Gnon Theology
I propose a short ritual for when reactionaries meet each other. You go to a church, or some nice old building. Emphasis on old, more than nice. You get there, and the master says the following string, which the apprentice is to repeat.
There is no God but Gnon. Kek is his avatar. And Jordan Peterson is a pretty good prophet.
Once that is done, the master shows a red pill to the apprentice, hands it to him. And the apprentice swallows it. No. He bites it. Munchs it. He chews it. It's hard. It's bitter. It's really hard to chew really. But at the very end it leaves an awesome aftertaste. Then Dark Enlightenment occurs.
Listen to this short clip (starts at 1:04:50), up to the end.
https://youtu.be/RcmWssTLFv0?t=1h4m57s
The Dark Enlightenment is based in evolution. This admits no discussion. Criticism of modernity on non-evolutionary grounds is just plain old reaction. Religious traditionalism. That's a thing. It's not my thing, but it's out there, even here on my comments, most often by a kinda annoying Jew. All in all it's a good thing that it's out there, annoying as it is. But there's a reason why reaction is a thing and neoreaction is another thing. Arnold Kling called Moldbug "neoreactionary" because he saw he wasn't just some plain old Crown Church and Country guy. Moldbug mentioned (not very heavily) HBD and that's about evolution. But there's more about evolutionary critiques of modernity than mentioning the biological heritage of humanity.
There's many ways that evolutionary theory shows the errors of progressivism. Let me mention 4 of them.
The basic one is that evolution shaped our brains as much as any other part of our bodies; our brains determine much of our behavior, and so much of observable behavior is inherited. See the above. Serotonin modulates animal behavior in lobsters, as much as in humans. You can't change that.
A corollary of these is that different populations evolved in geographically separate areas, adapting over tens of thousands of years to their different environments, producing basically different types of brains. And bodies, of course, but brains too. Evolution does not stop at the neck. So different human populations, and that includes what in popular speech is called races, have different types of brains. Different types of behavior. Different sorts of talents and dispositions. Steve Sailer called that HBD.
And of course a very important characteristic of life in earth, certainly of animal life, is that reproduction is sexual. There are two sexes who must copulate in order to reproduce. We call those male and female. The definition of male and female relies on the different size of the gametes. Males have small gametes: in animals we call it sperm. Sperm cells are tiny. Females have big gametes. In animals we call them eggs. Eggs are pretty big. That alone, the difference between the small reproductive cells of males and the big reproductive cells of females, already creates huge incentives for different behavior between males and females. Sperm is small, cheap to produce, easy to spread. Egg production is metabolically costly. It's basic economics. Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. Reproduction being extremely important; basically the whole point of DNA as a molecule, the very point of life; well having your reproduction mediated by cheap or expensive stuff is probably going to drive your evolution in different ways. To the extent that is possible (after all male and female DNA is mixed in every embryo), males and females are going to reproduce better if they evolve behavioral strategies that optimize how they use their gametes. And so males and females of all species behave differently. They must. Else evolution makes no sense.
This enough is very powerful. It goes against every single dogma of progressivism. Behavior has a strong genetic input. That implies races behave differently. Also that sexes behave differently. Which already by itself demolishes the very basis of progressivism. Of the Enlightenment really. Human brains aren't an blank slate. They are shaped by evolution, in different ways. Ways that matter. And ways that you cannot change.
But brains aren't the only thing that evolution shapes. And this is the fourth and most profound implication of evolutionary theory. Evolution is not only about life. Evolution is about existence. Well at it's core evolution is about conflict; evolution proves what happens when different things are in conflict and what strategies they take to win. And existence implies a conflict. Existence is in conflict with non-existence. Things that exist are here for a reason. Basically because they out-competed other things, which hence don't exist. Things exist because they work. Things that don't work cease, sooner or later, to exist. If you track how things came to exist, how they out-competed other things which used to exist, or things that might have existed; well you are doing evolutionary theory. This is of course more abstract than the very physical evolution of DNA molecules in living beings. But it is the same process all the same.
It is so abstract that can even be mapped to transcendental religion, which is why the term Gnon was coined. Gnon standing for Nature or Nature's God. Nature being that which exists. And so that which evolved. Once you understand this point you must think that everything exists for a reason. Everything exists because it works, certainly it worked until the present day. Now you may not like it that some things exist. You might want to destroy them. But before you do so you should stop and think about the evolutionary process that made them exist in the first place. Because remember, that things is there because it worked. And if the evolutionary process that put it there on there first place remains in place, then that thing will come back. Gnon will bring it back, no matter how much you hate it. No matter how utterly you destroy it, Gnon will bring it back. And you can't do anything about it.
That doesn't mean you must like everything. Or that everything always stays the same. Nature changes. I mean, Gnon changes. Evolution is a process; that implies change. Life changes. Animals change all the time. Humans also change things, and sometimes the change sticks. Human sacrifice used to be a thing. The Carthaginians sacrificed their own children. Their first bon sons. That was a thing. It happened for a reason. It evolved. It worked for them. Then the Romans conquered them and destroyed that thing; and it didn't come back. It stopped working. That's evolution too. That is Gnon's will.
The Romans destroyed other things too. They destroyed the patriarchal family. They'd rather have fun and be merry. They stopped having children. Roman hedonism was a thing. Then the Germans conquered them. Roman hedonism stopped being a thing. Rome itself stopped being a thing. Gnon brought back the patriarchal family. That one works. You can mess with it. You can destroy it for a while. Even a long while. But it will come back. Gnon will always bring it back.
So the point here is to tell what will come back and what will not. What works always and what doesn't necessarily do so. In theological terms, we must find out Gnon's will. I guess I'd translate it into Chinese as the Dao. Figuring out Gnon's will is not easy. Surely some Carthaginians might have protested about having to throw their first bon baby sons to die on the feet of Moloch. But the Carthaginian elite strongly believed doing so was Gnon's will. Turns out it wasn't. And they paid dearly for it.
And of course many Romans protested about the changes to paternal authority and general sexual morality in late Republican and Imperial Rome. But people thought that wasn't important, that Gnon's will was changing. Turns out it wasn't. And they paid dearly for it.
So you gotta be careful about every thing. And society is a thing. Culture is a thing. Every social ritual is a thing. You must understand Gnon's will if you want to survive. If you want to continue to be a thing yourself in the future. This means you need to understand why every thing exists. How it got there. How it evolved. You must understand it's history, in other words.
So in the above examples: the Carthaginians sacrificed their baby boys because many centuries back home people back in the old country in the Levant were doing their sacrifices. They had some problem, perhaps some weather problem, or some war with a neighboring tribe. Sacrificing bulls and goats as usual wasn't quite doing it; so some crazy guy. Most likely a woman actually, she threw a baby boy to the idol's altar. Then something good happened. It worked. Maybe the tribesmen saw the woman killing her baby to the tribal god, felt her strong commitment towards the tribe, which gave them courage, took them to battle, and made them win. Or maybe it was just some coincidence and it rained the next day. At any rate, the thing stuck, and ever since it became a mainstream signal of commitment to the tribe. An extremely costly, and hence strong, signal. Now signaling is also a thing. It exists for a reason. A very good reason. Signaling is important. You can't run a large human group without commitment. And you need costly signals to confirm commitment. But signals also tend to spiral for spurious reasons. Greedy people trying to gain status for themselves. Gnon doesn't like that. He doesn't care too much about it, hence peacocks. But every now and then he comes down to stop the spiral and restore order.
So child sacrifice died because it stopped working; it wasn't necessary to produce its evolutionary function of giving costly signals of commitment. Gnon came up with an alternative. The Roman error was more egregious. The Romans didn't get signaling wrong. They got something very fundamental wrong. They got family wrong. And there is no alternative for family. You can get everything exactly right and still perish because you got family wrong. The Roman Empire was a very great, long-lasting empire. It did everything right. They had the best military machine the world had ever seen. They had a very well managed urban culture that tribes all over the West eagerly adopted. They had a great bureaucratic and logistic machine. But they got family wrong. And Gnon made them pay dearly. Family exists for a reason. A permanently valid reason. Well perhaps not permanent, nobody knows the future. But certainly valid today, and likely to be valid for the foreseeable future.
The patriarchal family works. It evolved for a reason. It probably evolved separately a lot of times. There's this book called "The Inevitability of Patriarchy" which makes the point at length. Basically for a country to prosper you need men to defend it. And why would men defend the country? What's there in it for them? Well they get paid. Pretty well actually, soldiery was good job in Rome. But what do they want the money for? To raise a family. To have a wife and children. Emphasis on have. Have implies possession. Possession implies some degree of freedom of use. You have a wife so you can use her. So that she's nice to you and does things that you want. And of course the same goes for children. Children are the whole point. Children are everything. Gnon manifest his will through children. That's what evolution is.
