Language Games with Wittgenstein

Excerpt: from video above

......for a baby to understand, it will need a deeper context (than just words) that is informed by the linguistic community it lives in. Wittgenstein's drawing attention here to an important place that the meanings of our words are coming from. Again, it's a community generated pre-theoretical set of rules and practices. These are not written down anywhere. And these are things that themselves, to Wittgenstein, only really serve this purpose they do because there are people currently going along with them. In other words, all of this is subject to change. As the community changes, these rules and practices sort of crystallize into what he calls a grammar. And that grammar becomes the thing that makes any statement anyone ever makes seem coherent or not. Now, it gets slightly more complicated than this, but we're almost there, bear with me for one more minute or so.

Because Wittgenstein would also want us to consider that these rules and practices that inform our language don't just materialize out of thin air. We are human beings after all, that there are certain natural tendencies we have just as creatures, and those tendencies will always be at least a piece of anything that we ever want to say that's meaningful. Wittgenstein calls these "forms of life" in the book, and these are things that he'd want us to respect deeply. They're a source for us finding common ground with each other. He'd want us to just make sure we remember, these things are always driving us forward. To some extent human things, like caring for loved ones, the desire to survive, joking around with each other, mourning for the dead, there's always an undercurrent of our own humanity that has an impact on the things we ever decide to communicate, and what rules and practices make sense to us.

Now, if it helps you, he doesn't lay it out this way, but if it helps you and you're a visual person, when it comes to thinking about this whole process he explains about, the meaning of a word and how it arises. You could think of the base of this process as those "forms of life" we just talked about. Those ladder up into, and collaborate with, the rules and practices that collectively emerge. The rules and practices crystallize into a grammar of what makes anything coherent. And then finally after all, that the meaning of a word only arises for Wittgenstein when a person decides to speak it and use it publicly in a community setting.

At the risk of redundancy, here again, this doesn't come from an essence. This doesn't come from pointing at something and giving it a definition. The meaning of a word happens. It is created and recreated in real time, when it is used by people in a particular way within a linguistic community. And this is what is meant when people say in Wittgenstein's later work that "the meanings of words come from their use".

Now, I promise we'll come back to this, but there's an obvious juicy rebuttal to all this so far that's going to really help me make his point for the rest of the episode about some of the details here. You know, someone could hear what's been said so far and say, "Well what about triangles? Is the definition of a triangle something that only makes sense when some person says it? And if they're a bunch of delusional people that all came along and decided triangles only have two sides, are we supposed to listen to them? I mean look, this is an a priori fact of the universe: a triangle is a polygon with exactly three sides and three interior angles. To use the word in any other way than that is to misunderstand what the word is."

Wittgenstein would agree with basically all of this in spirit, but he'd want to bring this person's attention to something that they're doing there. In his terminology, this person's playing a totally different language game than we typically do when we talk about everyday concepts. More specifically, this person's operating in the language game of Euclidean Geometry. Remember those rules and practices that ultimately crystallize into a grammar, and how that grammar determines the criteria for what makes anything coherent or not? Well, geometry has a very specific set of these rules and practices that are distinct to it. For example, answers have to be calculable within the rules of the system. Terms have to be grounded in shared definitions or axioms. Proof is the primary thing that makes something justifiable in geometry. Now, these rules and practices are different than the ones we use when we have conversations about more ordinary things. And notice how everything about this different grammar is similarly grounded in a practice of communally agreed upon criteria, and how all these rules only hold up because there are other people that are willing to go along with them. In other words, geometry is an absolutely beautiful closed system of rules that allows for certain people willing to use this grammar to speak in a particular way to each other while operating in the community of geometry. These are people playing a very different type of language game that is a very different kind of grammar, where if it was applied to many other areas of our life, it would make it almost impossible to still be functional.

I mean just to illustrate this, imagine someone that's a big fan of Chess, another great closed system of rules. They're such a big fan of chess, it turns out, that they decide they're going to transpose the rules of chess onto their dating life. "Bro, how was your date"? "Uh, it was good. She asked me a really tough question, but I used the Sicilian Defense on her". "Bro, bro, do you think she likes you"? "I don't know, like, I think she does. But I'm hoping we can castle queen side once all the pieces get out of the way". It's like you'd be an idiot to live your life in this way.

And to Wittgenstein, this really is a story that's gone on over and over again throughout the history of philosophy. There's a certain archetype that pops up a lot of the mathematician turned philosopher. They want to find out the truth about everything, and they're really intrigued by the kind of certainty and precision that Math seems to provide to people. So whether it's Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, whoever it is, these are people whose projects came up short. Not because they're stupid, but because they're literally trying to do the impossible. They're applying a grammar that lies at the heart of one language game to a completely different language game.

This is why, by the way, this is such an effective rhetoric tactic by the debate master at the beginning of the episode. You're giving your opponent an impossible task, something that makes sense in a totally different language game, and then you can just sit back, relax, and point out all the exceptions to it as they scramble for answers and people start to doubt their knowledge. See, whenever we talk about something with more ordinary language, there is no singular static definition of a thing that's going to apply to all the cases. It uses a completely different kind of grammar, far more open-ended than something like geometry or chess.

Concepts like "insurrection", "justice", whatever it is. Wittgenstein says concepts have "blurred edges" in ordinary language. They're not these clear-cut things that someone can just lay out an airtight definition of. At best what we have, whenever we look at a concept he says, are a bunch of different takes on something complicated that bear a sort of "family resemblance", as he says. Let's describe what he means by that. The example he uses in the book is to ask the question, "What is a game"?

Think of all the different kinds of games there are, hopscotch, poker, tic-tac-toe, Call of Duty, rock paper scissors...all of these are games. And the temptation by a lot of people is to try to find something similar between all these examples, some essence to them that makes all of these games. But Wittgenstein's point is that no matter how much work you do trying to craft the absolute perfect definition of a game, you're ultimately committing a Category Error. Whenever someone, anyone out there, has an understanding of the word "game" in ordinary language, what they're doing there is less analogous to having a perfect definition of the word, and it's more analogous to knowing your way around a family album.

You know, those books of photos people keep of when they've gotten together for the holidays over the years? I mean I don't do it, uh, but if I had a family I would. Just kidding, I do know.

Anyway understanding the word game is like opening up one of those albums and saying "Oh there's Aunt Glattis, she's a oncologist. And look over there, that's Danny, that's her sister's son. That one right there is Grandma Beatatric, still hanging in there strong, she is." What we call games, like people in a family, share a kind offamily resemblance that you can be more or less educated to spot. But despite the people in the photo album all bearing some kind of resemblance, there's no single characteristic about them, or "essence" that makes that resemblance what it is. The edges are much more blurry than that. It's a lot more like a bunch of Venn Diagrams, all overlapping each other in different ways. Some overlap more than others. Sometimes two of them, both still part of the family, don't resemble each other much at all. And so too with games, or with any other concept we try to understand in this particular kind of language game.

You can also see to Wittgenstein here, not only why it becomes easy for philosophers to get lost in puzzles that don't actually exist. You know, when they try to rationally unify concepts down into things with these hard edges. But you can also see why it becomes so easy for people to be talking past each other. Because consider how language games operate in a real world example if Wittgenstein is right here. And I know, this is a charged example but look, I hope I've earned enough respect as somebody that's writing these in good faith to be able to use this one. It's an absolutely perfect one to show what he thinks the consequences of these language games can be, gender identity.

I know, one side of the table might say that gender is a biological fact, that male and female is either an XX or an XY chromosome situation. That I can look under a microscope and tell you exactly which one of these you are, male or female. Now the other side of this may say something like, "Look, when I think of male or female I'm not thinking of chromosomes under a microscope. I don't think of XX or XY. I think of a mustachioed man, or a woman with long flowing hair". Point is, to this person, gender is a community generated set of norms. Its' meaning is defined by a social performance of the gender roles of either male or female within a culture. That the edges of those concepts are going to be a bit more blurry, and that it's going to come down to a practice rooted in communal criteria rather than being able to read axioms out of a book about biology.

