NOTHING TO FEAR MORE THAN IDIOCY
What characterizes the human species above all others? More intelligence! To be more intelligent is to be more human. Thus, to be more stupid is to be more inhuman. This basic observation about human nature ought to be the foundation of any worthy humanism. Humanization? More intelligence! Dehumanization? More stupidity!
Ah, “dehumanization”. The buzz word of August 2018. Internet monopolies have recently enacted policies to reduce what they call “dehumanization” (whereas, in truth, they were its main enablers, for many years). In practice, Internet monopolies eradicated some posts and, or, posters who engaged in blatant, outrageous, hurtful lies. Boldly, the New York Times wandered “Inside Twitter’s Struggle Over What Gets Banned”: The enormity of what some Twitter executives consider “dehumanizing” is striking. Twitter executives ponder ”whether tweets that disparaged immigrants could be considered dehumanizing. One executive insisted that it was important for Twitter to enable debate about immigration policy.” Thanks Twitter to enable debate about concepts!
Dehumanization is a great problem over the Internet, indeed… And it starts with having oligarchs in charge of deciding what allowable debate, or even presentation, consists of. Facebook censors some most famous paintings of the Renaissance: they hurt its dearth of culture, basic indecency, and overwhelming stupidity.
Once one realizes that stupidity is most dehumanizing, priorities should change. Of course immigration should be debated, and of course *some*, yes, some, immigrants should be disparaged (for example those who immigrate just to kill people of their host countries: there were several cases in France alone, in the last five years, totalling hundreds of victims. For example the Paris November attacks, or the Nice truck driver massacrer, a Tunisian on a residency permit, who killed more than 80 on July 14th…).
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If intelligence is what characterizes our species most, why has it been so neglected by leading ideologies? Because of whom they were meant to serve!
Leading ideologies promote stupidity, not just because the dim witted, and those who have mental pretense (like professional intellectuals) without the brainpower, are afraid of the notion of relative intelligence (which, one must admit, is fraught with the greatest subtleties and difficulties).
The fundamental reason why intelligence was not viewed as the foundation of humanism has been that, ever since the Macedonian tyrant Antipater, executor of the will of Aristotle (!) destroyed Athenian democracy, dictators, naturally enough, have prefered to reward and promote stupid philosophies and religions justifying their evil ways (Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Marx were examples; modern examples are all the philosophers absurdly claiming the Absurd to be the foundation).
One of the royal roads to stupidity, thus inhumanism, is to claim that there is no evil. Indeed evil is smart: evil hides in the details, or in plain obscurity (the proverbial “Dark Side”, 4,000 years old. So one needs smarts to detect evil, and, furthermore, smarts fight evil. (See Note 1 On Internet Companies)
A little, yet tragic tale will illustrate this very well.
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Nothing To Fear More Than Overwhelming Politically Correct Idiocy
Sob story in the New York Times about the delicious US cyclists who went all around the world, constantly posting their adventures, and their faces, on “social networks”. And they advertized how great, handsome, and PC they were, because they extolled how everybody is good, and the only bad ones were those insinuating that not everybody is good, not everybody is beautiful (by the same token all US corporations and “foundations” are good, beautiful, and not evil whatsoever, as evil doesn’t exist).
The “cyclists” of doom, beaming with positivity. We are the world, we are the success, we are the good, look at us, world, just like the world, that world we rule, we gentle and beautiful. Plus or minus a few dozens of millions of determined killers out there… And the evil empire we work for. Mr. Austin was working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development when he decided to make the trip. The country where this picture is taken from crawls with millions of fanatical Muslim Fundamentalists determined to kill “disbelievers”. Obama says that’s beautiful (but then droned them in Yemen, Pakistan). I say it’s not smart to say this is all about goodness…
A mutual admiration society, throughout “social networks”… which can be very profitable for those who partake in them professionally: brainless, ignorant, thus splendid and familiar “Youtubers” can make fortunes, spilling all over the world their inanities. All for the best in the best of possible worlds, led by the best humanity which ever was (some of the major Internet monopolies are now taking affirmative action against authors who claim this is not the best of possible worlds, and censoring loud and clear; yours truly was censored and banned from many Internet places and search engines, more than a decade ago; when I said so, even leftists told me I was hallucinating). How wonderful, great, kind, awesome, well-meaning humanity is. Let’s quote the New York Times about that self-admiration society in “A Dream Ended on a Mountain Road: The Cyclists and the ISIS Militants”:
“Still, by the time they reached that bend in the road in Tajikistan just over a week ago, they had embraced the notion that the world was overwhelmingly good, the dozens of annotated photographs and the thousands of words they left behind show.
