The existence of intellectuals is more ubiquitous today than ever. Many are those who contend for public attention, credibility, and money as a reward for their wits, not to mention the very status of intellectual. Yet the existence of such people is far from self-evident. For centuries, traditional societies barely had anything or anybody that looked like modern intellectuals, and this did not prevent them from lasting hundreds or even thousands of years.
So, as we elaborate projects and ideas for reforming the depraved societies of the Empire of Nothing—a necessary step if we want a lasting victory—an important question must be confronted: do we need at all what has been called “intellectuals” during last centuries? And if we do not, what should we have instead?
The origin of modern intellectuals
At the heart of modernity lies a deep crisis. Before it, Western Europe was united by the same Christian faith and a basic agreement on the place of economy—subordinated to guilds and the rights of the average producer.
When modernity reared its philosophical head through René Descartes, a prominent thinker of the seventeenth century, the Old Continent was in a much more problematic state: Christianity had splintered into various opposing faiths whose intellectual opposition was shaking everything to the core. We have been told that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a glorious new flourishing of intelligence. But, in fact, thinkers who actually lived at this time had quite a different impression.
The Irish bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) criticized how the practice of philosophy had become, on his age, synonymous with getting embroiled into “thousand scruples… prejudices and errors of sense,” a situation he attributed to “the wrong use we make of our faculties.” Likewise, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) scolded his contemporaries for being too eager to criticize the “systems” of others for the sake of pushing their own on the scene, that is, a mutual hypercriticism that led to a general lack of certitude about everything:
There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions. The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision. Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if everything was certain. Amidst all this bustle it is not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence… From hence in my opinion arises that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds.
The first precursors were honest in their endeavour to solve the crisis. Descartes, Berkeley, Hume and many others genuinely sought a grand encompassing theory that could resume with all controversies. But soon the very controversy became an institution. A whole market of ideas was growing, in which more and more lettrés started to see an opportunity to make a name, thus earning fame, social standing and sometimes money. Hume could not help himself: soon after criticizing those who fed the crisis by attacking the others’ “systems” while promoting their own, he was doing the same.
Such was the so-called Enlightenment: the further undermining of any spiritual, philosophical or cultural unity by ambitious individuals ready to hustle for notoriety. They would be experts at flattering the powerful, mocking the Catholic church, fiddle fashionable themes and “witty” prose, and more than everything else rationalizing their activity as a “progress.” The very expression “Enlightenment” stems from their willingness to market themselves to the posterity.
The intellectuals’ bread and butter
It can be noted that, from the amateur gentlemen of the eighteenth century, generations of scientists have sprang up. Some of these characters were mathematicians, engineers, doctors, or dedicated observers of nature, and they all contributed to improving general human power over matter. But make no mistake: even science needs problems and unknown stuff to justify careers and research, thus following a headlong rush dynamic. At its side, the literary intellectuals need more problems so they can have the opportunity to sell themselves through claiming they want to solve them.
The momentous crisis turned into a crisis structure and the structure turned into a mark of the modern West. Where God ceased to speak, the modern talking head took more and more territory and wrote dozens of books trying to prove he was the embodiment of progress. It doesn’t matter if problems are genuine or artificial. Intellectuals need them like a blacksmith needs iron.
Two typical intellectual characters are Voltaire and Émile Zola. Both were gifted writers, both were charming and witty, both managed to write about matters that were actually relevant to their times, and both have used a trial with political overtones to make a show of themselves. (Not so incidentally, both were French and participated to the furthering of a twisted literary chauvinism.)
Voltaire took advantage of various trials to claim that the defendants were accused because they were Protestants inside a Catholic country. The infamous affaire Calas, from the name of a father who was accused of having murdered his own son, was used by the shrewd philosophe to sending pathetic letters to the upper crust of the society, stirring the public opinion, pressuring magistrates, until the father—who had been convicted and executed after a thorough investigation—was rehabilitated. Two centuries and a half later, young Frenchmen are still taught Voltaire was a champion of truth, justice, and reason, whereas he was more like a playwright who peddled influence.
Zola, more than a century later, did the same. A Jewish-French captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted for high treason after he allegedly communicated secret documents to Prussia. Years later, some new evidence seemed to indicate that Dreyfus was innocent and that another officer had leaked the documents: at this very moment, Zola published an incendiary article, J’accuse, where he spat on the judges and cried about the injustice of the affaire. Eventually, Dreyfus was rehabilitated—and the army, the patriots and the Catholics were shamed through a never-ending media discourse that casted them as villains of the whole story.
Voltaire and Zola played the same role in a narrative of the exact same kind. We are taught about a situation of injustice, where the majority of the population is oppressing an innocent group through an innocent individual and crooked institutions. Fortunately, a heroic talking head rises, miraculously converts the opinion to recognize the poor innocent victim as such, the talking head is crowned as an awesome thinker beyond boundaries whereas some are fairly vilified as “oppressors,” and the poor victim’s rehabilitation is also the victory of reason, justice, and progress.
Thus, the intellectuel in the most typical sense is a highly paradoxical creature who becomes taught in classes after having seemingly rebelled against dominant institutions. Teenagers are led to think that heroic and highly intelligent individuals can turn the tide of unfavourable opinion… provided they follow a mysterious sense of history. There have been a lot more intellectuals than the mere classics, and often those rejected by the official narrative are more interesting than those inside.
Who’s gonna pay?
Even if you are gifted with words and language, being a talking head does not pay much. Would anyone be ready to pay you for giving an opinion, no matter how elaborate, on anything? The problem of money is a good starting point to connect the dots: Voltaire was close from wealthy Protestants bankers, one of whom even helped him to obtain a house in Geneva, and Zola was a Rotschild protégé. Both of them contributed to tarnish Catholicism and most of their own people. In other words, they served interests that could pay them—they were sellouts.
Today, some bloggers happen to earn money as independents, especially when they found themselves a niche. Yet independence is scarce. Way too many people would like to live from their wits, and, even more, obtain recognition as intellectuals. More than often, intellectual types turn into teachers, journalists, or even marketers—thus depending upon an institution that pays them.
In North America, the war against whites and masculinity is massively subsidized, whether in the academic or in the media. You won’t easily find a job there if you take a critical stance on cultural Marxism. And in case you wouldn’t be self-hating enough, they are already replacing you with “minority” individuals who are rewarded for spewing wordy venom daily.
Old Marxism was well-aligned with the interests of intellectuals as a class, not as individuals. It handed them an official status and flattered their ego by casting them as the vanguard of “progress.” Keynesianism triumphed for the exact same reason as it justified the creation of a bloated State where model-obsessed nerds enjoy a tremendous power over those who produce actual wealth. Intellectual types historically joined the left because it gave them a status, money, and moral recognition.
But the whole Marxist vocabulary of “progress” and “emancipation” dissimulated what seems glaring today. Namely, that intellectuals were recognized and paid, not because they were enlightened or bright, but because they were an efficient tool of destruction.
The conservative right has often lacked a milieu for intellectual types. The average conservative was reluctant to pay someone he saw as a parasite. Such a lack pushed a number of high IQs to the arms of the left, who made an establishment out of them and paid them to enforce globalism, anti-whiteness, anti-masculinity, pathological altruism, transgender madness, “politically correct” repression and so on. Intellectuals were never paid to say the truth: they were paid as tools who performed a primarily destructive social function.
If we happen to beat cultural Marxism, what shall we do with intellectual types? If we are to dismantle globalism and build healthier societies, we have to think about what we will replace the bobo-leftist establishment. The intellectual mediocrity and spinelessness of the average conservative is no solution. A truly traditional society would likely have initiates, something akin to high priests and knights, in lieu of vacuous and coward talkers. How exactly we go there or how exactly this could look today is another question.
Conclusion
The French essayist Alain Soral once famously said, “a journalist is either a whore or without a job.” This is even truer for most intellectuals, sold as they are to a destructive left or (more seldomly) to the inefficient right.
Culture is overrated. What the mainstream refers to under that name is a giant matrix, full of lies, taboos, and the snobbery of talking heads who end up lying to everyone or believing into their own bullshit. No wonder why the shrewd Robert Greene advised to be an “intense realist”: one must cultivate inner intuition and situational awareness not to fall prey to some of the claptrap that constitutes at least eighty per cent of current mainstream “culture.”
The previous generations could join the cultural Marxist establishment and pretend their destructive, ego-laden works were progress. To our generation, this is impossible. Either we stand up for our very existence, even if we must go against more than two centuries of manipulations and lies, or we resign ourselves to an ignominious death. Before we take the power back, a shared awareness must be stimulated, and this is where we enter in direct conflict with the well-funded anti-white, anti-masculine establishment types, whom we must beat on their own field once and for all.
Bonus: 6 quotes about the intellectuels
Some of the problems that modern philosophical thinking puts forward appear void of any importance and meaning. [Modern philosophy] features a range of issues that merely stem from an equivocal stance and the confusion of different viewpoints. These issues only exist because they are poorly framed. They have no fundamental reason to exist. In many cases, defining their statements more precisely may be enough to make them disappear, plain and simple, if [modern] philosophy did not strive to maintain them, because it makes a living out of ambiguity.
— René Guénon, Introduction to the study of the Hindu doctrines, chap.8.
René Guénon (young)
Philosophers care much more about putting forth problems, no matter how artificial and illusory, than about solving them… They also strive to link their name to a ‘system,’ that is, to a strictly bounded set of theories they would own and consider as nothing more than their own work. Hence the desire to be original at any price, even if the truth must be sacrificed on the altar of said originality. A philosopher who cares about his repute does better by making up a new mistake than by repeating some truth that has already been expressed by others.
—René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, chap.5.
René Guénon (older)
The most evident feature of [modern] critique is the lack of principles and of authenticity. Its greater preoccupation consists in being brilliant, in appearing original… From the point of view of those who embody this ‘intellectuality,’ the catchy line, the dialectical or polemical posturing well noticed by others, have a much greater value than truth. Ideas, when they use them, are nothing but a pretext. What matters is to look intelligent—just as, to the mainstream politician, the ideology of a party is essentially a means for career. The ‘vanity fair,’ the most deleterious subjectivism, often verging on pure and unmitigated narcissism, are essential components of this phenomenon… The ‘critique’ is a scourge of modern culture, an epidemic that was born out of bourgeois society concomitantly with the commodification of culture… In normal, traditional civilizations, one could find creators, artists, and those who would judge the works without intermediaries: the sovereigns, the patrons, and the people. Our times have witnessed the appearance, between the public and the creators, of that cultural pimp, that cheeky and presumptuous parasite we call a ‘critique.’
— Julius Evola, The Bow and the Club
Baron Giulio Cesare Evola
Show me more venal, more insensitive, more corrupt minds than those of the literate caste! How many of them do you know whose virtue would still be uncorrupted? Who, but them, for over thirty years, kept flooding us with a loosened morale, a disdain for work, a disgust of duty, a disrespect for family, who but the literary? Who dipped into secret funds more shamelessly than they did? Who seduced women, softened the young, excited the nation to more debauchery than they did? Who did abandon cowardly the princes after begging for their favours…? So-called men of letters, always! They run like harlots between the legitimate government and usurpers, between monarchy and republic, between politics and socialism, between atheism and religion. Everything is good to them as long as they can make a profit and be fashionable out of it.
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (quoted by the following one)
Pierre-Joseph Proudon
Compare, for example, seventeenth century writers with those of the eighteenth. What a difference in tone and gait! The former, under a veneer of servility, have the most noble and proud stance… They do not pretend to reign. They merely stand at their place, recognize the place of a superior power beyond, give themselves completely to their writing task, dismiss the temptation of advertising and demonstrate their professional dedication. On the other hand, look at the Voltaire, Diderot and the like: they open well the era of intellectuals, writing stooges as they are, courtiers of princes they flatter and despise at the same time—something they are forced to do as they want to usurp their power… Their courtier nature reveals in everything they do… The whole eighteenth century, both spiritual and plain on a scoundrel background, is libertine, and already pornographic: such is the start of literary mercantilism; people of letters make money out of their writings, pretend to financial independence, and they write garbage to flatter the opinion of their public.
— Édouard Berth, Les méfaits des intellectuels (“the misdeeds of the intellectuals”), Introduction
Édouard Berth (disciple of Proudhon)
I have had the same experience with journalists citing each other about my books without the smallest effort to go to my writings—my experience is that most journalists, professional academics, and other in similar phony professions don’t read original sources, but each other, largely because they need to figure out the consensus before making a pronouncement.
— Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, chap.23.
Nassim Taleb
Read Next: How Social Justice Warriors Have Been Infecting Science For Half A Century
Too many intellectuals are idealistic at the expense of being realistic.
Jesus Christ knew it.
He sacrificed himself anyway.
Look at the world laws and how we live today. That’s 100% because of what He did.
Umn yeah…pseudo-intelectual here.
Just because the literate society used it’s knowledge against the masses doesn’t make all literate society bad.
,,Show me more venal, more insensitive, more corrupt minds than those of the literate caste! How many of them do you know whose virtue would still be uncorrupted? Who, but them, for over thirty years, kept flooding us with a loosened morale, a disdain for work, a disgust of duty, a disrespect for family, who but the literary?”
I remember a communist-marxist group who used the exact same of rhetoric when pointing out it’s political adversaries – the traditional family, the orthodox priest, the national teacher, the normal male of the society – in the 1950s.
True, some literate people have used their knowledge against the illiterate but in my country literate people have stuffed the prisons during communism. All of our elites were either jailed or executed.
All of the country’s true leadership murdered in a new-Gulag type of work-camps.
Don’t fall into the same trap my friend.
There is light in everything, but there is also darkness.
You choose what you want to flourish.
,,The French essayist Alain Soral once famously said, “a journalist is either a whore or without a job.”
Yeah !
Fuck the journalists !
Sounds familiar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia
Conan (and others):
In the future try to link to Infogalactic (a fork of Wikipedia that is actually somewhat honest). Vox Day helped create it, so we should help out our allies instead of the converged organizations.
https://infogalactic.com/
https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia
The Ancient Greeks distinguished a class of *pseudo*-Intellectuals that they called Sophists (from which we derive the term ‘sophistry’).
I think it is important to distinguish true intellectualism from insincere intellectualism, or sophistry. The article, I believe, attempts to do this by distinguishing ‘modern’ intellectualism, and I think this is right.
