovecraft were writing now, the old man in the story would have posted the pictures of the book on his twitter, and it would have gone viral, and the whole world would be steeped in the blood of cannibal butcheries without measure or pause until the death of death.
We romanticize Lovecraftian madness, but HPL's treatment of the subject is exactly the opposite, it's a genuine terror that seeps into the remotest crevasses of the mind. Maybe we are less afraid of madness because we are saturated in it.
How often have you been told to "read old books", and how often have you seen this exhortation disparaged as a kind of inactivity? But real, authentic readings of old books are dangerous, and they very well ought to give us strange impulses, otherwise, what was the point?
We live in the era of software, so the temptation is to think about everything in terms of computers and code. A philosophy is a computer program for the body: a system of precise abstractions orchestrated to produce effective actions.
In software we have an idea we call "dead code" — code that exists as part of a program, but it never runs. Dead code is bad because it distorts the domain of discourse. I claim that philosophy ends up being mostly dead code to most people.
And yet, we have found some ways to put the dead code in our philosophies to good use. It's often not so important to believe something as to say that you do. We use the dead code in our minds to signal affiliation and fashion.
So you could read a book of philosophy—something by Deleuze, perhaps—and even though you never act on it, you still get a lot of value from putting it on display. Fashionistas may also wear jackets in the summer time.
There's nothing wrong with using beliefs as gang signs and nothing I could say could stop you from doing it. Most people who read old books just pick up a lot of dead code, and that's for the best. The horror I feel comes from the other sort, the ones who run the code they find.
What happens if you download a bunch of random applications from torrent sites and run them? You get a virus, and your machine can become compromised. Well, it was a lot harder to get a computer virus before the internet, and also a lot harder to get a mind virus.
But nowadays, anyone can just go online and read an old book, and if they're really unlucky, they'll understand it and put it into practice. You should not consider this activity to be benign.
Here's a way to test if you downloaded a book as dead code for fashion, or if you are actually using it: can you convey it to others in a way that changes them, too? If not, you're a hipster in an ugly vest. And that's good. Hipsters get laid.
But not all change is good, and in fact most of it is harmful. This is true of both biological and ideological evolution. We forgot how to fear madness, because we are steeped in madness. We forgot how to fear change, because we are steeped in change. But fear is healthy.
Fear is unhealthy when it becomes hysterical, but prior to that, it's prudence. And I want you to know the fear in the fact that most people don't really act on their beliefs, the fear that, if they did run that old code, the result would be butchery.
Another test is that people who run the old code they find in books are afraid; things that change you are authentically terrifying, but people who use them for fashion are instead full of bravado.
Heidegger made the point that any man who could look upon the (then new) photographs of Earth taken from low orbit and not be afraid was probably an idiot. Lack of fear at least signifies a dearth of meaningful religious instinct, a kind of blissful thoughtlessness.
In online life we all goad each other to take our fashionable dead code beliefs and run them, and we are fortunate that most people don't. But the more they do, the more the madness takes hold.
Programmers understand another danger of dead code. It is not routinely exercised, so if it ever does run, it can be fatal to the application. Every time we spread a fashionable idea, there's a chance someone will take it seriously.
Because most people don't take their ideas seriously, bad ideas can spread very widely without consequence, until one day, one day...
There is another terrible allegory in "The Picture in the House". The old man looks at DeBry's picture of the cannibal before butchering a sheep, as if it were pornography.
Lovecraft didn't write about sex, but he did write about hideous appetites, found in enthrallment to an image. This is something we all know well. How many terrible images do we see every day, images we should never have seen?
Images of sex and violence can distress us in obvious ways, but the real madness comes from images that elicit pity, which I will once again remind you is a form of contempt. Can you think of an image that precipitated a descent into madness? (George Floyd's death)
Madness may not feel like madness to a man in the grips of it. In fact, it may feel like ecstasy. Shestov wrote that the sun of truth blinds the inhabitants of the kingdom of darkness with its brilliance
This is to say that there is no special quality of truth that makes it a midwife to sanity. The trick of religion is to transmute individual madness into collective peace, just as the trick of a market economy is to transmute individual selfishness into collective wealth.
Everyone who accidentally runs the philosophy they find on the internet has a similar experience, you may find this familiar: they ran some strange code and now they feel like the whole world is on the brink of "waking up".
It can take years to see that this is not the case, and to realize that you are now stuck with a weird operating system that makes it hard to interface with everyone around you. But nor can you just unsee the "truths" you have seen.
This is the true meaning "the only way out is through". Being in the grips of madness, we have to find a way to all share the same madness together.
Never forget that your enemies have faces, names, lives. The organizations that are waging war against you are composed of real people. Those people are your enemies.
They have families to feed? Thank you for taking inventory of their liabilities.
I really just cannot overstate how much getting in protracted twitter arguments is a waste of your time.
By far the most dangerous troll is the one who is arguing politely in good faith.
My friends, I am expanding to Gab, though I will continue to post here. This place has become too insufferable, too fake, too hemmed in, and I have found it is harder to speak earnestly to you, because to be earnest breaks my heart https://gab.com/0x49fa98
When I look around me, I feel mostly contempt. I'm supposed to say contempt is a bad emotion, that it eats you alive inside, that it's noble to set these things aside and focus on the positive–but I'm not here to say what I'm supposed to.
Trump is gone and we are all still processing that. I haven't had much to say on this topic because I prefer to watch things unfold than pretend to understand a complex social situation where I have no inside information.
We feel angry and betrayed after this loss, but it's not that we lost Trump the man, it's that we lost Trump the symbol. He represented a rising American nationalist consciousness, that's what we don't want to let go.
Any lingering hope I had for America is gone. This is not my country any more. Maybe it hasn't been for a while, but that last trace of belonging is gone. There are still people here who are my people, but this is not our country.
There are no moves within the existing political structures that will make it our country again. That's a fact. Some of us are in denial about this, others are bargaining, or grieving, or angry – but you need to accept it.
I say this not to demoralize you, but to push you to think of new strategies for taking back this place we have lost. If I had my way, no one would ever cast so much as a single vote for any GOP-affiliated person ever again.
Four years ago, the dissident right or whatever you call it had a "big tent" feeling. We had room for a lot of disparate viewpoints, but we were all interested in nationalism. This was a nice feeling. When we participate in a movement, we are seeking a sense of belonging.
It dawned on us around 2018 that our symbol was only a symbol, and more and more of the people in our "big tent" peeled off. Maybe this correlation with interest in "tribalism" means nothing, or maybe it tells the whole story.
One problem with attempts to foment American nationalism is that it draws a lot of people pretending to be nazis (the big problem with national socialists is that they are socialists, though of course, they have some other problems, as well...)
"Nebulous monolithic scapegoat" is a cognitive antipattern: the same sort of people who point out that blaming everything on "the jews" is overly reductive will then go on to blame "neoliberalism" or "the patriarchy" or even "the cathedral." Rationality is a myth.
On the other hand, it really is true that the only meaningful political distinction is friend/enemy, and all the principles and constitutions in the world are just 4d chess tokens that boil down to black and white. I don't mean that in a racial way but what can you do.
Technology makes previously hidden things visible. Print and typography made private inner experience outwardly legible, and helped awaken the nationalisms that arose in previous centuries.
In the same way, technologies of instant mass peer-to-peer communication made certain previously hidden commonalities much more visible, and now we can quite accurately describe America as two nations, one cup.
I don't really believe in "free speech" – there's no such thing. What there is is "tribe speech" and "other tribe speech". If you are the dominant tribe by a mile, you have the luxury of allowing other tribes to talk freely. Otherwise, "free speech" is pure liability.
Free speech, which is an indulgence that the powerful can afford to grant to their inferiors, is eroding precisely because the dominant memeplex is losing power, and it no longer finds this luxury to be within reach.
The reason there is only tribe speech, not free speech, is that marketplaces of ideas behave the same way as marketplaces of capital. The medium of exchange becomes distributed according to a power law, and that's just how power works.
That means there will always be things you're more or less obligated to say, regardless of whatever high-minded notions you have about truth and freedom. The definition of freedom that americans use, as a pure negation, is non sequitur.
The argument for free speech is that true ideas are supposedly able to drive out false ideas. This might be true in the world of homo economicus, but it's not true in the world of homonormativity.
The truth is that ideas that make you feel good will always drive out ideas that make you feel bad. No no, dear reader, I don't mean *you*. You are a steely-eyed realist with a special dispensation of intellectual grace that liberates you from motivated reasoning.
But for us mere mortals, us earthbound ones, truths can be very dangerous, and the herd to which you belong will only give you so much elasticity. If you stretch the norms too much, they snap.
We resent the groupthink of other groups, especially when they impose their thoughts upon us, but we have also placed far too much weight on being "independent." Yes, there are times to go against all herds, but a far better thing is to choose the herd that values you yourself.
You can belong to a herd of one, but that really does just make you a loser. There's nothing sadder than internet tough guys who posture and puff out their chests about how free-thinking they are. We know, we know; you're not like all the other girls.
Group-minds die if they can't reinforce themselves. Faith is a contract that exists among the members of a group, and it's something they continually renew amongst themselves. The goal of online censorship is to stop you from renewing your faith.
That's why if there's any hope at all, it starts with our communication networks. We must be able to talk to each other without persecution. We must have hard-to-fake signals of loyalty to a common cause. We must be able to transact freely with each other. These are table stakes.
There are many new and exciting technologies for both communication and payment that will help us to support each other, but all of them are in their infancy. Crypto is still nowhere near the thing we need it to be, and if it ever gets there, it will be the true end of the USA.
Twitter is enemy territory. That's a huge part of its appeal. When we're here, we're behind enemy lines. By fighting and fighting visibly, we give hope to each other. It sends the message: you are not alone.
Combat sharpens us, but it also warps us. The medium is the message, and the places you invest your mental effort ultimately determine the shape of your mind. Gab is a different place, with a different shape. Some might even call it cozy. I could do with a little coziness.
We should not concede the commons. A big part of the reason I started writing here was to try to show that it's possible to be literate and nuanced while also being hard right. I have found some friends also who succeed in setting that example.
We should continue to develop friendly spaces, and right now I feel the temptation more than ever to retreat into escapism and inner exile. Quietism, passivism, and defeatism are seductive, but it's not what I want for myself, and it's not what I want for you, my friends.
a fed is just a friend you haven't radicalized yet
https://gab.com/0x49fa98/posts/105594574708827405
When in the Course of human events, incumbent social media platforms become unbearably fake and gay, it becomes necessary to invest in alternate spaces
What drove me to finally come here was falling afoul of being reported for an innocuous comment. I don't think twitter is dying, exactly, but everyone even remotely interesting will leave, and it will become another facebook, if it isn't already.
Good content only exists on the frontiers. Every platform reaches a limit, its own idiosyncratic eternal September, which is itself a progression of morbidities. Death to the bird app
The best part about Master and Commander: there are no women in it!
This is sorry state of the world: If you try to create an exclusively male space, pathetic women try to shame you for being homosexual. Does she think there is something wrong with being gay? (there is ofc)
In fact, having exclusively male spaces is the straightest thing in the world, but cowardly men who fear a woman calling them gay give in to the hermeneutics of gay suspicion and make everyone worse off.
Straight men are afraid tot ouch anything that could be misconstrued as "gay", not because of media treatment of AIDS.
No, you can thank the innate revulsion that all healthy men feel when they think about homosexuality, because it spreads disease, and because most women find homosexuality in men to be sexually repellent.
Sex can be a vector for disease, but the incidence of homosexual disease is an order of magnitude higher, in part because gay men tend to have on the order of hundreds of sexual partners throughout their lifetime.
Moses lacked guile, which is part of why he needed Aaron.
Jesus was so good at manipulating people that we don't call it "manipulation." There is a negative connotation to this word, but there doesn't have to be.
https://gab.com/0x49fa98/posts/105596109758750871
Whatever America we may have believed in, it is well and truly dead, and it's not coming back. Joe Biden isn't the president, there is no president, he's some kind of new thing.
The girls raised by left, left-center parents are exposed to the deleterious memeplex their whole lives, so when they go to college, they have some immunity to it. The girls with conservative parents, on the other hand...
Words like "the patriarchy" and "capitalism" just mean "the devil". Idiots have never thought about what these words truly mean. Under patriarchy, which means "rule by fathers", onlyfans wouldn't exist. No father would allow it.
The fact that things like onlyfans exist proves how disempowered men and fathers actually are. It is precisely WOMEN THEMSELVES who demand the ability to whore themselves out online for cash. These are "slut walks" -- Don't see a lot of men, do you?
Yes, it takes men to buy it, but it's a funny old thing, shows the absolute intellectual bankruptcy of communists-- They blame the sellers, the "capitalists" for all the things that are supposedly wrong in the world, until it comes to sex, when the sellers are innocent angels.
"Oh but it takes a man to exploit them" Have you ever actually met a woman? They know exactly what weapons they have and exactly how to get what they want out of a man. It is not a joke that we refer to gynoid fat deposits as assets.
I have zero appetite for cooperation with feminists or communists.
Here is a litmus test: what does the Bible teach about homosexuality?
No trick. I think you will find that St Paul also had some thoughts on the matter. Are these teachings correct?
Anyone can say they are a Christian, but the moment you pick up gayism into your mental framework, your Christianity becomes cordycepted.
I do not trust anyone who claims to be Christian and can't just say "homosexuality is a sin" without hedging or dodging.
I suppose I should keep in mind that Catholics don’t have quite the same reverence for the Bible as Protestants but still. "Leviticus says" leaves a lot of room for "but there are many different ways we could interpret this and actually..."
We now believe the civil war was a holy crusade to save blacks
We now believe that ww2 was a holy crusade to save jews
Will our great grandchildren believe that civil war 2 was a holy crusade to save gays?
I bet if you go outside and ask ten randoms why the allies fought the axis, at least 7 of them would say to stop the holocaust
Smart, or even relatively smart people have a lot of trouble understanding what relatively stupid people think. It feels prideful or condescending to even try to think this way, but the reality is much, much worse than you imagine.
When we watch TV or play video games, we form one-way friendships with the characters, called parasocial relationships. The same thing can happen on twitter, especially with the bigger accounts you follow.
You see someone in your feed and it feels like they are talking to you personally, and you feel you have established rapport, but the object of your parasocial relationship is not aware of you, and generally can't be, due to the asymmetry of the medium.
These parasocial characters fill up Dunbar slots and they feel like your real friends, so without thinking, you try to mirror them socially, in order to fit in. A popular show like Friends or The Office can do more to the overton window than every politician in America.
Many years ago, before I was Lovecraft, I reached out to a big account in a DM, and he ignored me. I don't blame him, but I think about it often, because so many of you DM me, sometimes with encouragement, sometimes to fight, and most of all, to ask me for advice.
Make no mistake, anyone who enters the public space and becomes known is a clown, a dancing monkey, whether they're a politician or a CEO or an actor or a writer. And I often feel like that up here, writing my little threads. Dance monkey, dance for applause.
Anyone who says they're on twitter for a different reason is lying, probably to himself most of all. Attention is the most powerful drug there is, only some of us like the medicine with sugar, while others prefer a bitter taste.
And it doesn't really matter how strong your internal character is, this changes you, because there are two parasocial relationships going on here, there's the one that the audience has to the entertainer, and the one the entertainer has to the audience.
Because there is no "audience", there are a bunch of individual people, but that's not how it feels when thousands of people are listening to you. It feels like maybe four people (each standing in for 1000s), and you tend to mainly notice the angry one who barks at you.
So I get up here and I give you my (ok, yeah, I know) polished thoughts according to my own best clarity and conviction, and if you like hearing from me then I imagine that's part of what you like, and you tend to expect that when you talk to me "backstage" as well.
