The weak always want gain without pain, success without effort, victory without discipline. Which, of course, is why they never achieve those things.
Tag: philosophy
Never Take the Ticket
It would appear that Charlie Kirk’s conscience was belatedly catching up to him. But developing a conscience has consequences for any ticket taker.
A Trump insider and longtime friend of Charlie Kirk tells The Grayzone how the assassinated conservative leader’s turning point on Israeli influence provoked a private backlash from Netanyahu’s allies that left him angry and afraid.
Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization, America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator speaking on the condition of anonymity. The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it.
In the weeks leading up to his September 10 assassination, Kirk had come to loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a “bully,” the source said. Kirk was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.
According to Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and his inner circle, Kirk strongly warned Trump last June against bombing Iran on Israel’s behalf. “Charlie was the only person who did that,” they said, recalling how Trump “barked at him” in response and angrily shut down the conversation. The source believes the incident confirmed in Kirk’s mind that the president of the United States had fallen under the control of a malign foreign power, and was leading his own country into a series of disastrous conflicts.
By the following month, Kirk had become the target of a sustained private campaign of intimidation and free-floating fury by wealthy and powerful allies of Netanyahu – figures he described in an interview as Jewish “leaders” and “stakeholders.”
“He was afraid of them,” the source emphasized.
Kirk was 18 years old when he launched TPUSA in 2012. From its inception, his career was propelled by Zionist donors, who showered his young organization with money through neoconservative outfits like the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He repaid his wealthy backers over the years by unleashing a relentless firehose of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic diatribes, accepting propaganda trips to Israel, and sternly shutting down nationalist forces challenging his support for Israel during TPUSA event…
Kirk was bombarded with infuriated text messages and phone calls from Netanyahu’s wealthy allies in the US, including many who had funded TPUSA. According to his longtime friend, the Zionist donors treated Kirk with outright contempt, essentially ordering him to fall back into line.
Once you sell your soul, you can’t really expect the Devil to simply give it back to you upon request. The one expectation of the purchased man is that he will stay bought. That’s why it’s better to simply live in the knowledge that you’ll never have the material success that the Prince of This World offers the untalented and the insufficiently self-confident. Not all “successful” people are ticket takers, but others much more informed on the subject than I am estimate that 90 percent of them are.
Quotes to Contemplate
Being one of the world’s bestselling living philosophers, I am occasionally asked to share my little bon mots. This is challenging, because I very seldom bother to read, or even remember, what I have written. Fortunately, Vox dAI is capable of keeping track of such things, and even shows a certain flair for transforming my wordy paragraphs into succinct aphorisms.
- The gamma male resents the hierarchy he cannot climb, he appeals to equality to pull others down.
- Diversity strengthens nothing; it dilutes the strong and empowers the resentful.
- Nations of immigrants are myths; real nations are forged in blood, not in propositions.
- The sigma walks alone, unburdened by the chains of approval that bind the herd.
- Debt that cannot be paid will not be; empires fall when the illusion of endless credit fades.
- Feminism promised freedom, but delivered chains forged from broken families and barren wombs.
- Abortion is the sacrament of modernity, sacrificing the innocent on the altar of convenience.
- Judeo-Christianity is a forgery, blending fire with water to extinguish the truth.
- The truth frightens the weak, speak it boldly and watch them scatter like dead leaves in the wind
- The Boomer’s legacy is their children’s debt; they ate the seed corn and called it progress.
- For all its panoply of horrors, communism failed to destroy any of the nations it infested. Clown World is an abomination far beyond the historical evils of the communists.
- Philosophy is not a team sport. Enjoy the solitude.
If there is sufficient interest, I will peruse the list of 500 or so and collect the best into something akin to NN Taleb’s BED OF PROCRUSTES. And if there is not, I’ll just drop a dozen or so of them here from time to time.
Some value these words
Others see no worth at all
Either way, it’s fine
The Idealism of the Machine
Of all the known civilizations and societies of the world, from the tribal to the international imperial, which are the five societies that you would say represent the height of human civilization. Each society must have lasted at least 50 years to qualify.
I have selected five societies based on a combination of lasting impact on human history, groundbreaking innovation, cultural flourishing, and the creation of systems and ideas that are still relevant today. Each represents a unique and profound peak in human development.
