The glib answer to how to avoid falling victim to the Dark Arts is to just be right, and not let counterarguments change your mind. Occlumency, if you like.
One problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which you describe but don’t call by name: rebutting narratives through analyses of individual claims is infeasibly expensive. But far worse is answering the wrong question, letting the enemy choose the battlefield. Sticking with the war in Ukraine for an example, it’d be like answering the question of why Russia would blow up its own pipeline (Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortés burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin?) instead of saying, “Wtf? No, it’s obviously the US.”
As I said, I don’t know how one can consistently recognize traps like this. It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
To clarify my point about the Snake Island massacre: yeah, I think the audio was legit too. No, I believe the Ukraine government knew they were alive (or at least had good reason to think so), and pretended otherwise for propaganda reasons. Can I prove this? No, I don’t in fact have access to high-level military intelligence. This is the trap I’m warning against! Getting bogged down trying to ascertain exactly what the Ukrainian military knew and when they knew it is missing the point, which is whether or not they’re incentivized to deceive you, and so whether you should trust anything they say, one way or the other.
The same goes for your ad hoc determinations of which states are “legitimate,” based on considerations of “international law,” your personal moral views regarding “democracy,” and expedients of maintaining US hegemony. You’re answering the wrong question. Happily, in this case, I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
As I said, I don’t know how one can consistently recognize traps like this. It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
It is exceedingly difficult, but it can be learned. Unfortunately libertarianism (I get anarcho-capitalist vibes from you but I could be wrong) is itself captured by one of these traps, being basically a way of subverting leftism and turning it against itself. If you’re curious, the Austrian school was “pure” in a sense up to and including Mises, but then Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by Mises and wrote Atlas Shrugged, which is a brilliant book but also profoundly flawed, in no small part because its sociology is basically Marxian. Rothbard, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, then made Austrolibertarianism into a revolutionary ideology rather than a reactionary one. That is a trap.
I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
Non-aggression principle? My own principle is best formulated by Alexander Pope: For forms of government let fools contest, whichever governs best is best (slightly paraphrased), or alternatively, the old Catholic doctrine: error non habet ius. There are correct and incorrect principles of government; correct governance is always legitimate; incorrect governance never is.
Embrace the light side. The liberal establishment is not an establishment at all; it is an interregnum by edgy rebels who are against the establishment, ie. the ancien régime. Revolution, like Protestantism[1], is a disease of the soul.
It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
I can now return to this. The way to resist these artificial narratives is to simply learn to recognise archetypes in general. Archetypes of revolution, of patriarchy, of dark side epistemology, and so on. You will be able to see all the false narratives from the outside, as part of a larger worldview that subsumes them all.
I would love to do a quick rebuttal of libertarianism from a Carlylean standpoint, but unfortunately this is one of those issues where bullshit asymmetry applies. I can give a few pointers, however: libertarian theory is basically correct in its refutations of progressive economic policies, but there is a case to be made for political economy where the goal is something other than the maximisation of current GDP — averting the problem of the zero marginal product of labour, for example, by making labour artificially scarce. Yes, that is a tax and diminishes the productivity of the economy in the GDP sense, but it will nevertheless be conducive to general flourishing because productivity and flourishing, though aligned, are not the same. Mises understood this distinction, hence his insistence on keeping his economic theory descriptive only. Rothbard did not understand, being not quite on par with Mises. If you doubt this, just look at their faces to see which one was the greater man. As your name seems Indian to me, I would also recommend Late Victorian Holocausts as a helpful refutation of libertarianism.
I realise that various aspects of this comment are likely to be irritating. It is somewhat patronising and consists of various pointers and hints but not any actual arguments. I am making it because you stand out to me as someone who is a lot smarter than a typical member of this community, and you deserve the chance to take it to the next level by discovering the world entirely outside of the revolutionary bubble, rather than merely the ideologies at its periphery. It is presumably clear to you that OP is stuck inside a bubble like in the Matrix which you have broken out of. Problem is that it’s a Matrix within a Matrix.
How to recognise traps? Break through all the layers of the bubble and all the traps will be as overtly parochial as OP’s post is.
Not intended as an endorsement of Catholicism, but Catholicism is merely incorrect. It is not a psychic illness that distorts its believers’ views of absolutely everything, including secular matters, the way that Protestantism does. Anarchism, incidentally, is a culturally Protestant ideology.
The glib answer to how to avoid falling victim to the Dark Arts is to just be right, and not let counterarguments change your mind. Occlumency, if you like.
Well, yes, but I’m unsure if this is too helpful. Part of the intention behind my post was to distill what I viewed as potentially useful advice. Do you have any? If not, that’s fine, but I’m unsure if it’s too valuable for the readership.
One problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which you describe but don’t call by name: rebutting narratives through analyses of individual claims is infeasibly expensive. But far worse is answering the wrong question, letting the enemy choose the battlefield. Sticking with the war in Ukraine for an example, it’d be like answering the question of why Russia would blow up its own pipeline (Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortés burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin?) instead of saying, “Wtf? No, it’s obviously the US.”