And I had a guy who joined a DM group I'm in who just wanted to see "where my conviction came from" so he lurked the chat for a while then left, disappointed (disillusioned?) because I just post dumb memes and talk about my coffee addiction like anyone else.
And but I don't see myself as a leader or a scholar etc,. (I do see myself as a preacher) To the degree that some people form that image of me, it's the same way you feel about any other leader, teacher, etc: you don't want a man, you want an image.
People say that great spiritual teachers are able to talk to you so that it feels one on one, right to your heart, and you feel like even out of the crowd they see you, personally, and hear you--
but when someone comes to me for advice, all I can do is give it in the most general terms possible, and it's pretty much bound to be generic and common, because (preacher hat on) all the best advice about how to live your life is ancient and common and boring.
It has to be that way because anything that requires a rare intellect or a singular courage is by definition not for everyone, it doesn't scale.
Highly specific good advice requires an intimate friendship, and parasocial friendships *feel* intimate but of course the intimacy-as-such only flows one way.
The boring, common advice is this: be generous in friendships, care for the people close to you, respect your parents, exercise temperance and guide others away from vices. Forgive small failures and never tolerate betrayals. Invest in your future and develop strength.
There, that's all the good advice in the world, but the problem is good advice doesn't stick if you just hear it once. You have to hear it over and over, you have to affirm it, it has to be a litany, a devotional; that's why preachers exist.
The function of a preacher is to take timeless advice and make it seem timely, to expound on it and repeat it in a thousand variations.
Something I learned a long time ago is that everyone needs to tell a story about themselves that sets them apart. And sometimes that story is "I'm just a regular guy" -- fine, but that's as opposed to all the non-regular guys out there.
If you challenge someone's story that makes them special, if you try to take it away, that's when you get the anger, that's when they attack you. And often your mere existence, just the fact that you visible and you are speaking, that damages their story.
If you're trying to construct a story about yourself, which is the same thing as trying to construct yourself, that is when philosophy can sometimes be useful. And if it doesn't help you with that, it's no good.
Don't believe anyone who tells you that instrumentality isn't the point of philosophy. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee. In the process of building yourself, you must also learn what to throw away.
It's long past time that we in the West admit that not everyone is up to the task of building their own self, that most people who try it will come out half-formed, that "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" is the kind of half-ass recipe you find in a $47 cookbook.
A huge part of what "culture" is supposed to do is provide you with a good prefab self; that's what religion is for, that's what "society" is for, and that's why it can't just be every man for himself. It's neither good nor necessary that the average person should do this.
And let me just hedge here that I'm not so self-important that I think I have all the answers or that I am uniquely worthy of this project—I see clout go to a lot of peoples' heads so here's one more piece of advice: don't buy into your own hype.
But it is a project I take seriously and if you want to know why the world feels this way it's because in the early 1900s the most powerful people in the world tried to build a new self from first principles, for everyone, and now we're all the flaming wreckage of their failures.
We're all groping in the dark, like John the savage, trying to reconstruct faded mythology without ever seeing how it's supposed to work first hand. Or worse, when we do see it working, we recoil in horror, and convince ourselves that we haven't seen what we've seen.
People joke about infohazards but the fact is that they're all around us, we're constantly showing them to each other, like, hey, this drove me insane, you gotta see it. All the things we talk about on here, you can't unsee any of it, and it all hurts.
General advice is about what not to do, so to stop thinking your beliefs are based on logic, or that they're self-evident, or that they come from first principles. Justifying faith with logic only does injury to faith. Own your convictions instead of trying to weasel into them.
But I can't tell you, specifically, what to do, because I'm up here trying to tell myself, specifically, what to do, and perplexingly, more people than I can fathom have chosen to listen.
Tiktok turns women into either an anime character, or a scolding school marm lecturing you with words, words, words. Often both at the same time.
If you're into Nietzsche, I assume that whatever you spend your time attacking is something you want to see get stronger
Hegel is unreadable schlock, suitable only for kindling. I have read a fair bit of The Order of Things and some of Discipline and Punish, and I think Foucault has a lot of interesting and useful thoughts, but in his actions and his life he was unredeemably evil.
One or /ourguys/, a tiny account, got doxed. It was obviously someone he knew who did it, and in response, he an heroed. So let’s quickly talk about opsec.
Every single person who knows your secret is a liability, because they increase the surface area of attack.
This means you don’t tell anyone, ever, unless you would trust them to take your side in a life-and-death type situation. Because although that’s a bit dramatic, it really does approximate the stakes.
If you must have real name accounts as well as anon alts, never cross post content. Don’t say things with similar wording or express the same idea on both accounts around the same time.
Never post pictures of your pets, your yard, your environment, or anything that your friends could pattern match to you do. Never post food pics that you also post to your real accounts. This is basic but many don’t think.
You ever see death note? Basically you are Light and the world is full of Ls.
Any bit of information you leak could potentially be used by someone to narrow the range of your possible identities.
Most of the time, we suspect a dox is not put together by a team of 4chan autists, however. Most of the time, it’s someone close to you who wants to destroy you for personal reasons. Even if you trust someone, they may not feel the gravity of your secret the way you do.
In fact they certainly won’t, which is why the only real way to keep secrets is not to share them. The best encryption software in the world shares a common failure mode with rot13: the idiot using it.
So always be maximally paranoid if you want to speak honestly in dissident spaces. And if it ever does happen, don’t an hero.
If someone doxes you, you are now playing Minecraft together, you feel me?
Our ruling class has fully embraced the danger of information hazards. In fact, they have decided they are so dangerous that they now advise you to stop thinking all together. The WHO to advise that you wear a mask on your brain.
An information hazard is a piece of true information that causes some harm to the person who learns it. Bostrom identifies six types hazardous information transfer: data, ideas, templates, signals, attention, and evocations.
A data hazard is a specific, empirical piece of information that poses a risk. For example, the exact genetic sequence of a deadly virus, or a schematic of a nuclear bomb.
An idea hazard is a data hazard without specific data. Communism is an idea hazard, because if you implement it, it destroys your economy and causes famines and holiness spirals.
A template hazard is a bad example that you decide to follow. e.g. China instituting a full lockdown was a template hazard for the rest of the world, who followed their example and rekt their economies.
A signaling hazard is when knowing a piece of information sends a signal that causes others to treat you badly. Crime statistics and IQ research are signaling hazards.
An attention hazard is when a true but relatively unimportant piece of information distracts you from another, critical piece of information. Most of twitter is an attention hazard (everything on twitter is true).
An evocation hazard is when a true piece of information is presented in such a way that causes psychological harm. A video of starving 3rd world children is an evocation hazard.
In addition to the infohazard typology by information transfer, we can also classify infohazards by the type of risk they present: adversarial risks, market risk, error risk, psychological risk, information system risk, and development risk.
Adversarial and market risks are the types of infohazards identified by Schelling in his essay "On Bargaining," summarized by Robin Hanson in The Elephant in the Brain.
Information system risk is when data causes harm because it precipitates a dangerous state in a computer system (e.g., a robot, an AI, or even an email program) This could be as innocuous as a UI bug or as imposing as an automated MAD nuclear missile launcher.
Development risk is when information could lead to the production of a new technology that poses an existential risk. Nanotechnology is an infohazard with respect to gray goo, neuralink is a development risk for wireheading as the great filter.
Psychological risk is when your reaction to true information harms your ability to enact your intentions. Disappointment, embarrassment, and loss of motivation or "mindset" are forms of psych risk. Learning biographical details about your friends can destroy social capital.
When we evolved the power to understand and propagate arbitrary information, we became vulnerable to information hazards. This was a novel danger; only humans can be hurt by true information.
Finally, error risk is when true information can cause an agent to make dangerous mistakes. Bostrom also includes neuropsychological hazards such as the one in the story BLIT, a perception that exploits human brain architecture to kill anyone who sees it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
Neuropsychological hazards are fun (my favorite) but the more common type of error risk is presented by ideologies and biases. Ideology risk: if you believe there are no psychological differences between men and women, you will have trouble dealing with sexual contingencies.
True information can also skew your perceptions. If you think there's an epidemic of violence against a particular group, then an anecdote of violence against a member of that group will confirm your bias, regardless of ground truth.
Of course, there is a problem with framing ideology and epistemic risk in terms of bias. All thinking is biased. To be more precise, all reasoning is motivated.
We can build AIs today that are capable of thinking, but no one would accuse them of reasoning. This is not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack motivation.
An AI was programmed to seek novelty, and this made it capable of solving a maze, but it encountered the distinctly human problem of procrastinating in front of a TV.
A cynical man might suggest that our motivation mechanisms are also this crude.
Nevertheless, biasing hazards are real risks, but the bias must be framed in relative terms. The implicit assumption of "eliminating bias" is that there is some pristine unbiased view of the world that we more or less know, and we just have to train people into recognizing it.
In most cases, biasing hazard is less about things that pull you from the truth, and more about things that pull you from the center of social consensus. This is rule zero of power, which you've heard many times before.
In light of this, it's fun to notice that we consistently underestimate the risks posed by infohazards. There's a popular posture that we often take, as if we are so cold and realistic, no truth can harm us, that we will gaze into the void and master it...
but in fact the void often wins staring contests. We are self-deceiving creatures, this is another point I have often brought you. And self-deception can be socially useful, but we can also see it as an evolved defense against infohazards.
Infohazards are so pervasive and dangerous that we have evolved a defense against them in the form of strategic epistemic failure.
It's hard to believe things that go against social consensus, when you know they are signaling hazards. If someone presents you with an ironclad case for a socially dangerous idea, you will tend to doubt it or dismiss it. You might agree one moment, and forget the next.
For example, with Gellman amnesia you forget a disturbing observation the moment it leaves your field of attention. How many other jarring revelations don't stick in your head this way? You'll never know.
My favorite example is this study, which shows we don't believe scientific studies that come to negative conclusions about women.
If this finding doesn't match your predilections, you will also surely dismiss it.
And why not? The truth is all persuasion is grounded, not in reason, but in strength. When a logical argument convinces you of something, it's not the mechanics of reason that does it, it's the display of power that reason presents.
A skilled speaker not only projects power, but offers you power. "Think as I do, and you can wield some of my power." All persuasion is seduction. If the truth smells of weakness, most of us follow our nose.
If the news is no longer convincing, that suggests a loss of power.
you cannot detect someone's power level if it is too far beyond your own
Jordan Peterson is right about lipstick.
If a woman posts her body on the internet, she is doing it for sexual attention. She may not think that's why she's doing it, she may not be aware of why she is doing it, but that is why.
And in fact I do believe that there are female behaviors that should be socially sanctioned.
what does it say about you that you immediately equate power with oppression? this type of thinking is sick
As long as there is still one person on earth who has enough to eat, we can rest assured that real communism has never been tried
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 enshrined woke into law, it just took us a while to hash it all out.
Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971 created the doctrine that all people in all places must have the same statistical mix as in the general population "or else"
"What makes 'cancel culture' look like a new problem is that the movement has reached new levels of dominance which can, like Caligula appointing his horse to the Senate, enable new levels of brazen state sadism. It’s natural to mistake a threshold for an invention"
First off, yes, I am white, and I am proud of that. There is nothing wrong with being white.
Second, there's nothing wrong with being racist. Nothing. Racism is funny and healthy
Third, you are mediocre
By sheer numbers, communists have probably done more harm to more children than pedophiles across history.
The main difference is that pedophiles understand their desires are wicked, whereas communists think their disgusting urges are righteous.
Planning on taking dating advice from women? If you are interested in catching fish, do you ask the fish, or do you ask the fishermen?
It is 100% reliable: say something women don’t like, they insinuate that you are gay.
There is no such thing as a hate crime, it's just a way to make laws that specially target whites for steeper punishments.
Why am I always right? Because I have access to the secret source of racist sexist reactionary epistemology.
There is no such thing as a centrist. The centrist is on the side of "whoever is in power, whoever that is"
The truth is that men are very difficult to know and that, to avoid mistakes, they must be judged only by their actions and at that, by the action of the present moment, and only for that moment.
Those who suffer are themselves unjust.
Nothing is more imperious than weakness when it knows itself backed by strength: look at women.
I hear people say "right and left" are no longer coherent concepts. This is wrong but I see the temptation. The right lost bigly and no one wants to be on the losing team. How to get out of it? Oh, I know, the teams don't exist! Whew!
That was a close one. Almost had to feel like a loser for a second there. Must protect the positive self-image at all times. I'm not joking, I really mean that.
Common argumentative tactic, if you've been on twitter more than an hour you've seen it: "The concept you're using doesn't exist, it's really just [other concept]" or "it's a false distinction."
So there's no such thing as right and left any more, that's what you think? Well someone is giving lupiron to little boys and it sure as hell ain't "the right." These people have a name, and that name is the left.
And if you think you're on the left but you don't support that, then you're wrong about one of two things: either you're not really on the left, or else you support it by default. The excesses of the lft cannot be curbed, the excesses are the point.
But most leftists don't bother with this, they think it's all good: more socialism, more sexual politics, no borders, no shepherds, one herd. So I won't waste more words on those who are confused about what they themselves believe in.
Leftists exist, and people opposed to leftists exist, and I'm going to continue to call them "the right". Accepting this label means accepting a dire situation. It means accepting that a lot of lost people are on "your side." But those people can become found.
When I say I am right-wing I have people come to me who think they're above it all: why would you want to limit yourself with a label like that? They think if they stay nameless, they can be formless. When you put it like that, you see how stupid it sounds?
We used to talk more about being atomized, remember? About being rootless. And what does that mean? It means you don't have a label, it means you don't know what to call yourself. No identity.
You think you hate identity politics, but what you hate is that your identity, if you are male, or straight, or white, or worse: all three, is the target of a moral and rhetorical framework whose express purpose is to dissolve and marginalize you.
So why do you want to play the heel, they ask? What, are you going to whine about it? But that's the trick, that's you falling for it; you'd rather be no one at all than be that most hated thing, a straight white man.
It's less painful if you don't think about it. If you go quietly. And that's why the label matters, and also why you're afraid of it. If it didn't matter, there would be nothing to fear.
And it's true that "white male" in itself would be a pretty stupid identity, as stupid as "black woman" – but here we are. Everyone else celebrates their sex and their race, but you don't get an identity unless you renounce both.
They'll tell you that's not true, but it's a lie. An identity is so important that many men – cowards – are willing to accept the bargain, to be the lowest rung of the ladder, just so they can be welcomed into the fold.
"all of history has been about you" they say, "it's someone else's turn. You are the default, so we honor others, not to lower you, but to raise them." Lies, gaslighting, whatever you want to call it. White men, do you feel in charge?
The president of the USA is a straight white man, they say. First off, no, the president of the united states is a jamaican/indian woman, even the "president" knows it. Second, his symbolic importance is that he will shortly step down.
Anyway, what's an identity? It means you know who you are. It's how you know what's right and what's wrong, and who to trust. You need an identity because that's how you find your place in the world, so you know how you fit with others.
Maybe you think that the left is the polity of change, and the right is the polity of stasis. And who told you that, was it the left? Baseless slander. Stasis is slow death, and we preach life, which is measured growth.
Left and right both want change, I promise you that. But we desire very different changes from these people who wreak destruction and call it "progress", who call neglect "liberty" and decrepitude "health".
What does it mean to be right or left? You think it has something to do with “economics” maybe — that’s why you constantly lose. This is the cynic’s take, the simpleton’s take: that “it’s all driven by money” — but there are many other vices, other sins.
Money is only a proxy for less tangible things, things much realer than money, things older and deeper and more human. Things like dignity and honor, things economists can never measure.
Invisible things! Gossamer things! Managerial man sneers at honor and dignity. What are those, he says, can you eat them? Do they keep you warm? In fact they can.