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Mr. Austin wrote. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.
“I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own … By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind… No greater revelation has come from our journey than this,” [Mr. Austin] wrote.” .
The (relatively) wealthy cyclists from the disant imperial superpower joined with other cyclists.
“Days turned to weeks, and then into months. Their bodies began to break. An ear infection landed Ms. Geoghegan in the emergency room in France. They both contracted pinkeye. They shouldered on through upset stomachs and sore throats.
It was winter by the time they reached Europe last December. Torrential rain soaked through their waterproof gloves. “Utterly hopeless, wet and cold,” they posted from Spain.”
At that point, they were saved by generous French and, or Spanish inhabitants, who dried them, sheltered them, and let them live with them until recovered. The amazing thing is that Mr. Austin was exposed to wanton acts of cruelty on the part of other human beings. Still, he persisted in broadcasting his “no evil” theory of humanity… Was he so deeply inculcated by Google, which pretended, for a decade, that its credo was “Don’t be evil”? (At least Google admitted the possibility of evil…)
The will to claim there is no evil, even after having been exposed to plenty of it, means that one is not authentic. Authenticity enables to reach deeper truth more easily. Truth is not just pretty, and a higher calling. Truth saves. And for those who refuse the truth, in the worst cases, death awaits, which could have been otherwise avoided. New York Times:
“But in the course of their travels, their blog posts also noted flashes of cruelty.
On one mountain pass, a group of men blocked their path and tried to shove the couple off their bikes.
And just 50 yards from the Spanish border in bumper-to-bumper traffic, Mr. Austin signaled to a driver that he wanted to cut into his lane. The driver let him enter and then — slowly and deliberately — began to run him over, trapping Mr. Austin’s bike between the advancing car and the vehicle ahead of them.
Still, by the time they reached that bend in the road in Tajikistan just over a week ago, they had embraced the notion that the world was overwhelmingly good, the dozens of annotated photographs and the thousands of words they left behind show.”
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What happened in that bend of road is that those who self-promote through naivety to the point of hypocrisy met those who apply the lethal, vengeful, deliberately anti-Western ideology of Islam literally. Deliberately anti-Western? Muhammad himself said so. His followers followed the irate “men in black” Christian monks of the Fourth and Fifth century. Let’s not forget that, when Imperial Rome was at its peak, women bathed in what would be called 2,000 years later, bikinis.
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…What your “friends” call goodness, your enemies call evil:
New York Times:
…”over a week ago,came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.
A grainy cellphone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: The men’s Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp U-turn. It doubles back, and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Mr. Austin, Ms. Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill “disbelievers.”
It was a worldview as diametrically opposed as imaginable to the one Mr. Austin and Ms. Geoghegan were trying to live by. Throughout their travels, the couple wrote a blog together and shared Instagram postsabout the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.”
Mr. Austin and his pseudo-benevolent, pseudo-benign ilk, those holier-than thou types who insist that there is no evil, except in our presumably evil and obdurately perverse, all too critical minds, have human nature between blindfolds.
The world is a big, scary place, indeed. Some people are not to be trusted. Some people are bad. Some people are evil.
“I don’t buy it.” said the one who got assassinated, in a revealing semantic slip: the assassinated victim speaks as if he believed everything was for sale, even ideas… Maybe he believed indeed all was a question of buying and selling. That is exactly the sort of mercantile mentality, the mentality that everything is for sale, that everything can be bought, many of those who are angry against the established order want to destroy (thus the appeal of Islamism). (Some will pontificate that “I buy it”is just a way of expressing oneself, that it means nothing, that it does nothing. Yes it does: it infeodates, emotionally speaking, the realm of ideas to the realm of buy and sell, Wall Street.)