But for some odd reason Gnon did not make men desire a wife and children in the abstract. The behavioral urges of men are somewhat indirect. Men need sex, the way they need food. A man without food for a sufficient lenght of time will stop whatever he's doing and go crazy until he finds something to eat. A man without sex will stop whatever he's doin and go crazy until he finds a suitable woman. If the woman is nice to him he'll stick around. That is the way Gnon made it. In the old days that fairly reliably resulted in surviving children. Gnon saw it and saw it was good; and so that is what men do. A man with an obedient wife and well behaved children is a happy man. A man that will fight to defend it.
Well take that from a man and he will not defend his country. Why would he? Not to say that often it isn't man that takes it from himself. Many a man would rather not stick by his wife nor care about his children; seeking random women instead. That man, if successful, might be quite happy. Happier than a married man indeed. But he won't fight for his country. He has no reason to. Which is why that man, the sneaky fucker man, is considered evil in most societies. This is a man who has no skin in the game. An unloyal man. Gnon had it so that healthy societies did not allow that kind of behavior. That's why we got fornication laws. Regulation of sexual behavior. Monogamy was one way to solve it, but not the only one. But as Gnon had it having sex with a woman who was not your legal wife or a prostitute was a punishable crime.
The Romans messed with all of that. They allowed women to not be obedient to their husbands. This destroyed the incentive for many men to stick to their wives. This destroyed their incentive to defend their country. Soon enough no Roman was willing to do so. What happens when the men of a country are not willing to defend it? Somebody attacks you; and they win. The inevitability of patriarchy. That is evolution. Gnon's will.
**********
Let me recap. I have been writing about Epistemology of late. An important theme of this blog from the beginning was why leftists believe what they do. All that obvious crap. Are they stupid? Well they obviously aren't stupid. Look at Harvard. Those guys aren't stupid. But leftist they are. They believe obviously false things. Well why?
There's two parts to the answer to that. First is that you don't know what people believe. You know what they say they believe. That's different. You can't possibly know what's going on inside somebody's head.
Second is that most likely there's nothing going on inside that head. You can't possibly have definite knowledge on anything. And there's no reason why human brains will have evolve to capture objective truth. Brains are designed by Gnon so that you could be here. That means have you survive and reproduce. That's all they have to do. It's no easy task, of course, which is why are brains are so big and complex. But caring about objective truth makes no sense, either in philosophical or evolutionary terms. What's important is to be evolutionary fit. In human terms that means to have social status. So people who want social status will say whatever it is necessary, no matter how false. And they will believe whatever is expedient. That's all that believe really means anyway; you may define it is "to have whatever mental content necessary in order to produce some particular behavior". So most people today believe that homosexuals are born that way while transexualism is a free choice. It's logically nonsensical, of course. But the point is to say that when asked, and to be able to interact with the designated victim-privilege groups as necessary.
Rationalism equates language with thought; Chomsky famously said that language's primary function is as a vehicle of thought, not communication. That's completely wrong, of course, most of the computation your brain does to keep you alive doesn't use language at all. To the extent that a minority of people tend to have extensive internal monologues, that's just conversation practice. Talking to yourself; generally in order to be ready to talk with others.
Now of course language is a huge part of how we interact socially; and much of our knowledge is social. We learn from others how to behave, how to speak. To the extent that knowledge is mediated through language; well language is a social medium. There is no meaning to language but the correlation between the use of certain words and the behavior of the people who use them. You can learn that the sun comes from the same direction every day just by looking yourself. But you will only learn the meaning of the word "democracy" by hearing somebody talk about it. I made that point also here.
Now of course humans are social creatures, we learn most of our behavior from others, which includes the entirety of our language. But what determines what society does? One way of thinking about this is that Power does. Politics does. Societies have power hierarchies. People on top can change the behavior of others, either through violence or persuasion. This seems pretty obvious. Indeed it was at the core of Chinese classical political thought. Confucius talked about how a courteous and well behaved lord could "teach" their people to behave morally. Lord Shang talked how the state could make laws that killed or tortured those who didn't behave morally. Both work, to a point. Eventually they were integrated into Imperial Confucianism, the ruling ideology for 2,000 years.
Europe was under the spell of rationalism mediated by Christianity so we didn't really get this until the Communists came by. Or I guess Hegel stumbled upon this. Experts on German idealism can contribute in the comments. But Communists soon enough realized that people do and say what they're told; and they loved the idea. They'd grab all the levels of power and change people to do what they wanted. They'd change everything, even language. George Orwell made that point very vividly when O'Brien forces Winston Smith to say that 2+2 equals 5. There is no module in your brain which contains numbers when you're born. Some forager tribes hardly have any numbers at all. The way we count, our number system is a social construct. If the state applies enough force, they could possibly change that.
But of course the problem with Communism, as well as Chinese legalism is that they forgot about Gnon. Knowledge is socially constructed alright. Power can alter society alright. But power is inside society. The powerful are also people. The state is not an uncaused agent with freedom of action. Nobody has freedom. Everything is evolved. Everything is subject to the will of Gnon. Knowledge is socially constructed alright. But the precise way in that humans acquire their knowledge from society is an evolved mechanism. And it's fixed. You can't change that mechanism. That is Gnon's mechanism. If you want to play with it you have to understand it first. You can't just tell people that 2+2=5. Partly because that sort of stuff is taught to small children and once taught it's extremely hard to alter.
You can't tell people to look at a guy with a beard and call him "ze", because the basic constructions of language are learned as a small child and they're as much a hard habit as the way you walk or jump. You can force people to drop on their knees and say what you want them to say; but you can't change habits enforced by decades of repetition. And repetition is the point; the point of pronouns is that they're very frequent, and gendered pronouns have almost equal frequency, which is why they still exist. Evolution can be seen in the natural world but it is most obvious and easy to see in language. The grammatical patterns which do not work over time disappear. You won't get people to remember a pronoun they only use while in university and when meeting 1% of the student body.
So yes, everything is socially constructed. But social constructions are evolved. And evolution follows the rails that Gnon set up. It follows our innate brain structures. Which are themselves the product of evolution, if biological, on another timescale. The social constructions which work remain in place; those that do not work disappear. And often they take the people with them. You can play with language; but it will not stick. You can play with signaling; but you may end up killing your own babies. You can play with family; but you can kill a whole people if you get that wrong.
The only way to see which social constructions follow the Will of Gnon is to look at history. To look at what existed, where it existed, and for how long. What Moldbug called "slow history". Only there you can find the Old Truths (H/T AlfaNL). Which is why Gnon's church has no priests. Only historians and biologists. And motivational speakers on tour.
109 comments
[…] Gnon Theology […]
Of course this ties also in with patchwork/neocam as system of government. States tend not to die, even when they massively screw up, thus inhibiting the evolutionary process in systems of government. Lots of states exit = shorter lifespans, shorter feedback loops, more iteration, greater success for good ideas and greater failure for bad ones.
Got a whole book on that. What do you think of exitocracy? http://theanti-puritan.blogspot.com/p/necoamerial-future.html?m=0
"Everything exists because it works, certainly it worked until the present day. Now you may not like it that some things exist. You might want to destroy them. But before you do so you should stop and think about the evolutionary process that made them exist in the first place." As much as I like screwing with spergy jews, I realize they aren't going anywhere. The question then becomes, how do we get along? Or were we never meant to? Excellent blog post, and thank you for introducing me to this man's lectures. I'll be listening to them for sure.
Separation.
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Outstanding.
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> But caring about objective truth makes no sense, either in philosophical or evolutionary terms. What’s important is to be evolutionary fit. An intelligent animal must be able to form plans and evaluate these plans against their likely outcomes. Doing this requires having a model of the world which is "objectively true" on the relevant dimensions, in that it can accurately approximate the utility of an action when the utility depends on input from Gnon. It is true that evolutionary fitness pressures might distort our representations away from objectivity, especially by making us ignore irrelevant dimension. But evolution does favor an animal having an objective model of the world, for activities as small as planning muscle movements and as large as life planning. It's less clear whether this mental model corresponds to what a human means when he talks about what he believes. But in many circumstances evolution provides a pressure for language to convey objective truth. For soldiers going into a battlefield, it is a great advantage to have accurate information about the terrain. An army that is incapable of propagating accurate information among its units will lose to one that is capable of it, ceteris paribus. In an environment highly isolated from deadly pressures, like the West for many people, then there isn't so much of an incentive for language to be accurate, and it can be used for pure social signaling. But in generally there certainly are incentives for language to be true, and for animals to have accurate mental models of Gnon.