I'll tell you what it means to be right-wing: It means you know beauty is an unalloyed good, a good unto itself. Likewise strength.
We shouldn't need to affirm the goodness of beauty; it should be self-evident. But so many people are ugly and weak, not that they were born that way necessarily, but they made themselves that way, and declared ugliness and weakness to be the same as beauty and strength.
"Alright, suppose I believe you", you say, "What will I do with this identity? What good is it?" At best, its an anchor, which is to say it's a burden, but it keeps you from getting tossed all about in sea of information.
Postmodern condition, the only way you know anything is by believing statistics, images, and "facts", curated by "experts," journalists and politicians, all disconnected from the knowledge of your own eyes and heart.
What good is identity? It can make you act irrationally at a time when irrationality is greatly needed. What's dignity? What's honor? Why climb a mountain? Why raise a child? These are not rational things. So much the worse for rationality.
No great man in history has ever been shackled by something as petty and parochial as rationality. No great monuments were ever built because of "incentive alignment". No nation was ever founded to meet metric goals.
And now because you have thought this way, there is no longer a country for you forsaken American sons; Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but you hath not where to lay your head.
As long as we remain "rational" – we will always trade dignity for comfort, and we will lose all we have of both. If I told you what a real white boy summer would look like, I'm pretty sure they'd throw me in jail.
The woke left isn't a strawman of "real Marxism". No, that's the real left, and your fantasy communist left is dead and obsolete.
This is what you think, from what I can tell:
"the people in power aren't the *real* left, they may use leftist words and concepts, they may have applied revolutionary logic to sex and race, but they aren't the *real* left because they aren't redistributing money"
The point you raised in another tweet is that the above thread is based on my definition of the left, but why should we accept my definition over yours? The leftisms that emphasize sex and race over class and wealth are leftisms, and they are ascendant.
Purely economic leftisms had their day in the sun, they failed, and they are now marginalized. People like you, and there aren't that many but you are very vocal about it, think that a defunct and defeated subset of leftism is the "True" leftism and the others are just pretenders.
But this is simply not a meaningful distinction to any non-leftist, and the whole thing is a sad cope. The only true leftism for you will be some impossible utopia worker's paradise that has ended in starvation, stagnation, and blood every time it has been tried
but in the "millenarian" vision of the communist, it's only the "real" left if it actually works (which it never can) and the failures of it must be down sabotage by enemies, foreign governments, or "fake" leftists tricking you with their less radical leftisms.
In 1975 Simeon Wade took Foucalt to death valley for buttsex / LSD. While high, he met the devil and sold his soul.
Foucault then wrote The History of Sexuality, ur-tome of woke left
You totally realize that the news as its presented to you is only a tiny slice of reality and that a small cabal of reality-makers curate which stories go viral in order to control your emotions and thoughts.
And they get you every single time.
“Called out on [my transphobic and ugly white-idpol posts]”? What are you, my mom? That’s right, I am opposed to transgenderism and I am a race realist. I’m not ashamed of that. “Call me out” all you want, I have no interest in your gay understanding of morality.
This is why I am done with every single one of you. You're not "post" anything and you're not any kind of rational either, you are exactly the people I despise and if you hate me, I see that as a virtue. The exact things you think are good, I think are evil.
You stand before a pair of doors. Through the door to the left is the fulfillment of your heart's desire. Through the door to the right is the fulfillment of what you believe to be your heart's desire. What do you do?
(poll: 62% go through left door, 18% go through right door, 11% run away, rest refrain)
I say this in response to many polls but damn, a lot of you lack the courage of your convictions.
"an acceptance of the inevitability of self-delusion" - which it turns out is exactly the same thing as a lack of thymos.
There are many things that are charming when women do them that become revolting when men do them
(like communism?)
In fact yes, it is charming women hold puerile beliefs based on an absolutely braindead conception of human nature.
The mistake is taking them seriously, the little teasers.
I'm always sort of aghast at people who think it's "embarrassing" to be against homosexuality. Hideous, small-souled creatures, barely human
https://im1776.com/2021/06/08/dc-miller-vs-zero-hp-lovecraft-part-1/
Are you not a Nietzschean, a Darwinist, a materialist, an atheist?
I am all of those things, in greater or lesser degrees. But I am sure that Nietzsche means many things to many people. We could spill several books’ worth of ink trying to ascertain what exactly it means to be Nietzschean, for example. I find the ideas of Darwin to be undeniable, but I accept that there are problems with the theory as its currently understood. Regarding materialism, I have never found any reason to believe in invisible agents that act on the material world, but if such things exist, then they, too, will be bound by logic, and that they must exist within some physics of their own. Finally, regarding atheism: I have written at length elsewhere, that one must live as if there is a God, regardless of what he personally believes. To be succinct, I am an atheist who is ‘on the side’ of the Christians – though I know many of them won’t accept that.
Crowds are probably wrong about complex things, but they tend not to be wrong about simple things. Man is a social creature; you’re a winner if everyone thinks you’re a winner. You’re a loser if everyone thinks you’re a loser. We all know who is beautiful and who is ugly.
An idea is not the same as an agent, and never can be. Agency means having internal states, motivations, and intentions; in short, an agent is a thing with a will. An idea has none of these things. There are invisible structures, such as those things which are discovered by mathematicians. But mathematical principles, or laws like gravity, have no agency. They are, at most, mechanisms. You cannot pray to gravity, or appeal to it, or convince it to change its mind. Moreover, agency requires temporality. An idea is eternal, being the same in the past, the future, and the present moment, but an agent acts in time, and through time.
This is also why beauty is contingent in a way that gravity is not. We could easily imagine some other kingdom of creatures, aliens perhaps, who have an entirely different faculty of perceiving beauty from us. Even within our own terrestrial experience, we have little doubt that the aroma of feces is sweet perfume to flies and certain other insects. But no matter how the aesthetic faculties of aliens or flies work, they are equally bound by the laws of gravity.
Blake was a fine poet, but it’s telling that there is no Blakean school of rocketry or chemistry or so on. Newton’s view of the world as mechanism is ‘correct’ in the sense that it is possible to build on his work (along with that of people like Faraday, Edison, and Von Neumann) something like the internet, without which we would not even be having this discussion. Blake and McLuhan were both keen observers of the human heart, but the heart (by which I mean the soul) is quite a complex thing, whereas the things Newton et. al examined are much simpler.
My use of the word agent derives from my understanding of game theory and artificial intelligence: an agent is an entity that acts. The laws of mathematics (for example) do not act, they merely obtain. They are much more like an object than a subject. Subjectivity is a necessary precondition of will. When we talk about things like angels and devils and God or gods, we conceive of them ‘anthropomorphically’ – that is, we imagine them more or less as people, albeit people with special attributes. The Bible of course says that Man is made in the image of God, but regardless of which way the relation points, the idea is the same. I don’t see will as something atomic or fundamental; a will is also a very complicated thing.
Agents, which have will and subjectivity and so on, are built out of primitives like what scientists study; logic, matter and electricity. Regarding the question of how ideologies exert power over men, there is no way that living in a deterministic universe undermines the emotional power of ideas.
https://im1776.com/2021/06/08/dc-miller-vs-zero-hp-lovecraft-part-2/
When I refer to “how society should be structured” I am not speaking of a specific political arrangement. As you observe, “healthy” political structures resemble each other more than they resemble “unhealthy” political structures, regardless of such things as separation of powers or whatever political formulas one wishes to invoke, whether it’s the divine right of kings or the will of the people or what have you. Tyranny and oppression may emanate from the rulers of society, but they are enacted primarily by our peers; by our friends, our families, our coworkers and colleagues, and they do this in accordance with the norms of the society that contains them. Those norms are in part set by the upper echelons of our society, by those who occupy various newsrooms and boardrooms, but all of those people are also in thrall to those norms they enforce.
I recently read an interview you conducted with CJ Hopkins in which he observed that these norms and their enforcers are a hydra, ergo, it is impossible to kill it by chopping off one or more heads. I do think that if a majority of those heads were replaced by /ourguys/, it would be possible to shift those norms in a direction that you and I would both find much more favorable. “Rule by the wise” is a contradiction to most people whose heads are filled with modern ideas, and I agree this is desirable – but first one needs to have an understanding of what constitutes wisdom, and how to identify it.
I’m very skeptical about the possibilities of mass education, or at least, of formal schooling, to fix anything. I think when it comes to moral lessons about how people are supposed to act towards each other, or what they are supposed to expect from each other, they learn more these days from television than from anything else. The format of modern schooling is the only lesson it really teaches, which is the lesson of how to occupy a desk and do meaningless white-collar work. Mass education is the industrialization of school, and I question whether such a system can ever instill virtue in people at scale.
I want to dispute the claim, however, that modern education has “an anti-ethical character, which is directed away from the exercise of independent judgement in the service of a kind of moral anarchy.” I think there are very clear moral judgements in both our schooling system and in the wider culture they are designed to serve, but those morals are inverted from things we would like to recognize as good. We are talking about people who believe that ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ are the most important things, followed very closely by ‘the environment’. All of these symbols have precise meanings to the people who use them, meanings to which we would likely object. The word equality has fallen out of favor, yes. People now prefer ‘equity’ – a word which means, in Orwell’s formulation, that some are more equal than others.
Similarly, when they speak of ‘the environment’, what they mean is that people should accept various forms of privation and austerity, overseen by technocrats, and born of a corrupted scientific process that is divorced from reality, feeding instead on its own incentives to perpetuate itself into a world-swallowing leviathan. I know that you know this. But the point is that it’s not moral anarchy at all, there are things that are valued morally, there are duties that people perceive themselves as having. Wearing a mask because of Covid is a recent example: the people doing it very much see it in terms of good and evil. They are sanctimonious about these things, but they aren’t cynical.
Others may perceive left and right differently, but to me if you recognize that there is merit in a “hierarchical aesthetic judgement” then you are inescapably of the right, because the underlying principle of all leftward movements, be they economic, sexual, or anything else, is to effect a great leveling of all mankind; no one above anyone else, no one better or worse. This is not possible, of course, because wherever there is leveling, there must be a special class of people who oversee and enact the leveling. This is an inherent flaw in all egalitarian societies, but it won’t stop people who subscribe to these principles from trying to burn down the whole world in order to rebuild it. To be “on the right” is to oppose this movement at a moral and metaphysical level: that is what I mean by /ourguys/. I think it’s a mistake to try to project these things onto the party politics of any country today, although of course there are parties that map onto this spectrum.
Diversity has a meaning, even a rational one, it just has nothing to do with the dictionary definition. Nearly every progressive will look at a picture of a group of dark-skinned African women and proclaim “oh, how wonderfully diverse!” – this is not a contradiction. Diversity means to them that the last shall be first, and the first shall be last. It’s an extremely Christian principle (and to me, the worst of Christianity) only it has been, as you say, fitted into a materialistic framework. The online right has a long history of pointing out how deliciously racist it is to venerate diversity in this way, because of its implicit assumption that dark-skinned African women etc. are not only last, but that they always will be. The trick of it is that to speak this plainly would be racist within the progressive framework, so it remains forever as an undistributed middle. But for someone who doesn’t hold progressive piety, its logic is simple and clear.
We could provide a similar analysis for the other moral waypoints in progressive thought. Each of them has a simple, precise meaning which demands that, as part of its sanctification, it cannot be spoken, because to speak it would be to violate it. These contradictions are hardly unique to progressivism. The particular evil of it is that while traditional faiths contain their contradictions in the spirit realm, where they barely impact everyday life (caves within caves), progressivism must locate its contradictions in the material realm, where they matter a lot. There are many ways in which the thing pointed at by BLM/LGBTQ/Climate Justice are different from ‘classic’ religions, but they have all of the attributes I would expect from a federation of denominations with overlapping doctrines: they have priesthoods, liturgies, saints, organizations, tithes, taboos, eschatologies, evangelism, and foundational texts.
The thing they lack is formal awareness of themselves as a fundamentally religious movement, and this is to their benefit. It doesn’t matter if they “are not seeing clearly;” clarity by your reckoning or mine has no bearing on the internal logic of it, or on the subjective experience of the faithful. Pointing out the contradictions is useful and can be effective rhetoric against it, to a certain type of person. All of the things you are saying can be effective.
As for your second charge, I must, regretfully, agree with (some of) your analysis. The opposition mounted by the online right is indeed sporadic. Arguably there are very few of us who were even alive when the battle was being fought. The important political fights were lost in the 1920s, 60s, and 70s, and the rest has been mostly cleanup, in a sense. The events of the 2016 presidential election are instructive here. There is a huge potential for right-wing ideology to capture minds if it is allowed to propagate. A small group of people with a knack for propaganda could and did use the internet to amplify their voice and drive actual electoral change, (what that is worth is maybe more debatable) but very quickly we also learned that we were fighting in enemy territory, and now that potential has been mostly dampened and lost. We are never going to organize and rise up or win through any kind of activism. Rightists have had fantasies of this for decades and they have never come to anything, because these tactics are antithetical to the ways of life we idealize.
No one has any idea what the right solution to our plight is, not me, not any of the pundits certainly, not Yarvin or BAP or any blogger or Substack writer besides. The best thing any of us can hope for at the moment is that we continue to exist, to encourage and support each other, and to look for an exit. I don’t mean an individual exit. At this stage it is possible to live in places where one is relatively unharassed by progressive insanity. You can still get married and raise a family, though one increasingly feels the need to homeschool. The only real limits on achieving personal excellence are internal, and I think there are many in the online Right who are motivated to make this kind of journey by what they see and hear online.
Do we have contempt for our rulers and their pets? Of course we do. How can anyone reach for something higher if he does not know how to despise himself? How can we dream of a better society if we cannot despise society? The racism and misogyny are necessary elements of our counterculture, because they are both funny and true. Anyone who wields racism without humor is not one of us. There are real psychological differences between people of different races, and we have precisely two ways, collectively, of dealing with that: we can either kill each other, or learn to laugh about it. I choose laughter. Progressives choose killing. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, but there are more, many more than you think, who read us and laugh at what we have to say. Those people tend to be young. They will grow up and remember. That is our best hope.
https://im1776.com/2021/06/08/dc-miller-vs-zero-hp-lovecraft-part-3/
I don’t want to emancipate others nearly so much as I wish to emancipate myself (and those dear to me) from the derangement of others. In truth, I agree with everything you wrote in the above two paragraphs. But this is also why I approach religion from a functionalist perspective. Suppose I accept the superstition/religion distinction (I see it as a mere question of nomenclature), what does that change about the prescription? For that matter (I have often reflected) what is the utility of labeling this cancer a religion in the first place? Regardless, the thing we both desire is to replace bad beliefs with good ones. Pax Deorum is a fine idea, something I find wholly sympathetic.
But it’s not enough, clearly, to just have those good beliefs, or even to be able to articulate them. The derangement, the superstition, whatever you want to call it, is very compelling to many people, and without an understanding of why, that will continue to be the case. Telling people that the thing they believe is superstition (boo) and what they need is religion (hurray) might well be an effective rhetorical strategy. You’re not going to buy something from a salesman who doesn’t believe in his own product, which is why I’m not interested at all in gainsaying these constructions. Indeed, I believe some version of this is essential.
The interventions for cancer range from drinking poison to surgical removal. One is hesitant to draw too crisp of a parallel to what this might mean, by analogy… I think the apparent mindlessness of it is an illusion, because there are in fact many different sects of leftism, and all of them would happily tear each other apart if it weren’t for the ecumenical unity they find in their hatred and resentment of normal white men. But this line of thought quickly devolves into the need for, what, a taxonomy of progressives? I personally know some devout progressives who are highly competent, principled, and even vital. One man in particular I am thinking of believes strongly in the black supremacist notion of equity. He genuinely believes that ‘black underrepresentation’ is a searing moral issue of our day caused by systemic racism. He takes specific, effective, practical actions to try to mitigate this, and he is an evangelist for it.
