The ‘intelligent’ disdain the stupid. This disdain is easily transmuted into hatred; and this hatred is easily directed toward a Final Solution. But while walking down the road to Hell, ‘the intelligent’ will whistle a peculiar song: they will sing that the stupid refuse to see what is right. That they were given every chance to see the error in their ways; and that things have only come to violence because of the obstinacy of these fools.
This is why the early Soviets bothered to erect a legal system even though ‘ten years in the gulag’ was a foregone conclusion in every single case. ‘We’re just so obviously correct, comrade, that only a criminal would be standing before us. Now sign this confession. Yes we know you didn’t write it, but it’s what you would have said if you’d known better. Sign these words because they must become your words.’
What’s peculiar about all this is that you can’t blame an idiot for being an idiot any more than you can blame a Nigerian for being black.
As far as I can tell, people still accept that some kids are born bright and others dim, that talents* are given at birth, and no amount of training can make you a foot taller or grant a knack for some art. Few such glaring facts have survived the modern guillotine, but this one stated alone doesn’t get you hauled into the courtyard yet. That other things so plainly obvious have been beheaded while this one has been permitted to keep its neck is a little foreboding.
The problem with this little factoid is: if a person is ‘born this way’ – born stupid – it is deeply unjust to condemn him for it. You cannot punish someone for something he did not do. To do so anyway is pure cruelty. You may recognize this logic as the key that really opened the Queer floodgates in the West: presenting homo-sexuality as innate made all moral condemnations of it moot.** Yet this same moral amnesty was not granted to people ‘too stupid to see the truth of our politics.’ It is still permissible to hate people for not comprehending what is beyond their comprehension. Why?
‘Because our politics are so correct, so painfully, obviously correct comrade, that even the dullest mind should be able to see so.’ Therefore anyone willfully resisting Progress and Science must be a danger to themselves and society, in which case they should be contained. Or they are inherently (genetically) evil, in which case they should be shot. That’s the defence they went with, anyway. This is an unfalsifiable premise: you cannot prove who is wrong if you proclaim all unbelievers ignorant from the get-go. That this makes it anti-scientific does not bother the We Fucking Love Science group one whit because at bottom it operates on Faith, not understanding. This is news to nobody; least of all to people who have a Religion of their own and recognize bad faith when they see it.
No one is surprised by now that these Po-Mo Puritans are able to deploy such sophistry both on others and themselves. Having fallen for their voodoo curse in my younger years, I can tell you how they believe this with such earnestness and sincerity. It is actually very simple: they have a piece and mistake it for the whole. The Truth, that is. That is why they are so dogged with it. They have found something True in a world thought meaningless. They are facing off against a void: it is life or death that they defend this piece of meaning they have found. And I mean ‘life or death’ quite literally; it is no secret many Leftists are suicidally depressed. (And you can’t tell me such ennui can’t be found among Our Kind either: eg. the conspiracy theorists who’ve gone off the deep end.)
Shelve your disgust with the term ‘Whiteness’ for a moment and instead just look in the direction it is pointing. The modern world is the brainchild of Europe and it is universally agreed that modernity is like acid to the soul. The attempts to usurp the throne by Catholicism – and the Protestants who purged themselves of protective Dogmas afterwards – paved the way for this state of affairs. The physical complexity the system has reached is hard for some ethnicities and demographics to cope with or obtain status in. And finally, it is destroying the world at a horrific rate. Destroying cultures, borders, peoples, environments etc. etc. etc.
Much like attacking ‘Jewishness’ ceases to be offensive when we see its qualms can all be better called Materialism, the screeds on ‘Whiteness’ may as well be erupting from our own mouths when we see the substance of it is better named Modernity. This is what I mean by having a piece of the truth and mistaking it for the whole (which no one ever wholly possesses.) They know ‘Whiteness’ is accurately describing something but not that the term itself is woefully myopic.
