Tag: philosophy

Corception

Last night at the Voxiversity Q&A event, the discussion about a prospective Voxiversity on rhetoric and dialect revealed the need for a word to express the concept of something that is technically false but rhetorically true that tends to guide one towards the truth.

If you think about it, we use the term deception to indicate the opposite, when one expresses that which is technically true, but leads others into a false understanding. And to the extent we express the concept at all, we would probably resort to the oxymoronic and awkward construction “deceived into the truth.”

My first thought was to describe the concept as inceit, but the problem is that “inception” already has a fairly well-understood and unrelated meaning due to the popular movie. So, I landed upon the construction corceit, as it fits rather nicely with the etymology of the term “correct”.

1300-50; (v.) Middle English correcten (< Anglo-French correcter) < Latin corrēctus past participle of corrigere to make straight, equivalent to cor- cor- + reg- (stem of regere to direct ) + -tus past participle suffix; (adj.) (< French correct) < Latin, as above

The reason the term is needed is because none of the similar terms accurately describe the concept.

A correct statement is one free from error, mistakes, or faults. An accurate statement is one that shows careful conformity to fact, truth, or spirit. A precise statement shows scrupulously strict and detailed conformity to fact.

None of that is true in the case of what can be described as a corceptive statement or story, such as the parables told by Jesus Christ. That pointed to another possible approach to the concept with a term such as parabole, (which, interestingly enough, is a little closer to the concept in French than “parable” is in English) but again, “parabolic” has already been utilized for “having the form or outline of a parabola.”

Now, I am aware that many, if not most of you will completely fail to appreciate the point of this sort of thought exercise, but that’s fine. I happen to find it very useful to be able to identify and articulate specific concepts like this, even if it is only for my internal use. It helps me clarify my thoughts when I am contemplating questions like the morality of corceptive rhetoric vs deceptive dialectic. If it happens to be useful to anyone else, so much the better, but rest assured, I don’t expect anyone else to utilize my idiosyncratic constructions.

Of Left and Right

At its core, the left-right divide all comes down to the most basic principles.

Left = Plato. Anti-Christian. Anti-family. Imperialist.
Right = Aristotle. Christian. Pro-family. Nationalist.

This heuristic will allow you to quickly and easily categorize any ideology correctly and cut your way through even the most determined fog of nebulous redefinitions attempting to ideologically mischaracterize a person, a party, or a movement.

Anyone who is against Christianity is necessarily against the West, also known as Christendom. Remember that the concept of ideology is, in itself, an intrinsically Western concept.

UPDATE: based on my personal observations, you could reasonably add a fifth element to the heuristic.

Left = Redefinitions, complications, explanations, interpretations, penumbras, emanations, and appeals to authority, credentials, and the sacred spirit of Science.
Right = Truth

Who is the best dark lord?

Now, I may be biased, but I have long contended that dark lords don’t get a fair shake in literature. I mean, they are often portrayed as failures, but if they were historical figures, they would be legends who compare favorably to the likes of Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon.

So, who is your favorite dark lord from literature and why? The Black Rider? Arawn Death Lord? Sauron or Morgoth? The Warlock King or Torak the Half-Burned? The Night King or the White Witch? Or some other, less well-known dark lord.

Present company excluded, of course.

Never trust the moderates

They will sell out you and their previously professed principles in favor of their new friends on the other side in a heartbeat, as the True Finns learned the hard way.

The Finns Party, formerly called “True Finns”, rose from obscurity during the euro zone debt crisis with an anti-EU platform, complicating the bloc’s bailout talks with troubled states. It expanded into the second-biggest parliamentary party in 2015 and joined the government, but then saw its support drop due to compromises in the three-party coalition.

This June, the party picked a new hard-line leadership and got kicked out of the government, while more than half of its lawmakers left the party and formed a new group to keep their government seats.

Huhtasaari, 38, who was picked as deputy party leader in June, said voters were still confused after the split-up but that the party would eventually bounce back.

