Tag: philosophy

A tale of two rhetorics

Some of the white nationalists on Twitter have been remarkably sensitive over my observation that #whitegenocide is ineffective rhetoric. To be fair, most of them haven’t read either me or Aristotle and quite clearly don’t understand the difference between dialectic and rhetoric.

But even someone who doesn’t should be able to grasp the fact that the term SJW has proven to be far more rhetorically effective than the “white genocide” meme, and it has done so in far less time.

That is what the empirical difference between effective rhetoric and ineffective rhetoric looks like. Interestingly enough, there are some indications that “cuckservative” may be similarly limited, but it is probably too soon to tell. However, the fact that “cuckservative” is already utilized half as often as “white genocide” despite being around for less than one year tends to indicate that it, too, is a more effective term.

Regardless, it is important to remember that clinging to suboptimal tactics is one of the most effective ways to ensure one fails to accomplish one’s strategic goals.

Why #whitegenocide doesn’t work

The objectives of the white nationalists behind the #whitegenocide meme are laudable. They seek to defend the right of people of European descent to live, to maintain European cultures, and to preserve European nations. They seek to demonstrate that diversity is intrinsically anti-European. These are all very good, desirable, and for those of us who value Western civilization, true and necessary goals. Western civilization is a European construct.

But the #whitegenocide meme simply does not achieve its purpose, it does not work, because it is a misguided attempt to use dialectic in the place of rhetoric. This is obvious, because those who use that particular meme are always – always – having to rationally explain and justify it. And it can be justified rationally, at least to those with a reasonable grasp of history and sufficiently long time preferences. But that doesn’t make it good rhetoric.

As those who have read SJWAL know, the fact that something can be rationally justified is not only an entirely different question than whether something is rhetorically effective, it is a very strong indicator that the meme in question is not rhetorically effective due to the fact that it is clearly not rhetoric at all. One does not persuade the emotions through the use of logic.

When people think of “genocide”, of what do they think? What is the one single word that immediately springs to mind when someone says “genocide” to you? It’s not “Holocaust”, it’s not “Jews”, it’s not “Rwanda”, it is “bodies”. We are all programmed to think of stacks of bodies, limp and scrawny and robbed of all dignity, when we hear the word “genocide”.

Well, where are the white bodies? They don’t exist. So, to make the connection between the term “genocide” and the serious problem of the 50-year assault on the various European nations and cultures requires an abstract leap, and what is worse, an abstract leap that ignores the instinctive emotional connection. So, #whitegenocide fails because it is not rhetoric at all, it is pure dialectic that predictably fails to move the emotions.

Contrast, in comparison, this ad for The Man in the High Castle which was quickly pulled because it was inadvertently serving as effective propaganda for the very ideas and peoples it was attempting to denigrate. It was run with the hashtag #whatifwelost.

What if we lost? That snapshot of a supposedly scary future looks like a considerable improvement on 21st century America, in which single white mothers raise irreligious, low-IQ, racially-mixed bastards in tenements without support from the children’s fathers, most people are up to their eyeballs in debt with less than $400 in savings, no one under the age of 40 can afford to buy a home, and it is illegal to fly the American flag lest it harm the tender sensibilities of young Aztec invaders.

Remember, the best rhetoric is based on truth. In this case, the effectiveness was rooted in the truths being communicated emotionally regardless of what the creator’s intentions were. With the rise of tribal politics, the Alt Right, and Trump shattering the Overton Window, something that looks very much like that, less the swastikas, will be a successful campaign ad within a decade.

As #GamerGate has demonstrated, the best memes are visual rather than verbal and they appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect. They should be positive rather than negative, radiating confidence and certainty rather than fear and doubt. Some of the best memes I’ve seen are those produced by female white nationalists, which tend to feature pretty blonde white women in traditional dresses with white children; women respond to them with either palpable longing or instinctive rage.

The exact terminology doesn’t matter. Both #GamerGate and #NotYourShield were successful hashtags. The Young Swedish Democrats slogan “Europe Belongs to Us” is remarkably stirring. So, I would suggest that white nationalists use hashtags such as #WhiteAmerica, #WhiteWest, and #Whatifwewon, combined with positive imagery, if they want to gain more traction among those who value Western civilization and find white people attractive. Another option would be #WAGA, or White America Great America, which would be an effective spinoff of the Trumpean #MAGA.