Now to Wittgenstein, these are two people coming to the table using two very different language games. And as long as they remain rooted only in theirs, they will never see eye to eye on this stuff. The same world, in other words, can be seen through different grammars and different language games. And the specific language game you're using can shape what aspects of the world stand out as meaningful, or even visible to you. And for Wittgenstein, another way to put this would be to say that "Classification and Perception interfold each other".

If you remember the recent episode we just did using the duck-rabbit as an example, you may remember I was borrowing that example from the work of Wittgenstein. Well, here it is in "Philosophical Investigations". Now in that episode we were using it to describe different experiential framings of reality, but in this case Wittgenstein saying that there is no single language game that somehow captures the hidden essence of reality. The same events in the world, the same problems that need to be solved, can be looked at through different grammars. And different obvious solutions will emerge because of the rules and practices we're bringing to bear upon the moment. So whether you see a duck or a rabbit, or whether you see an event as a protest or an insurrection, or whether you see gender as a social performance or a biological fact, this has less to do with you uncovering the hidden essence of reality, and more to do with the specific language game you're playing.

Now to simplify all this so far, if you wanted two things that Wittgenstein's later work says is missing from many of the other theories of language, it's going to be a consideration of the role of Practice and Difference. Practice, meaning that underlying grammar that so many people ignore the importance of, and difference meaning the actual family resemblances of words with those blurry edges where they don't necessarily have some clear essence that we can define when the debate master asks you to. And for whatever it's worth, it won't be a coincidence that so many philosophers after this book comes out will use the words "practice" and "difference" in their work so much more. If you had one of those etmology like usages of the word graph thing, it goes way up after this in philosophy.

Now I'm sure you've guessed where all this is going. If we buy what Wittgenstein is selling here, then this isn't just going to be two or three of these language games that are going on that are competing with each other. Not only is there usually a diversity of languages that people are speaking in any given area, but now imagine each person is now oscillating between, god knows, how many different language games with varying levels of self-awareness that's the way communication works. Picture the sheer quantity, it's amazing, of just dumb, completely irreconcilable arguments that are going on between people. And think of how many of them believe that if they just push a little further in this argument they're having, the other person's going to come around.

More than that, if Wittgenstein's right here, then it's really interesting to consider how the role of a philosopher changes in this new world. I mean, what do they have left to do? The idea we're just going to sit around explaining these huge mysterious concepts like "time" or "mind", it just starts to seem pretty delusional. Because these things that seem like they're huge philosophical problems become, after you accept his premises, just mistakes of grammar that need to be clarified. As he says, "In philosophy all explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place". The job of a philosopher then becomes something almost like being a cartographer of language, making maps, reading them. Philosophy turns from something where people are sitting around kind of tortured, trying to come up with these grand theories that explain big things, and it turns into something that more resembles a kind of therapy, he says.

Let me explain what he means here, because there's multiple different therapies he thinks philosophers should be providing. First of all, when people are talking past each other in the world, if the debate master is someone who's demanding the essences to things, then the philosopher should be something like the opposite of that. Just like a cartographer, they should be gathering and surveying as many examples of how a word is used as they can, and then once they survey the different usages of a word, their job is to lay them out side by side, so that they can be observed and compared by people. This is therapeutic just because of the context, and humility that it brings to people. It helps them understand how language is actually functioning. As he says, "What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses which you had not dreamed. I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. And now you're free to look around the field of use of the expression, and to describe the different kinds of uses of it."

Another thing a philosopher has to do now if we accept Wittgenstein's work, is to spend more time clarifying those rules and practices that dictate so much about how our language works. There's tons of moments in his work where he thinks that even a slight correction that goes on at the level of grammar can solve some of the most seemingly impossible philosophical problems. Think about how the classic debate between "free will" and "determinism" starts to dissolve once you, and whoever you're debating with, stop treating words like they exist in isolation, and start acknowledging the ordinary context that give those words meaning in the first place to you. Words like "can" or "cause" or "responsibility. To Wittgenstein, there's no hidden essence of these things written into the Universe waiting for us to explain them with some kind of theory. And more than that, think of how this applies to things like "time" and "mind", two more monolithic concepts that people torture themselves over. Instead of thinking of time as something that's hidden and mysterious about the Universe that we have to explain, try thinking of the way the word "time" actually functions in our ordinary language about it, how we talk about "keeping time", for example. Instead of mind being some category of the Universe that Descartes needs to explain to us through some big dualistic system, instead think of the way the word "mind" functions for us, how do we use it. When is something just a brain? And when does it become a mind? A philosopher's job is to remind people of the ordinary context and grammar that allow for any of these words to make sense to us in the first place at all.

Another type of therapy a philosopher should be doing, he says, is what he calls marshalling reminders and analogies. What he means by this is, try to come up with memorable reminders that illuminate how language works, and thus guides people out of confusion, " leads the fly out of the fly bottle", as he says. And this is more than just confusion, like there's so many disputes out there that seem like they're huge issues, that people have been arguing about for years between themselves. Where when they get out of abstract theorizing about the words, and instead start focusing on the concrete uses of the words that they're arguing about, sometimes problems that seem really big can just completely dissolve. With that move, as he says, if misunderstandings result from the ambiguities of our language, then philosophical problems arise when, "language goes on holiday". ...

Full Fathom Five

Jackson Pollock, "Full Fathom Five" (1947)

Full Fathom Five is one of the earliest masterpieces of Pollock's drip technique. The actual origins and initial development of this technique have never been fully explained, except by reading back from fuller photographic evidence produced about 1950, two or three years after this work was painted. Like other practical breakthroughs in twentieth-century painting, 'creative accident' seems likely to have played an important part, as Pollock probed and tested methods of paint application which promote the continuousness of line rather than the broken lines inevitable in the constant reloadings and readjustments of conventional brushwork. His solution was to pour from a can of domestic paint along a stick resting inside the container, so that a constant 'beam' of pigment came into contact with the canvas (which he left unstretched on the studio floor). The character of the line was determined by certain physical and material variables that could be combined in almost infinite permutations: the viscosity of the paint (controlled by thinning and dilution); the angle and hence speed of the pouring; and the dynamics of Pollock's bodily gestures, his sweep and rhythm, especially in the wrist, arm and shoulder. 'Like a seismograph', noted writer Wemer Haftmann 'the painting recorded the energies and states of the man who drew it.' In addition, Pollock would flick, splatter, and dab subsidiary colors on to the dominant linear configuration.

The title, suggested by Pollock's neighbor, quotes from The Tempest by William Shakespeare, wherein Ariel describes a death by shipwreck: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Sylvia Plath, "Full Fathom Five"

Old man, you surface seldom.

Then you come in with the tide’s coming

When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung

A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves

Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves

Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins

Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins

Unimaginable. You float near

As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear

Of, not fathomed. All obscurity

Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I

Cannot look much but your form suffers

Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors

Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.

The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me

To half-believe: your reappearance

Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines

Of your grained face shed time in runnels:

Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels

Of the ocean. Such sage humor and

Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-

Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.

Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle

To root deep among knuckles, shin-bones,

Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once

Seen by any man who kept his head,

You defy questions;

You defy godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom’s border

Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.

Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water.

Problems of Liberalism - An Inter-Passive Lack of a Vision of the Future that Traps us in the Past and Focuses on a Redistribution of the Present (SoJus)

Distrust of Power as Exemplified by Anti-Authoritarianism and Excessive Proceeduralism

Deleuze: Concepts in Difference and Repetition

Identity and the "Che Vuoi?" Question

The White Guilt-Pride Pervert's Response... "I am an ally!  I am Woke!  I will NEVER criticize you!  And I can be PROUD, thereby, that I am different from my racist ancestors"

Intelligence: Informational Superiority

Why No One Ever Wins an Internet Argument

...and why they often just make you angrier.