Evil is not a make-believe concept we’ve invented to “deal” with the “complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own”…
Evil is not a question of making “deals”, as the naive smashed victim believed, in another semantic slip into emotional mercantilism. There are values and perspectives that are incompatible: an example is literal Islam, as found in Qur’an and Hadith… which is deeply incompatible with human ethology! Human ethology makes female and male humans quite similar. Islam says females are a fraction of men, at least judicially. The most common, wealthiest, most powerful versions of Islam says females are to be covered up. So it’s Islam against humanity, and only extreme violence can hope to succeed in this hopeless struggle. Hopeless: because how could humanity defeat itself?
Any ideology incompatible with humanity as deeply as Islam is, can be depicted as evil, as it generates a war with humanity: Nazism is another example. So are nearly all existing superstitious religions, for example Islam’s forerunner, Christianity… simply because they are war or slave religions which view women as warrior producing machines…
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Evil is not just hidden in ideologies, more or less. Evil also has a neurological side, with its own rewards and its own inertia:
Hormones and neurohormones leading to destruction, cruelty, sadism, viciousness, fighting, do exist. Some will scoff, because, in their colossal ignorance and lack of the most basic imagination, they don’t realize humanity stand on the corpses of hundreds of millions of lions. Among other beasts vanquished, and prime among them, other human beings. Beasts and men alike learned their lesson: they were deliberately hunted.
Indeed after all these lions had been disposed of, it remained to dispose of those who disposed of the lions (and the tigers, and the panthers, and the saber tooth cats, and all sorts of man eating bears, etc.). War hormones are made to take command, and kill. War hormones can take command of an individual, or, much more dangerously, a crowd (some forms of lethal viciousness such as anti-Judaism have persisted for 17 centuries). By and large, humans are kind, deep down inside. However, not all the time, and not everybody. How many lunatics with a finger on a nuclear holocaust does it take to ruin the planet? Answer: just one. So the question of the evil of the one is paramount.
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Stupidity is the main enabler of oppression, subjugation, thus evil (ideological, or physical):
Consider for example the banking system: money (for “everybody”) is created by lending to the wealthiest. Unacceptable in democracy, but accepted, because most people don’t know! Stupidity rules! (How the banking system works is not something taught as very important to MBAs…)
With the power we have today, a few self-interested plutocrats can own most of everything, and thus can have most of the power. And how many myopic leaders can we take? Even if the majority is kind, generous, and wonderful, it takes just one, or a few myopic ones, to kill us all.
No greater revelation came out of the naive victims’ sacrifices than this: one gets killed only once, and, nowadays, thanks to cars, SUVs, rockets, the atom, one lunatic can kill a village, a city, even a country.
Human beings can be all the kindness they want to project. I am sure the five Islamist murderers can be kind, generous, wonderful… in particular circumstances which suits them. But they also believed in a murderous ideology. Murderous ideologies have to be killed, and were always killed. This is generosity, kindness, and wonderfulness at their best. By killing murderous ideologies humanity progresses and civilization reconciles itself with necessary technological advances, reconciling our new found powers and what our ethos needs to be to enable the genus homo to survive.
That intelligence is central to humanity has long been obvious: after all, the name of the species is Homo SAPIENS (Swede Carl von Linné in 1758). Sapere comes in part from to taste, to perceive, being wise, all things pretty much synonymous with intelligence.
We live in strangely mentally degenerating times (take the notion that fearing Islam is racist, as if fearing Christianity, something most intellectuals were affected by, for 17 centuries, was racist… Or, more basically consider the (“snowflake“) notion that debate itself is something one should fear). Actually it’s not so strange: the degeneracy is symbiotic with plutocracy itself: it originates with it, and also makes it possible.
Small superficial thinkers play the same role in the army of plutocracy as light skirmishers played in ancient armies. They are also the junction between the most common masses and the sophisticated intellectuals from the top universities, experts of the collaboration with the established order.
Nietzsche attacked Christianity as a “slave religion”. Most superstitious religions are slave religions: that’s why they have been invented. They all rest on the sentiment that the common person is culprit, a sinner, because that person didn’t believe in the goodness of the powers that be, which, lo and behold, pretty much identify with the oppressors.