The Western Tradition has a proud, 3000 year, history of high intellectualism, embodied in great literature and loosely referred to as ‘The Western Canon’. It would be wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, as in great part the very core of the Western Tradition is *rationality*.
Unfortunately ‘modern’ intellectuals are indistinguishable from the sophists, have disengaged from our true tradition, are more emotive than rational, and have absolved themselves from the western tradition of rigorous criticism to establish the truth which was once its hallmark.
Unfortunately the mind can, and will, fly off in any direction is so chooses unless it is grounded in the other realities of the body, existence and history/tradition/society and if it ignores the accumulated body of work that is the Western Canon.
Somewhat. Sophistry and Higher Philosophical Intellectualism are not necessarily at odds…only coincidentally. Sophistry (which is actually derived from the root sophic which is wisdom/intelligence) in classic greek.
The Greeks placed a high value of sophists which were, essentially, travelling teachers which could be hired by the wealthy for the education of the youth. Famous Sophists like Protagoras or Gorgias were valued to the ancient Athenians much like an Ivy League degree is valued today (keep aside the liberal silliness that gets played out on the elite universities, they still offer incredible educations and networking opportunities which far surpass 99% of the universities in the country)
In fact, we still teach sophistry today. It is essentially “debate” which many learn in secondary school and are actively involved in in college and if they go for a law degree will spend entire semesters on. It is important to remember that in Athens there was a true form democracy. All land owning males had an equal vote on every thing that came up. This doesn’t mean there weren’t people with more political power than others. Some people would have dozens or even hundreds of other people dedicated to vote the way they did. This gave them a huge amount of power. So lets say Testicles wanted to build a temple and needed a vote on it. He might run over to Cuntogras, who happens to have a voting block of 500 or 1000 other Athenians, and make nicey nicey with a bribe because Cuntogras, when he votes, will bring a big block with him. The question is, in a world where everyone has the same amount of power, one vote one person, until power is built one of the primary skills a person can learn is elocution, debate and rhetoric and this is what the Sophists taught (amongst other things like history and mathematics)
Where do they get a bad name? Well that is where Socrates and, more importantly, Plato come in. You see Plato wanted to create a codified system based on objective truth. This is a strange objective truth however and one people often misunderstand. Socrates did a good job (in character form with Plato’s words somewhat at the beginning and by the later dialogues it is all Plato) in meeting with these sophists and using poignant questions to show that their argument would eventually collapse on it’s own weight.
One of the famous ones is when he sees Euthyphro who is at the courthouse to turn his own father in for murdering a slave and says he is doing it because he is so pious. Well, Socrates asks him what piety is and 60 pages later Euthyphro looks like a total dickwad. However, remember the following things….it is Plato who is writing these dialogues and he is doing it with a direct motive. These aren’t recordings. He sat down, after the death of Socrates, and wrote these out to specifically make a point. I often call the people on the wrong side of a Socratic Dialoug “Yes-Socrates” as they make the absolute fucking dumbest arguments in the universe. This would be like having some liberal write down a conversation between Michael Moore and a republican specifically to show that the republican was a dip shit or watching a spike lee movie to get an understanding of race relations in the united states.
Yes, Plato does a really good job at getting his point across and often makes interesting points but make no mistake that Socrates himself is participating in the long and rich history of sophistry. What people fail to understand about Plato because they are in such a rush to demand objective truth is a real and understandable phenomena, is that Plato breaks the word into two very distinct layers. There is the realm of the physical and the real of ideas. For Plato the realm of ideas or forms is totally inaccessible to the human. It is perfect and beyond the ability to comprehend. The ideals are eternal and never changing objective truths. The world of the physical is just a flawed representation of this and as such has subjectivity built into it (not as subjectivity itself but as all reflections, it has a subjectivity based on the errors of reflection and the understanding of that reflection from a flawed world and a flawed creature — man).
The bad rap that the sophists get is rooted entirely in Plato who has Socrates argue with sophists by conflating these two worlds. He considers the sophists relativists and Socrates a man of objective truth and as such always shows Socrates winning an argument. In reality what Socrates does is that he attacks the arguments of the world we live in with the argument from the realm of ideals. They aren’t playing fair. This is apples to coconuts.
An interesting question that I have thought about for a long time about these socratic dialogues is, in the end, who is right. Yes, Socrates is making a good argument from objective truth but for plato objective truth exists only in the realm of ideals and is not possible in the physical world (in the same way that your soul can’t run to the store for beer while you sit on the sofa your brain can’t really and directly process objective forms) so while you can show that there is an objective ideal in contradiction to the subjectivity of the sophist, in truth the sophist is merely living a life in a flawed world with a flawed outlook….an outlook that is flawed to mirror the world in which he lives and, as such, could actually be considered more valid (even if not as correct) than the argument from objectivity.
One last thing about the Ancient Greeks with regard to their feelings on Socrates and his high minded theories about a world of perfect and objective truths…..in the end they put him to death for it.
I would like to say in defense of modern intellectuals. They are simply not all the same. If you ask the most rabid insane lunatic left wing faggot to describe the average trump voter he would be wrong. That doesn’t mean that the description he gives you isn’t indicative of some class of trump voter. I would say a VERY vast minority. But the stereotypes exist for a reason and this is true on both sides. I think that “modern intellectuals” get a bad rap for a very similar thing. There are some really dangerous lunatics out there and some with their heads so far up their asses that they can give themselves prostate exams no different than there are shoeless overall wearing hillbillies yeehawwwing and stringin’ up naeggarz while chewing on pork and banging their cousin. These are not indicative of the general population but rather the extreme that it is simple to point to and laugh. A second reason is context. The late and great Justice Antonin Scalia argued against cameras in the supreme court because he argued that news outlets and modern man didn’t have the capacity to understand them. They would take a 2 second sensational clip from 65 hours of testimony and argument and shit it all over the world. This wasn’t, as liberals said, keeping the average man in the dark. This was about not giving morons fodder.
The same goes with a lot of modern academia. I see quite a few people who haven’t taken the time to follow the 3000 year debate, or even to read entire books in context of a time and an author, latch on to some quote and go clown shoes over the whole fucking thing and speak with such passion as they deride something that they are 500,000 miles from even beginning to understand. No different than going to an ROK thread, reading one comment that is a response to a response to a response to a response to a comment on an article without reading the other comments or even the article and then saying “this is so and so and I disagree with it” It is strawman hatred.
So while I won’t defend the whole system…in fact it is a system I angrily turned my back on after dedicating a long part of my life and energy and passion to so defending it would be disingenuous…I would suggesting thinking long and hard before just labelling “modern intellectualism” as a single monolithic thing and then saying “this is bad”
Sorry so verbose. Good coffee this morning.
You should quit coffee.
welcome back monsieur. A pleasure to see you. How was retreat training?
It’s fun. I get to shoot rifles and bitch slap a lot of very very very very dumb people.
We’re not as advanced as your army though. Still no transgender in sight, nor do we get medals for walking 1 mile.
My army? Well, I mean if you mean the army of my country then ok…you have to ask people who know more. I personally spent the time drinking high end scotch and defiling attractive women. Also not particularly advanced but there is at least as much of a chance to shoot yourself in the foot.
No trannies in sight here either but I did slap a lot of bitches (they really love that shit). So I guess if you change rifle to women we pretty much had a similar experience.
Heh… I was worried when I posted what I posted that I would stand corrected!
What can I say? I *completely* agree with you! you’ve gone right into he detail behind what I said… for sure, my rough-and-ready definition of sophists came straight from Plato’s hit-piece, but like it or not his definition pretty much stuck, and I reached for it to make a point.
Also, I clearly have to concede your point about ‘Modern Intellectuals’ and my lumping them monolithically. Of course you are correct.
Having said that, I stand by what I said…. generally! once we get into nuance, sure, I’m talking bollocks….
And my essential point was about those modern intellectuals who have strayed off the path of the multi-thousand year dialogue that I like to consider the ‘western tradition’.
Don’t be upset, the entire western world has been taken in by Plato and Aristotle and their chicanery. There are a few neo-platonists that did very good work…my favorite being Plotinus but there were others.
The truth is that your assessment is in fact correct for a certain segment. The problem is that that segment is really loud and tends to proselytize. There are academics out there that teach their students the subject matter and save the musings for their peers at conferences and journals…believe it or not they are actually the vast majority…you don’t hear about these people because there is nothing to hear about them. If they are truly great your grandkids will hear about them. Until then, for the most part, they are only celebrities in the very small groups they travel in.
I agree with you about the people who have strayed though I don’t think everyone who is accused of it has and I think a hell of a lot of people who haven’t been accused of it ought to be. The hardest thing, to my lights, about this stuff is that you have to step back and realize that some of the people you agree with are also total cocksuckers too.
TL; DR?
fair enough but why the question mark. If it is tl;dr then stand by that shit!
It’s like the upward inflection anglo saxon women use at the end of sentences. Like, I’m not sure what it’s going to sound like ? It’s very annoying ?
You eventually get numb to it like the way those karate masters beat their shins with bamboo until they are hard as stone.
French “Educated” english speaking bitches are importing it in France through your silly sitcoms.
annoying in women, rage-inducing in men*
*=I use the term liberally here
hahaha, terrible. Just terrible. What happened to you guys. I was in Cannes the day they opened their first McDonalds back in the 90’s. People were throwing fucking rocks at it. It was magnificent.
Would love to take this conversation on Socrates, Plato and the Sophists further at some point too, and again I generally agree with the nuance you’ve brought here.
Socrates for sure was using the sophists own tools against them, the only thing I find admirable is his constant need to question *everything*, again perhaps the greatest safeguard built into the Western Tradition. Socrates has his own rich store of nonsense (assuming, as we tend to, that Plato’s Socrates [as opposed to, say, Xenophon’s] is close to the original)… I particularly like when he uses a load of leading questions on servant to assert a kind of pre-existing eternal knowledge!!
As for Plato… I often wonder if almost all the problems in philosophy were *caused* by his notion of a world of ‘ideas’ that is somehow more real that the *real* world… oh dear! Yes we humans can create abstractions (from mathematics to *religion*) but mistaking them for reality is…. problematic!
Anyway, lots in that post of yours, and I think you’d find we agree on pretty much everything you covered in it.
To start at the end first, I do think Plato and Aristotle, while valuable, fucked up philosophy more than they helped it. They basically took a huge fucking dump on philosophy.
I tend to buy that the early dialogues of plato are a fair look at Socrates (at least as fair as a second hand opinion of someone who is totally fucking in love with another person can be). That said, the problem remains. Let’s assume Plato is right and that objective truth in a metaphysical realm of ideals exists, is permanent and it is never changing and that the world we live in is merely a flawed copy of it. So who is right? The person trying to bring the world of ideals into the flawed world or the person trying to understand the patterns of the flawed world and live accordingly. That is a very tricky question. Maybe not with questions like “should I murder this nice old man and then make a collage of his innards” or “how many degrees do the interior angles of a square make up” but in questions like “is this beautiful” or “should I be a tattle tale in a certain circumstance” If you are, like Plato, making an appeal from a flawed mind to a perfect entity for how to act in the flawed world relative to an inaccessible realm of ideals you may actually be doing shit wrong.
This is why I love Kant so much. Kant realized that things could be subjective and universal at one and the same time and was able to make an appeal to the world in which we actually live for the answers. This is what Plato missed. It’s ok. Kant had 2000 years of people mulling this stuff over to figure it out. There is a comment above asking where progress is made from the countless back and forth of philosophers shitting on themselves. But like Nietzsche says…things that take millennia to happen are often hard to see. Plato split the world into a realm of ideals and a physical world. Kant was able to maintain both of them while simultaneously unifying them and he could not have done that without 2000 years of back and forth petty shitting.
Very nicely put…
To the shitting philosophers commenter – read the above.
Ha! First time I read one of your philosophical Meinungen and I can’t (by all means!) say I agree.
Plato associates the metaphysical immanence with “pure Truth”, but all physical entities are expected to be reflections of the Absolute, their transient, incomplete (non-absolute) proxy images.
Remember he believed in metempsychosis, so, this was just borrowed time, a small oppportunity for you to grasp a portion of Truth.
There is an old image of the Tree of Knowledge (they had it exposed right in the lobby of my University)… lower, physical truths are indeed the trunk of our knowledge, the operational guide for daily life. Of course.
But those are the same for all of us (except perhaps the irrational ones, heh). The superfluous, delicate and sweet part of existence (its fruit, in the Tree analogy) comes with the Absolute and its personal apprehension… It’s Beauty, it’s Love (or Hatred), it’s God. These mostly useless, ideal things.
This way, you’ve asked “Who is right?”; my answer: both. You can’t explain God with maths (only Its reflexions, like the Golden Ration), but you can’t use divine knowledge to drive your car.
Yes, you’ll never talk with the Gods, or subdue love (non-Eros) with reason. But they will be there forever, for you (and bigger than you). Space shuttles, Ferraris, even other humans… you’ll understand them, but incompletely (oil leaks, cancers, unexpected mid-air explosions), and you’ll lose them, sooner or later.
it is hard to agree or disagree here. At first I merely laid out the facts of the history. The conjecture afterwards about subjectivity and objectivity, if you notice, was in the form of a question. I don’t have the answer. I have seen answers like your and find them, along with all the other answers, ultimately unsatisfying. If you think back to the Ion Plato says that physical reality is a mimetic and flawed copy of the forms where art is a mimetic and flawed copy of physical reality taking yet another step away from the truth and therefore is to be eschewed. That said….he is conceding that we are dealing with a second order reality in our day to day life with some very sketchy and imperfect access to reality through reason. Some things, like geometry, can be reasoned out even by a slave boy as he shows in the republic, so long as the slave boy has a teacher who asks the right questions. But the fact remains that there is a play in the world between our imperfect and subjective reality and the objective nature of reason and the forms. Plato acknowledges this in his visualization of the chariot where Thumos (pride) and Lust are two powerful horses with reason guiding them as charioteer. Things are a lot more complicated in the world than just lining shit up.
Furthermore, much of what plato says is actually bullshit and going to him for authority is like asking Henry Ford to peek under the hood of your Tesla and let you know why something isn’t working. It is beyond dated and superficial. In keeping with your tree analogy, it is like picking fruit from the bark of the tree rather than the flowers.
In the end, I have to say that I have more questions than answers by a long shot. So you aren’t really so much disagreeing with me. Rather you are saying that my question is invalid because you have it all figured out. That doesn’t make much sense to me.