In order to act you need to have reasonably good information concerning the environment in which you are doing that particular act. You don't need nothing as big as an "objective model of the world". People believe contradictory things at the same time all the time. A progressive can believe blacks are as intelligent as anyone else (your model to act socially) while taking your children to a white-only school (your model as a parent). Point being that models are generally ad-hoc, nothing world-scale. You're conservative about what you know best because you got a pretty close to objective model of that thing. The rest, you're barely capable of pulling that off.
This post is remarkable, because it's not just incoherent, it's incoherent on several levels, and the incoherence of each level supports the others. From biggest to smallest: 1. You want to start a new religion, but successful religions present a key set of principles which can be boiled down and transmitted easily. Even prog religion does this. If your adherents have to ingest this kind of mess, you're really limiting your reach and appeal. 2. Also, religions live and die by whether people are willing to sacrifice meaningful things for them. That goes from donating five bucks a month all the way to dying and killing for them. Who's going to be inspired by this mess enough to give five bucks? 3. Every one of your religion's truths as you describe them was a core principle of late 19th/early 20th century Progressivism, as espoused by the Fabians, Beatrice Webb, Galton, etc. If your revolutionary innovation is the return to the Progressivism of 100 years ago, this is not very innovative. It is really no different from Fox News desiring to return to the Progressivism of 70 years ago. That stage led inexorably to this one, so why return to it? 4.If you believe in the deity of nature, great. Everything natural exists for a reason, so everything can be spun as good. Flourishing (mid-Roman Republic, mid-19th century America) exists as a natural function of societies. Decay also exists as a natural function of societies. Flourishing leads to decay which leads to flourishing. Patriarchy leads to wealth and security which lead to decay and atomization and sexual chaos, which lead to collapse, which leads to patriarchy. If you have a naturalistic religion, not only do you have nowhere to stand when it comes to saying one of these states is inherently better than the others, but you have to say that any attempt to freeze this oscillation in one of these states is foolish, doomed, cursed, against nature. 5. "The brain has no ability or inclination to capture objective truth" || "Our new religion is based on objective truths like evolution" These two are mutually exclusive. Pick one. 6. People do NOT do and say what they're told. The harder you squeeze them, the more they rebel. Communists put down tens of millions of people, from the Baltic to Siberia, for exactly this propensity. If you make it hopeless for people to rebel outright, they will rebel subtly but constantly. The entire Soviet Union was comprised of people getting over and NOT doing and saying as they were told, in every sphere of life. 7. Human sacrifice is not peculiar to Phoenicians. It is a feature of practically every idolatrous society which believes its own propaganda, from pre-Columbian America to ancient Mesopotamia to India and Africa through most of their history to the modern day West. The latter both has implicit mass infant sacrifice (in the form of many millions of abortions performed at the request of women who hope to propitiate the modern deities of wealth, education, etc.) and apparently less veiled explicit human sacrifice (as hinted at in the Pizzagate scandal.) This is not some weird historical thing done by Carthaginians. It's a built in feature of human nature, which is expressed in the absence of monotheism. It does not depend on the intelligence of the sacrificing people, or their sophistication or belief in science: stupid 7th century Muslim Arabs found it abhorrent and eliminated it wherever they found it, while apparently modern-day CERN scientists do not find it abhorrent: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3746669/Human-sacrifice-ceremony-Geneva-s-CERN-laboratory-involving-cloaked-men-stabbing-woman-night-investigated-chiefs-world-famous-science-centre.html Noticing that different groups of people have different average abilities and inclinations neither requires a theory of evolution nor scientism (the belief in science and scientists as the source and arbiters of ultimate truth in all spheres of human existence.) The question is, now what? If our framework is scientism, it will take you right down the road we've taken. Fabian Socialism, with the Gates Foundation and other groups of select wealthy intelligent people, guided by science, rationally planning human existence and using the means at their disposal to create institutions to force and seduce the rest of us to conform to the plan, for our own good and that of the whole. In that case, you can only complain about the particulars of the current state of affairs, but not the general principles.
Watch the damn videos before going on yet another tirade in defense of your hostile tribal cult. And give me a fucking break. This is a blog post done overnight slightly intoxicated. I'm not publishing a bible. I'm not collecting people's money. Stop being so much of an ass or I'll stop bothering with you.
That's not a very European reaction. A real Whyte Man thanks someone who points out flaws in his argument, for making him stronger and more connected to the Truth. No? My religion is not hostile. Watched the video. Not very profound. Lobsters have serotonin. We have serotonin. You shoot a lobster up with serotonin, it acts confident. You dose humans up with serotonin reuptake inhibitors and...suicide rates do not go down, the humans start shooting up movie theaters, etc. http://www.cchrflorida.org/antidepressants-are-a-prescription-for-mass-shootings/ What have we learned from abusing the lobsters? Not very much, apparently.
BaruchK: "My religion is not hostile." Wrong. It's hostile to life. (((John 12:25))) anyone who **hates their life** in this world will keep it for eternal life It's hostile to family too. (((Luke 14:26))) If anyone comes to me and does not **hate** father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, **even their own life**\--such a person cannot be my disciple. (((Luke 12:51-53))) Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. All the creative interpretation in the world cannot cover up the anti-family, anti-life ravings of the (((Magical Rabbi.))) So why do you follow him? So you can abscond to a distant capital city in the clouds, traitor?
That's not his religion.
I realize he's from the Culture of Critique, but the Jews may as well own their Essenes cult texts, even if only Pharisaical texts, save for that singular Sadducaical text by the Qoheleth, made it into the Tanakh. Keep up your good work, spandrell.
Why should we have responsibility for your heresies? You guys decided you wanted what we had but didn't want to pay the price, so sprinkled some gnosticism on it, threw out the difficult parts, voila. Except that worldviews have consequences, which we're all enjoying now.
"You guys?" kek! “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” (((Matthew 15:24)))
Again, you guys decided to adapt one of our heresies. We immediately said that it was heresy. You picked up something we threw out and ran with it. You can't blame the results on us. Also, you write like someone who is either a teenager on Ritalin or suffering from a mental illness. This ranting, spergy style of discourse is very popular on the alt right, but I'm not a big fan. So if you want to have a conversation with me, you're going to have to make the attempt to write like an educated, mentally healthy person. Otherwise, it's just not worth my time.
Oh, I'm male, huh? Does your preference for feminine empathizing instead of male systemizing make you a limp-wrist faggot? > our heresies Like I said, the Jesus scam is from the Happy Merchants; thanks for agreeing with me. But even if it is a heresy, it compares favorably to the orthodox practice of swinging chickens over your head to get rid of your sins (Kaparot.) Maybe you ought to convert; it would be a move up.
Nice speaking with you. Watch your dosages, and look out for synergetic side effects.
The Jesus character surely had you guys nailed. Do you think it was a case of takes one to know one?
That kind of causative reductionism has to be one of the stupidest things on the far-right. What is for sure is that "excessive" evolutionism and belief in innate inequality most certainly wasn't the reason why we ended up where we are now. In fact, it was the religious impulse that led us where we are. It wasn't atheistic social darwinists that were the backbone of the Progressive movement 100 years ago. It was schizoid protestants.
They are two sides of the same coin, or different stops on the same train. Darwin came from a family of Anglican churchmen, and was a relative of Malthus. The Protestant/Calvinist idea of a minority elect of "justified sinners", who from birth can do no wrong, however much they sin, and a majority who are damned from birth, no matter how much they try to do right, leads right to the progressive idea of an enlightened scientistic elite and the mass of sheep over whom they preside, who would be better off if they'd never been born (because of their low IQ/inability to feed themselves/contribution to global warming/etc.) 100 years ago, the progressives were lead by people like Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger, etc. All these people were Fabian Socialists, believed in the same things you believe when it comes to the human condition. The centrality of evolution, the nonexistence of G-d or the soul, the ability to scientifically measure the important things about humans and assign them to proper baskets and manage them.
The strain of Progressivism that conquered the world was messianic egalitarianism (take a look at The War for Righteousness and The Great and Holy War) not darwinist socialism. These are the kind of people that would rather commit suicide than advocate for the things George Bernard Shaw advocated. And I am not defending George Bernard Shaw here, mind you. I am merely stating the facts.
