For the sake of
civilization
(a Letter to The European Parliament)
For the sake of civilization
By Jean-François Maquiné
1 - Why did I write this letter?
When the civilized part in us rebels
The 15 December 2017, a French-speaking Canadian YouTuber published a video in which an audio recording of another and well known YouTuber made racist and genocidal statements against the French:
In a nutshell, a left-leaning German YouTuber fighting the alt-right against race, made a racial and genocidal statement, nostalgic about the final solution designed by the Nazi. There are so many things wrong with his behavior that nobody would have thought it could happen, but it did happen. You may think he is an isolated case? He's not, and we have taken the bad habit to blind ourselves in order to precisely doubt the seriousness of such a situation in our society. You may advocate that if it was that serious people will go after him. No, they don't because they live in fear of potential retaliation by these people and their friends. Even if they are ready to do something they don't know what to do (Knowledge), I mean something that will make a difference. They don't know how to do it (tools), and they are only a few (support) - Annex A for more context information about the German YouTuber and the incident.
Duty toward the survivors of the camps
Behind the words, there are several serious political, educational, social, and moral issues that could put us all in trouble. If I, as a regular person, have noticed the problem, many others have too, but we were and still are very few to stand against the words which have been spoken. Why take a stand? Why take the risk to be in the spotlight? The message of the survivors of the concentration, extermination camps, and Gulags is clear: say something before it's too late. By writing that letter I'm doing my duty and I believe that the survivors would back up my initiative.
The issues I present to you rise one critical question: Have we missed spots or let places in the dark that have grown today so big, that the very idea of genocide, is again a question we have to deal with, in our occidental world? If so, have we enough courage, will, and the right intellectual and moral tools to face it? In other words, it's not only a question to have a discussion and take action on that matter, but our ability to open that discussion. If we can't, there is no doubt that in the future, groups will be tempted to apply genocide, whatever their political roots. No matter the form it takes, we can't accept it because it ripped us from our humanity.
I will have to dive into the darkness of our history, but also into the mind of those who believe, that the way of our civilization is the power struggles, the sufferings, the killings, and the genocides by being convinced of the absolute necessity of being ruthless, use violence, lies, and deceit. No wonder nobody wants the job, and the responsibility that follows, or is that duty? There is a difference between duties and responsibilities. Duties are what the community asks you to do and responsibilities are what you decide to do. I have decided to take my responsibilities to defend the French people, and beyond a nation, our civilization which is guided by the Greek civilization, enlightenment (note 1), Christianity, and my duties toward the survivors and our ancestors.
Note 1: The definition of enlightenment has changed over time. For example, in the 18th century, they believed in the blank slate. We know today that it's a faulty concept, but we know why they use it and how the definition of enlightenment evolved. Which definition is the right one, at least for now? Amongst all the definitions one element seems to be persistent, the belief that there are truths in this world and that we have the ability to get them. I will add a second element which is the belief that the future of society is to put the individual at the center of the society project (I discuss this in the letter).
I owe a great debt to many authors and scholars, but three of them have a special place: Karl Popper, F.A Hayek, and Ayn Rand. They saw that our actual problem is one problem and that it is not political. It is to define what it means to be human, primitive or civilized, emotion or reason, collectivist or individual, social engineering or human nature and it is the battle of our times (note). All three have experienced what collectivism is, the Nazi regime for Popper and Hayek, the communist regime for Rand. There is another author who deserved to have a special place, Socrates. I have discovered that most of what we know about him is due to Plato and that he has betrayed the thinking of his teacher, Socrates, on purpose. This betrayal is hidden because most of our elites follow Plato's political teachings, which Socrates often opposed. To hide the betrayal is to hide Socrates' superior view on many topics, and in particular, on Plato's ideal city which is totalitarian, class and race oriented, and a return to the primitive tribe in its organization.
Note: The reasons why those three authors are important regarding the war for civilization in which we are all in now, are not the same as why they are known by the public. Karl Popper is known for his falsification method, but I use the explanatory model he developed in his book "The open society and its Enemies". The human civilization is learning to move from the primitive tribe organization and mentality to the civilized tribe. F. A Hayek is known for his opposition to the economic socialist model which was defended by Keynes, but I used him as having provided complements to the explanatory model but also the first step to the autonomous individual which is based on Complex Dynamic System upon which economics is based. Ayn Rand is known to have created a philosophy called positivism, but I used her for her deep insights into the primitive minds, what it means to be primitive, and their rejection of reason and civilization.
I will now add a few names amongst an important list who have opposed the orthodoxy, even if it was not their intention they knew about the risk, and by doing so they have proven that they value knowledge beyond their own belief and that it has to be pass on, no matter what. Their courage and their sense of duty toward knowledge are an example for all other academics and must be praised. As difficult as it is to see those calm, articulate, and extremely well-educated people as warriors of knowledge, that's exactly what they are. Roger Scruton for his analysis of the new left pointing out that they are not the bearers of new ideas but a fraud, for his defense of the spirit of conservatism as a stabilizing force and not a rejection of changes (note: However conservatism cannot be a political project of its own because it is more concerned by the past with no specific plan for the future. Again the enemies of civilization conservatism do not provide the necessary tools to the people to fight back), and his call for beauty in human activities, which the collectivists are unable to produce because of their mindset and he was on those battlefields for the last 50 years. Charles Murray for showing that social sciences need to accept the theory of evolution and the genetic factor. More than to accept that we have differences at birth it is to accept the cause and the science that goes with it so that we can provide efficient and humanist enhancement to our society organization. Stephen Hicks for going on the battlefield to face the post-modernists and to show their link to collectivism and the monsters that they are. He shows something important that the rise of a movement like Nazism had more to do with a philosophical trend that started long before Hitler was known to the German. This is confirmed by Julien Benda and before him the role of Rousseau's philosophy for the French evolution. He reminds us of what a philosopher should be and why Socrates took hemlock. Philosophy is not about to bewitch the readers but to repeal darkness and develop human civilization. Steven Pinker for speaking about the modern denial of human nature embodied in three main ideologies and philosophical movements - the blank slate, the ghost in the machine, and the Noble Savage - which are at the root thinking of all anti-civilization, anti-human, and collectivist movements. To synthesize and render public that information was extremely important because a majority of people including academics believe in those concepts and collectivists feed on that belief.
To finish we owe already a great debt to Jordan Peterson, his indefectible opposition to collectivism and post-modernism is an example to us all, but he also gives us tools. For one the importance of the symbolic to understand ourselves and what our ancestors pass on to us which is mostly integrated into stories. The biggest story being the bible. His research on the symbolic 'the map of the meanings' which he used and extended for the interpretation of the bible is unprecedented and a revelation for the new generations. His encouragement to men and his plead to ask them to take responsibilities, has already enhanced the lives of millions around the world. He is a complex person, which is a way to say that he has contradictions, despites all critics he wants the good for people so badly so truly that he represents a force of nature, the figure of a hero that inspires people to become what he precisely calls for, resilient, responsible and autonomous individuals that have a project, want to do the good around them, true to themselves and the world and move on in their life with dignity.
Learning and thinking to build one's own path
Am I supporting all the works and opinions of those important thinkers? No, and the chapter 'The fallen Heroes' will explain that I'm less naive and more cautious. I oppose the support of Dewey by Hicks in education because he followed the romantics' ideas, and the Noble savage ideology. I'm very concerned about Peterson for his lack of interest in the origin of collectivism from a philosophical and evolutionist point of view (Popper, Pinker). He quotes almost exclusively irrational thinkers like Nietzsche and Foucault. I have a portrait of René Descartes on my desk and yet he is the father of dualism or the ghost in the machine which is used by the collectivists to help to justify their cause. We have learned a few things since the 17th century, though. Thomas Sowell is an extraordinary economist and a clear rational mind, but his position on intellectual biological characteristics does not follow evolutionary thesis and his view on that matter is used by the collectivists to oppose those who fight them. In that regard, he finds himself in opposition with Murray and pinker while usually, they agree. So no, not everything is that simple.
"Nécessité fais loi", say the French, which can be translated by "necessity acts like a law". Because of the seriousness of our social and political situation I have decided to publish the letter as it stands, to allow me to start another project that could have a direct positive impact on people's lives. The consequence is that nobody was involved in the reading of the document and therefore I have no feedback (note). To my sorry English, you can add incoherencies, inconsistencies, and conflicts in numerous statements I made and the ideas I presented (people who have written a book, know that it is more common than what someone would acknowledge, but they have an editor).
Why then do I publish the letter? I believe that all the issues of all the ideas presented can be fixed without damaging the main message. Now if you think that the letter deserves to be enhanced you're welcome to give a hand. Nonetheless, I was facing a dilemma. Can I publish a work that doesn't live up entirely to the academic level without tarnishing its message? Life has taught me a lesson - when people of goodwill face a topic of such importance, they don't hesitate to raise their tolerance, to see beyond the surface and the forms. They will focus on the ideas and connections between ideas I made, for the sake to enrich the discussion and the future of our civilization. I've crossed the road of those people, but are they still in number? Nowadays, anger is such a feeling of sweet sorrow that it has become the de facto stance when facing our civilization issues instead of the pleasure to overcome the hardship of understanding and solving them together.
Note: One might describe my situation as isolated, but that's the price to pay when you live in France and you choose the English language and culture to understand the world because that culture has evolved while France is in an idle state since its 18th Revolution. Not to mention to put Rousseau, Lamarck, Foucault, Lacan, Sarthe on the bad guys' side. I have no doubts that most French intellectuals will call for the guillotine.
The nostalgia of a left-leaning German YouTuber for the Nazi era makes him see the French as a race, and that they should have been exterminated to the last one. Strictly speaking, it's not what race is about (French is not a race), but from his perspective, he did not misuse the word, not really, he extended its definition. In fact, using the word race is widely spread around the world to express group differences. Our tendency to think in terms of groups comes from a very old mechanism called tribalism, and I treat this important question separately in an addendum. However, the group differences we are dealing with here are linked to behavioral differences and explained by differences in culture. The tribalism that we face is one that rejects implicitly the evolution of life from a Darwinian and genes perspective. This is our first encounter with social engineering as the explanation of what makes a society exist, its purpose, and its will to live.
Collectivism vs individualism: tribalism in modern times
Tribalism is often opposed to individualism (note 1) and is associated with a negative meaning. At the same time, tribalism is an innate mechanism, a product of our evolution. Not only do we live in tribes, but we couldn't survive without being part of one. Furthermore, what is innate is not bad or good, it just is. Some want to get rid of tribalism or at least dissociate themselves from their tribal nature. Fighting against nature is a bad idea but, there is even a worse idea that has taken the form of collectivism at the end of the 19th century. It is to emphasize tribalism with the belief that you can overwrite the laws of nature and create a central organization we call state to force everyone to accept that belief. Collectivism (note 2) produces many dark places, and I will investigate most of them. That collectivism, that tribalism has a name: Marxism (note 3).
Marxism as an existential statement
During the last six decades, our understanding of human nature has greatly increased to the point that we can look at Marxism in all its dimensions (philosophically, historically, biologically, sociologically, and economically). Marxism is not a political statement, it's an existential one (note 4). This explains its blindness to all the knowledge pointing out its lack of foundation and to the suffering it causes by the transformations it imposes. The savagery is the way by which Marxists attempt to give birth to a tribe in which every single mind will be absorbed and digested.
Because it's existential, Marxism is the expression of something much deeper and older. How deep and how old? One of the relentless questions of non-Marxists is what is the reason for what they want? What is the source? That it is existential does not explain why. Great minds have worked on that question and found answers but curiously enough their results are nowhere to be seen in what is usually considered to be the bookshelf of a modern educated man. Time to fill some blank spaces on that shelf. My work consists essentially to link all those knowledge and explain how they work together and why. I have used that knowledge linked to modern mathematic, even physics to explain practical application in our society. I have the audacity to think that my unconventional way to look at the great divide that shakes our civilization, might be of some help to other thinkers.
Note 1: individualism is not to be understood as egoism (Plato), but as an autonomous individual within a group, which was created around a consensus of concepts and that the simultaneous activities of autonomous individuals produce order instead of chaos, contrary to what collectivists think. There are examples in nature and we have started to have mathematical models to explain them.
Note 2: Karl Popper's definition of collectivism is very common and means "anti-individualistic". However, there are other definitions, like the one of H. G. Wells which Popper resumed by 'rational institutional planning for freedom'. When you read a text be sure about the meaning of the important words an author uses, before judging they might differ from a common definition.
Note 3: I use the words Marxism, irrationalism, and collectivism as interchangeable. This is because they are expressions of the same and very old problem. It is just that it can take different forms and names depending on the culture and era. The problem is to move from the tribe (collective) to a society (individual) which rise two main issues to allow that move: The confusion between natural laws and man-made laws and the rejection of reason as the driving mechanism of human thoughts instead of emotions.
Note 4: existential as in the inability to accept the basic reality of life and human nature. A distinction has to be made between the elite and the people. For the people, it is a brain maturation process issue and they lack the use of reason to access reality in a feedback loop to evaluate the production of their brain and to use reality as a reference point to adjust their brain production in order to better function in this world. The elites have the same problem to which we have to add a refusal to acknowledge the evolution of the society organization necessary to deal with the population increase. They want to go back to the primitive tribe system. To achieve this they build a tribe inside the tribe (composed by 'the race of the guardians') to reproduce the alpha (the dominant of the pack). The organization of that inner tribe is called communism and was designed to avoid conflict amongst them (read addendum: Communism, the gentlemen's agreement of the elite).
A visit to a concentration camp
When I heard the words of the German YouTuber, and because of my double culture (French, German), I was devastated. I made a video to answer him but unfortunately, in a very emotional way. That's life. Before making the video, I felt the duty to go to a concentration camp near Strasbourg, called "Struthof" (December 2017).
It had snowed, and the camp was shrouded with its winter clothes. The camp visit starts with the little gas chamber, which is in a house, a mile away from the camp. The "Struthof" was a small concentration camp. The gas chamber was used for experimentation. I remember visiting the bunkhouses. I thought about the living conditions they had during winter; the cold. I enter another room where there was a wood heater, but then I saw a line of shoes, old shoes. I understood what it really was, a cremation oven. Several months later, I keep getting emotional when I think about all of this.
There is a small museum at the entrance of the concentration camp, and I decided to visit it before going back to Strasbourg. The museum is mostly a collection of posters with pictures and explanations. The first text I read was about race and explained: "There is no human race because there aren't enough genes to generate differences in our species that we would call races." This is wrong, very wrong. Not only the pseudo-scientific definition they gave but the very motivation behind it, which is the same as what the German YouTuber was working on. They want to erase the concept of race, to erase knowledge and this is no different from the burning of books the Nazis were doing or from any totalitarian system that needs to erase and rewrite history.
Collectivism, a central question
The word race is not an isolated case, there is a war on words, and it's linked to the control of language, the control of what and how people think. Those who are doing this have an inability to accept reality, and they have fallen into a fallacy to escape it and in the process trapped themselves inside a nightmare. We will look at that fallacy. There are many other issues to investigate, but all share a common root: collectivism, the power struggle between groups, and the rejection of reason and reality to build a fantasy land in which all of their lies become true. Collectivism is a central point of this letter because it's always the logic by which genocides happen and are justified. I'm also writing this letter to show you that there is another way, and in the end, it's a choice of civilization. There is a way out, we all have the power not to be trapped. Remember! There is a way out not to choose collectivism.
The war on knowledge has two main battlefields. Knowledge itself, and school where knowledge is transmitted. There are other battlefields like media, art, politic, even science, but I will focus on those two. The Knowledge-battlefield consists of reducing the knowledge available and the reasoning capabilities so that the people will come by themselves to the conclusion the collective expect from them. An example is the Nazi's hypermnesia in history (the over-focus). Our young are taught that the worse things that happened in the 20th century had the Nazis as the point of origin, therefore if you ask someone, 'who are the bad guys', the answer is the Nazis. The lack of knowledge of the communist atrocities pushes for the conclusion that the collectivists want. More generally, what knowledge is taken away? Here is a first example of what I'm trying to do with the letter, going to the root of the collectivist incapacity to look at reality, to accept themselves, and accept civilization. To avoid facing those they build several layers of lies, which represent an artificial reality. The reason why we haven't been able to defeat them for the last 150 years, and with time why people think that they must be something right in their thinking is that we always stay on the top layers of their fabricated reality. We need to go directly to the deepest level of their thinking. What is it?
Everyone has now observed that they try to control everything, every aspect of your life, and even your mind. As you will read later, Stalin already was at work to control the thinking of the people, therefore it's nothing new for the collectivists. They are at war against natural causes because they share a common mechanism which is randomness. Randomness is our best friend and we do not alienate it as the collectivists do. Many important and modern knowledge is based on it, as do modern tools to assess new knowledge, reasoning, and decisions like political decisions for city management, or energy (statistic, probability...). Another cause for collectivists to fight randomness is that it produces patterns that represent fixed parameters of life. There is two sex, men are taller than women and there are also many variabilities in parameters that characterize human life that cannot be avoided. To hide all that knowledge is their best strategy because denying it will expose its existence.
Before I start I want to mention an important link between risk and randomness. The link is that reality is composed of an infinite number of parameters having infinite variability. You can't control them all, there is a probability that something will happen and impact negatively any of your projects. That's what we call risk. You don't control risk, you reduce it, no less but no more. When the collectivists want to get rid of something in our society for ideological reasons they often invoke the zero risk clause. For nuclear plants, energy in general, global warming, or more recently with disease contamination. But the no-risk clause involves the denial of randomness. We never ask them to face that. This is the same level of denial as the denial of the second law of thermodynamic and nobody right in his mind wants to take that path.
The Marxist war on natural causes
Marxism vs theory of evolution
A modern expression of a profound divide
Marxism did not appear suddenly out of nowhere, it is a product of its time, of the industrialization, the enlightenment, and of the works of great philosophers like Rousseau (society corrupt men) and Hegel (historicism). There are roots that are far older going back to Plato and Aristotle, and we will look at them, but for now, I want to focus on one cause that is too often forgotten. Marx's theory was written a decade before Darwin's theory (1848 vs 1858), and they oppose each other. The fact that Marxism does not rely in any way on external natural mechanisms to explain economic and social organizations, is no error. It is about the very notion of evolution. You have to understand that both theories didn't come to life in one night, nor by one man. They were in the minds of many intellectuals and scientists. It just took several decades to formulate them more clearly.
F. A Hayek explains in his book "The fatal conceit", how evolution is needed to escape the belief that authority is needed to bring order, to organize the world and human society. For a long time, humans had and still have God but now we have the state and social engineering. The idea of a state to bring order in this world is much older than we tend to think and can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle as Karl Popper explained first. It is the belief that men can create laws of the same kind as natural laws. That confusion between natural and man-made laws separates the primitive from the civilized man. The primitive is unable to conceive that the world and order can exist without him, without his action. Evolution like economic (Hayek was Nobel Prize in economics) produces order or equilibrium that allows things to exist. That kind of equilibrium is called dynamic equilibrium and we move from one dynamic equilibrium to another. Marxist and more generally collectivists end up with a static equilibrium, everything is fixed. The difference is a question of adaptability and evolution in order to survive. In the long run, any static equilibrium collapse, because it is not resilient to external pressures/changes which require the integration of new parameters and a change of organization of the society. Production plans of the communist countries always miss their target because unexpected events happen that need local adaptation, an economic system that generates dynamic equilibrium like capitalism can adjust. It is important to note that dynamic systems take into consideration random events, while static systems don't. The inability to deal with randomness and its rejection consciously or unconsciously is an important component of the Marxist/collectivist/irrationalist mindset.
Social construction and Lamarck's theory of evolution
I have recently observed a strategy that consists to acknowledge the theory of evolution and at the same time, promoting social construction and the engineering of people's behaviors. The trick is by using Lamarck's theory of evolution. The first lesson to get is to be careful when someone tells you that he/she is for the theory of evolution, it must also be linked to Darwin and Mendel. The second lesson is to know why Lamarck is wrong and what is the connection with social construction. Lamarck believed that environmental pressure induces changes in individuals that will be transmitted to the next generation. It's wrong for two reasons: a) this is the question of inheritance. In modern terms, we say that the individual is not the unit of selection. The individual is not the replicator (too big, too complex, not a fundamental block of life). Darwin didn't know what it was, and it was Mendel, who pointed to the DNA. If you artificially remove a leg from an animal, the change will not be passed on to the next generation (Lamarck believed that it does)). If you modify artificially the DNA (with x-ray) the change will be passed on to the next generation (Darwin/Mendel ideas). Because of that, Lamarck's theory of inheritance is false (Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene, endnotes to chapter three of page 34). b) The second error is the role of environmental pressures. With Darwin and Mendel there is a random variation of genes and then the environmental pressure selects the genes. Genes that can best survive the environment are transmitted to the next generation by the individual, which is used as a 'vehicle'. With Lamarck, it is the environment that produces changes in individuals. For Lamarck, the environment is the cause of the changes, while in Darwin and Mendel, the environment is only a selector of genes from a set of random changes.
We can understand why social constructivists are so attracted by Lamarck's theory, even if they don't recognize it. They both focus (the social constructivists and Lamarck's theory) on the individual and the environment. They believe that you can manipulate the mind of an individual so that it will adapt to the reality designed by an elite and that that adaptation changes his brain circuitry which will be passed on to the next generation. That's how you justify social construction but also concentration camps, and if needed extermination camps. It is harsh today, even inhuman, they acknowledge that, but they also believe that they will have their utopia tomorrow without doubt. I don't say that lightly, and I think that some people, and among them, scientists, who try to revive Lamarck's theory are, in fact, ideologically driven by social constructivism. If you're not comfortable with scientific demonstrations, you can still conclude that social construction opposes evolution by a simple reason-based argument. The first idea behind the theory of evolution is evolution itself (Jerry Coyne in "Why evolution is true"). However, the nature of social constructivism is to achieve a utopia, which once established is not meant to change. By definition, it does not include a mechanism that will allow it to evolve, and that's precisely where social constructionism opposes Darwin's theory of evolution or any mechanisms of evolution as we will see.
Who is right? The question that we have to answer is: Can we achieve a better world by socially construct the society, which goes with the correction of unwanted behaviors from individuals, or by accepting the individual as it is and to build the society based on its strengths and weaknesses? I will look at that question many times during the letter, but it appears that we all have the answer right in front of us for decades because the social construction thesis has penetrated so deep inside our society that even an iconic Tv-show as Star-trek promotes that ideology. In Star-Trek 'The Next Generation' (TNG) in the episode 'Rightful heir', the scientific officer Data, which is an android, has a discussion with Worf the security officer and explains - "I realize that if I were simply a machine, I could never be anything else. I could never grow beyond my programming, and I found that difficult to accept. So, I chose to believe that I was a person, that I had the potential to be more than a collection of circuits and sub-processors. It is a belief which I still hold." Worf: how did you come to your decision? Data: I made a leap of faith." - This is a social constructionist point of view. Data, the android, missed the point but not the writers of the episode. They know what they are doing. By rejecting his condition of being an android, he fails at the very condition of being a human being, accepting what you are. A human cannot become an android, and vice versa. You have to accept yourself, to accept nature, and here lies the biggest problem of all Marxists. We didn't come into existence out of nothing as if it were a spontaneous process, but we are the result of slow evolution. The question - are we nature or nurture? - has been answered, we have a nature and we can't escape it. The social constructionists face an existential issue because they want to escape their nature, human nature. They are not seeking for an 'evolution' to become what they advocate for, but a 'transformation'. The difference is that evolution is a slow process but that never stops, while a transformation is by definition, a one-time process and that's all. But don't be fooled, Marxists do not really support Lamarck's theory, it's just a diversion to hide their true objective. For they do not recognize evolution, and the very idea that what they want to create could itself evolve, repulse them. They lie to themselves and others, but they need that lie to avoid facing reality. They also make a leap of faith to believe that they can override evolution. This is a very big leap of faith and one of the elements which indicate the religious nature of the social construction ideology.
Example of use of Lamarck's theory today
I recently read an article about a difference in the ability to make jokes between men and women. I don't much value such articles, they are just a welcome distraction, but I was more interested in the reactions that it triggered and in particular how some people came with an explanation that fits perfectly Lamarck's theory of evolution. According to those, women don't joke because it is expected by society that they don't. If we organize the society so that they are pushed to make jokes they will start to make jokes. If we rephrase, it means that if the environment requests women to joke then they will acquire the necessary skill. This is the now-famous example of Giraffes given by Lamarck itself. According to him, their neck is long because they needed to access leaves on trees. That ability is then transferred to the offspring. Lamarck never explained how that ability is transferred, and in case you wonder the Darwin explanation cannot be grafted on Lamarck's theory, it's a lost cause. There is another problem, he never explained how a biological function is changed, as those who believe in the pressure of society to change people's abilities. To make jokes you need creativity and intelligence, how do you develop them, and more importantly how that development impact your biology is never explained. The Marxists have settled the question by believing that everyone is intelligent and everyone is creative. Of course, everyone is the next Bach, Callas, Delacroix... The reality is that it has very little to do with society and much with genes, men are good at jokes. You have a problem with that only if you don't accept your own nature.
The collectivists are more Lamarckian than you think. Somehow, they believe that what a generation will learn will be passed on to the next generation, and future women will naturally make jokes. Now if you put yourself in the mind of a collectivist this allows you to be as inhuman as it is needed because you are doing this for the greatest good and on behalf of all those people who needed to be protected, even if they do not want to because they do not understand what is good for them. You are perhaps harsh today, but not tomorrow because the new generation will have learned to behave properly. Collectivists see themselves as educators of humanity, they are not only the good guys but its savior. Now, how do react the collectivists, when their plan doesn't work? They explain that there is an unconscious bias by men that stopped women to learn the ability to make jokes. They force men to undergo reeducation training to correct their bias. What they ask men is to stop making jokes so that women will provide all the jokes about this world. That they are funny is of no importance. The collectivists redefine what funny means - what a woman calls a joke, and they will force you to agree with that - and all the fun of this world will be gone. That's how they operate, when a natural ability opposes their fabricated reality then they will erase it by threatening any person who will show that ability.
Marxism also opposes the concept of social dilemmas. The concept was known at the end of the 18th century with the Stag-Hunt dilemma designed by J.J Rousseau (intuitively even sooner: read the Talmud's problem) and can be described as the modelization of human interactions by using simple rules. The field belongs now to mathematics and has produced great results. It also has been shown to work remarkably well with the theory of evolution. The reason is that human beings have behavioral patterns, which can often be reproduced by simple iterative rules. The existence of those patterns is due to evolution which designs living beings with common characteristics.
Cities: when everyone become a criminal
Many city politics failed with collectivists because there ignore the patterns of human interactions expressed by social dilemmas. More precisely they refuse to adopt the social dilemma called the prisoner dilemma which focuses on the outcome to decide what action one will take. The dilemma shows that cheaters will always be part of human interaction, and the solution to it is called "credible retaliation", which enhances cooperation. Collectivists oppose the very notion of credible retaliation, remember they are the good guy so they use the information to tell you what you should do and think. When it fails, which always happen they use coercion but in a very special way. They change the structure of the cities so that people are left with only one option, the one that the collectivists want. There is nothing natural to it, and when people will rebel because it hurts their nature, they will be considered as a bunch of criminals, and the police state will solve the problem. That everyone becomes a criminal doesn't make them think that something is wrong with their view of the world.