“The game is really brutal. The biggest parties want us to disappear from the political map. No one is in politics looking for friends.”

The Finns party ranks fifth in polls with a support of 9 percent, down from 17.7 percent in 2015 parliamentary election, while the new “Blue Reform” group, which has five ministers, is backed by only 1-2 percent.

This is why moderates can only be permitted in support positions and should never be allowed in positions of leadership, policy-making, or personnel. They love to talk about principles for the reason that they don’t actually have any, and use these nonexistent principles as an excuse to break promises and commit betrayals whenever it suits them.

It’s not necessary, and it’s not possible, to spurn them entirely. There are enough of them that they have to be accepted. And this is fine, this is not a problem, so long as they are not allowed into any positions of power or influence despite their best efforts.

That being said, it won’t be surprising if the True Finns end up outperforming their 2015 results, while their short-sighted sell-outs vanish from the political scene.

Mailvox: God and morality: the connection

Groggy doesn’t understand why the question of morality and the question of the existence of God are intrinsically related:

I never really understood why the question of whether morality was objective was tightly coupled to the existence of God.

For example Sam Harris says morality is objective, and it can be discovered and solved through science alone in The Moral Landscape.

It seems that science deals with the objective, hence science would be a good tool for dealing with morality, if morality were purely objective.

If the 10 commandments just come down from God and are dictated to us, without us having any say, then isn’t that subjective morality, because then morality is just whatever God says it is?

I think J. Peterson would say that God speaking in the 10 commandments is not a literal truth but a deep psychological truth (evolved, even), built into the human mind which needs to come out through religious expression, and is more akin to ‘objective’ morality, I suppose.

For example if God had commanded in the 10 commandments – Thou Shalt Murder, would it be right or wrong? If morality is objective, then murder would always be wrong regardless of what the 10 commandments say.

I just never really understood why “morality is objective” was associated with Christianity and “there is no objective morality” was associated with Atheism. I don’t see the logical connection.

If somebody could explain it I would be very grateful.

The intrinsic connection is because if there is, in fact, a Universal Moral Standard, (or to use the more common term, Universal Law), then logic dictates that there must be a Universal Lawgiver. This is why atheists are driven to deny objective and/or universal morality, due to the implication that if it exists, a Creator God exists too.

The fact that Sam Harris says morality can be discovered and solved through science alone is in itself evidence that it cannot be, because Sam Harris is an inept philosopher and his argument is both illogical and incorrect. I addressed this four years ago, both on this blog and in the appendix of the book On the Existence of Gods.

Unfortunately, Harris appears to have adopted Richard Dawkins’ favorite device of presenting a bait-and-switch definition in lieu of a logically substantive argument. He repeatedly utilizes the following technique:

1) Admittedly, X is not Y.
2) But can’t we say that X could be considered Z?
3) And Z is Y.
4) Therefore, X can be Y.

For example, in an attempt to get around Hume’s is/ought dichotomy, Harris readily admits that “good” in the sense of “morally correct” is not objectively definable and that what one individual perceives as good can differ substantially from that which another person declares to be “good.” So, he suggests the substitution of “well-being” for “good” because there are numerous measures of “well-being,” such as life expectancy, GDP per capita and daily caloric intake, that can be reduced to numbers and are therefore measurable. After all, everyone understands what it means to be in good health despite the fact that “health” is not perfectly defined in an objective and scientific manner. Right?

However, even if we set aside the obvious fact that the proposed measures of well-being are of dubious utility – life expectancy does not account for quality of life, GDP does not account for debt and more calories are not always desirable – the problem is that Harris simply ignores the way in which his case falls completely apart when it is answered in the negative. No, we cannot simply accept that “moral” can reasonably be considered “well-being” because it is not true to say that which is “of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong” is more than remotely synonymous with “that which fosters well-being in one or more human beings.”

A Creator God-defined morality can be described as arbitrary, but it cannot be described as subjective. If God had defined murder as good, then an act of murder would be good, in exactly the same way that if the NFL defines a pass that goes out of bounds incomplete, then the pass is incomplete even if the receiver clearly caught it. Groggy’s problem is that he is unconsciously assuming a deeper concept of good by which the objective standard itself is to be judged.