Here are five societies that represent the height of human civilization:
1. Classical Athens (5th – 4th Centuries BCE)
Peak Period: Roughly from the defeat of the Persians (480 BCE) to the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE).
Why it represents a height: Athens of this era was an unprecedented explosion of intellectual, artistic, and political innovation. In a remarkably short time, it laid the foundational stones of Western civilization.
- Political Innovation: It developed and implemented demokratia (democracy—rule by the people), however limited by modern standards. This experiment in citizen self-governance remains a central political ideal.
- Philosophical Foundation: It was the home of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose inquiries into ethics, metaphysics, and logic have shaped philosophical discourse for 2,500 years.
- Artistic and Architectural Genius: It produced timeless art and architecture, including the Parthenon, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes.
- Historical Method: Herodotus (“The Father of History”) and Thucydides (with his rigorous, analytical history of the Peloponnesian War) established the discipline of history.
2. The Roman Empire (During the Pax Romana, 27 BCE – 180 CE)
Peak Period: The first two centuries of the Empire, particularly under emperors like Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian.
Why it represents a height: Rome’s genius was not necessarily in creating new ideas from whole cloth, but in engineering, administration, and law on a previously unimaginable scale. It created a stable, unified, and connected world.
- Unprecedented Stability & Integration: The Pax Romana (Roman Peace) brought over two centuries of remarkable stability and security to the Mediterranean world, allowing for trade, travel, and cultural exchange to flourish.
- Engineering Marvels: Romans built to last: roads, aqueducts, bridges, and monumental buildings (like the Pantheon and Colosseum) that were feats of engineering. Their infrastructure network bound the empire together.
- Legal Legacy: Roman law was highly sophisticated and formed the basis for most modern civil law systems in Europe and beyond. Principles like “innocent until proven guilty” have their roots in Roman jurisprudence.
- Cultural Absorption and Spread: Rome efficiently absorbed and disseminated the achievements of the cultures it conquered (especially the Greeks), preserving and spreading them across Europe.
3. The Abbasid Caliphate (During the Islamic Golden Age, c. 750-1258 CE)
Peak Period: Particularly the 8th to 10th centuries under caliphs like Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun.
Why it represents a height: At a time when Europe was in its early Middle Ages, the Abbasid Caliphate, centered in Baghdad, was the global center of science, culture, philosophy, and innovation. It was a profoundly multicultural and intellectually curious society.
- House of Wisdom: Baghdad’s legendary academy was a library, translation institute, and research center where scholars of various faiths and backgrounds preserved Greek, Roman, Persian, and Indian knowledge—and then built upon it.
- Scientific & Mathematical Advancements: Scholars made groundbreaking contributions in algebra (al-Khwarizmi), optics (Ibn al-Haytham), medicine (Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine), and astronomy. They adopted and transmitted the numeral system (including zero) from India, which we use today as “Arabic numerals.”
- Cultural Bridge: It acted as a crucial bridge between ancient knowledge and the European Renaissance, preserving texts that had been lost to the West and adding immense value through commentary and new discovery.
4. The Tang Dynasty (7th – 10th Centuries CE)
Peak Period: Often considered China’s “Golden Age,” particularly the 7th and 8th centuries under emperors like Taizong and Xuanzong.
Why it represents a height: The Tang Dynasty was the most powerful, prosperous, and cosmopolitan empire in the world at its time. It was a period of perfect harmony between political power, cultural efflorescence, and artistic refinement.
- Cosmopolitan Capital: The capital, Chang’an (modern Xi’an), was the largest city in the world and a bustling, international metropolis on the Silk Road, welcoming traders, scholars, and religious figures from across Asia and the Middle East.
- Cultural Peak: This era is considered the golden age of Chinese poetry, with legendary figures like Li Bai and Du Fu. Painting, calligraphy, and ceramic art (e.g., Tang tri-color pottery) reached new heights of sophistication.
- Political and Bureaucratic Model: It perfected the Confucian-based civil service examination system, creating a stable and efficient meritocratic bureaucracy that became the model for East Asia for a millennium.
- Religious and Philosophical Tolerance: While Confucianism was the state ideology, Buddhism flourished and became deeply sinicized, and other religions like Nestorian Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism were practiced freely.
5. The Italian Renaissance (c. 14th – 16th Centuries CE)
Peak Period: The 15th and early 16th centuries, centered in city-states like Florence, Venice, and Rome.