If you look closely, you will notice that a moment came when Darwinist socialism assumed the form of messianic egalitarianism. You can see Herbert Spencer, for instance, spending a few weeks right before his death passing the torch to Beatrice Webb, his niece. It was just the adoption of a different toolkit for the same means. So you see the supposedly messianic egalitarians conducting eugenics programs, sterilizing people well into the 1930s, Margaret Sanger pushing birth control for the poor under a completely Darwinist rationale, etc. It's the difference between an outwardly brutal 1984-type mode of explicit control and an outwardly kind, Brave New World-type mode of pervasive, subtle and ultimately more effective manipulation (and Aldous Huxley was very much a member of this elite social group.) You can see the same people pushing free love and the dissolution of the family and community, as well as the dissociation of sex and family, both through the promotion of free universal birth control. Again, a much more effective way to physically eliminate the inferior (Malthus' laborers breeding like rabbits, who'd be better off if they'd never been born/Calvin's born reprobates.) You can see that nothing had changed beyond the cosmetic by the way that the elites treated their livestock after the supposed transition to messianic egalitarianism. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Plutonium\_Fileshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical\_human\_experimentation\_in\_the\_United\_States The people who did/commissioned all of the above stuff were Ivy League educated, and steeped in the most current Cathedral outlook. Keep in mind that to someone like Galton, Malthus or Spencer, the typical European, with his IQ of 110 or less and his parochial interests and outlook, is more or less a brute, and different from the Africans in degree, but not in kind. Their perspective on the savage Fenian with his prognathous maw and so forth more or less makes that clear. Bill Gates and Henry Kissinger, by the way, feel the same way, and for the same reason. I do not see where anything in the NRx worldview allows for a principled objection to this outlook.
The point I've been making for years now is that there is no necessary consistency to any leftist movement. So what if Beatrice Webb was Spencer's niece? She was a social striver who pushed egalitarianism, which makes no sense from a Darwinian perspective. Early Darwinians indeed wanted to use the state to push for eugenics. The common thread here is "willingness to use state power", not any consistency in what the goal of state power should be. Obviously what they wanted is state power, period, the rationale being a lofty excuse according to the zeitgeist. Progressive egalitarianism was a backlash against Social Darwinism, not it's logical conclusion. And anyway I'm not saying anything about treating the poor like livestock here. So please stop slandering in my blog with 10 comments every day. Galton had his reasons, 100 years later I have mine. And stop saying "NRx" like you're some teenager. I stand by my views, and no others', and I have not fleshed them out yet. So shut up for a second. In the meantime you can go play with your dear Ethiopian brethren.
Assuming your enemies (who you yourself agree run the world) are stupid and inconsistent is not very smart. I recommend reading Carroll Quigley and Antony Sutton's work-they did not think that Western elites are/were stupid or inconsistent. Beatrice Webb was not just Spencer's niece. She was his confidant, and they spent several weeks together before his death where he passed the torch to her. The progs of the 19th and 20th centuries were the smartest of the Europeans, armed with the best educations their societies had to offer. You do nobody any favors when you go, "oh, they were just striver airheads, no need to delve further." What makes Moldbug Moldbug is that he was able to see a cohesive picture of the development of the Prog thought framework right from Calvinism to the present day. You don't seem to have any cohesive perspective on that (and can't be expected to as long as you believe that people only think the stuff they think as an epiphenomenon of status striving.) The underpinnings of your views are basically progressive is what I'm saying.
Spandrell wrote that he is critiqued "most often by a kinda annoying Jew." "Inside every Christian is a Jew." -The Pope kek
Barkuck, it is you who accepts messianic egalitarianism, with your rejection of GNON's evolutionary HBD, and acceptance of the (((Messiah.))) "I will draw all people to Myself." (((John 12:32))) But I will not be drawn. I will not be tempted by a "Jews First!"(((Romans 1:16)))) Jewcult to be a race traitor who absconds to a distant foreign capital floating in the clouds.(((Rev. 21:2))) I won't beg like a bitch for scraps from a Jewish master's table.(((Matthew 15:21-28))) Your Jew-worshiping ilk recruits Dindus (((Acts 8:26-40))) and elevate IQ-65 Nigers to be "teachers and prophets" over your family. (((Acts 13:1 KJV))) Because you think every human being has an equal "soul" magically created by some Jewgod, that must be magically "saved" by the same Jewgod. Not me. The notion of a "soul" is as fantastical as the idea that there are 65 genders. Both notions deny biological reality. Tellingly, (((Jesus))) denied male-female biological reality when he forbade normal male-female relationships in his heavenly Jewtopia (((Matthew 22:30))) and exhorted his followers to transition to eunuch by cutting off their balls. (((Matthew 19.11-12))) GNON is America's religion, written into the DoI. We red-blooded American men, unafraid of Jewish magic, reject "souls" and reject fantastical "spiritualism," i.e.: "To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart." -Thomas Jefferson (to John Adams, August 15, 1820) Stand up like a real White man. De-Jew thyself, even if you're only a few years from death. "I am a Materialist; he [Jesus] takes the side of Spiritualism." -Thomas Jefferson (to William Short, April 13, 1820) Accept the cold embrace of Loki's daughter Hell. Re-purpose your wasted efforts for the afterlife into the real after life -- your progeny, or as the US Constitution put it, "our Posterity." That's all that matters in life, if you've fulfilled GNON's biological imperative to reproduce.
Put real simple, which is more important? 1. Saving your "soul." 2. Saving your nation. Pick one. And (((Jesus))) made it very clear you can't pick both.
And what did Moldbug say? That Progressivism logically follows from Puritanism, every step of the way? No, he said the Left was a social club. And social clubs are groups of friends, not intellectual schools. I never said the elite were stupid. They were obviously smart. Smart enough to understand that being consistent goes against their staying in the elite. Funny thing is that Moldbug's argument absolves Jews from blame about leftism, which you of course like. But you're trying to stretch it into a vindication of your religion. Well there were plenty of Jews in that social club, at least since 1848. Why were they there? I'm saying they were social strivers, which basically explains it. But you're implying that they converted ex-nihilo to a foreign religion. How convenient. Everything follows from what came before; except Jewish leftists, those came without baggage. Why shouldn't I assume that the same way early progressivism follows from puritanism, late progressivism follows from Judaism?
Moldbug said that the Left was a social club, which it is. Also, in large part, a family affair. And he also said that Puritanism naturally evolved into Progressivism. Yes, obviously Jewish leftists are conversos, with all that implies (re: insecurity and striving.) You can read Assimilation and Its Discontents for an expanded treatment. These people are quite consistent. Spencer said "exterminate the brutes." Beatrice Webb said, kill them with kindness. The Gates Foundation (and the other foundations) are doing just that. If you can't see that, it's your problem.
They advocate whatever serves their interest at the given moment to gain more power. If Progressives are "exterminating the brutes" they have been doing extremely poor job, seeing how global IQ has been falling throughout the past century.
This is your last comment this year. If you wanna keep insulting my intelligence you can do it at your blog.
(((Jesus))) was a Jewish leftist himself, who inspired Marxism. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in his text Socialism, "primitive Christianity is Bolshevism." Even when wise Europeans try to compartmentalize the worst of Jesus' teachings with creative interpretation, the poison keeps leaking through the tightest isolation efforts, with even the Pope spouting Jesus' proto-Marxist liberation theology today. "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump." Yep. But what else can you expect from the original "Low Life's Matter!" movement?
Your comment shows bias when it comes to 5 and 6. Reply to 5: He obviously means the normal, ordinary human brain and/or mind. Or he meant "ultimate truth" in the first sentence, and "observed truth" in the second. Most likely, he was thinking from a political/sociological angle, not a philosophical one. Reply to 6: I am not inclined to believe you trust in what you wrote. People — except a few seriously maladapted ones (genuine philosophers and independent minds belong in the broader class) — crave doing and saying and believing and liking and disliking exactly what they are told they should. Remember that we are a social species, as are bees ants and primates and others. Surely with cognitive dissonance, "thank you" and "thanks", and "I want equality" as replacements for growls, roars, nails, claws (which is, arguably, some great advance, but still...). The rewards for mimicking, flattering, associating with "winners" are so lavish that (because being adaptive also means liking what's convenient) there are few things if any people love more than what conforming (to those who have proved able to acquire power — those who the others too show they like to conform to). A MIT language research found that in organizations and groups the mid-tier and low-tier members gradually make their linguistic expressions more akin to the group's heads'. Now, there is, more and more so in these democratic times (the last 2-3 centuries) the socially needed faith in the substantial intellectual equivalence of everyone. It wasn't always like this. People weren't made to believe they all are equipped to interpret every thing centuries past — they weren't till it became profitable to do otherwise. So, you have to reckon with hosts such as pride and vanity, meaning you have to tell them what to think like dislike be outraged over be approving of, and do in such a way that their deep mind can happily obey whilst the ego can stay assured that it is otherwise as it needs. Have all the socially relevant academics and "artists", Hollywood and tv programmes, school and university teachers and textbooks, "influencers" and assorted VIPs, legacy newspapers and social media, gently yet unceasingly pour the governing class' serving commandments on their heads like drizzle, and see whether they'll obey or not. Heck, even "rebels" and "outliers" — people who feel good cultivating such self-conception will conform wherever not doing so is discouraged with some severity 😅. See with what care they pick the things on which to express non-conforming opinions... Vanity pride and the gameplay of repression deception and self-deception make obedience far less easier to obtain when the obeyed can be perceived as an abstract collective, rather than a single or narrow group of close people. But really, even a narrow group will do: soon as they see other members conform, they'll strive to out-conform them. And if they leave reviling the group, they'll do so to move into a larger, more successful-looking group.