The world cyclists, everybody-is-good, everybody-is-beautiful reflected this, as they denied that there were bad ideologies, or bad people. Instead, they brandished as culprit the attitude of suspicion, and what underlays it, simple objectivity.
They paid the price. A sad story. Let’s make it a worthy lesson.
So would we, as individuals, or as humanity, if we didn’t stay sharp and suspicious. Critique, intelligence, a propensity to detect evil, are no way to sell one’s products, but they are the way to stay alive. And they are also the foundations of morality. Anything short of that is effective nihilism.
Patrice Ayme
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Note 1: Don’t be evil, we have the monopoly of that. Internet companies ask their subscribers and victims to sign long contracts in subtle legalese; that’s intrinsically evil: next thing you know all and any of your activities will be transmitted to various centers of powers, including para-governmental banks.
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Note 2: New philosophers and philosophies coming out of them have to be smarter, logically or emotionally, than what came before. For example, Kant could be very smart. However, on most important subjects, racism and slavery, he was most dumb. His position would have necessitated to prove that enslaved races were inferior, objectively. Worse among towering German philosophers: Marx was an outright racist against Africans (and Jews, although he was one of them… one feels tempted to say: because he was one of them…)
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/05/06/marx-as-vituperating-racist-proto-nazi/
One see here that the followers of Kant and Marx, among them the Nazis (who said so themselves! Even Hitler!), have been self-selecting for dumbness (because they believe strongly, on a most important subjects, and all the “proofs” they have, are insults…)
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Note 3: The rise of anti-PC psycho-philosophers such as Jordan Peterson (“12 rules”…) exploit the dumbness of the pseudo-left, by pointing out, implicitly, that it is more human to be smart.
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Note 4: I was banned from sites in the past, for unknown reason, including the NYT, which has recently reinstated me… The only site which banned me, around a decade ago, the “European Tribune”, for an explicit cause, explained to me that some of its members viewed me as a crazy conspiracy theorist, as I pretended that there were relationships between US plutocrats and Nazism, or between some well-known bankers and Nazism. The proof of my madness was that, according to them, Internet searches seem to show only me had such weird ideas…
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
August 15, 2018 at 2:22 pm |
Patrice, your post has motivated me to write up an incident that was conveyed to me yesterday. Won’t say more; you will read it tomorrow. But it will be about evil.
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August 15, 2018 at 11:26 pm |
Nice. Nice for you to tackle the subject… Courageous too, it’s an area where hell is to be paid… OK, waiting…
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August 15, 2018 at 7:23 pm |
All out, and to the point! Idiocy never rests! Not to believe Islam is good is racist, don’t you get it? BTW did you heard of the story of this famous feminist lesbian professor in New York who slept with her gay student? He is suing NYU university for millions
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August 15, 2018 at 11:27 pm |
Vaguely heard something… I don’t believe in the necessity to promote and publicize one’s sexual inclinations…
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August 15, 2018 at 10:04 pm |
Sorry, does not compel. Usually the denial of evil is associated with anti-christians or anti-religionists in general, which includes you of course. But it is easy to produce an example of intelligence designing evil outcomes. Empirically, most moral codes are associated with a religion. I do know one philosopher who has written about “Goodness” as the critical ingredient in Morality. Hahaha!
The confusion of the self-appointed cognoscenti is amusing however.
Cheers
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August 15, 2018 at 11:25 pm |
To describe yours truly as “anti-religionist” does not seem correct to the afore said character. Indeed, I do believe in several types of [SECULAR] religions… And. first of all what I (and others) call the “Republic”. Also (direct) democracy (seasoned with fierce debates).
That idiocy is a-human (a variant on inhuman) seems a fact. Idiocy –> evil could be read as (No Intelligence) –> evil, thus (No evil) —> Intelligence. Yet, as you point out, one can have: Intelligence —> Evil. Thus it would seem: No evil —> evil!
Maybe I should have explained the deep meaning of “IDIOT”. “Idiot” comes from being closed to (what should be) public knowledge: from idios “one’s own”. So “idiot” is not exactly “no intelligence”. Instead it means the brazen disregard of what (should be) public knowledge.