The growth of the “cancer” is largely down to people like him. They aren’t moral anarchists in the slightest. The person I’m thinking of may not be able to quote chapter and verse in Foucault or Marcuse or whatever Frankfurt School or critical theorist bogeyman we are blaming this week, but his worldview was substantially shaped by intellectual currents in precisely these spaces, and also by the American civic religion, and also by the legacy of Christianity. One does not have to be aware of the philosophical lineage of his worldview in order to be an effective vector for it.
A huge part of the reason this cancer grows is that competent people, who do have moral principles, work tirelessly to help it grow. They do this because it animates their passions, and because they truly believe. It is altogether easier to believe that this thing is a mindless, cancerous rot, but the truth is much more horrifying: It captures the hearts and minds of many intelligent, motivated people, and it gives them strategic blindspots which cause them to act in ways that propagate mindless cancerous rot, and then, once they have done this, they see the chaos they have wrought, and deduce that their intervention was insufficient, and that they need to do it again, bigger and more vigorously than before.
Although I cannot be completely sure, I know that his method is to count the number of people of different races at the company and then compare them to the statistical averages of those races for the region and the country where his company is located. He finds that less than 13% of the company is black, but 13% of the people in the USA are black, therefore, there must be more blacks. He performs similar analyses for women and so on. The question we must ask is, when he reaches this statistical holy land, what then? I think we and anyone who has read this far understand that this will in no way constitute a stopping point, but it is a waypoint.
We are cynical about these people, so we predict that they will next measure the distribution of salaries, and make sure that the compensation of each group is statistically balanced, and once that goal is achieved, we start to ask questions about the racial composition of the leadership, and once the leadership is corrected, the people who are promoted in the name of equity, who lack the principles of the crusaders who promoted them, will proceed to nepotistically hire their own race while neglecting the ineffable qualities that made the business successful in the first place.
But suppose that doesn’t happen, suppose the principled progressive stays in charge somehow, then what? Then the next step is to argue that, due to historical injustice, even higher representations of ‘disadvantaged’ minorities must be met. At some point the desired state is statistically impossible, whereupon he will apply pressure everywhere he can to increase immigration of black-skinned people. This has the perverse effect of driving up the regional and national percentage of blacks even more, justifying even more statistical leveling. It ends when there are no more white people in charge anywhere. The progressive cannot and must not see this, but he isn’t stupid or evil. You and I call it deranged, but my friend is charming, sane, honest, conscientious, and so on. To call this merely ‘derangement’ is reductive at best.
Underneath the hood, he has a sincere faith, much the way a Christian believes in Jesus, or a Buddhist believes in nirvana, that there are no cognitive differences between peoples, and that even cultural differences are negligible, and that it would be obscene to contemplate them in any depth.
It’s a common leftist tactic to try to deconstruct natural categories by claiming that a particular trait exists on a spectrum, and as such, I try to avoid these types of arguments where possible. But if there is one thing that really is a spectrum, it’s the degree to which you exist between the immanence of the animal mind, in an eternal now, versus the transience of the human mind, awake to the contours of the past and the future. To say this plainly may come off as the most noxious kind of arrogance, because the implication is that the person saying it thinks he has somehow mastered this dichotomy; I don’t think that, but I recognize how hard it can be to make even one or two inferential leaps from an initial premise, and I see how very small most people are, and how small I too can be.
We are trying to thread a needle in this analysis: it is an error to ascribe too little agency to these social justice types; in which case you perceive them as the shambling, mindless hordes in a zombie movie, but it’s equally an error to ascribe too much agency to them, to imagine that it’s all in service of some grand purpose. You may see me as an enemy or a friend – and I would prefer you see me as a friend – but regarding our common enemy, I see them as human, like us, all too human, but I am not a humanist, and they are enemies just the same.
There will not be (involuntary) gas chambers, but [the centrist] is underestimating how bad anarcho-tyranny can get. The worst case scenario is the same as the likely scenario. 0 policing of blacks, maximalist policing for whites; the whole country turns into a bantu zombie movie.
That will happen before anyone who isn't an irredeemable lefty gets mind control tech installed in their body.
Worth noting however that the "bantu zombie scenario" is not morally different from "gas chambers for karen (metal doors edition)", and known homosexual James Lindsay's rhetoric is more effective than centrist's kvetching.
We have watched each click of the ratchet, as mindless pod people tell us that each new change isn't really happening, it's a crazy conspiracy, and also it's good that it's happening.
Have you ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Don't waste your time on any version but the original from 1956. It's a truly chilling film, one of the great classics of sci fi horror, and also a political allegory, as poignant today as it was then.
In the story, alien seed pods grow exact replicas of the people all around you, and when you fall asleep, an alien consciousness grown from your pod takes over your body. At first it seems like a mass hysteria of Capgras delusion, but the aliens and pods turn out to be real.
"I will not eat the bugs, I will not live in the pod" – this far right hate slogan exists because we know the people in charge want to make us eat insects and house us in bug hives. But Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers us a different way to imagine pod life.
Progressives feel a salacious thrill when they imagine what common, ordinary things will be prohibited in the future. This is the sacrifice that the god "progress" demands – each generation gives up a slice of humanity – and they call this "humane".
We've all heard them say it, that perverted thrill they feel when they imagine their own futureshock. "one day, people will see meat-eating as cruel and barbaric" – These cancerous prohibitions are always latent in the progressive mind, then one day they metastasize.
The first time I was politically awake for it was the normalization of homosexuality. Public opinion flipped over night. One day, Obama himself was against it (lie) and the next day your very own friends were taking you aside in private to tell you to stop calling things gay.
Since then it's happened two more times in rapid succession: first with transsexuality, and second with Bowels Loose Movement. In 2014 they were a minor nuisance, in 2020 everyone spontaneously bent the knee. They did that because people instinctively submit to power.
Watching my friends and coworkers install the latest kernel updates for progressivism makes me feel like everyone around me is being replaced by Alien pod people. For some, the feeling is mutual, but these are people whose slogan is "Change", who insist WE are the radical ones.
Whether you can be body-snatched by a rapid norm reversal is pretty much the criteria for whether you are fully human or just some kind of animal. True nihilism isn't hopelessness, it's having no anchor.
People who believe in nothing also believe in everything, it's why cults proliferate in times of social collapse, which is what you are living through. Physical collapse isn't here yet, but cultural collapse, meta-political collapse, has arrived.
We all need rules and norms to tell us what to believe and do. The deluge of information we receive is impossible to sort and interpret without a hardened moral framework. Most of us lack that, so when someone comes along with clear, uncompromising rules, we're drawn to that.
Emancipatory politics wants the whole earth to be one big orgy. The orgy is the cessation of all norms into what Bataille called sacred time, when taboos are not only lifted, but ecstatically inverted.
We cannot exist in a state of emancipation in perpetuity, which is why society's emancipators have become its inquisitors. People need rules the same way they need food and the same way they need sex. Hence the lust for new prohibitions – forbidden words, forbidden foods.
Sacred food rules are as old as humanity. We have sad, atrophic jaws and teeth relative to our monkey cousins; man is the animal that cooks. We externalized our digestion into behavior and culture, and now everyone–left, right, savage, sophisticate–hungers for rules about food.
Food taboos that defy rationality and reason sustained our species in a world full of poison. Poison grows out of the ground, it grows on animal flesh, it ferments and blooms on the food we store. We had to learn to purify our food, with techniques that defy easy rationality.
What does that have to do with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with the mainstreaming of homosexuality, transexuality, and state-enforced negrolatry? Everything. Because for those of us who are not politically inert, we have watched these rapid norm shifts over the past decade.
We have watched as social media accelerated these norm shifts. Kittler defined totalitarianism as the distance between broadcast and public opinion. And we can see the norm shifts that are being planned for us on the horizon.
It won't be long til the pod people treat carnivory the same way they treat "racism." They will shamefully, tearfully admit they used to eat meat. They will confess their bewilderment that they ever thought this was ok. Probably within a decade, these things will come to pass.
The rest of this thread is and will be dedicated to chronicling the ongoing war on meat. They want you to eat bugs to weaken you and to humiliate you, but most of all the way the disgusting, sanctimonious thrill of a new prohibition.
More and more you will celebrities and politicians conspicuously eating bugs. The propaganda floodgate has already opened, and we reactionary cranks have noticed, and the feeling in the air is like 2014. The overton window is closing.
Meat recipes, traditional recipes that connect you to your heritage and your culture and your ancestors, will first be stigmatized, and then erased.
Prestigious restaurants will abandon meat, and these trends will cascade, like a waterfall, into bugman middle class strivers.
New regulations will gradually make meat less and less affordable to the average person.
Insect-based foods will occupy larger and larger proportions of supermarket space. And they will be subsidized, cheap, disguised at first as things you enjoy.
One way to shift the Overton window is to start with a ludicrous, unacceptable claim, then pedal back to a weaker version. This acclimates people to the extreme version, allowing you to claim a little more territory with each iteration.
God: sends a plague of locusts to punish us for our wickedness
Libs / Demons: Eat them
ignoring it can work for some things, but if you ignore cancer, it metastasizes
I imagine most ideologies are failed projects, and I think over time, the specific content of NRX has been less useful than its function as a schelling point for dissidents. The real NRX, quite literally, is the friends we made along the way.
Dropping the talking points of an ideology can be a useful signal, but on its own it's a relatively cheap signal, which is why you get "entryists" – I care much more about loyalty to a group of people than to specific talking points or anecdotes.
which isn't to say that those stories we tell don't matter, but there is "meta-political content" to NRX that transcends reading Thomas Carlyle or crypto-lolled guns.
I would have gladly welcomed rule by Donald Trump, and every nrx-er I know would say the same.
If a man stood up and pledged to police people fairly with no consideration to their race, and to make birth control pills and LGBT illegal, I would make him king for life.
That doesn't mean "exactly like me", I just want basic, sane rules for society.
Women can literally say anything they want on this platform but if a man uses a word that disrespects women, he loses his account.
Nature is women being in charge? Laughable. This space was created by men following their own path, ignoring women. Now, there are enough of us in this space that women are asking to play.
Feminism was always the enemy. It's been the enemy for a hundred years. I was born into a world where feminism was the enemy, and I will die in that world.
Young women can sense it is "low status" to be straight and "cis", so they find it necessary to use other labels
I'm not saying it's a conscious calculation, just something that they can feel. Straightness and acceptance of your own biology are denigrated on the world stage, so women gravitate away from them
You're in favor of huge amounts of immigration of unskilled workers from poor countries on the grounds that it improves their welfare, including if it reduces the welfare of your own country?
If one violent assault leads to improved welfare for one unskilled worker, how many times are you willing to be violently assaulted on this basis?
Really, honestly, put a number on it. What is the conversion rate between increased crime in britain vs. improved welfare for imported unskilled laborers. Is there any theoretical threshold where it's not worth it?
But doesn't the loss of someone's life fully negate that increase? Maybe my life isn't worth 5M to you but it's worth a hell of a lot more than that to me
I suppose you see no value whatsoever in preserving one's culture, heritage, or way of life.
Do you really not see the contradiction?
"I also favour huge amounts of immigration of unskilled workers from poor countries on the grounds that it improves their welfare even if it causes higher crime"
vs.
"There is a real cost to immigration and I don't support open borders"
These statements are clearly at odds. You may not support "open" borders but you support borders so porous that they might as well be open, and you have very little interest in the well-being of the Britons that you are saddling with these immigrants.
What we're circling around is the fact that fundamentally, I don't believe there is any cost on Britons that you would not accept to bring in more immigrants, and nothing you have said has given me any reason to doubt this intuition.
I understand it like this. You would gladly burn down England to make the lives of subsaharan africans better. That is the accusation.
"I support huge amounts of unskilled immigrants coming into my country" is functionally equivalent to "I support destroying my country's culture and heritage" and you are in denial
Women also work in South Asia. Educating women is highly correlated with decreased fertility, I have never met a lib who denied this. Many are proud of it. The more interesting question is _how_ do you roll back feminism?
I claim we could restore the world to sanity with one weird trick: make birth control pills illegal and mercilessly pursue birth control manufacturers/distributors.
You think this is delusional? Do you think feminism isn't a problem or do you just think birth control has nothing to do with it?
The ideological problem posed by feminism is only possible because women can (and do, and choose) to suppress their own fertility. Take that away and they won't have time for women's liberation, that awful thing.
This is defeatist thinking. "Nothing can fix the problem, all the things you hate are caused by inevitable trends."
Birth control pills are one of the great evils of our present age, and they should be disincentivized, not handed out for free. We are both theorycrafting here, your "urban exodus" + retvrn is just as hypothetical as my suggestion.
Twitter got rid of the ability to import blocklists because it was a feature that accidentally empowered their users.
The sharable blocklist allowed us to enforce borders around our communities without accidentally streisanding the objects of exile. Can't have that.
I see you are someone who does not believe in infohazards. a shame.
Do you really believe that every single person is capable of sovereignty?
It's a very common form of hubris, to think information can't hurt you, but you're wrong, so very wrong.
Enlightenment doesn't exist, and freedom is mostly an illusion. If these are the concepts you are playing with, you are not worth my time.
I don't know who first coined the term infohazard, but it goes back at least to the 90s.
Older than the term infohazard is "harmful perception" or "harmful sensation" – this concept is very old.
I first began to really appreciate this concept when I was introduced to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, who did most of his writing in the early half of the 20th century. It was a persistent them across much of his work.
H.P. Lovecraft, after whom I am styled, is also famous for deploying this concept in many of his stories, so much so that it's a bit of a punch line.
You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who invokes the word "ethics" is about to say incredibly evil shit.
The mainstreaming of homosexuality is integral to and inseparable from what you know as "critical race theory." You cannot oppose the one while embracing the other.
I can explain this take, but the real question is, can I do it in a way you will accept?
I don't really believe people are persuaded by reason; rather they are attracted to confidence, vitality, and power.
When I want to persuade someone of my views, I do it by projecting these qualities to the best of my ability, not by trying to plead with them through logic.
I don't have to justify myself to an angry little barking chihuahua. I don't lower myself to people who are obviously hostile.
If you can't see that there is something deeply wrong, perverse, and disgusting about homosexuality then nothing I say is going to persuade you.
Explaining this will require at least a few tweets, because I have to qualify that many individual homosexuals may disagree with CRT and may even think that their political project is at odds with it. But if we look at the philosophical and historical roots of it ...
then we can identify their ideas, their strategies, and their "leaders" – by which I mean the academics and journalists who determine the topics of the national conversation – view gender politics and critical racial politics as two parts of a whole. You can find this ...
in any discussion of intersectional feminism, or if you prefer, intersectionality. But this becomes obfuscated because to the degree there is a conspiracy, it is a decentralized conspiracy, and any one person is interchangeable within the movement if they know the words to say...
Both of these currents on the left come from a common view of mankind as being perfectly malleable, and as having a destiny to be emancipated from every constraint of human nature, and so they seek to discredit and to destroy every trace of biology, of nature, in man...
The emancipatory ideological complex positinos "colonialism", whiteness, patriarchy, heterosexuality, the "authoritarian personality," beauty, and fascism on one pol and opposes them with "equality" – by which is meant the negation of all those things in the first set.
Liberals do not understand why their own beliefs continually create conditions from which they must escape. maybe you aren't gay, but you're certainly a useful idiot.
I think sometimes they do realize it, and then they stop being liberals. But I agree that they can't both realize this and still be liberals.
Leftists win because they have "no enemies to the left" – if someone is further to the left than you, you never criticize them.
Rightists constantly try to denounce each other from within a leftist conceptual framework, accusing each other of being too far to the right.