Now, I think self-identified white nationalists have a challenge in front of them, in that only in America does a singular “white nationalism” really mean anything; in Europe the various white nationalisms are entirely distinct, and indeed, this is part of the problem that the many American Indian nations failed to surmount. That is why they would do well to endorse all nationalisms from America to Zion; I am an avowed Red Nationalist myself, and I suspect even the most rabid white nationalist has no problem with sovereign Indian reservations.

It is hard, after all, to argue with “France for the French, Israel for the Jews, America for the Americans.” The globalists can only win – assuming that is even possible, which it probably isn’t – if the various nationalists fail to ally against them. That is why “nationalism” is such a scary word to them, whereas they love nothing better than to accuse people of “white nationalism” or “white supremacy”.

The dank memes are important too, of course, and that is where the “Immigration is Rape Culture” sort of attacks are effective. But they are most effective when they attack undesirable consequences rather than specific groups of people. In general, when it comes to rhetoric, it is best to be direct in defense, indirect in attack. Consider how #GamerGate seldom aimed memes at Gawker or Kotaku or Polygon, but at the lack of ethics in game journalism, which everyone knew applied to Gawker, Kotaku, and Polygon.

White people have the unalienable right to live in white societies if they so choose. That right is called free association, and diversity, multiculturalism, and immigration are all anti-Constitutional, anti-American attacks on that. As an American Indian, I hope enough of them are wise enough to exercise that right before they, too, are forced upon their own Trail of Tears amidst the shattered remnants of Western Civilization.

If you want to learn more about the difference between dialectic and rhetoric, and how to make effective use of the latter, I strongly recommend reading my book SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. It has an entire chapter devoted to the subject.

America is not an idea

And Americans are not proposition people:

The concept of American Exceptionalism is one that on its face would seem to be a healthy one, which is what makes it so pernicious. In practice, American Exceptionalism is a favourite idea of the Glenn Beck crowd. Often what this belief comes down to is that the rules that apply to every country on the planet don’t apply to America, because there’s a piece of paper with ink on it in Washington that claims so.

America isn’t bound by blood like every other nation on the planet. Ethnicity and race may matter everywhere from England to China, but not in America. America, you see, is an exception to these rules, because America was a country created by ideas put forward by the founders. America is a proposition nation, they will tell you. Ideas built America.

This seems to me to be quite the concept! I wonder what it would look like to see Liberty and Equality running around Boston in 1750. How would the Declaration of Independence have managed to push further and further westward, trekking through miles of dense forest, weathering the rain and the snow and the hail, civilizing what was in in effect barren wilderness? What a sight it would be to see ideas clearing forest, laying down railroads, and building canals! I can’t say I have ever seen anything so incredible, but perhaps I would if I took a trip to the propositional nation to the south of me.

Yet, somehow, I doubt it. What mainstream conservatives have largely forgotten is that ideas can shape societies and peoples, but they don’t create them.

It would have been vastly preferable if the Founding Fathers had stuck to the original term – the Rights of Englishmen – rather than trying to make them sound universal for the purposes of rhetoric.

Just to give one example, those who don’t believe in the existence of a Creator God cannot possibly appeal to unalienable rights that stem from Him.

Of enthymemes and false erudition

First, Philalethes observes that my use of rhetoric was, indeed, effective:

VD’s original use of “Aztec” in the WND article was effective rhetoric, the Slate author’s snarky reference to it was at least attempted rhetoric, and then VD’s present response was also rhetoric, by the clever tactic of twisting the poignard out of her hand and stabbing her back with it. For me, it worked quite well, whether or not it was based on an enthymeme (about which I knew nothing until tonight).

Which is the point: either rhetoric draws blood, or it does not. Maybe for Mr. Camestros it did not, but that’s all he can legitimately say about it – though his effort to destroy the rhetoric by dialectic would appear to show that he is at least aware that this device did and would draw blood in the minds of most readers. So in sum I must agree that all Mr. Camestros has accomplished here is to make a fool of himself with his attempt to speak magisterially from the high seat on a subject about which he obviously knows less than does the person at whom he is aiming his barb.