That's why every commandment is imparted with preambles like "The consensus is", "The experts agree that", "The international community sees it as...", "Everyone wants...", trying to make it look as "everyone" (except Nazis Trolls Fascists and Morons and X-ists and Y-phobics and Z-ists: by who wants to be one of them?...). This works because a higher authority to obey to is deeply craved for — and it works because it's framed in such a way that the egos can gild their obedience with denial: they are obeying no-one! just facts, evidence, and what Everyone Decent agrees upon.
I thought neoreaction was libertarian computer programmers doing politics. Have you read C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity? He refers to the Dao, and argues Christianity as a religion is closest to the Dao, that's why it's successful.
Well it isn't very successful these days is it.
9 out of 10 evangelists prefer C.S. Lewis—the alternative Christ—when the Magic Jew just isn't good enough to persuade. When does he get formally inducted into the canon? kek! Yeah, Christianity has Buddhism in it, as Dr. Christian Lindtner has shown. So what? Whatever religions have been syncretized into Christianity, Christianity has been leavened with poisonous Jew worship. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. A little shit ruineth the whole punch bowl. There is no reason to worship a Magic Jew. Humans don't live forever. There is no afterlife. Get over yourself.
Awesome post. My only quibble is that I find Jim a better prophet than Jordan Peterson, but I guess history will decide.
If Jim gave video lectures I'd link to them too.
Have a look on the wiki page for religion, then scroll down to the section on definitions. You will note the reference to Westphalia. Then go to the etymology section that makes reference to Japan and the imposition of western secularism. If that makes you curious, then read "the myth of religious violence." Can you explain any of this? Now, I contend that you, Peterson and Jim have no idea what you are talking about. none at all. Neither does anyone who talks about "religion" - this includes practically everyone in the world. "Religion" appears quite clearly to be a category created by the state structure to shovel the Church and everything associated with it out of power. Here is the "religious" area that must have no connection with governance. It is private, spiritual and comprised of book X, Y and Z just like Protestantism - so the state sets up protestant "religions" everywhere, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, and here is the "secular" area which is not religion and has all the power, hence why "Atheism" is so popular and stupid shit like Darwinian Evolution is celebrated as if it is something groundbreaking and shoved in everyone's face (evolution is not a new concept, and Darwinism doesn't make a great deal of sense, again, read the wiki page for Darwinism with your bullshit filters on, tell me it doesn't honestly smell to you.) I don't know about you, but this looks like a spectacular fuck up occasioned by divided power to me. So if you talk about making a "religion" what you then mean implicitly is lets have a secular state with a pet protestant like thing called a "religion" (divided power) unless you want to incorporate it into the state, which means it is not a religion anymore and you have undivided power - no more fedora atheism and no more religion.
lol
How can you talk about subjects when you know nothing about them? and demonstrate zero desire to research them? It's hubris.
You tell me.
My religion makes the point that ego is the impediment to objective reality (Gnon). Seems relevant here.
> When your doctrine reaches the conclusion that Darwinism and evolution don't make sense > So you reject reality to save your ideology
As always, start with definitions. Evolution as a concept is pretty old, and was not invented by Darwin at all. Starting with Darwin, his theory was largely subdued until the 30-40s when neo-Darwinism and the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MES) was accepted (consensus science.) Obviously at this point Darwinism as reality has been rendered nonsensical. What Darwinism? original Darwinism? Neo-Darwinism? this is before we get into the quagmire of theoretical issues regarding selection. Darwinism has many meanings. By the time you get to Dawkins Darwin himself has been left behind. Darwin remember posited it was individual organisms and the environments effect, while Dawkins is saying it is the genome level on which selection occurs. Further to this, we can maybe note that Darwin borrowed from classical political economics for his survival of the organism among other things, and then note that liberals then obviously supported it for backing up their philosophy (given it derived from it, not a surprise.) Apparently Huxley wrote "every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism" http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/OrS.html Obviously liberalism is reality then. Case closed. Except we just noted the MES and Dawkins have already gone past the organism as the point of selection to the genome. Then we have the linked issue of altruism, with kin selection and self-interest suffering the exact same problems liberal political theory has. What is the interest? This is just a crazy mess and we haven't even come to a conclusion on any of it or explained any whys (saying "no why" is as much a metaphysical statement as positing a why.) So why has this been a political issue? Rational men discussing it would surely accepted the open nature of it all. But, we can just go back to the Huxley quote for insight on this. Church beating quite frankly. Power acting again. This whole mess has no place in questions of governance. It acts as a hallucinogen, not as tool of clarification.
Dude, you need to talk more with others and less with yourself. You're getting more and more unintelligible as time progresses. You have a very weird conception of scientific theory. Scientific theories are not revelations. They're imperfect insights. If the insight is the same, we keep the name, if the insight fundamentally breaks down, we throw out the name. Einstein thrashed the original insight, hence the name change. Darwin's original insight still applies, so we keep the name. Of course Darwin didn't get the whole picture, and got somethings wrong. Duh! It's fucking hard to formulate Darwinism without genes, DNA, and so on. So what? The essence of the idea is still the same. In fact, if you go back and read Darwin's work, it's incredible how correct he got things. Anyway, the core insight is cybernetic. Only those things that survive, reproduce, and therefore pass their hereditary info down ultimately matter. Only survival matters. Governments, like everything that exist, are cybernetic systems. They evolve. Their every aspect is subject to survival. Religion is a human adaptation that has many aspects and functions, one of which is facilitating in group cooperation. It observably incurs massive fitness advantage when done correctly. It kills you when you mess it up. Saying 'religion' is a fake concept to beat the church with won't make it disappear. It observably describes aspects of human existence, and it's subject to Darwinism. Calling things you don't understand 'crazy mess' doesn't make them so. Darwinism is the law that governs existence, not just biology. Hence you have to take it into account in ALL MATTERS, including governance, lest you lose your mind and start chanting 'imperium in imperio' ceaselessly. Whinging endlessly about muh librulism, and how people should stop dividing sovereignty is what you get when you don't subject your ideas to the filter of Darwinism. Pleas are not arguments, nor are they actionable plans.
"Only survival matters." - Why? Everything else you write hangs on this. "Governments, like everything that exist, are cybernetic systems. They evolve. Their every aspect is subject to survival. Religion is a human adaptation that has many aspects and functions, one of which is facilitating in group cooperation. It observably incurs massive fitness advantage when done correctly. It kills you when you mess it up. Saying ‘religion’ is a fake concept to beat the church with won’t make it disappear. It observably describes aspects of human existence, and it’s subject to Darwinism." <---This. The feeding back of Darwinism and this whole collection of assumptions back into politics is absurd. This get worse when you consider the massive influence classical political economics appears to have had on Darwin's theory. It's assumptions fed into X that get put back into Y and then Y cheers it as being obviously correct! "It observably incurs massive fitness advantage when done correctly." to what? to whom? "Saying ‘religion’ is a fake concept to beat the church with won’t make it disappear. It observably describes aspects of human existence, and it’s subject to Darwinism." Religion is a concept with a history which would make no sense to every society before the advent of the modern state. We can really cut to the chase. You have a series of categories provided by the conflict between power centers in the early modern period, and you take these as objective reality not subject to historical contingency. This is really the core of liberalism. Protestant Sola Scripture, Empiricism, Classical Political Economics, Darwinism - all manifestations of this same thing. It all falls apart at the slightest push.
Dude I know everything is politics but not everything is politics. If you don't get it go comment somewhere else.
https://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/adam-smiths-invisible-hand-and-charles-darwins-natural-selection/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227407307\_The\_Influence\_of\_Scottish\_Enlightenment\_on\_Darwin's\_Theory\_of\_Cultural\_Evolutionhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/228246862\_Hayek's\_Theory\_of\_Social\_Evolution\_in\_the\_Light\_of\_Darwin's\_Descent\_of\_Man
ReactionaryFuture, you'd do well to read David Sloan Wilson's text Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2002). The questions you ask are addressed within.