Human ethology defines an absolute (yet high multidimensional) definition of goodness. No need for superstition
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August 16, 2018 at 2:27 am |
The pseudo left is as much an obstacle to true left ideas as the right. PC has become a means to shut down discussions as the PC crowd uses it as a weapon. Was not PC born out of identity politics? Now both the pseudo left and the right engage in identity politics to distract from more important issues. Too many are led astray by this disingenuous tactic. As for evil, it is foolish not to be suspicious of others as evil lurks out there. Often where it is least expected/ Some of it is disguised under the cloak of respectability but evil no less. In Pennsylvania a grand jury report on the Catholic church’s child rape and molestation is just one timely example of this. In local news interviews of some church stalwarts, not one even mentioned the victims- rather they saw it as something that now can be put behind and forgotten. Sickening sentiments of the fully indoctrinated.
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August 17, 2018 at 1:06 am |
Agreed. I will say even more: the pseudo-left is worse than the right… Just as the stabber-in-the-back is worse than an enemy one faces…
I consider that the pseudo-left was planted by the plutocracy (thus, worse than the right!)… when not outright by the CIA and the like: consider “Daily Kos”, which banned me for life (and sent me warnings they knew who I was!)
Superstitious religious types call themselves “believers” precisely because what they believe in is unbelievable…
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August 16, 2018 at 9:04 pm |
People!
What a complex lot we are!
(And that’s putting it kindly!)
I wasn’t planning to publish a post for today. But then a recent post from Patrice Ayme spurred me to so do.
Let me explain….
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August 16, 2018 at 9:06 pm |
Thanks Paul for honoring me with suggesting that my essay somewhat inspired you. My essay focused mostly on just one source of evil, idiocy. I alluded, though, that a dark, cruel, vicious, evil side of humanity exists. I would add it exists, because it has a very good reason to: ecological balance.
Not an excuse, though…All the more as the causative mechanism is becoming clear… On a hopeful note, indeed, I have seen the USA’s busiest freeway being stopped because of one female Canada goose, followed by half a dozen ducklings, was laboriously going across ten lanes of traffic…
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August 18, 2018 at 12:51 pm |
Dear Patrice,
You’ve done so well producing entertaining and enjoyable essays describing historical and present pro-plutocracy and anti-democracy idiocy and various accompanying ignorant theories, religions, etc. that support that idiocy. But after a while I started to notice a growing frustration within, it finally occurred to me that something was lacking. It has been a lack of examples of inspirational events or of intelligent philosophers who must exist or else how would we (your admirers) ever have gotten the pro-democratic anti-plutocracy attitudes that we have. So I guess what I am asking is that you produce some essays about some historical events that inspired you, and especially, some writers, scientists, or philosophers who inspired you.
Thanks,
GX
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August 18, 2018 at 6:03 pm |
Funny you wrote this: you sound like my ailing mom… ;-)…
I will obtemper… 😉
However, let me point out this: per its very nature critical thinking criticizes. It comes from the Greek kritikos “able to make judgments,” from krinein “to separate, decide” (from PIE root *krei- “to sieve,” thus “discriminate, distinguish”. Such a good concept, the Romans adopted it wholesale, as they did with many other Greek concepts… Separate: in other words one has to use a sword, it can be grim…
And, as far as “intelligent philosophers, there are plenty… And that includes many who are not viewed as philosophers… But should be; take the Gracchi, Polybius. I will even go further: for example, clearly, Kant was no idiot… Vicious, in all too many ways, but no idiot. I have more a spot on approach, focused on ideas, good or bad.
Certainly, the all-out fights of Hypatia and Abelard, against tremendous odds, were inspiring. So was Buridan, engaging Aristotle himself… In more modern times, Rabelais, who took giant risks (his best friend, a printer, was burned alive), was certainly inspiring. So was Nietzsche, or even Voltaire… Or Lafayette… But when I see de Tocqueville seeing the lethal deportation of the Cherokee and his readers saying nothing about what Tocqueville said, no wonder I could get a bit riled up. Tocqueville said: “… the misfortune of Indians has to be to get in contact with the most civilized and, I will add, the greediest of the globe” (“le plus avide du globe” in the French original).
Tellingly, Tocqueville was there by happenstance, for a couple of weeks, when he interacted with Indians directly, AND no such good source comes from any US source in 1830… Why? Complicity? Refusing reality?