I’ll grant you that, keeping, however, the distance between our approaches. And let me at least acknowledge that I wish I had it all figured out… I just work my questions in a different system (more platonic? Alas…).
[The bad rap that the sophists get is rooted entirely in Plato who has Socrates argue with sophists by conflating these two worlds. He considers the sophists relativists and Socrates a man of objective truth and as such always shows Socrates winning an argument. In reality what Socrates does is that he attacks the arguments of the world we live in with the argument from the realm of ideals. They aren’t playing fair. This is apples to coconuts.]
-Mmm. My only question is, do coconuts migrate?
Well it all depends on the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.
What bothers me about the ivory tower is that it is no longer an institution designed for intellectual debate or discussion. They market themselves as the forefront of modern thought and discovery, but they take a particular (i.e., modern leftist) worldview as axiomatic and beyond criticism.
This is not surprising of course, as big government would ensure that there will always be more grants and sources of funding for their great contributions in the “social sciences”. They try desperately to insulate themselves from real market forces and then further isolate themselves ideologically, and then finally push their worldview on the masses as coming from a position of “higher truth”.
For all their talk of “diversity”, there is an awful lack of diverse thought in their departments, and you can’t even call them out on it.
The few times that I have challenged their ideas on issues like gender, freedom of speech, sovereignty vs. government regulation, I am always met with confusion and anxiety. The majority of these “intellectuals” do not have rebuttals to arguments that challenge their basic principles because they created an environment where their ideas would never be challenged.
I adore Western, Eastern, and world philosophy and the Humanities, but I have nothing but disdain for my supposed intellectual “superiors” in the regulated environment that is academia. I find the plain old common sense of the “little people” has more depth than these totalitarian fucks.
I noticed this when I returned to study as a mature age student. I’d be questioning my lecturers and tutors all the time and couldn’t get straight answers for the vast majority of my questions.
There are two types of academics in the arts/humanities: 1)true believers and 2)hobbyists. The second category are far less dangerous but they are pretty useless insofar as they are just interested in ideas for their own sake and tend towards novelty.
The so-called Western Canon is a loose construction. If one takes a close look at it, one sees it is full of contradictory ideas. Philosophers tried to reconcile this heap of creations by creating theories of dialectical development and going beyond contradictions, but they contradicted each other and could not stand the postmodernist assault. As the Bible says, a house divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:24-5).
In my opinion, the author is right to summon Guénon and Evola: a true Canon must be reflecting a perfect and complex coherence. It cannot be a patchwork bound to be torn apart.
A quick note on Sophistry, plato on “The Sophists” basically said that they say what the mass wants, as it wants to simply justify it’s ill behaviour.
This is a must read from Nassim Taleb, “The Intellectual Yet Idiot”:
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.lqskdhm8n
Some excerpts:
Brutal.
Taleb is a very good showman and excellent opinion piece writer but far from someone who can make a sustained argument. Some of the things he says are just spot on but in the end he is more of a 24hr news guy than anything else. Bill O’Reilly says some bright things on occasion, but in the end just another showman selling a bill of goods to people who are already predisposed to buying it
I think that Taleb is brilliant…but he knows his audience and understands that only 0.001% of the population would understand arguments based on mathematical modeling (which is prone to flaws due to our current limitations when it comes to analyzing complex systems) or in formal logic terminology. O’Reilly on the other hand…
If nothing else, O’Reilly knows his audience…
Your assessment of Taleb is dead on I think. Taleb is brilliant. My analogy to O’Reilly simply meant he was sensationalistic. Say what you want about his beliefs, O’Reilly is in fact successful and he is successful for a lot of the same reasons Taleb is. That said, thre is a reason those complex systems came about and that was to talk about complex structures which idiomatic colloquial speech simply doesn’t have the ability to actually handle. This is like when you have to use a flat head to unscrew a Philips screw. Yeah, you can get some results but you will more like than not strip the head and probably have to say “fuck” at least twice. The problem I have with Taleb is that people (absolutely not you as your comment shows) think that there is no different in formal logic and its uses and his idiomatic ways and make the mistake of now assuming they get it too. Then they argue as if from expertise and throw out a few taleb quotes which really only skim the surface and then present things in a way most people can get.
The compound interest on this shit is what makes people sound like absolute fucking dolts when they talk about it. This is why the Catholic Church didn’t want the common man reading the scriptures.
They invest so much to have that status that it has to count for something in the end right? How could you grind through 30 years of edukayshun and then admit that common sense is as sufficient as your 300 page dissertation?
Tell me about it.
I had a professor once refuse me a letter of reference after I pointed out an error in his work.
Petulant children, the lot of them. I’m going to laugh maniacally when tenure for life is finally abolished.
No kidding
So, you escape from Gramsci’s cultural Marxism only to fall into the hands of two of the worst con artists in history?
Guenon, a retarded occultist and disciple of Satanist Papus and nazi sympathizer Julius Evola?
Both Perennialists , the light of Lucifer behind all religions and the Gnostic crap.
You know, they fought intellectual modernism, but advocated a return to mystical witchcraft. From the pan into the fire.
Gimme a break.
Evola isn’t a Nazi sympathizer he just saw aspects of the SS that could be used to reignite the Shift towards Tradition. He wasn’t even liked by the Nazi leadership.
‘Philosophers care much more about putting forth problems, no matter how artificial and illusory, than about solving them…’ Sweeping generalization as not all philosophers (Including myself) are lost in a post-modern riddle of relativist uncertainty. I’m moving even closer to the naturalist position espoused by Richard Dawkins in which Philosophy and science are reconciled again, and empirical thinking underpins the subject entirely. Anyway, good to read a high quality article that challenges culturally Marxist ivory towers.
As an intellectual, I approve this message. What much of this applies to are the pseudo-intellectuals infecting today’s society: People think that reading Wikipedia makes them an intellectual.
No, it doesn’t. It leads to idiots spouting Voltaire or Nietzsche without understanding a damned thing about either of those men.
I’d say its similar to the “Hallmark greeting card feel-good posts” that infect facebook: No one is inspired by your pictures of clouds and skyscapes. Shut the hell up.
I find it fun to hunt down quotes from respected figures that contradict those sort of virtue signaling.
Everyone has their guilty pleasures.
As noted English philosophy and scientist Isaac Newton once said, “I agree”
(I mean, he probably said it at some point right?)
If only privately when he read Leibniz 😀
You can’t prove that! Muh feelz!
I literally had to put up with such a guy once when studying for my bachelor, it was the second worst experience on intellectual issues, after a guy who was EXTREMELY stupid, became an atheist and started to demand people to recognize his high inteligence.
As a former philosophy minor, i have to agree. All the other students were pretentious hipsters who just enjoyed arguing. Thats all philosophy is now, the art of debate. The subject matter is irrelevant as long as you look smarter than the other guy. Douches like abelard or kant…ugh. each philosopher that comes along makes a name for themself by shitting all over some previous guy’s assertions…does anything ever actually get done? Absolutely not. I still like plato, though.
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Intellectuals are a two-edged sword. They are able to see through the cons of our system quicker, but only if they have 3 tools at disposal:
1) Sufficient information
2) Free academia
3) Free media
Now the information is out there, but both academia and media has been bought and paid for by the money masters. Essentially in order to reign in the intellectuals all you need to do is take control of the press and the universities. Anyone with enough money can do that. After that the intellectuals will work for you since they will discard any other information that diverges from their indoctrination.
Isn’t this what the protestants said when they tore apart the Catholic Church?
Don’t see how this is related. The Catholic church was ossifying both academia & science and was interlaced with plenty of corruption. The protestant reformation actually forced them improve. Christianity was at best an underlying factor for morality, but it had to take a step back to let secular thinking go forward unhindered.
I suppose that depends on who you ask. I have no dog in the race here but I know a lot of people that think allowing the unwashed masses direct access to the scripture without mediation by the clergy was the beginning of the end.
Lots of good and bad. Same with Islam. If most of the fuckheads blowing themselves up knew how to read the Koran, the base of radical Islam would fall apart.
Ah – you are one of those wanting to restrict access to knowledge to “the deserving ones”. Open knowledge gives rise to real scientific growth as you find 100 times more super-intelligent men among the “unwashed masses”. Their abilities are better served in academia then tending to the sheep.
Nuff said.
I will never denied that the masses contain intelligent people. But statements like “you find 100 times more super-intelligent men amount the unwashed masses” are just plain nonsense and show, first hand, why the Catholic Church (like Antonin Scalia) worked so hard to keep them away. Pithy little insights of people who only understand a tenth of what they are reading and use emotional appeal as a crutch will resonate with other fools and being that fools exist in such greater numbers foolishness becomes the majority.
I would never say that there aren’t intelligent people out there doing what they do…some even incredibly intelligent….and I would never deny that there is a very healthy number of fucking morons in academia. But to extrapolate that to the nth degree is just plain clown shoes.
I actually can’t speak to this one as I never bothered reading the damn book. It was on my list of things I should read but for some reason missed out on right up until I read Moby Dick and then instantly burned that list and put the ashes in my neighbor’s garbage.
I bought MD when I was 10, got about a quarter of the way through it and haven’t touched it since.
Ever read “Dracula”…what a fucking snoozefest…
That book was just fucking terrible. I told myself I would read it and I did but man, it really fucking blew. Not only that, but what a faggy novel.
Here are some quotes I copied to “Notes” (btw the name of my Hipster Band would be “The Infernal Head Peddlers”)
“Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler.”
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess you’ll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”
“I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.”
I have dozens of others.
yeah Dracula was fucking awful. Holy shit. I mean, I like to imagine myself a creative sort but if I had been the one to read that book I would never have thought “lets make a movie about this”
I just wanted the author to die, after about the first six pages…
same. half the book was about exciting as reading a mortgage agreement.
Well, iirc, the first part was almost exactly that, a housing/legal situation on behalf of Dracula.
Nowhere near that exciting, come on, don’t sugarcoat it, Bram Stoker is dead, he doesn’t need any royalties…
yup
Does anyone know how to make custom coffee cups? My methods are crude, to say the least.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d27a4f9de8ad4c05bf8b9d545d07237ed091a5403bb6e3b49e4892a1449b6807.jpg
http://www.shutterfly.com
EDIT: I don’t know if they are the best or worst or cheapest or most expensive. I just know I made my grandmother a coffee mug for Christmas last year and it was pretty easy
Much obliged, Mr. Lolknee. btw I always enjoy your snarkish comments, and the unsnarkish ones too.
They sell special markers where you draw on the cup and then bake it in the oven. Look in an arts supply store.
Thank you very much, Mr Roosh. I’m not an artistic type so I barely know what an art store is, but I have friends who do. Would you suggest I go for the clean typed out look, or do you think the scribbled in new words over the scratched out old words is a better artistic expression, considering the context?
https://s14.postimg.org/7j1z5808h/image.png
This.
I dont see the avg IQ for hotel magnates/reality tv stars
Don’t give them ideas for new useless college majors.
haha- thats a helluva double major!
IT Girl, IT Girl Consultant, IT Girl PHD, IT Girl Bachelor(ette), IT Girl Master.
And I don’t mean the IT that has anything to do with computers.
YG Girl. You go girrrrrrrrrrrrlllllllll!
There’s only one point in that data set, and he promises to release his IQ after the inauguration.
^ butthurt
TPP might be DOA but trump is vlad the impaler
This is spectacular.
It’s also sad and annoying to me.
Sad and annoying? No. Whats sad and annoying is the pretense that it isn’t so.
Actually, you are right. It wouldn’t be a problem if we called things by their real names.
Truth doesn’t hurt. Denial does.
And it hurts people who have no fault at all. When X pretends to be Y, it hurts the real Y.
Why be saddened though.
In the end you look out at the world you live in, try to understand it the best you can, figure out what you want in life and then bend the world over and fuck it raw.
Wishing things were some other way is just being a dreamer
It’s annoying because people with the lowest IQs affect our lives a lot. We listen to them on the TV and other media. Without places like ROK they would have won those elections.
But look at what you are saying. THEY effect YOUR life a lot. YOU listen to them on the tv and other media. That is like saying that savage tigers in Africa kill people. Not a problem if you stay out of the jungle.
Those morons have very little effect on me or my life because I simply don’t pay attention to them. Yeah they are droning on and on about stupid bullshit on tv and radio but I see no compelling reason you have to be watching it.
It is never worth it to be upset about morons. They have always and will always exist. Ignoring them as much as possible is really much healthier
I understand what you are saying, but it still bugs me that all the stupid and useless people have the same voting power as all the smart ones. They almost brought us Hillary and WW3. If that had happened, it would be hard to ignore. Tomorrow we may not be so lucky.
It’s true that such people have always existed, but until modern times they rarely used to decide the course of our society.
Hillary would have brought us more of the same just like trump. People get all excited about this stuff. It’s all bs if you just ignore it it goes away.
Maybe I will. But first I will give Trump a chance.
Oh yeah all mens give him a chance. I don’t think he will do any harm and might actually do a few decent things. But in the end you would be hard pressed to convince me it really matters all that much
Also not a problem if you realize there are no tigers in Africa. Yes, it was a metaphor. It’s still a metaphor.
Lolk, which college did you teach in?
I taught in several state schools and a private university
Actually 3 private universities if you count places I taught only for a single semester
It also says, if you look closely, computer science majors are not only less intelligent than philosophy majors, but they also have less access to chicks.
I’m still not convinced the average philosophy major has an above-average IQ (you should have seen my profs explaining why Aristotle did nothing and was irrelevant, with kids nodding in agreement).
But Computer Science classes tend to have maybe three girls, if you’re lucky. And there are an astounding number of dunces in that field, too.
depends on who you poll. That is why these numbers are screwed. Let’s say you used, as indicative of all students, majors who graduated with a degree in field specific honor society who also were Phi Beta Kappa. Ok, there were lots of philos in there. But Phi Beta Kappa takes other things into account like diversity of classes, grades in fields dramatically different to major, participation in activities on campus, groups, blah blah blah so your average PBK philo member (who is a member of Phi Sigma Tau the international philo honors society) will have a gpa north of 3.75 and have shown high scores in language, philosophy, literature but also shown high scores in mathematics and science and will also show participation in things like school news papers, debate clubs and probably show a sport or two. If you just go to a state school and ask people majoring in philosophy to take an IQ test the numbers would be much different than if you asked majors who graduated with honors. Numbers don’t lie. Statisticians do.
Perhaps not major but academics in that field are quite smart.
You can’t bullshit your way through philosophy like gender and media studies: it is a legitimate discipline. There are lots of dishonest pricks though.