"No, I'm not the far right extremist, the other person with views that are indistinguishable from mine is the REAL far right extremist!"
Stop living in the enemy frame. If someone is further right than you, say they are maybe too idealistic but their heart is in the right place.
Me, I'm a good boy, but esteemed colleague here is a RACIST – you aren't going to beat these people by adopting 95% of their moral and philosophical framework.
You have to reject it ROOT and BRANCH.
"What's that, you said so and so is a racist? That's crazy man, is that a new dance craze? I think I saw it on Ellen."
If "progress" means something in your mental map other than "spiral into chaos and oblivion" you are not going to make it.
They call it misgendering, I call it "truegendering"
We must never complain of life... the door to the prison lies open.
I block many people, not because they are beyond the grace of God, but because He has not yet granted me the patience to endure them.
"You blocked me! you are weak" is the effete flailing of a person who is resentful that they were blocked.
You still didn't answer [how America doesn't have a left party], but from my skim of that article your claim is about what I predicted, to wit, "we don't have a socialist party" – but what this actually shows that you have never thought about the issue at all. There is more to leftism besides early 1900s socialism.
Your opinion is based on an outdated conception of left and right which refuses to grapple with what these two poles actually mean and stand for. The left stands for equality and flattening of hierarchy. 120 years ago that meant factory workers killing factory owners but now...
it means something substantially different. The old class distinctions that that revolutionary marxism was based on barely even exist any more, because the world has changed so much since then. The left has changed with it. The rhetoric of oppression and liberation has been...
projected onto questions of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and many other things. The underlying logic is the same and the leftists who have political power now are the ones who have adapted to the new paradigm. In short, you are wrong, propagandized, and a woman.
[Republicans and Democrats] are similar in some ways. The republican leadership is 5 years behind the democrats in their desire for social degeneracy. The actual republican constituents mostly hate their party and the party leadership hates them. I think both parties are irredeemably LEFT.
These are right wing views, and they are not represented anywhere in america, by any party:
* It's OK to be white
* Marriage is between a man and a woman
* There is no such thing as transexual
Any party that can't stand up and defend these things is a left-wing party
Really? No one disagrees with the first one? Wikipedia says it's a nazi slogan. University of Manitoba denounced the people who posted it as White Nationalists. The ADL says it's a hate slogan.
Here is proof. Please rethink your life.
I am right and you are being intransigent. I presented this to establish that indeed, many people have a problem with saying "it's OK to be white."
But this is a side point. There is no party in America that stands for the points I raised above. There is no right wing party.
The original thing we were arguing about is "are both of the parties in america right wing" The answer is no, because there are no parties in america that will stand up for whites and heterosexuality.
Emancipation is fundamentally an ethos of fatherlessness. It is a strange contrast to celebrate fatherlessness the day before Father’s Day. Father’s Day should be the most important holiday of the year. Embrace patriarchy.
You would think, when you go to the grocery store, “do not buy highly palatable poison” would be an easy bar to clear.
The average woman can't actually tell when men are sharing their genuine feelings with each other, because they have no clue what male lived experience is like.
When I am out with my bros and I nod in the direction of an attractive woman's posterior and he looks and then we nod at each other, we just shared a genuine feeling.
If you show weakness and a woman sees it, she will attack you. Women be like "how come men never show weakness?"
Classical liberalism and American civic nationalism are implicitly a form of white "supremacy" as a matter of biology. If you dismantle the systems that are designed to disprivilege whites, the cream rises to the top.
tldr our enemies are right about colorblind meritocracy
If revolting people don't hate you, you should question yourself.
It is a normative theory, because what is implicit in “systems treat races differently” is the normative assumption that they ought not to treat races differently. Everything in its “analysis” is based on this normative belief
And it’s even worse than that, because the analysis itself is lousy, and entirely focused around searing hot hatred of whites.
Let me be a bit less flippant. Crt is critical theory applied to the topic of race. Critical theory is dialectical Marxism scrubbed of the talk about putting people in camps. The point of it is to deconstruct existing power structures in order to pave the way for Marxist utopia.
It is an attack, it was always meant as an attack, and one of the ways it obscures its objective is through the ridiculous song and dance you are doing now (poorly) by pretending to be a very abstract theoretical type of thing.
And while useful idiots like you are doing that, “hey man I’m just asking questions man,” activists infiltrate institutions, change rules, change laws, install loyal people in positions to apply those rules, and push out anyone who opposes their ideals.
The key words they use have public inoffensive meanings that everyone will more or less agree with, and also (barely) hidden esoteric meanings which initiated understand. This is all done with little central coordination because it’s implicit.
Some people call it a motte and bailey, but the idea is that you advance a radical, incendiary idea and then when people push back, you retreat to moderate idea that is expressed in the same language. That is what you are doing right now.
And some people do this because they are malicious, and some do it because they are stupid, but when we look at what crt activists actually do, their radicals use genocidal language and celebrate violence against white people, while their moderates cheer and run cover.
Courtly love only makes sense in a world where women are legally recognized as property, as one should always be gracious to his inferiors.
The modern idea of chivalry only exists in romantic novels; it was primarily a matter of military and religious duty.
But who cares what a bunch of women think about the right way to date them is? Women literally have negative insight into how they themselves behave in mating games. The things they think work are anti-knowledge, and men who listen to them (on avg) fail to woo them.
"Respect women" is literally the worst advice you could possibly give to a man who wants to get laid.
For more fun facts about women, did you know that somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of women surveyed admitted to going on dinner dates with men they had no interest in, just for a meal.
Watched a movie from the 70s last night. The entire cast was white except for a couple Italians. There were no gays. It felt transgressive. (Should we start saying cisgressive?)
Normality feels like a norm violation. That’s where we are now.
Transgressive, adj. - having a combative attitude that stems from a combination of high T mixed with a cocktail of xenoestrogens.
“He was so transgressive when he demanded to be called ma’am”
If it helps I was eating spaghetti carbonara while I watched it. No cream, promise.
[Companies like Black Rifle Coffee] are not on our side in any meaningful way. Basically all businesses are structurally leftist and their "but muh veterans" act is fake and gay. Anyone who condemns Kyle Rittenhouse is cordycepted to the point that they are worse than an enemy
[A transition checklist app,] but it's gigachad and he reminds you to be based.
"We're all gonna make it bro"
"The heaviest things we lift are not our weights but our feels"
"Time to slonk some eggs"
"If those thots weren't so wicked, God would not have sent you to punish them"
One way of thinking about paraphilia is that it's a scrambling or disordering of erotic desire.
Properly ordered eros is not a fetish, so a desire to impregnate women is not a fetish.
Transexuality is disordered self-love, it's when a man loves himself as a woman.
Ordered self-love is something more akin to amor fati, the love of one's fate. If you are a man, then you love yourself as a man. "Philia" is supposed to mean friendship, not sexual love...
Really, they suffer from Autogyne-eros, not autogynephilia.
A man should be in love with his self-conception as a man, not erotically, but in the Greek sense of philia.
A broken man may have autogynephilia; does a fully realized man have "autoandrophilia"?
Handsome Thursday means something entirely different in this conception. An erotic image can be an image of an object you desire, but it can also be an image of a subject you desire to be.
There's 4chan lore that overconsumption of pornography blurs the subject/object distinction.
That is, some men develop a disordered sexuality by watching porn, because they lose the ability to correctly distinguish between an object of desire and a subject of desire.
No matter how paranoid you are, you are not paranoid enough.
My friends, it has been so long since we've had a heart to heart, and I've missed you.
This is my latest work, Don't Make Me Think, and I would like to apologize in advance to anyone who knows anything about neuroscience.
Please read it with an open mind.
A central fixture of this story is a real, imminent piece of technology, the Neuralink device, though I have taken some license, of course.
The device is supposed to have full read/write capability. If it can predict how your limbs are positioned, what else can it do?
This is another tale of technocracy and technology. Such things as computers and the internet are here to stay, barring a total collapse, because they offer tremendous advantages in economics and war, even when we consider all their costs.
This can be hard to accept.
You've heard the thesis of Seeing Like A State, that governments need to regularize their domains and their citizenry in order to understand them and rule them.
Neuralink will be the culmination of this tendency
No matter who is in charge or what their values are, men in power need to quantify and measure the world, and they will use technology to do it. China and the USA, with all their differences, are evolving into the same type of thing.
There is no escape into some vague world of "freedom". You say Lyotardedly that you are skeptical of metanarratives, but the bitter aftertaste of this pill is the realization that there is no such thing as a-narrativism.
"Negative" liberty is only ever a liminal space.
There is always a default, always a null hypothesis, and to choose nothing is to have the choice made for you by those around you.
This revelation was reified in 2008 by Sunstein and Thaler, whose book Nudge advocates technocratic selection of prosocial defaults in all things
Thaler called his approach by the oxymoron "libertarian paternalism", but it's more motherly than fatherly.
The main social role of women is policing adherence to group norms, and the more they are empowered, the more monocultural and stifling social life becomes.
A panopticon made of lightning will wrap us like a warm blanket, and already has. McLuhan said electric media makes the world a global village, because instant communication brings us closer together.
The global village turns out to be a global longhouse.
A diverting manifestation of the global longhouse is its creation of an ideographic newspeak called emoji, whose glyphs are chosen by international committees according to the modern fetish for mind-numbed corporate positivity and naive Sapir-Whorfism.
There are emoji for "super" villains but not for mere villains, such as prison inmates. The only symbols for insanity imply jollity. The gun emoji was famously replaced with a water pistol. There is no emoji for fatness, or for any deity.
But despite these limitations, reality asserts itself, and we can find ways to express truths in any linguistic milieu, no matter how Orwellian. We can always unbellyfeel Ingsoc, and though you can ban a word, the perception and the concept endure.
People who are good at talking fall into the Wittgensteinian trap, believing words are the whole substance of thought, but this is false because we see cognition in creatures with no linguistic faculty.
At its limit, it makes mono-sensory p-zombies.
The elephant in the room/brain here is that, because of this, I have annotated the entire story with emoji.
Emoji are low-brow, but like picking up a folk melody and working it into a symphony, they can be more, though one risks the total bimbofication of the text.
I cannot resist creating metatextual works. The existence of the glyph, the fact of the word, the texture of the writing–these things are as important to me as the story, and I derive much enjoyment from them.
If I were uncharitable to myself, I would say I'm too chickenshit to publish a long-form work without a gimmick.
If I say it first then it won't hurt me when you say it. But my intention is for YOU to access a new form of consciousness by means of this device.
We have many senses (far more than five) and when we consume media, it changes the ratio in which we employ them, and this changes the way we experience the world.
I believe the textual modality is cognitively distinct from the pictorial.
Of course nothing I do could approximate the phenomenological experience I have imagined in this story, but I dare to dream that by combining these two paradigms, I can produce a strange new experience through this format.
When most people write with emoji, they illuminate the text they compose with symbols that have a low semantic distance from the ideas they have typed. This approach cannot produce a stable transliteration of thought.
Instead, I have made a consistent lexicon where ideographic words map objectively onto alphabetical words, with a few liberties. The symbol Brain might indicate 100 different words pertaining to brains, but the pair of symbols Brain Tape denotes memory with relative unambiguity.
To build this lexicon, I have drawn from etymology, my own taste, and the Chinese language. Emojification is the sinification of the sign, and we are increasingly enthralled to the ideogram.
There are 3316 emoji and 8105 characters in simplified Chinese, but much of that is a wasteland. Like eskimos with 50 words for snow, there are over 25 emoji symbols that signify hatred of one's father, and they keep adding more, the Nine Billion Names of God.
That 3316 emoji number is also inflated by counting racialized variants. ~120 of the glyphs have 6 racialized variants each; 20% of the lexicon is dedicated to race.
The upshot of this is that emoji nudges you to think in explicitly racialized terms.
It's not exactly deliberate, just inexorable, that the emoji authority produces no symbol for prison inmate, because if it did, that, too, would have to be racialized, and that would be dangerously close to something unspeakable.
Ideas cannot be wholly suppressed through language policing, but the immediacy and saliency of concepts can be adjusted.
Having a name for something can reorient our perceptions around that thing. Emoji reinforce the impulse to see everything in terms of race and representation.
In any case, my twitter presence is often polemical, see above, but in a project like this, I prefer to keep politics implicit.
There is crimethink in this work, yes, but its only a whisper, a background assumption, never an imprecation, only an implication.
This project started out as a joke, if I'm honest, but it grew into something more. I wanted to retell a story by Borges called The Dead Man, and I take great joy in hitting all the beats of his story, making it mine, even when I quote him word for word in a few places.
Like in Pierre Menard, I believe it's possible to tell someone else's story, word for word, not by merely copying it but by "doing the work" of reasoning through it, and this can change its meaning. There is a sense in which everything I write is a footnote to Borges.
My first big story, the Gig Economy, had the motif of money, and my second big story, God-Shaped Hole, had the motif of sex. This story completes the trilogy, thematically: its motif is power.
For those of you who have followed me these past years, and also those who are just joining me, I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for giving consideration to my works. It is my great pleasure to share them with you, and you honor me by reading them.
Sing o muse of Bronze Age Pervert, and use small words so peabrain academics and NGO astroterfs who bite our ankles can understand. We love BAP because BAP is a king, but what is a king? Moderns with atrophied souls have rarely encountered true regality in their lives.
At the root of so many failed modes of thinking is the inability to grasp the nature of authority: idiots and spiritual children see only its privileges but cannot fathom its obligations.
True kingliness is the burden of responsibility, not the grandeur of luxury. Though we demand grandeur from our kings, the liberal or the progressive inhabits a satanic frame, mistaking the trappings of power for its essence.
The essence of leadership is to be responsible when things go wrong. To accept power over someone is to become indebted to them; in exchange for their loyalty, you owe them protection. If we hate our leaders today, it is because they have presumed to be noble while abandoning their obligations to us.
Authority is ever an obligation. Frederick the Great lamented, "Believe me, the humans I have known too well deserve little, sir, that we deign to be their master!" For such a man to carry this weight is a charity.
To be a leader is to pay a terrible price. Like Damocles who admired Dionysius' riches, the modal lib does not see the sword hanging over his head. Why should the king deign to rule you, if nothing is in it for him?
There are exactly two relations a king can have to his subjects: he can view them as cows to be slaughtered or sheep to be sheared. A good king is a shepherd, a bad king is a butcher.
And the modern man? He bleats, like a sheep, "no shepherd and one herd!" Every petty fool who speaks against BAP covets the respect that is paid to him, but they are incapable of seeing WHY that respect is paid.
Suppose we imagine twitter as a virtual feudal sandbox, each account a little fief, then BAP's use of the platform was unique; he rose above the mass by means of his magnanimity.
It may seem to be a ridiculous thing, but see how many frogs speak fondly of 'the moment BAP followed me' – BAP inverted the follower/following dynamic, because he understands the natural power of kings. When you wear his banner, he follows YOU.
And when he does this, he is accepting responsibility for you. He broadcasted the works of his followers, and warned them of dangers, and tried to act in their best interest.
Selflessness is only noble if you possess a self in the first place, a criteria which the vast majority of people fail to meet. The selflessness of the king is repaid when his subjects do great works in his name.
Progs sometimes grope towards this, when they hold up examples of male protectorship as "nontoxic masculinity" – but they have a perverse and childish understanding of protection.
Progs hate their fathers, as we know, and their hatred is rooted in envy, as Satan envied the Son of God. Fatherhood is a microcosm of kingship, and so we see here the same fallacy, derived from the same sin.
To protect someone does not mean to indulge them in all their desires, but to guard them from their worst impulses within themselves, and to do this requires a concession that liberals can never make: that there is a spiritual hierarchy among men.