Reality is not nice, it doesn’t have to be, because it’s real.
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August 18, 2018 at 9:10 pm |
Philosophers are always accused to be party poopers. Patrice is excellent that way that’s why we love her. She wrote stuff on love in the past and find Lamarck inspirational. And she has a crush on Caesar
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August 19, 2018 at 12:45 am |
Crush on Caesar? Let’s say that I was 100% against his assassination at the point of time it happened, and for the reasons evoked. Also, although his war(s) in Gaul was/were extremely costly in human lives (one million dead, one million enslaved, some say), it was not really his fault… And the result was excellent, in the long run.
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August 19, 2018 at 12:22 am |
Dear Patrice: Thanks for the helpful response. I’m honored to be compared in any way with your ailing mother. Maybe there are those of us who have a larger need for inspiration and a need to know that we have numerous allies in the human record, both living and dead. Some of us are trapped by circumstance in places where the withering assault of pro-plutocracy idiocy continues with no end in sight from left, right, and center. Speaking for myself here in the USA, the evidence of idiocy and of love for plutocracy is already overwhelming and I have no need for more. So the more weapons I can deploy against them the better. Thanks again. GX
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August 19, 2018 at 12:51 am |
Dear Gloucon X: Few passions can be as diverted, and even diverted against itself, than love. Hence the love for plutocracy, or Aztecs’ priests tearing living hearts.
As I may reveal in some essays, I have been exposed to particularly disgusting human behaviors recently, exceeding my worst expectations. But then there is the medical personnel taking care of my mom, which is just the opposite…
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August 29, 2018 at 2:47 am |
One of the more perplexing things is that stupidity seems to be confined to Homo sapiens, which, given what sapiens means is somewhat ironic. You do not see animals behaving stupidly. The may get into accidental difficulties because they don’t know, but by and large they sensibly follow their own best interests. So maybe it si stupidity that defines humanity.
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September 1, 2018 at 10:10 pm |
Being deliberately stupid certainly defines humanity.
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September 23, 2018 at 7:36 pm |
Reblogged this on Croatian Conservative and commented:
Problem is that there are many types of intelligence. Personally, I would divide them into philosophical intelligence (ability to understand complex systems that do not follow mathematical principles – such as human society), emotional intelligence (ability to understand emotions), mathematical intelligence (ability to calculate and think arithmetically). Social intelligence falls into first category. Yet today we are focused too much on mathematical intelligence, especially in the West: East fortunately still teaches subjects such as philosophy and sociology, if much reduced.
But intelligence itself is useless without a foundation: as programmers would say, GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). And yet that is precisely what is happening. For example, many people believe – and it is often taught – that conflict between Islam and the West started with the Crusades. In reality, it started some 450 years earlier, in 634.
Today, critical thought is the ultimate revolution. It is easier not to think, and plutocrats have used that to force people to think what they want them to. This is helped by obvious appeals to emotions and social pressure: nobody wants to be called “intolerant”, “bigoted”, or, God forbid, “racist”. OK, Islam is not a race, but nobody cares. Anyone who tries to debate even one of forbidden topics is automatically dehumanized through usage of these labels.
One could make a case that ideologies are by default stupid. They all make absolutist claims, which ignore complexity of reality, and of human society specifically. Political correctness is a logical outgrowth, extreme of that – the totalitarian opinion that only my own view is correct, and no other explanation may possibly be correct. More than that, it is a major oversimplification of reality, and based on idiotic notions to boot (“Humans are inherently good”). Leftist ideologies in particular are guilty, because they are by nature globalist… nationalists at least take into account cultural, mental and genetic differences and do not claim that their solutions are “best for everybody”, let alone the “only choice for everybody”.
Humans are inherently stupid. Brain power is limited, and we regularly have to jump through logical hoops and loops in order to function in our daily lives. This is especially pronounced due to informational overload of today’s society. And evil is a consequence of stupidity. From this would then follow that humans are inherently evil… but to call person evil, you need intent. Stupid person will cause evil for sure, but is not itself evil. However, does it matter whether evil was caused intentionally or not? Depends on the situation. Evil due to stupidity can be just as bad as intentionally done evil.