Empathy CAN change you... but sometimes like an abused child into a child abuser yourself (ala Stockholm Syndrome/ Patty Hearst).

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

-Nietzsche 

Formalized Intersectional or other Oedipal/ Political categorization is also a defense mechanism against empathy and synthesis.  I don't want to Identify WITH you or your thesis.  You are 'other' and I don't WANT to change my anti-thesis.  I need my Ego's anger to fend you off and prevent any self-reflection induced changes to my Super-Ego through synthesis of arguments or positions, thereby avoiding acceptance and experience of the immediate Ego shame that might reduce my anxiety but also increase my own sense of self-guilt through transmutation of your external ethics into my internalized Ego/ Super-Ego based morality.

...and cuz Orange Man BAD!

Why Woke Can Never Be Woke Enough...

Stephen Pinker on "The Euphemism Treadmill"

Connotations are Stereotypical.  You can Bait & Switch escape them temporarily, but like a bad penny, they ALWAYS return.  Euphemism is this futile, often neoracist linguistic tactic to flatter and virtue signal (aka- a relatively cheap transactional attempt to gain "Social Capital") friendship rather then do the hard work needed to actually establish a lasting friendship.  One in which the usefulness of the other person to you in the social relationship obtained temporarily through flattery appears more important than establishing a long lasting friendship through straight talk, mutual honesty, and respect.

You'll know when certain minorities have achieved social equality the day people stop inventing euphemisms out of guilt-pride to describe them, and stop seeking to gain surplus self-pride through using euphemisms to describe them.

Today that Flattery Must be Individualized through Use the Preferred Pronouns.  One wouldn't want to appear Racist/ Sexist using the older well-connotated term on the euphemism escalator (no longer a level treadmill)

A Message from the Dalai Lama

from the video above:

Dear human brothers, sisters,

We human being so unlike other animals, we have this very sharp intelligence. And also have the ability to visualize long future. So in that respect the various different tradition develop. So, religious freedom is actually, in a way, the freedom of our thought. The various different religious tradition, different philosophy, different tradition, but all carry same message. Message of love, and forgiveness, contentment, self discipline. So these are even, non-believer, it is very relevant. Content and self discipline, and think more of other rather than oneself. All religious tradition, you see, taught compassion, sense of what's respect for other, sense of concern of others wellbeing. In philosophical field there is much differences. So now we can make the two part. One part is the real teaching of religion is on remain honest, discipline, and helping other, reduce anger. Now these are true religious sort of value. And all religion teach us that. And then philosophical field, there are lot of differences, but these are method. To increase the real message of love, for example, theistic religion believe Creator. And then non-theistic religion, such as Janism and Buddhism and so on, you see use different reason. But all message is same. We should be kind, honest, truthful. So now, in modern time, we can make distinction, religious belief, and the practice of essence of religion that's honest, warm-heartedness. So in that respect, even a non-believer also need honest, truthful. These days, I emphasis, we need the entire 7 billion human being. We are same. We oneness of all these human being. And respect each other, helping each other. So that's even non-believer, you see this practice is very relevant. So in the past, and even today, unfortunately I think due to the political or power difference of reason, religious possibly use for one's own power, or interest, and fighting. That, now, we should think it is past. Now we human being. Now 21st century. We got lot of experiences. So now we should feel now enough. Free of fighting in the name of religion. Enough! Now we must work together, live together. So that's my main message. Thank you

Nassim Taleb - Philosophical Hercules

Francisco de Zurbarán, "Antaeus fighting Heracles" (1634)

from Wikipedia:

In Greek sources, he was the son of Poseidon and Gaia, who lived in the interior desert of Libya. His wife was the goddess Tinge, for whom it was claimed that the city of Tangier in Morocco was named (though it could be the other way around), and he had a daughter named Alceis or Barce. Another daughter, Iphinoe, consorted with Heracles.

Antaeus would challenge all passers-by to wrestling matches and remained invincible as long as he remained in contact with his mother, the earth. As Greek wrestling, like its modern equivalent, typically attempted to force opponents to the ground, he always won, killing his opponents. He built a temple to his father using their skulls. Antaeus fought Heracles as he was on his way to the Garden of Hesperides as his 11th Labour. Heracles realized that he could not beat Antaeus by throwing or pinning him. Instead, he held him aloft and then crushed him to death in a bear hug.

The Cult of the American Future - The Ownership/ Sovereignty Society?

Sex is too Narrow a Raison d'Etre.  It's Secular Capitalism's Broader Injunction to ENJOY!

Mind YOUR Business! Fugio!

Not THEIR Business for a Surplus Salary, Prole!

A Foreclosed Nostalgic Digital Future Makes You My Customer/ CONsumer FOREVER!

So Become a PROsumer!

But Don't become a Cloud Vassal who lets a Cloud Lord like Jeff Bezos Steal your Profit by Trapping Everyone in the Amazon Store and Directing the Cloud Serfs to You for a percentage!

Into Babyl-on

I think it's a category thing. I think one of the things is that when a society gets rigid its' categories, get very very rigid, and they just go. What was astonishing when I started making films is that I'm just put... and this is really key, the music you use has to be the music you like, because the audience know it when you're cheating, when you're putting in something, when you're putting in ghost town. They know it and they don't like you for it, but if they think your real true inner DJ is coming out, they will like it. The people I knew in television, and still know, when they would leave television, would sit and talk about the music they liked. And they were really good, but when they got into those categories, they felt, "Oh, I have to have money, money, money when I'm dealing with banks.

-Adam Curtis, Interview on "Shifty" 

Adam Curtis on Politics and AI

Adam Curtis' Docuseries "Shifty"

Excerpt from video above:

...come from being a reality producer, I suppose.

So you started, you used to work on "That Life", right?

Well I mean, yeah. I have reflected on that that, that I was taught that one week you would go and film a talking dog and then the next week you go off and do some journalism about the corruption of a housing estate built on polluted land. And I did I began to realize you could put the two together. You could have pretentious sh*t and trash. I mean talk that's unfetched talking dogs. It was the idea you could bolt high-end and low-end, and just get rid of the middle, which is the bit that when I was growing up and in television I thought was so boring.

So what is that behind the scenes if you're in a current affairs department or a documentary department or a news department in a big organization? Is that a cultural thing? Are there people there who are not interested in low culture? Who don't understand that people like both of those things? Is it a personnel thing, or is it a historical thing that we've always made things that way? Why are you the one that makes things differently?

I think it's a category thing. I think one of the things is that when a society gets rigid its' categories, get very very rigid, and they just go. What was astonishing when I started making films is that I'm just put... and this is really key, the music you use has to be the music you like, because the audience know it when you're cheating, when you're putting in something, when you're putting in ghost town. They know it and they don't like you for it, but if they think your real true inner DJ is coming out, they will like it. The people I knew in television, and still know, when they would leave television, would sit and talk about the music they liked. And they were really good, but when they got into those categories, they felt, "Oh, I have to have money, money, money when I'm dealing with banks.

Well it's like for me, that would be puns on voiceovers on daytime TV. You think you don't need to do it. We're watching people we like. Watching people. I'm watching someone buy a house, i don't need you to say "there's a chicken coop at the back, what an excellent property this is. I don't need you to do it, just show me the house.

Yes, because if you actually convey your feeling about the story, I've always have... I call it mood, you convey the mood you have about something. That's probably how people would also feel. Other people would feel about it, so you connect with them. Yeah, and that's all I really tried to do was to take what you referred to as high-end pretentious and make it, fuse it, with something. Not cynically, to entertain, just because I thought it would be fun. 

