In modern usage, the terms sophism and sophistry are used interchangeably with “inaccurate” or “deliberately misleading.” A sophist is someone who relies upon fallacious arguments or reasoning to win a debate. Someone can be accused of sophistry because they are too stupid to see the flaws in their reasoning. Other times they are accused of deliberately misleading arguments. The motivation is malice rather than stupidity or carelessness.
This negative view of sophistry was not always so. We get the word from the Greeks who used the word to mean teacher. A sophist hired himself out to rich families to instruct their sons in philosophy, math, rhetoric and music. The ability to debate in public was an important skill for an ambitious Athenian, so educating your children to be convincing orators was a primary goal of rich parents. A good sophist was one who was good at making convincing arguments.
Our negative view of this also comes from the Greeks. The reason we know about Socrates is we have the writings of Plato, who tells us Socrates was opposed to sophistry in his day. He thought arguments had to be logically sound and factually accurate, rather than just convincing. Of course, Socrates was forced to drink poison by the Athenians, because he was condemned for undermining public virtue. It turns out that the truth does not always set you free.
The reason any of this matters is that in democratic societies, there is a tension between these same two claims. On the one hand, winning the crowd is vital to democratic politics and the marketplace. This was true in ancient Athens and it is true on social media today. On the other hand, we are a society that believes deliberate deception is wrong, so factual accuracy is important. Winning the crowd through deceptive means is viewed as immoral.
This tension has been at the heart of mainstream conservative politics. One camp, the Straussians, think that winning the argument, which in politics means winning elections, is all that matters. The alternative camp insists that being right is what matters, even if it is not always popular. The former camp is correct that the goal of politics in a democratic system is to win elections, but the other side is also right that winning elections means nothing if the result is bad policy.
This conflict is at the heart of this back and forth between Michael Anton and Paul Gottfried over natural rights and traditionalism. Anton is a Straussian so he is therefore unencumbered by logic and factual accuracy. He simply wants to convince people that a society rooted in natural rights is the only choice, if America is going to hold together for much longer. Gottfried and others point out that natural rights do no exist and therefore they cannot be a foundation for anything.
What you see in the back and forth is that Gottfried in his short responses is describing things with as much accuracy as possible. He makes a descriptive claim, while Anton, in his lengthy responses, makes prescriptive claims. One side describes things as they are, while the other side argues for how they should be. Anton believes he is in the right because his proposition would solve the problem of governing a majority-minority society, while Gottfried is right because he is factually correct.
This conflict between the descriptive and the prescriptive is turning up in the dissident critique of the conservative movement. Conservatives argue that they are upholding the constitution and the natural rights tradition in America. Dissidents point out that no matter how elegant the arguments are in favor of conservatism and its natural rights foundation, the results, to this point, have been disastrous. In other words, the facts contradict the claims, no matter their intent.
The shadow over all of this, of course, is the purging of the paleocons from conservatism by the neocons and their Straussian enablers. Free from facts and reason, the winners in that struggle were able to conjure the history they needed to support their prescriptive claims, which solved a problem for conservatives. Like a python, they swallowed the Civil Rights Movement whole and digested it into their theories of the founding and their natural rights arguments.
That bit of history is what hangs over the back and forth between Gottfried and Anton and it is what hangs over the dissident critique of conservatism. The neocons and their Straussian enablers won the argument, but to what end? What was the point of winning the argument if the result was the present catastrophe? Anton would like to reframe this as the old neocon versus paleocon dispute, but no amount of words can conceal the elephant in the room. His side won the battle and lost the war.
In the end, this is the lesson of sophistry. It can only flourish in a culture that sees winning the argument as an end in itself. This is the curse of democracy, which brought down ancient Athens and is bringing down the New Athens. The truth is like a corpse in that it can never be truly concealed. The sophists think they can weigh the truth down with words, but like the body bobbing to the surface after the spring thaw, the truth eventually reemerges into the life of a society.
That truth in the current crisis is that the clever arguments and complex logical constructs of the last half century contained no truth value. The sophist of our age profited greatly from their arguments, but the result is the ungovernable mess that is modern America. Like Havel’s green grocer, we must now live in the truth which means shedding the sophistry that has led us to the present catastrophe. The truth may not set us free, but it will keep us from being erased from the book of life.
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“When I hear the word ‘ideology,’ I release the safety on my Browning!”
Socrates believed death would set him free as immortal soul to rise to heavenly bliss, He wasn’t forced to drink hemlock, he followed the law voluntarily when he could have chosen self imposed exile.