I don’t know. That guy who inspired the Matrix trilogy (I forget his name) wrote a few books of Yakov Smirnov jokes, but he took them seriously.
It’s a field containing plenty of bullshit, but there’s absolute gold in there if you are willing to keep digging.
Sure, but to get to the point where you can get away with writing bullshit you have to put in the hard yards.
The only reason I didn’t pursue a Phd in philosophy is because I couldn’t afford to. I needed to make money, not spend more time studying.
I find it less than necessary to pay and slave for a doctorate, given the availability of ebooks and blogs. We live in a world where the wisdom of the ages can be cataloged and stored on a 5-inch device, and even amateur philosophers such as myself can publish our thoughts.
It is truly a glorious thing.
I’d like that to go, and no, I’m not looking for a girlfriend with a useless college major debt.
IQ tests are bullshit.
The graph makes a lot of sense in the context of the article, so maybe it’s not so bullshit.
no way social work students are above 100
The chart seems to be using a different IQ scale than I’m familiar with. I seem to recall a study or two showing education majors averaged 85, and college students in general averaged 105.
There’s just no way Computer Science majors have a +1.5SD on intelligence, given the people I’ve worked with in school and industry. That’s what tipped me off.
one must approach all stats with a critical attitude. I can’t say I’ve met enough comp sci students to comment, but social work students – pretty much scraping the barrel. As far as I’m concerned most of them should be taken into care for their own safety
There are plenty of subpar Comp-Sci students that just copy code from the web.
The people I knew who were good at programming were pretty intelligent dudes (yes, usually men) from my intuition. That said, not everybody who STUDIES it is intelligent. In fact, many don’t even know what to expect and go into it blindly and fail. From what I experienced, maybe 20% are really good at that stuff (narrow sample from private university).
But this diagram is concerned with “majors”. Correct me if Im wrong but does that not mean they have “majored”?
Yeah but those never make it far. Maybe they can pass some exams with the help of the more gifted students, but they will never be really good at it, my guess.
This article comes to mind.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/
Aren’t people below 80 mildly retarded (seriously)? How could education majors be 85?
That made me think. We don’t know if they majored for sure actually.
women studies students were off the chart somewhere far down and right.
IQ tests are odd. Many of the questions have more than one answer, depending on your perspective. How anyone could profess to be able to accurately gauge a person’s intelligence is beyond me. If a person can write full-blown musical compositions in their heads, but they can’t select the “correct” responses to questions posed by people who probably don’t even score in the 140-plus range for the very tests they create, well, gosh-golly, they’ve just got to be dumber than fuck, eh? There’s a lot of evidence for the case that IQ tests measure malleability – how easily programmable a person is. I gotta go with that one here…
To my thinking, IQ is (or should be) the measure of pattern-matching ability. Individuals who can quickly create patterns from observations, extrapolate those patterns, combine those patterns, and replace broken patterns are able to do things with which we associate high intelligence.
Theoretically, engineers, computer scientists, and philosophers should necessarily have high IQs, because all those fields require that kind of pattern recognition/application/creation. In fact, one could reasonably assume (in the absence of exposure) that psychologists should have high IQs, because they have to be able to create patterns from behaviors, body language, etc.
Never bothered to take an IQ test. I reckon the number will either be higher than I think reasonable or lower than I think it should be. Either way, it detracts from my life.
It’s all just academic at the end of the day.
Agreed. I think it’s all about awareness, the myriad levels of it. IQ tests tend to shove people into boxes. It’s pretty hard to be aware of much of anything, if one is shoved into a box…
Ah, you beat me to it.
I think I did some tests at school, but they never told me my result … which in hindsight is VERY strange.
I also did some online tests where I scored around 130 or so. Which I think is in the lower bracket of above average.
“What would a person with an IQ of 134 think of this ….”
thats the high end of above avg- congrats
Hmmm, I don’t think so. They had some bell curve (or whatever) that declined somewhere around 160 or 170.
116-130 above avg 131-144 sperg 145-plus probable evil genius
Lol. Well maybe it was just 120? I dunno. For some reason, I have the number 130 in my head… but we all know memory can be funny.
But I don’t really thing Aspergers correlates with IQ, although women tend to call intelligent men autistic.
On the other hand, who knows.
120? That makes you a bezerker
Then that’s probably accurate.
I’m psychic but that’s tough to measure unless you have full control over it.
I suck at math though so thats a tradeoff I can live with.
Even with that cro-mag forehead you got? Color me impressed.
It’s a photoshop, heh.
I, too, am metahuman. I am blind, but my eyes allow me to see (like Daredevil, but less so).
I think a lot of people take IQ tests like they are family feud contests. They aren’t infallible but they aren’t so random as to be total bullshit. Somewhere in the middle. Kind of like testing body fat with a caliper. Yeah, it gives you an fair measurement and if you do it week to week it will show progress, but if you aren’t submerging your body in water and adding bonedensity to the equation you are basically dealing with a lot of subjectivity.
IQ tests should be like family feud though
“Affirmative Action Family Feud”…sweet.
nah…I used to think of it as affirmative action. Now I just think of family feud as getting to go to the zoo without having to smell the poop. This goes for black and white contestants. I have yet to see an episode where every single fucking contestant isn’t absolutely ridiculous and hilarious. Really, I sometimes sit there just laughing out loud looking at these fucking animals.
Like most game-shows and reality TV, you’re screened out for your ability to entertain the masses. So the folks that make it through to the show are almost entirely buffoons, trash and pricks.
Just like sports and elections, it’s entertainment…bread and circus (or zoos, as you aptly noted).
yeah but the Feud really is on point. Most episodes pit a family of real tree swinging coons versus a family of out and out inbred white trash where each group of 5 members has a combined IQ somewhere near Mayonnaise which has sat out in the hot Georgia sun all day and then forces them to be supportive of each other. It truly is spectacular.
I like this one – Sugar Ray Leonard on “Wheel of Fortune” –
fucking a I never saw that. so classic.
This one is even better; Steve Garvey, Warren Moon and Sugar Ray Leonard –
“name a place where you and your spouse have sex.”
“in the butt?”
best answer ever
classic newlywed game
make america like richard dawson again!
awwwww yeah. You know how much huge bush he probably took down?
Did Nixon ban all black and navy suits in the 1970s? I will never understand why everything was so yellow and brown in that decade
Bright colors grab short attention spans. They’re entertaining, not meeting in board rooms.
youre telling me you rock a brown suit with a yellow shirt and a butterfly collar?
Absolutely not. I’m also not a game-show host from the 70s.
Yes, it was built upon the McCoy act of 1909 in which “Immigrants who wanted citizenship had to stay out of their apartments at least four hours a day and walk around in the streets with hats on”
how about Family Freud? Dr Phil could host it
“They aren’t infallible but they aren’t so random as to be total bullshit.”
This.
Gayyyyy.
God the old timers were some kind of geniuses.
Gee Whiz! Where are all the BBW’s at? Take note how trim all the women are. It wasn’t all that long ago.
Yeah that’s very possible. And yet, when you look at this diagram, there is at least a grain of truth in it. Unless … you’re gonna posit that science and philosophy and programming is not a real thing.
While I agree that IQ is vague and may not say much about an individual person, I think that it roughly reflects a person’s brain capability of pattern detection and quick association and interconnection of information. Those are “skills” that would be necessary for those jobs in the top IQ tier.
As for malleability, I agree and I don’t. Maybe the important thing for malleability is not so much intelligence, but PRIDE in intelligence.
Interesting points. I know this Air Force Colonel, and he told me that all standard intelligence tests (IQ and otherwise) help weed out who the most malleable people are, who the troublemakers are, etc. He says that this has really been a major project since the 1960s. I remember taking these intelligence tests (non-IQ, they were different) at every level from the 1st through the 6th grades. And I always wondered why the hell I had to take them, what did they “prove”. Apparently that’s for the data-sorters to figure out (heh).
I never liked taking them either.
In hindsight, they are kinda strange, right? The tasks in them are so totally divorced from most anything you do in real life … hm.
Maybe the most malleable people are the ones who actually put effort into the IQ tests while the normal people think: WTF is this bullshit?
Heh.
The first one they gave me way back in 1rst grade I flat out asked the lady why we were taking the test. She had no answer.
“how easily programmable a person is”
yeah ive always thought the same way
There are actually people with Down syndrome who can do impossible for us calculations (or some other stuff at similar scales) with their mind alone, and at the same time those people are completely retarded in every other sense of the word. But they are exceptions.
Every person has his/her own talents. If you brain, however, is exceptionally good at something, chances are it will be good at other things too. Einsten was a theoretical physicist, but he could also play the violin. I am not a musician, but I’ve heard that the violin is the most difficult instrument to play. I guess that tells us something, even if Eistein wasn’t a world class violinist.
I think what Downs syndrome people give us is an opportunity to be completely human. To “give” without any expectation of gain, social or material reward.
I am lucky to know a good man who is probably one of thr most dangerous men alive. A real killer who worked in one of the elite special forces. His wife died after giving birth to his downs syndrome daughter. And since then he has taken care of this child like something you cannot imagine.
He told me that when she was born he asked God “what did I ever do to deserve this?” And now he asks God “what did I ever do to deserve someone like this in my life?”
Those people have no chance to develop themselves or prosper in life. Even if all people got Down’s, and the world turned into some perfectly happy paradise, we wouldn’t have technology and stuff. We wouldn’t survive. Not a world we would want to live in.
If everyone was Stephen Hawking nothing would get done. If everyone was Joe Blue Collar nothing would get invented, etc etc. I’m talking about a benefit from one segment of society.
Anyone who can write full-blown musical compositions in his head will wipe the floor with the memory and nonverbal pattern recognition sections of the test.
IQ tests are limited tools, and there is much they do not measure (i.e. long-term memory, and the unclassifiable forms of abstract association required for significant creative work) but they do consistently correlate in a general way to academic success and general intellectual ability.
Wow! That’s a genius diagram, man.
Yeah, kudos to whoever made it.
Interesting. It goes in line with what I’ve seen from people in those areas…
Notice how lower is the IQ of those who deal with people’s problems (health, social workers, education…). The fact is, it’s the only way you’d survive. Your clients are uninteresting, selfish, disgraceful, entitled/pompous liers. One after the other. If you apply true intellect on them, you’ll either be an ever-depressed professional (“I can’t believe Humanity is this!!!”) or you’ll ruin objectivity and your “empathic duties” (stop eating so much, you whale/ stop drinking and beating your wife/ study more, you lazy moron/…).
Switch off, dumb down: you’re just playing your role, applying guidelines and enjoying you’re not ‘them’.
It makes sense to behave like Dr. House now.
Look at the ratio for mathematics. I saw this firsthand. At NYU on the 11th floor of the Courant building, is the math lounge. If you walk in there you’ll notice roughly 30% of the people there are women, they are also the cutest and most feminine women on campus. And unlike the bitches in the “womyns studies” department, they earned their degrees doing incredibly hard work without any hand holding.
Yeah, I noticed Maths is a bit exceptional too.
And let’s not forget why half of psych majors got into psychology in the first place — just an attempt to solve their own (often intractable) mental problems. Then they get into a high tower and find themselves as unassailable hypocrites; gives them a power position without any solution needed for their root problems.
It doesn’t matter if they are intellectuals and know a lot. If they are political correct and does
not expose truth for what they are and water down it, then it’s useless. 99 percent of people
cannot handle the truth very well even when the patterns are obvious.
That professor in the article photo, shown below…why isn’t he hanging from a lamp post? Why hasn’t he killed himself yet?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6ccfbaebfb56defbe3fb7df4f3621313e823d381e42bcd5b126b900875468aab.jpg
Let me guess… this prof is jewish?
The anti-white rhetoric coming out of those liver lips lead me to that conclusion.
Wait what? Can’t he be sued over inciting people to commit suicide?
You would think…
Intellectuals are also responsible for the innovation of every single piece of technology that has made our lives what they are. You don’t have to work in an academic institution to be intellectual.
There are intellectuals, and then there are ‘Intellectuals’.
I call bullshit. This is to say that either Duke the dog is an intellectual or the recipe for Bush’s baked beans is not a piece of technology that has made life what it is. I refute both claims.
Maybe we should be talking about empiricism v rationalism. Assume that both are forms of intellectualism. You’re probably opposed to the second, Mr. Bacon?
I never understood how people who took a quarter million dollars in loans to apply for a job where 1 in 70 candidates actually get hired to make a starting salary around 35k were allowed to teach anything called “Rationalism”
The greatest intellectuals are folks you’ve probably never heard of. Men that toil away in obscurity and silence. People like Michio Kaku, Neil Degrassi Tyson and Bill Nye (lol), are nothing but pseudo-intellectual glory-hounds and entertainers. Hawking’s fame and relevance stem more from his disability than his contributions.
I agree with you on all counts. That said, Hawking really is fucking brilliant and would be famous *in the physics community** at any rate even if he had far less notoriety to the larger population. That said, he did step out of academia to write a brief history of time….a book specifically for educated people who didn’t have the advanced mechanisms to wrestle with the larger theories so I think he would be slightly more known than, say Thomas Young who laid the outline for the double slit experiment but no where near the commercial popularity he currently enjoys.
Agreed.
Indeed. I would add that a philosopher who doesn’t lift is a clown.
This article makes a great case that Stephen Hawking is running the depopulation point guard position for the NWO –
http://milesmathis.com/hawking.pdf
Before I even get into that link, I can assure you that Bill Gates is the star of that team.
“Now if we do a really good job with vaccines…” – agreed.
you know there have always been guys like Tyson and Nye and Michio Kaku. But they weren’t really taken seriously. Johnny Carson would bring them on once every couple of months to do some trick where a balloon was blown up or some shit and everyone had a laugh. The muppets lampoon this with Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker. Things that are fun and silly are fine. Hell, even Aristotle, that notorious fucking bore, takes this stick out of his ass long enough to say that we need time to have cathartic moments.
I mention this because this is the diagnosis of modernity as I think of it. When we start taking entertainment as authority then we have a problem. This is the reason that people like The Kardashians and Donald Trump and Miley Cyrus have a voice in this world. We all started conflating the things that entertain us with the things that are important.
I think Tom brought it up in another post, but actors used to be considered shit. Low-class scum.