But it also, by the way it is, I have come from a certain class, I'm now in a completely different class. And I like to watch both of those things next to each other. In the same way what the BBC used to be, would be, you would have. You know, a documentary, then a sitcom, then a documentary. And so, you would have a sort of sandwich of culture, which of course, we can't do anymore because we're so siloed. But you can do that in an individual film. 

Yes, you can. That's what I worked it out, and some of the BBC were quite shocked. But others work well. People seemed to quite like it, so they just let me go on.

Ah Oh...

A Peak into America's Future...

Mass Psychosis

Government: "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself"

- Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun

Got Leverage?

"The Art of the Deal" isn't Rocket Science.  It's "art"

Can America Shake Empire?  Can Trump?

"Shifting" Past the Post-WWII Consensus

Excerpt from video above:

Liberalism doesn't have an account for unity. It's all about ideas. It's also based upon individual freedom. And individualism does not a society, make. We need reasons to be together. We need reasons for me to consider you my neighbor and not a stranger. Like, there has to be something that binds us. And I think that like you said, Christianity played that role for a while and then a kind of Nationalism played that role, also for a while, but that Nationalism that was completely unmoored from Christianity is what led also to the great wars. ...

There's something about Christianity and Empire that is actually more flexible than Nation. Because Empire has a way to have a loose affiliation to center right so you have some... it's like you have Rome as the center, and you have the Emperor. But it's like if you're in Gaul. It's like your connection to the Emperor is very symbolic, right? It's very ritualized, but it still functions, makes you feel like you're part of something. But it also leaves room for a lot of variation and transformation. One of the things that happened in the modern Nation State is of course a mistaking, or a confusion between unity and uniformity, Right? So you see all the stories, right? So basically, Napoleon eliminates all of the local languages and just imposes French top down, education system top down, a top down bureaucracy that completely is ruled by the by the central thing. And it's already there even in the Enlightenment Kings, right? It's like this, everything is just this top down uniformity. But ancient worlds were just a dance between unity and multiplicity, right? They were dances between adaptation to the local space, and local languages, and local dialects. But then our elites still know Latin, right? But I don't have to know Latin, can speak whatever romance language I speak. But as long as the bishop and the priest know Latin, there's some connection to a unity, right? And so I think that that is a better way. I don't know how to live that out in the modern world. But what I mean is that you can see that we've radicalized identity, and that's one of the things that led to this fascist-communist opposition, is that it's like uniformity or flatness.

There's another aspect of, maybe it's insignificant now but one thing I have noticed over the last 5-10 years is that terms like Nazism were so overused that no one really believes it anymore. Well, a lot of people no longer believe, it doesn't have the edge that it did because everything's called Nazi. But I say that as a little glimmer of hope that maybe things are moving in a positive way.

...and the Dawning of the Technofeudal Age

Adam Curtis, "Shifty"

What's My Part in this Band of Attention Seekers?

Originality - The Original Sin?

Moo!

btw - I HATE the Tuba and REFUSE to Play it!  Now Trumpet...

...Trumpet will attract me a Strumpet!

AdS/ CFT

Are Gravity and Time Emergent Properties that Don't Really Exist Yet  Emerge through Entanglement from Thermal Properties on a flat 2D Quantum Space into 3D?

Welcome to Sphereland, home of the 'Flat' Earth Society!

The motion of "Time" but without any corners...

From the Jowett Summary of Plato's "Laws"

But first I must pray the Gods to assist at the demonstration of their own existence—if ever we are to call upon them, now is the time. Let me hold fast to the rope, and enter into the depths: Shall I put the question to myself in this form?—Are all things at rest, and is nothing in motion? or are some things in motion, and some things at rest? 'The latter.' And do they move and rest, some in one place, some in more? 'Yes.' There may be (1) motion in the same place, as in revolution on an axis, which is imparted swiftly to the larger and slowly to the lesser circle; and there may be motion in different places, having sometimes (2) one centre of motion and sometimes (3) more. (4) When bodies in motion come against other bodies which are at rest, they are divided by them, and (5) when they are caught between other bodies coming from opposite directions they unite with them; and (6) they grow by union and (7) waste by dissolution while their constitution remains the same, but are (8) destroyed when their constitution fails. There is a growth from one dimension to two, and from a second to a third, which then becomes perceptible to sense; this process is called generation, and the opposite, destruction. We have now enumerated all possible motions with the exception of two. 'What are they?' Just the two with which our enquiry is concerned; for our enquiry relates to the soul. There is one kind of motion which is only able to move other things; there is another which can move itself as well, working in composition and decomposition, by increase and diminution, by generation and destruction. 'Granted.' (9) That which moves and is moved by another is the ninth kind of motion; (10) that which is self-moved and moves others is the tenth. And this tenth kind of motion is the mightiest, and is really the first, and is followed by that which was improperly called the ninth. 'How do you mean?' Must not that which is moved by others finally depend upon that which is moved by itself? Nothing can be affected by any transition prior to self-motion. Then the first and eldest principle of motion, whether in things at rest or not at rest, will be the principle of self-motion; and that which is moved by others and can move others will be the second. 'True.' Let me ask another question:

What is the name which is given to self-motion when manifested in any material substance? 'Life.' And soul too is life? 'Very good.' And are there not three kinds of knowledge—a knowledge (1) of the essence, (2) of the definition, (3) of the name? And sometimes the name leads us to ask the definition, sometimes the definition to ask the name. For example, number can be divided into equal parts, and when thus divided is termed even, and the definition of even and the word 'even' refer to the same thing. 'Very true.' And what is the definition of the thing which is named 'soul'? Must we not reply, 'The self-moved'? And have we not proved that the self-moved is the source of motion in other things? 'Yes.' And the motion which is not self-moved will be inferior to this? 'True.' And if so, we shall be right in saying that the soul is prior and superior to the body, and the body by nature subject and inferior to the soul? 'Quite right.' And we agreed that if the soul was prior to the body, the things of the soul were prior to the things of the body? 'Certainly.' And therefore desires, and manners, and thoughts, and true opinions, and recollections, are prior to the length and breadth and force of bodies. 'To be sure.' In the next place, we acknowledge that the soul is the cause of good and evil, just and unjust, if we suppose her to be the cause of all things? 'Certainly.' And the soul which orders all things must also order the heavens? 'Of course.' One soul or more? More; for less than two are inconceivable, one good, the other evil. 'Most true.' The soul directs all things by her movements, which we call will, consideration, attention, deliberation, opinion true and false, joy, sorrow, courage, fear, hatred, love, and similar affections. These are the primary movements, and they receive the secondary movements of bodies, and guide all things to increase and diminution, separation and union, and to all the qualities which accompany them—cold, hot, heavy, light, hard, soft, white, black, sweet, bitter; these and other such qualities the soul, herself a goddess, uses, when truly receiving the divine mind she leads all things rightly to their happiness; but under the impulse of folly she works out an opposite result. For the controller of heaven and earth and the circle of the world is either the wise and good soul, or the foolish and vicious soul, working in them. 'What do you mean?' If we say that the whole course and motion of heaven and earth is in accordance with the workings and reasonings of mind, clearly the best soul must have the care of the heaven, and guide it along that better way. 'True.' But if the heavens move wildly and disorderly, then they must be under the guidance of the evil soul. 'True again.' What is the nature of the movement of the soul? We must not suppose that we can see and know the soul with our bodily eyes, any more than we can fix them on the midday sun; it will be safer to look at an image only. 'How do you mean?' Let us find among the ten kinds of motion an image of the motion of the mind. You remember, as we said, that all things are divided into two classes; and some of them were moved and some at rest. 'Yes.' And of those which were moved, some were moved in the same place, others in more places than one. 'Just so.' The motion which was in one place was circular, like the motion of a spherical body; and such a motion in the same place, and in the same relations, is an excellent image of the motion of mind. 'Very true.' The motion of the other sort, which has no fixed place or manner or relation or order or proportion, is akin to folly and nonsense. 'Very true.' After what has been said, it is clear that, since the soul carries round all things, some soul which is either very good or the opposite carries round the circumference of heaven. But that soul can be no other than the best. Again, the soul carries round the sun, moon, and stars, and if the sun has a soul, then either the soul of the sun is within and moves the sun as the human soul moves the body; or, secondly, the sun is contained in some external air or fire, which the soul provides and through which she operates; or, thirdly, the course of the sun is guided by the soul acting in a wonderful manner without a body. 'Yes, in one of those ways the soul must guide all things.' And this soul of the sun, which is better than the sun, whether driving him in a chariot or employing any other agency, is by every man called a God? 'Yes, by every man who has any sense.' And of the seasons, stars, moon, and year, in like manner, it may be affirmed that the soul or souls from which they derive their excellence are divine; and without insisting on the manner of their working, no one can deny that all things are full of Gods. 'No one.' And now let us offer an alternative to him who denies that there are Gods. Either he must show that the soul is not the origin of all things, or he must live for the future in the belief that there are Gods.