Second, I will explain how the now-banned Camestros Felapton either badly misrepresented, or simply failed to understand, Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, as well as the purpose of the latter. He’s rather like a tactician who doesn’t grasp strategy, as he seems to have a basic knowledge of the technical aspects without understanding their basic purpose or how they can be utilized:

I know what an enthymeme is, thank you, which is why I re-expressed your enthymeme as a formal syllogism with premises. I do so to highlight what your un-expressed major premise was. Put another way, what was the underlying assumption that you were appealing to in your rhetorical device.

That assumption appears to be this:
“People who are part-X are not people who are paranoid about X” Which is best described using the technical term ‘bollocks’.

If your response is an ‘effective’ one then it is because your audience is accepting that assumption as being correct.

An enthymeme has UNSTATED premises (or conclusion). The premises and/or
conclusion are suggested or implied (in the non-logical sense of
‘implied’). You seem to be thinking that ‘unstated’ means ‘logically do
not exist’. That is incorrect. With an enthymeme the reader is expected
to ‘fill in the gaps’. This is why I asked you what your premises were
so as to re-express your enthymeme as a formal syllogism.

This initially made me suspect that Felapton was simply being dishonest. The reason he wanted me to translate the rhetoric into dialectic, and complete the formal syllogism, was so he could criticize it from a logical perspective and thereby discredit it in an attempt to persuade others to believe Slate’s claim that I am paranoid about Aztecs. (Which was, in itself, merely another step towards his real purpose.) He was pushing me to state the unstated because an enthymeme does not only contain unstated premises, but those premises are often incorrect from the purely logical perspective. This is why Aristotle gave this type of syllogism a different name and devoted considerable effort to defining and explaining how it worked, because otherwise it would be nothing more than an incomplete syllogism.

Consider one example provided by Wikipedia:

“Candide is a typical French novel, therefore it is vulgar.”

In this case, the missing term of the syllogism is “French novels are vulgar” and might be an assumption held by an audience that would make sense of the enthymematic argument.

Now, obviously not all French novels are vulgar, so therefore, Felapton would argue that the syllogism fails logically and is incorrect. That is why he was trying to get me to state the unstated premise of my Aztec enthymeme, so that he could attack it dialectically. But as I pointed out, the syllogism was an enthymematic argument, not a logical argument, and therefore his attempt to logically disqualify it was totally irrelevant. As I have repeatedly pointed out in the book he has not read, there is zero information content in rhetoric; it is not designed to inform and persuade, but emotionally convict and persuade, because, as Aristotle correctly informs us, many people cannot be persuaded by information.

This is the point that Felapton fails to grasp, and his subsequent comment tends to indicate that it is not merely dishonesty on his part, but also a genuine failure to understand the distinction between rhetoric and dialectic that underlies his incorrect statements on the subject.

A great place for you to start to get a better understanding of the role of enthymeme in general and its relationship with logic would be Aristotle’s rhetoric itself. I think you perhaps have misunderstood the distinction as somehow rhetoric (in Aristotle’s sense) as being utterly divorced from logic. If so then the word you are looking for is not ‘rhetoric’ but ‘bullshit’. Substituting the word ‘bullshit’ for ‘rhetoric’ in your response, renders it a better description for what you seem to be trying to say.

However, Aristotle did not advance the notion of rhetoric as BS or sophistry but as an art of persuasion but persuasion towards TRUTH by rational means.

“It is clear, then, that rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is concerned with the modes of persuasion. Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.

The orator’s demonstration is an enthymeme, and this is, in general, the most effective of the modes of persuasion. The enthymeme is a sort of syllogism, and the consideration of syllogisms of all kinds, without distinction, is the business of dialectic, either of dialectic as a whole or of one of its branches. It follows plainly, therefore, that he who is best able to see how and from what elements a syllogism is produced will also be best skilled in the enthymeme, when he has further learnt what its subject-matter is and in what respects it differs from the syllogism of strict logic.”