I think I get what you're saying; which is not easy because you make no attempt whatsoever to make yourself understood. Yes, sure, the Theory of Evolution was discovered in a particular time, under a particular political environment; and sure, Evolution was promoted and made famous because there was a political constituency which found it useful to pounce against the Church and the forces of traditionalism of a sort. So yes, The Theory of Evolution was at that time a weapon of liberalism. So what? You're using old Chinese reasoning here. You have to judge scientific theories by their actual scientific claims, not just attack their political motivations. By that token Newton was a mystical weirdo who spent more time thinking about angels than about gravity. I don't like mystical weirdos; should I argue that gravity is nonsense? It's patently not. It makes logical sense, it works, and it's observable. If you're trying to say that you have this reactionary Absolutist movement and that in order to pursue your political goals it behooves you to deny Evolution and anything that was ever writte after 1650; well that's your right I guess. But that's retarded and I want nothing of that in this blog.
"Why? Everything else you write hangs on this." Entities that exist in the present determine the future completely. So things that fail to exist are irrelevant to future. Those things that don't survive cease to exist. Time flows in one direction (only future matters). Hence, only survival matters. "Religion is a concept with a history which would make no sense to every society before the advent of the modern state." I don't see an argument here. Even if we assume it's true, what does this have to do with anything? "to what? to whom?" To the gene pool of course. " It all falls apart at the slightest push." You keep saying that, but I don't see any arguments. To understand and describe reality, I use many concepts that may or may not have been conceived by "liberalism", in the absurdly broad sense that you use it. If you want me to stop using certain concepts, 'libruls came up with it' won't do. You'll need to actually articulate what's wrong with it.
"Entities that exist in the present determine the future completely. So things that fail to exist are irrelevant to future. Those things that don’t survive cease to exist. Time flows in one direction (only future matters). Hence, only survival matters." The obvious problem with defining fitness as survival is that it renders "survival of the fittest" trivial. What is fit, survives. What is fit? Whatever survived. No explanatory power, no predictive power. It's also wrong. Are mosquitoes fit? Yes, because they exist. Would they have been fit if we'd decided to exterminate them? No, because they wouldn't have existed then. That's, of course, nonsense; in this scenario, their existence does not in any way depend on their fitness, it depends on our decision to not exterminate them. Human intent enters the picture and survival no longer equals fitness.
Indeed. Which is why you cannot derive and ought from an is. At most you can browse for workable oughts by inferring from what is and has been. But ultimately it's an arbitrary decision we have to make.
@pdimov "The obvious problem with defining fitness as survival is that it renders “survival of the fittest” trivial. What is fit, survives. What is fit? Whatever survived. No explanatory power, no predictive power." You're conflating different time horizons. A phenotype that's fit over 100s of generations is not necessarily so over 10 000s of generations. When we say survive, we can mean survival of a single generation, survival of a group over many generations, all the way up to survival of an evolutionary branch on the phylogenetic directed acyclic graph. "Sucks for the that phylum but we won." Also evolutionary theory has very little predictive power since it's describing a chaotic system. It's value as a scientific tool comes from the fact that it can be used as a negative test, in other words, as a critique. It won't positively construct futures for you, but you know that things are certain to fail if they don't meet basic Darwinian criteria. In this sense, 'only survival matters' means, 'things that don't survive, don't matter'.
"Saying ‘religion’ is a fake concept to beat the church with won’t make it disappear." That's not what he's been saying, or at least not what I understood him of saying. The point is that the word religion meant something - the system of shared beliefs, rituals and norms of a society - and now means something else. Religion (original meaning) is inseparable from the society, it's what makes a group of people a society, it's how you tell whether a person belongs to the society or not. It's essential. By the new meaning, however, you can supposedly have several religions within the same society, religious freedom, religious tolerance, and other similar stuff that is completely nonsensical by the original meaning. Religion has been reduced to the inessential. This does not exactly contradict what Spandrell's saying though, so it's possible that I have misunderstood one or both of them.
@pdimov His point is that 'religion' as a concept is modern. It didn't exist before 16th century or so (I don't know if it did, this is RF's claim). So he's saying that it's just like the word "racism" is to progs: an anti-meme to warp your thinking. "Racism" too is a very new word. It starts appearing in books after 1920s as Moldbug mentioned once. What RF doesn't seem to get is that, the reason we stopped using "racist" as a relevant category is not that it was invented by Trotskyites, but because its implicit moral system and teleology is absurd. (I get that it's not exactly smart to ever use your enemy's moral frame, but I won't stop using words or concepts just because X invented it, you need to argue why it's bullshit). We use the word 'religion' to talk about how humans use costly signals, in particular, signals that demonstrate their belief in, and allegiance to obviously false, or at the very least, untrue things, as an adaptation that solves coordination problem. If RF thinks this is bullshit, let's see arguments.
Religion is a modern concept? Not so much. The Anglo-French word religiun dates from the 11th century CE, which is based on the Latin word religio, which Cicero used in the 1st century BCE. To be sure, the ancients' concept of θρησκεία (religion) is just like ours. I'll quote Plato (4th century BCE,) who in turn is quoting a passage from Homer (7th or 8th century BCE,) as follows:
Say amen, put your hands on the radio.
Stupid shit like Darwinian Evolution? kek! So you've revealed yourself as a very stupid creationist, just like today's Liberal Creationists, who think every soul has equal worth before a magical Jewgod. That puts you in the same boat as the Cultural Marxists. Liberal humanist values are merely a "hollowed-out version of a theistic myth" as John Gray notes, among other notable scholars, e.g.: "The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in the free and eternal souls. Without recourse to eternal souls and a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual Sapiens. [...] The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God." p. 231 --Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. (Harper Collins, 2015) "In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values." p. 297 --Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. (Basic Books, 2009) The way out of today's cultural marxism's magical equalism-before-society, which is just a repeat of equalism-before-skydaddy, is a recognition of differences in humans, i.e, human biodiversity, a.k.a., evolution.
Well if you want to openly acknowledge "differences in humans" you have to at least do away with democracy, and even that wouldn't be enough. Widespread fear, I think, would be required. And I'm not sure any of us (or you) would really want that.
I admire your skepticism about evolution. But to be skeptical of evolution and then accept creationist tales from desert tribes is a little like "straining at gnats and swallowing a camel," don't ya think? Run out of skepticism when you take a hit off the Jewbook? Are you also skeptical of atomic theory? It has been experimentally confirmed only in the last couple hundred years, and has been through many models that are now obsolete (like evolution) and was first proposed by Epicurus' the third Elementary Principle, namely, "The universe consists of atoms and space." But St. Paul not only mocked atomic theory, he made his salvation scheme falsifiable, by making his concept of the body's "soul" dependent upon matter not being made of atomic elements, as DeWitt demonstrates here:
Who said I was a creationist? I am merely pointing out that Dariwinian Evolutionary theory faces precisely the same problems as liberalism - if you have no context to explain self-interest, you can't explain self-interest. The issue of inclusive fitness really takes the piss in this regard (and is not strictly Darwinian.) Not the individual organism, but the gene? ok. So we should act in the gene's interest? or the organism's self-interest? what is the interest? what have we explained? So how about those political theorists citing Darwin as "simply reality" flesh this out? and I don't accept it as "reality" TM, instead it appears to be assertions of liberal assumptions under a "science" TM mask. It is really one way of interpretation which is always altering and has other interpretations. As for atomic theory, this is a bad example (and it always surprises me how much politics boils down to epistemology.) In basic physics/chemistry elements are shown as atoms but this is not accurate at all. Particles (as posited by quantum mechanics) behave as packets of waves in this scientific model. String theory applies a completely new model to explain the same phenomena. No doubt in future a new model will develop, and that will become "reality" TM.
Why would you purport that there is "no context to explain self-interest" in evolutionary psychology? Sure there is. • Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Harvard University Press, 1996) • Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton University Press, 2006) • Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago University Press, 2010) • Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. (Basic Books, 2012) Evolution is a fact. Evolution also has a "theory" to explain those facts. Gravity is a fact. Gravity is also a "theory," and there is much we don't understand yet about gravitational theory. Are you going to jump off a roof while you critique gravitational theory's shortcomings? Have fun with that. As for the atomic theory, if it is somehow a bad ample, then take it up with St. Paul, because he mocked the idea of atoms (more than once) as antithetical his soul-salvation scam. Atoms exist, souls don't, per Paul's falsifiability of his scam. You're playing skepticism games about nature to protect a super-natural belief system about which you dare not question with even a modicum of the same skepticism. I've seen your game over and over; it seems useful to you, because it ameliorates your mortality salience. If this post makes you feel aggressive against thinkers like me, I even know why.