The fall of the utopian society
Steven Pinker in his book the blank slate reminds us that the general Marxist project is to build a utopian society that rallies any groups that support the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine. People are usually puzzled by the heterogeneity of political and philosophical groups that all of a sudden agree to vote for the same left-leaning candidate. To understand their links you have to look at one of those three ideologies are their deep beliefs. However, all three oppose natural laws and Marx was aware of those and reject them when he wrote "Communism is ... the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved". As Pinker comments "It doesn't get any less tragic and more utopian than that".
In the 1970s, explains Pinker, "the ideas from the evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public ... could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision". If you look at theories that have taken roots in the 1980s and 1990s like post-modernism and critical theory, they are perfectly tailored to avoid answering the knowledge provided by the field that uses the Darwinian theory of evolution.
The fact that most biological and behavioral characteristics follow a bell curve finds their origin in evolution (height, I.Q...). The bell curve, better known in Europe as the Gauss curve, is also a battlefield for the Marxists. The bell curve is the expression of the variability that happens when a random process is iterated a great many times. Marx's theory and alike have no concept to handle this type of distribution, nor knowledge. This goes far deeper than you think. Iteration often means a timeline and when you add a feedback loop mechanism, the variability can imply changes, therefore, evolution. Any process that is repeated a great number of times will have variations because of randomness, but the result of the process is not random it shows a pattern we call distribution. This is a natural mechanism.
Marxism implies a static system. When a Marxist society happens, nothing changes, nothing evolves, forever. No wonder that they fight evolution, the very notion of evolution hurt them. Another distribution is the Pareto distribution and capitalism is linked to it. Both, the Pareto and bell curve distribution implies differences in abilities and wealth for people. Collectivists cannot handle the concept of distribution because they reject randomness and natural causes. They consider those differences as inequalities, which of course must be corrected according to them. As a rule, any policy (city or state level), that is designed to help people must take into consideration distributions (and from the previous paragraph, we can add social dilemmas) to maximize its effectiveness and avoid hurting people's life.
April 2021 - processes and self-ordering systems: To the question of why collectivists reject distribution laws, randomness, human nature is because they are invisible or are based on invisible mechanisms (processes and systems). Only their results are visible and that's how we can detect and analyze them. Because of anthropomorphism, collectivists completely ignore any mechanism that is not directly designed and activated by human beings. That nature can generate mechanisms that will produce order like to make life happen or regulate the market, is rejected. It is axiomatic for any collectivist.
A case study: Linking equity, social construction, equality and evolution
There is a well-known picture, which depicts two nearly identical scenes. If you don't know the picture, I strongly suggest that you look on the Internet right now (search for an image with the keywords: equity, equality, football/baseball match). Three persons standing on crates, look at a football match behind a wall. The difference, in each scene, is how the crates are distributed and the size of the persons. The purpose is to show the difference between equality and equity. In the equality scene, each person is on one crate, and the smallest person can't see the match because the wall is too high. On the equity scene, the tallest person has no crate, and the smallest stand is on two crates. All three can see the match. The goal of the picture is to promote equity based on the 'fairness' argument. Is it truly fairer? NO, as we will see, it's a trap, a huge one. What promotes the picture is not fairness, but collectivism and in the process deny evolution. Let see how it works.
In real life, there is no wall, there are fences, which allow everyone to watch any match. It means, that society is not built to maximize what people cannot do, but upon the idea to maximize people's activities without inserting specific advantages. This is important because, on the equality side of the picture, each person stands on a crate. However, there is no need for crates to symbolize equality. (In fact, that observation is even more important when you understand that the crates symbolize the state. So not only the equality scene does not require crates, but also no state). The author adds them to show how equity reorganizes the society to be fairer, compare to equality.
Let venture into the making of some definitions. Equality is to treat everyone the same way based on their natural abilities. Equity is to treat everyone the same way regardless of their natural abilities. To achieve equity you need to add a mechanism to compensate natural abilities so that they become 'equal', sort of. The state will be the tool by which that mechanism is applied. When you allow people to develop according to the best of their abilities, you follow the theory of evolution. When you add a mechanism to compensate for natural abilities, you follow the social construction ideology. Moreover, the wall in the picture is the symbol of a corrupt society but it's a fraud. The wall is only here to push for collectivism.
Another element in that picture shows that the one who can't watch the match is a kid. Equity is said to help the feeble ones so that they get a chance. What happens is that they take away, from those who could do much better, the potential to achieve their best. As a consequence, general abilities and particularly regarding education are lowered (for a complete explanation and demonstration read the chapter 'Thinking in systems'). You may ask, so what? Our modern civilization requires to have enough people to be at the best of their abilities, and it's already no more the case for the actual generation. They will not be able to manage it, not to mention to make progress. Now, who provides the crates? The state of course. Equity is not only linked to social constructivism but also to a centralized state which will provide crates. As a provider, it decides who will receive the crates and those who don't. It will produce real systemic inequality starting with race and sex segregation. For example, men are rejected from jobs just because they are men and nobody tells them, it's hidden. We have testimonies of that reality. Well, when you have to be unfair to apply equity, you better hide it, to avoid dealing with what you are. Moreover, it will generate a dependency which will have on people a deleterious effect on being able to think by themselves and to figure out how to solve a large class of situations. They will become dependent and live in fear of tomorrow.
The rule to have an efficient society is to minimize the role of the state and to let natural abilities run the machinery. As a corollary, when you maximize the abilities of the best, you maximize the average abilities. When you maximize the abilities of those with less you decrease the average abilities. As a counter-reaction, equity induces the creation of an elite that will protect itself from the inefficiency of society. By a feedback loop, this elite will run the society (authoritarian class) and at the same time be trapped by it with no hope for a better system, because it feeds itself from its low performance. One must acknowledge the effect on our brain that the picture has. You can't stop yourself to find equity 'cool' until you process the consequences, which requires you to mentally handle feedback loops. The picture was meant to hack your brain, in that regard, it's a success.
Note: If you liked that chapter, you will be delighted by the one called 'Thinking in systems' at the end of the letter as the chapter about the mathematical mystery of the Babylonian Talmud.
All children are told that they can become whatever they want. Those who advocate for it know full-well what it is all about. It's the blank slate ideology. We are all white pages on which it's up to us to write our life (Of course with the help of some Marxists, it goes so much better). The blank slate is not compatible, not a bit with the theory of evolution and its adepts oppose it. Their strategy is to omit to tell the children, their war against evolution, and let them think it's a natural approach to human nature, one of those obvious truths.
Lies transform reality until they become truths
Letting people think they can become whatever they want is a powerful statement, so powerful that if you fall for it, the only person that can get you out of its falsehood, is you. If you don't, other lies will come. Lies change the texture of reality which by feedback allows you to tell even more lies. It quickly produces an alternate reality in which all your wishes come true, and you're the center of your narrative. There is a difficulty if you're the only one to tell a specific lie. To keep your lies running you have to remember everything you have said. A real salts mine work. However, if your lies are motivated by an ideology, you will find people to back you up, but your delusion will become a nightmare because everyone who tells the same lie will drag you down each time you want to wake up.
Hey, what does it matter if we all tell the same lie? It's just another reality. How does it differ from the real one? Well, instead of spending your time building a civilization, you will spend it to survive the day. Not convinced? Try to tell something that does not back up the lies of your collective. They will not ignore what you say, they will come for you. The coherence of a world of lies is achieved by constant work, if you stop lying, you're done. While the coherency of the world-of-truth, the 'real' reality, will manage and adjust itself, you're free to mind your projects.
You start by exploiting or producing narcissistic personalities because they are easier to manipulate then you build a world of lies that will become their prison. The beauty and monstrosity of the plan are that everyone can go out of that prison any time, nobody 'forces' you, and because of that the prisoners believe that they made a rational decision. Now, what you have to do is to protect the walls of that prison because reality will always knock on the door with its truths. The solution is to emphasize the 'us vs them' by projecting every bad emotion and idea on the other camp, on them. In fact, it is the Jungian projection mechanism that allows at the same time to not have to look at your personal weaknesses since you just projected on 'them'. One of the consequences, which is positive for the collectivists, is to cut people from the acquisition of knowledge. No information that is not from 'us' is discarded therefore the possibility to be wrong too. This is one of the two pillars of scientific thinking, the other being the scientific method itself, and we owe it to Socrates. This is a new wall for mind-prison because if you can't be wrong then you're omniscient and you will find an explanation to any information so that it confirms or fit what you already know.
When the conclusion provides de reasoning
The perfect balance is the truth
That lie goes along with a way of reasoning that cannot be beaten. If your emotions drive your decisions, then what matters is to find a solution that resonates with your emotions. So you think about a solution to a problem that makes you feel good, and then any reasoning that reaches that conclusion is good, any other is bad. The reasoning by itself doesn't matter, but it must respect some rules, the ones charged with positive emotions, like the use of the perfect balance (50/50) or we are all the same, and we all belong to a big whole. Those who follow that thinking, live in a binary and simplified world in which the word unbalance means unfair, the word difference means inferior and superior. Both must be corrected and those who engage in that action are the SJW (Social Justice Warrior). Equity is often their main tool (same outcome for everyone). Balance and being the same, are perceived as good values, therefore, those who use them are good people. Those who do not conform to those concepts are bad people, not even human, and deserve no right, no pity. Their reasoning also uses the analogy mechanism. There is constantly something that looks like what you're looking for. Therefore, you can always make things up by using analogies. Logic doesn't matter. Proof doesn't matter. For example, if they see someone that is bald and white, he must be a right-wing para-military. That he has a disease, will never cross their mind.
The whole machinery of their reasoning allows them to contest the most knowledgeable people in the world, with a complete lack of understanding of the matter at hand. Well, to be honest, you might have to argue with someone with more knowledge than you, and it doesn't mean that the argument should be ended because of it. If you have to be the most knowledgeable person in the world to have the right to contest something, then nobody will ever be able to say something, because there is always someone who knows more and better (note). However, there is a huge difference, while a normal person will get some knowledge from the argument and learn something, the Marxist warriors don't try to get any knowledge, never. They don't need to learn, they know. That's why they are at war against knowledge. Their way of thinking will always find knowledge as an obstacle to their world of wishes, and they are terrified that they might be expelled from it.
Note: People who have a bad understanding of the scientific method or want to use it for their own needs and not to get to the truth, tend to shut down any debate by telling you that if you're not a scientist then you have nothing to say. Of course, the level of education on a specific topic is important, but that's not the first thing you should look for. What matters above all is that your interlocutor uses the scientific method to articulate his/her thoughts. From that point, you can infer that he/she is having a conversation with you in good faith. The next step is to educate that person by providing more and/or better information. To focus on the method first and not on the knowledge implies that you forbid yourself to shut down people's free speech. The recent tendency to even forbid people to intend convention and political reunion on climate change, just because they have doubts about its severity, hurts the spirit of the scientific method.
Learning by heart is brainwashing. Really?
You have all heard that children should not learn by heart. When you ask why you will get answers like: it's useless, it's bad - followed by some weak reasoning that doesn't explain anything - It's not natural, we must allow the children to develop themselves. There is a discrepancy between what they do and what they explain but also between the decline of education and their will to solve the problem or the lack thereof. What is going on?
We know today what is happening. We have scientific studies proving that all of their methods are wrong, and the results point to an ideology that they never mention. Let start with two questions most of us have had to battle with. Why does the education level of children decrease and why teachers don't want to change their views? For them, learning by heart destroys the natural abilities of a person to acquire knowledge. They equal learning by heart with brainwashing. It's Rousseau and the Good/Noble savage ideology, also linked to the romantic movement. What is artificial, i.e. not natural, is bad and destroys what's good in human beings. We live in a civilization requiring a great amount of knowledge, which cannot be acquired by our natural abilities, or instincts.
This goes far beyond education theories. They believe that civilization itself is bad and corrupts all of us. It's getting even worse. They believe that the mind and the biological brain are two different things. This is an ideology called dualism also known as the ghost in the machine. The mind comes from the brain, but that's not the case for them. For them, any evolutionary mechanism stops at the head. The ghost in the machine is the main ideology that explains their rejection of I.Q and partially why they advocate for the equality of outcome. The belief that competencies do not come from natural abilities, but only from what you want (you can become whatever you want, remember). If you haven't acquired a desired competence, it is because the system stopped you. The equality of outcome corrects that injustice. The problem with the equality of outcome and education is that you have to target the least common competence that everyone can achieve. The result is a decrease in education level.
The way you define human nature determines what kind of social organization you want, and therefore what kind of education. The way they teach our children (oriented and swallow knowledge) is in line with what they are up to: applying Marxist and Post-modernist ideologies, which take their roots in the blank slate and ghost in the machine, based on philosophers like Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc. They hide their intention (which is why parents don't understand what is happening) because none of their arguments can't stand rational scrutiny, but the consequence is to make the educational system a dark place. The theory of evolution is consistent with a science and technological-based civilization, consistent with enlightenment, individualism, freedom of speech, due process, values-based education... and those things repulse them.
Controlling people by restricting the concepts accessible to them
The final and most important change in education happened during the 1960s (the starting point is as soon as the mid of the 19th century) and has eluded the keen eyes of every observer (the purpose of the change has eluded them) because the most powerful trick to manipulate minds is to restrict the number of concepts upon which the student can build a reasoning. It doesn't matter if you speak of them positively or negatively, it only matters to focus on those concepts and never mention any other. After a while, you start to focus on the positive side and present those who oppose your concepts as bad people. The reality is that they are not necessarily opposed to them. It's just that they have other concepts. That's when the manipulation produces its effect, nobody will take what they say seriously, because nobody has ever heard of their concepts. The technic is even better since you never forbid anything, you can herald for being the champion of free speech, while, in fact, working to shut it down.
For example, most students have no idea of the importance of the theory of evolution. When you have to think about human nature with a choice restricted to religious beliefs or Marxism, the latter could seem to have some credibility. When you give evolution its rightful place, then everything changes. Better, Christianity appears to have far more credit from an evolution point of view than Marxism (birth rate, moral code, family structure ... to name a few). Another example of the restriction of information, is the lack of teaching (an understatement), of the atrocities of the communist regimes. Not only, young people have no idea what communist societies produce, but they have a romantic view of their ideology. They are even educated to believe that being a revolutionary communist is cool, like the glamour given to Che Guevara.
A special case consists of constantly broadcasting the same message. People start to believe it is true. By focusing on the same message, you're occulting other messages, which is a form of restriction of information. The people start to believe it, mostly because they have no other message, no other truths. So, my understanding of that technic is not the repetition itself that makes the trick, but the repetition monopolizes the broadcasting and the attention of people, they cannot hear other voices.
Critical thinking does not mean what you think
They're not truthful with what they do to our children
When pedagogues and teachers tell you that they want to develop the critical thinking of the children and students, they are not truthful. Reason-based people, to which I belong, think that critical thinking has to do with getting to the truth. It is a tool to analyze, classified and evaluate arguments, statements, hypotheses, facts to find some truths and preferably some that we share so that we can agree to solve problems, make a decision, and together build the best working society possible. For us, the truth is something that is discovered, not decided, and by decided I mean not by a God or by a consensus of a group of people. This has enormous consequences which I will explain, but the final result is that schools do no more provide knowledge but political, social, and philosophical ideologies to the children, and they have to comply. It also means that those teachers are compelled to teach one side and only that side. It goes as far as schools fighting against the right of parents to transmit their knowledge and experiences to their children.
The irrationalists, to which an overwhelming majority of pedagogues and teachers belong in our occidental society, believe that truth is encapsulated in our language and culture and therefore is context-dependent. According to them, what determines the truth is the most powerful group in society, and therefore, the truth is the result of a power struggle. The group which wins teaches its truth, and language is used to broadcast that truth, hence the necessity to control its use.
To consider truth as context-dependent has great significance. 1) it states that there isn't a reality that we share, and by we, all humans. Immediately science becomes European-centered and a belief system, which has the same value as any other. 2) Reality is something in which we live, therefore it can be used as an external point of reference, with its immutable laws (laws of nature). For the irrationalists, it is we that define reality, it is centered on us, an anthropomorphic reality. Knowledge becomes a story. 3) This allows them to justify to teach one side, and only that side, anything else doesn't exist, this goes as far as the erasing of history, authors, and ideas. 4) To make effective that fabricated knowledge they cut words from the properties they are representing and link those words to emotions. This develops in the children the use of a technic to understand the world, known as essentialism. The language becomes verbal diarrhea, from the high sounding words of prophets that bewitch the readers and students, to slogans that are spouted with the rage of the emotions but express only the short-circuit of our ability to reason.
To find the power struggle in the text
Text analysis is the most important training a student has to master to learn to think and to articulate his thinking. The old technic but still relevant which most people still believe to be taught is to search for the thesis of a text and its arguments and to make a résumé of it or to show the thesis in a broader perspective by bringing external arguments. This is no more the case. Students are asked to search for the underlying power struggle that the text exhibit explicitly or implicitly. More precisely, it is the relation of oppressed/oppressors who has to be discovered. The student analysis must then conclude that the oppressors are wrong and bad, no matter their arguments. Any work that does not fit (or feed) that method of understanding the world is forbidden, and students will be severely judged if they do not comply. This goes on, in occidental schools, for the last 50 years, but has started already at the end of the 19th century.
A network of ideologies to catch them all
The pedagogy promoted by their ideology is not monolithic but a dense network of philosophical and political schools of thought. For example, the concept of a power struggle that Marx developed (theory of conflict), comes from the German philosopher Hegel, himself inspired by Plato. The exploiters/exploited from Marx were turned into oppressors/oppressed. You have the Frankfurt School, a group of German Marxist academics, who went to the United States of America after Hitler was elected (in the 1930s) and developed the critical theory. You have the post-modernists, mostly French intellectuals and philosophers (ex: Foucault), who reject reason and the very notion that there is such a thing as truth. The deconstructionists (ex: Derrida) who explain that to deconstruct a text is to expose or demystify its statements and that there can be no reference to any specific meaning inherent within the text (no matter what the author tries to say it is always context/culture-dependent, even the general relativity of Einstein).
They teach that political motivations, intuition, and emotions are the only knowledge you need to understand the world. In opposition, a reason-based analysis is to extract meaning from texts which imply knowledge, every kind and type of knowledge and this imposes impartiality. When we encounter a knowledge that we consider as erroneous we archive it, they want to erase it from the memory of human history. They pretend to have the truth, but they believe to be the truth which explains why they never consider being wrong. Our approach to knowledge is also very different, we search and value knowledge not centered on us but on the world around us which is used as an external point of reference. It changes everything, for example, the social organization of humans is a product of forces independent from our own will. All in all, that's quite a difference in the purpose of education. For the students and because of that constant selection they impose, knowledge is lost and society problems can't be solved anymore and the story ends with its collapse. The most important article of the letter explains the mechanism of their thinking, and it is 'Essentialism'. All those schools of thought have common views on how to understand the world, and it is never explained how their view converge. Essentialism is the missing key that links them all. We need to get rid of it once and for all if we want to make sure our schools are a temple of knowledge and reason-based culture.
The disintegration of traditions
They say to our children that they have to think by themselves. That idea is a disaster because any adult knows that young people know nothing, and by applying that idea, then nothing will become even less. The irrationalists have disguised that idea as a pedagogical tool to cut our children from the traditions of their culture. To the question of why are traditions important, the first and classical answer is that traditions are the sum of wisdom our ancestors have collected and it is important to pass it on because no one can in his lifetime collect that much information to enhance its life. The second reason is explained by F.A Hayek and integrates an evolutionary point of view, "The tradition is the product of a process of selection from ... unjustified beliefs which, without anyone's knowing ... assisted the proliferation of those who followed them." Book, the fatal conceit. Hayek then explained that traditions build processes and self-ordering systems that are invisible but help society to survive from generation to generation. The apparent unjustified or even irrational root of traditions is explained by the fact they are built on facts far greater in numbers than what a wise man could proceed, "... in consequence tradition is in some respects superior to, or wiser than, human reason ... I confess it took me some time to recognize this ... This decisive insight is one that only a very critical rationalist could recognize". I fully endorse his view on that matter.
Let's take an example. The Abrahamic religions, which have developed around the Mediterranean Sea, ask for a clear separation of the role of men and women within the society. In a modern way, we could describe the role of men as the builder of civilization (material and immaterial infrastructures) and the role of women as the builder of humanity (give birth). The traditions built on those religions are based on practical but solid knowledge of human nature, women and men differ, not only biologically, but also mentally. The latter being denied by the collectivists because of their belief in the ghost in the machine and the blank slate. When it comes to the invisible systems that tradition builds, we can observe that a society built and managed by men is a society of knowledge and erudite. Women are protected to give birth, but there is a reason for that protection because it builds a system that allows society and its population to face the unknown. In human history, there have been terrible plagues and natural catastrophes that have killed large portions of populations. Women are the parameter that allows to rebuild the population, they are the fail-safe of a tribe, a city, a society, and a civilization. More than the protection of women it is the protection of their role that we have to be dedicated to. If we destroy that role and without noticing it the society will try to protect life at any cost. People would want to control risk, any risk to make sure that they are not hurt. They will also want to extend their life span. Both actions will push society to search for the fountain of youth. It's a myth and those who fall for it, stop living to live longer. Yes, traditions are important but you have to realize that in human history traditions evolve too. So they need to change, but with the sense of upgrading them, not erasing them.
Note: Here comes trouble. The political movement called the conservative, is by definition dedicated to preserving traditions, but when traditions need to evolve, they will resist that evolution. They are a very positive force, rightly so because you don't change something that works. Therefore the question is, when should the conservative step down? When people start to lose contact with reality, that they are doing crazy things while forcing all the others to accept them as the new reality. That will be a good criterion that a deep change, in our paradigms and traditions, needs to happen.
The power struggle of irrationalists is an act of predation over the mind. The language is the semen by which the mind will be inseminated (Essentialism), and the schools are the wombs of the state in which freshly shaped humans will be produced to serve the new truth in the collective (propaganda schools). Any dissident will be destroyed for he/she is a stain of the genetic purity of the collective truth. That truth is provided by a small group of alpha males and females, who never have to face the consequences of their ill-conceived decisions, nor to bear any responsibilities, for they are like demigods.
The nature of knowledge through the understanding of the world is to define a unique reality that is used as a reference point, allowing us to solve problems, settle our arguments, pass on reliable knowledge to the next generations, and build a civilization. However, if knowledge is subordinate to what a group wants, then power struggles become the way to settle arguments and to understand the world. The nature of Knowledge is thus defined to be a slave of the power struggles with the task to create 'A' truth, an ideology belonging to each group. It is precisely the lack of a reference point for all groups that favor the power struggle, but that is exactly what they want, not civilization.
The Marxists and even more the Post-modernists ask knowledge to be subordinate to their will, but this is only a vestigial of our primitive self. It's our allegiance to knowledge that builds civilization. Knowledge can't be subordinate and must be protected above all, above the will of people whatever their number, above any laws and rules. If reality as the ultimate arbiter ceases to exist then we raise ourselves so high that we become our own God, and our words are all the knowledge that is to know.
I have now the unenviable task to explain to you that Marxists and all collectivists do not understand the nature of knowledge, and if you are below 60 years old, you have been educated by them. They think they can build a civilization, but they do not grasp how knowledge has to be structured to become the tool that makes a civilization happen, and society to work. This occurred to me when I was working on the difference between knowledge and skills. The focus on skills instead of knowledge started during the 1960s. What they ended with, is to put children in a situation of an activity for which you have to use knowledge, but they haven't the knowledge. For example, if you want to learn mathematics you have to put yourself in the shoes of a mathematician, they say. The whole thing is just a play, an imitation game. All generations born after the 1960s have shallow knowledge. We have several generations with knowledge atrophy. They won't be able to pass on the knowledge required to manage our civilization, they already don't know how to enhance it nor to see the problem in front of them.
The knowledge atrophy is a dark place because the ability to be autonomous as an individual requires having as much knowledge as possible while respecting the society in which one lives. The only option for dysfunctional knowledge-related individuals is a collective, and the collectivists are aware of that.
Basic scientific reasoning remainder
Science knowledge is a network
In science, a hypothesis proven right takes the name of a theory. In common language, theory means a hypothesis. Therefore, to clear any confusion, you have to consider the theory of evolution as factual, as the scientists do. It means that it has been proven beyond reasonable doubts and integrated into a dense network of knowledge. If you want to deny the theory of evolution, you not only will have to put down each of its arguments but also knowledge from other fields that are linked to it: biology, psychology, genetics, medicine, archaeology, ethology, ethnology, history... If you have reached that point, I suggest you put down mathematics and physics. Everything is linked together, and the corollary to this is that you can't take just one element without denying a large part, if not the whole structure.
Practicing: social construction vs science
As science goes, there is another consequence. Any new theory which would explain life on earth will have to integrate the results of the theory of evolution. Again, this is simply a consequence of the structure of scientific knowledge. Naturally, if you already have put down the whole scientific edifice, you don't need to, but every society needs a theory of human nature, even a dysfunctional one. In literature, you build your reasoning, one argument is based on one another, and if someone puts down one of them, the whole edifice might fall. There is a domino effect. That's not the case in science. Each argument has its validation connected to all concepts related to it and they have their own validation, that's what produces the coherency and resilience of the whole edifice. No domino effect and that's why you have to take down most of the edifice piece by piece if you want to put down only one piece.
Social constructivists don't know why they're right
All people who deny the theory of evolution and who are not religious, haven't another theory, well, a functioning one. That's why they never focus on their theory, but on why other theories are false according to them. It also explains why they are constantly telling you why you're wrong, and never tell you why they are right. They can't because they don't know, and they don't know because knowledge is not a thing for them. The winner of the power struggles writes the truth, and don't forget, knowledge is a slave to the power struggles. What it means is that those who live by the power struggle to feel that they exist, build a world without real (not reliable) knowledge and truths.
On the so-called tyranny of science
"I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on - are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science." Richard Feynman (1966 meeting of the National Science Teachers, USA).
Fifty years later, the unscientific world has become a world of primitive beliefs, in which the four elements (water, earth, wind, and fire) have returned to replace the elementary particles and forces as the primary explanation of all things. Vulcan, the planet of the people of logic has been destroyed (star trek movie, 2009), and the universe is saved by 'The fifth element', a feminine spirit that complements the four elements (movie, 1997). All over the western world happen manifestation of the cult of the end of the world and they say that science backs them. They are so confused that they don't understand what the science of their ancestors was all about. For them, there is some sort of machine called science and they have no idea how it works. They only see that it is meant to produce truths and that people accept them as factual. They don't even try to understand why and they are even unable to make reverse engineering on that machine. They believe that what they think is the truth, therefore it is scientific and what they think is what they feel, that's what a reasoning is, they have been taught. They are only capable of analogies because they do not understand what is behind the words, only the surface of things (Essentialism is the general reasoning behind it and a large chapter is devoted to it). I wonder if people can still understand the quotation of Richard Feynman, I'm quite sure, most can't.
Science, the real one, with proofs, facts, and being able to change his mind, is only perceived as a tyranny for the people of primitive thinking. They can't sort things out while science can, but at the same time, they refuse to leave their beliefs. Now that they have taken over the western world, they call science their truths and ask everybody to bow. Science, as they define it, has truly become a tyranny. The end of the world, they profess, is only about the use of the fear of death to rally people to their primitive belief. In fact, their belief is a product of their fear of not being able to continue the civilization they have inherited, and that protects them. Their cult of the end of the world is an acknowledgment of the fall of their civilization because they are unfit for the task. Without the way of civilization which imposes a way of thinking, their mind has fallen back to its default settings. They are what we were long ago. As I shall explain many times, civilization is not about building cities, even if it's a part of it but to save us from our primitive mind, which can't produce a correct map of the world, of reality.