What Felapton clearly fails to understand here is that the fact a highly skilled dialectician will also be skilled in the use of rhetoric only means that the best and most effective rhetoric is constructed in a similar manner and is in line with the truth. It absolutely does not mean that the use of enthymematic arguments that are not in line with the truth are not rhetoric, for the obvious reason that there would be no difference between a syllogism presented for dialectical purposes and an enthymeme presented for rhetorical purposes. But the two related concepts are intrinsically different and we know why. Consider Aristotle’s additional observations:

  • Persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have
    proved a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive
    arguments suitable to the case in question. 
  • The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such
    matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in
    the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated
    argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.
  • It is evident, therefore, that the propositions
    forming the basis of enthymemes, though some of them may be “necessary,” will
    most of them be only usually true.
  • We must be able to employ persuasion, just as strict reasoning can be employed, on opposite sides
    of a question, not in order that we may in practice employ it in both
    ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order
    that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man
    argues unfairly, we on our part may be able to confute him. No other of
    the arts draws opposite conclusions: dialectic and rhetoric alone do
    this. Both these arts draw opposite conclusions impartially.
    Nevertheless, the underlying facts do not lend themselves equally well
    to the contrary views. No; things that are true and things that are
    better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and
    easier to believe in.

In other words, Felapton has confused Aristotle’s admonition to use rhetoric in the service of the truth with Aristotle’s definitions of what rhetoric is as well as with his instructions on how to use rhetoric effectively. In fact, Aristotle makes it clear that both dialectic and rhetoric can be used impartially on either side of an argument, although it is much easier to identify the deceptive use of dialectic due to its reliance on complete syllogisms and strict logic than it is the deceptive use of rhetoric due to its incomplete structure and its reliance on apparent truths that are accepted by the audience.

What Felapton calls “bollocks” and “bullshit” is nothing more than what Aristotle calls “apparent truth”. But, as we have seen, rhetoric can rely upon these apparent truths just as readily as upon actual truths. And in this particular application, my rhetoric, even structurally reliant as it is upon apparent truth rather than actual truth, is more persuasive, and therefore more effective, than Slate’s rhetoric, in part for the obvious reason that it is absolutely true.

There is no room for false modesty

Not where genius is concerned:

Keyboardist Morris Hayes arrived at Paisley Park as a production assistant. Under Prince’s tutelage, he eventually became not just a member of the New Power Generation but the band’s most senior member.

“I was just one of those church cats that played music by ear, so at first it was very difficult for me to keep up. We wouldn’t just learn one song, we’d learn a string of songs, and when we’d come back the next day I’d forget some. I remember he pulled me to the side and said, ‘Are you a genius, Morris?’ I said no. ‘O.K., then write it down. I don’t write it down ‘cause I’m a genius. I’ve got a million of ‘em, and I can remember. But unless you’re a genius, write it down.’ He gave you that extreme focus, where you knew you had to really come with it.”

It’s fascinating that unlike so many gifted individuals, Prince was able to coach less talented and help them improve. I wonder if that might have had something to do with his early relationship with Andre Cymone, his friend from junior high and member of both Grand Central and The Revolution, of whom it was said that he could play everything Prince could play, but only if Prince showed him how to do it first. Speaking of which, this article about his performance at the 2004 ceremony honoring George Harrison tends to support that anecdote as well as put both both his performance and his demeanor in context.

I had no idea that Prince was going to be there. Steve Winwood said, “Hey, Prince is over there.” And I said, “I guess he’s playing with us?”

So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?”

Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!”

I was actually more surprised that Prince had ever heard anything played by a band called Average White Band than at the fact he would remember a riff from it and be able to play it from memory. But then, they were pretty funky and even I would recognize “Pick up the Pieces”, so I suppose that makes sense.

My favorite part of the Harrison tribute article is how the clueless lead guitarist kept playing the Clapton solos in rehearsal and Prince didn’t make a fuss. He just strummed along, waited for someone else tell the guy to back off, then waited until they were on stage to show him how it’s done. Prince being Prince, I strongly suspect it was his quiet annoyance at the guy’s earlier failure to know his place that drove the unusual nature of his performance that night, particularly because he told the producer to let the guy go ahead and play the middle solo.


“Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo.”

That wasn’t just genius being expressed on that stage, it was also the contempt of a genius for mere talent and skill. Hey, even geniuses sometimes require motivation.

Bud Grant, philosopher

I only met him once, but I still love the old man. He defines old school common sense and toughness:

The MMQB: If Marv Levy hadn’t lost four Super Bowls with the Bills, your team would’ve been the NFL benchmark for almost winning it all, over and over again. Do you feel more pride in having reached four Super Bowls, or ignominy for having lost them all?

Grant: We got paid. We won. We came back, and we won again and again. But you have to remember one thing: Football is entertainment; it’s not life or death. Once the game is over, you’re already talking about next year and the draft. It’s just entertainment. It’s like going to a play: When it’s over, you walk out the door and it’s over. There are no residuals to it. You’ve got to start all over again. If winning or losing is going to define your life, you’re on a rough road.

There you go. You cannot let winning or losing define your life, whether it is a paralyzing fear of failure or a psychotic need to win at everything. Do the best you can, train hard, and when you line up for the playing of the national anthem, you damned well stand up straight and in a straight line.

And after the game, whether you win or lose, you face your opponent and you shake his hand. If you can’t even do that, then what good are you?

A world of niches

Mike Cernovich explains the true meaning of “be yourself”:

People ask me why I do what I do on Twitter. The only reason my antics seem “off” is because you’re comparing me to others in my genre. You have a vision based on how I am supposed to act. That vision is based on how others act.

What good would it do me to act like everyone else?

But there is no one else like me online. I’m more than a troll. I combine a unique blend of mindset, masculinity and trolling with a nuanced discussion of sensitive issues.

If I played Mr. Reasonable, I’d be another fungible good. There are hundreds of other people saying the same stuff as everyone else. Why join a conversation only to be like everyone else?

If I played up the Mr. Self Help Guru game, I’d have to get Botox like Tony Robbins and pretend to like people in order to take their money. I’d rather call out assholes than kiss up to them for cash.

You gotta play your own game.

How can you find that game? As cliche as it sounds, you must first find yourself.

In like manner, I often have people telling me how much more effective I would be if I was more patient, less contemptuous, and played more nicely with others.

But that’s not who I am. Just as Mike is a cheerful brawler who gets in people’s faces, I am an arrogant, solitary creature of the night who silently broods about things and makes plans while other people are sleeping.

A study recently came out that said intelligent people are happier if they don’t spend too much time with their friends. I think that’s largely true. I am one of the happiest people I know, which is somewhat remarkable in light of how it’s hard not to see violence, bloodshed, conflict, and war on almost every horizon. But I’m happy nevertheless because I only spend time with my favorite people and otherwise doing exactly what I want to be doing… for the most part. I rather like the niche in which I have found myself; dark lording suits me.

That being said, paperwork is the bane of my existence. You have no idea how much paperwork is involved in running the Evil Legion of Evil.

And from the Christian perspective, how can we serve God if we are trying to be someone else, and play someone else’s role? Play your own game. Don’t try to play someone else’s, because it rings false, it won’t suit you, and you will not play it well.

The left-wing mind

An explanation of it from a red diaper baby now in recovery:

For the millions raised as leftists, it is not an ideology; it is a culture. Since childhood, they have lived and breathed it every day in the home. They know nothing else. Like any culture, it is a way of speaking, thinking and acting, with its own narratives and rituals. Narratives are held sacred, repeated, reinforced and, over time, added to. That which challenges sacred narratives, even reality itself, is met with confusion and hostility. As with any aggressive, intolerant culture, if you enter it, it enters you.

Contrary to opinion, leftism isn’t just about hate. Leftists are more complex than that. From my time as a red diaper leftist, I can tell you that a whole range of emotions are involved. Hate, anger, fear, bitterness, jealousy, envy, rage, greed, pride, smugness and paranoia (not technically an emotion, but it is widespread among leftists).