I saw that. Low class scum….so so. Mostly, I think, they weren’t thought about at all. They were the help. They were either good at their job or bad at their job like the maid or the waiter. What they thought was fucking irrelevant. Part of this is how Jews got into the entertainment business. By and large jews went into businesses that were seen as dirty an uncivilized because they were immigrants and seen as dirty and uncivilized themselves. Questions of conspiracy aside because I don’t want to open that bag of chestnuts: if Hollywood and Banking is seen as work for the rabble and you put them there and then Hollywood and Banking winds up being very powerful…the people who dominate those fields….the former rabble…then wind up amassing power.
My take on actors: They’re paid to be fake.
agreed. That’s why I don’t care if Brad Pitt is a total beta cuck or if Sam Jackson feels a certain way about politics. I love fucking Pulp Fiction. I love pretty much every movie Sam Jackson was in. And I really love Brad Pitt flicks. I mean from A River Runs Through it straight to the big short I don’t think he has a single movie I didn’t really like. What goes on in his head is totally fucking irrelevant to me.
That flick with julia roberts was pretty bad. he drove an el camino. thats all I remember
The Mexican. I loved that movie.
James Gandolfini play a homo mobster and Pitt was a quintessential fuck up in a remake on a classic Mexican folk tale. How could that be bad!
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3c398aef75c1886b2d1159f64e298358b35635905cac763cf415f8ce671ea5b6.jpg
*EDIT, I added the name of the author, whom I remembered after a brief look at my library*
During the middle ages it was the far more worst time for acting, the reason was that the medievals knew roman theatre, a type of theatre in which there were orgies on stage and public executions! By Chrysostom (Goldmouth) a Church Father who lived at the times when the old religion still had a hold in his work “on how to raise the kids” he said at one point maniacally:
“The child should never go to the theatre! It must also hate the idea of going to the theatre. For this reason you, and your servants, will explain to him what the seeing of spectacles does to the soul and you should take him and sit in a place facing the entrance of the theatre and see the people that go out from it and start laughing with them for the damage that the theater has given them. In this way you do not scare the child away from the theater only but you make him understand that by going there he will become deplorable”
It really strikes a nerve a bit, thinking though of what it is played on theatre today (through commercials) and what on TV and the cinema with just an 1 in 10 good shows, spectacles or films, I really understand them. The main reason I think is because these amenities help shape one’s perception of the world and if what is shown is twisted or bad it helps to make a twisted person, this is also the basis for Plato’s hate on the theatre and the poetics (He basically accused the poets of twisting the relations between gods for entertainment value, making them appear human and conflicted).
If they keep their politics out of my face it is ok, but I can’t stand hacks like Affleck.
I was never a huge fan of his but his behaviour on Maher put me right off him.
I need that source. It looks like good one.
It is from an old Greek edition of collected sayings of some Church Fathers. The writer was Chrysostom (Goldmouth) and in the collection it was called: How one must raise the kids.
You can find all his works in kindle form, but sadly I cannot help you to pinpoint the exact work in English.
John chrysostom is expressing his disapproval of mimes, the most popular form of Roman theater. He does not disapprove of tragedy or even old comedy as art forms. Hos contemporary basil and Gregory are unabashedly on favor of reading homer and tragedy as a necessary step in a child’s education for learning moral truths and moving on to biblical study.
The reference to poetics was on Plato, for his contemporaries I did not know nor refered to them. The theater thing though was as it was in the Greek edition.
Never liked Michio Kaku, he did not shew himself as knowledgable. On physics I respected and liked (on pop scientists) only Carl sagan (you ‘ll be missed :’l ).
At least Mr. Trump is actually a businessman and has some balls and people skills.
Debatable. One thing I always point out is how much he is despised amongst his peers (NY billionaire real estate developers).
How so?
I am a corporate officer for a developer and as such come into contact with other developers about the same size or bigger than trump. He is generally mocked, his business practices questioned and thoroughly loathed by the very small group of insiders in that business. I think it is quite telling when a man’s peers think he is a buffoon. This business is an old boys club. He is pretty generally loathed
Doesn’t mean much to me. I don’t really give much damns about insider groups. Fuck that. It’s like trades in Germany. The people have to learn a kind of ‘master’ (not the BA Master thing) to be allowed to practice the trade. And they all have some arbitrary rules and standards etc to ‘ensure quality’. In my eyes, they are just arrogant and prideful and are basically like mafia/unions. Protecting a ‘job title’ as if it was their own. Like photographers. It’s fucking ridiculous. They disgust me.
Unless you can tell me something concrete that Trump did that is objectively a very bad idea, I can’t really value your argument much.
You said he had charisma (forget the word you used) and I told you that people who actually know him regard him as a fucking clown. He doesn’t have people skills. He is a huckster, a snake oil salesman and people who know him know that. What he is is a reality show personality. So perfectly suited. I will think of him as the Kim Kardashian president.
These aren’t arrogant prideful bastards. They are very brilliant and very quiet business men who don’t like peacocking turds who act like totally douche bags for attention to hide deep seeded insecurities.
I’m not guessing at this Tom. This is my world and my business. I see how acts at REBNY functions. I see how very smart men scoff at him and his “business acumen” which is profitable but is no different than a sideshow at a carnival.
Hm. Okay, that sounds more convincing. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re not. I suppose if I want deeper answers, I’d need to research a bit of the business Mr. Trump does.
Haters be hating! I’m talking about the real estate dudes!.
Btw, he does have people skills. You proved it.
From my experience in the corporate world, people skills ARE about being snake oil salesmen. About selling yourself, even if you have no essence. Maybe I was just in the wrong business, but that’s what I kinda learned. Be good enough at making people feel good and shit and nobody cares about ‘rationality’. I always protested against this shit. I guess it is an irony that I would like a man who embodies pretty much that which I always despised. Weird world. But I still think you may be wrong about him, so I naively hold on to that notion. Heh.
He has his talents that’s for sure and unlike his opponent he isn’t a murderous evil thief sonof the two he was better but he is still a rediculius ass clown and I am not particularly happy with him being the star on the nonsense reality show we cal politics
They aren’t haters. They are quiet civilized billionaires who dislike his Tom foolery and bullshit.
I don’t think research is necessary. I think he will do a mediocre job at best probably not fuck too many things up but as you get to know him better in general I honestly believe you will agree with me. His name has been household in NY since the 80’s and i have been in real estate development for nearly a decade. I just find him very unlikeable (again, not a trait as bad as some of his opponents)
Also, there is a difference between doing it in the context of television and production (or even a campaign) and meeting someone, shaking their hand and having them immediately not like you. I will be curious to see who he surrounds himself with. He has, unfortunately, surrounded himself with suck ups who will smell his shit and tell him to bottle it as cologne which is why stupid ideas like a line of knock off luxury watches a cologne a university a bottled water company a vodka have come out and failed. It’s like he wakes up in the middle of the night and is like “trump bubble gum what do you guys think” and 20 idiots on the payroll say “oh yes Donald that is brilliant”
I will keep an open mind but if I see him putting in long time yes man cronies in his key staff positions I will know that this is going to be a long 4 years of eye rolling and annoyance. Who knows, maybe not. Maybe being elected president will have the effect of sobering him up. I mean, my motorcycle accident some years back had the effect of really getting me to stop being a total fucking idiot and taking life seriously. So I will watch and wait.
Well let me just say I will be very humbled about my gut instinct if it turns out he is just a fraud.
They aren’t mutually exclusive. Like I said, who knows he very well might have some kind of awakening. My sense is that he has been a fraud his whole life. I’ll take a wait and see attitude. Like I said, a nation that will make Kim Kardashian the head of a media empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars deserves a president like Donald trump.
For lack of a better argument:
https://scontent-frt3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/14962791_10154060921338873_6230943131133858286_n.jpg?oh=3c77960a4dbf036ee1920408ab04d6ca&oe=58904CD6
TOM foolery? Waaat?
There are different sorts of people skills. Being huckster is just one set. It generally isn’t that effective in the corporate world. Being a brown-nosing suck up or getting everyone to like you are generally more effective IME.
What isn’t effective? Showing up and doing your job well putting money on the bottom line. Sadly that’s where my skill set is.
Hahaha. Well, I am a programmer and every now and then a photographer and I can’t say I have been judged much for anything but my skills. Although it DID hamper me that I don’t have “people skills”. Actually lost a contract or two because of that. Hm.
who is this Tom Foolery?
Because he is not a (((Tribesman)))
Yeah yeah yeah you feminists always have one answer. It must be nice living i a world with no nuance.
Interesting a corporate officer of a New York developer has time to spend all day and night working these forums.
It could lead one to believe you’ve been given a token role because you’re a fellow (((Tribesman))) or your stories of banging Russian supermodels and the like are greatly embellished.
Not supermodels, just run of the mill modeling. But whatever makes you feel like less of a closet homosexual with 0 testosterone is fine by me you little bitch
Haha, strike a nerve you imposter. Does internet shilling make a good supplementary income?
http://consciouslifenews.com/paid-internet-shill-shadowy-groups-manipulate-internet-opinion-debate/1147073/#
You have struck a nerve. The “oh my god moronic jackassss with no knowledge or masculinity are so fucking annoying” nerve. Save your masturbatory echo chamber links where the rest of your queer butt buddies talk about why it’s not your fault your fathers were failures for someone else
Your insults/deflections are lacking. The Hasbara network may have to replace you with a more competent subversive or appropriate more snakes to come help you..
Yuppers
Have you read the poetics? Aristotle argues that tragedy, a popular form of entertainment is a serious authority and that the katharsis created by it is its serious moral function. Even Aristotle who is skeptical as Plato toward the authority of poets believes that tragedy is an authoritative mode of teaching truths and managing collective emotion.
yes and you are correct. So maybe the stick wasn’t all the way out of his ass. However, he specifically points at the theater as the appropriate place for men to be able to cry. Yes, there is a serious moral function to it…..my point though was that the catharsis isn’t optional, it is necessary…..moral or otherwise….
As dumb as humans are they deserve credit no matter how big or small their contributions as men who at least make an effort to better our knowledge.
“The refraction of the protraction of the protrusion, related to the thrustulence of the intrusion, is bending beams of light around your panties, and moistening dat pussy, right-the-fuck now – gnome sane? Now suck this dick, white bitch. Uh-huh. Just like dat.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson
I miss the Tyson memes!
Mike or Neil…?
I meant Neil….but both are great. I am already looking forward to next spring when I break out my mike Tyson “Thuns Out Guns Out” tank top
Mike Tyson: Secretary of Education. Where do you think Trump will stash Gary Busey in the cabinet?
Probably the liquor cabinet…
Hopefully it’s an actual cabinet.
Putin: Where is that sound coming from?
Trump: Don’t worry about it.
Yeah, with see-through glass on the front…we can watch him impersonate Buddy Holly.
Oh Busey???? Director of ATF is really the only possible appointment I can see for him with the poooossssssiiiibbbbblllllleeeeee exception of FEMA Director
Hahaha!
That’s what I like about Arizona…guns and tits are displayable 24/7.
I miss Chuck Norris.
Well Chuck Norris would never miss you. He never misses. Never.
Chuck is beyond time and space.
he is beyond space and time….on a mountain…at noon.
breaking rocks with his cock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
The media painted all of us as deplorable and uneducated. There are some really smart people in the manosphere. Here I am learning a brief, but inspiring history of modern philosophy. Meanwhile, my supposedly “more educated” liberal colleaugues are scouring clickbait articles about cat ladies who stood up to their online bullies and transgender ” heros.”
Advanced Education = Advanced Insanity
Leftists cling to class-structure. They desperately want to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is a simpering idiot, a peasant, unworthy of anything other than contempt.
when you obsess all day on climate change, refugees and gender pay gap you’re left with utmost stupidity.
Wow. I need to make a trip to the book store.
I suggest for starters:
Aristotle: Nicomachean ethics
Physics
Metaphysics
Art of Rhetoric
Plato: The Republic
The Symposium
Apology of Socrates
After them you will be able to understand:
Carl Schmitt: The concept of the political
Political Theology (both volumes)
The crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
Friedrich Hegel: On the existence of God
Saint Augustine of Hippo: Confessions (I suggest the Oxford edition due to it having the best text as the original was written as a poem)
Nemessios Emmesis (a byzantine scholar): on Human nature (I do not know if this work can be found in English though, he combines the best of Plato and aristotle in his methodology)
Nikitas Stithatos: on soul (same as before)
Trust me if you read just a fraction of that your mind will open magnificently, you ‘ll truly become liberated!
I’ve been meaning to read the classics. This is great!
I better suggest you to start with Plato’s Republic, as the way it is written makes it more accessible and direct, you need though to pay attention to some details that most people miss (for example the differences between the republic’s classes, most miss it and think Plato for a socialist). The writing though warm due to the dialogue and there are even some counter arguments, after that you can only go forward and upward! I Wish you luck!
I concur. Plato and Plotinus are a solid foundation for rightist thinking, a lot of later works make sense after the initial theory.
Just read Die Genealogie der Moral from Nietzsche, all works from Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Der Untergang des Abendlandes from Oswald Spengler and you’re good to go. These are books that guide you through life, not like intellectual BS like Kant or Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
I second the list of @varonosminxaouzen:disqus but would add to it St. Augustine On the Trinity Descartes Meditations of First Philosophy; Immanuel Kant Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics and Metaphysics of Morals and I also suggest learning how to bit torrent. You can pretty much get every single book in all of western philosophy in a single downloadable torrent for free and download it in less than 30 minutes.
I recommend only books I have read (considering that one does not have the time to read 50 books a year), I also do not feel comfortable with e-books and due to my love for old RTSs I have learnt how to bit torrent. From Kant I have: the critique of Judgment, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of pure reason, but have not read them. Thank you for the recommendations I will note them!
The critical project of Kant is my absolute favorite and the Critique of Judgement is very close to my heart. I think it is one of the top 5 books every written in any field of philosophy. That said, I recommend the Prolegomena and the Met. of Morals because Kant needs to be practiced. Just picking up any one of the Critical Volumes…especially the CoJ….without having an understanding on how to read Kant, how he uses words, his structure, etc is a quick way to getting bored and giving up and usually misunderstanding everything you read.