As for why so many insist that there is no evil? My theory is that because they are weak, and evil scares them. Thus it is easier to pretend that there is no evil. Thing with the psyche is, is that abandoning one’s own beliefs is painful because it destroys the whole carefully constructed image of the world. Therefore, people will persist in their beliefs – especially when emotionally charged, such as the “no evil” bullcrap – way past the point of sanity. Or even point of death.
Another point of note are mental gymanstics required by the globalist ideology of progressivism. Progressivism is the ideology of Borg Collective, a belief that there are no differences. That everyone and everything is the same. So if all people are the same, then they must all be good. All religions are also the same – Islam, Christianity, Buddhism – because why the f**k not? Nevermind all the differences between them, and obvious evil of Islam – but pointing that out would collapse progressive mental model. Yet humanity itself had prospered through, ultimately, genocide – Homo Neanderthal, sabertooth tiger, cave bear… they were all killed off by humans, because they were a threat. Groups of humans happily genocided each others, and those strogest prospered… creation of states, of which nation-state is the ultimate expression, was meant to, and did, structure and formalize warfare, therefore reducing and limiting its damage. Indeed, most if not all genocides happened when two or more ethnicities happened to be within the same state, typically the victim had no state at all – such as islamic genocide of Armenians, Nazi genocide of Jews, and modern progressive genocide of Europe. Isolation creates differences, and differences create progress… progressivism as such is inherently regressive.
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September 25, 2018 at 8:23 am |
Dear Picard:
There are indeed many types of human intelligence. My main argument against sexism is actually that human female based intelligence tend to be different from male based (performance of course will vary: some males can act extremely feminine, some female very masculine: consider the three empresses of Russia of the 18th century).
The mathematician-physicist-computer scientist-philosopher Pascal used to distinguish the “esprit de finesse” and the “esprit de geometrie”. That confused me for a long time, because, crucially, the “spirit of geometry” depends upon the “spirit of subtlety” (basically, fundamentally, the foundations of math are irremediably fuzzy, and one has to decide they are not: that’s the subtlety…)
There are several types of mathematical spirit, mostly depending if one is more towards geometry, arithmetic, probability… Coding (computer science, AI) is related but, paradoxically, I feel, more rigorous and logical than pure math itself.
What’s called “philosophical” teaching is full of garbage, prominent yet corrupt…traitors (as alluded to again in my latest essay “France Parented the USA: So Why Forget?…”) They also forgot the “That Nobody Comes In Who Is Not A Geometer” which Plato put at the entrance of his academy… Plato, BTW, was an arch-conservative… My point? There is no contradiction, and one gains by exposition… intellectual tourism, if you will…
GIGO is indeed the fundamental problem… But many, most, are not aware of how severe it is.
The example you give is the most obvious: Islam was indeed an ideology fabricated as an ANTI-GRECO-ROMAN weapon. One could, and should say: ANTI-CIVILIZATIONAL weapon. Muhammad himself said so. He explained that at the time he was expressing himsef, was the most favorable period to attack the great empires of the north, the Greco-Romano-Franco-Gallic empire… and the Persian empire. Muhhammad himself said it was the first time in 1,000 years that the Arabs could renew their raiding. The reason? The terrible war between Persians and Romans, which Rome (aka Constantinople’s Heraclius) had just won, shattering the Persians into civil war (Arabs knew Persians well, because they had occupied all Arabia prior…)
The first “Crusades” so to speak were purely defensive: the counter-attacks, withing FRANCIA of the three main invasions of FRANCIA, starting in 721 CE… Then fighting to shake the Muslim invasion of France went on through the Ninth and Tenth Century. For example a Frankish (often erroneously depicted as “Lombard”) army freed Rome from a Muslim army (which had destroyed the Vatican). Charlemagne reconquered the north of Spain (especialy Catalogne), 80 years after it had been lost, and the Muslims had killed 25% of the Catholic there… Finally the reconquest of southern Italy and then all of Sicily, grabbed back from the Muslims invaders by the Giscard, by the Franco-Normands, happened in the decades prior to the “First Crusade”.
Making people realize how severe is GIGO is of the essence.