Morality is objective

Again and again, we see that the rationales and justifications offered by atheists for their disbelief simply don’t stand up to even cursory philosophical analysis. (This is not to say their disbelief is not genuine, merely that its cause is seldom rooted in the explanations provided.) While on the emotional side, atheism may be little more than social autism, on the intellectual side, it appears to be primarily a combination of historical and philosophical ignorance.

Consider the following exchange:

AB: some people, psychopaths especially have no capacity for moral reasoning and no moral agency.

VD: Of course they do, if you define morality correctly. The fact that psychopaths have no EMPATHY does not mean they have no moral agency, because morality does not depend upon empathy.

AB: I think understand what you are saying but I simply cannot grok the idea fully as I cannot see morality as objective.

This is little more than a failure to understand what morality is, because while the existence of God is nominally disputable, the objectivity of morality is not, and more importantly, cannot be disputed.

The definitions of morality refer us to the definition of moral, which is given a follows:

  1. of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong;
  2. expressing or conveying truths or counsel as to right conduct, as a speaker or a literary work.
  3. founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom.
  4. capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct: a moral being.
  5. conforming to the rules of right conduct

Now, if “the fundamental principles of right conduct” are not mere legalities, enactment, or custom, then they must be objective, for the obvious reason that if the standard for right conduct is subjective, then no such standard exists, not being a fundamental principle. Morality not only is not subjective, it cannot be subjective, because a subjective fundamental principle is both an oxymoron and an actual contradiction in terms.

A psychopath has both a capacity for moral reasoning and moral agency because he is capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct even if he does not feel any empathy for others. He can even conform to the Golden Rule; even a psychopath knows how he prefers to be treated himself.

AB’s fundamental mistake is that he confuses the concept of a personal ethos with morality. But a personal ethos is an ersatz morality and is no more a system of universally applicable rules than a preference for calling pass plays over running plays or playing man-to-man defense instead of zone are official NFL rules.

Not a good start

After reading Tom Wolfe’s unstinting praise of EO Wilson, I decided I need to read the man’s work. Who could fail to be interested after this sort of billing?

He could be stuck anywhere on God’s green earth and he would always be the smartest person in his class. That remained true after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in biology from the University of Alabama and became a doctoral candidate and then a teacher of biology at Harvard for the next half century. He remained the best in his class every inch of the way. Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson.

Fantastic. But as I am insufficiently learned to read his scientific work critically, I elected to begin with his philosophical work, specifically, The Meaning of Human Existence. And I was unexpectedly disappointed on only the second page. To say that it does not begin well for a man of supposedly superlative intelligence would be an understatement.

In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.

There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. During organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. This concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.

What? All right, hold on just one sociobiologically-constructed minute. No one, literally no one, ever uses the word “meaning” that way. Even less so can this usage be excused in the case of an author who is writing in the intrinsically philosophical context of attempting to explain the significance of Man’s existence. Let’s reference the dictionary.

MEANING, noun

  1. what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import
  2. the end, purpose, or significance of something

Hmmm. He has at least a superficial excuse. It appears that Wilson is playing a little fast-and-loose with the definition of “meaning” here. He is clearly using it in the sense of “what actually is”. That is (unexpectedly) fair enough, except for the fact that by selecting that specific meaning of the word,(1) he reduces both his statement and the thesis of his book to basic tautologies.

Consider the title: The Meaning of Human Existence. Now let’s incorporate this second, broader way the word meaning is used, according to Wilson: The Actual Is of Human Existence. What, one wonders, can we derive from Wilson’s bold statement that humans actually exist? Are we to assume it is a catalog of facts about humanity rather than a statement about the significance of humanity’s existence? It’s more akin to a bad comedy routine than a genuine philosophical statement.