Socrates - I know that I know nothing
We always present Galileo's work as the first step to modern scientific thinking, which initiates the use of experiments to decide if a hypothesis of our own is valid or not. As Richard Feynman put it in one of his public lectures "If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science". He's right, and that's a heritage of Galileo's work, but there is something that is so implicit, that we forgot its importance to make the whole edifice of knowledge viable, and that's something we owe to Socrates. For every statement, every hypothesis, every thinking you have to consider the possibility that you are wrong and it has nothing to do with being polite or open-minded. It must be carved in your flesh, in your mind, in your soul it must be part of what defines you as a human being. The demonstration is very easy. If you do not recognize the possibility of being wrong, I mean truly, then you affirm that you know everything that there is to know. When presented that way, people say that of course, they don't know EVERY-thing. You don't get it. Not only you don't know everything, but you don't know when you don't know. It means that even for the most obvious things, you can't be 100% sure. Those who tell you that science has settled the question on a specific topic and add that from now those who oppose its truth are deniers of reality, not only lie but, oppose the principle of science. Only Gods can know what they don't know because they know all the things in the universe and all the paths that the future can take.
This is one of the basic concepts of science that the false prophets got wrong, they see science as a set of absolute truths. That's why they can't stop trying to use it to provide the famous "Science back up our claims" to close all debates. Any civilized citizen has made his own the knowledge that he knows nothing regarding what he already knows and therefore that he can be wrong. This allows him to progress, become a better person, and build a better society. Without that particular teaching from Socrates, we're primitives. The non-civilized will then attack and use the Socratic position as proof that there is no truth (like the post-modernists). Truth is a multidimensional network of properties that don't belong to the inner world of the individual, but to an external world that we call reality and upon which we have no power. The non-civilized can't see that network because they link knowledge to language and the definition of words to emotions which have only one dimension. There is no network of truth in their world, just the positive feeling of the sound of words.
For the primitives, truth is given by their emotions, not acquired by reason. How can emotions be wrong? They never are, because it's what defines the primitives, it's existential. To accept that their emotions are truths is an existential statement against which you can't argue. Truth is also given by the herd, group intelligence is never wrong they said compared to the individual. Truth is given by an omniscient elite they won't dare to question, in fact, they have a slave mentality because they are afraid to be autonomous. When they said 'our truth' they mean a truth defined by a human whether it is through emotions, the herd, or the elite. When they say 'there is no truth' they mean truth external to humans and therefore independent of humans. Truths exist only if they can control them.
The common understanding of a consensus is often that of a compromise and the political compromise, which is the worse, is given as an example. This has nothing to do with a scientific consensus, unless if what drives you as a scientist is a political and personal ideology. What is a scientific consensus? The business of science is to get to the truth, a good enough truth that allows us to cure disease, make planes fly, heat our house, send men to Mars, etc. When two groups have different views on what constitutes the truth on a particular question and have run out of arguments, they make a consensus. It's the acknowledgment, by both sides, that they haven't enough knowledge to settle their argument and it's a commitment to get that knowledge.
The common consensus is a game of power while the consensus in science is a battle for knowledge. It doesn't mean that two groups of scientists cannot fight to the 'death' for their ideas, like with the theory of light (a 200 years battle to determine if it is a wave or a particle), but they all agree that the upper purpose of any scientific fight is for knowledge, to get to the truth.
The 'treason of the intellectuals' by Julien Benda
Those who record the knowledge of our civilization
The 'Treason of the intellectuals' by the French Philosopher, Julien Benda in 1927, is often quoted by English and German scholars since the end of WWII because, like F.A Hayek, he saw something that we just have begun to understand. The French title is 'La trahison des clercs'. A clerk (clerc in French) is associated with someone that is a well-educated person, usually a literary person, but not restricted to. We should use it as someone who records the knowledge of civilization, to which he doesn't take part because he needs to be impartial in the affair of this world.
The first words of the book are a quote. "The world is suffering from lack of faith in a transcendental truth." (Charles Renouvier). Knowledge is the truth of human civilization that transcends individuals and societies. It is the responsibility of the clerks to protect that transcendence and this is precisely what they failed to do. It is that abandonment that Julien Benda denounced.
Julien Benda's book is of great importance because it links the 18th and the 19th by the enormous changes that happened, and then the 19th and the 20th, for its consequences. While the book is not easy to read (lack of a clear organization, constant overlapping of the author's explanations) the knowledge it contains creates many links to our past, which are needed to understand our present situation. From a scientific point of view, I would describe his work as a meta-analysis of a century of philosophical ideas in connection with political and social changes and we are facing the dire consequences of those changes. Something went wrong in the 18th century and we took the wrong turn. We can't undo what was done but we need to understand our error to get a new bearing.
The treason and its dire consequences
The treason happened when the clerks decided to play the game of political passions. The first consequence is that they abandon impartiality, to become partial therefore they took sides. This means that some knowledge would have been erased and if it can't be done, it will be fought. The end of impartiality expresses also the abandonment of reason for passion, which the author described as feeling with the need for immediate action. The second is that they bring their political passions into their activities, the painters, the writers but also the historians, the philosophers to mention a few will influence their field according to their passions. Culture and later the temples of knowledge (universities) will be transformed to serve their political passions. The third is to abandon the universal for the particular and the rejection of the love of the spiritual for the practical. The author then mentions three secondary consequences. a) The abandonment of the right of reason for the right of custom history. This is known to us today as cultural relativism. b) The rejection of experience, that what has proved to work for a society, for experimental politics like 'what is just' without any knowledge of its viability. This is a rejection of a necessary level of conservatism for what is known today as social justice with roots in Romanticism ideology and J.J. Rousseau's thesis on education. c) Political forms should be adapted to "man as he is and always will be". The author didn't tell from whom the quote is, but explained its meaning. Men are believed to be "unsocial and bloody and therefore eternally needing systems of coercion and military institutions". In modern words, men are in need of an authoritarian centralized state, to bring order, which the author opposes. Julien Benda then continues that the new clerks teach the love of the group to which a man belongs, denying individualism which he characterized as "the one who seeks truth by himself" contrary to the collective in which the truth will be given to him.
They also teach the right of the numerous therefore the right of the stronger. Gone is the transcendence of truth. There is also a change in the virtues that are taught. Courage, while always needed by men is now the first virtue following Nietzsche's philosophy and not Socrates who put wisdom and temperance as first virtues. They also value honor with the aim of glory and not respect. Harshness, which is needed to succeed, goes now with the cult of success. A cult that validates the path of the warrior instead of the man of justice, to seek success by any means necessary. This is the teaching of Zarathustra "Be hard, be pitiless, and in this way dominate". Charity is seen as a degradation of the soul. Mr. Benda has an interesting take on contempt. The author explained that French writers like Flaubert or Baudelaire (Famous french romantic authors of the 19th) have developed the use of contempt to harm what/who they despise, to do real damage. It has taken the name of 'cancel culture' in our times, to forbid any validity to any idea that does not embrace the political color of the day, which is collectivism a denial of natural laws, and human nature. Three others words are often used nowadays to describe the feelings of the intellectual left: Disdain, resentment, and envy.
Instincts instead of intelligence
While Julien Banda insists, rightly so, that the consequences of the betrayal were to promote the creation of the idea of nations as a race, and the German better than any other group have applied that ideology (starting around the 1810s with Fichte and later Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Those are the philosophers of the blood, the nation, the state, the law of history, of irrationality, instincts, the will to live, and the existence of an eternal enemy as a necessity to exist). He also saw the bigger picture that something more important and deeper is at work. By doing so he is a precursor of Popper, Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Sowell. I quote "During the fifty years (1870-1920), especially in France ... a whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense, as opposed to the intelligence), and has proclaimed it in the name of the practical spirit, because the instinct, not the intelligence knows what we ought to do - as individuals, as a nation, as a class - to secure our own advantage." This is collectivism, a modern form of primitive tribalism.
What means Benda's message for the 21st century?
All that Benda has observed a century ago can still be observed today, perhaps even more, and transcend all collectivist schools of thought, in particular those of the 20th century. Something much deeper is going on.
In his 1946 edition, he added a large preface following the events of WWII. His take on totalitarianism is clear-minded, like most writers of that period (Popper, Arendt, Hayek,...), and sheds light on our actual situation. Beyond, he explained that the intellectuals wanted the breakdown of the actual order. He goes as far as affirming that the french elites wanted Hitler to win the war, and the communists were working hand in hand with the French political right-wing. He then explains that beyond political categories, they wanted the return of the Spartan model, a closed society as explained by Karl Popper. One that rejects natural laws and with the existence of a unique reality, one that favors magical thinking over reason. This is a society based around an elite and best describe by Plato's ideal/perfect city. The Spartans model brings us back to the war between Sparta and Athens, and the elite of Athens helping secretly Sparta to win the war (déjà-vu). Each city represented two visions of the world, of nature which is the explanation of a closed and open society by Popper, but it is also about human nature itself, which is described by Thomas Sowell. A constrained vision, which considers human nature is flawed and needs to be constrained by the society (laws) to work at its best (This is the open society of Athens which give us democracy, the American revolution). And an unconstrained vision that does not consider human nature has limitations or flaws. This implies that the right education (social engineering) will allow the citizens to fit in the perfect city (this is the path of Sparta, the closed society, Rousseau, the French Revolution, Communism, and Nazism).
Benda observed not only a shift in the meaning of words, concepts, and values but a degradation. He explicitly tells us that we are moving away from intelligence to return to our instincts. This is about clear or proper thinking, let explore this. It started much sooner than the 19th century and the french revolution and J.J. Rousseau are examples when thinking goes wrong. In the 17th century, René Descartes was still writing about good thinking with his book "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences". The English world is all about the enlightenment, but blind to an event prior to its happening that shaped it, the conflict between ancients and moderns that raged in France. Let put aside the pride of nations to focus on civilization. France was an important country during the 17th and its scholars were imitating the Greek intellectual and artistic tradition because they thoughts it was the highest form that human beings could reach. Jean Racine as a play writer is such an example. The conflict was about to leave behind the Greek model, and that's what happened and soon after the enlightenment rose. Of course, it took decades, and from nation to nation there are overlapping, but that step was necessary for the enlightenment.
When we look at our situation in Europe today something went wrong. We had problems and at some point, we decided to take a turn, but we took the wrong turn. Instead of decreasing, our problems increase to the point that Europe started to become the home of two populations with no common ground, not even a history on which they agree. Here is my understanding (note). There were two enlightenments. One led by England and later the American nation, the other by France, and when its intellectual power was destroyed with its revolution, Germany took over. Fundamentally both countries were the head of the counter-enlightenment and formally that's what Benda describes. This is clearly expressed by Thomas Sowell with his thesis of the two visions - unconstrained (French revolution, Marx and the communist revolutions) and constrained (American Revolution).
The unconstrained model becomes the home of France as soon as the revolution (1789), and the latter, Germany, in the first half of the 18th century. However, America which became extremely powerful was advocating the constrained model. Under the economical protection of America, the European countries adopted the constrained model, but beneath cultural changes were happening to make the unconstrained model a reality, which happened in the 1960s all over the western world, America included. When we look at how the world is governed today, we can only lament over the terrible mistakes made. 1) The unconstrained model is not a political model called left, socialist, communist,... but a civilization model that does not tolerate any other model. The tolerance theory of K. Popper is clear: if you tolerate intolerant people, they win and tolerance disappears. We had no future in their model from the beginning to bargain and compromise was a death sentence to our values. 2) it is not a model led by the people for the people but by an elite for the elite. The textbook of the revolution of the unconstrained model is not 1984 from G. Orwell, but the "Republic" and the ideal city of Plato, led by the king philosopher (the corporation), that's what the people behind that model want to achieve, and tyranny is part of the cycle described by Plato. 3) We let them redefine the language, and this was a masterpiece of the French and German philosophers and intellectuals. If the English world is the master of ideas, the masters of languages, the use of words to bewitch the readers has its origin in France and Germany. Liberty is to follow the orders of the state. Free speech is to say what the group says, you don't exist as an individual. Equality is equity, everybody must resemble all others. Fraternity is not to be willing to help others but to be responsible for whatever might happen to them, with the intended consequence that only the state can take action. 4) The spreading of civilization become colonization, and the war between the unconstrained and constrained model became decolonization wars. But in their mind (de)colonization has not much to do with taking away the colonies, but to impose another civilization model, which is a primitive one, the closed society. It is not only the territories that they decolonize but also the minds. From what? From the Greek and Christian legacy.
We, the civilized, made a terrible mistake. We misunderstood, and still are, the nature of the merchant model. We thought by bringing that model to the population they will become civilized in the Greek sense - Organize, democrat, individualist, mental discipline, love for knowledge, a sense of beauty, rule of laws, etc. Everything that the Greeks and later the Romans achieved is based on good thinking, to have a functioning brain that handles our nature and the nature of reality. For a short among of time we live in the illusion that it worked, but by Zeus, everyone can now observe firsthand how far we are from the most basic good thinking. Let's talk about this and we shouldn't be ashamed of what it involves because it has provided the most incredible advancement the human civilization could ever dream of. We must learn from our errors, and the first is to be convinced that we need a new civilization project while continuing the one of the Greeks and those who precede them. The enlightenment was a continuity of the Greek project, not a new civilization project (note). This means to refocus on the Enlightenment will not solve our situation and many things that's what we should do, unfortunately.
One of the great discoveries of the Greeks, and perhaps the greatest of all, was to have understood the importance of good thinking, and to get practice is difficult. Behind the expression good thinking, there are elements to consider, the description of good thinking, its properties so that we can recognize it, and the origin of the need for good thinking. Good thinking is the ability to produce reliable ideas and this goes with tools to test how valid those ideas are. Socratic dialogue and logic are part of it, but also a systemic approach to knowledge which led them to develop a taxonomy of knowledge. They tried to generalize any knowledge with which they came in contact, and this led to more discoveries and categorization of knowledge. The whole allows a better control of the knowledge you use and a better thinking. This was unique in the history of human civilization. It was not only the knowledge but the economy, military, and society organization that were impacted. To make the merchant model work and spread all over the world we needed that good thinking, or if you prefer a more adapted thinking to our cognitive functions so that we can exploit them fully.
The apparition of the merchant model and good thinking were no coincidence, but a necessity. Human society needs to evolve and the Greeks were the point of origin of that evolution. Why did we need those changes? The short answer is to release the pressure on human society due to population increase. We needed a new model and the Greeks were the ones to find the way to do it. My analysis is that we face a similar situation today, and our failure to provide the right solution, at least for now, explain why the world is falling apart and people losing their mind by rejecting good thinking. Good thinking allows the design of rules and processes which will produce systems in which people can function and live decently, that are stable generation after generation and able to adapt to external changes. Good thinking relies on truth (reality), impartiality (universality), self-criticism (control), mental discipline (to control your emotions to allow your cognitive functions to lead), and accepting having flaws (able to acknowledge errors to correct them).
Enlightenment which endorses the Greek legacy has been rejected by most populations on Earth and also by many Europeans, its heirs. The strong feelings of anti-Semitism, anti-men, anti-white are the expression of anti-intelligence, anti-reason, and anti-discipline of the mind. Intelligence, reason, and discipline of the mind are not expressions of some cultural identity, but aptitudes that need to be valued to allow human civilization to continue to flourish. That's what the Greek project was all about, to build civilization 2.0. Unfortunately, we assist in the revolt against proper thinking, and in that sad process, the identity of the civilized has been shattered. We're not moving forward but backward and gone also is the civilization project. All of this will have to be rebuilt, but we must not aim to rebuild the Greek city of Athens but to continue their journey and move to civilization 3.0 and with it to find a new project. The merchant model implicitly broadcasts modern thinking all over the world. Our next project will be to have a model of society that manages more population but also our resources while endorsing the lesson of the Greeks. Managing resources is not a human project, we must encapsulate it in another project and that will be to become a space civilization and our first base will be Earth (note 4). The institutions which are at the heart of all society today, are overwhelmed and can't function properly regarding the size of our population. The increase of efficiency does not follow the linear function of the increase of their size, but an asymptotic one which we have reached. We will have to move to self-ordered systems, which are independent of the number of people who use them. Institutions will not disappear but greatly reduced. The power and intellectual elite will have to respond to a moral authority that will respond directly to the people and have their own system of education.
Note 4: I know that everyone has their eyes on the Nasa and SpaceX programs, and Elon Musk of course. But the conquest of space, the next frontier, can not be at the core of a space civilization project it is a consequence of it, but not the cause of it. Why? The risk of complete failure of the colonization of space is very high. We need that the whole society, even the whole planet to be behind the project to reduce as much as possible the risks. To achieve this we need to optimize our society, and when done then the space program will have a much better chance.
The treason concern not only the intellectuals but also the power elite. What is going on for both? The particularity of the elites is that they can't reform themself because, as game theory teach us, they have the best strategy, and they believe that they have a Nash equilibrium, meaning that no matter the strategy the people will adopt in regard to the elite miss-treatment of the population and ill-thinking, it will not change their position, nor their outcome for the game, which is the highest they can get (in the mathematical sense, because of course life is no game). This position is summarized by the french elite by calling the common people, the "sans-dents" (English: without teeth), meaning they can't bide their master, or change the outcome of the game. The power elite never really make it to the Greek model. Silicon Valley is the true heirs of the 30 tyrants of Athens, who betrayed the people and reject the Marchant model (note 5). There were short periods in which they work for the people but most of the time they did not. What saved the people from living constantly under tyranny was the lack of coalition between the elites, but that's no more the case. As K. Popper explained the communist project fits much better the need for the power elite than of the workers. What is missing? They need a moral authority with full independent power. Independent here means a power that belongs to another system (Note 6). Regarding the intellectual elite, the treason is still going on even by those who denounce it, in particular the academics. How so? The universities have had moral authorities with religion and kings, but since the enlightenment they have none, and they refuse to have a new one. They believe to be able to be their own authority. It's not how it works and certainly not to them to decide on that matter. The lack of a moral authority for the academics explains why they were taken over by the collectivists and why they can deny that fact without being seriously challenged.
Note 5: One may say that Silicon Valley is a product of the merchant model, of market and capitalism! The economic model we have has a signature. The distribution of wealth follows a Pareto distribution, but that distribution is exacerbated by those who are at the top to get more wealth with the aim to get more power and impose their model, their game. The difference between a natural Pareto distribution and an exacerbated one is the disappearance of the middle class. It is the middle class that redistributes the best the wealth. Without the middle class, wealth and power inequalities increase to the expend of the people, not the elite.
Note 6: An efficient way for the elite who will be the next generation of the elite is cooptation. They choose those who will join them. This way they are sure that the people who join them share the same frame of mind assuring the reproduction of their model of thinking and life.
Why is this discussion about the elite (power and intellectual) that important? In 2021, 111 people have died from hypothermia in their homes, in the most wealthy and technologically advanced country in the world - Texas, USA. They had no electricity during winter, not because they were poor but because the system failed to provide electricity. The real cause is the treason of the elite and their bad thinking which leads them to not be able to build a system to provide the required electricity. You have to understand that not all ideas are good ideas, that there is not an infinite number of ideas in which you can always take the one that pleases you while expecting that things will continue to run. Even if you choose the right ideas, there is not an infinite combination of those that make things run. A system is a complex construction based on ideas, and there is a very small set of those that will work together to make a system work, to provide electricity when it is most needed, to provide food, etc. It is the responsibility of the elite to provide that system, and they need good thinking, in order to select the right ideas. Our actual elite is no more capable of good thinking and therefore to provide such a system. We have the concept of crimes against humanity, but we don't have crimes against the system, a crime against civilization. What if, by your bad thinking, the food supply system, the energy system, or the health system collapse? It's a crime more terrible than a crime against humanity, but we can't judge it because we don't value good thinking.
Science is a religion, they say...
The scientific method and the scientific thinking that goes with it are the best tools we have to guide and check our thinking, and they say science is a religion. People need to know where it comes from and what purpose it has so that doubt will not weaken their understanding of the world when they use science or told that it is a religion. Furthermore, it is the main tools of the elite (the ones who want to build a human civilization), which allows them to produce and manage knowledge of civilization and to build systems in which people can live, and yet they are the first today to tell you that science is a religion or to use it that way to manipulate you.
Collectivists believe that truth is a social construction, which implies that it is human-related and relative. We, the civilized consider that truth exists independently from us and universal to every human and living creature in this universe. The reason why they believe in social construction is that they reject the idea that they are natural and man-made laws, they confuse both. They believe that they can produce their own natural laws which K. Popper considers to be the main property of magical thinking. That's why collectivist are primitive but also collectivist, the truth can exist only if the group exist and therefore you can exist only through the group.
They consider science to be a religion because religions follow their truths given by their God, and they are universal (Collectivists use the word absolute instead of universal because they see truths as relatives, and for them, absolute is the opposite word of relative). The truth of science being universal as the truth of religion (usually they refer to the Christian religion when they say science is a religion)), then, in their mind, science is a religion. It is interesting to mention that the lack of universality also leads to a denial of human nature.
"Science is a religion" is used by the collectivist in two ways. The first is to deny non-collectivist to make universal claims, or claim about nature and about reality. The second is to use science as a religion to manipulate the people. But it's not science they practice because they feel entitled to manipulate data and true scientific reasoning, and they will label "denier" anyone who opposes them. Blind as they are to their own limited view they do not understand that by calling someone a "denier" they precisely broadcast to the world that they are not practicing science, but religion. Science constantly tests itself, even old truths. It is also important to know that a scientific consensus is not about deciding what is true, that's a political consensus, but to agree on a lack of certainty, to put on hold decision and to continue to search for knowledge that will decide what the truth is. Humans do not decide what the truth of this world is, that's reality. To be sane a human being must accept that he does not shape reality.
Note: When I say "My" or "I", I want to make explicit that I do not dilute or hide behind the name of others tinkers, my responsibility for my ideas. This is a reaction to the intellectual game of my country, France. Every educated person needs to have a large bag of quotes of great thinkers to hide what they believe in. At the end of the day, they believe in nothing and no conclusion can ever be drawn to move forward and solve problems. This is not the mark of a civilized mind, but of a decadent one.
Note: I was tired of people who live in a Museum they call their country and are themselves a piece of that museum. Now I'm exasperated. Exasperate to hear that nothing will ever be more beautiful than that piece of Bach. Why would anyone make a statement that forbids you to have a future, to live in what was realized by our ancestors, or that Roman Theater in the city of Orange (France) that people left in ruin while still playing in it? They seem to enjoy being a ruin themselves. There is no respect of the Roman civilization by letting that beautiful theater in ruin because, the first decision that the Roman will take if they were to come back, would be to rebuild it as new. That's what they will call being civilized, not living in ruins and rationalizing to enjoy it.
What does evolution say that so many reject?
Do not forbid to ask questions
If you think that the best way to answer questions related to evolution, is to forbid them from being asked, I would not suggest you to think about it again, but to stop thinking because you're not capable of it.
But why would you want to do that? Because you don't know how to answer the question of inborn inequalities, and even if you do, you don't know how to live with that answer. There is an interesting parallel with an explanation about equality given by Thomas Sowell in his book "The social quest for cosmic justice". I quote "One of the most thoughtless and dangerous consequences of pursuing the mirage of equality ... has been a pervasive reaction against all forms of authority or even social differentiation". He observed that calling everyone based on his/her first name is a way to avoid dealing with the implication of authority. The rejection of the natural laws of biology follows a similar mental mechanism to that of the example of authority given by Sowell. If you can't deal with something natural then erase it or forbid others to deal with it, especially if they can upset you. That's not what I'm up to here, so make up your mind and decide to continue your reading or not.
There is a scientific definition for races
I will let the biologist Jerry A.COYNE do the lesson. He wrote the book "Why evolution is true" in which you will find that lesson. The book is supported by no less than Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, two of the most important and well-known thinkers of the 21st century. I quote:
"The existence of visible different human types is obvious but there's no bigger minefield in human biology than the question of race. Most biologists stay as far away from it as they can. A look at the history of science tells us why. From the beginning of modern biology, racial classification has gone hand in hand with racial prejudice."
"In response to these distasteful episodes of racism, some scientists have overreacted, arguing that human races have no biological reality and are merely socio-political 'constructs' that don't merit scientific study. But to biologists, race - so long as it doesn't apply to humans! - has always been a perfectly respectable term. Race (also called sub-type or ecotype) are simply populations of a species that are both geographically separated and differ genetically in one or more traits. There are plenty of animal and plant races, sparrow populations that differ in size and song, and plant races that differ in the shape of their leaves"
"Following this definition, Homo sapien clearly does have races. And the fact that we do is just another indication that humans don't differ from other evolved species"
Why evolution is true, Chapter: What about us, by Jerry A. COYNE.
Time for practicing the definition: 1) A person can identify the continent from which someone originated with a high level of certainty by simply looking at some visual characteristics. Skin, eyes shape, nose, hairs... does it fit the definition? Continents are geographically separate thus allowing specific traits to appear, and the visual characteristic can be assimilated to traits. The definition seems to confirm people's ability to identify someone's race. It's not perfect because it's only visible traits, but there are also many non-visible traits. 2) Continents are not the only possibility, islands will do too because separated means geographically isolated from each other for a sufficient among of time. You can identify Japanese people (Japan Island) from Chinese people (part of the Asian continent).
The list of forbidden knowledge
The list below makes no value judgment. Each entry of that list is considered as factual by scientists. There are dozens of books on the topic, sadly not translated in most European languages. The scientific works that have provided us with all those valuable information to enhance the organization of the society are never cited nor mentioned in the MSM (Main Stream Media), or at any university by the humanities. Most highly educated adults are completely unaware that those discoveries have been made and have become mainstream science.
A - I.Q exists and is the most well-defined and used tool in psychology.
B - I.Q is roughly defined by 80% by our genes and 20% by our education.
C - The average I.Q between men and women is the same
D - The distribution of I.Q between men and women is different. The lower the I.Q the more men but also the higher the I.Q the more men.
E - Men are naturally interested in things and women in people.
F - The more equalitarian a society, the greater the gender differences in activities
H - They are differences in I.Q between races
I - The philosophical question Nature vs Nurture is resolved. Nature wins. The genes define mostly what we are but not all.
J - Knowledge is the key to education. Skills are knowledge-dependent. Knowledge calls for more knowledge.
E) This has a huge consequence that we have just started to observe. Men have a role, not a function as a builder and caretaker of civilization. The status and function of knowledge are different for men and women. We find here the main source for the reason for the destruction of universities and schools as a temple of knowledge and a place to learn to use reason.
G) Gender comes from a grammar differentiation between masculine and feminine. Basically, it comes from the language and that's very insightful. As we will see in the chapter about Essentialism, there are people for whom language is all the knowledge that there is. They do not use reality as a reference point, but the language and they link words to their emotions, they do not use reason to question reality.
H) Collectivists see differences as inequalities. This wrong evaluation of that knowledge makes them unable to use it and to solve problems in which that knowledge plays a key role. For example the academic achievement of black people. Their solution is to put everyone to the level of the average black person. This not only put down the whole education system, but by doing so they fell to recognize the ability of some black people to be smarter than white people, or other groups like Asians. This is astonishing and racist to the core. Thomas Sowell is smarter than me, and I would have been glad to have him as a teacher. Smart people want smart people to learn, and when they are educated the smarts have to help others to build and manage infrastructures in which everyone can have a good life, that's all that matters.
Note: I recommend a new book by Charles Murray, 'Human diversity - The biology of gender, race, and class'. While some parts of the book are for readers with some scientific background (high-school level will do) other parts are for all public and explain clearly the knowledge we have on those topics and where it comes from. Of course, if you have already dismissed scientific thinking, you know already everything there is to know, spare your money.