That hierarchy has nothing to do with education or "economic opportunity" or any such casuistry. It is found in the blood, it is ineffable, and it can be smothered by "environmental influences" but no mere "environment" can bring it about.
At the risk of painting things too starkly, there are only two orientations to life: there is reverence of beauty, which is necessarily elitist, and reverence of ugliness, which is an attempt to "democratize" beauty, the worship of the great soulless mass of slaves.
Some of you hear this and call me a sycophant. Why would you "suck up" to BAP like this? Don't you know he is gay? But if you think this, YOU are gay, because you can't imagine a relation between men that isn't sexual.
"Oh but BAP is a spook! He's a GOP psyop!" And the standard retort: if that is so, then he is the guy telling you to lift weights, to seek beauty, to authentically embody masculinity. Does that sound like the GOP you know? Everyone who says this has the body habitus of a groyper.
We see so many who wish to be honored, but who have no understanding of honor. "Why shouldn't I be honored like him?" they bray like donkeys, but they never brought honor to others, they only ever tried to honor themselves.
The twitter jannies do not understand what they have released into the world. Twitter was a containment zone.
Empathy is just a modern word for pity, which has the side effect of concealing that pity is just another word for contempt.
"Capability to grasp someone else's perspective", that' what it's supposed to mean, but it cannot escape the connotation of moral obligation, that by understanding someone else's perspective we have a duty as egalitarians to respect it.
Which is also why libs basically never use this word to talk about the right.
I know empathy is a sacred cow to you. I spit on everything you consider to be holy.
Only autists are capable of modeling women.
What bacha bazi is to young boys, going to college is for girls: both are forms of sexual abuse.
Assuming no collapse, future Americans may believe we went to Afghanistan both so women could go to college and so young boys could be their most authentic sexual selves.
Never forget that Aeschylus was more proud to have fought at Marathon than to have written any of his plays.
“Writers block” is the mental state where you are unable to write because, in your mind, the ideal of “being a writer” has eclipsed the work you are purportedly writing.
The eating of meat and the execution of criminals are the two acts that bring out more intensely than any others all our perplexities as "human animals."
It is difficult to come to any decision about them without appearing either a brute or a humbug.
To attach, as the humanitarian does, a mystical value to life itself, for its own sake, is as much a treachery to spiritual truth as it is a gesture of "humanity."
The manner of the administration of our law is thoughtless and brutal usually. But the theory of capital punishment is as humane as possible.
I have talked about how we evolved the image of the fedora tipping incel to counteract the mind virus of New Age atheism. You could call it a “memetic antibody”
Ricky Vaugn created perfect memetic antibodies to the Hilary Campaign, so good they prosecuted him. There are popular leftist slogans which are memetic antibodies to RW concepts as well. Scott Adams (Do not research!) called this a linguistic kill shot, as you will recall.
(DMs)
Don't let Ilsa Strix [psyopping the Wachikowskis into becoming trans] thing eff you up too much, men can only be led down that road if they already want to go there.
All the characters in the non-matrix part of the matrix universe are (allah forgive me for saying this word) coded as queer.
They cast a 13 year old dyke boy as neo's love interest for a reason.
Tank and dozer? mystery meat. Switch? lesboid. Cypher? sleeze ball who jerks off whlie holding the camera. Carrie Ann Moss? dyke. Mouse? coomer.
The only remotely normal straight ones are Neo and Morpheus. Morpheus is the bull.
Neo is the audience insert getting pulled into the world of queer. The red pill is, I am sorry to inform you, HRT.
Lore about dominatrices is also that most of their clients are jewish men, for whatever reason, the jew is drawn to this.
I will say this, in defense of Wachowskis. They most likely could have remained relatively normal straight family men if their society were not fucked and they hadn't stumbled into the depraved world of the jewish hollywood elite.
But they had, as the oracle said, "the gift" and they were waiting for something.
Leftists often live in a fairyland where they think the right is slowly closing in on them, because they don't understand that the various civil rights acts and Hart-Cellar are fundamentally leftist doctrines, leftist victories, and everything since then has been cleanup.
Curtis Yarvin has posted some cringe, but his core insights are critical for Americans to understand: our democracy doesn't work like you think, and even if it did, it wouldn't be good. Now Yarvin is becoming "mainstream" because the right has nowhere else to turn.
In a way it's a riff on an old joke: "if voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal." Yarvin's innovation, simple as it sounds, is taking this joke seriously, and convincing others to take it seriously, too.
And I mean you hear these jokes, maybe you laugh and repeat them, then you carry on acting like it's not true. Republicans are dems driving the speed limit. Dems are the real racists. These are also mental stopsigns, if they keep you playing the game.
The centers of political bodies are low energy; only acting when they allow the fringes to animate them. The left has always drawn from its radicals while the right has cut them off. This is why the left has won victory after victory against us.
Yarvin understands how to speak to the elites and be heard. Yes, we agree, the elites are vacuous midwits. Whatever makes you feel better. They’re still in charge. Their glory is faded but not extinguished, just like America.
You want to know why he called it the cathedral and not the synagogue? Because in America only trisomatic mongrels hate Jews, but the people running the show? They hate Christians. Yarvin knows how to talk to them, how to make them hate the right things.
(And don't get me wrong, we must dismantle hall-of-cost-ianity with all the gusto of a joolattress (rhymes with mattress) on a FAANG hiring board, but most of y'all aren't ready for that conversation).
Yarvin used ideas from critical theory and even new atheism to subvert elite ideology. He bent the Dawkinsian critique of Christianity back against progress by highlighting its essentially religious nature when elites were seething against religion.
This is also why he teaches that the Cathedral is a fully decentralized conspiracy. The higher your social class, the more memetic antibodies you have against "conspiracy theories." But if the conspiracy is decentralized, that's a novel infection.
We call something dextrogenic if it moves people right. Sinistrogenic if left. Yarvin's ideas are dextrogenic. Parts of the decentralized conspiracy are centralized, sure. But elites and left-normies are never going to believe the latter without passing through the former.
But we must disambiguate the word "elite". The elite are a "class", and Americans, I'm told, are bad at understanding class. We reduce it to income brackets, which is wrong. Just as a race is an extended family, an elite is an extended circle of friends.
The members of an elite may be rich or poor. It's not just about money; they are supposed to be united by a shared taste and sensibility, as illustrated by Fussell's (dated) book Class. This is still true, though it's muddied by strivers who try to imitate elite "culture".
An elite is a class, and an elite is an extended circle of friends. Yarvin likes Mosca, and Mosca he say: Voting is only effective if you vote for someone who can win, who is championed by his circle of friends. The voters in a democracy don't elect you. Your friends elect you.
So how do your friends elect you? By manipulating procedural outcomes. The left operates mostly within the law by controlling the context where it is enacted. Yarvin explains how power works in the USA, vs how you were taught it works.
More than one circle of friends can exist and can compete for elitehood. The polar opposite of our present ruling elite is a class of extreme social outcasts who see themselves as the owners of reactionary thought in the winter of the long 20th century.
The better ones know the stereotypes of reactionaries, that the rest of the world sees them as stupid, inbred hillbillies. But now, in defiance of the stereotype, they like to overcompensate by reading lots of books, especially history and philosophy, especially from Germans.
These people have genuine, surprising insights, doubly so if you have studiously avoided them. I would never have given them a single glance were it not for a truly subversive line by Yarvin: "I'm not a white nationalist but I'm not exactly allergic to the stuff"
But the huh-wyte nationalists, (rhymes with rationalists) have some problems. The sort of person who openly admires hitler no only has no social capital, he also does not understand to build it. You might say they are missing a mood.
Many of these older guard reactionaries don't care for us because they see us as latecomers, and because they cannot abide their ideas becoming popular. They don't want to be elite, they want to take a voluptuous pleasure in alienage.
I'm not interested being the king of the disaffected losers, or in adopting a victim mentality. I AM interested in kingship as such, and in agglomerating a new, replacement elite, which is to say, an extended circle of friends. Friendship is a necessary fundament of kingship.
As BAP notes, A king can only be understood as “the most noble of the nobles” and has meaning and continuity only in a society ruled by nobles, which is to say, by armed men who are also able to lead other men.
Friendship is usually served to us as watered-down pablum for children, and taken to mean something like "we play video games together" – but this is in fact a degradation of a noble impulse, the impulse to go to war as a band of brothers.
So when people ask what we are doing here, why we say what we say, that's why. We are cultivating friendship, incubating a new nobility, from which we hope a king will emerge. I know this sounds grandiose and crazy to many of you, as every grand endeavor must from the outside.
And it is natural sometimes for us friends to fight. The source of civilization is not the family, the market, the electoral process, or scientific committees of "experts" – it is the Mannerbund, the organic organic hierarchy of men that springs from their competitive instinct.
We are cultivating a shared taste and sensibility which is antithetical to the regime that contains us. We are not so worried about populism or "the masses" – we are not communists with dreams of new soviet man, though we may be otherworldly at times.
To do this, we will need to discredit such ideas as democracy, equality, and yes, even "individual liberty" – in so far as it is one more pacifier to the latent new elite that is even now, despite everything, listening intently to what we have to say.
Not all who who consume our culture are of it, but still they receive our ideas: An idea is a conscious form taken by our feelings, which covers both an intellectual act and a direction of the will. Every idea is a force, tending more and more to realize its individual end.
The goal of speaking in a mass format is not the mass itself, but to reach those KINDRED SPIRITS who are can embody the beautiful ideas that we nurture. Or as Nietzsche said,
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men – Yes, and then to get round them.
I suggest Gaetano Mosca, a contemporary of Pareto, is probably a much bigger influence on Moldbug's thought. Mosca wrote his book in 1939 though and he has some great predictions that turned out to be true, as well as some that will make you laugh.
Look, The Cathedral is not a governing body. It rarely issues specific policy prescriptions, it is way of thinking about how ideology is manufactured. It doesn't say, "lower the taxes on oil profits", it says "oil is sinful because of climate change"
In Moldbug's model, it's up to the bureau to translate a moral precept into policies. The civil rights *movement* could be seen as the output of the Cathedral. The Great Society (understood as the civil rights acts in '65, '65, and '68) is an attempt to implement it.
I am not aware of any "standard model" of how power works, because by its nature these things are highly abstract, ephemeral, and politically charged. Anyone who tries to create a model of power has an agenda, whether it's Marx, Foucault, or Moldbug.
So there is no sense in which you can learn the standard model and then compare it to Moldbug's unorthodox model. This isn't physics; it's human, all too human. Whoever is in power will promote a model of power that reinforces their power, with no regard to "truth"
Moldbug's analysis of power is right-wing, but it has a lot in common with some post-modern strands of left-wing thought. Its main point of departure is that the best of left-wing though on this subject came in the mid 20th century, and identifies power as Right-Wing, whereas...
Moldbug's analysis is more contemporary, and identifies power as left-wing, which, at present, it is. Arguably, it was also left-wing back then, but it was only barely beginning to be, and it has become more consolidated and the lines have become better-defined.
The Cathedral's moral proclamations are not always obeyed exactly. Sometimes the implementation is imperfect. We can mostly identify the middle class as "anti-cathedral". Sometimes they win minor victories, such as electing Trump. This doesn't change what the elites think.
In fact, it tends to galvanize them, as it clearly has. Power in a system at the scale of a nation is about influence and incentives, not about specific commands issued by a specific person. Large masses of people have variance at every level of understanding and compliance.
What the Cathedral model attempts to describe is how academia, journalism, and philanthropy interact at a high level to generate a singular(ish) moral vision that guides policy makers, "informed opinion", and other arteries of influence.
One of the core claims is that the president is not "in charge", and no elected official is. All of the elections and the elected officials are part of "The Show." The people in the show were powerful in the past but now it is a hollow shell and the cathedral has real power.
Part of the reason for this is that the elected officials necessarily have very short time horizons, whereas bureaucrats tend to be lifers and university professors and new york times editors also enjoy much longer tenures.
If you're the president, you don't author some thousand page bill about why we should do this or that pursuant to mitigating climate change. Lifelong bureaucrats write the bill and they do it using information emitted by universities and popularized by journalists.
The president is the LEAST powerful person in this stack, all he does is say yes or no, (do you imagine obama read the full text of anything he signed into law? I can't even get you to read a 10k summary of moldbug), and if he says no, then next week there is another 1000 pager.
You don't really have the final say though, because the people who want to enact policy X just put it in every single law that comes across your desk. One week it's packaged into a farm subsidy. The next it's packaged into a tariff relaxation on chinese imports. etc.
You can just say no to everything, but all that does is gunk everything up and make you more enemies. If you say yes to anything, you say yes to everything, because the same group of people with the same beliefs (coordinated by the cathedral) are producing all the proposals.
Understanding that memeplex is the gateway to the nrx project.
The first step is realizing that it is, in fact, an ideology. It likes to pretend that it isn’t. “This isn’t about politics, it’s about equity”. Recall good year tires banning “politics” from their workplace but not BLM.
Moldbug constructs his ideology from principles that most people will find agreeable, and uses it to come to conclusions that most people will not find agreeable, and this itself is evidence that he is onto something big.
One of the major points of his critique is that liberal democracy has a certain bend to it, which is disastrous whenever the practice catches up with the theory.
"Democracy is the wrost form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is a classic mental stopsign; it's a meme that causes you to stop asking questions and stop examining. I suggest deleting it from your brain.
Liberal democracy is not what makes us prosperous, and it's not what brings us civic order, which are the two things that I want.
When you let girls in your clubhouse, no matter what the club was about, it's now about them.
Same goes for gays, "diversity", gender weirdoes.
Every single one of these things is Dracula: Evil comes into your house when you INVITE it.
"Gays and girls are evil, am I reading this correctly?" Duh.
There's a "we're all reasonable people" diplomatic answer I can give you and then there's a "get in line, nerd" answer. Both are true.
But to put things in stark terms that I think will be legible for you:
Homosexuality should be repressed, they should not get "married" or be celebrated or portrayed positively on television.
Women should not be "liberated".
I don't expect you to be capable of intelligent thought, pronouns. You believe every other category of person should be able to create a space for themselves, but straight men are never allowed to have men's groups.
Easiest litmus test in the world for whether someone's politics are garbage: Do they think the government should give them money? If yes, it is safe to ignore every other thought that comes out of their head.
Teaching children about Santa Claus primes them for liberal atheism. This ritual indoctrination into a false faith, followed by its inevitable decay, gives people a model where "growing up" means rejecting "childish superstitions about sky fairies"
Most of the time I can just ignore the rot around me, if I want to. My own life is going pretty well, all things considered. But once in a while I come face to face with the insane, civilizationally suicidal forces that we all mock here, and I wonder how anyone laughs at all.
I don’t believe I have no power to fix it, because that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I will use every gift God has given me to strike at the heart of leviathan.
Women are not the empathetic sex, they are the machiavellian sex. Both of these attributes have the same surface presentation: a fixation on the motives behind mundane utterances.
You hear people say "my brain thinks this" "my brain tells me that." Stupid. Alienation from the body culminates in alienation from your own perceptions and thoughts.
Your brain isn't fooling you, you are your brain, and the rest of your body, too.
Also note this is not a strictly materialist or secular notion. It's not any kind of "soul denialism." Christians (ought to) believe in the resurrection of their physical body. This kind of dualism is gnostic, and heretical, regardless of your worldview.
The belief that you can exist apart from your body is what leads to gender ideology.
You know if you put one woman of color on the moon, it’s a humiliation ritual for you, but if you put them all on the moon, that’s a beautiful thing you’ve done.
Better to keep your petty little hatreds bottled up. Smother them, because if you let them out for air, they grow and grow. Occasionally we all fail at this, of course.
"Actually, hatred is misguided love", you say? Gay. I hate people who talk like this and not in a petty way.