I think I can take issue with this logic. Ukraine can benefit from German economic ties being severed from Russia. Russia can benefit with Germany hydrocarbons being depleted further (part of Russian strategy was restriction of gas exports to drive up energy prices), and of course the US benefits from there being less Russian trade flows. Analysis of the relevant actors would likely lead to convergence on a more informed judgement.
By your logic, wouldn’t I find myself drawing outlandish conclusions? Why would the Ukraine invasion ever happen? Why would Russia compromise it’s geopolitical position and encourage Finland to join the alliance, European remilitarization, and increased reliance on America for security partnerships? Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortes burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin? Wtf, no!! It’s obviously the US. The white house actively encouraged the invasion of Ukraine! Just look at what their German minions did with Ostpolitik!
I could go on, but I don’t think I need to. Saying that ‘X is obviously true’ in absence of compelling evidence while refusing to analyze the requisite evidence seems like weak intellectual work at best. It tends to result in conspiracy theories. Of course I can’t have complete confidence in my story, but I can claim to have done the proper analytical work and arrived at the most reasonable conclusion.
To clarify my point about the Snake Island massacre: yeah, I think the audio was legit too. No, I believe the Ukraine government knew they were alive (or at least had good reason to think so), and pretended otherwise for propaganda reasons. Can I prove this? No, I don’t in fact have access to high-level military intelligence. This is the trap I’m warning against! Getting bogged down trying to ascertain exactly what the Ukrainian military knew and when they knew it is missing the point, which is whether or not they’re incentivized to deceive you, and so whether you should trust anything they say, one way or the other.
Isn’t this just a false dichotomy? Either we can trust them or we cannot. I find this misleading. Suppose a salesman is trying to sell me a particular canned food product. He may explain that it’s nutritious, affordable, and has significant dietary effects that might make me popular with the ladies. (don’t you want lean muscles?) I know he is a motivated reasoner, but that’s not to say I can’t glean useful information or distinguish between ‘likely true’ and ‘likely false’ statements. I can reason that the salesman is being honest about the price (because he’s making the sale). Regardless of whether this price is worth it. I can reason that the nutritional values listed on the can are probably accurate (as otherwise the FDA would come down on his head). I can conclude that there are likely some dietary effects, but their extent would depend on research I would want to do myself, rather than taking his word for it. There are probably legitimately good things about the product, regardless of the salesman’s presence.
In much the same way, we can trust some things the Ukranian government says, and their reports usually provide useful information as to what’s happening in the war, even though we would be idiots to trust them completely. They are a ‘noisy’ version of reality we need to filter through. Not reality. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful as an information source, however, or that we should automatically assume them to be liars.
The same goes for your ad hoc determinations of which states are “legitimate,” based on considerations of “international law,” your personal moral views regarding “democracy,” and expedients of maintaining US hegemony. You’re answering the wrong question. Happily, in this case, I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
So… Russia has no right to exist, Ukraine has no right to exist, the US has no right to exist, all of this is pointless? I’m not too sure what you’re implying here, but I’m unsure if I like the direction of this conversation either. I think I’ll stop here, I don’t imagine further discourse will be helpful.
The glib answer to how to avoid falling victim to the Dark Arts is to just be right, and not let counterarguments change your mind. Occlumency, if you like.
One problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which you describe but don’t call by name: rebutting narratives through analyses of individual claims is infeasibly expensive. But far worse is answering the wrong question, letting the enemy choose the battlefield. Sticking with the war in Ukraine for an example, it’d be like answering the question of why Russia would blow up its own pipeline (Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortés burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin?) instead of saying, “Wtf? No, it’s obviously the US.”
As I said, I don’t know how one can consistently recognize traps like this. It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
To clarify my point about the Snake Island massacre: yeah, I think the audio was legit too. No, I believe the Ukraine government knew they were alive (or at least had good reason to think so), and pretended otherwise for propaganda reasons. Can I prove this? No, I don’t in fact have access to high-level military intelligence. This is the trap I’m warning against! Getting bogged down trying to ascertain exactly what the Ukrainian military knew and when they knew it is missing the point, which is whether or not they’re incentivized to deceive you, and so whether you should trust anything they say, one way or the other.
The same goes for your ad hoc determinations of which states are “legitimate,” based on considerations of “international law,” your personal moral views regarding “democracy,” and expedients of maintaining US hegemony. You’re answering the wrong question. Happily, in this case, I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
It is exceedingly difficult, but it can be learned. Unfortunately libertarianism (I get anarcho-capitalist vibes from you but I could be wrong) is itself captured by one of these traps, being basically a way of subverting leftism and turning it against itself. If you’re curious, the Austrian school was “pure” in a sense up to and including Mises, but then Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by Mises and wrote Atlas Shrugged, which is a brilliant book but also profoundly flawed, in no small part because its sociology is basically Marxian. Rothbard, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, then made Austrolibertarianism into a revolutionary ideology rather than a reactionary one. That is a trap.