Knowing what happened in Nazi and communist regimes, based on rather the misused or the rejection of evolution, it is necessary to recall some basic reasoning rules. Any country that rejects that list does not recognize science as a means to acquire knowledge. That being said and if we put aside religious beliefs and even the blank slate ideology, why would one reject the theory of evolution?
The theory of evolution is perceived as unfair, and that's an understatement. This explains the psychological distress (literally) many have to accept it. It's understandable but lying and adopting deceiving discourses to escape its acknowledgment, can't be tolerated and yet that precisely what's happening. Public discourses follow gender-neutral and 'raceless' guidelines, textbooks are rewritten, conferences blocked, and research forbidden. You can't replace nature and if you try, it won't end well. Weaknesses given by nature can be observed very early in life, but strengths, also given by nature, need to be revealed. People who do not help you to develop your strengths are not your friends, they only use your weaknesses to gain power.
The racist 'raceless' guideline
The collectivists have rewritten the definition of racism. Racism is defined through the power you have in society. White people are therefore racists by definition, but not black people. The same applies to sex. Sexism can only be done by men, not by women because they are looking for power like men. Therefore misogyny is real but not misandry. This allows us to write laws that create inequality while pretending the contrary. Don't try to look at some coherency. There is only one point on which we are sure with those new definitions, they reject that race and sex are biologically real. Isn't that convenient? From a political point of view, it allows the collectivists to rewrite definitions according to their needs, for example, to depict their political opponent as bad people, and in the process giving a moral orientation to the definition. Can we prove that it is arbitrary? Absolutely and it's very easy. Sexism against men is very high right now all across the western world. The motto is to hear all women because they speak the truth about the reality of their life. However, when women stand up and defend men to speak about the inhumanity of the system against men, they suddenly lost their rights to be heard and are portrayed as the puppet of the men. Their 'sickness' has even a name, they suffer from internalized patriarchy. The definition given by the collectivists depends on the observer and not on the properties of an object or a concept, that's why it is arbitrary. Beyond that power game, there is a way of thinking about the world this has enormous consequences on how to build the society and one of the causes of the actual big divide of the western world and beyond. More on that in the chapter about essentialism.
The definition of race does not matter. You don't need it.
A few years ago, I saw an interview with a Swedish biologist about the state of science regarding the categorization of population. The interviewer asked him about the view of American biologists on race. He answered, "Why this obsession about race?" It was a misleading answer, but also a very insightful one. The misleading part is to put motives and emotions on what is a scientific question. The insightful part is that if you have no specific reason (professional, research, forensic...) to deal with races, then you don't need to think about it. In fact, nobody does. Why?
Being lectured by Charles Darwin
For any regular person, race doesn't matter, because it's useless. You can't extract useful racial information from one individual due to the genetic variability inside a race, or if you prefer, an individual is not representative of his race. Charles Darwin already figured this out 160 years ago: "but the mere existence of individual variability ..., though necessary as the foundation for the work, help us but little in understanding how species arise in nature". What accounts for species, also accounts for races. But then, how do you find any utility for races? By using statistics you can extract information useful to understand, for example, the dynamic of population or specific indigenous diseases. In that situation, you work on large data sets. You use advanced mathematics and have access to computational power. That's professional work and not what everyone has to deal with daily.
Now I will explain my statement that if you think in terms of race, you're a racist. If you constantly have negatives thoughts on someone or a group, chances are high that you will react negatively, even aggressively, when you have to interact with this person or group. When our brain is overly focused on a thought, it will change the way you see that person or group related to that thought. That's the meaning of the sentence: If you think in terms of race, you're a racist. Your brain will put forward the concept of race to explain any situation or interaction before any other legitimate concept. This applies not only to those who call for the existence of a superior race but also to those who call for the non-existence of races. They are so obsessed that they see racism everywhere. They are so focused on races that the sole solution they come up with is to apply racial discrimination and in the process to develop hate toward a race. Some North American universities have started to ask white students to go through a mandatory re-education process to undo their unconscious racial biases. Most people never think in terms of race, because they don't need to and that's exactly how it should be.
Ayn Rand, the American philosopher, born Russian recalled how the soviet citizens were looking for their proletarian roots, as the Germans did for their Aryan roots, during the 1930s and 1940s. Proletarian was considered as much as a race as Aryan. As I explained at the very beginning of the letter, people understand race as a group difference. In a civilized society, you seek to make yourself a name, to build roots, not to get one from the past. Knowing where you come from is sane, defining your future from your origin is not. The past cannot define the future and if you believe it then you have none, there is nothing to work for because everything has already been written. There is no future in the collective, just a permanent state of immobility.
Testing racism, two hypotheses
The more driven by your instinct the more racist you are, the more driven by your cognitive function the less racist you are. Since there is a direct correlation between the use of instincts (resp. cognitive function) and being a primitive (resp. being civilized), the more racist you are the more primitive you are, and the more civilized you are the less racist you are. The level of racism of society should reflect on its level of civilization in the sense of its acceptance of human nature, and randomness the rejection of magical thinking, and the use of its cognitive functions.
How do you use that knowledge to evaluate a society? First thing first, you have to use statistics, because only through statistics you can have a reliable picture. This means that you cannot use an accident no matter how tragic it is to prove anything, in fact, you have to forbid yourself to do so. If you failed then you would have proven you're racist because you have let your emotions take over your cognitive functions and extrapolate from one case the sin of a whole society. There are markers that can help to evaluate how primitives a society is, the collectivist red lines I wrote will greatly help.
The second hypothesis is to use the trolley problem. Effectively, If the trolley problem expresses a variance in our moral judgments, there should be a discrepancy between racist and non-racist answers, thus we should be able to use that measure, to assess racism within society. (note I use the Trolley problem later, to explain the discrepancy between the atrocities committed by the communists and the level of emotions it provokes, or the lack thereof.
Evolution, the second scientific revolution
The scientific revolution started with Copernicus and Galileo by removing us from the center of the universe. This is known as Heliocentrism. The harsh lesson we had to learn is that we are a part of a whole, and its existence doesn't depend on our own. If we disappear, the Whole will still be there, meaning that there is a reality independent from the one our brain can build. That revolution was not only a knowledge revolution but a psychological one, how we perceive ourselves in the universe. Regarding knowledge, it was the starting point for which all knowledge must be validated by a process independent from our thinking: experimentation is, of course, the core of that new process. From a psychological point of view, it is about our narcissism, but not only.
What I call the second scientific revolution which started with Charles Darwin, is to accept that we are a species among many others, we don't command natural elements, and we do not procreate ourselves. We are a product of those.
The link between the twos is that both are a blow to our narcissism. The universe was not created for us, and as a species, we have no special power to command nature. We have to accept ourselves with our strengths and weaknesses. The failure to do that has largely contributed to the life-thirsty 20th century.
The Christians had and still have a hard time with the first revolution, but when it comes to the second revolution progress has been made through the reinterpretation of the scripture. For the Marxist, the second revolution is a bridge too far. A reinterpretation won't work because its roots are precisely based on the opposition to natural mechanisms. That opposition to the second scientific revolution is a dark place. Sorry, I meant to say: THE DARK PLACE of all dark places. Did I speak out loud?
Marx has open the door to legitimate the denial of nature and with it human nature by adopting his philosophy. People do not understand what that denial really means. If we put aside the most intelligent and educated, the people of the collective do not know what reality is. They have another definition that is composed of their emotions and then submitted to the collective, and if there is a consensus it becomes reality. To accuse someone that he deny reality, one must have access to that reality and they do not. They have no feedback loop mechanism to probe the reality and to get information from it. That's why books like "The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature" have no impact. The book is appreciated but has no impact to curb the trend of creating a new reality, the one defines by the collective. To create that feedback loop with reality which is what we call reason, one must first accept that there are natural laws on which he has no power and to which he must bow. Gravity does not forgive, to mention one. This is the magical world of the children and we as adults have abandoned our duty to teach them to accept that reality, not to fabric one that will leave them in that childish world of emotion and whishes. When I have a dialogue I discuss what reality is, my facts come from that reality and my reasoning can be checked by that reality, but that's not what the collectivists think. Facts are emotional statements and reasonings any assemblage of words emotionally compatible with the emotional facts. When you oppose their facts you don't oppose an understanding of reality but their very existence. We are an existential threat, and they will never accept reality and natural laws, therefore they understand the world as a "them vs us", with all the blood that comes with it and Marx has legitimate that position and that's why the opposition of the second revolution is the Dark place of all dark places.
Back to the Christians. The reason why they have access to reality is linked to the teaching of evilness. They learn that evil exists and that they can do evil things themselves. The consequences of evilness are grounded in reality and observed by all. To see yourself as one of its agents implies having a feedback loop to that reality. The social justice warriors which are the agents of evilness are incapable to see themselves as bad people, no matter how height the pile of corps is and the smell of their burning (at the end of WWII, the German started to burn the prisoners in mass and in the Nurnberg trial they all have pled not guilty). Another reason is that God can be assimilated as an external point of reference and provide a door to reality, but only a few have a personal experience with God, but all of us have had one with evilness.
What I'm getting at is the problem of the reasoning quality. What does it mean? The second revolution is rejected because we didn't assimilate the first. While no one disputes anymore that Earth orbits around the Sun, the first revolution came also with reason and a way of reasoning that shook how we build knowledge, and what to make of it. Essentially it is about to test the validity of a reasoning. If the validation failed, no matter how smart your reasoning is, you're wrong, and you have to adapt. You have to take your responsibilities, and you can't shield yourself by a laconic: I disagree. You can't disagree with the theory of evolution as you can't disagree with gravity or the second law of thermodynamics. If you do, it's not the same world and certainly not the same society. However you may test them, but that something else. You do not engage in a denying process, but to gain knowledge. Back to reasoning. A reasoning means that you can visualize each of its steps, how it relates to other reasoning, and how they interact by a feedback loop. That you're able to understand clearly the conclusion and its consequences and to accept to apply them. We need to teach people how to organize a reasoning and the rules for producing valid ones. In the same way, we need to call out logical fallacies, slogans, and concept restrictions for what they are, brain hacks, and if it is what you're up to then you don't have good intentions. Mental slavery is your business.
As far as we know, social constructivists are aware of the complete failure of their program, and that it can't pass the reality check, because they already have taken actions to get around the consequences of the theory of evolution. In STEM, for example, they can't get parity between men and women. There are many reasons, but one is very easy to understand: most women don't want to do work related to STEM, it's a personal choice. To get around that reality, they artificially apply quotas. Worse, men's candidatures are rejected, from STEM workplaces, only because they are men. Competences are no more used as valid criteria. Not only do we reduce the level of competence of our engineers and scientists, but we reject meritocracy and the hierarchical structure on which our society is built. It's also, authoritarian and they know it because they hide what they are doing, letting people think that meritocracy is still a thing in our society. It's gone. (Look at the examples below)
1) Harvard's race-based manipulation of SAT results
All universities around the world select their students and American universities, like Harvard, used an evaluation tool called the S.A.T (Scholastic Aptitude Test). There is a high correlation between I.Q and S.A.T, but I.Q is a taboo word like race, so everyone talks about SAT. Statistically speaking, Asian-Americans have an I.Q of 104 and, statistics being statistics, they top the SAT, followed by white Americans, Hispanic Americans, and black Americans. Harvard, like all universities in the occidental world, is left-leaning and wants to apply leftist ideas, especially: diversity. They applied a correction to the SAT results to step up the result of black students by 310 points and Hispanic students by 130 points, while at the same time decreasing the result of the Asian by 140 points. White Americans are used as the baseline for the calculation. The American left acknowledges the bonus points given and taken and by any standard, they applied racial evaluations, but they consider that it would be racist not to try to make the university more diverse. Harvard has been recently called out by the American federal justice department for practicing racial discrimination in its admission process against American Asian students. A lawsuit is following.
Diversity, which is aimed to be a countermeasure to racial segregation or privileges, implies to put in place ...(drum roll)... racial discrimination! Until the 1970s, there was another way to bring black-Americans to universities/colleges as the economist Thomas Sowell reminds us and for which I have dedicated a whole paragraph in another chapter. It doesn't matter. They don't care about the best practice, because those who advocate for diversity are worshiping a more important ideology: equity. It is the idea that the results, of our efforts and aptitudes, must be the same for all which is often stated as the equality of outcome. According to Jordan Peterson, equity is the most dangerous concept of the political left, and as such, is equivalent to the claim of race superiority by the Nazis.
2) The Struthof attempt to redefine the scientific definition of race
The definition I found in the museum (Concentration camp the Struthof) was "There is no human race because there are not enough genes to generate differences in our species that we would call races". For a layperson, I can imagine that the sentence looks like a scientific explanation, but when you have scientific training, you immediately spot an ideological statement disguised as a scientific one. They reject the concept when applied to humans, and Jerry Coyne warned us about it and explained the motivations, but political motivations are not science. According to their definition, there is a threshold beyond which there are human races. How many genes must that be and since every gene is not alike, which ones? You will find no biology textbooks to answer those questions because that's not how we determine race. We don't count the number of genes to talk about race with animals and plants. More importantly, we don't know which genes are involved, because we don't need them. This is a common error, and people have a hard time getting it. You don't need to know how a process is produced to describe how it works. You can do it by observing its results. For example, Isaac Newton didn't know where gravitation came from to produce his three laws, which have changed the world.
The error of the museum is that they try too hard. They try to disguise a political statement as a scientific definition, and they try to present it as common knowledge, while any scientist would have been cautious when dealing with such a matter. Not to mention that there is absolutely no necessity to engage in a race debate to pass on to the next generation the horror of concentration and extermination camps. You don't put people in camps with gas chambers, crematorium ovens, barbed wires, watchtowers, and soldiers ready to shoot anyone who tried to flee. It's inhuman. Period. They have taken a great risk to manipulate the mind of the visitor and what they have done is the equivalent of burning books. They try to make the real definition disappear and to replace it with their belief.
Bottom line. I do support the existent of that concentration camp to remember the evilness that each of us can accomplish in bad times, or suffer depending on which side we are on, but that political statement must go away.
Calling someone a 'racist' is a powerful statement that can destroy a life and for which there is no rightful defense. This tool is mostly used by the left for political and historical reasons against the right. They even developed an immune system, for any person who calls out a racist, can't be himself/herself a racist. This is paradoxical because they do not believe in Darwin's theory, and therefore in races. That's why they call you a racist, to tell the world that you use a misconceive concept to grant yourself some kind of superiority. But it is precisely the truthfulness of race that makes it such a powerful political tool and those who use it know full well. If races didn't exist, scientifically speaking, who would care?
4) The google bias of their anti-bias politic
During an interview, the American economist Eric Weinstein explained that most people were getting it wrong with Google's search engine. From a Google point of view, the search engine has no bias. On the contrary, they try to get rid of the biases. They teach their A.I algorithm to identify biases and then how to correct them. The reality is that the anti-bias program at Google is the reason why there is bias in the search result. Confuse?
For example, they consider that the overwhelming presence of white males in the history of physics is due to discrimination. When you look up for physicists, Google will add photos, works, and texts from non-male or non-white physicists. There is a slide problem, Google doesn't tell you what they are doing, and you have no reason to think that what is on the screen is not natural. It isn't!
The wrongdoing of Google is even greater than you could imagine. They reject the result that there are I.Q differences among ethnics (Murray- Herrnstein - 1994). They reject the spectrum explanation of the I.Q difference between men and women while having the same average. Men's I.Q is more widely distributed, which can be resumed by more dummies, but also more geniuses. Physics is really hard and demanding, intellectually speaking, which correlated with high I.Q. There are other differences like men are more attracted to things and women to people which, in STEM fields, has a huge impact.
In conclusion, Google's search engine results have biases. They know about it since they are based on a manipulation of data. That manipulation goes as far as to reject the theory of evolution.
5) C.E.R.N, the return of Lysenkoism
Alessandro Strumia, a high-profile CERN physicist, was suspended in October 2018 after giving a talk on sex differences and discrimination against men in science. While his presentation could have been more tactful, and he certainly had a motive, none of the data presented are contested by any scientist worldwide.
A remainder: CERN is the French acronym for: Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, in English, European Center for Nuclear Research. Its activities are mostly about discovering the foundation of matter. They are running the biggest piece of technology in the world right now with the LHC, a particle accelerator with a 27 km circumference.
Being a physicist is one of the most complex jobs today and regarding the cost of such technical installation, it doesn't take a genius to ask that we have the best people in the world working on it. If there is a place where we shouldn't care about sex, here it is. Furthermore, if there is a place where scientific disagreements should be answered by using the scientific method, again here it is, but that's not what's happening. Scientists know that Strumia has his data right and the reaction of the CERN was a déjà-vu. In fact, if we take all the scientists worldwide that have been sacked for pointing out the research on sex differences then our impression of déjà-vu, leads us straight to Lysenkoism.
You will find a large chapter dedicated to Lysenkoism. It's a dubious theory made by Lysenko that got the support of Stalin. Lysenkoism was far more than that, it was at the heart of the communist spirit, the hand by which capitalist science will be proven wrong. Lysenkoism was not a mere propaganda tool. People believed, it was true or had to, and the reason for that is explained by Thierry Wolton in his third book "A world history of communism". I quote:
"Lysenkoism is the ultimate weapon of the socialist camp on the ideological battlefront, which draws the line between the Marxists and the others, between the good and the bad people, the friends and foes. It's war."
Lysenkoism is an ideological uniform. The parity rule based on the denial of sex differences, itself based on the denial of evolution is coming right from the belly of the blank slate in which man-made laws override natural laws. It's the cult that replaces Lysenkoism, but it has far more consequences. Lysenkoism was restricted to genetics and agriculture. The newly declared cult attacks all fields of science. This is a war on reality and human civilization is at stake. We all have suffered losses, family members, and friends. Of course, technically, there are alive, but we don't exist anymore in each other's reality.
People insist on using scientific evidence and rationality to convince those converted to the new cult. They failed to understand two facts: 1) they can't accept that highly intelligent colleagues could fall for that cult. It has to do with very primitive instincts that facts and logic can't beat. 2) Their constant attempts to bring up facts and evidence, while failing each time, is a psychological reaction to their inability to face a sad reality, the infrastructures that support science, universities, and research labs, have fallen, the CERN has fallen.
Nature vs nurture is a central question to philosophy because many other philosophical questions depend on its answer, and it has great consequences on our social organization. Nurture is the idea that everyone is the product (the result) of a lifetime accumulation of experiences. Nature follows the idea that there are external mechanisms, over which we have no grip, but will define us for the better or the worse.
The other theory of human nature
Nature is the answer to the 'Nature vs Nurture' question. It doesn't mean that we can't enhance ourselves with education, training, and will, but we are mostly the product of our genes. As Stephen Pinker pointed out, in his book, 'The Blank Slate', most intellectuals give the Nurture answer and therefore, use the Blank Slate as a theory of human nature. They do not reject explicitly the theory of evolution, but that what they do. When you tell young people that they can become whatever they want, you oppose evolution as the mean by which all species have become what they are. The evolution of species demands that there is genetic variability for all. Without variability, there is no evolution, we cannot be the same, and that accounts for physical as cognitive abilities.
I will share with you two ideas about the blank slate to shed a little more light on that concept. 1) While the blank slate is crucial to understand the causes to deny evolution, I've started to think that it is the product of another mechanism, and I name the ghost in the machine or dualism, the idea that the body and the mind are two separate elements. 2) the second idea is that the blank slate and ghost in the machine are very old beliefs. By old, I mean 40 000 years or more, we are talking about primitive thinking. Primitive does not equal simple, just, before civilization. That thinking has never left us which is basically to believe in the power of the brain over its environment and on other beings. Nowadays, sorcerers that master the art of the powers of the brain, have taken fancy names, like the Quantum psychotherapist medium. The success of fantasy in movies and fiction books is not linked to the stories but to the magical world, they describe. Haven't you heard about the adventures of a young sorcerer in the last 10 years? No, then where have you been? For many people, there are all kinds of energies all around us, we just have to learn to understand how they influence us, to know ourselves better. When the physicist Brian Cox stated on the BBC that Astrology was a load of rubbish, he had to apologize. He explained that astrology was not rubbish, but utter rubbish. That video was banned and nowhere to be seen. I'm giving you that example to demonstrate that primitive thinking is strong among our occidental fellows, not to mention the other parts of the world, but I do not support the idea that this belief is due to a misunderstanding of modern knowledge. Not only, they are not interested in scientific knowledge, but they oppose it. That's why they never change their minds even if proven wrong. Richard Dawkins has done some pretty good work in a documentary called 'The enemies of reason'. When those 'enemies' are asked where they got their power, and how it opposes modern knowledge, they don't seem to have any conflict because they don't care. They don't. It's your problem, not theirs.
All people who support science and reason-based thinking, most of which with one or more Ph.D. never want to engage in a difficult conversation about the consequences of primitive thinking. One of these conversations is to allow access to executive positions to people that can't handle complex projects and at a fast pace. Let's take an example. This week I have viewed a video of a session of the Australian Senate finance committee. An association was presenting its case to enhance society. After the presentation, a senator asked a question for the wage per hour and not per year as it was presented, to compare apple to apple. The member of the organization first repeated what they already said, and the senator did reformulate his question. The question was very simple. They were genuinely not able to understand what the senator was asking, a division of the sum of the wage per year by the number of hours. Even more than their inability to do a division, what stricken me, was their inability to understand that the solution to the problem was a division. What we are dealing with here is that they don't know how to think, which is of an entirely different level than simply not knowing the method to do a division. You can rapidly teach someone to do a division, but you can't fix a whole education that easily. Worse, their failed education is by design. Our civilization will have to go into space, at least to get the resources we will need. A challenge of that scale can only be achieved if all the people at the helm are extremely well-educated and capable of formulating problems and their solutions, and all the people around them have to be autonomous and efficient. Primitive thinking by opposing openly modern thinking does not allow us to envision a future in space. It has spread so broadly for the last decades that the very existence of the occidental civilization is at stake. They are unable to understand what they are doing wrong and unable to criticize themselves.
Life is unfair. We all learn that lesson pretty quickly, and it is the role of parents to protect their children from the answer until they have the required brain structure and basic knowledge to deal with it. The attitude we have toward unfairness continues the discussion between nature (the theory of evolution) and nurture (the blank slate). How do we know that? Because, knowledge-wise the debate is over (The blank slate has no scientific ground, the consequences of its application have all shown to be counter-productive), but still many people continue to believe in the blank slate, and this gives us an important insight. The blank slate is a belief and has nothing to do with knowledge.
The question Nature vs Nurture was used to hide a deeper problem. Do we have the power to change the laws of nature? Officially, the answer is no, but many still think as if supernatural and magical powers exist: being able to health by energy transfer, to speak to dead people, or that our character is written among the stars. Supernatural beliefs are not the appanage of religious people, far from it and the blank slate is just a modern and more polished version. Thinking that you can become whatever you want is to have the power to harness reality. When reality is the result of what you want, the only knowledge that you need is the one from your emotions. Make a wish ... Hocus Pocus ...
Take responsibilities, tell the truth
The theory of evolution reminds us that we have no magic wand to take away the hardship that life sometimes imposes on us, and this implies that we have to deploy a huge amount of energy to deal with it. We have to take responsibility and tell ourselves the truth. If we felt to do so, the consequence is to believe that we can fix life itself. But of course, you can't, and the only course of action that will be left to you will be to put the responsibility of your hardship on someone else. Stop it! You cannot fix life. Accept it, for the sake of yourself and the others.
Collectivism: the weaponization of empathy
There are many angles from which you can look at collectivism to understand how and why it appears. Right now, what I want to show you is how a group of reasonable people with good intentions, but the wrong tool can slowly shift to a tyrannical and collectivist society while rationalizing their doing.
But I want what's good for you, they say
It starts with empathy. Suffering is part of life, and we are able to feel the suffering of those who are in pain. Without empathy, a group can hardly survive and in fact, empathy is a natural instinct and hardwired mechanism. We can't help our self to feel empathy. It follows that we want the suffering to go away. There are two ways to achieve that goal, one leads to collectivism, the other to individualism.
The first focuses on getting rid of the bad there is in the world. Natural disasters are out of reach, so you will devote your attention to people and their bad behavior. We all behave more or less in bad manners so it's easy to sight it everywhere and think that getting rid of them will help. You will start by asking people to change a few habits here and there. It won't work. You will ask more and start to use coercion. Again you will fail. Bad behavior will be criminalized and the justice court will be full of people who have all those tiny bits of misbehavior. Sure they are the bad guys. Not only you will fail at your task, but you will fail to admit your failure. People will always suffer from other people, you can't rewrite the rule of nature, nor reality, but now people are suffering from you. You will start to forbid facts and reason, redefine the meaning of words, and burn books. Dried out of any idea by your blindness, only one word will be left to be said to your population: Obey. If you have chosen that path then Bravo you have achieved the level: society of fear. You're now officially a tyrant.
The second focuses on doing good actions. To show people how to do some good and ask them to do it as many times as possible. Encouraging people to do that has tremendous positive feedback on society. It gives them a sense of purpose and it asks them to take initiative, which implies responsibilities. They have the freedom to choose. If you have chosen that other path felicitation then, you have achieved the level: society of freedom. It will be an honor to shake your hand, have a drink, and share some jokes.
The hunt for power to control reality
In a collectivist society, the loss of liberty coincides with the rise of the quest for power. That power is needed to take down even more freedom to have the illusion to master reality. What they try to get rid of is their own inability to face life, to face what it means to be human. The hunt for power is a major link to another ideology called postmodernism, which complete Marxism. Like them, postmodernists want to impose an ersatz of reality, to replace the one they reject. For Marxism, it's all about the control of the society so that it fits their reality, while Postmodernists rewrite knowledge so that it fits how they think reality. Both want power but act on different parts of society.
'Catch-42', the collectivist fallacy
Note: Catch-42 honors the author of catch-22 since I had the idea while working on its logic. 42 is, as everyone knows, the answer to the ultimate question of life as explained in the movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The link between the two stories is the use of absurdity to describe life. Obviously, I oppose that vision because the universe has a highly coherent structure and our life has a purpose and meaning.
Catch-22 is the title of a book written by Joseph Heller published in 1961 - During wartime a fighter pilot tries to play the insanity game with a doctor to get grounded, but failed miserably because only a sane person can understand how crazy war is. What he was trying to prove, was precisely what proved him not to be crazy - Catch-22 has given its name to a kind of logical trap - It is precisely the process by which you try to solve a problem that makes you unable to solve it. The more you try the more you're trapped.
Behind the mask of administrative absurdities, there is a critic of the society and, of course, of war. It is reasonable to think that the author advocates for a world without wars, taking the side of the anti-military and anti-war movements - his logic is that if you're a sane person, why would you want war? It would be absurd, insane and nobody wants to be like that. If you do, then something must be wrong with you. According to the author, the fighter pilot has no way out. There is a common element between the character in the story and the author's situation. Something is wrong with the system and the only way to fix their problem is to fix the system.