“What do you mean by that?”
“What it is. What it actually is.”
“I know what you said. But what do you mean?“
“What I said. What else could I mean?”
“Don’t you mean what else could I actually is?”
“Don’t you?”

In fact, I even suspect Wilson of cherry-picking this definition in order to beg the question he appears to be feigning to propose given the fact that it does not appear in other dictionaries, such as the Oxford online dictionary.

MEANING, noun

  1. What is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.
  2. Implied or explicit significance.
  3. Important or worthwhile quality; purpose.

But the definition provided is even worse than the self-parody it appears to be. Remember, Wilson didn’t directly state that meaning is that which actually is, he declared the second way the word is used to be is that the accidents of history “are the source of meaning”. So, he’s actually using the word meaning in his own definition of the word meaning. This is either intellectual incompetence or intellectual shadiness, and while I cannot say which is the case yet, I am now on high alert to the probability of either… or both.

Given this shaky – or shady – foundation, I do not have very high hopes for the philosophy that Mr. Wilson has constructed upon it. I completely understand why some find my intellectual arrogance to be unseemly and offputting, but honestly, can you not in turn understand how I come by it, given how often this sort of thing happens?


(1) One can legitimately groan at that one. It does nicely underline my point, though.

40 principles at 40

Mike Cernovich hits a milestone and passes on what he has learned in the preceding 40 years:

Today I’ll be living a day previously unimaginable, because where I grew up, it wouldn’t have been possible to imagine such worlds exist. I’ve been from the poor house to the White House. Here is what I’ve learned along the way to help you dream and live big.

  1. Surrender feelings of self-importance. With apologies to Carlos Castaneda for the blatant ripoff, this is the most important lesson you will learn. It’s not about you. Get over yourself. Incidentally, it amazes me that people complain about their friends without thinking, “Hey, I’m the one who surrounded myself with these people.” It’s only about YOU when you can blame OTHER people for “mistreating” you. What a racket.
  2. View yourself as the most important person in the world. If you are not healthy, wealthy, and wise, how can you leave an impact on the world? If you’re mindset isn’t in order, how can you be a good parent, pastor, teacher, public servant, or even informed citizen. Make yourself great.
  3. Become comfortable with paradoxes. 20 year old men are chomping at the bit to correct the obvious contradiction between 1 and 2. Get used to holding simultaneously contradictory thoughts. For example, free will is a myth, and if you live as if you have free will, your life will improve. If you live as if free will is a myth, you’ll be miserable. This has been scientifically proven. But wait, if free will is a myth, how can you live as if you have free will? Exactly.
  4. Look for the sentiment expressed by a person rather than the literal truth. When someone says, “Live as if today is your last day,” they don’t mean you should go out and exact revenge on your enemies without fear of consequences, or spend all of your money, or do something reckless as if you’re Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. What they mean is to make every day count, because it might be your last day.
  5. You are the product of your habits and your friends and family. If you don’t like who you are, look inside for your habits, and outside at your family and friends. You may need to cut out some negative forces in your life.

Read the rest of them there. This, in my opinion, is probably the most important:

Think big, start small. How did I get to where I am today? I wrote terse posts on a WordPress dot com blog and trolled with some friends on Twitter. Get out there, make your voice heard, but don’t expect to take over the world in a day or even a year. A decade is more like it.

Remember this when you see how Alt★Hero plays out over the next 18 months. We started with a conversation between Cliff Cosmic and me, followed by a few sketches of him putting my ideas to paper. But we are thinking of disrupting and eventually replacing not one, not two, but three industry giants.

Also, Happy Birthday, Mike!

A continent, not a government

Rather a lot of this “conservative manifesto for Europe” not only sounds encouraging and inspirational, it sounds familiar:

1. Europe is our home.
Europe belongs to us, and we belong to Europe. These lands are our home; we have no other. The reasons we hold Europe dear exceed our ability to explain or justify our loyalty. It is a matter of shared histories, hopes and loves. It is a matter of accustomed ways, of moments of pathos and pain. It is a matter of inspiring experiences of reconciliation and the promise of a shared future. Ordinary landscapes and events are charged with special meaning—for us, but not for others. Home is a place where things are familiar, and where we are recognized, however far we have wandered. This is the real Europe, our precious and irreplaceable civilization.