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The salient fact missing from the argument between Straussians and their as yet unnamed opposite numbers is that Western society was once premised on a Biblical foundation. As such, it could and did successfully contain anyone who shared that Biblical foundation, even though the people groups within the larger social milieu had vastly different views on many vital topics, including how best to arrange and govern themselves. Once the Biblical underpinning was removed, everything that had been built on top of it began to crumble, leading us to the present moment in which we are debating what to do next.… Read more »
Excellently thought-provoking as usual. My contribution: Truth is what works to your advantage. Given that logical bind, I’m not sure the accusation of sophistry is really of any help to the case in hand, because nobody is free of it (and religion, which I advocate for everyone except me, is the apotheosis of sophistry). The current problem concerns the cult of compassion. Compassion is now driving the west and co-opts morality on its side and therefore is (currently) unarguable. What we need are arguments why compassion is inappropriate as an overarching precept of social organisation. This is easy: opposites must… Read more »
We need lies as there is no way for us to live together in harmony without them. We perpetually move from one to another until we settle on one that seems best to the lie adjudicators. But! Not all lies are equal. We have noble lies and evil lies. Santa Clause, Sky Gods, All Men are Created Equal, Natural Rights, 2 + 2 = 5, Gender Monomorphism, White People are Evil, astrology, the Pope is in regular contact with God…the supply is inexhaustible. So it’s just a matter of which set of lies to chose to live by next. That… Read more »
Great essay. I will confess I don’t grasp all of the detailed arguments over the concept of natural rights although I grasp enough to know that “ rights” is not a thing I can point to like my home or my car and say it’s mine, I have the title that means something. Natural rights to me lies in the realm of lawyers and legalities that unfortunately appear in the modern world as very unstable and fungible to mean whatever the purple haired lawyer wants them to mean. We must find our way back to reality and the real world.… Read more »
I am reminded of what the Spanish Felangist Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera said about “talking” and “dialogue”; “I believe in the dialectic of fists and pistols.” He eventually was caught in a “Republican” (i.e. communist) sector in Spain and murdered like a dog. It seems like there are three possible outcomes for today’s America: 1) the commies win, and crush us. 2) the Right stops talking and “destroying” people in debates and instead takes up the “dialectic of fists and pistols” 3) the Lord God breaks through into our world and changes the hearts of men. I am a… Read more »
Strike Three. I’m with that guy. Keep praying Striker. It’s only in baseball that 3 strikes and you’re out.
“ rights” is not a thing I can point to like my home or my car and say it’s mine, I have the title that means something.
Funny you should say that – because the car or home “title” means only what the purple haired judge says it means, too. At any moment, on the whim of the state, it can be taken from you.
The concept of “rights” has been abused to the point of being meaningless. Anything which can be taken away from you is not a right, it is a privilege. Even the so-called “right to life” is a false argument as everyone will die. Personal property, constitutional rights, in fact, virtually everything which we think we have a right to is not really a right at all, but just something which we have at the moment. There are really only a few things which can be called rights (natural or not does not enter the equation) and are timeless and guaranteed.… Read more »
Southwest has ceased to be an airline, as they can no longer operate; 70% of flight canceled today, same tomorrow expected. TVA cannot provide power during Winter. To me, this shows why there will not be a police state in AINO; the people in charge are lunatics and are dismantling everything that would allow them to manage such a country. I think these episodes are apropo of this post’s topic, as it demonstrates how TPTB believe they can control reality through magic words. If they decide all vehicles will be electric, then there is no need to allow fossil fueled… Read more »
The infinite digital control grid they dream about requires infinite electricity, which their green power grid won’t come close to producing.
china’s will though.
either that or it’s the beginning of a depopulation agenda by the WEF/CCP . makes more sense than believing they really believe what they are saying . https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/12/27/world-economic-forum-cancels-twitter-directs-followers-to-chinese-social-media-apps/
The WEF is a weapon of the CCP . just like the WHO , only much more powerful.
Excellent retort to Anton’s attack manifesto (that man has entirely too much time on his hands). The fact is. when the founders spoke of rights they were speaking of their traditional rights as “free Englishmen.” In the years leading to the Revolution, they argued their conflict with the king was in defense of the “ancient constitutions.” Anton, who is clearly rooted in the left, seems to think these arguments were made in defense of a grand set of universal rights. No, they weren’t. As they clearly said, their arguments were based on the defense of their English traditions. They were… Read more »
I’m not old but I’m older than Anton, so “the rights of Englishmen” is a grand cliché I remember. Strauss knew it too, and he knew what it meant to forget it.
Funny when you think about it….Strauss, Jaffa, the Frankfurt School loons, Emma Lazarus, Israel Zangwill, Irving Kristol (and little Billy), Marx, Bloom, etc…. What do all of these strange people who have collectively ruined the American republic have in common? Hmmmm
It was said (pejoratively) of Gorgias that he was so gifted in argument that he could take either side of a controversy, and win. Personally, I’m not a fan of rhetorical flourish: I prefer the old phrase from Lucian (“How to Write History”, 41[55]) τὰ σῦκα σῦκα, τὴν σκάφην δὲ σκάφην ὀνομάσων Call figs figs, and a tub a tub. And I have a strong bias for Bias’ famous apophthegm: οἱ πλεῖστοι ἄνθρωποι κακοί That’s usually translated as ‘Most people are wicked’, but I prefer “Most people are shit”. Bias – being a Sage and all – was careful in… Read more »
Z-man writes: “I am not so sure philosophy has much to offer here. The place to start is that our senses evolved to give us either a greater understanding of reality or they evolved to improve our fitness. The latter is the correct answer, but then the question is, does a more accurate conception of reality improve our fitness?” I’d suggest that the answer to that question is yes: that evolutionary fitness is so inextricably dependent on having an accurate knowledge of the environment, that *the two are actually referring to the same thing* But let’s start by imagining two… Read more »
I’m comfortable with the notion that the evolutionary ‘sweet spot’ for our senses, was that level of congruence with reality that resulted in a slight bias to over-reaction. Accurate sensors are evolutionarily expensive, and ostly to run. We spend a lot of calories running our brains as it is, so adding hyper-realistic sensors isn’t a good idea. (That’s why our eyesight has such a small area that works in very-high-res; the rest is basically infill). It’s the old “is that rustling in the bushes a tiger?” thing. The strategy that maximises survival is not the strategy that maximises finding out… Read more »
Yeah; apparently our brains are biased towards interpreting ambiguous sensory data as possible threats. Which makes sense: you’ve lost very little if that snake you thought you saw turns out to be a stick; whereas you stand up to lose a lot more, if what you perceive as a stick turns out to be a snake. So having our perceptual apparatus biased towards perceiving threats, enhances our chances of survival. I was listening to a podcaster the other day— I forget who— who pointed out that our amygdala is constantly reacting to possible threats; while the job of our cerebral… Read more »
Just be sure that noise behind the bush isn’t Covid. Quickly now: wear a mask, stay 6 feet away from the bush and be safe.