There is a fallacy in the conclusion of the author about war because there is a way out for the fighter pilot. The author is just unable to see it because of internal conflict. The solution is to accept the usefulness of war. When the first bombs start to fall on your head, and you have tried everything in your power to avoid it, you have to go to war. If you don't, you're whether suicidal, nihilistic or have lied about the values for which you want to fight. The conflict that the author face is his inability to accept that war is a possible outcome of human interactions and natural to our species. It doesn't mean that war is good, just that it can happen. The fighter pilot has just to accept that dropping bombs on the enemies is the right thing to do and that he may sacrifice himself in the hope to save the values in which he believes. The author hides that conflict not only to his readers but to himself. This allows him to put the burden of that conflict on someone else. This is achieved by asking a person to change by endorsing a new paradigm, a new reality. If he refuses it will be one more proof that he is the source of the problem. The problem is said to be obvious, even self-explanatory, therefore if you don't see it, it is because you're unwilling to do so and that's the proof that you're part of the problem.
Before I show the extension to collectivism, I will explain what that conflict is. I write about it several times in the letter. The general idea is that we have many hardwired behaviors but we have also the ability to have 'software' programmable behaviors. To move from the primitive self to the civilized we need to move from the hardware to the software, from emotion to reason, from instinctive decisions to cognitive decisions, and to gain access to reality. In the process, we need to abandon the belief that our brain has some kind of magical power over our environment which pushes us to confuse natural law and man-made laws. The consequence of the denial of nature and with it human nature is to not have access to reality. The language will become your reality. The conflict arises because to control your hardware and more specifically the production of your brain comes with a cost (discipline, courage, hard work, self-evaluation... nobody likes that at least at the beginning) and to leave something behind which is the primitive self. If we do not we become monsters. Only the civilized man cares about the other and wants him to be as independent as he is (note). By now I shouldn't have to give you specific examples of the result of the action of the primitive self. You can observe them in your cities and your country, observe the will of destruction of the primitives and its result.
The collectivist in the catch-42 fallacy
To become civilized is an individual experience. If you reject that experience, a severe conflict arises. Collectivism is the dissolution of the individual and by that process, you dissolve the request for the resolution of the conflict at an individual level. Hocus pocus, no more conflict. We fall then into the Us vs Them conflict. To ask a collectivist to leave collectivism is to ask him to solve its internal conflict. A maturation process is at work. Don't explain to them why collectivism is bad, but give them elements on how to solve their internal conflict, show them how to mature.
The collectivist fallacy is to believe that the problem they have is due to society, while the truth is that they refuse to become autonomous individuals and civilized men. The consequence is to reject the existence of natural causes and believe that the unfairness of life is produced by society. They borrow a cause and take a righteous stand to hide their personal failure. They become the good guys of the story. This explains why white rich kids become the savior of the working class, of the black community, and more broadly of any victim of the society in which they live. It's very easy to borrow a cause because life is unfair, but they are in denial of that reality. What they end up with is to try to fix life itself. The fallacy also explains why they repeat endlessly that if they gather around a problem they will solve it. They solve nothing and the gatherings are only grand Masses of the individual dissolution and the validation of a reality in which their conflict with reality is dissolved.
Consequences: There are many but one will observe that they are childish in their behavior and often violent to impose their view like an eight years old child can be. They focus their knowledge on the language because it can be manipulated while reality can't. Never forget that they are primitives. The external layers of civilization they project are only reflections of the civilization in which they live. They are anti-civilization because to become an autonomous individual is what civilization asks us all. Also, to accept that natural and man-made laws are not the same. We are no God and the universe doesn't obey us. We are part of a big whole, and that whole doesn't need us to exist. Move on.
Karl Marx perfectly fits the fallacy. His theory is a model of the world designed to produce tools to save the world. But that's a fallacy because he only tries to produce a world in which his internal conflict doesn't exist instead of solving it, which is that there are natural inequalities amongst humans. There is no oppressor/oppressed pattern from a historical point of view. Marxism is a chimera, a tribal nightmare - macabre and powerful - where everything is interpretation but from which you never wake up because there is no reality, only the collective.
Note: the level of trust between each member of a society correlates with his achievements, and trust is linked to empathy. Empathy is activated whether by common characteristic traits or to share the same society project. Both are insurance that I want a future for you and you a future for me.
Cognitive dissonance is generally associated with the moment a person becomes irrational with an attempt to rationalize his/her irrational understanding of a situation or facts. This can be resume by the sound 'Spoing' the brain produces when that happens. However, and as amusing as it is to depict cognitive dissonance that way, the one to which psychologists refer is not the one I will define and that people are facing at a political level with great consequences on the future of our civilization. Psychologist like Steven Pinker calls cognitive dissonance when a patient enters in an ego-protection activity to avoid acknowledging any wrongdoing or weakness which unconsciously impact his/her life quality. It's a defense mechanism, but it's an individual mechanism and therefore specific to each person.
The cognitive dissonance I want to present to you is at a group level and concerns humans in general. The definition is 'cognitive dissonance happens when our internal map of the world, drawn by emotions, conflicts with the map of the world drawn by reason while being in a flagrant negation of the reality. When this happens a secondary mechanism enters into action which is the rationalization of the cognitive dissonance often based on a projection of our weaknesses or wrongdoings onto the people that oppose us not only politically, but oppose the reality we imagine. While ego-protection is a projection mechanism, rationalization of our irrationalism is the result of a hardwired mechanism that pushes the brain to always give us a map of the world which is intended to help us to survive (note). This also means that the individual believes that he/she is rational while being irrational. Fortunately, we have started to have tools to check if a rationalization process is genuine or motivated by a cognitive dissonance like to create a deficit of information that will justify the erroneous rationalization, non-transitive thinking (A is a communist, communism is an ideology then A is not an ideologue), false evaluation and perception of probability (we can bite the pandemic only is there is 0 case), the use of language by changing the meaning of words (hate speech is no free speech), the rewriting of history or historical data (the occidental world has invented slavery), circular reasoning (you can't be racist against white people) or the lack of universalism (science is part of the culture of Western countries).
When the group is your reality
While for the individual the cause of cognitive dissonance is caused by the ego-protection mechanism, in collective cognitive dissonance it is caused by the imitation mechanism. Again we are dealing here with a primitive hardwired mechanism that forces us to adopt the same behavior as the others, that mechanism must be the most underrated survival mechanism of all. This a part of the definition of tribalism that we often forgot 'do what the others do to enhance your survival chances'. When we eat what the others eat, or run when they run it is not because we know that what we eat is good for us, or that we have seen any danger. Group behavior by imitation is a survival mechanism. If there is a sufficient number of people around you that think irrationality in a particular way, chances are high that you will do too. As Jordan Peterson resume "In Nazi Germany, you most likely would have been a Nazi", the same is true for any collectivist system. There is a small group, let say 10% or less of the collectivists which is very active and well organized that causes the irrational of collectivism to be deployed and take over to society. Those have cognitive dissonance not because of our imitation mechanism or by the fear that forces us to cope with the irrational world imposes on us, but because they can't handle reality. It's a no-go zone and an existential threat. This motivates them to constantly seek confirmation of their irrational map of the world because to find others like them validate their map, in other words, people who have a similar irrational map of the world. Since it's existential they are extremely motivated, which explains why there are so noisy and well-organized. Here is the most important weakness of the rationalists. For them, reality is their common ground to seek approbation, while for the irrationalists it is the tribe itself. For the irrationalist to act collectively is existential, that their strength. What creates a collective of rationalists? A civilization-level project, a religion, or both. One must understand that the end game of cognitive dissonance is the end of civilization, but it is not by fighting it that you win, but by having a vision of the future in which that cognitive dissonance won't and cannot take place.
The other answer to the 'Nature vs Nurture' question
The fundamental flaw of Marxism is expressed by its connection to the blank slate which explains the social engineering of the society. Is there any proof of this? Since we answered the Nature vs Nurture question, yes there is. However, don't equal Marxism with the blank slate. What we call Marxism is the social and economic assessment of society by the blank slate ideology. Since the blank slate implies rejecting the answer 'nature' to the question 'are we nature or nurture?' then Marxism defines itself to be based on the assumption that there isn't such a thing as human nature.
Marxism categorizes the social organization as exploiters and exploited and that it generates a fundamental injustice that needs to be corrected. However, there is a problem, for that injustice is not man-made. Moreover what is natural is not just or unjust, it just is and categorization can't apply. This opposes Marxism and through it, the blank slate ideology, which precisely states that the society is responsible, not nature.
The truth is that everyone has different inborn aptitudes and the better they are, the better he/she could do well in life. The existence of those differences is shown by the theory of evolution and explained by genetic. That truth will not change. If you want to develop a new social organization, you better check first if it's compatible with the theory of evolution, and then with human nature.
Unable to cope with the evolution principle
Even the very concept of evolution is completely alien to Marxist ideology. It can't provide an explanation for the evolution of different civilizations without cutting off the mind from the body (it means: using the ghost in the machine ideology to avoid explaining differences in cognitive abilities and how they impact the development of civilization). What is true for the past also goes for the future. Once Marxism is in place, there is no evolution of his model of society. There is no mechanism of evolution inside the theory, nor in the mind of those who adopt it. They can't envision an evolution of the Marxist society or any collectivist societies and this goes against everything we know about the universe.
The abolition of the patriarchy
Let go straight to the point. Is there a patriarchy? If you mean that men want to impose and enslave women, the answer is no. If you mean, a hierarchy produces by natural mechanism and for which men have been molded by nature to manage it, the answer is yes. To be clear, there are several entry points to explain patriarchy, what follows is one, but my understanding of the topic has evolved and can be found in other texts, which I wrote later. Fortunately for me, I can bridge that those explanations and show their coherences. However, no matter which ones you use, collectivists have rewritten the definition, already in the 19th century, based on their vision of the world, the power struggle.
Therefore for them, patriarchy can be discussed only from the power struggle perspective with the consequence that the mere opposition to their definition will be regarded as a power struggle. When you have a civilization project, patriarchy simply expresses the repartition of role between men and women and men are the ones who build it. Maternity defines the role of women in that project. Those who reject patriarchy, any positive form of it, cannot be persuaded because they have not only rewritten the definition but also the laws of nature and in particular human nature. They do not recognize natural abilities, therefore that men and women have different roles. In the end, they will try to force you to adopt their definition and as a civilized person deny you to have your own based on natural laws. There is not much to have a discussion here, so please would you mind stopping to adopt the definition of the collectivists? Thank you.
What teaches us western iconography?
There is the idea, promoted by the feminists that patriarchy, is the doing of a group of men imposing their will on the rest of the population and particularly on women and is the result of a constant and reckless search for power. This is akin to the Marxist ideology that inequalities are the product of a group of men in search of always more wealth. Marxists call capitalism the system by which they get that wealth with the consequences of producing inequalities. Both groups based their rejection respectively of patriarchy and capitalism on the implicit assumption that human beings are all equal, particularly in their cognitive abilities. Both refuse to acknowledge a natural explanation of the existence of capitalism and patriarchy. But of course, if you're a social constructivist which both are, all causes find their origin in the human will, not nature.
The picture of a group of white men only interested in getting more wealth and power is not only common to the anti-patriarchy and anti-capitalism movement but also the anti-Semites. What you make with that connection is your doing, but the scandal of the women's March in the U.S.A in 2019 is very worrying. However, what I make with that connection is different. I see groups of people focusing on powerful groups of people, with a unique goal; taking their place. The use of that picture is the expression of a power struggle and nobody cares really about the people. If they are, then where is the iconography of the fight for the people, by the elite? Quite a missing piece for the building of a better society.
The gender equalitarian experiment has failed
Those who oppose the patriarchy, want its deconstruction to allow an equalitarian society to happen. That what they say, but what they don't tell you is that the experience has already been run, and we have the data, they disavow that hypothesis. The more equalitarian a society is, like in Scandinavian countries, the more the choices of men and women differ. This was resumed by Jordan Peterson as 'The more you minimize the cultural differences between men and women, the more you maximize the biological differences'.
Why have you not heard about that experiment? Because the social constructivists are at the helm of all the organizations that broadcast knowledge, and they don't like the result. Unfortunately for them, the result was based on a large data set and has been several times reproduce in the last decade with the same outcome and therefore, hard to contest. It won't go away. The social constructivists simply don't care about the result, and they continue to act as if nothing has changed. The reason is they reject the second scientific revolution, the Darwinian revolution. For them, biology cannot be the most important driving force in social organizations. We have a very similar situation with chimp studies, like those made by Janes Goodall. She found out that chimps go to war, and didn't like the result. She thought chimps were 'contaminated' by human behaviors, and she didn't publish her result immediately. Chimps go to war and this is now well documented, but those who adhere to the noble savage ideology cannot make the move to integrate that into their knowledge. For them nature is good, society is bad.
When all your hypotheses are falling, when reality shatters your understanding of what a better humanity should be, your only resource is to worship your fantasy and let it become a religion. The thoughts will be purified. The sinners will be hunted. At some point, those ill-adapted people will have to disappear, to make your dream come true. Genocide becomes a logical conclusion.
I borrow a large part of the argument that follows to Jordan Peterson who articulated them. Sometimes, I added information here and there, but in case of errors or misunderstanding, it is my doing.
We have three questions to answer: Why is a hierarchy needed at all? A hierarchy implies a ranking system, why meritocracy? Why are males in charge of the hierarchy?
Hierarchy is not the product of capitalism or western society. The proof is that animals have a hierarchical organization. The next question is: how long has been the hierarchy around? Let's go back in history, let say 350 million years. Lobsters were already on our planet, and they have a hierarchy that hasn't changed since that time. We know about their hierarchy because their rank depends on their level of serotonin. We are no lobsters, but it shows that nature hardwires hierarchy inside the brain of species, and the human species is no exception. Because it is hardwired, it influences many of our group activities, hierarchy shapes our reality. We can accept hierarchy without the lobsters because scientists have observed that hierarchy is the rule for all kinds of organizations (see Donella Meadows). To not find hierarchy is the real mystery.
Why did nature make that choice as a fundamental structure for living beings? To solve the problem of scarcity of resources. Without hierarchy, we will jump to each other's throats constantly and this is not a stable strategy. No species can survive such a scenario. As a consequence those on the top of the hierarchy eat first and all the way to the bottom. Yes, it also means that if resources are scarce, those at the bottom will not eat. It's rough but not as rough as a constant battle that would happen without the hierarchy. The quest for resources produces hierarchy. In general, hierarchies have proven to be efficient and resilient systems on which many life forms depend.
You want the best to do the job, but why? Because they solve problems, they do not create new ones. You can't have a complex organization like the one we have developed without solving the maintenance problems, just to start with. Another reason comes from the complexity and number of tasks to be accomplished. A group of top people cannot know and do everything. They need to rely on other people who need to have real competencies, and on which everyone can rely.
There is vital information here. Meritocracy allows that at any level of the hierarchy problem can be solved locally. They do not require, higher level to be involved. Meritocracy is what makes the hierarchy work. The lack of locality accounts partially for the inefficiency of collective systems. Your competence is secondary, compared to your loyalty upon which a collective is built.
Why historically males run the hierarchy?
From the beginning of our species, men have always been more expendable than women. What counts are the eggs, women have them, and men are hardwired to protect them to protect our species. That protection can go as far as to do the ultimate sacrifice. There is a set of biological differences between men and women, and most are responsible for their specific role in the reproduction of our species.
As Jordan Peterson put it - 'Life until the 20th century was very hard for both sexes and cooperation was what kept them alive, not slavery'. The sexual liberation of the 1960s has more to do with technical advancement than any political movement. Moreover, in the occidental world, women can choose whatever they like, and they are not that much interested to go after certain jobs (ex: dangerous, outdoor, or technical jobs). This means that the function men and women had in society for millennia, is linked to their natural role, not some social construct. Women manage the family and men the infrastructure of the society in which the family can grow up.
Putting down patriarchy will transform society into a non-functional system, and great misery will come out of it. The patriarchy is the structure upon which many other problems are solved, by getting rid of it those problems will suddenly and all at once blow up in our faces. We, as a civilization, won't stand it. Justice and the lack of famine for example are products of the patriarchy.
When you reject the theory of evolution, you still need a theory of human nature, and that will be the blank slate. You also reject the biological entities and their specific role as men and women. The promotion of equal gender rights goes in that direction. The problem is that men don't have eggs. Therefore, they're not needed in an equal-gender society. A few men can fertilize millions of women.
The state or the men. Pick one ladies but not both.
The whole project of emancipation and sexual liberation of women is a sham. Women have been taking hostage in the war between the collective and the individual, between the state and the men, between the elite and the people. To gain their cause the state has given women large compensation and they fall for it. However, it is short-sighted, the contract with the state is non-negotiable while the one with the men inside the family is. The control of sexuality is not to restraint women, but to control men that refuse to control their sexuality and will become, in regard to the need for civilized behaviors, a sexual predator. To maximize your sexual activities is not part of a healthy life, it is to exchange immediate fleeting gratification for delayed pleasures which allow long-lasting satisfaction and to have access to a broader type of pleasures. Marriage and family are the best friends a woman can have for a well-fulfilled life. The kitchen is not what defines their role, it is to take care of the maturation of the child biologically and mentally. In particular, brain maturation is vital in a civilized society. Ladies your men are designed to be out there to build the civilization that allows the kids to become civilized and allow you to do your part, and this is needed because the primitives are out there lurking in the dark, but that seems to be a lesson that we have forgotten. The only way to serve the state is to be a slave and in that world, men have no role. But don't lose the focus, which is the concept of 'role'. The debate about the equality of men and women is just a tool to achieve a bigger goal, to erase roles that are given by nature, and therefore the real target is the laws of nature. In that war, both sexes have been taken hostage and in the process lost their natural identity femininity and masculinity, and our role inside the group.
The hate of men in the occidental world has reached an all-time high, but are men the primary target? The use of the expression mansplaining (cliché: men explaining to women) is to shame men with the objective to forbid them to take part or to initiate a discussion, but the explanation has a function. It is the exchange of information and reasoning with the purpose to solve a problem or to tune our minds so that we can cooperate for a solution. Mansplaining is not about men but the 'explaining'. Women can perfectly articulate their thoughts, so why do some of them resort to mansplaining instead of debating? The way men articulate their thoughts is generally based on reason and logic, and not on emotions and social relations. The hate of men, in that case, is the hate of reason, a way to think of the world in which reality is an external and common point of reference and language only a means to exchange information about that reality, not the reality. In the collective, the men's way of thinking the world is an obstacle because it allows independent thoughts and therefore it is forbidden. The hate of men is the hate of reason as a primary cause, and in a collective state-oriented society men become useless.
If you're not compelled by the rules of nature or any external rules, but define your own rules as the social constructivists do, then you have no rule, no value at all because you can always make one up to escape your responsibilities.
Theists have a set of values from their scripture to guide them. It is said that non-theists, in a very broad sense, don't have rules. That's not correct, they are fully aware of the need to have a set of core rules. The reason why they don't advocate for it, which explains why they don't have rules as a group, is that they think that each individual has to find his own set of rules. At the same time, they hope that the rules they define will match those defined by all other individuals to have a functioning society. It doesn't work. There are several reasons for that, for example, it's not easy to find working rules. We get ours from previous generations, which themselves got them from previous generations. It is a slow process that works by addition and correction. Another example: the need for coordination implies that the rules are identical and understood the same way. It can't work without a group consensus, but then you have to state the rules as a group. However, when it comes to the skeptic community (most are atheists), there is another reason. They do not want to ask their members to adhere to a specific set of rules. Some use that excuse to avoid having their ideology exposed and others because a few rules would be the same as the theists, and that's too much to ask. Understandable, but you got to have rules.
The needs of rules: An evolutionary perspective
As living beings, we have needs (eat, sleep, reproduce) and there is the world. To satisfy those needs we have to interact with that world, composed of the environment, other life forms, members of your species, and our self. You need to have a set of rules to interact with that world to satisfy your needs because that world has its own rules and if you ignore them you die. You got to have rules to navigate in an ocean of rules that the universe itself needs to function. The more optimize your interactions, the better the rules. The best rules are transmitted from generation to generation and become moral rules.
The lack of a moral code: The case of the skeptic community
This chapter is a direct continuation of the discussion about the lack of a moral code, taking the Skeptic movement as an example, to show how the collectivists use the void of a moral code to infiltrate and corrupt all movements.
After the year 2000, (hard to point at a specific date when it comes to social changes), a crack started to appear among the atheists, and there is something to learn from that story because the crack has revealed a dark place, carefully hidden. The crack is about the connection between some of the principles of the great religions, and the natural/Darwinian rules. Being an atheist was becoming problematic. For example, the great religions are based on a clear distinction of the role of men and women, and evolutionary theory shows us clearly that they differ. To treat them differently to optimize their potentiality might not be a bad idea. The crack is not the observation of convergence between religion and evolution, but from a hard-core atheist standpoint, to acknowledge that great religions might have a point based on a keen observation of human nature. But that crack hides a dark place. Those who have pushed the atheists to reject any valid points of the great religions were not exactly hardcore atheists, but people who embraced at least one of the ideologies linked to irrationalism. The problem is that any of those ideologies, sooner or later, oppose reason and science, and subsequently individualism, free speech... What a surprise.
It was not obvious, to anyone what was happening. We didn't even know that there was a crack, to begin with. We thought we were all unified behind the banners of reason and science and that our differences were shallow, if any, and couldn't overthrow our mission to push for reason and science. To never give a point to great religions was strange and I ask myself if the 'new atheism' movement was not created as a consequence of that crack.
The fall of the skeptic community
When I was part of the international group of skeptics and atheists, what stroke me the most was the lack of values. Individually, people have values, but the group was not promoting any values. This can be summarized by the emptiness of the answer to the question: what does it mean to be a skeptic/atheist? You wake up at 07:00 and then what? What is it that you do that defines you as a skeptic? The lack of values as guidelines for life is a call for the blank slate ideology, and that's not restricted to the skeptic community. I have witnessed the takeover of the skeptic movement by the Marxist/postmodernist and its destruction. You find here the explanation of the de-platforming of Richard Dawkins by the New-York City skeptics, before his stroke. The lesson to learn is that any groups that do not promote a moral code or at least, a set of values should be considered dangerous or in danger to be taken over by the blank slate ideology. This just happened to the Linux community. As for the skeptics, some genuinely want to help society to have better tools, more freedom... but they are lost, when their movement is taken over by an ideology. They do not understand what is happening and do not know what to do. Even if some do, those who have taken control will swiftly expulse them from the organization by every means necessary. Ostracism is such a sweet sentence, to feel the power you have over people and tell them that they do not belong to this place anymore.
Values, moral code, call it whatever you want are the cumulative wisdom that is passed on to the next generations. They are important because one generation cannot face all the issues of a civilization in its lifetime or think about the best solutions. I still follow, from time to time, the skeptic community, and when the Charles Murray conference incident happened in 2018 (Read my chapter on Forbidden knowledge to get more info), I saw how they were torn between their willingness to let scientific views to be stated, and their fear to displease the Marxist/Postmodernist rulers of the movement. They came up with the following solution: a person of good faith, meaning one who does not have a political agenda, should be allowed to express themselves publicly. We all know who will define what a person of good faith is, and we know that the good people among the skeptics will never take a stand to defend a scientist declared persona non grata. Values help to have a strong bearing and as a consequence, you know what has to be done, and it helps to grow a spin. The key values, in that situation, are free speech and personal honesty. There is more to say about values. They help to detect people who are up to no good because they are always the ones who work endlessly to promote the absence of values or use them as a tool, against those who stand in their way.
Religion and its rules as an adaptation to natural constraints
Historically, those who create the enlightenment did a terrible mistake. Back at that time, the movement was opposed to religion. In their fight to break down God as an explanation of nature, they also put down the moral code that comes with it and that was more than enough to allow the people who believe in the blank slate to think they can take the power. There were true enlighteners, who wanted a modernization of the society by using science and reason, and they didn't see it coming (Well, some did, but they had not the right tools to fight properly as we do today). At the very beginning, the counter-enlightenment movement was somehow part of the enlightenment. Nowadays, the confusion is cleared up and to be part of the enlightenment means two things. 1) You're for reason, free speech, truth, and individualism because we know that they can't be separated. 2) You have to reject explicitly several ideologies like the blank slate, the ghost in the machine, collectivism, emotion over reason... because they are all chained together and oppose reason, individualism, truth, and free speech. (Later in the letter I gave another definition of enlightenment, a more general one, which focuses on truth. Both can be bridged)
I'm enlightened and a non-theist. I do have a moral code based on the latest discoveries in human behaviors. Any enlightener will engage itself in defining a code, and in the process will have a revelation, sort of. Those who create religions around the world were right on several things and the Jews and Christians more than any other. God or science, it doesn't matter, what matters is that you accept such a thing as reality and that you have to adapt to it (in a very broad sense) to better function, not the other way around. That adaption is best achieved through a set of values. That's why those who defend the modern enlightenment share common values with religious people.
Those who support the Blank slate do not follow a moral code, but they follow the voice of a collective or a tyrant who tells them what to do, what to expect. However, there is nothing to expect, nothing will change. When you hear those voices, reality doesn't exist, the voice is the reality. Nothing evolves, and this is death. Any human group that answers the call rejects reality, it doesn't have a moral code, and as a consequence will disappear. The lack of moral code is indeed a dark place. One way to detect them is to ask: What are your values? If you can't get a clear, understandable, usable answer that doesn't oppose Science, nature, and reality then run.
Complement: When the theory of evolution meets the ghost in the machine
I just had the opportunity to look at an interview with the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, and he said something very important (November 2018). I don't have the time to fully integrate that knowledge into a chapter, that's why it's a supplement to the chapter.
According to Weinstein, thirty years ago, the theory of evolution took a turn in considering human culture as having its evolutionary path independently from the genes. This was expressed by Richard Dawkins with its invention of 'Meme' (chapter 11 from the book: The selfish gene), which is the cultural version of genes. The problem is that you cut yourself from understanding the root of any culture from biological evolutionary mechanisms. As an example, religions cannot be seen as an evolutionary phenomenon, but a group of people with a 'faulty brain'. I used the expression 'faulty brain' on purpose. As a former skeptic, I can testify that conversations around the faulty brain of some groups happened from time to time, as well as the publication of articles on that topic. This idea is at the center of what became later the new-atheism movement. Relative to that case, I'm on the side of Bret Weinstein, and all of the hypotheses I've written in that letter follow the idea that cultures are shaped by evolution, perhaps not entirely, but it certainly is a starting point to all cultures, religions included.
That explanation allows me to make a connection with the social constructivists. When you consider cultures as separate from biological evolution, you introduce the idea that the brain can be dissociated from its biological evolutionary roots. This insert, inside the theory of evolution, the ideology called, the ghost in the machine also called dualism in philosophy, that the body and the mind are two different entities. The ghost in the machine is linked to the blank slate which is the root of social construction.
Note: what is a 'Meme' today? Largely used on the Internet, it is a misuse or a hijack, of a well-known cultural element, to express an opinion, often of political nature, but not only, in a humoristic way. The creativity and intelligence to do it, are as valuable as the message of the Meme. They have become part of popular culture. It is a way for people to express themselves. In case, you become the recipient of a Meme as any high-profile may become one day, the best way to deal with it, is to acknowledge the message and congratulate the quality of the Meme. The goals of Memes are not to destroy, but to show a perspective that is missing on a statement, a decision, or the behavior of a high-profile.
4 - Lysenkoism: when ideologies drive science
The 20th century has engendered two monsters: eugenic and Lysenkoism. They both use science to serve an ideological purpose, both have killed millions of people. Lysenko was a Russian scientist (chief of the agriculture department in late 1920), who believes that natural selection was an invention of the capitalist bourgeoisie which was defined by competition between individuals and was a destructive force (note: The basis of capitalism is each individual is free to manage his/her project, which will lead to a competition of ideas but also to a coalition, which is cooperation). Opposing what he thought to be the underlying root mechanism of capitalism, he defined a theory in which plants were naturally inclined to cooperate (in other words, that communism ideology can be extended to plants). He asked all farmers to put into practice his theory. They have to put plants very close to each other, to allow them to cooperate/communicate and share natural resources. The result was that plants were fighting to get the resources, leading to poor yield.