I used to feel like you about ebooks. However, time and usage has made them second nature to me and I have come to absolutely love them
I never had that problem (not understanding a philosopher) In truth all the basis exists in the ancients, here, having read all of Plato and some of Aristotle I did not have a problem with understanding even heidegger (on the nature or nature, honestly I cannot translate it from the Greek, in that book I understood at last telleology). With Kant my problem was that I got introduced through Pure reason and found about the other critiques just a month after writing to you for the first time which made me give a second chance to Kant. Then I found that it was the end of a series! Also I have found that the one’s who discredit him judge him practically and not ideally (he used aristotle’s technique but his ideas were closer to the Platonic ideals) so they cheated. In short I do not think I ‘ll have a problem + being Greek and able to understand the structure of German I do not suffer from their peculiarities…
Heidegger himself said it..philosophy is done only in greek or german. You have to remember that americans simply are not as literate. I don’t separate myself from this. You would have received training in how to read things very yearly on. Most americans read everything as if it were pop fiction and then have to learn later in life the way to read academic scholarship. This is why I recommend intro books like metaphysics of morals rather than Critic of Practical Reason. The training most European Primary School students get American University students lack
we translate here “On Nature” btw.
In Greece people do not read nearly anything, while they have a skewed understanding of the world (time stoped at 1981, we think the left is on the rise, we like Russia because we think it is the USSR and communist, We do not like Trump because he has racism etc) I second him, but add that only people with fusional languages (we make phrases, so words have a meaning only in context) may make philosophy, with analytical (Chinese write only platitudes, words always have a meaning by their own, so they need not a context ) never and with agglutinative (they better make words than phrases) only by accident. I have even read some good philosophy even in Berdyayev (Russian right philosophers mix theology and philosophy alla byzantine), but from Anglos (sorry by the way but I think it to be true) though has never come that was not materialistic or deconstructive even in the cases of the Australian Stove (forgot his name….) who deconstructed the deconstructioninsts. Skypes are worse though, they only critisize and deconstruct.
In Greek it was “Περί της Ουσίωσης και της έννοιας της φύσης” (peri tis ousiosis kai tis ennias tis fisis) what you say would have been simply as Peri fisis, this is more close to “on the being/becoming,/naturalizing and the the meaning of nature” the phrase is difficult to be remembered even in Greek so in conversation I simply say “the work of heideger concernig nature” I do understand the difficulties that most would face with him, you really need to have read some Ancients to understand what he sais.
That is interesting about the language. I was taken to believe that most educated greeks had, at the very least, a rudimentary knowledge of the classic philosophers mostly because of the greek deification of its own ancient culture. That said, fusional languages make a HUGE difference in understanding how to read. Not just understanding the phraseology but having an epistemic consciousness that is a vibration of a language like that is incredibly helpful wrt philosophy. I think it is why Americans and Englishmen make better lawyers. THey don’t have the fusional linguistic mindset that the germans and greeks do so they tend to be able to write things like 1000s of pages of, say, building code much cleaner.
As for deconstruction I am an enormous fan and former student of Derrida (I don’t want to blow it out of proportion, I did a grant with 50 other students in paris for 5 months it isn’t like he was my mentor) and think he has done seriously fantastic work. Also, the modern hermenuitc, Rudy Makkreel especially, have done some brilliant work without simply being snarky dickheads
nature makes sense because, as you know, he will be playing on the root of the word physis as a breath of air and that it is onomatopoetic…phu…winds up playing an actually significant role. There is a reason the empiricism and American philosophy tends towards the pragmatic.
Don’t even get me started on what the extant fragments of Heraclitus look like once they are translated to English. You would think that they were pithy Chinese fortunes. The reason I worked so hard at classic greek was Heraclitus.
For instance:
οὐ γὰρ φρονέουσι τοιαῦτα πολλοί, ὁκοίσοι ἐγκυρεῦσιν, οὐδὲ μαθόντες γινώσκουσιν, ἑωυτοῖσι δὲ δοκέουσι
in the most standard English translation is:
The many do not take heed of such things as those they meet with, nor do they recognize them when they are taught, though they think they do
and
φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ simply becomes “nature loves to hide” with no special refrence to how it is that a crypt withholds let alone any respect for the play on words.
A good law system has few laws that have a clear but wide applicability (for example stealing 400 $ physically or through the net is still the same thing one law is enough not two, now if in the first case there is also murder you add that to his charges not in connection to the theft ) and only a handfull of exceptions or leniencies(like if one murders a thief at the act or while pushed), with a lot minuscule ones with very precise applicability there is chaos and disorder needless to say a possibility for the creation of a dystopic state (dystopia also can never exist as their are reverse utopias).
There is a joke here that we are born with Plato written in our DNA, it makes fun or our not caring about our legacy, even Greeks that read (like my Grandparents and my mother) do not know anything about ancient philosophy, or philosophy at all my knowledge of it makes them proud (also my reading of the old testament as they couldn’t get into that brick, and the new testament, which they read, generally Greeks have a problem reading anything longer than 50 pages, hence us being once magazine types, today that has fallen to a staggering 20 pages!) and the most serious books they read concern history or are reports on political subjects (like the 17th of November the terrorist organisation and its connections to a formerly ruling party, or conspiracies of so and so political families). Sadly novels in Greek are dead, the more I try to give chances the more sad I get (In Greece most novels used to be ethologies, this means that they lack a plot and mostly try to be a photograph of a society at a specific time, the story has nothing remarkable and in most cases there is no underlying idea that wants to be conveyed, modern novels copy the worst qualities of foreign ones).
I do not like any deconstruction, so even my weird love for Nietze stems only from his writing, he is only philosopher I cannot recall a work of his after I read it (human all too human, beyond good and evil), mostly because aphorims very rarely do mean anything, although that sensation I did not get at its fullest with Nietze, so he did have things to say albeit comments, but from Chinese. Tao Te Quing, The analects, tottally void things that were full of bromides and cliches. I did not expect that. Anyway I like deconstruction when it deconstructs deconstructionists, as it has the tendency to through the baby with the water.
See I have always loved deconstruction. There is something about breaking things down and seeing what their constituent parts are and then building them back up that is genuinely fun for me. That said, I have come to realize that it is best suited as avocation rather than vocation. I don’t know if you know any American greeks. My friends and I call them the Italianese because they are trying to emulate Italian culture (at least they were 15-20 years ago) but I think you would get a good laugh. Suffice to say 70% of their entire vocabulary is a single word…..μαλάκας It is like they all had some seizure or something.
Both I understand as deplorable translation, still heraclitus is difficult to be understood in Greek because many words out of use, (ὁκοίσοι, ἑωυτοῖσι) translation though is easy and intellectually modern greek can manage to bring the whole meaning of a phrase from the ancient and many times the world play, also the weight of the world still remains the same. Only sad thing is that modern Greek can only imitate the precision of ancient Greek and even then most people cannot understand the half of what is being said.
For english I take that most words are like your cuisine: bland (with the exceptions of: Burgers, Cottage pies and Fisherman’s pie). Do not get me wrong here but when I read Greek or Russian I feel the words weigh different in english i never take that sensation.
I can’t honestly say if the cuisine metaphor rings true though I suspect it does. I live in NYC so I have access to very good examples of pretty much all the worlds cuisine. However, if I can recall my time in Ireland and England, your analogy would be very accurate I believe.
“Deplorable translations” is right. A long time ago I pushed through Plotinus’ Enneads in the original classic greek. So amazing. I really suggest it if you haven’t. Especially Ennead III. Read that and then laugh as you realize that while Heidegger was claiming superior descendant he really was basically plagiarizing
the malakas thing is a very weird one, it is an insult but also a praise and even some times it is neutral, it means the masturbator and it has its base in malthakos (μαλθακός) which means soft, in a bad way, it is the equivalent of f*ck it is what one wants. The malaka mania exists also here although not as bad as you describe it is one of the results of our wondrous education system more words come that have flexible meaning and fewer are being used. An another example is the word fasono φασώνω never used hated it from when it appeared when I was 15 years old. It has a wide meaning and it can be refered to any oral encounter from a kiss on the cheek to serious naked stuff. I take that Greek style is a better version of American hipster style today (although without its extremities), though more uptight people (like me and the older generations) copy the uptight English one (without double colourings though), Italian style remains somewhat unknown here and we, here, basically do not copy foreigners, on good things, on bad ones we do.
I am happy that you see deconstruction as an avocation, I do also and I sometimes deconstruct only to find how something works, but when I broke a clock on that I stopped deconstructing physical things (I have even read the major works of Poper the only good was an unended quest and then The povery of historicism and the open society) that was when I found that most deconstructionists are malignant and to the credit of Nietze he is the only one I read that remains detached.
The enneads are on my to-do list but before there are 2 or 3 or 5 douzines of books I have and want to read so probably I will take some time
Popper was a twat but there are some very interesting people with interesting ideas. Hate so see a wide brush paint over all of them.
Funny about malakas. The Irish are very much like that with cunt. The sheer breadth of both positive and negative connotations is astounding
I too understand him to be deplorable, when I read in the open society his understanding in the republic I was furious for a whole month!
Still deconstruction even when well meaning risks throwing the baby with the bathwater.
Funny that thing with the Irish.
There is always a risk with deconstruction which I why I am one of the last people who advocate for some knowledge to not be so readily available. There are learned stewards of esoteric knowledge in ivory towers that keeps this stuff from the masses. More dangerous than any of the theory, in my opinion, is this idea of egalitarianism that suggests anyone ought to be able to posses it. It is important that scholars have freedom to have ideas. Letting every dip shit have access to the sacred texts is dangerous I believe.
Greeks respect intellectualism more than some other cultures but they are too lazy to think properly themselves. That was my experience.
You basically gave an idea for an article right now, maybe even a fiction book!
Egalitarianism is an idea that was problematic from its conception, the only that may exist is the egalitarianism of the soul, that all souls may be judged in equal matters, that equal matter is a problem.
The reason is that humans prefer to rationalize their behaviour rather than fix it. The normie will simply think in ways that would justify his way of doing things and even worse enhance his bad habits, Plato and Aristotle warned much against it.
They have warned about it long before Plato. Anaxamander, Anaxeminies, even Pythagoras warned about knowledge being kept from hoi polloi for their own good. Marx isn’t the problem. Antoni Gramsci isn’t the problem. The problem is these ideas being given to a world that is not mature enough or smart enough to put them into proper context.
In a world where People were protected from forbidden knowledge Marxism would have been an interesting footnote and exploration of ideas.
That is my experience too although I think its more common with older people, younger people basically do not care for anything.
The first I think was Heraklitus? anyway Platon’s and Aristotle’s work is the best preserved to our days so we can have the complete reasoning. I would also add the fact that only detached, highly inteligent and unemotional people may ever have access to these ideas and help in the running of the state by educating the children of the ruling class.
Marxism would not even have been a footnote, it would have been left to dust and the insects that feast with dry paper. Such ideas always rose up but there was an class of people dedicated to uprooting them or stopping them, when that was lost, modernity rose.
Good looking out. just saved me some time and money.
If you want I can post this weekend the name of good torrents. They are easy enough to find but I wouldn’t want to use office computer.
I’d appreciate that.
Why does Taleb look like Salman Rushdie. It’s all very suspect !
Modern intelectuals, are anti-intellectual, in very few historic instances intellectuals were made from the universities: the middle ages (the Church on both sides of the schism, but monasteries used to act also as universities), late antiquity (because major philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle made Academies, most though Academies where generally spewing out nonsense) and the late 19th to early 20th century in Europe and Japan (Heidegger, Hegel and Schmitt on Germany and on Russia Berdyaev and Ilyin, basically offshoots of the German Conservative Revolution that managed to pass through, on Japan its scolars were higly influenced by Heidegger and vice versa), during most of history though the academies did not produce anything.
The problem is that universities tend to do the oposite of what they say they accomplish: the numb and give shape to the mind, now if what is told is right, or can be right in its context there is no problem with it, BUT in the oposite case, which happens today, the only thing that may happen is just spewing of propaganda, specifically Frankfurt School non-sense (Karl Popper, Koestler etc.).
One of the reasons that this has happened had to do with the fall of Europe’s natural elite and its replacement by the modern globalist one. For example let’s take liberal arts, this major takes it’s name due to the fact that it can liberate one’s mind, today the oposite happens, but that major was made originally for helping the sons of the upper class to become better rulers (for themselves or/and for the people is another question) their parents wanted also to be sure that their offspring would receive good education on these subjects. Today though the masses made the grave mistake to believe that a diploma is enough for one to have a good carreer, it made it mandatory in time and today no one cares for what someone is being taught because quality control has been lost in order to accomodate more people.
These things were meant for few, when that was kept the quality went up, when not down (hence the dichotomy of ancient Greece with everyone going to his prefered academy not caring for the truthfullness of what one learnt). The Marxists were fare better than anyone else to giving the intelectural hogwash most people wanted, ’till now after a lot of damage was caused.
I think you’re right about modern intellectuals being anti-intellectual. Society is always anti-intellectual (except in Germany etc perhaps), but there has been a big push against big theory in favour of make-shift instrumental theory. This, despite the fact that marxism in its various forms and permutations remains completely respectable at least as a reference point. In part this could be seen as a reaction against the metaphysics of the past, but I suspect there is also a degree of ideological policing going on: the de facto ban on big theory prevents real challenge to intellectual / academic consensus (that part of leftist / marxist theory that has filtered down into the sub-strata).
For that reason, I am a little reluctant to ‘approve’ the authors message. I think we need intellectuals, just as we need theory. We just need alternative intellectuals and alternative theory that can displace the ideological control system in place today.
“I suspect there is also a degree of ideological policing going on”
A polish scientific philosopher said something similar I have forgotten his name and I found out what he said through a video but basically he was arguing that in the academies there are biases and when these are broken the new paradigm happens and that then there is progress.
In the academies the left managed to throw away most if not all (In Greece if you go for a philosophy bachelor you basically have to become a commie) so they enforce marxism in the campuses.
A peculiar case there are the intellectuals, society does need them but it must understand that these people will always be few and that they need to be managed very closely, for example the damage that Russia suffered through the bolsheviki was partially enabled by the inteligentsia of the country who wanted to abdicate the tsar who was supported by most (aprox 80%) and broght through Kernsky (a commie but not a bolshevik) instability to the country that allowed for the revolution to happen and be successful. Most of these people became leftists (specifically old democratic liberals, to be mixed with the parties or modern liberalism) in Europe where they studied. On the other hand of the greatest supporters of stability in Russia and right now are pushed by Putin (Berdyaev and Ilyin) were the people that studied in Germany (the academia was conservative) and tried to give to Russia a purpose.