I agree with the arguments, but believe that there are gender differences. It is mainly men who have had to deal effectively with reality. Women, on the other hand, have been in a state of vulnerability for most of their lives throughout human history, whether through pregnancy or a large flock of children to care for. Their strategy has had to be to get the male gender to cooperate. In one way, this was achieved by the unique characteristic in the animal world that men are constantly horny. In another way, however, women possess, in my opinion, the ability of… Read more »
Which is why in past times once a village or community included females, they agitated for a church and a school and a doctor. Think “Paint Your Wagon”..
I’m a simple guy, so I won’t try to trade intellectual blows with the likes of Z-Man, Anton or Gottfried. To me, there is such a thing as natural rights, but, by natural, I mean natural to a certain people – and, by people, I mean a group connected by biology, culture and history – at a certain time in that people. In this, I am in disagreement with Anton. His assertion is that a particular set of natural rights are natural to everyone at every time, ironically, denies, well, nature. Kipling said it best: The Stranger within my gate,… Read more »
Amen and Amen. If you were to say “you’ll shoot your eye out” to a Somali immigrant, he will have no idea to what you refer. If you try to pay full retail price in a produce market in Tijuana, you will be thought a fool, because “They” all know what you do not.
I think this is related, from elsewhere: ” Another thing had changed along the way: the Democratic Party became dominated by activist women, who exhibited two outstanding behavioral tendencies: they tended to make decisions on the basis of emotion… their feelings about this-and-that; and they were much more ruthless in political battle than men — their emotions eclipsed age-old principles, such as the ideas of fair play. In short, they resorted almost automatically to dirty fighting. That is probably at the heart of what is most confounding and vexing about the great political division in America these days. We are… Read more »
Jim Kunstler. Sui generis.
Excellent essay Z-Man. This is your best ever articulation of this point that I have seen. Alzaebo – It isn’t just women who have engaged in bad faith politics. It is the, “communities of color”, that have done the same thing. In fact they have manipulated those dominated by feminine traits to play power politics. After 65 years one must conclude, in fact every day the statements from those, “communities”, directly say, that they don’t identify as Americans and aren’t interested in equality under the law … This article is spot on. What matters now, is that those who emerge… Read more »
To understand what natural rights might be we need only to observe each particular peoples in their singular environment over centuries. The rights that nature provides, though whatever means, are quite different, and exactly in proportion to their nature. That is why America is no longer sustainable as a proposition county.
Do any people other than those stemming from Europe or England talk about rights at all?
They do in the sense that they confuse rights with entitlements. Were the issue that some of our people were confused over the benefits of negative rights vs. the detriments of positive rights it would be difficult enough to preserve the nation. That is the entire body of discussion of the Constitutional framers and the ratification debate. Ultimately, they decided that a singular, culturally and ethnically homogenous people with a morality suitable for self governance was the pillar they would erect the civilization upon. It is bad enough that was doomed to fail. Now you have a multitude of many… Read more »
The only non-Europeans I feel enough alike to talk seriously with are Japanese. And I happen to know a bunch of them. They’re very but not truly like us. Old men believe in Enlightenment/analogous stuff, like our normie-cons, and younger people don’t understand it at all. They think America is grotesque but somehow metaphysically “ahead” of them—that we are their future, no matter what they’d prefer. To me this is very weird, because I’m a GenX guy so I’ll always imagine the future as ’80s Japan. Young Japan imagines the future as Pride Month without end.
“Young Japan imagines the future as Pride Month without end.”
I agree with young Japan. Except the “without end” part, which in America is when the dollar falls, the grid collapses and the hard men rise.
“Anton is a Straussian so he is therefore unencumbered by logic and factual accuracy.” I think that’s a non-sequitur and an ad hominem attack. Anton’s attack on Z may very well not be a proper application of Strauss’s teaching (his mention of Locke and Hobbes in the same breath betrays this) but it should not reflect poorly on Strauss himself. To infer that Strauss himself was “unencumbered by logic and factual accuracy” is simply wrong. Strauss’s teaching was highly nuanced. He understood, from the trial of Socrates, that being logically correct was in and of itself insufficient in the political… Read more »
Educational and well argued, but for Strauss to erect a beneficial despotism, I say he believed he had to get the *right kind of people* in place.
What was that, a cadre of 50 to 100 students he taught to say anything, be anything, only focus intently on locii of power? Justified or not, he intended to overthrow, and did so much more quickly than Marcuse.
The result? Millions of broken eggs, but that’s gonna be one tasty omelette!