Application of Lysenko's theories was involved in both, the great famine of 1932-1933 in the U.S.S.R and China's famine that occurred from 1958 and 1961 during the "Great leap forward". The main factor of the famine was forced collectivism, the first ordered by Stalin and the second by Mao, but Lysenko's theory reduced, even more, the production and as a consequence helped to kill more people. Lysenko's theory was directly linked to the political ideologies of collectivism. During his "reign" scientists who dare to oppose his theory were sacked or sent to the gulag.
What we can define today as scientific rationalism is the use of science to justify the rationalization of an ideology, but has little to do with science and reason. Its DNA can be traced back to the 18th century for which there was for a short period the belief that the world can be described by a gigantic equation. We refer to that period as the Laplacian world (Marquis de Laplace French physicist), or more commonly the classical mechanic point of view. Randomness, infinities, instabilities, and quantum effects have shattered that dream at the very end of the 19th century and have characterized modern physics and science since then. Unfortunately, it seems that collectivism, which has taken the form of Marxism, has endorsed and based its thinking on that vision, that everything can be determined and ordered. It's was understandable back then, but instead of given up, its followers transformed it into the only thing that can survive the evolution of knowledge, a cult. Lysenkoism fully inherited that classical mechanic thinking and became a cult (that all have to follow), and a taboo (part of the natural order needed by the society to function). To go against it will be equivalent to a death sentence. Several new cults replace Lysenkoism, but they all follow that scientific rationalism, with a kind of science that can never be wrong nor evolve and a kind of reason that has no access to reality, therefore cannot check that science. There is something sad to observe primitive thinking taking momentum, and throwing away millennia of knowledge acquisition.
There is a subtle but important distinction that has to be made. While scientists of the 18th-19th believed in the determinism of the world in the sense that they would be able to read the whole equation of the universe, the Marxists thought they could write that equation. The former makes a distinction between natural laws and man-made laws, the latter doesn't. It is also interesting to note that the Marxists endorse the revolutionary thinking of the 18th about the blank slate. The concept provides a means to oppose the birthright of the aristocrats to be in charge of the country and in particular of the King. While scientists and the enlightened have evolved about their understanding of the world, the Marxists don't and they won't because knowledge is not their business, however, ideology is. They make up their mind about what they want, then provide a posteriori an explanation of their choice. It's all made up and that's why they can't evolve.
"The tragedy of the collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends" F. A Hayek, 'The Road to Serfdom', chapter 'the end of truth'.
The responsibility of scientists
While some scientists have opposed Lysenko and other dubious theories of the communist regime, a greater number supported it. In that group, there is the opportunist, a third grad scientist which will be given the opportunity to get a first grad post and become the little hands and ears of the party. There is the coward, a first grad scientist with a long list of excuses to support the system but the truth is that it all comes down to protect the invaluable importance of his little person. Despicable. The third one is feared by the two others. Those are first grad scientists who believe beyond any doubt that science is here to support the ideology he believes. He is the primitive one, he doesn't think like civilized people. To lie, to manipulate results and numbers, to kill those who oppose their doing (socially or physically he doesn't care) is part of a moral necessity for the ideology. Knowledge becomes subordinate to their needs. It is generally said that it is the power that they are after, but my hypothesis is that power is only a need for their attempt to escape the nature of reality, to escape their nature as human beings.
There are many ways to qualify the Nuremberg trial that judged the German political elites of the Second World War - a masquerade, a historical error, or a complete mess. We think that those people pled not guilty for strategic reasons, they might even let us thought it was for that reason. Our grandparents failed to show us that the reason they pled not guilty was that they believed their reality is the only one and that we are the monsters for not seeing that their solution is the right one. Let say that maybe, back at that time, they hadn't the tools to understand the not-guilty, but we don't have that excuse anymore. The failure of the Nuremberg trial is to have judged them for what they did and not the concepts on which are based what they think, which are the real cause of what they did. They are not bad people as we usually understand the word, they are different people which happen to be anti-civilization because they failed to become civilized, and they failed because they follow other concepts. That's the conversation that the world should have had. We would have judged collectivism and that's precisely what many people wanted to avoid.
Why did I put a paragraph about the Nuremberg trial inside the chapter dedicated to Lysenkoism? The answer is academics. The people who were judged didn't invent by themselves all the concepts they were promoting and the actions they took based on those concepts. That was the work of highly educated professors and it started already in the 19th century. Don't get me wrong they had to be hanged, but Hitler and its lieutenant didn't make it by themselves, nor the support they got from the population. It was the work of academics and highly educated profiles who have diffused, in society, collectivist concepts for decades. Lysenkoism is not about his theory, but about a set of concepts use like relics that people have to worship, and those concepts are chosen, defined, and propagated by the academics, whose function is to be the priests of a new religion. The Nuremberg trial was a monstrous error because we did not judge the concepts and the people who are responsible for their existence inside our society. The consequence of that error is that those concepts have continued to sap the structure of our civilization. When academics start to explain and provide literature that you can't be racist against whites because they are in power and it justifies racial discrimination for the admission in ivy league universities like Yale or Harvard, then the people will have no choice then to bow before that new relic because they haven't the education to see that it is a bogus reasoning, nor the voice to be heard.
The denazification program developed by the allies after WWII continue the discussion of the Nuremberg trial. The objective of the program was to filter the Nazis from German society in order to sanitize it. One was a Nazi if he was a member of the party, had acquaintances with Nazis, or work for them. What characterizes a Nazi from an ideological perspective was never analyze, therefore the program consisted only in hunting Nazis, not what they were standing for. The movie 'Taking side' shows the program applied to the Berliner conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler who played regularly for the Nazi officers and Hitler. The movie is, in fact, taking a side against the program and the American officer, which is portrayed as inhuman.
The actual orthodoxy of the so-called left, which are collectivists, is to explain that Nazis were not socialists. This is a belief that is in complete contradiction with history this is clearly a revisionist position as the denial of the extermination camps is. As I explain later in the addendum 'On the nature of Collectivism and individual', Communism and Nazism are concurrent to dominate the world. Their conflict is a power conflict, but they have a common enemy, with which they have an existential conflict. That's why they signed a non-aggression treaty in 1939 and it was not the first time. Thierry Wolton reminds us of the secret Rapallo agreement (a small city near Genoa) in 1922 between the Russian and German, to authorize the latter to develop and produce modern military equipment, for the rearmament of Germany on Russian soil. What motivates both countries was to take down England and France. Many insist that the lack of a peace treaty after World War I, explains World War II. It certainly played its part, but there is an existential difference between both groups of societies. Because they shared so much, to focus on what the Nazis ideology was would have mean to focus on Communist ideology, and this would have undermined communist penetration of western societies. This implies that the communist penetration was already deep enough to influence such a decision. How far that penetration was, we don't know, but that we seriously underestimated it, that much we know today.
It is surprising to think that one that was a real Nazi, the philosopher Heidegger, was authorized to teach again, but even more to think that the French intellectuals and philosophers adopted his philosophy in the 1950s. From their work came out existentialism and post-modernism, and most were all former communists. It is like a continuity of the work of the collectivist intellectuals, but how could we accept that? One more dark place on which we failed to shed light.
Lysenko has never recognized his errors, and all the Lysenkos our world has produced are protected by the system. If you oppose them, you're at risk of being criminalized or losing your job (case: James Damore memo vs Google 2017). There is always a Lysenko waiting and when they are in a position of power, you know that reason is no more a cornerstone of the society in which you live. To limit the power of the state, will limit the power of any Lysenko.
If something can be done it's before a Lysenko can impose his thinking, which has nothing to do with science, reason, truth, reality, or responsibility. Before we go down that way, we must remember that the 20th century has shown us beyond any doubt that people can willingly abandon reason to become irrational, and you don't need a God to achieve that transformation. In fact, there are reasons to think that mono-theist religions are a shield against the abandonment of reason. We just start to understand how messy our brain is. The need for our brain to make sense of the outside world based on all the inputs it receives is an impossible task without cognitive functions (in opposition to our instincts) and this means the use of reason and a feedback loop with reality.
(Note: In the first years of the writing of the letter I use the expression third party to what I refer to now as an external point of reference. The change was motivated by the reading of Donnela Meadows, whose work I explain in the addendum 'Thinking in systems'. What characterizes systems more than anything is their feedback loop and this requires a point of reference to determine what has to be changed at each loop to enhance the system. She shows that if the point of reference depends on the system (I call - internal point of reference) then there will be a degradation of the system. If there is an independent point of reference (I call external) then the system can enhance. If we consider human beings as a system, then collectivists are human who have an internal point of reference, their understanding of the world will always degrade no matter the theory they use to drive their actions)
There are several tools that our ancestors have passed on to us. The importance of having values like honesty, discipline... which helps to sort out the chaos of information. There is also the importance of reason, in the sense of reasonableness and coherency. The third one would be to put into the hand of a third party the power to decide if what we think is right or wrong, real or not. For monotheist religions, it's God's judgment, for science it's the experiment that was the root of the Galileo revolution. There is reason in the bible and there are values in science practice, meaning that there are bridges between the two, and those are more important than our differences because they aimed to reveal any Lysenko and repel their ideologies. Collectivists/irrationalists have no third party. They are narcissists. They dislike humanism and progress because it is about caring for others, even if they otherwise. They hate to engage in a dialogue because they don't understand what it is for. They lack basic moral values because they reject human nature, for they want to build their own.
Lysenko's theory opposes genetic and Mendel's explanation of the heritability of traits - how they are passed on from one generation to another. His ideas were similar to those of Lamarck, who has been proven wrong. For the record, Darwin's theory is about the existence of a heritability mechanism. What that mechanism is, was Mendel's discovery.
The well to which Lysenko draws his ideas is the nature vs nurture debate. He is on the nurture side and when you're on that side, following what we know today on genetic, then you need to be 100% on it. Nurture imposes that all mechanisms are culturally based, with no genetic explanation, and no exception. That's what happens when you're ideologically driven, you can't change your mind. On the other hand, the nature side, tells us that what defines humans is genetic but not all, a small part is cultural (The twin studies). That's what happens when you seek the truth and are ready to embrace it, you don't have to twist reality. You simply adjust your brain's patterns to reality, and coherency is enhanced.
The main philosophical concept of nurture is empiricism, which expresses the idea of a blank slate (read Steven Pinker: The blank slate), and implies that your environment, your education will make you what you are, and only that, no gene is involved. Like all ideologies, it can't integrate new facts without facing self-contraction. If you are on the nurture side, you will explain that everybody can become whatever they want, we are a blank slate, but how do you become a Nobel Prize, a Diva? If you're on the nurture side, it will lead you to define an education based on the lowest common denominator so that everyone can get a degree. Soon enough knowledge will become your enemy. That lowest common denominator is a threshold, but those who advocate for the blank slate never talk about those who can't pass that threshold because they have a low I.Q. Sometimes you hear about them when the word immaturity is used. Any society that puts a threshold and says to the other part that they will receive a salary and have nothing to do, is based on the blank slate. Being human is to discover your gifts and weaknesses, and it means that we are all different, but if you believe in the blank slate, then somehow we are all identical. The blank slate is to renounce our humanity.
Lysenko, the sun around which reality orbits
That ideology is even worse than you think. If you believe in the blank slate, you're the builder of your reality in which nurture is true. There is no limit to what you can do, you're your own God. During the last centuries, humanity has faced two devastating blows for our understanding of the world, the heliocentric system and the theory of evolution. They demand us to face that we're not the center of the universe and that we do not believe we can define what we are. It's nature that defines us, and we have no control over its mechanisms, its laws. This explains Lysenko's inability to accept any proof of his erroneous theory. For him and alike there is no reality in which their point of view can be wrong.
Lysenko couldn't hurt Mendel as he did with all the U.S.S.R scientists who dared oppose his theory, nor did he dares to oppose Mendel using science. It's always the same pattern. They do not use knowledge to understand or solve a problem. They use it to tell a story, and they tune that knowledge to make them feel good until there is a perfect resonance with the fundamental statements of their ideology. That's how the self-reinforcing mechanism of their belief works. But one must know, at the end of that tuning process, that the knowledge produced sail away from the island of reality. It's a very small island in an ocean of irrationalism and it's extremely difficult to find its way back.
During the late 1960s, several hypotheses about education were applied without any scientific evaluation and were based on post-modernism, Marxist, and of course the blank slate ideologies. For the last 40 years, psychologists and neuroscientists have proven them wrong. All of them! Those hypotheses and their refutations can be found in two books: "Seven Myths about education" by Daisy Christodoulou and "The knowledge deficit" by E.D Hirsch, Jr. For example, the idea that skills must be developed over fact-based teaching. We know today, that skills are knowledge-based. Moreover, the more knowledge you have the more knowledge you will acquire. In the case of science, knowledge is paramount.
Lafforgue testimony against the French 'Khmer rouge'
I will quote Laurent Lafforgue, the recipient of the fields' Medal in 2002 who was involved in a governmental project to enhance the French educational system until he gave up in 2005. His resignation made the headlines because a private e-mail was rendered public in which he exposed what was happening in the French educational system and made a comparison with the "Khmer rouge". Of course, the newspapers focused on that expression for their headlines, but his arguments are what matter. I quote:
"Since, I started, 18 months ago to investigate the state of education for our country, I have come to the conclusion that our public system is on its course for complete destruction." "That destruction is the result of all the politics, and all the reforms carried out by all the government since the late 1960s". "Those politics have been inspired to all those people by an ideology which consists to stop giving knowledge any value, combines with the willing the change schools' priority and goal other than education and the transmission of knowledge, the mandatory belief in crazy pedagogical theories, the contempt for simple things and fundamental apprenticeship, the rejection of organized, explicit and gradual teaching, the disdain for basic knowledge linked to the teaching of specious knowledge and over the top ambitious. The doctrine which sets the pupil at the "center of the system", who have to build its knowledge."
The last sentence is a direct reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory on education - the noble savage - while all others are linked to post-modernism theories, which are mostly based on the blank slate when related to education. I'm far from being the first to link Rousseau and Lysenko. Let the French Nobel prize in medicine (1965) Jacques Monod speak:
"There were absolutely no roots to it. I mean, no material roots, no experiments, absolutely nothing. Nothing but ideology. ... Explaining it all on the basis of Stalin is not enough. Because it had started before Stalin. The attack on the genetic approach, based on ideology, you see, was already present in 1925 and 1926. In fact - well, this whole trend of Western socialism goes back very largely to Rousseau. To the idea that man is good and society is bad. And therefore, if you introduce the idea that what defines man as a species, and different men as individuals, is very largely biological rather than social, that goes against the creed."
Why should we fight Lysenkoism?
The collectivists never try to convince you over the technical superiority of their social model for it doesn't add up. Instead, they will tell you a story with moral claims in which they are always the good guys and ask you to make a choice. There is only one right answer, the one that leads to your obedience and makes you a collectivist. That's what Lysenkoism is all about, or for that purpose any kind of Lysenkoism. If you bow to the cult, you're safe, if you don't it will be hell for you and most likely for your family too.
Civilization has to be able to evolve
There is a straightforward answer to the question: why should we fight Lysenkoism? Civilization has to be able to evolve. How can we achieve that goal? The necessity of progress is often presented as the need to enhance live quality. That's true, but there is something more central to the idea of progress, but before I state it, you have to consider that for the first time in human history, we might have to say no to some technological advancements. The reason is simply that it will be wise to do so. For example, to push technologies to the point where human beings have no risk to take, no problem to resolve, no responsibility to face, no difficulties to go through, no challenge to win will impact the very definition of what it means to be human. I absolutely advocate acquiring knowledge, but human civilization needs to learn to say no to the use of knowledge (not its acquisition, read the note), in other words, to enter the age of adulthood.
Note: Knowledge is a dense network in which all entries are connected. To forbid ourselves to add a piece to the network will inevitably lead to forbidding ourselves to have access to knowledge that wait to be discovered, and that we could use. Due to the structure of knowledge, we can't allow ourselves to be picky in our quest for knowledge. As a consequence, there will be some knowledge that could damage us as an individual and/or as a group.
The central question that progress tries to answer is the unpredictability of the future. Because entropy drives the March of the universe, we need to acquire all the knowledge possible to adapt to whatever will come. It's important so I rephrase. The universe does not standstill. It evolves because of entropy, and we will be wise to be able to adapt to any change, which requires maximizing the knowledge at our disposal, to maximize the chance of our species to survive.
When you live within a society in which there is a Lysenkoism cult, the notion of progress dies. As I already explained in the first part of that letter, knowledge becomes subordinate to an ideology. The ability of such a society to adapt is extremely low. With the scarcity of resources that human civilization inevitably will face, the answers given by a society based on progress and a society based on a Lysenko-like ideology will be dramatically different.
At the end of the 1960s, Lysenkoism was dead and the Marxist ideology was facing the death of millions of people, the revelation of its totalitarian nature, and poor economic performance. They manage to flip the odds, but not by trying to be a valid alternative to the occidental civilization, but by launching an all sides attack to undermine its efficiency. That was not enough, they had to attack its foundation, the idea that the world is intelligible and there is such a thing as truth and a reality independent from our mind. Reason and science are among the main casualties. This was achieved by former French hard-core communists who based their work on a Nazi writing Nazi philosophy. I name Martin Heidegger. This weird association was not advertised but known by many intellectuals and even had a name as Jean-Paul Sartre explain: "Heideggerianism". Aside from its empty verbiage as described by Karl Popper, Heidegger's philosophy can be resumed by: "beings need an enemy to fight with the goal of their total annihilation. If there is no enemy, they have to create one". What is the motto of the post-modernist? Truth and reality are whether meaningless or cannot be defined, therefore, everything goes. This leads to social constructionism because you extract yourself from any constraints of a reality on which you have no control. The connection between the communists, the Nazis, and the post-modernists is Marxism and more broadly collectivism and the blank slate. However, there is another connection. Heidegger is a product of German philosophy, and his work is linked to Kant, Hegel... the tradition of the German school of philosophy is to oppose the enlightenment, product of English and French philosophy. The enlightenment started with René Descartes and reason, which the post-modernist oppose. QED.
From an implicit to an explicit rejection of science
Marx's model of society makes use of social constructivism to build it, thus rejecting implicitly the theory of evolution. The post-modernists by rejecting the validity of any science-based models to explain the world or social organization reject explicitly the theory of evolution.
There is not one, but a plethora of new cults to succeed Lysenkoism. With the help of post-modernism, and more generally of anti-rational concepts, they are constantly able to escape any real judgment of validity. Let's take two examples. The first being the anti-nuclear movement and Germany has elevated the meaning of absurdity to new highs. Those who declare themselves as the champion of the fight against global warming have succeeded to increase their production of CO2 while investing massively in clean energy. They have closed their nuclear plants. They could have waited, but no. The cult has spoken. The second is gender equality and is by far more important than global warming. This is a cult that hides a war on males and masculinity. While the data are recent (the last 30 years) we have enough information to know that there are clear differences between men and women, with considerable impacts in many areas of their lives. By rejecting that information because of the gender equality cult, we are hurting people, men as well as women, and we are hurting our society so badly that it might not recover. Even more disturbing is the war on boys at school. Boys are failing badly, and this is on purpose. The schools are not adapted to girls but tailored for them. This is not the act of civilized people, who try to build a good living place for all.
All those new cults are driven and supported by the new lysenkoists and they have one ugly characteristic in common. They have no moral compass, no compassion. They just want to be at war, to hurt people in the hope to alleviate their pain from their inability to handle what it means to be human. However, it doesn't work, and more people will have to pay the price. They know what they are doing because they have to disguise themselves as the good guys, and therefore, you are the bad guys. You deserve what happens to you.
This paragraph has many links with the first chapter: The war on knowledge. No wonder that I carry on that discussion here because the lack of knowledge is a fertile ground for all the Lysenko.
Knowledge because the less you know the more you're prone to manipulation, and they need to hack your brain to make you believe in the fabric of reality, which is the reality of wishes.
Values are personal guidelines and have no place in a collective society. The irrationalists/collectivists use virtue signaling, which has nothing to do with enhancing people's behaviors, but to check who is a friend or an enemy.
The convergence of values and knowledge happens in the teaching of human nature. We need to teach it in school. It must be for all, mandatory. Smart and highly educated people too can be manipulated, because they haven't had any teaching about human nature. Those who manipulate us are experts in that field. This was the role of catechism, which has nearly disappeared today. We can modernize catechism based on the bible and modern knowledge of evolutionary biology, game theory, etc. Mythology will be of great help too.
Some think that the truth is in the perfect balance of all things
What kind of knowledge? Let's be honest about that, scientific knowledge, for the most part. We don't need more engineers or scientists but definitely more people able to handle advanced reasoning tools to understand the world in which they live. There are hundreds of concepts that people don't even know of their existence, while they are being useful daily. There is no point to start a list here, but having been trained by the literature department and later when I change my mind by the science department I can tell you this. Literary people have a sort of general reasoning mechanism, in which all ideas must be express by the form: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It's linked to the primitive belief that perfect balance leads to the real nature of things and their true reality. The truth is not what is right but in the equal handling of all things simultaneously, which is expressed by the synthesis. The relativism of post-modernism is connected to that belief - the truth is in our ability to produce a world that synthesizes all cultures, all races, all genders... in a perfect balance. More than sadness, I feel great desperation for that reasoning for it will drive you away from any hope to understand the basic principle of life and certainly not the theory of evolution. It's not intellectual reasoning but a gut feeling and therefore, biological. As I explain later, rather than to be something that went wrong in their lives, I firmly think it represents something that has not been achieved in their emotional and intellectual development.
Note: The concept of perfect balance can be seen as simplistic or childish. In a way, it is, but from their point of view, it is also a profound expression of communion with the universe. When they apply a concept like the perfect balance, they create a direct connection with nature. What they are unable to realize is that nature is far more complex than what their limited model can handle. This extends to the question of a model of human nature. If they had an understanding of it, they would never push for the social construction of society.
Perfect balance, zero-sum economic and equality of outcomes
This little paragraph is a very late addition (I'm right now in the rereading process) but I just realize how the perfect balance is deeply related to the concepts of zero-sum economic and equality of outcome that the irrationalists are advocating for. The perfect balance means equality in the sense that everybody gets the same share and if that's not the case then someone must have taken it from you. In such a world, the production of wealth, which represents non-zero-sum economics, will introduce an imbalance between people hence the zero-sum economics in which they believe. Regarding the equality of outcomes is a direct application of the perfect balance, there is no difference in abilities and therefore, there should be no difference in the outcome of any activities. There are traces of perfect balance inside Lysenko's theory when he imagines that plants communicate and indirectly redistribute the resources. It might be that all Lysenko-like theories are based on some sort of perfect balance: Gender equality, cultural relativism, race representation.
Those who are possessed by the perfect balance will dismiss any negative consequences or any valid reasoning that opposes it. They cannot even think it could be morally wrong to apply a concept so blindly. They believe that anybody who tries to discuss it is a monster. If you do and according to them, you're literally trying to kill them, to kill humanity. There is one little annoying glitch in that magnificent fresco of humanity that they want to paint. They try to hide their actions the best they can because they are unable to face what they would see in the mirror, their ugly self. They don't tell you they work for a perfect balance all over society. They don't tell you that they reshape economics base on their belief in the zero-sum game. They don't tell you that education is organized to make happen the equality of outcome also known as equity.
The world of a socially perfect balance is a reality in which the throw of a coin invariably falls on the pile side and then on the face side, and again the pile, then the face... it also means, that if you have two faces in a raw, the coin must be rigged. That world doesn't exist and the probability to have two faces in a row is to be expected. For the worshippers of the perfect balance, it cannot be. To beat reality, they need to rig the game. That mechanism is at work in Hollywood movies, for at least the last 70 years, in which they forced the apparition of white and black actors following the perfect balance. It is often supposed that what the irrationalists are after is power, but I believe it's just a secondary brain pattern activated as a consequence of a primary pattern, which is the perfect balance. To apply the perfect balance, they need to rig the game, and this implies to have the power to do so.
Nature vs Nurture: An answer to imperfect balance and asymmetry
For the irrationalist, if the perfect balance can't apply, then it must be a black-and-white situation. In the nature vs nurture debate we are either the product of gene or social construction all the way, according to them - no grey area. The complexity of the answer to the question of nature vs nurture is that not only we are in grey areas but there are variations, depending on what you focus on. On average your genes account for 60% to 80% of what you can do, in comparison to education. There is also an asymmetry between genes and social construction. Any education can't erase abilities coming from your genes, but the genes can rewrite or undo your education. The undo happens because education doesn't last forever, and you will be left with your natural abilities after a long period. For example, you can enhance the I.Q of a person by about 20%, but in the long run, that person will return to his/her natural intelligence.
We need to teach people the existence of complex balances and asymmetries on which many modern concepts are built. These concepts associated with dynamic equilibrium are a good start to understanding modern knowledge and its models. People have to know that the knowledge and understanding we have today are far more advanced and complex than what they are taught for the last century. They deserve to get access to that knowledge. It's time.
What values should we teach? If I had to put one on the top of the list, it will be honesty, personal honesty, and toward other people. Without honesty, there is no trust, cooperation is deficient and no value system can survive.
Fighting the clandestine communist networks
From "The world history of communism", the third book, "the Accomplices" by Thierry Wolton, page 408. "The third of the conditions imposed for membership to the Comintern (short name for International Communist) - The duty to create everywhere, alongside to the legal organization (which is the communist party), a clandestine organization able to fulfill its duty towards the revolution when the time comes - is the implicit acceptation of a decision-making center other than the direction of the party."
This was explained by Leon Blum at the Congress of Tours (a French city) in 1920 and then confirmed by Trotsky himself in a letter to the new PCF (French Communist Party - Parti Communist Français) in 1921. "To whom falls the authority of the party?" Ask Leon Blum and then to answer "A secret committee appointed ... by the Comintern itself". Trotsky explains, "This executive committee shall reserve the right to establish itself the secret organization that is imposed on you". Thierry Wolton explains further that if the Comintern did die, the networks were still functional after WWII like "rabcors" in France.
I'm curious and so should you. What is the status of all communist secret networks around the world in 2019? If they still exist, and there are grounds to think so, we need to put them down, all of them immediately. They are not secret because they want to be allies of the civilization we built, but because they want to replace it.
How do you detect a secret network?
In his book, 'The Square and the Tower', the historian Niall Ferguson shows that they are a world beyond the visible architecture of society, a topological network of powers, all kinds of powers. Those non-visible networks have always been there, and always will. However, there is another kind of network which wants to remain invisible and act to remain that way. Those are the secret networks.
Visible networks are those of your daily life. The institutions and organizations with which you have to deal with belong to that category. Non-visible networks are usually professional, social, power networks, and even religious or ideological networks. Secret networks work mostly to change society for the benefit of a few.
You can detect these secret networks because they create a discrepancy between reality, what is expected to happen in a specific situation, and what really happens. They broke the randomness of reality. One event is not enough, but when you face a repetition of events or reactions that shouldn't exist then you're entitled to believe that something fishy is going on, something hidden.