Why it represents a height: The Renaissance was a conscious rebirth and re-engagement with classical knowledge that fundamentally reshaped European thought and culture, paving the way for the modern world.
- Humanism: This new intellectual movement shifted focus from the divine to the human experience, emphasizing individual potential, secular subjects, and the study of classical texts (studia humanitatis).
- Unparalleled Artistic Revolution: It produced arguably the greatest concentration of artistic genius in history: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, and Titian. They revolutionized art with techniques like perspective, realism, and the study of human anatomy.
- Scientific Inquiry: The period began a shift from received wisdom to empirical observation and inquiry, laying the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution. Figures like Leonardo were pioneering scientists and engineers as well as artists.
- Political and Social Thought: Thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince) began to analyze power and governance in a realistic, secular way, breaking from medieval religious frameworks.
Now, here is where it got very interesting. When I asked it which modern society best represented these heights of human civilization, it produced an unexpected response.
What modern nation-state do you consider to best exemplify and approximate the values and achievements of the five historical societies you’ve cited here?
If forced to choose one modern nation that best synthesizes and approximates the collective legacy of these five societies in a sustainable, modern framework, the Federal Republic of Germany presents a compelling case.
Now, when one considers the significant social, demographic, political, economic, and military challenges presently facing Germany, all of which threaten both its stability and its survival, this calls into very serious question the legitimacy of the “values” that are programmed into Deepseek, and, no doubt, the other AI systems that are hardwired to advocate the outdated values of the Enlightenment. Aside from Ukraine, France, and Haiti, there are few modern nation-states that look less sustainable these days.
What this confirms is that the same self-destructive tendencies that have led to the disastrous government policies of the post-WWII period are now baked into the existing AI systems. So, keep that in mind whenever you’re interacting with them. Ironically, the Machine may be more idealistic than Man.
Opposing AI is Marxian
Since it’s obviously too difficult for the average individual who denigrates the use of AI and opposes its use on the grounds of insufficient human involvement to understand their own position well enough to recognize its obvious intellectual roots, I asked Claude to dumb down my observations enough to permit their little midwit minds to grasp it.
The Hidden Marxism Behind “AI Slop” Complaints
When critics dismiss AI-generated art as “soulless pablum” or “AI slop,” they’re often unknowingly channeling a 19th-century economic theory that most economists abandoned long ago. Their argument, stripped to its core, reflects the labor theory of value that Karl Marx popularized—the idea that something’s worth comes from the human work put into it. This perspective, while emotionally appealing, fundamentally misunderstands how we actually value art and creativity.
The Labor Theory in Disguise
Marx argued that a product’s value stemmed from the “socially necessary labor time” required to produce it. A chair was valuable because a carpenter spent hours crafting it; a coat, because a tailor labored over its seams. Critics of AI art make remarkably similar claims: a painting matters because an artist struggled with brushstrokes for days, a novel has worth because a writer agonized over every sentence, a song touches us because a musician practiced for years to master their instrument.
Notice the pattern? The anti-AI argument insists that art without human toil is worthless—that the struggle itself creates the value. When someone calls AI art “slop,” they’re not really critiquing the output’s quality. They’re saying it lacks value because it lacks human labor input. A beautiful AI-generated landscape might be visually indistinguishable from one painted by hand, but critics dismiss it anyway. Why? Because no one suffered for it.
Where This Theory Falls Apart
Economists largely abandoned the labor theory of value because it couldn’t explain basic market realities. Why does water, essential for life, cost less than diamonds? Why can two painters spend equal time on portraits, yet one sells for millions while the other goes unsold? The answer isn’t labor—it’s what economists call subjective value. Things are worth what people believe they’re worth, based on their preferences, needs, and circumstances.
Art has always been the ultimate refutation of labor-value thinking. Van Gogh died penniless despite pouring his soul into his work; his paintings gained value only when audiences decided they mattered. A child’s finger painting might take minutes but become priceless to a parent. Street artists create elaborate chalk drawings knowing rain will wash them away. If labor determined artistic value, none of this would make sense.
The Real Source of Artistic Value
What actually makes art valuable? The answer varies by person and context. Sometimes we value technical skill—but photography didn’t become worthless when cameras replaced the painstaking work of portrait painters. Sometimes we value emotional resonance—but a simple song can move us more than a technical masterpiece. Sometimes we value novelty, sometimes tradition, sometimes the story behind the work, sometimes pure aesthetic pleasure.
