I really enjoyed this podcast, thank you for reposting it.
"For, intellectual activity, according to me, is and must be, disinterested. The truth is a two-edged sword – and if one is not willing to be pierced by the sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.”-James Baldwin (borrowed from https://musaalgharbi.com/2022/07/01/clarence-thomas-white-liberals-abortion-racism/).
I am stunned by the lack of curiosity by our "intellectual" classes and the glut of garbage they churn out full of perpetual motivated reasoning and attempts to shove all of human existence into mono-causal narratives.
Most ideas are wrong, at least in the realm of "ideas" and abstractions. People hold axioms void of intellectual basis that endlessly contradict one another. To accept this precept requires an amount of humility, perhaps more than most have the capacity to stomach -- to admit that everything is trying to conform to a narrative which is at least partially if not entirely untrue means that many humans are in fact preposterous creatures chasing broken caricatures. "Belief" is obviously not belief (thank you Nietzsche), and if you can't see that, you are lost trying to tease out everything that humans do.
Another book recommended on this podcast (by Arnold Kling), however poorly named, puts forth the idea that a lot of the way humans think are innate or at least partially innate (https://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Worriers-Survival-Joyce-Benenson-ebook/dp/B00HO6WT3O). Thus, most humans are going to fail at stepping back from innate ways of thinking and admitting, "Oh, everything I think is wrong." Curtis Yarvin asks, then, if this is what humans are, where then do you swim? If "Democracy" isn't really democracy, "liberals" certainly aren't liberal (in the sense that one would apply salt liberally), and Ezra Klein has to go to the extent of calling many of his followers "small c conservatives" because no matter how many Black Lives Matter yard signs you put in front of your $2.5 million dollar house, when push comes to shove, you are mostly interested in preserving your real estate value. I'm not sure I know the answer to Yarvin's question, though I like the idea put forth in the podcast that it can start with small groups of people breaking through groupthink and creating new ways of being.
I really enjoyed this podcast, thank you for reposting it.
"For, intellectual activity, according to me, is and must be, disinterested. The truth is a two-edged sword – and if one is not willing to be pierced by the sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.”-James Baldwin (borrowed from https://musaalgharbi.com/2022/07/01/clarence-thomas-white-liberals-abortion-racism/).
I am stunned by the lack of curiosity by our "intellectual" classes and the glut of garbage they churn out full of perpetual motivated reasoning and attempts to shove all of human existence into mono-causal narratives.
Most ideas are wrong, at least in the realm of "ideas" and abstractions. People hold axioms void of intellectual basis that endlessly contradict one another. To accept this precept requires an amount of humility, perhaps more than most have the capacity to stomach -- to admit that everything is trying to conform to a narrative which is at least partially if not entirely untrue means that many humans are in fact preposterous creatures chasing broken caricatures. "Belief" is obviously not belief (thank you Nietzsche), and if you can't see that, you are lost trying to tease out everything that humans do.
Another book recommended on this podcast (by Arnold Kling), however poorly named, puts forth the idea that a lot of the way humans think are innate or at least partially innate (https://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Worriers-Survival-Joyce-Benenson-ebook/dp/B00HO6WT3O). Thus, most humans are going to fail at stepping back from innate ways of thinking and admitting, "Oh, everything I think is wrong." Curtis Yarvin asks, then, if this is what humans are, where then do you swim? If "Democracy" isn't really democracy, "liberals" certainly aren't liberal (in the sense that one would apply salt liberally), and Ezra Klein has to go to the extent of calling many of his followers "small c conservatives" because no matter how many Black Lives Matter yard signs you put in front of your $2.5 million dollar house, when push comes to shove, you are mostly interested in preserving your real estate value. I'm not sure I know the answer to Yarvin's question, though I like the idea put forth in the podcast that it can start with small groups of people breaking through groupthink and creating new ways of being.