You are right, we are in the best situation for the rise, the dawn, of overall and everywhere critical thinking… Thanks to the Internet, which can tap all minds of the planet… It’s indeed the “ultimate revolution”. The revolution where severe, unbounded critique takes power.
P
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September 25, 2018 at 6:46 pm |
Yes, male and female psyche are indeed different – possibly genetically so. For example, male babies will focus more on movement (mechanics) whereas female babies will focus more on faces (emotions).
Today’s subjects are too often used to push ideology… just like Marxists did (it could be accurate to said that Marxism conquered the West after the fall of USSR, just as Greece conquered Rome after being militarily conquered by it).
Islam is, in essence, anti-intellectualism. Muhammad prescribed camel piss as a cure… after he lost philosophical debates with local Christian monks (or whatever they were)… who by the way were not even Orthodox… he simply made up a proclamation by Allah which “reveals” that Christianity had been “corrupted” (indeed it had… but Islam was far more so, and from the very beginning – Islam in fact is nothing but a Christian heresy). Any time he did not like something, he had Allah condemn it; nothing could be allowed that is outside Islam, and especially so critical thought. Compare this to Christianity, which despite some periods of anti-intellectualism, inherently was liberal towards critical thought: all of which stemmed from Jesus’ “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s”.
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September 26, 2018 at 10:39 am |
I just learned that (supposedly) human females are more color sensitive than males (to be verified)… One more surprise… we don’t want to be too surprised, we warriors…
We have to be careful with the environment presented, though: environment codes neurology powerfully… environment even codes genetic expression, fast and deep (epigenetics). Some of these changes carry over generations. maybe even the germ line irreversibly, sort of.
I believe Marxism fell with the USSR. Putin is doing standard Cesaro-Patriarchism, Xi is doing like Qin, 23 centuries ago. In Western Europe, Marxism is nowhere in government, nor even in opposition… Jeremy Corbyn is as close as it gets, and still, very far… Philosophically, only Badiou is one of the old Marxist of influence. I know some ex-extreme Italian leftists (Brigade Rouges)… They have become anti-Marxist…
Islam, Islamism, is, in essence anti-intellectualism, just like Christianism it learned from, but worst: at least Christianism bothered to confuse everybody with its notion that the “LOGOS” was God (a trick to seduce, and thus disarm and divide, the immense intellectual majority of the Greco-Roman empire, which was Neo-Platonic…)
The local Christians who inspired and directed Muhammad were ARIAN (followers of Alexander bishop Arianus, a doctrine outlawed by Constantine, creator of “CATHOLIC ORTHODOXY” as proper Christian faith; Emperor Theodosius decided all others were “demented and insane” and should be “punished”, that is put to death. Under Constant I, son of 1) so they didn’t believe in the Trinity, in particular NOT in the LOGOS AS GOD…
The Christianism of Constantine is a version of the mythical Jesus heavy of the perversity, lethal side… Agreed that the ‘leave what’s caesar to Caesar’ could have been generalized nicely, but, instead, Constantine made himself in the image of the maniacal god of the Old Testament, and Muhammad did the same, being prophet, apostle and Constantine all by himself, in 20 years…
For millions of years, the greatest enemy of man has been other men, the men of the distant tribe. Proper ecology required to find them repulsive, to reject them, to kill them. Such is the basic reason for the evil men commit: ecology. But there is worse, and of that more soon: stupidity itself is preached to fools, so they can become dumber, and be harvested with less protest…
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September 26, 2018 at 11:02 am
Marxism has transformed into what is now called cultural Marxism – the idea that there are no different cultures, no sexes, no races, no differences at all; that we are all one big happy Borg Collective. If anything, it is even more insidious and dangerous than the economic Marxism. In fact, anything that denies human tribal nature is dangerous, as it lays down ground for experiments that end in failure.
As for ERE and Constantine, issue was that there was much less separation between the Church and the state… maybe because Constantine had used the Church for political purposes. That went against the “Caesar to the Caesar’s”, but today we see how every ideology becomes lethal – even secularism has become lethal, as it had made the West blind to the dangers of Islam due to assumption that Islam can be worked into the structure of secular state. And now, as always, we see that civilization loses fight against barbarity whenever it becomes too civilized.
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