There is another way to know about those secret networks. Very smart people are the first target of those networks because they are the elite, and as such, they can help to apply the changes that the secret networks are working for. They know about those secret networks because if they are not part of them, they have been approach and they have rejected the proposition or they are black-listed because they have been evaluated for not being good material. Yes, secret networks are choosy. In scientific institutions, there are 'secret seminars', that's how the mathematician Eric Weinstein discovered their existence. I had a similar experience. Do not imagine that in those seminars or meetings that happen in your city, you will see a Lenin advocating for the revolution, nor necessarily connected to collectivism. It's far more subtle than that. There are at least several thousand of very smart people in the western world who are not part of them but know about their existence for decades and haven't said anything. Perhaps it is time we met and makes public that knowledge even if it's not much and despite possible divergences in our experiences, but something is not right, and it interferes with the regular functioning of society's structures.
Secret networks have properties that give them a signature, but they all share one, they hate common people. Secret networks want to change the world, but the people represent a mass with momentum and a course that cannot be easily changed. The people are the wall that separates the secret network from their dream of a better world. What would be worrisome is that one network has become so powerful that its dream of a new world is now a hypothesis that could come true. Never lose sight of the word secret. The secrecy exists because they have to hide to the people their real objective and its cost.
The reasons for the success of secret networks are twos. The secrecy gives an illusion of power over the regular people. They know something the others don't know. It's petty power, but it works on many minds. The second is group dynamics. The secrecy binds the people who share it, it creates an identity. One aspect you must never lose sight of is that only a few are controlling the network and know exactly what the final objective is, all the others even the elite, are puppets. By puppets I mean exactly that, their brain has been programmed during those 'secret' meetings. They are of all kinds, but they all insist on revealing a truth that no other knows. They are the chosen ones. Many people believe that the elite is motivated by money, and it is one of the reasons, but never the first. They believe in what they are doing and that's why they can keep that level of secrecy. That they are illuminated by a true is a secret and they want to keep it hidden and are ready to take it to the grab.
Trust, risk, courage, emotions, and honesty
You often heard those words, and they are required to have an individual-centered society, but why? What connects those words together? We need to trust each other to get things done the best way possible. If you don't, there is no progress. Trust implies an element of risk. To take risks you need to have courage, which means to be able to control your emotions. Often a risk-free life is one of immediate satisfaction. To maintain trust, in the long run, you need to be honest. If you don't sooner or later, the world that your lies have built will collapse, taking away everything.
In a world of a Lysenko cult, there is no honesty, no courage, and no trust. You're working constantly to avoid any risk and the sole emotion that drives you is fear. Now here comes the question that you and only you can answer. What kind of society do you want? What kind of human do you want to be?
Science as a fast-food of ideas is a recipe for disaster
To think implies to acknowledge the possibility to be wrong
At some point, our German YouTuber decided to be involved in the battle about races against the far-right and to use science to prove his point, which is the one from the political left. (Everyone who states that race exists is far-right and by that, they think Nazi and don't get him started with the biologists). He made several basic scientific errors and other YouTubers, with scientific backgrounds, have tried to help him to correct those. Not only, he didn't apply the corrections, but he doubled down, tripled down, and quadrupled down making new scientific errors each time.
What was wrong with its approach? The arguments are of secondary importance, I want to focus on the reasoning. He has a classic European education, which is literary-oriented. We all learn rhetoric, which aims to win the argument. Methods to enhance those skills have been described by many authors, mostly philosophers like Schopenhauer in its book "The art of being Right." It is essentially a manual on the good use of logical fallacies.
We, the people of logical thinking
People with scientific culture and/or rational minds prefer to follow other rules, which are listed in the book "Being logical" by D.Q Mcinnery. The problem is the use of rhetoric with scientific knowledge. Nobody in science will do that, because planes have to fly not to crash. If you try your reputation will be terminated, and we should be all grateful for that. Let me rephrase this. During a meeting, if scientists start to use rhetoric to convince their colleagues, we're all doomed.
How is that connected to Lysenkoism? The way to mistreat and use science for ideological purposes is by no means different from what all the Lysenko do. Hence the title - Science as a fast-food of ideas is a recipe for disaster. They don't care about the truth and the consequences of the reality they impose on others. They're only concerned with what they think and what they want.
The paradox of the self-centered who wants to be a caretaker
It looks paradoxical that those who ask for a collective society are those who are the most self-centered, while those who ask for an individual-centered society are those who are the most caretakers. The former are collectivists not by choice but because of primitive patterns that dictate what they are and from which they cannot free themselves. As a consequence, they are not free to endorse logical thinking, intellectual rigor, and the scientific method so important to have a truthful look at reality, which is unavoidable if you want to help others. They are obsessed to help the less fortunate precisely because they can't. It helps them to compensate for what is missing in their personality, a coherent map of the world, and a perception of what reality is. Their solutions will fail or at best will be inefficient and costly.
Trading forgiveness for responsibility
We are witnessing the radicalization of the political left and at the same time, more people of the center-left are living the boat. By doing so, they believe to make their mea culpa, and everything will be fine. Some, who were already radicalized, tell their story about how they have helped to sapper the structure of our society. They all ask for forgiveness. 'Hey, you see; I'm no more with them. I'm a good guy now. Ok?' Not ok, for at least two reasons.
1) They never acknowledge the values issue of the ideologies which convince them to participate in bad actions. This is due to the hidden nature of the left message whose purpose is to make their action more virtuous as they are. When they said, "we are in favor of education" you need to translate by "We are blank slate" meaning that they need to molt the young minds. They are convinced that it's for the greatest good. Another example, '80% of the people should have access to the university' translated into 'I.Q is not a thing'. Most of their ideologies turn around an erroneous model of human nature. They need to acknowledge that fact. They need to learn from their errors and not be granted a free pass to escape their responsibilities.
2) It is part of the culture of the political left to work for an organization helping those in need around the world (Helping them, not solving their problems). We know today that several of these organizations are political Trojan horses, and some members have spoken out about it. It does not happen that often, but it happens. After they speak out, what do they do? Nothing, and by that I mean they won't engage themselves in actions to counter what they have helped to produce. Sorry, but it won't do. They should put the same energy and commitment to help to produce a free and viable civilization as they did to undermine it. They have taken the responsibility to do it, now they have to take the responsibility to undo it. Sadly, they are not going to do that because if they disagree with the political agenda of those organizations, they still believe in their mission, in their values for the same reason I mentioned in the first point - an erroneous model of human nature.
Do you want forgiveness? Fine, but work harder to acknowledge why you were wrong, the root of it, and then join an organization that helps people to become autonomous in a modern world and not to build a human zoo that will justify more help for your personal moral comfort.
We are used to say that most people do not take sides, but that's not entirely true. They make an assessment of which side is the most dangerous for them and will go with that group. That assessment also includes the evaluation of how the other group will react if they change their mind. We, the people of freedom and reason, tend to grant forgiveness very easily. It means that our openness is seen as a weakness that one can take advantage of. They are not as neutral as they think. By hardening the conditions by which forgiveness will be granted and the responsibilities they have to take, it will have an impact on their assessment of allegiance when the time comes to make a choice.
5 - The dehumanization process: causes and examples
The dehumanization process is part of any genocide plan. Timothy Snyder, author of the book: Blood lands - Europe between Hitler and Stalin - recalls "the key to both national socialism and Stalinism was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human." You can always make up a reason to deprive a group of people of its humanity, which is used as proof that they deserve it. "They're a threat to the world, to its future. We must get rid of them. History demands it." The reasons given are a facade because the perpetrators of genocide are the ones who cut themselves from their humanity to achieve their goal. (Addendum April 2020: the corona crisis has revealed that some left-leaning politicians are willing to put in psychiatry some political opponents - the case Beate Bahner in Germany. If they don't cooperate they must be mentally ill and need our help. The use of psychiatry is a well-known and convenient trick of the collectivists, for you lost your rights not to mention the public stigma. This is part of the dehumanization process.)
The hypothesis I will follow is that genocide needs a particular frame of mind, tribalism of course, but more precisely of the collectivist type. While individualists can do the same, that's not what they are up to as Karl Popper reminds us: Collectivism defines itself as the power struggle between groups and he adds "The division of mankind into friends and foe is a most obvious emotional division." Collectivism dehumanizes people and particularly the individuals who reject that system. The way they proceed generates many dark places, and I will explore some of them.
The root of mass dehumanization
The root cause of dehumanization is to cut yourself from any positive emotions toward another group (note), and this is the mark of the collectivist mind. To see some population as another pool of genes that can domage theirs - they need to be exterminated. For the individualist, this is very difficult to understand and some philosophical insights will be of great help. I will first let Karl Popper defines rationalists and why he considers the opposition of rationalists and irrationalists as the most important warfare of our time. Next, I will present Stephen Pinker's historical understanding of the enlightenment movement. As a conclusion, I will show how those two visions share an identical evaluation of the struggles of human civilization and that they take their origin in the warfare between the collectivists and the individualists.
Note: we must distinguish between maternal and paternal love. Maternal love serves the interest of the giver and produces a dependency without solving any problem, while paternal love serves the interest of the recipient and will develop his autonomy including the resolution of problems if any. Maternal love implies the loss of liberty, while paternal love, by its very action, advocates for the defense of liberty. Collectivists advocate for maternal love, always. Since it doesn't solve problems it is a destructive love for the individual and society.
I quote Karl Popper: "The irrationalist insists that emotions and passions rather than reason are the mainsprings of human actions. To the rationalist's reply that, though this may be so, we should do what we can to remedy it, and should try to make reason play as large a part as it possibly can...". "It is my firm conviction that this emphasis upon emotion and passion leads ... to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter to any dispute". "The rationalist attitude... is very similar to the scientific attitude, to the belief that in the search for truth, we need cooperation". "The fact that rationalist attitude considers the argument rather than the person ... leads to the view that we must recognize everybody ... as a potential source of argument". "Authoritarianism and rationalism in our sense cannot be reconciled, since arguments, which includes criticism and the art of listening to criticism, is the basis of reasonableness." (The open society and its enemies - chapter 24: The revolt against reason).
In his latest book "Enlightenment now", Stephen Pinker separates the world into those who support enlightenment, meaning reason, science, humanism, and progress, and those who support a counter-enlightenment movement. The extreme polarization of ideas we face today is the result of the warfare between those two movements. More specifically and I quote "The disdain (for enlightenment) has a long pedigree in elite intellectual and artistic culture." While the enlightenment was more clearly articulated by the Western and American civilization, it is rooted "in reason and human nature" and therefore, was expressed many times during the history of human civilization and in many places. "The Romantic movement pushed back particularly hard against Enlightenment ideals. Rousseau...and others denied that reason could be separated from emotions, that individuals could be considered apart from their culture." What do the counter-enlightenment people think about science and reason? They rob life of its enchantment and humans of their dignity.
A common vision: Knowledge and reason
Karl Popper expresses the same issue on what irrationalists think about rationalists. "They are the poor in spirit ... pursuing soulless and mechanical activities...unaware of the deeper problem of human destiny". Both Pinker and Popper give a very clear definition of what is important to our civilization. Karl Popper: "Rationalism...an attitude that seeks to solve as many problems as possible by an appeal to reason". Steven Pinker "Enlightenment humanism...the idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare" Both want deeply to help the other with the help of science and reason. I fully endorse that vision, but I will add values. They are based on our understanding of human nature, they guide us throughout our lives and are above rights. Since they are extracted from human nature, therefore, reality, they cannot be in contradiction with reason and science.
Irrationalists reject reason as a means to understand the world and to interact with it. Instead, they emphasize the role played by emotions. People driven by emotions are of the collective type, the herd. Being driven by your emotions does not mean that you're overly emotional, but that your decisions are driven by your feeling. If a reasoning, no matter which one, happens to be obviously true, you will dismiss it in favor of your emotions, if it conflicts with them. Communication and reasoning through emotions do not allow complex, nor non-intuitive reasoning as modern science requires. Life quality regresses. Regarding the herd's behavior, the truth is given by the collective, and each of its members has to keep listening to its music to constantly be in tune with it. There is no such thing as truth and objectivity, you're the product of a group and its culture. Human nature in which everyone has its particularity is a heresy. This herd vision is of great significance to understand dehumanization.
You haven't heard much from Karl Popper's ideas lately. He is known for his critic of the scientific method and his falsification method, but after WWII, he wrote a political book "The open society and its enemies" which appears to be today the best explanation ever given on the grand conflict we are facing and its consequences on our civilization. In that work, he is clear-minded on Plato, the elites, Marxism, collectivism, and he is explicit about what he thinks about reason. He chooses rationality. He stated it, he wrote it and defended it. He also makes the hypothesis that irrationalism is a long-standing struggle in our civilization (since Plato and Aristotle) and that our time will have to settle the question. History proved him right. Instead of erecting new statues of Karl Marx, Germany should erect statues of Karl Popper. The first name being the same, it shouldn't be that hard to get used to it.
When the elite let down the people
"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain" (Schiller)
Those who create the 'new' reality for the collective are academics and intellectuals, top-ranked irrationalists. They are so absorbed by their own ability to build a perfect world that they see themselves as Gods, but at the end of the day, when no problem is solved, the life quality of people has decreased and the social structures are in decay, the only thing left is stupidity. Those people are no God. The Gods have tried to show them the path of humanity and civilization but against stupidity...
Peter Hitchens provides another way to say it 'Too clever to believe in God'. Those elite believe that being clever is the way out to the belief in God, but it's not, it's their way to escape it. The more they insist that smart and educated people can't believe in God, the more they show how much they lack the courage to face the one they can't beat, and that is themselves. While nobody denies that a fine and well-worked brain can produce an accurate picture of the world, it is precisely that ability that stops them to accept to have weaknesses, because it asks the paradoxical question - If I have weaknesses why should anyone believe that my understanding of the world is reliable, that I'm clever? The paradox is resolved if you understand that facing your weaknesses has everything to do with courage and little with being clever. People in the western world, which are looking for a bearing and answers, have now understood that they have nothing to expect from the academics who have proven to be the most cowardly people in the world.
The discussion about the elites and God is fascinating and one that we forgot to have. First, most of the elite never really believe in God, but contrary to what they say they understand the need to believe in it and that's why they want you to believe. The non-uniformity of the Christian faith is proof of this. Each major elite adapted it to his needs (Lutheran, Anglican) You may think that things have changed with enlightenment and God is dead, but that's not what C.G Jung think, I quote "The state has taken the place of God; that's why seen from this angle, the socialism dictatorships are religions and state slavery is a form of worship". What's the connection? The fear of God is now the fear of the state. Collectivist states are dictatorships, not for no reason. They need you to fear the state, which is just a facade to hide those who really control the world, that controls you. More than the fear of God, it's the fear of the judgment of God and the state. Most have observed that what is asked is blind obedience to what the state says, whatever science says because it has become a tool for the fabric of reality as I have explained in the chapter 'the war on knowledge'.
Secondly, the belief in God is not about its existence of God or who/what he is but what you are, this includes the elite and they know it. To fear the judgment of God is to accept that there is a point of reference outside us and above us. Above us doesn't mean in the sky, but that it prevails over our judgment. This is, at least, the outside world, the universe, or reality. It matters because if we are to be judged it means that we accept that we are not perfect nor innocent, and we will have to face that dark side of us. That's what to believe in God is all about. To accept ourselves, with our strengths and weaknesses and that's what the elite refuses, they are in denial of their weaknesses, and as a collateral damage in denial of their human nature. What happens if we refuse to be judged, to look at ourselves as we really are? C.G Jung explains that we will project on others our dark side that Jung called the shadow, and you will be led by that shadow. You will be doing to others what you accuse them to do against you. The victimhood class system that is implemented right now is not about justice but to use you as their oppression officer against other people and you will be called social justice warrior. That's the difference with the state-God. While God asks you to look at your darkness to become good, The state-God uses your darkness to do its dirty work. Meanwhile, the elite work hard to produce a world in which they won't have to face their darkness. The elites live in fear of themselves, we will never bring them to believe in God as we have understood it for the last millennia. But we need them to accept that something has to be taken as a reference point on which we have no control so that we will be judged by it. This will imply to accept themselves and their dark side and that they are not the wiser of the wiser, even if it is virtual.
The responsibility of academics, especially the humanities, is massive, and this is known by all of them for a long time. In a free and open society like the occidental civilization that we have built, academics enjoy the full liberty of being their own master and being in charge of the knowledge of the civilization and the education of its elite. They are the guarantors of reality. When the first stone of the first university was planted to become the home of knowledge and a beacon for humanity, there was a religion with its moral code and there were kings, the ultimate arbiter. Back at that time, academics had moral obligations and guidance and if a conflict arose among them, they will have asked, at least theoretically, for arbitration that no one would have dared to discuss. Nowadays, they are on their own, cut from their duties to civilization and any powerful arbiter.
People were left with a candid hope, that the academics won't betray their mission. That hope was shattered. In such a context, game theory teaches us that the lack of accountability and this applies to the elite in general, will drive them to play the selfish card, and to break the cooperation and the social contract with the people. It is precisely the lack of plausible retaliation by the people that enable the elite to play the selfish card and allow them to get away with the consequences. What are they? The elite will force upon the people its own rules, to get as much power and wealth as possible while despising the people. The people will revolt individually in a case-by-case situation. Again game theory explains what happens. Robert Axelrod writes in his book 'The evolution of cooperation', regarding the social structure of cooperation "The futility of isolated revolt (by low-status player) is a consequence of the immutability of the other players ... this leads the higher-status players to be concerned with their reputation for firmness". But that's not the worse. When people will have to face bad practices from businesses, doctors, lawyers, police officers, and politics, they will feel powerless. However, at the same time, they are asked to act as if everything is fine to replace reality with an artificial one. This is how you deprive people of their humanity.
The killing of universities and the 3 pillars of its reborn
Regarding the few academics who understand their responsibilities, a question arises - why don't they fight back? They do (some of the few), by using reason, open dialogues, and evidence-based arguments, but it doesn't work because the other side has already decided to go for a 'take it or leave it' strategy. If the dialogue is impossible why do they still try to engage it? Even the most courageous lack the courage and the spirit of their ancestors but I suspect that they know what's wrong and what they failed to address.
The betrayal of the intellectuals
Another way to look at the betrayal of our intellectual elite is that they have no idea what should be the next step for human civilization, they are clueless. Nonetheless, they still believe that they have to be the light that leads the people, and as such they will push for the only option left to them, going back to the old way, the closed and primitive society. I quote "Unwilling and unable to help mankind along their difficult path into an unknown future which they have to create for themselves, some of the educated tried to make them turn back into the past." Karl Popper - The open society and its enemies, chapter 10.
What does going back means? The population growth pressures our social organization which needs to evolve to adapt. The biggest change is that the members of the tribe become individuals and slowly the alpha/herd model fades away. This change and its cohort of consequences are at work since the beginning of the modern human, roughly for 50000 years. In the long run, the individual is an inescapable outcome but the spirit of the primitive tribe will always try to come back and the elite is its stronger defender. For the individuals to be, and every single human has to follow a maturation process to be that individual, several ingredients are required: the most important are 1) to accept the existence and unicity of reality, 2) that there are truths, 3) that reason is our access point to reality, 4) reality is a reference point to check our understanding of this world, 5) to focus on doing the good on this world, and 5) freedom of speech and thinking. All of those have been fought by various political, social, and philosophical movements, but the fight began much sooner than most people believe. For example, misandry, the hate of men is already mentioned by Socrates and he observed that misandry is linked to misology, the hate of logic, and logic is generally associated with reason. Feminism is nothing new, the fight for equality is a facade that has remarkably worked, and to put women in charge is only a consequence of the primary target of the collectivist, the return of the closed society. You don't like what you just read, I understand that, so let's make a reality check of our present situation. Can we build an organization managed by women composed only of women? The answer is yes. Can we build an organization managed by men and composed only by men? A question will immediately be asked, why do you want to do that, are you sexist? So yes, not only misandry exists, not only it is used as a political tool but it also used to oppose the principle of civilization. Reason is part of the many ingredients that make civilization work, without it, any project of civilization will collapse, without men at their best, civilization collapse.
Another battlefield is imperialism. Everyone is used to that term and that it is associated with European culture, but the accusation goes back to the conflict between Sparta and Athens. The Spartans accused the Athenians of expansionism, another word for imperialism, through their commercial politics. What was that accusation all about? It's an attempt from the Spartans to protect their way of life, the close society, its rigidity, and necessary superiority. Exchange of any kind goes against their taboos that maintain frozen their society, but also its order (organization). Unfortunately, it also keeps away the acquisition and exchange of knowledge. The reason why we can trace back to that period most of our social, philosophical, and political movements, is because we haven't settled the question between the open and closed society. But that question doesn't answer all issues, there is the question of accepting human nature and one that is often belittled, to be conscious of our dark side and to accept it. Without that acknowledgment, doing the good is impossible.
Why do we need a science-based culture to learn how to think in modern times?
This is a complement to the second pillar of the next generation of universities. If we put aside deconstructionism to analyze texts, which is characterized by searching the underlying power struggles, the students are required to use the Hegel method. This method tries to organize a topic by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (in fact, there are relations with deconstructionism in their search of a bipolar structure in texts. Who opposes who). In a knowledge-based society, students are expected to find the many arguments of a text and then to be able to evaluate if they're true or not. They may also bring external arguments for matters still open to inquiry, to contrast those given by the author. All of this requires knowledge and in modern times, it means mainly scientific knowledge. That's why the science department needs to take over the university to teach students how to think. This is by no mean a small change, but nonetheless, an absolute necessity to allow our civilization to solve the many challenges ahead.
What makes the elites so important?
In an open society, meritocracy is the mechanism by which the best people are chosen, no matter the group they belong to. The top elites are the pump that allows the lift up. If they stop the pump, meritocracy falls apart, and it opens the society for an authoritarian system, if not worse.
The loss of the meaning of sacrifice
Stand for something greater than you
You have to stand for something more important than you, your comfort, your material possession, and even your own family. The structures and organizations that keep at bay evilness, must hold to protect what we believe in. We believe in the concepts and values that help us to be civilized humans, which are embodied in the society we build, and we believe in our family, protected by that society. As such Jesus can be seen as a role model for what has to be done to preserve our civilization. This is something that any non-theist can adhere to, if you don't agree on the model, you still have to stand for the concept that supports civilization. We know what happens if you do not.
"A man who has put his faith in what he owns, rather than what he stands for, will be unable to sacrifice what he owns ... this decision will weaken his nature and make him unable to cope with the tragic weight of his consciousness; it will turn him toward the lie and make him an active agent in the production of his own and his society's insufficiency." Jordan Peterson, 'Maps of the meaning'. Haven't you seen recently, the person who Peterson is talking about? I bet you have, and I'm turning my head to the academics. How are you doing?
One more thing, there is a feedback loop between the individual who wants to stand for something and the society, the group must welcome such a stand. Without the support, at least in spirit, by the society, individuals will doubt and as a result, do nothing. That feedback loop is one of the mechanisms that allow a civilization to take ground and prosper.
Message for the atheists and/or skeptics
I know what you say each time Jesus is mentioned I have had discussions about that with you. I remember. You will say 'We don't even know if he existed', casting doubt, because that he is not the son of a God is implicit and therefore, already answered. My answer is straightforward. It doesn't matter if he existed or not, and frankly, we don't care about what you have to say because your statement is just a distraction from what truly is important. What matters, is his story because of the message it delivers. The message is about us, about being human, and guidance about how we should behave. Did Ulysses exist? It doesn't matter, but the message in Homer's Odyssey is important for us as human beings.
Why are stories of Jesus, Ulysses, or Gilgamesh so important? Why don't we directly give moral obligations or rules of behavior? We, as humans, have a brain that is far more receptive to information encapsulated inside stories, which involve other humans. It's like if they talk to us directly and when the personage of those stories acts like heroes, it's like having your family giving you a bit of advice, and we are more prone to listen to a family member than a stranger. Coherent stories with heroes, which provide moral guidance, values, and insight into our human nature are extremely important to become civilized. They help us.
To produce the next generation of civilization, which will imply acknowledging the legacy of what was before, we will need all the help we can get and the stories of the ancients and the Christians are powerful allies. We will also produce stories of our own to reflect modern knowledge that was never put inside stories before.
The denial of a unique reality is to dehumanize those who endorse it
I've already made that case with the first part of the letter regarding the consequences of those rejecting the Copernic/Galileo and the Darwinian revolutions. However, I have now more tools at my disposal to explain further.
When the irrationalists came back in force with the romantics, they adopted the strategy of "take it or leave it". It means, that you have to take the way they see the world and how it should be run, or to go to hell. The mistake the rationalists did make (once more, we are really slow learners), was to fail to understand that that strategy was a declaration of war, for it cannot permit any resolution between the two sides. As the prophecy about Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter says, one must die by the hand of the other. Well, the 20th century gives us a clear idea of what hell is, with the irrationalists of the collective type.
Rousseau and the hate of civilization
This drastic stand comes from the work done by J.J Rousseau (two books: Emile - The social contact) in which he inserted that men are good naturally and become bad when in contact with civilization. For the irrationalists, civilization equals reason, which equals science, which equals industrialization. The quest to escape that reality became an existential quest and their battle cry is: take it or leave it.
The need to eliminate alternative realities
This is even more inhuman than you might think. The take it or leave it, not only marks a territory but it's a rallying cry, sorting those who are irrationalist and the other. A question arose when they win like in Russia and China: what happens for the generation born after? Not all of them will rally the fantasy, even with the help of reeducation camps. It means that the persecution and the killing will be an endless ongoing process. What a joy to live in such a society. If they are so empathetic why didn't they thought about allowing them some land and avoid the constant persecution? The problem with irrationalists is that they need to eliminate any alternative reality, particularly the real one to impose their fairy tale. This is very interesting because it shows that the rationalist can adopt that strategy, take it or leave it, without entering the endless persecution and killing. The rationalists have just to grant some lands to the irrationalists and Voilà. Rationalists do not feel the constant urge to persuade others of the correctness of their ideas... They can go their own way and let you leave in your fantasy. Clearly, it's not that simple, but at least the possibility exists. For example, the hate speech issue on the internet is very easy to solve for the rationalist you just have to create a subtype internet for the main groups with their own rules, their own arbitrators, and it won't cost a cent. When someone creates a website or a YouTube channel he/she has simply to state what rules and values it follows. Technically, it's straightforward to implement because the whole logic of the technology on which our virtual life is based is a tree-like organization (read my propositions at the end of the letter).
In his book 'The quest for cosmic Justice', Thomas Sowell explores the question of justice and its numerous underlying reality, to show the flaw of collectivist thinking on that important topic, one of which is the cost of justice. He wrote, "We need to consider that those who believe in the vision of a cosmic justice seldom want to consider - the nature of those costs and how they change the very nature of justice itself." Cosmic justice is the mythical justice that exists in collectivist utopia. He gives two examples, primogeniture - the practice of leaving the estate to the eldest son to keep an estate intact from generation to generation. That example is about an injustice done to avoid greater injustice, the fall of the family with the loss of its estate. But of course, you need to understand how life was back then, to understand the rationale behind that decision. The second example is simpler. A boat of 300 passengers is sinking, but there are only save boats for 200 passengers. The answer to such a question is already known and applied, men sacrifice themselves for the greater good, but that's not the kind of answer collectivists want to give. As Thomas Sowell explains, in the mind of the collectivists' justice must be sought at all costs. When applied to that example, they would rather let sink everybody, so that no injustice would be done to anybody.