Without a purpose no country will not survive and it cannot live, to create a civilization, that is why we need intellectuals, on the other hand if mismanaged they bring ruin by destroying a country’s purpose, by it the identity is being based.
you might be thinking of Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the structure of scientific revolutions, and put the forward the idea that we theorise within paradigms or models of the universe etc., which we limit and constrain our thinking. Foucault said something similar re. power/knowledge (or regimes of discourse) except with the former I think there comes a point where the paradigm is ruptured (e.g. by new scientific research as with galileo) and then the old paradigm collapses to be replaced by a new paradigm. In both cases there is the sense that you never quite get beyond the cultural foundations of knowledge. Both are probably along the right lines, but one implication, particularly in the latter case, is that a degree of relativism creeps in. It’s not just that the mind has to break free. Galileo for instance is constrained by the reactionary forces of the church etc (I’ve not read it ‘structures…’ i.e. their is a social (political) aspect to knowledge production that traditionally intellectuals have tended to ignore or be unaware of (especially in the natural sciences)
I think you’re example of the Bolsheviks etc is a fair one, although one might well ask whether the revolutionary intellectual climate at that time was typical. I would say it both was and wasn’t. firstly the bolsheviks were of course not just intellectuals, they were revolutionaries trained to eschew philosophy (as say meditation on the objects of the mind) in favour of praxis and revolutionary, destructive change. All intellectuals are ‘dangerous’ insofar as there must always be a critical function to intellectual activity and that critical function (as we have learned from the idea of ‘critique’ in a post-Frankfurt school world) may have a destructive side. Indeed there are some who argue ‘critique’ as it has evolved on the left (in critical theory etc) had an explicitly destructive function, being designed to destroy the bourgeois institutions that propped up capitalist nations (others of course deny any such motive or political affiliation on the part of the frankfurters like adorno etc). I would say at such we might usefully distinguish between ‘intellectual’ criticism as an activity designed to direct proper scrutiny at phenomena of interest and the kind of intellectual activity we find with the bolsheviks and the frankfurt school / critical theorists, which was generally unfriendly. I appreciate not all intellectuals in late 19th century russia were of that mould: I would say late 19th century russia, and beyond towards the first world war was a very fruitful period. I’m not at all sure bolshevism was inevitable (except through political machination): notwithstanding the catalyst of the assassination of the tzar in the 1880s? there were populists and conservatives (Dostoyevsky and later Tolstoy spring to mind as well as the guys you mentioned) as well as the nihilists and socialists who were out to destroy russia.
The danger here is that the revolutionaries give all intellectual activity and criticism a bad name. The conservative right has effectively been intellectually stunted as against the left because it has been unwilling or unable to produce theory worth of the name. Even those who dislike the left would probably recognise that it has had all the best theory, and therefore the best of the argument. I would say that that is the legacy of a marxism that sought to destroy all ideological rivals right from the get-go.
So to blend your points and my earlier ones, if we are talking about paradigms and the kind of “revolutionary” intellectual (or theoretical) violence that makes a paradigm shift possible, maybe what we are beginning to see is the shattering of the old paradigm, of which marxism was perhaps the most visible example (if not always very visible at all)
First one thing: the revolution in Russia was preventable and that could have happened if:
a) Russia did not enter WWI
b) the Tsar moved the capital on Novosibirsk or Siberia to stay away from the liberals
c) The Inteligentsia (it was a class not a few individuals) used to sent their children in Russian universities.
Also I pointed out that the the Inteligentsia helped through the Tsar, brought up Kerrensky on the February Revolution and put the country into chaos (democracy) and then the October Revolution could happen and the Bolsheviki who (besides Trotsky) were not intellectuals.
I agree with the rest and it is truly a superb summary and conclusion! Thank you also for reminding the name of Thomas Kuhn. In general most philosophers back then were not leftists and they were quite good, the problem is that the modern academia has led their work to collect dust.
The left has the worst probable theory, the conservatives based themselves around the same principles while they allowed them to take full control of the academies, so they could not create any theory. For example libertarians make more sense, but are more deamanding, leftists basically say that without work you will live like a king the message is positive and easy. For this reason the inquisition was made in the middle ages to stop the spread of stupid ideas, in that time as heresies. The bloodliest resolve was that of the Cathars, they weren’t violent but they were very successful and preached against giving birth to children, today they are heralded as proto-femininsts, also these heresies tended to appear in pairs (stupid and easy ideas spread faster) so the Bogomists in Bulgaria were also a great problem and they too preached against childbirth. The cricists were malevolent but their ideas took root due to them being easy, stupid and positive in the end, sin as much you like no God will punish you, you do not need to work you have a right to nourishment, run around naked there is not self-decency etc.
You get what I mean? (as yamamotoTsunetomo said once in the Hagakure)
Do they have the best theory or the most seductive theory?
Thanks and interesting counter-factual re. Russia. It’s difficult not to see in the inevitability of the Russian Revolution perhaps because we have been trained to think in terms of the ineluctability of the historical process. Of course the revolutionary domino effect that October ’17 was supposed to kindle only met with very limited success, being either thwarted before it could happen (as in Germany) or rolled back (as in Hungary). Having said that I wonder how easily a) could happened and b) would have required considerable foresight. I don’t really think the Bolshevik success was fortuitous for the Bolsheviks, or improvised, although the timing perhaps was. I’m not sure I could imagine the Kerensky government enduring. If you think back to the french revolution much the same thing happened: the moderates yielded to jacobins etc ensuring revolutionary bloodshed and psychopathic extremism would prevail
You are right that the left has little ‘probable theory’ – that’s because social justice and revolutionary change doesn’t care about empiricism or about the facts on the ground. It can’t afford to be beholden to reality, since it’s entire purpose is to change it according to whatever utopian ideas are in favour. This has of course had a corrupting effect on the academy as one cannot seek to create ‘change’ at the same time as pursuing ‘truth’, or more prosaically upholding academic integrity and rigour. Just like the markets, the news, elections (? 🙂 etc academia is rigged to produce knowledge that favours power. You could point to the power/ knowledge nexus that Foucault argues for, but that nexus seems rather more inevitable precisely because those who argue the meta-law of power/knowledge relativity are ensuring it’s transcendent truth by abolishing objectivity and integrity: Focault’s analysis is entirely self-fulfilling.
There is certainly scope for revisiting reality through a determination to return once more to those values of academic integrity, objectivity that once allowed us to take academia seriously. I don’t like anything inquisitorial. In a sense the right has benefited from borrowing from the methods of leftists themselves (including Alinsky perhaps) but there is a grave moral danger to either bending to ‘end justifies means’ behaviour or simply reverting to a more a right-wing kind of policing of academia – if the purpose of the elites is ‘control’ then whether the left or the right is in favour isn’t that important necessarily. Our purpose if there is to be a renaissance for the pursuit of knowledge must be to restore virtue and integrity to intellectual activity and to academia. This requires subordinating any equivalent social imperatives we might have to the principles free enquiry: if the result is degenerate theory the method of social control should be to equally freely point that out.
I appreciate your example of the Cathars / Bogomils. You are correct in thinking there was a viral aspect to Catharism, and looking back one might wonder whether the ‘heresy’ could have been contained without violence. Perhaps the church did the only thing it could, but that was then, and I think in a different age it is necessary to win arguments rather use artifice or coercion. The left didn’t lose the election because of the number votes cast (it even it seems one the popular vote) but because it lost the argument. The zeitgeist was against it; momentum was against it.
That is precisely why this is the time for some intense theorising if not necessarily intellectualising (with all the connotations of vain pursuit that might imply). France has a tradition of public intellectuals / celebrity intellectuals. Invariably they are at least in part poseurs and charlatans. We need intellectual firepower but without narcissism and posturing
very good question, and of course the answer is the latter (and of course Baudrillard has theory that is self-consciously seductive). I would say though that their theory aims at seduction because it cannot aim for truth or objectivity, the very things that are to be subverted
I agree with the 95% you say.
For the revolution in Russia if the Tsar was intelligent in politics enough he could have saved himself from abdication, preventing Kerensky and from gaining power, only to lose it, or he could have used reservoir troops from Siberia and the White rebels against the Bolsheviki.
Sadly the methods of the church were required for the time, the virality of the cathars would make it more powerful peaceful solutions were lost the moment they managed to have in control provinces in France. Trump did not win any argument, he won due to the situation worsening to the point were apathy was out of the question, plus him giving the image of a fighter and being generally stallwart and holding his ground. Most people do not argue by exchanging ideas, they simply wait for the others to finish and then they say whatever they wanted to say all along. For these reasons the academies can only be semi-free so that order may manage to prevail instead of allowing the modern situation to develop.
Baudrillard deserves credit for at least suggesting that ‘brainwashing’ was not an entirely accurate way of describing the effect of the mass media on mainstream society. He argued that in order for their ‘tricks’ to work people actually have to want to be manipulated/seduced. Of course a Marxist would argue that this desire for seduction is the result of alienation (from one’s own labour) which leads to an unfulfilling life, but it is pretty clear to those of us who aren’t biased that that isn’t quite true.
Your being a realist. I appreciate that, and accept that often that is the only thing that prevents being swept away by less principled foes – certainly I have no illusion about the unprincipled nature of the modern left: their entire method involves the end justifying the means, although I would point out that as soon as one admits of that principle, absolutely any atrocity is permitted. Personally I can’t see the point of utopianism if the cost is tens or hundreds of millions of lives, but neither can I see the point of conservatism if the cost is equivalent. Is Suharto’s Indonesia closer in spirit to Reagan’s America on account of it’s conservativism or to the Khmer Rouge on account of its genocidal extermination of opponents. What I’m saying is, I loathe many modern left-wing democracies but would still prefer them over Dutarte’s Phillipines right now
You are right that people don’t listen to arguments. At least reasoned logic typically flies right over us unless we are primed to be receptive. Yet there is also the wider argument, the argument in the ether so to speak, what I referred to previously as the zeitgeist. I think ‘the argument’ has changed, and I think we have been winning it. Trump’s success against PC, Milo’s following against feminism and even the increasing sympathy shown to ROK amongst those who are simply sick of the MSM and the narrative is all part of an argument which has turned against the progressivism. I would say it’s been going that way ever since the top-down imposition of gay marriage.
Again I understand your position with respect to managing academia etc. Universities will always be managed in some shape or form. Usually through incentivisation and direct funding streams etc. There is nothing wrong with that necessarily, but I think any kind of heavy-handedness will be counter-productive. It is precisely the heavy handedness of universities, including their willingness to persecute young men charged with crimes they are not permitted to defend themselves against for instance, that has galvanised the disillusioned. Nothing could stay the progress of that process better than becoming more draconian than the left
kudos for having read baudrillard. I’ve never got very far with his work, although I do think he’s one of the more interesting post-modernist writers. I’d say there was also a lot of truth in the idea. One only has to look at this week’s election to see how suggestible and willing to be swept off our feet by a dashing desperado (excuse the feminine imagery) we all are. We know Trumps flaws and weakness, but happily overlook them all, so the seduction can proceed. Yes, we collude with our own manipulation and seduction
The right, as it represents order, does not need to become more Draconian than the left as it;s violence is controlled its sufferers are people who would victimize your average normie for not being with them the right cares only for the ones who are against it, not the ones who are irrelevant to it (politically speaking) the left wants only its supporters because it stands for chaos it requires to force people to believe its ideology so that it does not lose its grip.
Last you make only one mistake with Duterte, the philipines are a country with different standards and it should be judged in the context of those standards, the Philippines will never be like people of European descent. Also the exception proves the rule you cannot base a system or a belief on the exception but on the rule. The one who manages to reign through the exception he is a true leader as I can say through Carl Schmitt. at November 8 we had an exception the masses felt threatened for their sustenance so they went against the left. This happened some few time in the past and then the left continued unstopped.
I sincerely hope that at the last moment the people saw through them and I wish them (it is malevolent to hate the normie) but needless to say they still failed during most times. Also what is needed to keep a state prospering and protected the normie cannot manage it you cannot manage it I possibly cannot manage it, we do not need to know what our rulers may do for the good of us. Of course I am not speaking for the ones that govern us today, but for the ones that made sure that our countries would be powerful, good, manageable, clean, prosperous so that we would have our normal lives.
Needless to say I respect to your opinion and wish you luck and health to your life and beyond you can think and learn that is rare in our times.
Are you talking about Baudrillard’s idea of Hyperreality and the desert of the real?
An interesting book on the Cathars is https://www.amazon.com/Lucifers-Court-Heretics-Journey-Bringers/dp/1594771979
thanks, likewise. Political realism is important. I fully accept that. I am also under no illusions that the underbelly of government, the deep state (of whatever kind – and I’m not just alluding to the conspiratorial sense – as in puppet masters) keep things running in ways that reflect real-politic. That is true whether that refers to the left or the right, those who would administer chaos or those would maintain order and good governance, and of course both of us would prefer the latter.
I’m not really one for pushing the idea of the right over the left as often-times the difference may conceal more than it reveals. That is one reason why I think we have to be careful about the methods we are prepared to adopt, as if we adopt the same methods as the left, even if in the name of order and right-thinking, we may come to resemble them and reproduce the evils they have been responsible for. Above all, that has been about collectivism and a burgeoning state interfering with people’s lives – I don’t think you can counter that without being less rather than more interventionist.
Anyhow there is time to think further about such issues. You are quite right that the forces of mayhem have only received a set back and will continue to menace decent folk. There is a great deal of work to do.
Does indeed look like an interesting book. And of course Lucifer is an interesting guy. Worth asking what sort of light he brings though.
I’m quite interested in the Ahnenerbe and all the supposed missing research that disappeared into university vaults after the war. Billions were spent on the projects.
hadn’t heard of that, although I knew about himmler’s interest in the occult.
If the MSM is right about Trump (it isn’t) what remains of the Ahnenerbe research institute should be applying for fresh funding right about now
I probably should read Heidegger as I’ve been recommended by quite a few people and he seems popular in these parts. Maybe start with Being and Time.
yeah, you do hear his name mentioned a lot. I need to too, but that means getting one’s head round all those strange german words
This guy is pretty interesting, he has pretty weird views on women though.
But apparently this is pretty good. I haven’t read it yet but it should help.
https://www.amazon.com/Schelling-Understanding-Idealism-Michael-Tsarion-ebook/dp/B01I0P3GRA
yeah I’ve heard a lot about him but never read anything
Start here but yeah, I haven’t read the book either. When I get some spare cash I will.
http://www.schellingzone.com/chapter-3.html
It’s connected to that, but from memory he seemed to be responding more to the typical Frankfurt school line of consumer brainwashing etc.