Problem Solvers vs. Crusaders

Deleuze and Finnegans Wake

SchizoAnalyses vs. Schizophrenic Daughters

We're ALL in 2nd Order Observation Mode Now!

Always Performing for Others, yet Watching Ourselves in that Performance.

The Commodification of Land, Labout, Capital, and now, Personal Information (aka- The Self)

Who Really Ran the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration?

Meet Mike and Tom Donilon aka - Blackrock.

Identity vs. Morality

The flaws in this video?  Assuming "heredity and race" are the foundational units of "identity" and NOT the Civic Constitution: The Ordo Caritatis.  Another, that morality extends beyond the self.  The only "friendly" Morality based Ethic is as Kant categorically defined it, that of  "Not imposing your will upon any others, treating them not as a means to an end, but as ends unto themselves.

And no, Identity isn't "better" than morality.  Morality is "inward" facing, it's what I think of Me (and yes it may be based upon the ethics imposed by others like shame, guilt, pride, etc.)  Identity, on the other hand, is more "outward facing" like a mask and often based in ethics imposed by others.  Identity is a mask that I outwardly present and which defines me for "The Other" and what I want "The Other" to know or think about me and which lets him know what he can expect from me.  It varies dependent upon the role in life's masquerade  I am fulfilling (father, brother, worker, citizen, boss, representative).  Today it is often on-line (24/7/365), both curated and and profilic.

What the videographer calls "Universal Morality" or "the Pseudo-Moral frame" in the video is really the "Ethics of Kitsch".  It's he Secular Ethic of the Globalist/ Universalist.  The "lover of all".  The cosmopolitan humanist.  The value he theologically places "above" that of his  actual social/ civic constitution, that of his nation.

Technically, I'm Amish...

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

― Marshall McLuhan

Rule by Legal Processes...

...and centralization of Executive Information and Ensuring a Unitary Executive:

Deep State entities within the Executive Branch will no longer be able to hide their activities in information silos from their superiors.  If the deep state is going to help Ukraine target Russian strategic bombers, the president will know what the USIC is up to.  Ai will be watching them.  The USIC will find themselves within the panopticon, and not stationed unobserved within its' central observation tower cloaked by National Security Ring of Gyges and invisible to the DNI.  She will possess the "one ring to rule them all".  will it corrupt her?  Or empower her to actually become the "Director" of National Intelligence?

So, either repeal the Patriot Act and stop spying on Americans ENTIRELY or let the DNI do her job, and the President his.

For Popper's Open Society

Selected excerpts and notes from the video above:

"What we need and what we want... is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals." 

- Popper

Moralize Politics: Apply ethical standards to political action

Politicize Morals: Enshrine one moral code as unchangeable law

Popper did not deny the existence of objective moral truths, what he denied was the State's right to impose them as fixed certainties.

"Identity has increasingly filled the void left by the absence of shared cultural and moral frameworks. Religion, nationality, and even biological sex have become battlegrounds where individuals seek personal meaning. This cultural transformation began at Universities, but as Andrew Sullivan argues in his essay "We all live on Campus now," it quickly spread into journalism, corporations , and government."

The post-modernists moral relativism was replaced by a new kind of moral certainty rooted in identity and lived experience rather than universal principles. Once truth was recast as power, traditional norms lost legitimacy, and so did the very idea of open disagreement. University politics on microaggressions and trigger warnings reflect a new moral framework in which harm is measured subjectively and debate can itself be construed as aggression. Many students now interpret words as violence, and view disagreement as a for of disrespect or invalidation.

The failure to defend the cultural and civic infrastructure that once gave openness coherence, and provided moral depth. Liberal societies are not adrift because they honored openness too much, but because they ceased to defend the cultural and civic infrastructure that once gave that openness coherence and provided moral depth.

Bureaucratic centralization further weakened community self-government by displacing local initiative. As Uval Levven observes in "The Fractured Republic", a nationalized political culture has increasingly crowded out the middle layers of society, the local associations that once formed the bedrock of civil life. In the UK, local authorities now raise only a fraction of the revenue they spend, leaving them heavily dependent on central government transfers, and limiting their scope for local innovation or accountability. A 2022 report by Center for Cities concluded that Britain has become one of the most fiscally centralized countries in the developed world. As Phillip Blond has argued in "Red Tory", "The state and the market have conspired to hollow out civil society, leaving individuals atomized and communities fragmented."

The decline in civic education. Civic education provides a shared vocabulary about the common good without requiring a shared theology or ethnicity. Civic enfranchisement depends on a shared base of knowledge. Without it, democratic deliberation breaks down.

The erosion has also been cultural.

The model d' Toqueville observed in 19th century America still works. The evidence is particularly striking in Denmark. Denmark consistently ranks among the world's most cohesive and high trust democracies. Its' cohesion stems from strong civic networks supported by public institutions that are transparent, responsive, and widely trusted.

The civic religion must be taught. Over time citizens can come to emotionally identify with a new second patriotism founded upon the Constitution. However, this patriotism must be taught. When schools fail to transmit a common base of knowledge, it would be hard to invent a more effective recipe for cultural fragmentation. Nations need stories they can tell about themselves that are forward-looking, inclusive, and cohesive. A society paralyzed by shame will not survive, nor will one built on nostalgia.

Constitutional patriotism, then, can live in story, education, ritual, and shared public life. In this way, liberal democracies can foster cohesion without succumbing to the exclusionary certainties of the strong gods.

Liberal societies should also recover the civic power of local communities. Excessive centralization has weakened the middle layers of society, displacing voluntary institutions and disempowering citizens. One remedy is subsidiarity, shifting decision making closer to those affected by it. Switzerland exemplifies this with a federal system that gives substantial autonomy to Cantons and Communes and engages citizens directly through referenda. These decentralized models offer a way to restore civic belonging without restoring top-down cultural unity.

Liberal societies also need clear moral and civic boundaries. Mutual tolerance should not be a suicide pact. Immigration can enrich liberal societies- but only if newcomers accept core liberal principles. Inclusion requires clarity. The price for admission to a liberal democracy should be respect for the rules that make peaceful coexistence possible. That includes rejective efforts from any quarter to impose religious orthodoxy, racial essentialism, or ideological loyalty tests.

The current turn towards strong gods reflects a fear that Open Societies can no longer provide meaning. That fear is misplaced. Liberal societies need not imitate sacred authority to inspire belonging, but they must stop outsourcing meaning to the very sources that threaten them. The Open Society will only endure if it is made into something people can believe in again - because it delivers not just rights but prosperity; not just institutions, but ideals worth committing to. The real test is not whether liberalism should resurrect the religious or nationalist certainties of the past, but whether it can rebuild the civic and cultural foundations that allow meaning and freedom to flourish together.