How do all the authors define good and bad? What framework are they using? Kantian? Hume? Rawls? is this an epistemological ethics? what? If these are the self-interest evolution of altruism crap as their book blurbs indicate then you are ignoring the philosophical and conceptual issues behind this. "to protect a super-natural belief system" what are you talking about?
A Heinleinesque framework*—one that takes a functional amygdala** to grasp. ____*"I now define 'moral behavior' as 'behavior that tends toward survival.'" —Robert Heinlein, James Forrestal Memorial Lecture, United States Naval Academy, April 5, 1973 westernrifleshooters.blogspot.com/2008/03/pragmatics-of-patriotism.html **"Wonder why we think stealing is wrong? A few million years of this will do the trick..." anonymousconservative.com/blog/k-selected-darwinism-produces-morality/
Do you have a supernatural belief system or not? I've never yet argued with somebody who attacks evolution who does not believe in one. Is it the one where the dear leader of the cult wears a mitre with a Satanic Hexagram (Star of David)? "I, Jesus, have sent My angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the bright Lucifer." --(((Revelation 22:16)))
Humans, or "peoples" whatever that word means, rather do not have to believe in objective truth indeed, the Greeks had a word for this, they can very well be coerced through either physical violence or intense psychological terror, that is what the Humanities currently under control is, an instrument of terror, so proficient that the target organism(s) can be made to self terminate over a long enough time period, to believe that 2 2=5; i.e. a modern absurdity, however the trouble with such a belief is that complex computation become impossible, infrastructure becomes impossible beyond the most primitive domicile, much less a crude crossing, and everything, mostly resets to the base. Which I suppose is hunky dory to the Progressive, since the current set up is "not fair", whatever that means. I know, I know, no one believes 2 2=5, yet, but I was using that as an example, you can fit any Progressive pet theory into that scenario and the outcome is the same. Stifling, naked, ignorance, darkness, desperation and death, This of course has somewhat do with HBD, and somewhat to do with Gnon, but mostly it has to do with Philosophy, which some in Neoreaction are attempting to flee from. Aristotle laid the ground work for this, others expanded upon it. I thought we moved beyond this, it is fine to have Gnon in the corner as the guy who brings in the stool to sit on. Civilisations/masculine can be made to learn things, only societies/feminine troublingly can be made to unlearn them, but Philosophy is your coach, without it then we are animals stumbling from one catastrophe to another, and if a certain people wish to exist in the future, past say 2050, they would do well to remember this. HBD can only get the ass to the well, but can it make it drink?
You speak of humans being controlled by "intense psychological terror." True, as Terror Management Theory (TMT) has demonstrated. We're afraid of death, and concoct all sorts of stories to ameliorate our terrific mortality salience. Epicurus, the true father of the GNON concept (via Lucretius' De Rerum Natura) took away the sting of death. "Death is nothing to us." Thus, many of Western civilization's ancients' epitaph read "Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo." Still, the Happy Merchant tries to deny biological reality sell you an afterlife insurance policy for your magical "soul," if you'll only kowtow to a Magical Rabbi. Accessible and excellent resources on Terror Management Theory follow, praise GNON: • The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death (TED Talk by Stephen Cave) youtube.com/watch?v=PB7xs7UpIfY • Flight from Death (Ernest Becker Foundation Documentary) youtube.com/watch?v=9Hi1C4NNnV4 If you have enough humility to accept GNON's plan for your life, you don't need the Happy Merchant's cheap afterlife trinkets. • A Quiet Ego Quiets Death Anxiety: Humility as an Existential Anxiety Buffer academia.edu/5508505/A_Quiet_Ego_Quiets_Death_Anxiety_Humility_as_an_Existential_Anxiety_Buffer "GNON, it's hard to be humble, when you're perfect in every way!" kek
Spandrell, not one of your strongest posts IMO. Love your work though. You've had a tendency lately to fall back on concepts like "natural" or "signaling" which are too broadly defined to be really applicable to the specific phenomenon being described, and they're also not succinct enough. Your older posts were more insightful as a result. For example, this post could be described succinctly as: "There are rules a society must follow in order to flourish, which can be seen across cultures and across different historical periods. Once a society disobeys these rules, they inevitably devolve into chaos, corruption, and failure. One of these rules, shown over and over again, is that patriarchal societies are a required component of a society's success, and the weakening of this institution is a strong signal of it's impending downfall." What's all this ridiculous talk about Gnon as a God? Stay rooted in the real world, please. With all due respect this lofty and unclear verbosity was the mark of late stage Moldbug.
Gnon is staying. But yes, I'll try to be more brief when I flesh his out later.
If Gnon is staying, might I suggest this as your God? "'God' is the specific and definable rules a society must follow in order to flourish, based on human nature -- a nature which is difficult to decipher but which can be gleaned by tracing repeating phenomenon across cultures and different historical periods. "Flourishing" in this sense means an expansion of a culture's territory, power, and influence both (i) vis a vis other cultures and (ii) in achieving objective technological advancement versus what came before. Following these natural rules results in society flourishing, and disobeying them ultimately results in chaos, corruption, and failure. It is the goal of this blog to decipher these rules in the hopes of it propagating to a larger audience, and serving as a realist alternative to Islam (which can be very successful in the first (i) sense of flourishing but *never* in the second (ii) sense) in the vacuum of a dying Christianity."
Yes, that's pretty much where this is going. Stay tuned.
Isn't this just another term for 'Natural Law'?
And here's where Jim's ethics come in.
The length is fine.
Talk about Gnon as a God is ridiculous? Have you not heard of the Declaration of Independence? Do you think it's ridiculous too? • "Deus, sive Natura" (God, or Nature) -- Spinoza • "Nature's God" --Declaration of Independence Some historical background you're lacking:
Matthew Stewart (2014) Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. W.W. Norton & Co. mwstewart.com/books/natures-god/ David Voelker (1993) Who is Nature's God? The Hanover Historical Review. history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhr93_1.html
"Experts on German Idealism" well memed my friend
I prefer the "Gods of the Copybook Headings", but I'll give it a pass. A little better humor and some more references to your rum and this is quality Last Psychiatrist stuff.
I really think you would benefit from a close reading of the Pentateuch, applying this filter. There is nearly no gap between the G-d of Abraham and Moses and Gnon. The Shema is almost certainly the declaration you are heading towards (there is only one G-d, and he is *ours*). It's a good declaration, which is why it's lasted. The laws of the Torah are, at their core, guidelines to help people behave as though they understand what you're saying, even when they don't. Obviously, nature prefers friction, and wealth pushes that friction into the realm of pure signaling, so here we are. Fortunately, Torah provides an answer to this very challenge.
You have to judge a religion by its results. And the results of Judaism are (1) its adherents constantly being kicked out of every country they inhabit over the long term due to enormous hatred by outsiders (across many cultures and time periods), (2) constant pogroms keeping its population small also due to enormous hatred by outsiders, and (3) bitter and incessant infighting by its adherents (which is still manifest today in Israel and in the diaspora). Judaism is no religion of gnon although it's fourth quality, longevity in spite of 1-3, is interesting.
As you allude, our main result is that we survived where hundreds of other nations rose and disappeared. And not as an irrelevant fossil, like the Assyrians of Iraq, but as a vital nation. And came back to our Land and possessed it. The fact is that every distinct, successful minority eventually gets massacred/expelled by the majority. See: Huguenots, Overseas Chinese in SEA, etc. We are different because we survived.
Survival is a necessary but not sufficient element of gnon. Thriving is just as important. 20 million Jews worldwide means they are no further away from elements 1-3 above, and Israel's survival as a country is utterly reliant on the US's continued support. It's a very precarious position to be in.
The Pentateuch needs a helicopter ride. "Ecclesiastes is the only charming book ever written by a Jew." -Ernest Renan (1823–1892) And Ecclesiastes turns the JewG-D of the Pentateuch on his damned head; Ecclesiastes is an heretical/apikoros/Epicurean book, which echoes an ancient title "Vanity of Glories" written by Themista, a disciple of the materialist Epicurus. The author of Ecclesiastes believes in a GNON-like deity, much like Epicurus did, one who does not deign to interfere in the affairs of mankind. "Be not overly righteous." "Time and chance [darwinian evolution!] happens to them all." "A man hath no preeminence above a beast: [evolution again!] for all is vanity." Forward to the present, the United States was founded by an Epicurean. "I am a materialist," and "I too am an Epicurean," wrote Thomas Jefferson, who also wrote GNON (Nature's God) into the DoI. You'd do well to read "De Rerum Natura" (The Nature of Things) by Lucretius, whose long-supressed text single-handedly carried the ancient Epicurean concept of GNON into the Enlightenment era. A good historical review on how this happened is "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" by Stephen Greenblatt is a great read, although it should be rather titled, "how Europe Became Epicurean Again." Praise GNON and hear his laughter through KEK!, oh my children. Fail thee not to meme Pepe's mockery of liberal/cuckservative creationism. Swallow thy red pill now.