Very impressive argument. Very academic. I mean that in all sincerity. I think the heart of today’s post was based on the fact that the Straussians denied realities of both Lincoln and MLK’s world views and motivations. They erected a fantasy that the Civil Rights regime represented the full realization of America’s founding promise. To do that, they accepted and venerated that regime which was antithetical and utterly destroyed America – both the propositional nation that it violated and the people who are the nation. That battle was a rout. Now the slow motion meat grinder creates not an existential… Read more »
Without necessarily endorsing Jaffa’s “Second Founding” thesis, I would simply like to add once again that most of this debate goes back to the tension between the teaching of Plato and that of Aristotle. From Plato’s perspective, anyone capable of understanding The Forms (objective ideals) could be a member of the guardian class, hence there was equality of the sexes and a sort of communism within the guardian class in his description of it in The Republic. Aristotle countered this by arguing that people were different by nature, and that Nature established a hierarchy as follows: Male, Female, Child, Slave,… Read more »
Conservatives didn’t lose because their ideas were wrong. Conservatives lost because they were crushed by Jewish money, Jewish power, Jewish organization, Jewish control of the media and Jewish immorality or, if you prefer, Jewish sophistry. Conservatives could have had all the right ideas (in which case, yeah, they would no longer be conservatives) and the same thing would have happened. In the end they had a price, it turned out to be low, and now they are ideological streetwalkers for another tribe’s pimps. You will notice that the same thing happened to liberals and libertarians and environmentalists to varying degrees… Read more »
The group that you identify exerts controlling influence over the media in many cases and has since at least WW2. Further, one of their greatest gifts is storytelling and the creation of narratives. Whites are credulous and most want to be thought well of and thus are easily programmed by the narratives from the hegemonic media. How can this problem be solved? One quick example: A leftist friend of mine has started to become conservative on law and order issues due to the conquering of the cities by the bums. He even jokes that he is becoming a conservative. But… Read more »
I’d suggest that all of us evolved with a need to be thought of as moral beings by those in our group. It has nothing to do with our being White. Seeing as how for most of our human pre-history, getting along with our group was absolutely essential to our well-being— and getting ejected from our group meant certain death— it makes sense that everyone has an innate need to get along with the people around them, and to have those people think highly of them. In our modern world, by contrast, there are any number of groups we can… Read more »
In classical democracy the main problem might well have been sophistry replacing well reasoned argument. This reflected the fact that classical democracy was quite “elitist” by our degraded standards and also was quite masculine in that there still *was* at least an argument. There were subjects open to debate. There were arguments for and against, however idiotic and sophist-icated. The wider the franchise became, the more the narrative became central to the political process. This is because stupid men and most women can’t even follow basic arguments (even bad ones full of sophistry) but love stories. Along came mass media… Read more »
Every family library should have copies of Havel’s “Living in Truth” and Plato’s “Gorgias”.
All family members should also take a class on political philosophy, with this essay as the first reading.
The devil has no power over you other than what you give him. Many have given to the detriment of many more.
I favor the truth crowd, but they often lack the will, which is understandable because the truth is often uncomfortable and unpopular. I think on a deeper level it’s difficult to be willful in truth, because the truth will sometimes lead you into Nietzschean territory, and that doesn’t compute. For the same reason, it’s difficult for the rationally- and scientifically-minded to have faith. The mixing of reason and intuition, emotion, etc., seems a contradiction, and in narrow terms it is, yet in the whole of Creation, there is no contradiction. If we’re to believe all of this has purpose, meaning,… Read more »
Faith has a purpose, a function; it serves our social groups.
Not the only purpose
Speaking of collapse; are there any talented hackers here among us?
Because I’m thinking that if someone were to hack into the Department of Agriculture servers, and wipe out all the data which allows the food stamp program to function— if all the EBT cards of the 40 million people getting food stamps suddenly stopped working— we’d soon be seeing Rodney-King-level rioting in every inner city in America.
Just a thought….
Sounds reasonable in lieu of a centralized authority with the power to confiscate goods and services to “redistribute”. Which I suppose is one of the assumed(s) in a collapse scenario. I just harken back to some of the FEMA proposals and given authorities viewed during Katrina disaster.
Thr government would simply order stores to honor the claims of anyone who wanted their gibs. Our nation would be filled with undocumented consumers.
I hear you, that might be their first impulse. But I question whether the government would be capable and competent enough to immediately start reimbursing millions of stores. Look at their failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina: then imagine a situation in which the whole country clamoring is for assistance at once. Would the promise of eventual government reimbursement be enough to convince the stores to keep re-stocking their shelves and giving those goods away? And once word got out that the stores were giving stuff away free, wouldn’t millions of people who didn’t have food stamps claim that they… Read more »
Problem would be the distributors. If they don’t believe the store owners will continue in business and pay, who will want to supply them? Doubt most of the store owners could (or would want to) pay on delivery.
The Greek philosophers believed in totally as perfection and completion Today that idea has been extended to a society of perfect well-being which will some day be achieved. Presently this country is a long way from this utopia. in fact many believe that chaos is soon to destroy the peace and prosperity most cherish. And if indeed, this chaos and destruction were to occur what would be the consequences? Let me add two truthful statements. Nothing lasts forever and we live in a world of relativity. Whoever has the power will rule and decide what direction society would develop. Unfortunately… Read more »
Yet another thought-provoking rumination! Here are a few of the thoughts it provoking me: In addition to ‘prescriptive’ versus ‘descriptive’, we can overlay another metric onto our analysis: ‘idealistic’ versus ‘pragmatic’. Inevitably, the folks prescribing solutions are also ideologues: speaking from a dogmatic and idealistic ideological stance they have adopted, such as radical egalitarianism: ‘All men are created equal’. Their argument is consequentialist, in the sense that they justify their belief in it by pointing to an imagined future state: ‘Society would be so much better if everyone acted as if all men are created equal’. In doing so, they… Read more »
The real Bill: “In addition to ‘prescriptive’ versus ‘descriptive’, we can overlay another metric onto our analysis: ‘idealistic’ versus ‘pragmatic’… They often attempt to convince us— or more accurately, to deceive us— by appealing to our emotion rather than our reason…” TrB, they can now see all of this on neurological imaging. Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans February 13, 2013 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970 You can put someone into neurologial imaging, flash some pictures in front of their eyes, and know with a very high degree of certainty whether their ancestors were e.g. Unitarian versus Congregationalist Quaker… Read more »
Yep! I love neuroscience.