Non-aggression principle? My own principle is best formulated by Alexander Pope: For forms of government let fools contest, whichever governs best is best (slightly paraphrased), or alternatively, the old Catholic doctrine: error non habet ius. There are correct and incorrect principles of government; correct governance is always legitimate; incorrect governance never is.
Embrace the light side. The liberal establishment is not an establishment at all; it is an interregnum by edgy rebels who are against the establishment, ie. the ancien régime. Revolution, like Protestantism[1], is a disease of the soul.
I can now return to this. The way to resist these artificial narratives is to simply learn to recognise archetypes in general. Archetypes of revolution, of patriarchy, of dark side epistemology, and so on. You will be able to see all the false narratives from the outside, as part of a larger worldview that subsumes them all.
I would love to do a quick rebuttal of libertarianism from a Carlylean standpoint, but unfortunately this is one of those issues where bullshit asymmetry applies. I can give a few pointers, however: libertarian theory is basically correct in its refutations of progressive economic policies, but there is a case to be made for political economy where the goal is something other than the maximisation of current GDP — averting the problem of the zero marginal product of labour, for example, by making labour artificially scarce. Yes, that is a tax and diminishes the productivity of the economy in the GDP sense, but it will nevertheless be conducive to general flourishing because productivity and flourishing, though aligned, are not the same. Mises understood this distinction, hence his insistence on keeping his economic theory descriptive only. Rothbard did not understand, being not quite on par with Mises. If you doubt this, just look at their faces to see which one was the greater man. As your name seems Indian to me, I would also recommend Late Victorian Holocausts as a helpful refutation of libertarianism.
I realise that various aspects of this comment are likely to be irritating. It is somewhat patronising and consists of various pointers and hints but not any actual arguments. I am making it because you stand out to me as someone who is a lot smarter than a typical member of this community, and you deserve the chance to take it to the next level by discovering the world entirely outside of the revolutionary bubble, rather than merely the ideologies at its periphery. It is presumably clear to you that OP is stuck inside a bubble like in the Matrix which you have broken out of. Problem is that it’s a Matrix within a Matrix.
How to recognise traps? Break through all the layers of the bubble and all the traps will be as overtly parochial as OP’s post is.
Not intended as an endorsement of Catholicism, but Catholicism is merely incorrect. It is not a psychic illness that distorts its believers’ views of absolutely everything, including secular matters, the way that Protestantism does. Anarchism, incidentally, is a culturally Protestant ideology.
Well, yes, but I’m unsure if this is too helpful. Part of the intention behind my post was to distill what I viewed as potentially useful advice. Do you have any? If not, that’s fine, but I’m unsure if it’s too valuable for the readership.
I think I can take issue with this logic. Ukraine can benefit from German economic ties being severed from Russia. Russia can benefit with Germany hydrocarbons being depleted further (part of Russian strategy was restriction of gas exports to drive up energy prices), and of course the US benefits from there being less Russian trade flows. Analysis of the relevant actors would likely lead to convergence on a more informed judgement.
By your logic, wouldn’t I find myself drawing outlandish conclusions? Why would the Ukraine invasion ever happen? Why would Russia compromise it’s geopolitical position and encourage Finland to join the alliance, European remilitarization, and increased reliance on America for security partnerships? Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortes burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin? Wtf, no!! It’s obviously the US. The white house actively encouraged the invasion of Ukraine! Just look at what their German minions did with Ostpolitik!
I could go on, but I don’t think I need to. Saying that ‘X is obviously true’ in absence of compelling evidence while refusing to analyze the requisite evidence seems like weak intellectual work at best. It tends to result in conspiracy theories. Of course I can’t have complete confidence in my story, but I can claim to have done the proper analytical work and arrived at the most reasonable conclusion.
Isn’t this just a false dichotomy? Either we can trust them or we cannot. I find this misleading. Suppose a salesman is trying to sell me a particular canned food product. He may explain that it’s nutritious, affordable, and has significant dietary effects that might make me popular with the ladies. (don’t you want lean muscles?) I know he is a motivated reasoner, but that’s not to say I can’t glean useful information or distinguish between ‘likely true’ and ‘likely false’ statements. I can reason that the salesman is being honest about the price (because he’s making the sale). Regardless of whether this price is worth it. I can reason that the nutritional values listed on the can are probably accurate (as otherwise the FDA would come down on his head). I can conclude that there are likely some dietary effects, but their extent would depend on research I would want to do myself, rather than taking his word for it. There are probably legitimately good things about the product, regardless of the salesman’s presence.
In much the same way, we can trust some things the Ukranian government says, and their reports usually provide useful information as to what’s happening in the war, even though we would be idiots to trust them completely. They are a ‘noisy’ version of reality we need to filter through. Not reality. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful as an information source, however, or that we should automatically assume them to be liars.
So… Russia has no right to exist, Ukraine has no right to exist, the US has no right to exist, all of this is pointless? I’m not too sure what you’re implying here, but I’m unsure if I like the direction of this conversation either. I think I’ll stop here, I don’t imagine further discourse will be helpful.