With such a parade of negative emotions, it is no surprise that so many leftists suffer from chronic depression, often from a young age. Even if they lose the anger, they still retain the attitude: that the government must fix everyone’s problems, regardless of cost and that there is an enormous right-wing conspiracy that is just around the corner.

The victim narrative of the Left is very infectious. You are always the victim and you are always owed something. The wealthy are always evil, while you are always good and wholesome. Converts are often more intense than those born into it. My father, raised a leftist, eventually mellowed and began to question some leftist beliefs. My mother, not raised a leftist, but having become one, never mellowed.

Leftism encourages and is driven by the most negative, damaging
emotions. It harnesses together childish emotions and paranoid thought
processes. Its narratives are a filter that reality has to try to
struggle through, often failing. The child-like thinking
solves all problems without pesky details and facts interfering, leading
to delusions of intellectual brilliance.

It’s an interesting glimpse into what, for me, is an entirely alien mindset. I find it easier to understand those from very foreign cultures, including the English, the Italians, and even the Japanese, than I do a left-wing 2.0 American. While I correctly noted their fixation on narratives and the childish nature of their magical thinking, I was always mystified by their delusions of intellectual brilliance.

I put it down to their education and credential fetishes, but the author makes clear their belief in their intelligence is actually due to the fact that they are so deluded, they believe they are actually producing the solution to all the various problems they encounter by virtue of repeating their magic mantra: more government spending.

Of course, their concept of government is childish too; it is essentially a magic combination of a 365-day Santa Claus with a friendly Sunday School god whose got the whole world in his hands.

This is useful, as it provides several clues for rhetorical triggers that should prove devastating. It also explains why it is not merely my high intelligence, but my willingness to openly flaunt it, that reliably enrages them. This confirms my belief that if you assume emotional projection when attacked by a rhetoric speaker, you’ll be given the key to dismantle the attacker’s psyche.

Do we need God?

It is not an exaggeration to say that of all the books that comprised the critical response to the initial onslaught of the New Atheism, the most effective was The Irrational Atheist. This was due to the fact that, unlike most of the other books on the subject, it directly addressed the various arguments presented by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others. Since then, the New Atheism has largely subsided in the public eye, and yet, if the relevant statistics are to be believed, Western society remains heavily influenced by the inept secular philosophy that provided the foundation for the New Atheist wave, secular humanism.

The first noteworthy thing about C.R. Hallpike’s book, Do We Need God to Be Good, is that the reader is nearly two-thirds the way through the book before he can reasonably ascertain which way the author would be predisposed to answering the titular question. Nevertheless, I must admit that Hallpike’s book is even more effective than TIA, because instead of refuting the atheist arguments used to attack religion, it targets many of the philosophical foundations upon which those arguments are dependent.

Hallpike is an English anthropologist, and if Wikipedia is to be trusted, apparently one of more than a little note. This is unexpectedly relevant to the topic, because, having lived with the primitive tribes of Papua New Guinea for years, Hallpike has amassed, and published, considerable first-hand evidence concerning the way in which pre-civilized societies are actually structured. And it is through the expertise he has acquired that he effortlessly demolishes a vast edifice of pseudo-scholarship that has been erected under the name of “evolutionary psychology”:

Normal science proceeds from the known to the unknown, but evolutionary psychology tries to do it the other way round…. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized, therefore, that our profound ignorance about early humans is quite incompatible with any informed discussion of possible adaptations. Ignoring these drastic limitations on our knowledge has meant that many so-called ‘adaptive explanations’ are merely pseudo-scientific ‘Just So Stories’, often made up without any anthropological knowledge, that have increasingly brought evolutionary psychology into disrepute.

Hallpike provides one devastating example, cited from the Proceedings of the Royal Society, in which it is claimed that humans lost their body hair and took to wearing clothes as the result of sexual preferences expressed over one million years ago. He then points out that while our ignorance of primitive sexual preferences is complete, “at least we know they could not possibly have had clothes, because these have only been around for a few thousand years.”