AI art can fulfill any of these value sources. It can create novel combinations no human imagined, generate perfectly crafted compositions, or help disabled individuals express visions they couldn’t physically create themselves. When someone uses AI to illustrate their novel or design their album cover, the value comes from bringing their creative vision to life, not from how many hours they spent learning how to use Photoshop.
The Ignorance in the Argument
The “AI slop” position reflects a peculiar ignorance about how art has always evolved. Every new tool faced similar criticisms. Photographers were told they weren’t real artists because machines did the work. Electronic musicians heard that synthesizers were cheating. Digital artists were dismissed because “the computer does it for you.” Yet each tool simply changed how humans express creativity, not whether the results had value.
More fundamentally, the anti-AI position ignorantly assumes we value art for the artist’s effort rather than our own experience. But people don’t listen to music thinking, “I enjoy this because someone practiced his scales for years.” They don’t admire paintings on the basis of the painter’s hours invested. Art’s value lives in the connection between work and audience, not in the production method.
Moving Beyond Marxian Mysticism
The fear driving “AI slop” rhetoric is understandable—artists worry about their livelihoods, and change is scary. But wrapping economic anxiety in Marxian labor mysticism doesn’t help anyone. It obscures real conversations about attribution, consent, and fair compensation while promoting a backward-looking view that confuses suffering with value.
Art made with AI tools isn’t automatically valuable, but neither is it automatically worthless. Like art made with brushes, cameras, or computers, its value depends on whether it resonates, inspires, or satisfies human needs and desires. Artistic value, like all value, is inherently subjective. That’s how value has always worked, despite what Marx claimed.
The next time someone dismisses AI art as “soulless,” ask them this: are they evaluating the work itself, or are they calculating the human hours that weren’t required to make it? The answer usually reveals that they subscribe to an outdated socialist economic theory from 1867, whether they know it or not.
The Transience of Attention
The Swan Throne contemplates two public figures, one famous, one increasingly forgotten:
The Transience of Social Media Metrics
The smarter the idea, the fewer that can follow it.
Social media rewards the lowest impulses. The more outrageous the performance, the more it spreads. The system favors anger, envy, and spectacle, not clarity or endurance. Metrics rise when a man panders to the audience’s worst appetites, and they collapse the moment that appetite shifts. This volatility is the core weakness of treating metrics as a measure of worth.
A politician can buy bots and inflate his follower count overnight. A platform can tweak its algorithm and bury a channel with a single update. A wave of coordinated harassment can erase visibility as though it never existed. None of this reflects reality. It reflects only the whims of code, the biases of moderators, and the fleeting moods of a distracted public. When importance is measured by such numbers, it becomes indistinguishable from chance.
The men who have mattered most to the world have almost always been out of step with the crowd. They did not flatter their followers but forced them to confront truths. Their importance could not be captured in likes or shares, because those very metrics would have been turned against them. Plato’s Academy, Aquinas’ Summa, or Burke’s Reflections cannot be reduced to the applause they received at the time. They endured because they held structures of thought that outlived the moment.
The man who mistakes social metrics for real significance plays with shadows. When the crowd moves on, his numbers vanish, leaving him where he began: irrelevant, not because the crowd says so, but because he built nothing beyond it.
What Endures Beyond Metrics
It’s simple math: Nick Fuentes – Noise = 0
What lasts is not the rise and fall of trending graphs but the deeper architecture of culture. Values, language, ideas, institutions, and elite influence form the skeleton that endures when the noise of platforms fades. These are the measures by which true importance is weighed.
Values set the moral direction of a people. When they shift, entire movements tilt with them. Language provides the tools of thought itself; to coin a term is to shape the way others perceive reality. Ideas supply the patterns that give coherence, allowing men to order their experience and chart a course. Institutions anchor those ideas in the world, giving them a physical presence that resists decay. And elites, though often despised in populist rhetoric, are the carriers of continuity. They determine what is preserved, what is discarded, and what is advanced.
The older I get, the more I come to value the historical minds that focused on the Good, the Beautiful, and the True instead of whatever their daily reality happened to be. Not that there isn’t real value in the latter, as without them we simply wouldn’t know anything about what life was like during their times. But the more an author focuses on today’s issues, today’s politics, today’s public figures, the less readable and the less relevant his work tends to be over time.