2. A false Europe threatens us.
Europe, in all its richness and greatness, is threatened by a false understanding of itself. This false Europe imagines itself as a fulfilment of our civilization, but in truth it will confiscate our home. It appeals to exaggerations and distortions of Europe’s authentic virtues while remaining blind to its own vices. Complacently trading in one-sided caricatures of our history, this false Europe is invincibly prejudiced against the past. Its proponents are orphans by choice, and they presume that to be an orphan—to be homeless—is a noble achievement. In this way, the false Europe praises itself as the forerunner of a universal community that is neither universal nor a community.

3. The false Europe is utopian and tyrannical.
The patrons of the false Europe are bewitched by superstitions of inevitable progress. They believe that History is on their side, and this faith makes them haughty and disdainful, unable to acknowledge the defects in the post-national, post-cultural world they are constructing. Moreover, they are ignorant of the true sources of the humane decencies they themselves hold dear—as do we. They ignore, even repudiate the Christian roots of Europe. At the same time they take great care not to offend Muslims, who they imagine will cheerfully adopt their secular, multicultural outlook. Sunk in prejudice, superstition and ignorance, and blinded by vain, self-congratulating visions of a utopian future, the false Europe reflexively stifles dissent. This is done, of course, in the name of freedom and tolerance.

4. We must defend the real Europe.
We are reaching a dead-end. The greatest threat to the future of Europe is neither Russian adventurism nor Muslim immigration. The true Europe is at risk because of the suffocating grip that the false Europe has over our imaginations. Our nations and shared culture are being hollowed out by illusions and self-deceptions about what Europe is and should be. We pledge to resist this threat to our future. We will defend, sustain and champion the real Europe, the Europe to which we all in truth belong.

5. Solidarity and civic loyalty encourage active participation.
The true Europe expects and encourages active participation in the common project of political and cultural life. The European ideal is one of solidarity based on assent to a body of law that applies to all, but is limited in its demands. This assent has not always taken the form of representative democracy. But our traditions of civic loyalty reflect a fundamental assent to our political and cultural traditions, whatever their forms. In the past, Europeans fought to make our political systems more open to popular participation, and we are justly proud of this history. Even as they did so, sometimes in open rebellion, they warmly affirmed that, despite their injustices and failures, the traditions of the peoples of this continent are ours. Such dedication to reform makes Europe a place that seeks ever-greater justice. This spirit of progress is born out of our love for and loyalty to our homelands.

6. We are not passive subjects.
A European spirit of unity allows us to trust others in the public square, even when we are strangers. The public parks, central squares and broad boulevards of European towns and cities express the European political spirit: We share our common life and the res publica. We assume that it is our duty to take responsibility for the futures of our societies. We are not passive subjects under the domination of despotic powers, whether sacred or secular. And we are not prostrate before implacable historical forces. To be European is to possess political and historical agency. We are the authors of our shared destiny.

7. The nation-state is a hallmark of Europe.
The true Europe is a community of nations. We have our own languages, traditions and borders. Yet we have always recognized a kinship with one another, even when we have been at odds—or at war. This unity-in-diversity seems natural to us. Yet this is remarkable and precious, for it is neither natural nor inevitable. The most common political form of unity-in-diversity is empire, which European warrior kings tried to recreate in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. The allure of the imperial form endured, but the nation-state prevailed, the political form that joins peoplehood with sovereignty. The nation-state thereby became the hallmark of European civilization.