Have you noticed what a perfectly closed circle this worldview is? Every emotion has to be love. Every feeling has to be good. You cast your emotions in these Manichaean terms because you’re a simpleton. Everyone who disagrees with you is “immature”.
No, you’re just shallow. This isn’t anger. This is contempt.
People who strive for happiness are never happy, no matter how much pleasure they feel.
People who strive for money are never rich, no matter how much money they make.
Handmaid's Tale is just The Turner Diaries written by a woman. Of course she makes it all about herself.
The good guys in the turner diaries are portrayed as the bad guys in handmaid’s tale.
Why is “portraying antagonists with humanity” supposed to be salutary? This way of thinking is contemptible.
You say that assuming someone who disagrees with me is evil is just a stereotype? You probably say "humanity first" and would try to reprimand me about humanism. You may not realize it, but you are fully cordycepted.
You probably think women should be able to vote.
Much as I don’t want to pick at this scab it’s awfully convenient for all of you "just be reasonable" types that all of the norms around this have been rewritten from the ground up in our living memory by a cabal of the most powerful people in the world.
"He’s a dick", I sneer, as a matrix of progressive social norms redefine everything he believes to be rude in a matter of only a few years. You guys are epistemic terrorists and you cry out in pain as you strike us.
Breaking up big tech companies and protectionism are not socialism. Nationalizing health care is socialism, and in my experience most rightists do not want this. I don't even want the big tech broken up, personally, that's just naive populism.
The short answer of why healthcare should be bound to employment is a little something I like to call the S-N cycle.
Basically, there is a giant cancer on the medical industry, a convoluted mass of useless flesh that is beyond anyone to ever map out or understand, where in vast amounts of money are simply lost, stolen, and squandered.
Much of this is done in the name of helping people who cannot afford their own health care. There is a vicious circle where a person who can't afford care (A) gets it anyway, and (B) pays for it with money that belongs to neither of them.
The longer this goes on, the more the healthcare providers are able to charge person (B), to pay for (A), and most of the money ends up going to a fourth party for arcane reasons. Perhaps the only way to fix it is to destroy the whole mess. Sympathetic to that.
The part I find objectionable is what comes next: what should we replace it with? Why should we replace it with higher taxes and more entitlements? All that will do is replace one type of corruption with another.
You cannot, in any scheme for the reformation of society, aim directly at the flourishing of the arts. These activities are by-products for which we cannot deliberately arrange conditions. But their decay may always be taken as a symptom of some social ailment to be investigated.
There is no one I dislike more than anarcho-communists. Also known as "my father did love me but I had only resentment and failure to offer him in return".
By its nature, liberalism is be a tendency towards something very different from itself. It releases energy rather than accumulating it, relaxes rather than fortifies It is a movement defined, not by its end, but by its starting point.
In the 19th c. the Liberal Party had its own conservatism; the Conservative Party had its own liberalism; neither had a political philosophy. To hold a political philosophy is not the function of a Parliamentary party: a party with a political philosophy is a revolutionary party.
Liberalism means chaos; Conservatism means petrifaction. Both are equally repellant. We are always faced with the questions: "what must be destroyed?" and "what must be preserved?"
Liberalism and Conservatism are not philosophies, only habits, and neither is enough to guide us.
Curtis Yarvin has posted some cringe, but his core insights are critical for Americans to understand: our democracy doesn't work like you think, and even if it did, it wouldn't be good. Now Yarvin is becoming "mainstream" because the right has nowhere else to turn.
In a way it's a riff on an old joke: "if voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal." Yarvin's innovation, simple as it sounds, is taking this joke seriously, and convincing others to take it seriously, too.
and I mean you hear these jokes, maybe you laugh and repeat them, then you carry on acting like it's not true. "Republicans are dems driving the speed limit." "Dems are the real racists." These are also mental stopsigns, if they keep you playing the game.
The centers of political bodies are low energy; only acting when they allow the fringes to animate them. The left has always drawn from its radicals while the right has cut them off. This is why the left has won victory after victory against us.
Yarvin understands how to speak to the elites and be heard. Yes, we agree, the elites are vacuous midwits. Whatever makes you feel better. They’re still in charge. Their glory is faded but not extinguished, just like America.
You want to know why he called it the cathedral and not the synagogue? Because in America only trisomatic mongrels hate Jews, but the people running the show? They hate Christians. Yarvin knows how to talk to them, how to make them hate the right things.
(And don't get me wrong, we must dismantle hall-of-cost-ianity with all the gusto of a joolattress (rhymes with mattress) on a FAANG hiring board, but most of y'all aren't ready for that conversation).
Yarvin used ideas from critical theory and even new atheism to subvert elite ideology. He bent the Dawkinsian critique of Christianity back against progress by highlighting its essentially religious nature when elites were seething against religion.
This is also why he teaches that the Cathedral is a fully decentralized conspiracy. The higher your social class, the more memetic antibodies you have against "conspiracy theories." But if the conspiracy is decentralized, that's a novel infection.
We call something dextrogenic if it moves people right. Sinistrogenic if left. Yarvin's ideas are dextrogenic. Parts of the decentralized conspiracy are centralized, sure. But elites and left-normies are never going to believe the latter without passing through the former.
But we must disambiguate the word "elite". The elite are a "class", and Americans, I'm told, are bad at understanding class. We reduce it to income brackets, which is wrong. Just as a race is an extended family, an elite is an extended circle of friends.
The members of an elite may be rich or poor. It's not just about money; they are supposed to be united by a shared taste and sensibility, as illustrated by Fussell's (dated) book Class. This is still true, though it's muddied by strivers who try to imitate elite "culture".
An elite is a class, and an elite is an extended circle of friends. Yarvin likes Mosca, and Mosca he say: Voting is only effective if you vote for someone who can win, who is championed by his circle of friends. The voters in a democracy don't elect you. Your friends elect you.
So how do your friends elect you? By manipulating procedural outcomes. The left operates mostly within the law by controlling the context where it is enacted. Yarvin explains how power works in the USA, vs how you were taught it works.
More than one circle of friends can exist can compete for elitehood. The polar opposite of our present ruling elite is a class of extreme social outcasts who see themselves as the owners of reactionary thought in the winter of the long 20th century.
The better ones know the stereotypes of reactionaries, that the rest of the world sees them as stupid, inbred hillbillies. But now, in defiance of the stereotype, they like to overcompensate by reading lots of books, especially history and philosophy, especially from Germans.
These people have genuine, surprising insights, doubly so if you have studiously avoided them. I would never have given them a single glance were it not for a truly subversive line by Yarvin: "I'm not a white nationalist but I'm not exactly allergic to the stuff".
But the huh-wyte nationalists, (rhymes with rationalists) have some problems. The sort of person who openly admires hitler no only has no social capital, he also does not understand to build it. You might say they are missing a mood.
Many of these older guard reactionaries don't care for us because they see us as latecomers, and because they cannot abide their ideas becoming popular. They don't want to be elite, they want to take a voluptuous pleasure in alienage.
I'm not interested being the king of the disaffected losers, or in adopting a victim mentality. I AM interested in kingship as such, and in agglomerating a new, replacement elite, which is to say, an extended circle of friends. Friendship is a necessary fundament of kingship.
As BAP notes, A king can only be understood as “the most noble of the nobles” and has meaning and continuity only in a society ruled by nobles, which is to say, by armed men who are also able to lead other men.
Friendship is usually served to us as watered-down pablum for children, and taken to mean something like "we play video games together" – but this is in fact a degradation of a noble impulse, the impulse to go to war as a band of brothers.
So when people ask what we are doing here, why we say what we say, that's why. We are cultivating friendship, incubating a new nobility, from which we hope a king will emerge. I know this sounds grandiose and crazy to many of you, as every grand endeavor must from the outside.
And it is natural sometimes for us friends to fight. The source of civilization is not the family, the market, the electoral process, or scientific committees of "experts" – it is the Mannerbund, the organic organic hierarchy of men that springs from their competitive instinct.
We are cultivating a shared taste and sensibility which is antithetical to the regime that contains us. We are not so worried about populism or "the masses" – we are not communists with dreams of new soviet man, though we may be otherworldly at times.
To do this, we will need to discredit such ideas as democracy, equality, and yes, even "individual liberty" – in so far as it is one more pacifier to the latent new elite that is even now, despite everything, listening intently to what we have to say..
Not all who who consume our culture are of it, but still they receive our ideas: An idea is a conscious form taken by our feelings, which covers both an intellectual act and a direction of the will. Every idea is a force, tending more and more to realize its individual end.
The goal of speaking in a mass format is not the mass itself, but to reach those KINDRED SPIRITS who are can embody the beautiful ideas that we nurture. Or as Nietzsche said, "A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men – Yes, and then to get round them."
Girls only want one thing and if you say what it is, they call you an incel, because they believe that if you’re talking about it, you don’t have what it takes to do it to them.
Most people aren’t able to process or even approach ideas they don’t already recognize.
I'm just going say it: Women who use birth control are empty beer bottles. That's right, Jewel beetles would rather mate with a certain type of empty beer bottle than with females of their own species, because the design of the bottle confuses their mate-finding instincts.
An evolutionary mismatch occurs when the conditions that produced an adaptation are disrupted, and the adaptation is no longer beneficial. You can find other famous examples involving sea turtles and such. Bright lights confuse their hatchlings and can't find the ocean.
Evolution is a form of computation. Genetic algorithms work by producing a population of variants on a theme, evaluating them by some criteria, and producing the next generation from the winners. Genetic iteration yields shockingly intelligent outputs.
Once you understand genetic algorithms and you've seen how they work, it's such a useful and obvious frame that it changes your perspective forever. There's still plenty of room for God, but whatever creation consists of, evolution is a big part of it.
The exact same logic that produces animal (and human) instincts produces traditions. Our behavior is optimized over time as beliefs that multiply us proliferate and beliefs that don't, don't.
Tradition is a kind of externalized or "socially constructed" instinct, but the construction is not arbitrary. It's the output of an optimization program that's been running for 300,000 years.
Traditions can fail in the same way as instincts, because they're both forms of optimization relative to particular environments. A change in environment can break a tradition, just like it can break an instinct.
People who talk about jeweled beetles usually mention superstimulus, where you prefer a simulation over the thing being simulated. Video games, porn, etc. But the deeper problem is much more dire than that.
Superstimulus is a surmountable problem for an intelligent being. We have a solution, and it's called discipline. The real problem is when the environmental disruption is so radical that the instinct is maladaptive even when it's working "as intended".
Environmental disruptions that change our fertility are the most consequential. They're "right over the target," which, for evolution, is multiplication. It's no surprise that that our most emotionally charged traditions revolve around sex and reproduction.
So I'm sorry to bring up this discourse again but the trads and the cads are both wrong. No sex before marriage is insanity in the world of birth control and late-life marriage. But banging a bunch of women to "find yourself" is arrested development and spiritually corrosive.
I know because I, too, have drunk from these wells. From both of them. And they're both poisoned, because when the environment breaks, instinct and tradition also break.
The only way to fix the jewel beetles is to get rid of the bottles.
The only way to fix marriage is to get rid of birth control.
But then isn't birth control the beer bottle? And can't women just stop taking it?
No. When you elect for sterility, that mark stays with you.
There's no social construction that can fix the beetle and the bottle. It mates with things that look like women. Its woman-detector thinks the bottle is a woman. Likewise, men mate with things that look like women. Our woman-detector thinks a female on birth control is a woman.
Raising a family may not be so pleasant. There's a tremendous amount of sacrifice in it. Only a deluded right-wing NPC would say otherwise. But raising a family is also the main thing that makes you an adult. Only a deluded left-wing NPC would say otherwise.
Traditions are good because they have practical, immediate, and inextricable good consequences. Without birth control, sex means children. Sex before marriage means children before marriage, and produces rotten children. There's a reason "bastard" used to be a slur.
But now that chain of causality is broken. When sex means responsibility, then sex makes you a man. When it's just 2-player onanism, it doesn't. The prohibition on sex before marriage in this environment doesn't fix that, it just gives you contempt for those who prohibit.
But notice how stupid the cad also looks here; he looks exactly as stupid as the beetle who fucks the bottle. He never grows up. And don't get me wrong: having children is not your salvation that you nobly choose against the modern world. You're not supposed to have a choice.
You're not going to outbreed the libs, because liberalism is childishness metastasized in the bodies of adults. Your sons are growing up in a world full of beer bottles, and they're the beetle. For many are culled, and few are chosen. (Yes I said culled).
Now I'm going to let you in on a secret: men are made, not born, and the process where a boy becomes a man is painful. Given the option, most boys won't grow up, they'll just get bigger. Woman's "liberation" from her bio-logic is man's enslavement to his most childish impulses.
Paglia knew: emancipation through sex works exactly the opposite way that liberationists imagine. Integration of man's body and mind is a profound problem that is not solvable by recreational sex or an expansion of women's civil rights.
The word freedom has two completely different meanings, with zero overlap. The first one, the common one now, is the freedom of a child, which is freedom from consequence, characterized by a radical LACK of autonomy. It's freedom from worry, because you're never at fault.
The other type of freedom, which is rarer now, is the opposite of a child's freedom. It's total autonomy, consummate responsibility. People conflate them, because we use the same word. And so often people appeal to the latter, when what they really want is the former.
Masculine freedom isn't freedom from constraints, it's MORE constraints. It's the covenant between you and nature or nature's god to abide by his laws. But most can't make this distinction, so when I talk of freedom elsewhere, I mean childish freedom.
Males only become men with great difficulty, because masculinity is something over and above our natural state. It's built, and it's built through pain, the pain of responsibility. Two different kinds of freedom. Don't forget.
If you want to understand why masculinity seems to be in short supply, it's because responsibility is in short supply, because one of the main things that causes responsibility, fatherhood, is delayed and deferred, because, given the option, most boys will opt out of it.
Sex is not just something that "consenting adults do behind closed doors." That was always a lie. Sex is an act that always, necessarily, has societal (and therefore political) dimensions. By reducing sex to mere pleasure, we reduce people to automatons.
And maybe they always were automatons, and maybe most of them alway will be. But I think it's also clear that we are living in a degraded and decadent state whose degradation can be hard to quantify.
When we do a bad job of understanding our problems, we come up with bad solutions. Cad and Trad are two bad solutions to the problem that women are empty beer bottles and men are reduced to the spiritual condition of beetles (beetles are lovely but we should stand above them).
Sex is an encounter with that part of us that is the least human, the least safe, the least controlled. Cad and trad alike want to denature it, tame it, whether through lassitude or repression. But it's supposed to be galvanizing, so it can turn you into an adult.
It's not even that they adhere to some misguided-yet-rigorous epistemology, it's just that they are craven and won't believe anything that authority hasn't rubber stamped.
You can break out of this sad, robotic conditioning. There is a human soul underneath it, somewhere in your body, trying to get out. You don't have speak this babytalk designed to stifle your mind. You can draw breath and live.
The very nature of expert consensus is that most of them are trusting a tiny minority who have official sanction to make the claims they are making. Do you actually know any experts on anything in real life? It's very hard to find two who agree, let alone 100.
If half of experts agree on something, it has a chance of being true. If 99% of experts agree on something, it means they are engaging in group think (banal claims about gravity or breathing air notwithstanding).
Why? Because they all read the same two or three textbooks? Because the high status scientist formed an opinion and all the others were influenced by him? Scientific consensus has bottlenecks which confound headcount as a proxy of correctness.
So you believe that there is some large, mythical group of people who all "know how to draw a conclusion from data available" who have all, independently, and minimal distortion from personal incentives, arrived at the same conclusions–
It's like it's never even occurred to you that credentials could be bestowed on any other basis but pure unbiased abstract truth.
You have no evidence that experts are more likely to be correct than laymen about nutrition.
Where do facts come from?