Speaking of which: here’s one of Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman’s latest podcasts, in which he lays out all the ways in which cannabis has been found to be harmful:
https://youtu.be/gXvuJu1kt48
Which is a bitch, because I really enjoy smoking the occasional joint.
Oh ffs. Not the dogooder propagandists again.
Just selling their effing services, aren’t they. Heaven forfend we return to the godless heathenism before 1919.
Weed is especially dangerous; the sanhedrin Peter Lewis & George Soros both knew d@mned well that Weed causes schizophrenia, which is why they threw so much money into legalizing it, to literally drive the goyim insane. Oh please. The ‘literature’ on the weed-schizophrenia link is of a piece with the VAST bulk of the research output of the charlatans from the psych[] fields… that is, it has aoll the hallmarks of bias; is mostly small-N; and is designed for innumerates because the quantitative content is so shoddy. Those klutzes barely have a coherent analytical framework to tell anyone what schizophrenia… Read more »
Bro.
WEED INDUCES SCHIZOPHRENIA IN AT-RISK NEURO-PHYSIOLOGIES.
Deal with it.
[Or don’t, and get locked up in the psych ward with all the other Cluster A’s who thought it was safe to toke.]
Kratoklastes, I can’t believe you know anything about Huberman, if you can claim with a straight face, that he’s not “a scientist of any description”; or describe his presentation as “pop-sci mutterings”. He’s a professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford School of Medicine; who oversees a research lab and regularly publishes in peer-reviewed journals. And someone who devotes a tremendous amount of time to publicizing scientific findings which are helpful to people trying to live healthy and productive lives. And unlike many podcasters, he does it for free. Moreover, his entire approach is one of the scientist: carefully… Read more »
LOL. fanboi is outraged at someone who doesn’t genuflect at the credentialled object of their current infatuation. Let’s preface this: I’ve been aware of the obscene corruption of science since the 90s. Deeply aware. Aware in ways that make my skin crawl. As to Psychocharlatanry more specifically: their BEST shit doesn’t replicate. I’m talking about the MOST-CITED shit in their HIGHEST-IMPACT journals. That’s their fucking CANON. And it’s horse-shit. It’s got the same predictive power as haruspicy. And that’s what was known BEFORE the recent shitshow about SSRIs (that’s more the intersection of Psychocharlatanry and Pharma, but it’s of a… Read more »
isn’t a hallmark of sophistry, the practitioner doesn’t believe what he is saying?
Or is the first trick of the Sophist that of deceiving himself; of convincing himself that his sophistry is true? It seems to be the case that someone can lie more convincingly, if they can first convince themself that the lie they’re telling is true. We humans are really good at self deception. It’s so easy to believe what we want to believe, or what makes us feel good to believe, rather than facing an unpleasant truth. I suspect that the primary talent of the successful sophist, is to be able to stuff the truth down below the level of… Read more »
TrB: “Or is the first trick of the Sophist that of deceiving himself; of convincing himself that his sophistry is true?” You’ve also gotta factor psychopathy in there somehow. If you try to analyze sophistry from the point of view of a fundamentally honest man, then you’ll never be able to understand sophistry from the point of view of a pathologically dishonest man. And then there’s sadistic psychopathy, which likely results in a licentious/lascivious thrill being experienced by the sophist, every time the sophist successfully commits yet another act of sophistry [compare e.g. kleptomania; c.f. the actress Winona Ryder]. I’m… Read more »
Yeah, scientists tell us that around 2% of the population satisfies the clinical definition of psychopathy.
And while many of those psychopaths end up in prison, there are a not-insignificant number of high-performing psychopaths who are CEOs of major corporations, military leaders, and successful politicians. A pathological lack of empathy and concern for the effects your actions have on others, will help you advance in some circles.
So I agree: it’s helpful to distinguish between ordinary ‘honest’ sophists— who may be genuinely believing what they say, and deceiving themselves first of all —and sophists whose deception is driven by psychopathy.
Telling Anton he’s a sophist? That’s gotta sting.
What does it prove, or how does it further the debate?
Sophistry is a technique. Belief or lack thereof is irrelevant.
The essential problem of ConInc. They promote, with rabid fervor, the canard that voting harder-harder will save the day someday in the future. So chase the carrot even if it leads you off the cliff. And they do this despite knowing full well that vote-rigging has fundamentally changed the game and it now guarantees that the most corrupt politician gets an automatic “victory” no matter what voters actually do at the polls. They then sweep this reality under the rug by asserting that those who point this out are “cynical” and therefore to be burned at the stake as heretics.… Read more »
The thing is, both Rep and Dem are corporations, chasing the bottom line of bundled donors. They pitch their worth to those donors by showing metrics. Those metrics are all “inside baseball” numbers about seats filled, not related to if rules work or not.
TomA: “The guy that stabs you in the back is a thousand times worse than the guy that punches you in the face.” Passive Aggression >>>>>>> Active Aggression Or at least it has been over the entire course of my lifetime. Sadly, though, the only way to put the Passive Aggressives back into their proper place in society is via Active Aggression [which is why I am a Stalinist]. Lately I often think of the entire course of human history as being nothing more than 50- to 100-year oscillations of a giant meta-sociological pendulum, as it sways back and forth… Read more »
What do you mean collapse? America has long since already collapsed. I would be willing to bet that the majority of the country wants things this way. I see nothing that is ever going to reverse this course of insanity. We are moving ever closer to the point where being a normal white person and breathing is a crime. I see no way this can ever be reversed or fixed.