In other words, an Open Society should be based upon economically independent and small, local but fiscally-independent, anti-fragile communities with strongly enforced boundaries operating within a framework mediated by a strong National Constitutionally based civic religion.

Salvador Dali, "The Old Age of William Tell"

Neo-Liberalism: Last Men Smothering the World with Totalitarian and Oppressive Love?

...or Strong Men Just Keeping the Status Quo Ante Power and Wealth Retention Game going?

Matthew McManus,"Nietzsche's Critique of Liberalism"

Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving,—by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle… Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one’s cause, one’s self included. Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other instincts; for instance, over the instincts of “happiness.” The man who has won his freedom, and how much more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom, tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort which tea—grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats worship in their dreams. The free man is a warrior.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Many are the angry counter-cultural intellectuals who declare themselves a “destiny” but few are those who are much more than a 15-minute idiosyncrasy. Nietzsche is one of those very few who truly achieved the epochal significance he—half joking, half deadly serious—projected for himself in Ecce Homo. That Nietzsche slipped into madness and the not-so-tender care of his Nazi-sympathizing and anti-Semitic sister just as his influence was about to take off is one of the great tragedies in philosophy. One can only guess at the number of vulgar interpretations of his work which might have prevented.

Nietzsche’s reputation has gone through a remarkable roller coaster since he passed away in 1900. Hard-nosed analytical philosophers like Bertrand Russell took a dim view of Nietzsche’s contributions, finding them wildly declaratory and bombastic. In his History of Western Philosophy Russell summarized Nietzsche’s outlook with a line from King Lear: “I will do such things—What they are yet I know not——but they shall be The terror of the earth.” Nevertheless his reputation amongst the broader intelligentsia, from James Joyce to W. B. Yeats, grew rapidly. In the leadup and aftermath of the Second World War, the view of Nietzsche again soured as many took the Nazis at their word that he was a predecessor to their views. In his The Destruction of Reason the great Western Marxist Gyorgy Lukas centered Nietzsche as the great “irrationalist” of the 19th century who paved the way for Nazi hostility towards the “masses” and veneration of a new and violent aristocracy.

But the power of Nietzsche’s thinking couldn’t be denied, nor could his profound influence on diverse postwar figures like Jean Paul Sartre, Leo Strauss, Ayn Rand and countless others. This led to a reevaluation of Nietzsche’s value, spearheaded above all by the great Walter Kaufmann’s lucid and evocative translations of Nietzsche’s work which became standard across the Anglo world. In his seminal Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, Kaufmann read Nietzsche as precursor to then-ubiquitous existential individualism. Alienated, counter-cultural, and deep of course. But effectively apolitical, and certainly nothing as crude and vulgar as the Nazi portrait of Nietzsche as a barbarous proto-Fascist. At most he was a bohemian individualist; a kind of spiritual artist as beyond politics as he was good and evil.

The screw turned again in the 1960s as Nietzsche was discovered by a generation of New Left and post-structuralist thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. They embraced Nietzsche’s perspectivism, method of historical genealogy, and fascination with power in a number of highly creative ways. Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault both developed a popular “post-modern” view of Nietzsche as a philosopher who resisted normalization and celebrated a healthy distinctiveness against the pressures of discipline or control. Foucault even declared that he was “simply a Nietzschean” who developed Nietzsche’s views on morality and power to demonstrate that values asserted as universal and rational in fact rested on forces of disciplinary oppression.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the great left-liberal Richard Rorty internalized the perspectivist Nietzsche of “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense” where the latter described truth as a “moving army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.” Rorty hoped that the extension of this Nietzschean outlook would help gentle the fanaticism and fundamentalism of political conflict, especially that coming from the political right. As he put it in Philosophy and Social Hope Philosophy and Social Hope “rightist thinkers don’t think that it is enough just to prefer democratic societies. One also has to believe that they are Objectively Good, that the institutions of such societies are grounded in Rational First Principles…My own philosophical views—view I share with Nietzsche and Dewey—forbid me to say this kind of thing.”

It was this Nietzsche that I came of age reading and this Nietzsche that many conservatives attacked for his influence on the counter-cultural left. And to be clear, I think there is still considerable value in liberal and left readings of Nietzschean themes which repurpose his work for progressive ends. Nietzsche may have despised readers who acted like “plundering troops” who take away a few things, while distorting the “whole.” But I see no reason to adopt a tone of pious reverence towards an author who self-identified as the Anti-Christ and who himself liberally drew ideas from a wide array of disciplines and themes. However, while it may be permissible to appropriate Nietzsche for liberals and progressives we must be very clear that we are using weapons he intended be directed against us. This is because Nietzsche’s thought, regarded as a “whole” constitutes one of the most profound and sweeping rejections of egalitarian modernity ever seen.

Nietzsche and the contemporary radical right

In a cycle of eternal recurrence which might have amused him, we are now seeing another new interpretation of Nietzsche appear. A new interpretation which is in fact an old one, but filtered through the concerns of our cultural moment. This is Nietzsche the aristocratic radical and fanatical opponent of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. His presence has grown so ubiquitous that commentators are now regularly talking about the “Nietzschean” right and its influence on American politics. It can be juxtaposed against the more religious “post-liberal” right of figures like Patrick Deneen, or the “national conservatism” of Yoram Hazony as the third leg of the new three legged stool of the American right. In theory the overt religiosity and communitarian ethos shared by post-liberalism and national conservatism should inhibit a tight embrace of Nietzschean tropes. In practice things become more complicated.

In an amusing twist, the nominally Christian magazine First Things has published figures who offer discounted Nietzschean bombast like Lom3Z. In his essay, Lom3Z condemns the “Longhouse,” which encompasses “technocratic governance” but also “wokeness”and all that is “progressive” “liberal” and “secular.” This needs to be confronted since it “distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist.” This shows the extent to which the Nietzschean right has become a major cultural player.

The modern Nietzschean right was willed into being by proponents like Richard Spencer and the alt-right, who leaned heavily on the thinking of the “Conservative Revolution” in Weimar Germany. Nietzschean ideas have since gained traction through popularizations like Bronze Age Mindset, which includes truly endless whining about the influence of soft progressive “bugmen” and calls for a new aristocracy of coconut oil glazed musclemen. These ideas have gained considerable traction with young conservative radicals in search of a more muscular rejection of liberal “effeminacy” and its replacement with a butch ethos of unconstrained power. That many of the proponents of these views are terminally online nebbish intellectuals who’d struggle to cosplay as “super-duper” Conan the Barbarians is a major paradox of praxis the Nietzschean right has yet to resolve.

The American Nietzschean right once more combines Nietzsche with various forms of nationalism and crude racist biologism. This is the temptation generations of interpreters tried to ward off because of its transparent Nazi associations; usually by pointing to Nietzsche’s condemnations of anti-Semitism and his cosmopolitan insistence on being a “good European” in Beyond Good and Evil. But the allure of a more populist Nietzsche remains an enduring idol, and its not hard to see why. One of the major tropes of right-wing populism has been the struggle to extend notions of aristocracy and status downwards to build support for hierarchical policies amongst the lower orders who may feel invested in upending them. Not coincidentally Southern antebellum racists were particularly gifted at this, with James DeBow insisting that “the color of the white man is now, in the south, a title of nobility” and observing that poor whites in the North are “at the bottom of the social ladder, whilst [their] brother here has ascended several steps and can look down upon those who are beneath him, at an infinite remove.”