His critique of secular humanism is even more effective, as the sins of the evo-psych enthusiasts can be reasonably put down to a combination of observable ignorance with a predilection for writing fiction. It is one of the more powerful refutations – to say rebuttal is simply not strong enough – one is likely to encounter in print, as Hallpike not only highlights the philosophical competence of the secular humanists, but casts serious doubt upon their self-professed motivations as well.

Given the importance that Humanists ascribe to science, and the revolutionary claims of modern biology about the nature of Man, it is quite striking that the only interest they seem to have in biology is using it to attack religion, not to reflect on what it has to say about Man. Yet if one takes the claims of evolutionary biologists seriously, especially their denial of consciousness and free will, it is hard to see how the very idea of human agency and moral responsibility could survive at all. Although Humanists prefer to ignore these issues, in the words of Francis Crick, ‘tomorrow’s science is going to knock their culture right out from under them’, and they need to come to terms with the obvious incompatibility between their liberal Western values and a genuinely Darwinian view of Man.

It is remarkable that despite the fact that his critique of evolutionary psychology is well within his professional wheelhouse, Hallpike is at his most effective when criticizing secular humanism by its own professed standards. After tracing its intellectual history back to the 14th Century, Hallpike reviews the foundational work of two influential humanist philosophers, A.C. Grayling and Paul Kurtz, and points out the conclusively damning fact that none of the qualities of the ideal secular humanist nor the detailed program of what all proper secular humanists should believe have anything to do with the principles of science or secular humanism!

We are also given a detailed programme of what all rightthinking people should believe about human rights, sexual morality, abortion, euthanasia, parenting, education, privacy, crime and punishment, vegetarianism, animal rights, separation of church and state, and government. This seems a remarkably detailed set of conclusions to draw from the two simple premises of ‘no supernatural beings’, and ‘thinking for oneself’, but in fact none of it follows from these at all. What we are actually getting here is a highly ethnocentric summary of the fashionable opinions of Western secular liberals in the early twenty-first century, and who in Britain would read the Guardian.

Humanism is a prolonged glorification of Self, success, and the gratification in every possible way of ‘the fat, relentless ego’, which is why it has a particular loathing of religion. 

Having executed the sacred cow of secular humanism in a manner brutal enough to make a Chicago slaughterhouse butcher blanch, Hallpike proceeds to examine other modern belief-systems, including Objectivism, Behavioralism, and Collectivism before proceeding to directly address the question posed in the beginning of the book.

While his answer is a reasonable one, it is not exactly straightforward. His answer is ultimately yes, that Man needs God to be good because the moral significance of God is the provision of a worldview that provides men with objective value and moral unity as God’s children, elevates spiritual values over purely material ones, and justifies personal humility in the place of self-worship.

I highly recommend Do We Need God to Be Good to anyone who appreciated TIA. It’s intelligent, well-written, and highly-accessible; I would have loved to have published it. And I am very pleased to be able to say that Dr. Hallpike will be the guest at the next Open Brainstorm event, which will be Tuesday night at 8 PM Eastern. I will be sending out the initial invitations to Brainstorm members later today, and provide the registration link to everyone else tomorrow.

Brainstorm members, please note that you will be receiving a review copy of the ebook with your invitation to the event.

The price of truth

Rollo explains the price:

One tenet of that build-a-positive-fantasy-life mental model is the clichéd notion that you should surround yourself with winners and blow off the losers in your life. It’s a simple aphorism that rolls off the tongue easy; associate with winners and that winning will rub off on you. What they don’t tell you to do is how to cut out the unhappy and unlucky persons in your life who also happen to be your oldest friends or closest family members.

This is one of those painful truths that will set you free, but still stings like a bitch.

But eliminate them, or marginalize them you must. Most guys know this, or they come to know it as the first thing once they unplug. There’s a cost to Red Pill awareness.

That being said, the cost isn’t quite as great as most people fear. While it’s true that neither liars nor those comfortable being deceived like being around those determined to seek the truth, the fact is that it’s really not very enjoyable being around either sort.

The liars constantly engage in preemptive attacks to discredit you so that they’ll take less damage in the event you call them out for their incessant shenanigans, and the deceived react angrily every time you say anything that might threaten their cherished illusions.

For most men, finally walking away comes as a great relief.