8. We do not back an imposed, enforced unity.
A national community takes pride in governing itself in its own way, often boasts of its great national achievements in the arts and sciences, and competes with other nations, sometimes on the battlefield. This has wounded Europe, sometimes gravely, but it has never compromised our cultural unity. In fact, the contrary has been the case. As the nation states of Europe became more established and distinct, a shared European identity became stronger. In the aftermath of the terrible bloodshed of the world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, we emerged with an even greater resolve to honor our shared heritage. This testifies to the depth and power of Europe as a civilization that is cosmopolitan in a proper sense. We do not seek the imposed, enforced unity of empire. Instead, European cosmopolitanism recognizes that patriotic love and civic loyalty open out to a wider world.

9. Christianity encouraged cultural unity.
The true Europe has been marked by Christianity. The universal spiritual empire of the Church brought cultural unity to Europe, but did so without political empire. This has allowed for particular civic loyalties to flourish within a shared European culture. The autonomy of what we call civil society became a characteristic feature of European life. Moreover, the Christian Gospel does not deliver a comprehensive divine law, and thus the diversity of the secular laws of the nations may be affirmed and honoured without threat to our European unity. It is no accident that the decline of Christian faith in Europe has been accompanied by renewed efforts to establish political unity—an empire of money and regulations, covered with sentiments of pseudo-religious universalism, that is being constructed by the European Union.

10. Christian roots nourish Europe.
The true Europe affirms the equal dignity of every individual, regardless of sex, rank or race. This also arises from our Christian roots. Our gentle virtues are of an unmistakably Christian heritage: fairness, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, peace-making, charity. Christianity revolutionized the relationship between men and women, valuing love and mutual fidelity in an unprecedented way. The bond of marriage allows both men and women to flourish in communion. Most of the sacrifices we make are for the sake of our spouses and children. This spirit of self-giving is yet another Christian contribution to the Europe we love.

The Alt-Right is inevitable. It doesn’t need leaders, dramas, or monkey-dancing for the media. It simply needs to stay focused relentlessly, and fearlessly, on expressing the truth. Globalism, multiculutralism, civic nationalism, and progressivism are rely upon the enforcement of lies. The truth will set us free.

A reader sends a not-unrelated quote from Toynbee:

“The moth’s self-inflicted doom is an apt simile for the nemesis that overtakes the barbarian invaders of more prosperous societies that lack the military strength to hold their aggressive barbarian neighbors at bay. The barbarian invaders’ greed is self-defeating. If the the intruders are not eventually exterminated by a counter-stroke, as the Gutaean conquerors of Sumer and Akkad were, they survive only to share in the impoverishment that they have inflicted on their victims.”

The problem, of course, is that even impoverishment by European standards is still better than living in non-European filth. And the European women are considerably more accessible, both with and without consent.

Mailvox: this is how you do it

Yesterday, I responded to an email from this gentleman which indicated that he did not understand how rhetoric worked. My response was not particularly gentle. This was his reaction:

Your email and blog post were humbling and appreciated. I read both of your SJW books last weekend after hearing about them on Instapundit. Your message and stand for Christianity inspired me to check out your blog and eventually contact you.

Clearly I’m misunderstanding one of your fundamental lessons on communicating with the rabid left. Also, another mistake I made was to assume that SJW was how the left describes itself which lead me down the path of “better” rhetoric.

On the tangential topic of the impact your books are making, I was also inspired to contact [someone currently under SJW attack.] I sent him a note of support and the link to SJW Always Lie. He was very appreciative and I’m hopeful your book will help him save his job.

The main point of this email is to thank you for taking the time to respond and continue to teach, especially when your “students” frustrate you. Thanks. What you are doing is so important. I appreciate it.

Some of you have asked about the difference between Delta and Gamma. Well, you’ve seen Gamma responses; this is not what those look like. This is how a competent individual accepts authoritative criticism and correction.

“Oh, did I get it wrong? All right. Let me try it again. Thanks.”

Notice the complete lack of defensiveness, the total unwillingness to rationalize or justify or explain away his previous mistake, and the complete absence of bitterness or unease at being told he was incorrect. That’s the difference between a Delta confidence and Gamma butthurt.

This is why most men like and respect Deltas, regardless of their own social rank. Deltas don’t create drama or cause trouble when they are accurately criticized, they just correct course and carry on.