The Straussians are heirs to the Flowerman project, the wide attempt to change white people’s thinking through moral suasion. That is, through emotional rhetoric, as does a religion. It worked. They applied their verbal pseudoscience, a subject intently studied since the neurosurgeon Freud theorized that the mind, like the brain itself, must have a structure, if only we could work it. The results are proof positive that alien software conflicts with white hardware; for instance, “atheists” or agnostics ignore the reasoning proffered, because it doesn’t answer the factual questions they are asking. As always, the Flowermans insistent arrogance that their… Read more »
“the Flowerman project”
Do you have another spelling for this?
I couldn’t find anything at the usual search engines.
Thanks.
“culture that sees winning the argument as an end in itself” True, but there is a worse aspect. The culture sees winning an argument as a theological triumph even when it is blatantly untrue. Orgasmic pleasure is derived from the sophistry, and the feelings of the “winner” are all that matter. In this regard, although many other such similarities abound, there is no substantive difference between neoconservatism/Straussian thought and leftism. The destruction this infantilism has wrought is irreversible, and that may prove a feature and not a bug. As you frequently write, reality is the thing that does not go… Read more »
“this infantilism…is irreversible, and that may prove a feature and not a bug.” Yes. They want us to see the world as they do–and they are batshit crazy. Right and better than you, no matter what. Willing to force it, as the puritannical Puritans showed. Unwilling to accept any difference, despite the results, lest their overweening sense of moral superiority be dented. Worse is when history or fact is changed in pursuit of that win. When the truth is erased, it is forgotten, and the lie becomes the truth. New effort is then based on accumulating error. The driving force… Read more »
I suspect that most leftists really do believe that their dogmas are true.
It makes them feel so good to believe them; and everyone else they know believes them; and it would put them at odds with everyone they know if they stop believing them; and they’re never exposed to persuasive counter-arguments; so they unquestioningly accept them as being true, and never seriously consider opposing viewpoints.
Yup, they’re better than you, on the right side of history.
We have ersatz status grabs, rather than pride in our little community and its Main Street parades.
Bill
Perfectly accurate description of leftists. An acquaintance of mine thought I was lying when I told him that people lost their jobs by refusing the vaccine. He really didn’t believe it. He also couldn’t believe it that blax can score far lower on tests such as Fire Dept. A fireman present had to let him know the truth. They can’t accept that everything they believe is a lie. They’d rather die than see truth, which quite honestly would be fine with me. I view them not as human beings, but as parasitic viruses to be “removed”
“Michael Anton and Paul Gottfried over natural rights and traditionalism” Both sides are wrong, because both are arbitrary assertions; and because both are rooted in (arbitrary) utilitarian arguments that societal (national, global – whatever…) “well-being” is the bottom-line index of morality. This serves as the bottom line for truth, as well. The definition of Truth that you often use is implicitly rooted in the idea that societal well-being is a ‘truth’ that cannot be concealed, will always come bobbing-up. Yet the concept of social well-being is exactly what is at issue. And there will never be convergence on truth by… Read more »
A truth that is contingent upon anything other than physical reality is categorically different from a truth that is contingent upon something other than physical reality. Therein lies the problem with moral philosophy and theology. They are untethered from physical reality. They are contingent, as you say, on metaphysical assumptions. I would argue that they are contingent on convenient fantasies about reality and our ability to quantify reality. Those fantasies are culture specific, which means they are people specific.
We will be quite lucky if the end result is just national dissolution. These people are so detached from reality many would welcome a fiery and bloody end. At best, we will be often hungry in the dark as part of the collateral damage.
Not as different as you imply. All observations about the universe are just that — anecdotal observations. Humans seem to think it all makes sense somehow, and seek generalize to some Truth. Sometimes this is relatively easy, like F=ma. Most real-life situations are far more fiendishly complex, as in global warming, or trying to decide how to order a society. Even if you had appropriate data, analysing it is tough. It is easy to grab a ruler and draw a line through the data, but what makes one think it *should* be a line? And when we try to generalize… Read more »
@Z Man – Actually, it is the other way around. Metaphysical assumptions provide the framework within-which physical reality can be understood – otherwise there would be only a meaningless, ‘booming and buzzing confusion’ (William James) – a chaos of perceptions. You, like everybody, necessarily base your apprehension of ‘physical reality’ on metaphysical assumptions, that are Not empirically derived. But these metaphysical assumptions of yours are (apparently) implicit and unconscious – at present you are not aware what these assumptions are, and therefore do not know whether these are assumptions that you would regard as intuitively valid and coherent. Once you… Read more »
My first “assumption” is that 2 = 2. Please explain how that is not “empirically derived.”
I’ll bite. How do you go from “2=2” to race realist, particularly when there are any number of exceptions to the general rules of race realism?
“How do you go from “2=2” to race realist”
Easy: Two Wongs don’t make a White.
@Z Man – I’m not engaging in argument. At some point (and it should come much sooner than usual) people should stop arguing and start thinking.
And that means thinking each for himself – because there is nobody – o authority – that we can trust (no institutions, no reputations); and the sheer quantity of error, fraud and incompetence in our culture is overwhelming.
It is not empirically derived. It is the metaphysical assumption of the law of identity that a thing will always equal itself. It is this assumption which then allows us to empirically observe that the quantity of these two things equals the quantity of those two things. It is also a true assumption.
“that are Not empirically derived”. i would disagree with you here. the only way to derive metaphysical principles, is by observing physical reality. this to me fits the definition of “empirically derived”. now where people *do* get into trouble, is when they start using the term “metaphysics” for what is more properly defined as “mysticism”.