But I’ve gone a bit astray here. I said at the start that ‘the intelligent’ disdain the stupid. That was of course a feint. Only people who think they are intelligent – because they believe what ‘the smartest people’ believe – go on to disdain the unbelievers, whom they call stupid for not sharing in the faith of the smartest people. But as we already established, anyone with a whit of intelligence knows it is wrong to hate fools for being born foolish – and if an unbeliever is stupid, it is truly foolish to reason with him and then despise his lack of reason.
The people who disdain fools then are really just arrogant fools – otherwise called ‘Useful Idiots.’ Rather than being Humble and thus perhaps growing past their limitations, they’ve fallen for the magic spelling of demagogues who praise their believers; throwing Pride Parades to honour their arrogance and delegating entire History Months to their aggrandizement. You might even say their obsession with Progress is tied to their own futile lack of progress, and that their constant transgression of old norms is a desperate attempt to break out of stagnation. All of which is a result of their refusal to admit their true standing.
Many of these people may counter that they do not feel arrogant in the slightest and that they admit all their worst faults and subjectivities in pursuit of ‘living their truth.’ But if you suggest they are simply too stupid to tell fact from fiction – and that this is why reality appears ‘fluid and subjective’ to them – be prepared to have plates and cutlery thrown at you on the way out the door. (Well, to be fair, that is a very rude thing to tell someone.)
But alas, it is abundantly true and its evidence abounds all over. An enormous cohort of mankind – 40% at least – have no such faculty, and instead rely on a much simpler and ingenious workaround: they find someone worthy of Trust instead, and then just trust whatever they say.
This shortcut saves a lot of calories and lets a person devote their energies to some other vocation than Contemplation. It is much easier to love people who don’t think for themselves once you’ve grokked this – and your ego should deflate accordingly. It’s not like the brightest minds of the world aren’t also foisting off Thought in favour of Trust when it comes to matters they can’t comprehend or care about.
Nonetheless, the fool’s trust has been misplaced. How?
In a normal world, finding someone at least half deserving of your faith and trust would not be hard at all. I posit that this was one of the major and most important functions of Monasteries in the past. The monastics forsook wealth, status, sex, pleasure, progeny – anything at all that might motivate a person to lie – and then told whomever asked them for advice to take it with a grain of salt.
To put it mildly, this is not the case at all with our modern truth-tellers: the academics and scientists. High status! Fat pensions! Research peons! Particle colliders! Political favours! And? Luxurious living in the nicest neighborhoods to boot. These men and women have every possible motivation tempting them to lie to Joe Public or turn a blind eye. Even the monks that preceded the academics sinned often.
Moreover, the modern clergy have motive to crystallize their beliefs into dogma – lest someone knock them down from their perch with some new attractive theory or contradictory data. Is it any wonder morals were made so conveniently weak and ‘subjective’ during the academic’s reign? “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the results.” The results are in: the Brahmin have been horribly corrupted.
This is why Moldbug’s coining of the information institutions as ‘The Cathedral’ is so apt – since it behooves these irreligious clergy to tell people what is true and worthy of belief as determined by Science. But while the Church could be shamed by its more pious adherents, there is no such check or balance in the modern system – there is too much to be gained by playing the game.
Everyone understands pain, so that is how the old system got the truth out to the dullest of dullards – by willingly subjecting itself to pain. I mean, who sounds more committed to a cause? The guy who sets a building on fire, or the guy who sets himself on fire? The Tibetans must have something worth grieving if they’re going that far, don’t you think?
The simple man of the past could contrast the happy hardship of the loving monks with his own life and cotton that there must be something to God and whatever else the monks prattle about. How else could they live in such physical severity and yet clearly be more satisfied with life than he? “Not only are they cut off from all gain, the monastery is even self-sufficient. They need nothing from me, so why lie to me?” Try sticking that image next to today’s university. Always ‘underfunded’ despite hoovering massive loans and charging foreigners triple. Is it any wonder the professors disdain their students?
*Talanton is Old Greek for a weight of coinage. Thus ‘Talent’ is called such because it’s how much God invested in you. “He is a man of many talents.” Isn’t etymology fun? Just remember that ‘to whom much is given, much is expected.’
**And indeed, I believe it is – partially – innate; but so is a predilection for colon cancer.