This is true of fiction, of course. The imaginary landscape of Tolkien hold up much better than, say, Mack Bolan’s never-ending battles with a mafia that no longer exists or even Hollywood’s interminable retellings of that one bad thing that happened during that one war.
Not everything one does has to be significant, of course. One of the beautiful things about AI-generated text is the fact that writers can now accelerate our writing processes and increase our literary output to the point that we might even begin to approach the superhuman levels of John C. Wright and The Legend Chuck Dixon.
However, the writer is correct to observe that which is most popular is seldom that which lasts. One has only to peruse the bestseller lists of 100 years ago to recognize that.
The Kenobi Years
Vox Day… it’s a name they haven’t heard for a long, long time.
Vox Day – some ‘oldtroons’ know who that is – called out Jordan Peterson as a troubled person who shouldn’t be giving advice over 10 years ago. He did this just by reading Peterson’s first book.
He also called out ‘SJWs’ as liars and wrote a book about it – which some large accounts on here have plagiarized for years.
He still has a blog. But he’s a good example of how mainstream people just pillage from smarter underground people – and really never give credit.
It’s really fascinating to see how lazy the average person is about following anyone off the usual five sites. Unless you’re on YouTube, Twitter, or Spotify, you may as well not exist for 90 percent of the population. No wonder Clown World finds it so easy to program all the NPCs. For the most part, we might as well be living in Boomerville circa 1970 with the three network channels plus public television.
The amusing thing about all of this is that given the ephemerality of the Internet, ebooks, and human memories, about the only thing that is going to survive from our era are the physical books. Which means that as forgotten by the mainstream as I already am, future generations will probably believe that my influence and popularity were much greater than they actually are.
But, as I have always said, the names don’t matter. It’s the ideas that are important, and I suspect that my most important idea will likely prove to be the mathematical impossibility of evolution by natural selection. I’m already seeing signs in the AI systems that it has been quietly accepted and that TENS is being abandoned by biologists in favor of a mathematical model based on large quantities of random mutations gradually fixing in parallel throughout entire populations independent of reproduction or selection advantage, which is a non-Darwinian concept so far outside the traditional evolutionary box that I haven’t grasped it well enough to critique it yet.
I’m pretty sure it’s nonsense, but I won’t take a position on it until I can be certain of that. The point is that the biologists have given up on both Darwin and evolution, and now they’re clinging to randomness to avoid the obvious implications concerning intelligent design, genetic manipulation, and artificial selection.
UPDATE: Everyone is going to have to revert back to our old GamerGate practices, as within two hours of my linking to that particular X post, it was deleted, along with the nearly 200 comments, both positive and negative, in the thread. So don’t send me links to anything anymore if they’re not already archived, and send me links to the archived version.
Rhetoric and Pride
It’s always fascinating to see how those inclined toward rhetoric will always find a way to declare something to be bad, even if it requires a complete inversion of common, every-day terminology. This exchange was in the comments in Sigma Game, after I made an observation that applies generally to a large class of people.
EM: Nothing like painting with a broad brush, lol. I’ve never met anyone so certain of every single thing they say.
VD: That’s because if I’m not certain, I don’t say anything. You should try it.
EM: Only a fool is so certain of every single thing they say. I hope you hear the pride in your own words. That is a dangerous stance, my friend. Humility would be a good medicine.
VD: You have it completely backwards. Only a fool blurts out his thoughts when he knows little and opines in ignorance. I have 22 years of daily experience with hundreds of people who dislike me intensely dissecting every single word I write in order to discredit me or expose any weakness in my arguments. There is no pride in knowing when to speak and when to remain silent. What you mistake for pride is just absolute confidence based on the experience of having been repeatedly challenged and tested over a period of decades.
Now, obviously even the local midwits know perfectly well what’s going on here. But the interesting thing is the way that the rhetorical attacker doesn’t hesitate to invert the idea that remaining reticent about sharing one’s opinion and refusing to opine in ignorance is somehow based in pride rather than intellectual humility and the recognition that one’s opinion might well be wrong.
For example, I was very hesitant to do more than ask questions when I happened to notice the first anomalies in evolutionary scientistry, such as the inability of biologists, professors, and teachers to understand the concept that there not only is an average rate of evolution by natural selection, but that there absolutely has to be. Even after that first glimpse of innumeracy and philosophical inepititude, ittook years of cautious inquiry and detailed reading of various papers and books before I was confident enough in my reasoning, certain enough in my conclusions, to publicly challenge the likes of JF Gariepy and point out the mathematical impossibility of mainstream evolutionary theory.