I like the mention of William James here, and wonder whether his philosophy of pragmatism might be useful in sorting some of this out in the service moving forward in the way that those of us on this side of divide want to see it move: “…an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected.” I also like some of what Z has emphasized recently with strong encouragement to start thinking about 2040 and… Read more »
Reality cannot be subjective, simply because the universe existed before our species came into existence. The concept of “truth” came into existence when our species invented the concept and gave it a name. And if truth is to be defined as an absolute (doesn’t change over time), then the only immutable standard can be correspondence with reality. In practice, all assertions of truth are approximations subject to testing and verification. And all findings are consequently approximations. Therefore, seeking truth is a process where the destination is unachievable because of the limitations of our senses and conceptualization capabilities. So we always… Read more »
Truth is the accurate perception or conception of reality.
Most higher-order life forms perceive reality through the various biological sensing organs, and some have limited brain-based conceptualization ability. Humans max out on the latter, but all are subject to error in either mode of functioning.
Nature intends that error leads to extinction.
I want TomA at my parties to ensure that we don’t get a bit too euphoric.
“did someone mention ‘disease cells’?”
The way our brains are wired, before any sense perception reaches our conscious awareness, it has already been processed by the areas of our brain which impose meaning and context. Thus there’s no such thing as a ‘pure’— unconceptualized— perception. And to the extent that our conception of life is inaccurate, our perceptions will be inaccurate as well. Some people strive to accurately discern what is true; and to make their conception of life as accurate to reality as possible. Other people begin with preconceived dogmas, and strive to make their conception of life conform as closely as possible to… Read more »
“The fact is that truth is contingent upon metaphysical assumptions …” I agree, and even in physics there are certain tacit metaphysical assumptions that undergird the conceptual systems of classical mechanics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. In fact, in relativity and quantum theory it was the metaphysical assumptions of classical mechanics that had to be questioned, modified, and even discarded (e.g., absolute time, absolute space). But these are deep waters and I don’t want to go deeper into them here. You are also correct that for any kind of debate to exist (as between Anton and Gottfried) some sort of tacit… Read more »
I agree, and even in physics there are certain tacit metaphysical assumptions that undergird the conceptual systems of classical mechanics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. This is where you begin to question the nature of reality and our ability to conceive of it. I will admit I am skeptical of the claim that our sense evolved to give us an accurate conception of reality. instead, I think our sense evolved to provide us with the most fit conception of reality. Even if our conception of the world is a simple or complex approximation of reality, reality still exists. Otherwise, we exist… Read more »
Z Man boldly proclaims, “reality still exists,” which itself is a metaphysical assumption that can’t be confirmed. Boy, this thinking stuff makes me kinda nauseous…
“During times of universal unreality, saying ‘reality exists’ becomes a revolutionary act.”
-Z Man
Once you start veering into “Maybe we’re all the dream of a turtle in space” territory, you can’t figure anything out. Reality isn’t real means no empiricism.
As I said, deep waters. Kant’s turgid “Critique of Pure Reason” is a good place to start, or some modern writer who can present Kant’s ideas more cogently. There is a reality out there — “the thing in itself” — and we have a sensory apparatus that is pre-programmed (like a pre-programmed read-only ROM) that interprets sense perceptions a certain way. But I believe Kant argued we can never grapple directly with the “thing in itself.” You are probably right that the read-only ROMs that survive were and are best attuned to the “world out there.”
I am not so sure philosophy has much to offer here. The place to start is that our senses evolved to give us either a greater understanding of reality or they evolved to improve our fitness. The latter is the correct answer, but then the question is, does a more accurate conception of reality improve our fitness? There are three answers. One is a clear yes, which means that our senses evolved and continue to evolve to provide us with more concise approximation of reality. The second choice is yes and no. Perhaps our sense evolved to provide us with… Read more »
fMRI neural imaging has shown that before our sensory input has come to our conscious awareness— before we become aware of what our eyes are seeing, our ears are hearing, our noses are smelling— the stream of neural impulses embodying that ‘raw’ sensory data has already passed through those portions of our brain which assign meaning and context. By the time our sensory input has reached our conscious awareness, it is already been assigned a tentative meaning. So there truly is no such thing as unmediated sensory awareness. However, I’m not aware of any sense in which our brains are… Read more »
Being uneducated, I did a skim of Kant and Hume highlights. To my surprise, they were both making a theological argument about the same errant foundation- that is, based on the idea of a One God, a primary single Source. Such an idea is inherently contradictory. I say it leads to an actual short circuit in the brain, thus we remain confused between the emotionally moral of the backbrain and the material real.of the forebrain. Literal cognitive dissonance between the two speech processors. Understand-able at the time, but no wonder people come out of college confused. They’re trying to solve… Read more »
Also, and on a side note, “reality exists” has to be defended otherwise we soon end up like the po-mo crowd and insist everything is a “social construct.”
Right: our senses evolved to enable us to best fit in to the reality of the physical world we find ourselves in. The more accurately we succeed at making our conceptions conform closely to that realm of reality, the more successful we will be in navigating, and surviving in, the world around us. And our conceptions of reality don’t have to be perfect in order to confer a survival advantage; they merely have to be ‘close enough’. The caveman’s underlying notions about lightning could be completely flawed; but if he knows enough to stay off high mountaintops during electrical storms,… Read more »
Agreed. Mr. Charlton is pointing to an End that guides him. To his credit, he allows that others in pursuit of a different End- rather, a similar end by different means- speak a different dialect.
I say a quantifiable model is more universal in both its understanding and application, able to recognize the emosocial needs and limits of human nature.
This forced mishmash is a violation.
Quantifiable theology?
Oh yeah. We have enough, now. The science and the mechanics, thank you white people. That’s why they were made.