Data is gathered by people, people are more loyal to other people and to their personal incentives than they are to their own eyes.
Choosing randomly vs. trusting experts is a false dichotomy.
So in end aren’t you saying that you can only arrive at your trust in experts through introspection and trust in your own, personal, first-person instinct? And isn’t this exactly the opposite of trusting experts?
YOU don’t see a problem with Veganism but that is in no way a guarantee that there isn’t a problem. The first, most obvious problem is that there are nutrients which are almost impossible to get from plant sources. We know of many, such as b12 and d3. Note I said *almost*…
These nutrients are present in trace amounts in a few plant sources but they must be refined and concentrated into supplements in order to meet the requirements of a normal person. I can find a list of least seven such nutrients as the top hit on Google.
This tells us two things:
1. That Veganism is only possible in a modern techno-industrial world where economies of scale and highly specialized knowledge of chemistry can be taken for granted. It is evolutionarily novel.
2. That if there are so many essential nutrients that are basically impossible to get from plants that we know about, then there are bound to be more that we don’t know about. There are unknown unknowns.
We can deduce that Veganism as it is currently practiced is unhealthy from these two facts. It is flying almost blind in unexplored territory, and the average vegan looks frail and sick.
There are marketing brochures for Veganism and propaganda groups who find relatively healthy vegans and use them as their face. These people exist because it is possible to be mostly healthy through careful supplementation and disciplined dietary practices. However…
Those people are still obviously missing things, and this can be seen from the fact that basically all vegans cheat a little bit, (there are even studies) and many cheat a lot and just call themselves vegans.
Veganism is not good for your body, though in the short term a diet of all organic fresh vegetables is probably better than a diet of all highly processed snack foods. For many vegans, they start cooking for themselves for the first time after their conversion.
And they may experience a short period of flourishing as their bodies still retain whatever essential animal products they have been consuming but now they are making up for other deficits with their new diet.
But over the long term there is an obvious bodily degeneration that you can observe in almost any vegan person if you take the time to look closely at them and you are intellectually honest.
All of the things I have said are easy to verify, even "scientifically" with ten minute with a search engine. The burden of proof isn't on me because, again, the hypothesis the veganism is perfectly fine should not be your null hypothesis.
One google search. You literally won't do one google search to see if you can find anything to back up my claim. What that suggests is that you actually have very little interest in the truth.
The exact way you have formulated the argument doesn't prove your case, either. Again, why is "veganism is OK, we know all the essential nutrients" your null hypothesis?
None of the clauses in your above statement follow from each other. I'm not even trying to definitively prove anything to you, I'm trying to help you understand that you aren't being rational, you're being dogmatic.
DMs
I don't quite know how to say this but why are we wasting money educating the bantu.
It just doesn't make sense
I have no solution for what to do about mulattos and the talented tenth (who are basically all mulattos)
Pick one: "wrong species" or "sensible civics"
There is really no way the American dream can work for the average negro, and I feel just enough of the white man's burden that it doesn't seem right to consign him to the hell of his own making that would be black separatism.
Black-a-block has other problems though. Segregated schools... also have problems.
They are different species whose primary survival strategy is to imitate humans and convince them to share food.
"Free vasectomies for blacks" is the original RW charity project
Whitepill: Blacks have the highest rate of homosexuality of any race and it's not even close
Honestly though it's probably because they have the highest rate of fatherlessness (and implicitly the highest rate of molested by uncleness).
It's amazing that we still have anything resembling rule of law at all.
What would it take, to get justice in the current year? Is anyone willing to do what it takes?
As they say "come the revolution," (a term we as good rightists should studiously avoid) we imagine things might be quite different.
For example, in Basedistan, or Chadistan, or whatever, we would clearly ban tattoos on women
Why ban tattoos on women? Because tattoos on women are ugly, and signal promiscuity. This is the only justification one needs. In general we are against ugliness in all forms, against the democratization of beauty, against feminism, homosexuality, and all other forms of emancipation.
The mind as sphincter:
Each time you take psychedelics you become a bit less tightly wound. Perhaps some are born with too much tension, but they say the mind, once stretched…
And again, if the spirit is a bow, how tight must it be to launch an arrow at its target?
If you would make yourself a disciple, then every man who thinks himself a teacher will resent you, because he will wonder: Why didn’t you pick me?
What are women better at than men?
Pregnancy, social power games, smelling nice, looking cute, lying, knowing when everyone's birthday and anniversary is, knowing when you had that dinner thing with that other couple, keeping all of your children's names straight.
Purity spirals are a common failure mode of any group of people.
Liberalism is an attempt solve the problem.
It fails because people begin purity spiraling over who is the most liberal.
It's fun to participate in purity spiral mobs.
It's also fun to sanctimoniously renounce purity spiral mobs.
It's also fun to sanctimoniously renounce people who sanctimoniously renounce purity spiral mobs.
This is a perfectly closed circle.
Critical Race Theory is too bizarre to be fiction, it's the sort of thing only the real world can vomit up: It's literal, explicit black supremacy, enacted and enforced by white people against each other.
The only thing that legitimates any claim is a sword.
Being gay is a bad thing, because:
* it's disgusting
* it's a sterile life of fruitless hedonism
* it's predatory on children
* it spreads disease and the only thing keeping gays alive is massive govt. subsidy of antiviral drugs
* poisons the signaling commons for male friendship
Men who have never bared their soul to the world in their lives condemn us for hiding our faces.
Every whites girl you fail to knock up is going to turn into an AWFL.
You can save her — you can save all of us.
To find peace within yourself, simply declare war upon the world.
The goal of every tweet I write is to make myself laugh. that's it, that's the soul of it.
Not to have one's own interests at heart—this is a moral fig-leaf hiding a very different fact, to wit:—"I don't know how to find what is to my interest"
Instead of saying ingenuously "I am no longer any good," the moral lie of the decadent says: Nothing is good - life is no good
All our lives we've watched the GOP lose while hiding behind "principles" — but many learn the wrong lesson from this. It's not that you shouldn't have principles, it's that they don't apply to your enemies.
Everyone has an intuitive understanding of the concept of "black privilege" — it is called "the race card".
it's fine to judge groups of people, but it's an error to judge them by their dumbest members, who are also inevitably their largest subset.
You will live to see all of your idols crumble. This is why enduring religions worship very abstract gods.
We are living in a scientific theocracy that has rejected both God and science.
This is possible because ideas are alive and they reproduce by influencing humans to spread them, and there's a sense in which ideas are bigger organisms than people, higher up the food chain.
An older version of this thought: the idée fixe—an idea becomes an object of fixation, and completely overtakes the person, til his mind is nothing but the idea. This is part of the theory of the idea as force: "people don't have ideas, ideas have people".
But the understanding of "idea as force" is incomplete without an account of the Darwinian struggle between ideas. It's not only a metaphor, to say ideas have their own life, because although they exist in our minds, they exist independently from any individual.
That said, we should not abandon the notion of personal agency, but we must contextualize it. There are things which are made purely of ideas, things that move among us, that also move us. Some people call this an "egregore" but lately I have taken to "metahuman".
A great man, who commands the multitudes and shapes the world to his will, becomes metahuman, and his command becomes an identity, an epistemic grounding, a verbal uniform—in short, an ideology.
Ideologies—metahumans—are much more immanent because of the internet. They move, spread, and evolve faster. Their food is attention, their ecosystem is our minds, and some are parasitic, some are symbiotic, and some are predatory.
Not that "scenes" or subcultures never existed before; we can think of various metahumans from history such as religions and nations, especially. You might expect the internet to create a Cambrian explosion of ideologies, but I think the opposite is true.
There are 3 avenues of transmission for a living cluster of ideas: vertically, from parent to child; horizontally, from peer to peer; and institutionally, from school to student. The internet disempowers institutional transmission the same way institutional disempowers vertical.
The increase in speed and spread of these "metahumans" allows them to evolve faster and to maintain tighter coherence within themselves. When it takes days or weeks to send a letter, ideas drift and diverge within their carriers. When it takes seconds, they stay in sync.
And when things spread via network effects, winners win yugely. For the same reason BTC has an order of magnitude greater market cap than ETH, the biggest thoughtforms in the game dominate the smaller ones, and "woke" is the biggest game in town.
You could pick up a lot of this from reading about memetics, the now pretty much dead branch of thought that sprung off of dawkins and blackmore and a few others, though that thoughtline was deficient in the ways Moldbug outlined (in "How Dawkins Got Pwned")
The problem with treating these metahuman entities as hostile invaders is roughly the same as treating your gut bacteria as hostile invaders. You have a gut biome for digesting food and a mind biome for digesting perceptions.
Like any metaphor, this one is limited, because gut biomes don't spread virally, but mind biomes can and do. And the truth is, when we hear the call of an idea that feels clear and beautiful, authentic and true, we have very little power to resist it.
Early in its lifecycle, the loss of a key man can wipe out a thoughtform, but as it spreads, it takes on a life of its own. People who are successful at spreading ideas are rewarded by those ideas for doing so, in the form of prestige.
This is, again, not to discount individual agency regarding the ideas we ingest, but it's likewise a mistake to pretend we have no reliance on them. The collectivist vs. individualist debate is idiotic, but it's also a durable self-replicator.
From this you can see how truth is not essential to the fitness of a self-replicating idea cluster, and it may be even be a hindrance. Lies, simplifications and contradictions all have their uses to the organism, and every ideology has them.
There are shapes ideas must take to stick in our minds, and there are doctrines that arise in different places and times in almost the same shape. This could be evidence of either perennialism or convergent evolution.
Example of convergent evolution: Pure Land Buddhism mirrors the Lutheran idea of Sola Fide, salvation through faith alone. Pure Land Buddhists believe enlightenment (salvation) is unattainable in a fallen world, and comes instead from faith in Amitābha.
An idea hits the Darwinian jackpot when it manages to colonize an influential school or a government department of education. A scientific paradigm is one type of idea that can do this, and it obeys all the same rules as any other kind of idea.
Besides predictive power, a scientific paradigm might have properties which allow it to thrive and multiply in a govt dept of science. Eg. a hypothesis might engender a state of crisis that necessitates new departments, jobs, laws, consultants, lobbyists, and so on.
Government money-receivers want to keep existing, so both institutionally and personally, participants in them aren't capable of apprehending the counterfactual to the hypothesis that justifies them. Anyone who can is filtered and selected out as part of the evolutionary process.
This is an inextricable feature of the Vannevar Bush system: once it's captured by a dogma, it has no recovery mechanism. A scientific finding which expands bureaucratic power causes the system to replicate it, regardless of replicability.
Every scientist in the regime must also be a bureaucrat; he must know the prejudices of grant-writers and appeal to them. Those prejudices are determined by scientific consensus, which is determined by those same prejudices.
Real scientists are interested in falsifiability, but scientific theocrats are interested only in dogma. They advertise their lies as "settled science" and "consensus among scientists" but they don't even see the narrow chokepoint of govt funding through which consensus must pass.
Slowly at first, then all at once, Science that depends on state power becomes a factory that manufactures state power. Simultaneously the state evolves to launder power through Science. We can think of many examples.
No moderate or centrist view is possible once a hypothesis is entrenched in scientific institutions. No study that seeks to negate it will be funded. 97% of scientists will agree, almost as if the negation of certain positions instantly ends your career.
We see this dynamic play out with climate change, covid, with questions of race, and most strangely, with the LGBT movement. Science should not make any moral claims, should not cross the is/ought barrier, yet it now informs me that transgenders are heckin' cute and valid.
Science (big-S) now attempts to ground prescriptive claims such as "you should castrate your 13 year old son" with descriptive claims such as "clownfishes exhibit sequential hermaphroditism." Scientists refer to this as the Novum Organum.
That the regime has lost the ability to do science is a source of untapped strength for us. Dissident anons can out-predict the regime because we hew closer to reality. So we must not abandon science (small s) out of disdain for Science (big S).
Having abandoned faith and eschatology, Science has become faith, become eschatology. In these online spaces where new rival thoughtforms ferment and foment, we need to recover the sense of religious fear, so it may be overcome by religious hope.
The police are the way they are because the left continually probes at every legal and procedural boundary to try to break it. They don’t want criminals arrested, tried, convicted, or imprisoned. They attack every stage of the penal system with lawyers and lobbies to weaken them.
As a result, the system is has grown deranged in order to cling on to some semblance of effectiveness, a task which is compounded in difficulty by the criminal proclivities of certain demographics.
There is a certain level of contempt for men that no real woman would ever feel; the deepest hells of misandry are occupied exclusively by men pretending to be women.
[Communism's] not a necessary outgrowth [of Christianity] but it's a possible one, and it's the one we got. We'd like to know who/what is "really" to blame for this mess, but we'll never know.
All we can do is try to fix the problems we see, and at present the sermon on the mount is used to justify tyranny.
Anything could be used to justify tyranny, but this thing is being used to do it, and this is an important distinction. Maybe instead of "tyranny" I can be more specific: this is how progressives get christians in a rear naked choke.
My name is Zero HP Lovecraft, and it is not my real name, but nore is it a pseudonym nor a nom de plume, no no. Zero HP Lovecraft is a nom de guerre, a name assumed for a particular task, most typically (and in this case) combat. Words are weapons, and text is a battleground, this is what I believe. A common tactic in that battleground is to feign apathy: "Oh, you think words are weapons? Why do you care so much, who are you trying to impress?" This is ever the cry of the effete hipster, whose friends no doubt respect him for is insouciant, devil-may-care mediocrity.
Let me give you the tenth verse of the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. My father gave this wisdom to me when I was a young boy, when I complained of the effort of some task that was before me. I have shared it with you now, both to repudicate my critics, and in memory of him. It may be that in the current year, to honor and love your father has become a radical act.
It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, and as such, racism is a form of civil disobedience.
I'd love to be patriotic. Nothing would make me happier. But what's left to love about my country, its "democracy?" In school I learned democracy meant everyone should have a voice. But my whole life I've been told my voice doesn't count because I'm straight white and male.
Here's the America I want to live in, the America I could feel patriotic about. American flags and a closed fist. I'd be willing to fight for this empire, an America that glorifies excellence and reveres its founding stock.
But here's the America we live in, and it stands for exactly two things: sodomy and the worship of africans. Nothing else. Here are pictures of the true American flag, flying in Moscow and South Korea. Notice which one is bigger. Bonus, New York, notice which one is on top.
Last time I expressed displeasure that no one in my country represents me, a brown immigrant mocked me for having an uppity opinion like "the government should represent the people's interests" — I point out this person's provenance because that's the state of America:
Foreigners come here with no connection to our heritage or history and then shit all over both. I used to have a Pakistani boss who would openly and casually call for the disenfranchisement of white men. He would say this to my face with no self awareness, no circumspection.
But that's not racism, you see, because being a brown man he is the victim of 6 million years of structural oppression by whites, and this explains why he was the director of a department with over 500 people and earned over half a million a year.
When you live in a democracy with 300 million other people, you expect your voice to be small. A tiny sliver of a great throng. OK. But it's not even that I'm outnumbered. Our state should act in the interest of its people, but America actively subverts our interests.
When you realize you live in a "democracy" with no voice, you have two choices: the easy thing to do, the thing women and weak men do, is convince themselves that the thing the state is doing is what they really wanted. It's stockholm syndrome, it's wet streets cause rain.
"The government listens to my voice, therefore whatever the government is doing must be what I want." To be fair, the government is more than happy to encourage this delusion. We live in a propaganda state, a mediocracy and a mediocrity.
The other choice, the choice where you realize the state's actions are hostile to you, hostile to everything you hold dear, is a morass of confusion and chaos. You never quite know what to believe, never know what is true, all you know is if the state is saying it, it's a lie.
Believing "there is no political solution" will paralyze you
I saw a sign the other day that said "everything hitler did was legal"
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