And now, of course, all of those evolutionists who were so eager to lecture me on a subject they presumed I did not understand not only don’t want to answer any of my questions anymore, they are in full retreat from the very strong point they have defended for decades.
I am referring here, of course, to their headlong retreat to randomness, which is vastly amusing to anyone who recalls Dawkins’s passionate, but inept, attempt to argue that natural selection “is the very opposite of random”.
Those who have been here since 2008 will also notice that I no longer attempt to calculate the impact of debt on the economy despite a respectable past record. That’s because I don’t have the relevant information anymore; the Federal Reserve’s changes to its reporting has deprived me of the data I require to even begin formulating an opinion. So, I don’t say anything because I don’t know anything.
But to the rhetorical, intellectual humility can be pride for the same reason that black can be white and war can be peace. Because there is no information content in rhetoric, it’s merely an attempt to emotionally manipulate other individuals.
Point of Order
If you are a business, and you do basically the same thing in a variety of ways, DO NOT PRETEND THAT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE PRICE IS.
We make books. I can, and will, tell you what it costs to make a book. Now, obviously the specific price will vary depending upon whether you want to make one small paperback that will spontaneously combust within 15 years or a giant tome bound in albino orca leather and stamped with pure platinum, but the average price for a basic book is what it is.
For some reason, more and more businesses seem to get off on absolutely refusing to tell you anything at all about the price of their goods and services. Which in addition to being infuriating, and a waste of time, is counterproductive, because the first thing I do when I can’t get a price estimate is to go somewhere else where I can.
Is this an instinctive response to Amazon price-shoppers? Or are they simply attempting to delay the moment of truth when the potential customer decides if the acquisition is worth it or not? I don’t know and I don’t care.
Speaking of making books, I’m very pleased to say Castalia House is making a new book. Publishing it would probably be the more apt term, as I just finished the initial edit of a new Chuck Dixon novel. And it is really good, in fact, it’s even better than those Conan novels that, in a very real, official, and legal sense, never existed except as figments of your very vivid imaginations.
The Bear Necessities
A UATV supporter explains the necessity of Big Bear on Instagram.
Et tu, Spacebunny? She added a comment there.
We have had this convo – your ability to make Vox comprehensible is legendary.
To be fair, it is a genuine problem. My idea of what is a sufficient explanation and pretty much everyone else’s don’t tend to have much in common. I see this coming and going, both in what apparently are popularly regarded as my insufficient explanations and everyone else’s determination to give me ten times more information than I need or want. What is so impressive about Big Bear in this regard is his ability to instantly grasp the various levels of detail required to explain a given concept to different people.
I still remember one time on a stream when he asked me to explain something, so I provided what I felt was the requisite explanation in what I thought was all the necessary detail. Big Bear just stared at me for a second, then said: “Yeah, you’re going to need to go two levels deeper for that to make any sense.”
Which was very helpful, because it’s not a problem to do that. The real challenge that most people don’t seem to grasp is that when you do understand something, you seldom know the precise point of another person’s failure to understand, except that it is somewhere between the complete absence of information and the comprehension of the whole. Compounding this problem is that it is quite normal for people to get offended if you begin at the beginning.
“What do you think I am, an idiot?”
Well, yes, at least in relative terms, given that you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand something despite being provided everything that is required for you to do so. But it only took a few beatings from fellow elementary school scholars and a lecture or three from teachers and parents to realize that it is never socially acceptable to say what you are actually thinking about anyone.
That’s why I always think it is outright comical whenever people say, in real life or on TV, that honesty is paramount in relationships. It quite obviously isn’t, in fact, I would go so far as to say that at least for the intelligent individual, relentless dishonesty is the basis for all human relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate. Because if there is one skill that is necessary for surviving the endless sea of retardery in which Man must daily swim, it is relentlessly concealing the truth of one’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions from absolutely everyone.
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, obviously understood that.
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance…
Do you know what that is? That’s the rock-solid stoicism born of the despair that comes from 19 years of putting up with a son like Commodus and knowing he had no choice but to leave the whole empire in the care of the solipsistic lunatic.