Nietzsche offers an aristocratic grammar and outlook that can be extended to the national level through proclamations that one belongs to a great people who have been humiliated and shamed by decadent and corrupting egalitarian enemies. Once these enemies are overcome by a rarefied elite of super-duper men, this Eminem blonde people can once more fulfill its grand destiny through palingenetic renewal. While technically at cross purposes with Nietzsche’s exclusion of all demotic politics, this offers a useful way to drum up popular support for the far right in the same way figures like DeBow hoped to induce poor whites to fight and eventually die for the slave system that ultimately benefited the masters above all else. Bronze Age Pervert even concedes the need for these kinds of Nietzschean compromises with Machiavelli. In Bronze Age Mindset, when he isn’t congratulating himself for coming up with coining some neologism as an insult, Pervy the Populist encourages his followers to “make alliance with people who otherwise wouldn’t be your friends. I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe here, but in the short run democracy—the will of the people—is on our side because the democracies have been hijacked by a stupid and corrupt elite.

The nations face extinction and an era of permanent civil war because this elite wants to pillage and pillage: and wants to flood them with the shit of the world. This is the immediate threat, and on this you can be allied with people who otherwise may not shoot for the same star you do. If Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan were in charge, you would get 99% of what you want. Therefore use them as models to solve the problems that face you, and don’t scare the peoples with crazy talk if you want to move things politically. Let the normies have their normal lives, and paint our enemies as the crazies…which they are…and as the corrupt vermin they are. If you haven’t compromised yourself go into political life maybe, and use Trump as a model for success.”

Nietzsche, the aristocratic radical

One of the major condemnations of the Nietzschean right is that they’ve failed to read the master correctly. “Drunk on bad readings” of Nietzsche as Vox’s Sean Illing put it. And in many cases that is true, as any careful reading of Nietzsche would encourage people with taste as tediously crass as the far right to refrain from depleting the culture through their “contributions.”

But this approach only goes so far. Focusing on the far right’s misreadings risks insulating Nietzsche from critique out of a desire to make him safe for liberals and the left. In his magisterial Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel Domenico Losurdo refers to this as the “hermeneutics of innocence” Its ironic that a thinker as obsessed with “hard” thoughts as Nietzsche— who read virtually every major figure in philosophy with suspicion—would be the beneficiary of such a velvet touch.

For the remainder of this essay I’ll discuss what I consider Nietzsche’s own political views, following Malcolm Bull’s correct observation in Anti-Nietzsche that “equality has had no fiercer critic than Nietzsche, whose ‘fundamental insight with respect to the genealogy of morals’ is that social inequality is the source of our value concepts, and the necessary condition of value itself. His rejection of equality is unequivocal.” So entranced with Nietzsche was this notion that he even pre-emptively rejected the popular Kaufmannesque take on his philosophy as individualist, declaring in The Will to Power that his “…philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd – but not reach out beyond it.” That is when he wasn’t declaring that the “great majority of men have no right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect among our race; I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are even unfit people.”

Nietzsche’s political thinking went through a number of evolutions which have kept scholars busy for years. His work as a whole is usually divided into an early period between 1871-1876 when Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy and other Wagner inflected works on culture and the Greeks. The most famous idea to arise during this time was Nietzsche’s famous contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to reality, with Nietzsche inveighing against the Enlightenment optimism of the former. Nietzsche also resists liberalism’s individualism and attempt to orient life around economic production and consumption, even finding transient charms in Prussian militarism and its war against French revolutionary demagoguery.

In An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker, Keith-Answell Pearson argues that in Nietzsche’s mid period between 1878-1882, he transitioned to being a kind of ultra-elitist champion of “the aims of the Enlightenment, and promoting the cause of a rationalist, critical theory.” Both Lukacs and Losurdo argue Nietzsche embraced a kind of aristocratic liberalism during the era—embracing the principles of free thought and expression amongst the elite, and even occasionally seeing a bright side of marginal democratization. But this was not to last, and Nietzsche came to feel nothing but contempt for both decadent liberals and soft conservatives who tried to rule the masses by placating their most venal desires. Instead, the confrontation with nihilism would require a new kind of politics which was violent, stimulating, and stimulated the strength of those worthy of being strong.

By the time of The Gay Science Nietzsche is already suggesting he’s onto something original and difficult to label, insisting that he wishes to ‘conserve’ nothing, neither do we want to return to any past periods, we are not by any means ‘liberal’; we do not work for ‘progress’; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the marketplace sing of the future: their song about ‘equal rights,’ ‘a free society,’ ‘no more masters and no more servants’ has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth…we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventure, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery—for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.”

It is in the works of Nietzsche’s maturity (1882—1889) that he developed the most refined view of his politics and his most creative set of ideas. This was undeniably a time of great energy and inspiration for Nietzsche, with Thus Spoke Zarathustra appearing in 1883 and the publication of no less than seven major works between 1886—1888 alone. Nietzsche often promised the publication of a grand systematic work, The Will to Power, that would bring all his major ideas together into a whole, but it never came to be before he descended into madness (the work published under that name was written by Nietzsche, but was a collection of statements largely organized by his sister).

Nevertheless there is a clear political philosophy in the mature Nietzsche which was new and deserves attention. Probably the most programmatic statement in Nietzsche’s oeuvre appears in the mature work Beyond Good and Evil, where he lays out his utopian vision for the ideal society.

Every elevation of the type ‘man,’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society—and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other. Without the pathos of distance such as develops from the incarnate differences of classes, from the ruling caste’s constant looking out and looking down on subjects and instruments and from its equally constant exercise of obedience and command, its holding down and holding at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have developed either…in short precisely the elevation of the type ‘man’, the continual ‘self-overcoming of man,’ to take a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.

As is often the case, the language purrs with suggestive connotation even where it is not subtle but brutal. In correspondence with Nietzsche, the Danish critic Georg Brandes described his thinking as a kind of “aristocratic radicalism,” and the former approved the view. This leads to the question of why this required a rejection of liberalism, socialism, and democracy, and what aristocratic radicalism would entail.

The pathos of distance

The poison of the doctrine ‘equal rights for all’—this has been more thoroughly sowed by Christianity than by anything else, from the most secret recesses of base instincts, Christianity has waged a war to the death against every feeling of reverence and distance between man and man, against, that is, the precondition of every elevation, every increase in culture—it has forged out of the ressentiment of the masses its chief weapon against us.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

Nietzsche is the greatest right wing thinker of all time because he had the audacity to go further and more boldly where other defenders of aristocracy and hierarchy still fear to tread. His originality comes from the sweep and depth of his critique of egalitarian modernity, which inverts the progressive liberal and socialist trajectory to characterize history as a long fall into nihilism.

There’s no doing full justice to the sweep of Nietzsche’s arguments in an article, let alone a full contrast with other thinkers (though I attempt this at book length in The Political Right and Equality). To put it simply, esteemed right wing thinkers from Robert Filmer through Joseph de Maistre shared many of Nietzsche’s reservations about the Enlightenment claim that all individuals possess a capacity for reason (even if this proposition was reserved at first for straight, male, white, propertied individuals), and were therefore capable of deliberating on and criticizing political authority. This in turn led to calls for political equality and participation, opening the door to a world of demanding citizens rather than complacent subjects.

The right’s most sparkling intellects reacted with a mixture of alarm and disdain. The connective tissue between them is a sense that the low “herd” might well triumph, bringing about a transformative change in society. But to avoid glamorizing this excessively, this transformative change was invariably deflated by the right. A world run by the herd would be one filled with endless talk and deliberation about banalities, lacking energy and drama. De Maistre characterized Enlightenment philosophy as a fundamentally “destructive” force since it opened authority to endless contestation, rather than treating it as a creed. From the beginning Burke and De Maistre contrasted what they saw as the staid values of the herd with the sublime “pleasing illusions” and emotions stirred by submission to resplendent aristocratic power. For them, the ascent of the herd guaranteed a world devoid of color and meaning, lacking the splendor and awe that could only come from projecting sublimity onto power to transform it into authority.