We’ve been lied to and propagandized over just about everything these past few decades and further bashed over the head with a “moral” cudgel if we didn’t believe. It makes one wonder what truths or at least elements of those truths will wake enough people out of their torpor to finally do something about it. It’s all getting more brazen and ludicrous by the day – at some point, the dam has got to give.
“… at some point, the dam has got to give.”
We’ve been saying that and waiting for quite a while. But the plates keep spinning. My thought—roughly considered—is when the dam gives way, what will it look like? For example, will it look like an epiphany where folks come to their senses and see the light? Where folk say. “What was I thinking?” Or “”Time to reorganize.” Or rather a descent into mass chaos where folk are no wiser than before, but even more desperate. A Hobbesian world of all against all.
I have never been in the collapse camp, but I do think we are reaching an end point. I have argued that we are at the confluence of several cycles at their end stage. What we are approaching is something like what happened to the Soviet Union. It will be a disorderly retreat from empire to something else.
The irony is that the crackpots planning the break up of Russia could very well cause the break up America.
As Z man has repeatedly pointed out, we have no social cohesion now. A significant portion of the population have sub 90 IQs.
We probably won’t fare as well as the Soviet Union in any collapse.
Yeah, I suspect the concept of “orderly retreat” is in the eye of the beholder. USSR -> Russia could have been worse, but if my memory serves, it was pretty tough going—and I suspect greatly mediated by the USSR shedding off its ethnic minority republics. Even then there was war.
Two very good ponts.
Tough going: 14 million dead of the collapse.
Only that many, because the shedding. Ukraine might be counted as an ethnic minority shed along with the ‘Stans.
Here, they’re pouring them in as fast as they can.
Somebody noted in Europe, far too many Muslims have military haircuts, new clothes and cell phones.
How many disguised mercenaries are we getting, amongst those “people from all over the world?”
@george 1, “A significant portion of the population have sub 90 IQs.”
That is not nearly as much of a concern as one might think. Given a set of mores and the will to expel any who will not respect those mores, pretty much any society worthy of continued existence can accommodate a substantial number of below-average intellects. Indeed, it must be able to.
True, but the problem is too many of those below average intellects are getting into positions of power and responsibility where they wreak havoc.
“The irony is that the crackpots planning the break up of Russia could very well cause the break up America.”
Agree but it could also be that the morons planning the break up of Russia hope thereby to stave off the break up of the USA. The predator USA needs to be fed just as Ungoliant did in Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion.”
Agree with staving off breakup. If we can just grab some more resource flows, we can skim some new loans.
Not of the collapse camp either. Nevertheless, reports of widespread looting in Buffalo after the weather was cold for a couple of days and they had some extra snow. The sophistry of “Diversity is our Strength” (*) is as obviously without any rational or evidentiary basis as it is simultaneously legally actionable to politely question. Any real hardship in the US will see the inner cities that have maximum DIOS become hellscapes in days. (* – Given to us by the great mind of “P-o-t-a-t-o-e” VP Dan Quayle, ironically given in a speech to the Japanese who thought the whole… Read more »
The LA “roof Koreans” were the villains of almost all the media coverage of them. That’s why news photographs of them are inspiring to young men now. They were chosen to scare women and white-collar sissies and remind middle aged guys of Vietnam.
The first Stop Asian Hate-type media campaign happened then. It was waged entirely against Ice Cube, who before the riots had released a song complaining that all the stores in the ‘hood were owned by Korean weirdos. QED, the music made them do it. Coincidentally, that same album contained a popular song “noticing” local Jews.
Good times.
The Adam Curtis documentary on the Soviet endgame “TraumaZone” gives a pretty good look at a collapsing society. A very low trust, diversified society with an inflated currency, here in the US, is not going to be pleasant.
Still and all, waiting for the Saxon to begin to hate is getting tiresome.
Waiting for the Saxon?
Some people started early.
We think it all started with a pencil factory in Georgia in 1913.
It might go back to the 10th Century, when
Rus Prince Svyatoslav destroyed the Khazarian Empire, in today’s Ukraine.
(To be clear, the second “homeland” where certain folks in the 1st century A.D. met and merged with another invasive ethnicity that came in the 1st century B.C.
The two unrelated groups found each other quite agreeable, being minorities and all.)
The Russian core of the USSR was far more intact and unified than Heritage America is now. The divisions within Heritage America always have been there but the hatred is worse than ever. Yankee Puritans will want to maim and murder and settle scores during any dissolution. The Russian communists were not that way at the end. The Gorbachevs were not murdered after they were kidnapped. That would not happen here.
Most will think the same lunatic things. Nothing should be allowed out of the chaos that has any of them in a position of influence.
The current example, in miniature, of what you are in talking about is the people who flee the woke cities while learning nothing about the causes that compelled them to flee. In my own family, some people fled Portland and moved to a small town and I promise you that some of them will begin work in earnest to turn that small town into Portland. It’s infuriating. That small town is helpless and can’t reject them.
Yep. I bet many Californians who fled to the TVA region due in part to power outages advocated for policies that led to blackouts in their new home.
Egads. My liberal bestie did just that.
The legacy families in our new home keep this clean, quiet little town locked down! We’re being oppressed! That I fled the scabby, diversifying city for this!
Thank gosh he’s too stoned all the time to run for city council. Ffs, he even got to lead the parade his first year there! That’s gratitude for ya.
They will be hunted down like rats if they lose their grip on power. They know this.
Yep. They live in a house of cards. What they own can be easily confiscated, albeit I suspect every smart one has a percentage of wealth stashed in areas they consider untouchable. Perhaps they’ll survive and live there lives out in leisure—if not power.
Compsci, I think that certain people will be highly motivated to find those who get away. There won’t be a place on earth where they will be safe.