Your ego is interfering with your adherence to your own standards. The Pentateuch is part of the three primary monotheistic religions, two of which have conquered pretty much the whole world. It clearly confers an enormous amount of fitness, and figuring out why is of critical importance. It is in no way inconsistent with any concept of Gnon, and arguments to the contrary, from either side, are mere status whoring.
MacDonalds and Pepsi have conquered the world (except for North Ikea.) Don't let your Lego get in the way of admitting that the Almighty Dollar clearly confers a more enormous amount of fitness.
Furthermore, GNON is clearly pantheistic. The Pentateuch clearly is not, and rejects the concept of GNON. That is why the Pentateuch-following Jews tried to murder Spinoza for writing "Deus, sive Natura."
>Things that exist are here for a reason. Basically because they out-competed other things, which hence don’t exist. Things exist because they work. One could object here that it does not seem to be true for the lifeless mass that makes up 99.9999999999% of the universe. Stars or interstellar gas doesn't work. Nor compete. The keyword here is that it is only true for thing that can be copied. Copying is what makes all this possible. Of course everything that actually matters from a human viewpoint is something that is copied. Competition is a competition in who, which one gets copied. Wrote more about it in: https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/copying-is-everything/ I know and probably you too do many excellent little restaurants in Europe. Typically their owners own only that one restaurant. I.e. what does not happen in Europe and yet it happens in America all the time is to leverage that it into making a chain, making a franchise. In other words, American restaurant owners are not necessarily better than European ones at cooking or other skills, but they are better at _copying_ i.e. taking their first restaurant, extracting a DNA from it and injecting it into another thirty, making a chain, making a franchise. This is something I always admired, something we need to learn. Thus, copying itself can be a distinct competitive skill in itself. I.e. it is not that the best simply wins the competition. Rather that competition exists in copying, in who gets copied, and copying itself is a distinct skill too. Maybe reactionaries need to learn copying, need to think in franchise, chain, propagation. An entity that was optimized for copying and not much else is, if I am not mistaken, called a virus. Maybe being viral is a skill to learn. We cannot just expect the best to win, the best AND most viral wins.
There is a song about Gnon (with the ridiculously long title, yeap) You Get An 'A' for Effort, But Burning a Pile of Physics Books Won't Curry Favor With the Gods of Construction. It Will Only Piss Off the Laws of Nature This is not flight said the dove This is merely falling from high above Can't stop the seas from swelling Can't stop the waves from crashing in The decay that owns your cliff is growing On where you perched your perch my friend This is not flight said the dove This is merely falling from high above In a cage, flapping its wings Pretending to be aloft while waiting for what the ground brings Reality can be painful For those who build foundations on hope and sand Once glimpse of heaven can't deny That all sandcastles wash away in the end Gravity cares not for your plans Or for your goal to stay on the dry land You may be granted a reprieve but ultimately The fall is long, the stop is short my friend https://sadbastardbookclub.bandcamp.com/track/you-get-an-a-for-effort-but-burning-a-pile-of-physics-books-wont-curry-favor-with-the-gods-of-construction-it-will-only-piss-off-the-laws-of-nature
I'm not sure why everyone is so worked up by this post. Seems reasonable to me. A different take on the scarcity of eggs and the abundance of sperm. Japanese scientist have raised mice by taking skin cells and turning them into stem cells, then eggs. They then fertilize these cells with sperm. Oops, turns out it's sperm that is the trigger for turning cells into zygotes. The success rate is up to 24 percent. Those mice have in turn been breed with regular mice and there seems to be no problem with them. Normal mice. They said there is no problem doing the same with humans. http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/10/baby-mice-created-from-skin-cells-and.html So eggs can be made from any old cell but sperm is the necessary ingredient to create a zygote...life. Feminist are really, really going to like this.
I liked the child sacrifice example. Things exist because they work, but what about short run vs. long run. What works for 100 years may not work for 500 years. Consider fractional reserve banking as an example. Suppose society A has hard money, while society B has easy money. In the short run society B can borrow and conquer A economically or even militarily, while in the long run B's strategy is unsound. It is easy to become pessimistic and proclaim that we are doomed as Derbyshire says, but we are getting a handle eon what goes wrong. Some people like to claim that society is doomed because of entropy, but entropy only applies to a closed system. All systems in which feedback loops operate tend to oscillate. The periodic rise and fall of civilization is simply the result of these feedback loops operating. Thomas Malthus was one of the first to observe this and his observation about the cyclical rise and fall of population is a glaring example of feedback resonance in humanity. Many other feedback loops operate in society. Democracy is destructive because it is a a positive feedback loop. (self reinforcing) Civilizations fall cyclically, but once we understand why we can engineer partial solutions. Negative feedback can be built into systems and damping can be applied. We are not doomed, but we have much work to do.
[…] been fleshing out the reason for why we need one, and what kind of religion we should get. This was an approximation, expect more of this to […]
Spandrell, how closely do your ideas on GNON parallel those of William Pierce's Cosmotheism?
I've no idea who that guy is. And I instinctly dislike anything with the word cosmos in it.
Cosmotheism is race-realist pantheism.
You make it sound like good ol' pantheism was blank slatist.
Ernst Haeckel was an exception. :)
[…] is really fantastic here with an apology for Gnon Theology. I cannot possibly excerpt this article with any justice, but a few samples are in order. For […]
[…] A religion has to be in tune with Gnon’s theology in order to thrive among the people. Jesus’ message of love was very effective when people lived in closed communities and cared for their neighbours. But modern transportation methods makes us all potential neighbours and some neighbours just don’t go together very well. Jesus telling you you should love your neighbour is in this sense not a strength but a weakness to be exploited by those who wish harm upon you. Which is exactly what is happening. […]
[…] Gnon Theology. A winner almost any other week of the year. This was a superb re-articulation of the principles of […]
Well, your Gnon prophet appears to have accepted the position https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixc9i1G7eew
Glory to Kek.
[…] Evolution, survival, and patriarchy. […]
[…] now famous psychology professor from Canada, about his philosophy of life. I wrote about him here and here and […]
[…] here’s a great take on Gnon by Spandrell. See if you like […]
Whoa! That was a nice post. > There’s many ways that evolutionary theory shows the errors of progressivism. I disagree a bit on this: first, progressivism is not an ideology but a disease, or rather the symptom of a disease that is a bit like a contagious cancer of the mind that generates whatever ideology it requires. Other metastasis would be the cult of reason, the enlightenment, communism, etc. So, I think arguing that progressivism is “wrong” is like arguing with a tumor. It isn’t gonna care much about what you say… Of course you think progressivism is wrong, it’s there to kill you, that’s what it’s for! Anyway, cancer occurs when one of your cells decides it’s gonna play the evolution game too, then it mutates and finds a way to reproduce and take over, and then you die, and it dies with you… does it always? No! Tasmanian devils have invented the contagious cancer of the face, which they spread by biting each other’s faces off as these cuddly animals love to do. Coming soon to a backroom near you: contagious cancer of the rectum, package deal with super-AIDS. But I’m digressing. IMO, the disease has been there for millenia: some envious bastard in your civilization decides it’s unfair that everyone else has it better than them, so they invent an ideology to justify making everyone equally miserable, and then it spreads, and next thing you know, gulags sprout everywhere. Communism is extremely successful in that regard, it works perfectly at making everyone either miserable or dead. Very reliable, proven track record. Communism always works! Those that say it never works don’t get what it is actually supposed to do. If you try thinking like a psychopath, communism makes perfect sense. Bioleninism seems insane too, but it is exactly the kind of stuff a psychopath would invent while signing some prisoner execution forms during breakfast. And if you try thinking like a psychopath, progressivism also makes perfect sense, yeah, it’s an ideology to kill you, great! Hmm, should I check “by hanging” or “decapitation” or “other, please specify...” let’s get creative. I mean, so many people play whackamole and DEBUNK progressives with FACTS, but as soon as you smash one head, another one pops out, the progs don’t care, it doesn’t work. In fact, debunking their “arguments” makes them find more efficient arguments: it helps the disease evolve. Now, there’s a book… a team of rogue Polish psychologists living under communism decided to study the insanity of their own government, in secret, and they name their new science “the study of evil” aka Ponerology. The book is hard to read and not well organized, but the material is in there and I’m sure you’re going to find it fascinating. I would love to read your take on it. “Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)” by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. You can get it on amazon. Bonus: http://www.ponerologynews.com/psychopathy-adaptive-strategy-vs-mental-disorder-debate-evolutionary-journal/#more-318