De Maistre even evoked proto-Nietzschean language about how it is “always an oracle, which founds cities; it is always an oracle, which announces the Divine protection, and successes of the heroic founder. Kings, especially, the chiefs of rising empires, are constantly designated, and, as it were, marked, by Heaven, in some extraordinary manner.” Or elsewhere claiming that “lawgivers, strictly speaking, are extraordinary men, belonging perhaps only to the ancient world and to the youth of nations. Providence has decreed the more rapid formation of a political constitution, there appears a man clothed with an indefinable power; he speaks, and he makes himself to be obeyed.” De Maistre also shared with Nietzsche a keen admiration for the animating excitement of violence, and how it imbued meaning to life through bringing individuals out of their mundane concerns with self-gratification and elevating their feelings to an existential pitch.

But conventional conservatives and reactionaries often ended their critiques of liberalism, socialism, and democracy at the Reformation. As Don Herzog points out in his seminal Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, the early right had a deep nostalgia for a flavor of Christianity (often assisted by Aristotelianism) that emphasized the hierarchical structure of society. Natural human hierarchies on earth were conceived as coextensive, and participating in, more sublime hierarchies set by God. An eminent example is the popular image of a “Great Chain of Being” running from God, through his angels, to kings and downwards. For many of them, it was the decline of religious dogmatism which led to the Age of Reason and then the endless Age of Revolution. The goal was to deny the universality or even use of reason next to “dogma” or “faith” or even just the use-value of tradition, and go back to the more meaning-saturated cosmos of the Medieval era.

Nietzsche’s brilliance came from entirely rejecting this line of argument after his middle period, often lampooning this form of nostalgic conservatism as comically ineffective. In a short section of Twilight of the Idols he “whispered to conservatives” that such “a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite—they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs.” Part of his revulsion was disturbingly anticipatory, as Nietzsche chastised conservative elites the same the far right today chastises RINOS: as lacking nerve and a willingness to truly use violence and domination to put the people back in their place.

In the same book Nietzsche sneers at conservative elites who think it is sensible to educate the people, even marginally, and iterates his familiar call for the reintroduction of slavery in German society. Domenico Losurdo stresses how these passages are directed against very conservative German imperial government, which Nietzsche chastizes for being too benevolent towards the workers movement. This ranged from providing various forms of education to introducing, mostly nominal and intentionally ineffective, ways for the masses to participate in politics. Nietzsche lamented the effect these concessions had on the lower orders in imperial Germany, moaning that they will only foster a sense of equality on the part of workers and make it impossible to produce “a modest and self-sufficient kind of human being, a type of Chinaman…” He goes on to groan that the “worker has been made liable for military service, he has been allowed to form unions and to vote: no wonder the worker already feels his existence to be a state of distress (expressed in moral terms as a state of injustice). But what does one want?—to ask it again. If one ills and end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.”

But the deeper basis for Nietzsche’s rejection of conservatism lies in its failure to recognize the real roots of the problem. That is that liberalism, socialism, and democracy aren’t breaks from the Christian tradition of yore. They are its secular continuation. People like Jordan Peterson can complain about declining Judeo-Christian values as much as they want: from Nietzsche’s standpoint it is the post-modern neo-Marxists (or meta-Marxists, or whatever Marxists they are this week) who are the real heirs to the Christian axiom that the wretched of the earth will have their day. This is also where Nietzsche’s intellectual and political radicalness lie, since he recognizes that any overturning of these decadent modern ideologies will also require the emphatic rejection of Christianity.

Nietzsche’s most sustained arguments for this position are made in The Genealogy of Morals and The Anti-Christ. In short, pre-Christian and especially Greek societies were characterized by an aristocratic and healthy “master morality” that divided the world into good and bad. Goodness was what beatified and strengthened the most rarefied persons and was associated with the proud nobility, and badness was aligned with slavish ugliness of the masses. Unable or unwilling to seek revenge against their masters in the physical world, the slave class directed their feelings of resentiment inwards until they became creative. The consequence was the development of a new morality which declared the values of the masters to in fact be not just bad but “evil” while the proto-egalitarian and populist values of the slave were “good.” This was for Nietzsche the basis of the Christian morality, which in turn aligned itself with Platonic emphases on the value of “truth” to further divinize their feelings of resentiment by presenting them as universal moral facts. But eventually this “will to truth” central to Christianity came to compromise the faith since Christianity “…as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality, in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish to: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth.”

This “inference against itself” brought about Christianity’s own will to truth brought about an end to Christian metaphysics. But not, according to Nietzsche, Christian morality. Instead of abandoning the resentiment—driven Christian belief in reason and the universal equality of all human beings, the most creative modern thinkers such as Kant found ways to secularize them. Instead of reason being the handmaiden of faith in a better future in the afterlife, the scientific method became a tool to project an endlessly improving future in the profane world. Instead of moral rules being ordained by God, they came from “pure practical reason” or the doctrine of “utility” or the “doctrine” of “equal rights for all.” These secularized philosophical ideas laid the intellectual foundations for liberalism, socialism and democracy and were so successful their genealogical origins in Christianity became swallowed up and even repudiated.

Given this it should come as no surprise that many, but by no means all, on the Christian and nationalist right are keen to reject Nietzsche. And not just because his work critiques their worldview. As mentioned, taking Nietzsche’s thinking seriously would lead to the conclusion that it’s actually the Biden—Sanders—Cortez types who are doing the Lord’s work, while their hoary defenses of traditional privilege and the law are a kind of insincere halfway point between true Christianity and antiquity. Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for all of this, insisting in The Anti-Christ that above all he hated the “rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge…. Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights…. What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.— The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry.” All these secular doctrines, from liberalism to socialism undermined the rabble’s instincts for submission and narrowed the “pathos of distance” between great and herd so necessary for the elevation of culture and resisting nihilism.

Resisting Nietzschean politics

Nietzschean aristocratic radicalism is a genuine threat to liberalism and all forms of progressivism because it offers those convinced of their own superiority a powerful and deep philosophy for them to dilute into cheap justifications for their own privilege. Nevertheless there are important ways that liberals can respond.

One of the first and most important is to turn the argument about Nietzschean resentiment on its head and point out the serious gap in his analysis. That is how the “masters” in any given society are very capable of their own forms of resentiment driven politics, down to even calling Trump the “only middle finger available” to stick it to liberalism. The allure of status and rank is in no small part its exclusionary qualities—the fact that one can enjoy status and rank while others can’t. Many forms of right wing politics are motivated by resentimment that that status and rank are being extended to others, even where that has no material impact on ones self. This contributes a lot to what Greg Sargent has rightly called the “MAGA Persecution Complex.” Many of the nativist forms of politics which lean on Nietzschean rhetoric are predicated on the idea that “our country” is being taken away or polluted by the presence of the unworthy, who dilute the esteem with which we can hold ourselves. This has deep roots in the political right in America, as when George Wallace threatened to close schools for all if they were desegregated. One can also see it in much of the vitriol directed at student debt forgiveness. While some of the conversation has centered on immediate economic burdens, much of the right’s rhetoric has taken the form of “if I didn’t get it, neither should they.” The MAGA persecution complex is difficult to understand without grasping this basis in resentiment.

But in the long run the more important task for liberals is to confront Nietzsche more directly and insist that equality and freedom for all are the long term answers to the threat of nihilism. Here we have a great deal to do. Liberal states are currently riven by deep inequalities which expose the stark contrast between high ideals and brutal realities. Neoliberal “possessive individualism” has contributed to a corrosive ethic where the poor are made to internalize a sense of blame for their own marginalization, and the rich come to think that they owe nothing to the people who do most of the working, sweating and dying in this country. This is an unsustainable situation and creates fertile ground for the siren’s call of those who insist the powerful are powerful because they truly are better. Or, in a more populist and resentful vein, that one belongs to a dispossessed elite whose coronation will come as soon as the decadent egalitarian bugmen living high in their cathedral are exterminated. For liberalism to become meaningful to all liberal states must show equal respect and concern to all. How to achieve that is the “heaviest burden” for those of us who believe in liberty, equality, and solidarity.