Most of the Baudrillard I’ve read was just an exercise in creative tautology. He has like 2 ideas that he repeats ad infinitum/ad nauseum.
I suspect that Baudrillard was arguing against the simplistic top-down media analysis put forward by Frankfurt School types and other assorted Marxists that denies the viewer/consumer agency.
For me Baudrillard’s appeal is superficial, but I must admit that there is a seductive (that word again) appeal to his concept of reality disappearing in the hyperreal society, which has only become worse since the mass adoption of digital technologies. No doubt it’s a provocation, but there is at least some merit to it, especially when considering how easy it is to fabricate just about anything.
Overall I find him most effective in the margins, in his side notes and observations. His take down of Andy Warhol and the pop artists of the 60’s was rather humorous to say the least.
yeah, within the context of dreadful french theory he’s a breath of fresh air, but outside of that context it still isn’t that much fun. I don’t know why french intellectuals have to write like that. Or rather I do, but wish they wouldn’t.
First encountered his work when he made controversial and widely condemned comments about the ‘hyper-reality’ of the first gulf war or something to that effect, saying it was the first virtual war or something like that. This was taken as sneering at the actual loss of life on the ground but twenty five years on his take on the simulated nature of how we experience events seem spot on, and increasingly prescient. Look at what is going on with ISIS. Regardless of the truth of the situation, there is all the identity confusion relating to who the terrorists are really working for, who is fighting whom, whether everything is all theatre (c.f. rita katz) or some mixture of all of the above. The only thing we would find hard to believe is if everything were exactly as we are told. Indeed that would itself be a most machiavellian trick: if the MSM were tricking us into thinking they weren’t telling the truth and it turned out they were, a dissembled dissimulacrum of sorts. I might giving him another look, but only in small doses
Talking about intellectuals, has anyone here ever read Don Colacho’s aphorisms?
How to counter them? Use their strengths against them.
Invent a rant with reverse phobias and isms. And watch their whole worldview collapse.
I learned in High School IQ doesn’t mean common sense or smart. I was lab partner to the smartest girl in school that couldn’t do basic lab things, had a Jesse Jackson for president t-shirt, typical ultra-liberal idiot.
High IQ is your ability to use working memory. If the premises of your beliefs are based in fantasy, you use all of that horsepower doing nothing but running in circles.
An example of this is believing everyone is equal in every way.
That’s true, if you don’t learn by middle school that equality is bull crap you’re never going to learn.
http://www.returnofkings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/1.jpg
These pictures creep the hell out of me. Everything about it is artificial. Hell, even the hair. The mannerisms. The games they play(ed). The costumes. It fills me with existential dread.
“So-called intellectuals” = pseudo-intellectuals..
Here is an excellent article on the topic titled “The Role of the Pseudo-Intellectual in the Alt-Right”
http://hewittemoore.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-role-of-pseudo-intellectual-in-alt.html
It is ironic that you write an article where you recognize that intellectuals make a name by attacking systems and claiming someone is oppressed, yet use the same article to make such a statement about whites and males.
Not that I disagree, but from a logical standpoint, you are doing exactly that which you criticize in them.
Are you not also attempting to make a name for yourself by attacking the intellectuals as a class and referring to some ominous truth they ignore?
Again, I don’t really disagree. Or rather, I don’t really want to disagree. But I can’t help but see you basically do the same thing. Maybe that’s just what we are as humans. Opposing fractions fighting over some menial bullshit all the time. Maybe its not really the bullshit that matters to us, but the fact that we fight.
When I was a kid at school, I was often told I was intelligent. I always felt that they told me this to instill pride in me and become dependent on their praise, which worked in the end, and made me overly eager to prove I understand any bullshit they feed me. To prove I am still intelligent.
Whether on purpose or not, I think this is done a lot these days in schools and universities and I think it is the reason for why many people are so close-minded. They are extremely attached to their status of “being intelligent” and “knowing truth” that acknowledging a mistake would practically destroy their identity and sense of self.
Ayn Rand also criticized the “intellectuals” in her work. Part of why I like it. Some really funny parts in it.
Rand didn’t dismiss the value of intellectuals as such. She just wanted to replace the current ones with “new intellectuals” who followed her ideology.
BTW, Rand’s name hasn’t come up often in discussions of this election because people can tell that she has little to say about this election’s issues. Our elites also agree with a lot of her philosophy, though they may have arrived at it by other routes: Feminist degeneracy; racial equality; sexual freedom; deracinated, atomistic individualism; open borders; free trade; the wonders of Israel; self-esteem and so forth.
I would add Rand’s atheism, though after reading about the weird occult rituals our elites allegedly engage in, I may have to rethink that.
BTW, I think you could make the case that modern progressivism has roots in New England Puritanism. Progressives have just repurposed the Puritan impulse to scold, punish and reform the “sinner” towards a quasi-secular project of creating their vision of the perfect world.
Good points!
The biggest problem with intellectuals is that they don’t live in reality and generally aren’t held accountable for being bad influences. This is why Marx survives today. His ideas were mostly bullshit that caused major harm when applied, yet there has been much effort since the failure of communism to turn him into a misunderstood figure.
I’ve known a few bonafide intellectuals in my time, including university lecturers, and have noticed similar traits among them: mediocre to poor social skills, an emotional commitment to bad ideas, and a feeling of unearned superiority.
Intellectuals think they are hated for being smart when in reality most of them are just smug assholes.
I saw inside the belly of the beast while I was getting my PhD (hard science, not soft squishy pseudo-communism bullshit!) It’s corrupt, every focus area is run by a bunch of ‘Dons’ who approve grants on behalf of the government, who approve publications, and who are vehemently against anything that doesn’t match the ‘narrative’ – even in hard sciences. Lib Arts are far worse – you don’t get in unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool fellow traveler, and they basically test you to ensure you’re not a mole. And that was back in 1988!
My advisor – a mostly-decent fellow – told me the secret. It’s all about egos, which is why it’s so uniform in thinking. They almost all have massive egos, and since the only way they can get a grant is to go along with the current thinking, they propose stuff that’s even further left to show how ‘devout’ they are, then they go to conferences and show off to each other. It’s a filthy, corrupt world, and it’s no wonder the so-called intellectuals make no sense – they don’t live in the real world. Hell, they’re not even on Fantasy Island! They’re off in another dimension completely, so far removed that little nuisances like hard evidence can’t faze them about their pet Cultural Marxist theory-du-jour!
There’s a reason I’m not in academia. I wasn’t going to sell my soul. That almost cost me my degree.
It’s rotten. Once you make a compromise and step onto a fucked up path, it’s very painful to get out of it again. My old boss for instance ran a business that got most of its money through contracts with big corporations. Sounds nice eh? Pretty much fixed income etc. But the price you pay is that you always have to pander to those corporations and can never allow yourself to put anything even slightly provocative out there (unless it is provocative in the way they like it). At that point, you don’t have much of a choice anymore. Especially when you have a handful employees you feel responsible for etc. It sucks. But then, he never seemed to mind it. I couldn’t live like that. Or perhaps I could. But I don’t think I’d like it at all.
Men this election isnt over. We need to finish the job. They have shown their next strategy- bus people in to cause riots, report riots in Main Stream Media. This fake seeming huge social unrest that will give cover for A) getting electors not to vote how they are mandated to vote(one elector did this in 2004), or B) it gives cover for Obama not to hand over power. Some ideas-start a change.org petition confirming Trump (they have one trying to get electors to swap). Infiltrate the riots like project veritas did to get incriminating video of bussing, not local rioters. We also need to find a memeworthy name for the Main Stream Media. Main Stream Ministry of Propaganda? Mainly Steaming Manure ?
Those fuckers. I hope they fail miserably in changing the outcome.
I’m just thinking of all the Republicans who turned against him when the ‘pussy grab’ tape came out..if there are alot of people like that who have been chosen as electors, he could lose(for many states it is legal for electors to change their votes). Its crazy until you understand that they’ve rigged the system in multiple ways. They are crafty bastards who have been at this type of thing for a very long time.
Muslims have Muslim intellectualism. Why not do that for Christians. We have some of the world’s oldest universities where Islamic debate is alive and well. There is a vibrant tradition of intellectual debate within the confines of religion. So that’s why when an SJW goes after us, we can skewer them, attack back. Notice Hijabis stand their ground with confidence, agaisnt shaming. Why not have the same for Christian women?
I love the intellectual debate here. Reminds of debate in Yemen. I think now that Trump is president, this is some of the best progressive-free intellectualism in the west. Consider Roosh University, Return of Kings Institute or something.
I love that the writer said that secular intellectualism is merely about who sounds more eloquent or who whores for who. A lot of vibrant thought is happening in Orthodox Christian monasteries. Maybe consider returning intellectual guidance to the church. Religious Christian schools in India have an excellent reputation for education.
Professional intellectuals fall into what I call the priest class. The priests were the original intellectuals. The purpose of the intellectual is to serve the ruling class or some other interest that wants to become or influence the ruling class by telling the people what to believe. To convince the people to obey and sacrifice. To create and maintain beliefs. For this they get to have a nice comfortable life.
If people start disbelieving bad things start to happen. People refuse to pay higher taxes. They elect people like Trump. Or they toss out the ruling class entirely. Even worse is creating a situation where they have to start working for a living. Having intellectuals give cover to wholesale theft mechanisms like central banking is key.
that Julius Evola had it spot on, didnt he?
Evola’s books are worth reading. You can find PDF’s of them online. Revolt Against the Modern World is probably his most famous.
thanks man
The problem with intellectuals is they think they know more than you do, but have no expertise (as in actually doing things), even #Losertarians like Block and Hoppe. Two weeks in the real world would shatter their cloud castles, but they won’t go there.
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) – On Intellectuals:
. . . . “There was Haythorpe, who when George first knew him was an esthete of the late baroque in painting, writing all the arts, author of one-act costume plays— “Gesmonder! Thy hands pale chalices of hot desire!” Later he became an esthete of the primitives—the Greek, Italian, and the German; then esthete of the nigger cults—the wood sculptures, coon songs, hymnals, dances, and the rest; still later, esthete of the comics—of cartoons, Chaplin, and the Brothers Marx; then of Expressionism; then of the Mass; then of Russia and the Revolution; at length, esthete of homosexuality; and finally, death’s esthete—suicide in a graveyard in Connecticut.”
There is this new breed of what I like to call “Twitter intellectuals”. These are normal folks on Twitter, possibly a blue tick because they publish for some toilet rag, who have “followers” in the thousands, as high as 100K, giving them continuous validation through retweets/likes no matter what mumbo jumbo they spout as it is a circle jerk of like minded.
Typical bio reads: Writer, Blogger, Traveler, Coffee enthusiast *insert lame pun*, View are my own
Their writings might be well done as far as structure/grammar, but are atrociously shallow, fluff, no depth or anything. Just reiterating their b.s. beyond 140 characters to may be 4-6 paragraphs.
Love when you have a discourse with them, the moment it starts to get heated they take a leave because they feel validated through the retweets & don’t feel obliged to finish the convo.
This also goes for people whom I agree with on an ideologically/generally, but that doesn’t change what I’ve said.
http://www.returnofkings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/6.jpg
Why does the white man continue to oppress these underprivileged Jews by existing.
One thing I’ve seen tossed about lately is the ‘Flat Earth Theory’ being toyed with by crafters who toy with the idea , seeing if they can make it plausible using pseudo scientific sport. It was both novel and entertaining and a challenge like doing a puzzle or game, immagining how one could crunch numbers and evidence to present a premise that the Earth is indeed flat. The postulates are at most fun to finegle with and discuss with someone who puts forth the ‘what ifs’. The proponents of ‘flat Earth’ are light heartedly putting forth an intellectual challenge. It’s all in good fun and the folks are creative enough but they’re not laying forth ‘flat Earth’ as a state enforced belief system at gunpoint or they’re not screaming heretic for non believers.
THAT’S WAS THE PROBLEM as the old kingdoms and religious rites of Europe consolidated power and subjects ‘couldn’t handle the truth’ otherwise their power bases would have to be re drawn.
Immagine arguing against the flat earth theory if the state enforced it. A common public educated citizen who is taught only the supportative evidence that the Earth is flat would be just as hard to argue with and just as hard to talk sense into as the state/foundation brainwashed sjw’s. Immagine screams of “heretic” and “blasphemer” and toarches given the green light to give you the state crafted ‘shitscare’ and wipe that dubious doubt of orthodoxy off your face.
It is just of recent date that masses within the confines of state shitlib facist orthodoxy thought policing that citizens see through the shitlib falsehoods. The shitlibs arguements fall apart with consideration of natural truth and logic. Stipulations of evident truth that were previously screamed and shouted down, silenced and quaffed by facist shitlib thought and speech police. The state snitches were as deplorable back then as the see something say something morons are today. Try arguing natural law, patriarchy or neomasculinity to some screaming pro Hillary feminist sjw statethink zombot and it’s the same. A good 30% of people are completely programmable but they are overall unthinking, inflexible and marginally functioning ‘etch-a-sketch’ brained wipe faced products of state enforced zomboogerification.
But the ‘flat Earth’ theorem is as entertaining as a Rubik’s cube to a person who hasn’t had a crossword puzzle or who hasn’t had a good spatial or number crunching puzzle to consume along with breakfast. . . so pour a steamy cup of java, sit back and solve this one:
Funny that the article completely ignores the ancient worlds platonism/sophism/Aristotelianism that exhibited all of these same traits and inspired the intellectualism of the 17th century. He posits some golden age before intellectuals came in and ruined it, but there was no such thing. He gives a falsely unified and simplistic view of the middle ages while brushing past regional irregularities and the monastic scholastic intellectual world. The irony is that his adulation of the medieval guild system and unity of thought is closely reflective of Marx’s own romanticism and admiration of these same medieval concepts, simplified of course.
I am a white European man ! & you piece of shit come & take me ?
http://www.returnofkings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/6.jpg
Ill receive with you lead at 1200m/s !
Consider adding this one to your list:
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”- George Orwell.
“Zola was a Rotschild protégé.”
Why saying so in relation to the story of Alfred Dreyfus? Was he not innocent? Was he not chosen by officers who were all catholics in order to avoid condemning a catholic? Is condemning a catholic for his actions equated with anti-catholicism?
One of my favorite ROK pieces of the month, for sure. Well done. And this is why I always love pragmatic realists like Green and Eric Hoffer. See the world as it really is and act upon it!