Some might think that Thomas Sowell used tailored examples to prove his point, but he really is on to something. Collectivists want justice at all costs, but to avoid facing the moral consequences they intentionally failed to estimate the cost. Start Trek TV show from the 1960s gives a perfect example of that justice, at all cost, frame of mind. In the episode 'The conscience of the king', Captain Kirk is following the track of Kodos the former governor of Tarsus IV colony. He killed 4000 people when facing a famine to allow some of them to survive but the supply ships sent to save them came earlier and Kodos was considered as a butcher. But was he? At the time he took his decision he couldn't count on that supply ship, he had to make a decision and a price had to be paid. It's not what Kodos did that is interesting, but what the writer of that episode didn't explain. If we put aside the supply ship parameter - there is no supply ship at all, then what is the right answer to the famine of the colony? The social justice mentality does not allow us to envision an answer in which there is a cost to justice and they consider anybody who will implement a solution with a cost, no matter how small, as a monster. They will let the situation follows its natural course - chaos, death, and in some case cannibalism.
What happens in real life when the collectivist apply cosmic justice? They will make a cost evaluation, and then depict those who need to be killed as non-human. Since they aren't human, they are not part of the cost calculation and therefore there is no cost. To call someone a racist, a Nazi, a misogynist is part of the dehumanization process, in order to apply their idea of justice for all with the illusion that there is no cost.
In Memory of Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame
We will not forget your sacrifice
During the writing of this letter, a terrorist attack happened in France. Amidst the victims, Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, a French gendarme officer. He took the place of some hostages and was killed. He sacrificed himself in defense of values that are the foundation of our civilization. His sacrifice also gives us the courage to defend those values. What are those values? He was a catholic, and their values are known: tell the truth, humility, courage, responsibility, discipline, forgiveness, conscientiousness, sharing, cooperation, being better, family, individualism, introspection...
A hope of convergence and reborn
I will be brief. A common ground has started to take shape between the enlightenment and the Christians. Several science fields through the lens of evolutionary theory have shown convergence between the two, and the reason lies in the universality of some values that help individuals to be at their best. I have great hope for the development of a society organize around those two movements based on common values and goals. Not everything will be shiny, but strong and lasting cooperation can be achieved. Another motivation exists that has started to be obvious to more and more observers. Both have a common natural enemy, the irrationalists. We don't ask for it, but it's time that we protect ourselves against it, and a common society will be a stronger bastion than our actual democracy.
The 'useless' people. When not being human is the new human
Amongst some elite, there is the idea that with advanced mechanical devices (robots) and A.I., there will be people who would have nothing to do, because there are unfit to serve any function in society. We will pay them to be able to buy food and have a roof. Only the very gifted will be of any use. I could argue that a person that has no function, no responsibility is not a human being, but what I'm getting at is far worse than that. Depending on how A.I will perform, there will be eventually 7 billion useless people.
Then what? They will just sit there all day long, doing nothing other than consuming Earth resources? Science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov in "Cavern of steel" have depicted that situation. He took the soft solution; the elite moved on other planets with only a few of them on each. In reality, all of our knowledge on social organization, psychology, economics... tell us that at some point in time a group of elites will consider getting rid of those people.
I once heard that if someone states that something unbelievable is happening, your first sane reaction is to consider that person insane. Your second reaction is to check the story because if you don't, you're the one who is insane. The social Republic of the useless will happen insidiously, in a collectivist society where individuals have no meaning. An individual-centered society is a protection against it.
Having purposes is what it means to be human
As a person who defends enlightenment, I don't support that policy, but above all, as a person of knowledge, it is the lack of advanced and creative thoughts, and the will to find a solution that I oppose. Those people have just given up on what it means to be human and civilized and the beauty of what we have achieved. The useless-people is the next-generation tool for mass-dehumanization, and nothing good will come out of it. People need to have a purpose to be human, and they must have their saying in defining that purpose. The time has come that if we can choose to implement a new technology that will take a little of that human purpose, we will have to put it aside.
Intersectionality: a ranking tribal system for mass dehumanization
Relativism as a defense mechanism
For 2000 years, relativism has been fought with no success. The reason is that it does not have any validity on its own (the logical flaw of relativism that it can't apply to itself is long known), it is a by-product of the self-centered narrative of the irrationalists. Their narrative is "the" reality. Each group, each ideology, must have its own reality. When a group of irrationalists states that the narrative of other groups/tribes is as valid as any other, it's not in defense of those groups/tribes but to protect their own narrative, their own reality. That's why they are not interested in the inconsistency of relativism, which can go to the extreme. When we are told that we have to take at face value the stories of the origin of American Indians and Australian aborigines as they know it, we are told that they have not migrated from Africa. It means that there are several human species. Quite a statement. The rejection of the universality of the message of the occidental world, replace by diversity will bounce back badly for it's a return to tribalism.
Beyond the self-defense tools, relativism is useless to solve conflicts that will inevitably occur between groups as Keith Windschuttle explains in his book, " The killing of history". To solve a problem you need a common ground, and relativism refutes that possibility, and we should not forget the difficulty to evaluate a prejudice done to a group. Why do you think that universal human rights apply only to individuals? The universality is the common ground and the evaluation of the suffering of an individual makes sense. The relativists solve the problem by using a ranking system for groups called intersectionality. The function used to establish the rank of a group is 'power over', and it serves to evaluate which group has power over another group. The criteria used are mostly sex and race. A black woman ranks higher than a white woman but less than a black-non-gender. Of course, the bottom is populated by heterosexual-white-western-male. They just have the right to stay silent and listen to higher-ranking people. We all understand how intersectionality helps our civilization to progress toward a better social organization and a better world. Haven't we seen something equivalent before? The bourgeoisie and lenders against the proletariat, the Aryans against the Jews?
In intersectionality, there is no compassion for those who are down the hill, no willingness to blur the frontier, no way to enhance yourself. It is a caste system in which the values of individuals have no meaning. That caste system is not even stable, there is always a new group that ought to have more or fewer rights. It sees sex as a race and is racist to the extreme. We know where that path leads.
The victimhood mentality and strategy
Victimhood is by definition the state of being a victim. It has taken a social and political meaning and can be characterized as a mentality and a strategy, and those who play it are no victims. You have to know that when you're a real victim what you want the most is to move on because you have nightmares, and in some cases flash during the day of the moment you have become a victim. Your social, professional, and sexual life is shattered, you might experience memory issues because your brain over-focuses on that tragic moment, and more. It will take months if not years to be able to move on, but that's what you want the most and you will avoid any situation that can remind you of what happened to you. The political and social victims of today do not want that, they want to cultivate their state of being a victim (they exaggerate), they don't want to stop being a victim (long-lasting) and that's why we know it is an act.
Victimhood in the social and political sense is to put the burden of what is wrong with you on the shoulder of someone else to avoid fixing the errors you made in the past or to accept who you are and in that case, you will borrow a cause. When that victimhood is practiced at a group level the end goal is to put down the system with the belief that a reset will solve their existential issue. This is childish to the core and reminds me of a Piaget experiment. Jean Piaget has observed that children under 4 years believe that when they can't see you, you can't see them. Similarly, they think that if the system goes away, their problems will go away too. They don't even want to discuss the issues because by doing so they could have to discuss their problems.
There are only two ways to change an actual system with the aim to produce a better one, whether that aim is realistic or not. One is to make a complex analysis of the situation and carefully design a new system with a plan to apply it step by step. It's the hard way. The other is to overwhelm the actual system of all that is not right in the world and play the victim so that it justifies to put it down no matter the way. The latter has a considerable advantage, it is easier to gather people around negative emotions than positive emotions. However there is a backslash, those who use victimhood have no plan to build a better society. They have no future other than to put down the actual system. This is fundamentally the Marxist plan, when all the perpetrators of all crimes will be dead then the victims will reign in peace. Unfortunately, when the perpetrators are dead, there is no more system to allow people the get food, shoulder... and the truth is revealed. They are the victims of themselves but they won't accept that reality and the civilization of the volcano people, the self-hating and destructive people will rise and in a matter of generations disappear.
There is also the dark side of victimhood, which forced those who play it to see all problems as an 'Us vs Them' issue. It's primitive tribalism, and that's the part of that strategy that can lead to genocide - one must die so that the other can live. The hypothesis that we, the people, separate, that we split the society is never considered. The destruction of symbols that belong to the other group is the first sign to prepare for the genocide. The 'live and let live' motto, no longer takes place. All collectivist revolutions are taking the path of victimhood. One may object that there are sometimes legitimate grievances. It's true, but in this case, ask the victim what their strategy and what they need to have a better life - better education, better living standards, soils, infrastructures... it's up to them to define it. If they can't then they are just playing the victim nothing more. If they start to destroy symbols in particular art and historic symbols, then you know that their victimhood has nothing to do with any plan for a better life. They are only motivated by an extermination wish. Will it go that far? Only history can tell, but history also teaches us that it is usually what happens. The Russian and the Chinese communist revolutions are monstrous examples, as the final solution against the Jews designed by the German.
The social aspect of the victimhood mentality is to redefine social organization based on a victimhood status. In Communist Russia, it was to look for your proletarian roots, in 2020 it is to look at your ancestor depending on your race and your sex. What it means is that all our activities on a daily basis, must be thought in term of victimhood. What is called virtue signaling is one of the most observable mechanisms of that social organization at work - to show that you comply and accept the new hierarchization of the society - but make no mistake it is collectivism all the way. It is inhuman and it's anti-civilization.
The fundamental mechanism of victimhood is, of course, a strategy, but what I call victimhood strategy is the use of emotions to portrait the one who uses it as the good guy and its target as the bad guy. How do they know what emotions to use? The projection mechanism provided them instantly and unconsciously with the answer. They will project their dark side onto their opponent and accuse him of what they wanted to do. But the projection mechanism is not the only mechanism involved, there is also an existential mechanism. When someone tells them an observational truth that contradicts their victim status, they will feel as if their existence is at stake, and they will call it hate-speech or whatever is needed to avoid facing that truth. The psychological reaction is that by marking your opponent as bad then what he says is false. That kind of logic is well-known. What if beautiful is true and what is ugly false. A bad person is ugly therefore wrong. Of course when you're the only one to judge who is beautiful or ugly things are really simple. However, truth is not in the eye of the beholder, because truth implies an external point of reference that cannot be another human being.
Why are emotions at the heart of their strategy? They lack access to reality, which is given with the development of reason. That tool is supposed to be acquired when moving from childhood to adulthood. One of the main thesis of the explanatory model I'm trying to develop to understand collectivism and all its offspring, is the maturation process which is to move from an emotional to a reason-based understanding of the world. That understanding is the map of reality that the brain needs to help us to navigate into that world. Among all the explanations I give to make that move, there is one I did not give yet, which is the importance of a role model, and for that specific task, the role model is necessarily a man.
The importance of role models in the life of people is not only known by all but that it has always existed. The first question to answer is why do we need a role model? To answer that question you just have to look at how it works. We have a hardware mechanism to push the young to imitate what the adult around them do. It is part of the survival tools we all have and nature imposes on us the following logic. If the adults around us are around is because they have assimilated knowledge that allows them to stay alive. If I want to stay alive I need to imitate them. That imitation is not only for visible behaviors but also for mental behaviors like facing danger without quitting, to affront an opponent without going to physical or lethal violence, etc. Men are invaluable for that purpose but it's a knowledge that is today hidden in our big cities. Let go back to our countryside to understand what is at stake. In those places, nobody will deny the importance of men, and the more isolated the more that statement is true. It has little to do with physical force even if it is useful. What I'm talking about is a particular frame of mind that can be resume by "they will make it work". No matter the efforts, no matter the weather, or whatever that will come to stop a project to be achieved they will find the mental resources to make it work, to bring life where there is none. It is that strength that makes civilization happens, and it is precisely that strength, bear by men, that has become invisible to the point that too many people have forgotten about it.
The victimhood mentality was able to grow because we forgot about some natural realities. This is a luxe that city dwellers can afford, but only for a limited amount of time. After that, things will go ugly, and the state will not save them because it serves only those who have developed it, the elite. Those elite are no victims. Victimhood is an anti-survival skill.
When relativists denied the existence of the extermination camps
Post-modernisms' negation of Auschwitz
During the 1960s, a new philosophy appears, post-modernism, led mostly by French intellectuals. A fundamental statement of that philosophy is that there is no fact, which accounts also for historical facts. This, of course, is supported by a very strong relativist attitude. So strong, that it put them in a very dangerous situation at the beginning of the 1970s. According to that philosophy, stating that Auschwitz existed or not has the same value. If they had continued along that line, they would have become a harbor for a denial of the existence of extermination camps. Francis Wheen reminds us of that moment and how they solved it in his book "How mumbo-Jumbo conquered the world". He quotes Richard Evans, author of the book: In defense of history, quote "Here is an issue where evidence really counts and can be used to establish the facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric."
That quote reveals the general agreement that rhetoric cannot be allowed to understand some situations. I already covered the use of rhetoric with scientific reasoning and the danger of it. At the same time, the author of the quote acknowledges that some facts are not stories, but how do you decide what is a story and what makes a fact? Where are the criteria? Who wrote them? Let say it's a matter of interpretation, then you have a serious problem. On what argument do you intend to fight people with genocidal ideas? Remember what the survivors told us? Do something before it's too late. BEFORE. You can't wait to see the corps, the building of the concentration camps, and gulags. To be able to act before, you will need to have some facts on which you will have to decide if you're facing genocide and fight it. That decision, clearly, could put you in a very bad position. This is a very important decision and the tools you use to take that decision must be reliable. But if it's only a matter of interpretation, why would you go that far to put yourself in danger? Relativism is a means by which you can avoid taking any responsibilities and hide your true thoughts and motifs to the scrutiny of others.
Thierry Wolton in his world history of communism: the accomplices, remains us how the generations born after WWII have been educated to know most details of the crimes of the Nazis but so little about the crimes of the communists, to the point that those crimes don't even look that bad. This does not compute. It is not a glitch in the teaching of history. It's by design. That strategy was massively used by Stalin's propaganda against Hitler, and we must face that it is still applied.
Labeling someone as a Nazi serves not only to shut down the debate without having to explain why but to dehumanize your opponent and rip him/her away of its rights. That action opens the doors to a simulacrum of justice and due process without facing real opposition by the public, who has been told at school that Nazis, truly, are bad people. They might think that they should be happy to even have a trial, or maybe they already have understood what is happening and have decided to live a double life to survive.
The Hypermnesia of Nazism is a tool for "the tyranny of silence", which is the title of a book written by Flemming Rose and as explained by Natan Sharansky, a notorious U.S.S.R dissident and member of the 1970s Moscow-Helsinki organization, a human rights organization. I quote "In free societies, conflicting opinions coexist, even ones that are opposed by the majority in power. In a fear society, that is prohibited ... the existence of a diversity of opinion is more significant than the specific nature of individual opinions". "A society is free if people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm". (Chapter: from Russia with love)
Shadow banning, 21st century's Gulag
Ignoring people is worse than hate
As Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, explained, shadow banning is the act of hiding a user's messages to other users while letting him/her think that his/her messages are read. This is the worse mistreatment you can inflict on a human person because they would prefer to be hated than to be ignored. Even the ability to make that choice has been taken away from them. The evilness is even greater than you think. All the person engaged in the debate about shadow banning seems to imply that there isn't much damage done to the person, because if he/she doesn't know. Moreover, those who denounce it tend to focus on the free speech problem that prompts shadow banning but not on the psychological effect.
You've no right, not even the one to know it
Here is what happens in reality. A large majority of people who use social media are smart enough to make basic probability deductions. The most-used technic to evaluate a message is the 'dumb up' and 'dumb down'. People can observe that many messages get a dumb up, and if you don't get one for that message, you will get one for other messages. They then compare to what they get, and if it is zero dumb up constantly they will start to wonder and make some tests by going to other channels and other social media. At some point, they may send an email to know if there is a problem with their account, but social media will deny any issue. They never recognize to ban someone, specifically. In that case, what's the problem? The person has no right. No information on the ban, no acknowledgment, no possibility to lift it for the rest of his/her life. So you're done and not only on one social media but with many others since they share lists of banned people. What about the worst-case scenario which is when people don't understand what's happening? They may think that everything they write and think is worthless, they are worthless.
When the world becomes a Gulag
The dehumanization process of shadow banning is the modern expression of what the Gulags were once. They are camps aimed at forbidding prisoners their human rights, torturing them, and breaking their minds. There is one difference, they've found a way to personalize the Gulag so that your home, your city becomes your Gulag, from which you will never get out. It is a weapon of mass oppression, which slowly distills fear. It is a political tool and the social media which practice it, like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, to name a few, are all on the far left. They don't deny it anymore (well, left-leaning they say). Marx as set his mark and seal on the Internet. Shadow banning is the electronic form of genocide and those who are doing it have the same frame of mind that those who have accomplished the physical genocide of communism. Here come the trolley problem and the question of why we can't judge the crime of the communists as we do with the Nazis.
We know what the Nazis were up to. They wanted to purify the race. But what were the communists up to? They wanted to purify the mind. As ideologies, communism, and Nazism, asked for purification, the only difference was that for the Nazis it was about the flesh, the race and for the communists, it's about the minds, the thoughts. They both share the same mental process required to justify purification. Ideologies that asked for purification existed before communism and Nazism and sadly new ones have grown from the ashes of their victims.
From environmentalists to Marxists
For the environmentalists you most respect nature, or you are impure. For the feminist you most respect women, or you are impure, for the vegans you don't eat meat, or you are impure, for the post-modernists, you don't think rationally or you are impure, for the Marxists, inequalities exist, they are man-made and must be corrected or you are impure. A radical trait common for those ideologies is that any opposition must be eradicated, and their goal is to get the power to apply a purification plan. The power struggle described by the post-modernists is only a step to the final objective, the final solution.
They are truly that radical and serious about purification, even if they don't use the word. They will refuse to share any place on the planet with those who don't share their ideology. They will persecute them, hunt them, and go to war. They will never stop.
The catch-42 fallacy is a description of what is happening. The purification is to put the burden on a group, no matter who they are, in order to relieve your existential problem. Unfortunately, this is a misguided answer, and those who apply persecution and purification won't get any relief. The process will never stop. The purification gives an immediate and strong gratification which blocks one's ability to process the consequences and to foresee the future towards which his civilization is heading - destruction. No more reality, no more consequences, only the gratification, the purification.
What are the signs of purification before it begins? Constant persecution and the denial of basic rights are justified by ill-conceived reasonings, which often contradict themselves or the principle of equality under the laws. When the Australian government passed a bill in which domestic violence can only be caused by men it's a sign of persecution. The main causes are drugs, alcohol, mental illness... and women are not immune to them. The bill is based on the purity of women who can't do such acts, but more importantly on the impurity of men, that act like animals. It doesn't matter if the law doesn't take into consideration the wrongdoing of women, the intent is to focus on men, the impure.
Those who purified do not want to hear that they are unfair because, by nature, the purification is good, and it's for the greatest good, therefore, fair. This leads to another sign, that purification is the real motivation behind the persecution. If you oppose the purification, then you must be impure yourself. You don't even have to take the side of those who are impure. You just have to be in contact with them, to talk, or to share any activities with them.
Being civilized means in that case not to externalize the work needed to be done to sort out the mess of our brain, which takes the form of purification and ultimately, human sacrifices. To achieve that goal (To clean your room as Jordan Peterson would say), you need intellectual rigor (courage, discipline, knowledge, a project...) which reminds us of the old civilizations and a set of values about human nature as given by the Judeo-Christian world. Clean your mind, so that you don't have to clean your neighborhood, to tolerate yourself.
6 - The language as reality: Essentialism
An irrationalist method to think the world
Irrationalists are people who refuse, on purpose, to follow reality, rationality, coherence, and consistency, to produce their ideas. However, they are not monkeys that randomly push buttons on a typewriter. For instance, you can observe similitudes between the concepts they oppose or defend, as well as patterns in the way they articulate their thoughts. It means that they have a method to think about the world and to produce knowledge from that world, which then they organize and use to oppose rationalists.
The method they use is called essentialism. It is the master key to understand what is happening to us, to our civilization, and our species. What oppose it, is that we call today the scientific method. What we will discuss here is not about the concepts used by the irrationalists but how the knowledge of those concepts is produced. In the end, it is about the way we think the world (the use of emotions or reason as a feedback loop with the world) and about what we are. If there was one concept to remember among all of those I present in this letter, it would be essentialism. None of you has ever heard of essentialism or the way I will explain it following the teaching of Karl Popper. Again, not only do people lack the basic concepts that are at the root of irrationalist thinking, especially in Europe, but even the words that define them are missing in their education. This is no error. This is by design. If you don't have those concepts and words, you can't oppose them, for there is nothing to oppose.
The first sign that essentialism might be at work is when very smart and educated people have erroneous thinking as Stephen Pinker explains: "I have observed many smart people who have little idea of how to think logically, through a problem, who infers causation from a correlation, and who use anecdotes as evidence far beyond the predictability warranted". The second observation is the lack of progress in knowledge and the resolution of problems as Karl Popper recalls "The development of thought since Aristotle, could I think, be summed up by saying that every discipline, as long as it used the Aristotelian method of definition (i.e. essentialism), has remained arrested in a state of empty verbiage and barren scholasticism and that the degree to which the various sciences have been able to make any progress depended on the degree to which they have been able to get rid of this essentialist method. (This is why so much of our 'social science' still belongs to the Middle Ages)."
Some will say - Of course, this is problematic, but it hardly looks like that civilization is at stake because some scholars think wrongly? This is an error that all observers have made for a few centuries now. They do not think wrongly but differently because they follow another method, which is essentialism. What happens when those people, the irrationalists get the power? What happens when essentialism takes over a place, like the Evergreen College (Washington D.C) in 2017? The primitive self takes over each individual, and it becomes the realm of fear and darkness: The hunt of individuals (literally) who do not belong, group purification, etc. Do you want to see how our ancestors lived 200000 years ago? Numerous videos are showing what happened at Evergreen College, which is when people surrender to their primitive instincts and reject civilization. Let Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor of the Evergreen College speaks of the event:
"This is a breakdown of the basic logic of civilization, and it's spreading ... and it does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue to function...it has gotten to this point because we let it fester. These ideas were wrong when they first took hold in the academy ... these ideas are so toxic ... that civilization will come apart, so we have to fight this." - Bret Weinstein (excerpt from the video interview released by Mike Nayna: The hunted individual, part three).
Bret Weinstein and his wife, also a former professor at the evergreen college, are scientists, atheists and deeply engage in left-leaning projects at the evergreen college, which aimed to offer a place for those who do not fit well in our society. Bret Weinstein has seen hell and real tribalism, and they are not the only ones. You have to hear those people. It's beyond political divides. It's about life, about all of us and what we will become.
A brain process to catalog the world
I wanted you to know all of this before I start explaining essentialism. The situation is very serious. Also, I will add a hypothesis as to why the scientific method opposes essentialism not only on a technical level but on an existential one. I think that essentialism is the combination of 1) a brain process that has in charge to catalog the world to allow us to survive and 2) language itself, which allows us to greatly enhance that catalog like an encyclopedia. The problem is that the brain has no process to control the coherency and therefore the reliability of the knowledge it produces. We need an artificial process for that control, and language cannot be that process (or a poor one), because language refers to itself. We need a mechanism that will create a feedback loop between the world, and the representation of the world our brain produces until they are close enough. That's the role of reason, intellectual rigor, the scientific method. The social troubles that our modern societies have faced for the last 500 years, perhaps even more, find their root in the revolt against the control of the production of our brain, the revolt against reason.
It is a method to acquire knowledge from the world. It is also a way to organize that knowledge because of the way we collect it. The result of applying essentialism will be no different than what an encyclopedia looks like in our modern era. Everything starts with four concepts on which, essentialism builds knowledge. 1) You have a 'thing' which can be an object, a concept, or whatever. 2) The essence of that thing (hence essentialism) or defining formula. 3) The definition that describes the essence. 4) The term or label which points to the definition.
Before I explain how those four concepts/elements work together, you have to understand that we need terms and definitions to be able to communicate. Even if essentialism has unredeemable flaws, and we declare it "persona non grata", terms and definitions will stay. Because any method that collects knowledge will need to organize and communicate that knowledge using a language. You can't escape the use of terms and definitions. How and what you do with them and the meaning you give them is the problem, not their existence. Here is why they are so important. Imagine that you replace every word of a sentence by their definition. The sentence will become a text, and communication will take a lot more time. But it doesn't stop here. Definitions themselves contain words, and you will have to replace them too. Again, those new definitions contain words too... you understand what is happening, you enter in an infinite regression (an infinite loop). The text will have an infinite size, and communication will become impossible. We can't make it without terms and definitions, how we deal with them is the question.
We have the following links between our four concepts/elements: Thing - Term - Defining formula - Definition. The definition comes from the information, called the defining formula (in science, we will say the properties), provided by the essence of the thing. The question is: how do you get this information with essentialism? Following the explanation of Aristotle, Karl Popper explains, by an intellectual intuition (which becomes intuitive knowledge) which is to look at the essence of things with a 'mental eye', a mental observation, and we put aside our senses to not be influenced. For some, it might resemble a kind of early scientific method. It's not. The irrationalists think (Goethe, Rousseau, the Marxists, the Frankfurt school, and post-modernists) that humans possess a natural ability to understand the world. The scientific method is perceived as artificial, and if enforced in education will destroy our natural abilities (Rousseau). A quote from Roger Scruton, describing the Frankfurt school's thinking - "The enlightenment has replaced mystery with mastery. And in doing so has cut mankind off from the true meaning of culture, which is the self-knowledge and inner truth..." (Book: fools, frauds, and firebrands. Thinkers of the new left). Goethe, 'Die Natur' - "We are in her, and she is in us...the game she plays with all is a friendly game ... those who will not partake to her illusions she punishes as a tyrant will punish...To love her is the only way to approach her". Goethe was at war against science and more particularly, against Newton's theory. In the mind of Goethe as for the romantics, science with its mathematic, experiments, and apparatus rapes Nature. (Excerpts from the book: higher superstition, the academic left and its quarrel with science).
Three differences between essentialism and the scientific method
What each method expects to achieve
The first difference that opposes essentialism and the scientific method, is not only how we get to define things, but what is expected to achieve. For essentialism, intellectual intuition led to perfect knowledge, the Truth. For the scientific method, the truth is imperfect for it can never be fully reached, but still usable (we only need good enough truths that are coherent with each other and universal). That's why we still conduct tests on Einstein's general relativity and all other theories because we don't consider them to be definitely true. That's also why we still use Newton's theory, in many calculations because it's good enough. With the scientific method, truth is not revealed but built to form a network in which each truth controls all other truths to produce a consistent and coherent map of our reality. We know today, that those who follow essentialism to understand the world, tend to form a collective society based on emotions, which truths are given by an elite, the only authorized to read nature. The others, the herd, are expected to listen to the revealed truths. Each collective has its truths. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism make sense, in a socially constructed world based on essentialism thinking. In contrast, those who follow the scientific method and reason, consider that each individual can get to the truth, and all societies share the same truths, hence the idea of universality. The truth of the world is unique by definition if the world is what defines the content of your definition and not your intuitive knowledge that you use to read the essence of things.
To read nature from left to the right or from the right to the left
A second difference, and to take an analogy from Karl Popper, is that essentialism read nature from the left to the right while the scientific method read it from the right to the left. In Science, we have: Thing - Properties - definition - Label. Compared to essentialism, the order is not the same because Aristotle asked to start to name the essence with a term and then to get the defining formula by the method of intuitive knowledge and then to produce a definition, usually shorter. In science, everything starts with the properties of a thing which are the result of experiments, measures, etc. We then add a label and a definition. With essentialism, the term and the definition are all the knowledge that there is. In practice, how does it work? Karl Popper gives the example of a puppy. Let's start with essentialism. To produce the definition, you would ask 'What is a puppy?' and the definition will be 'A young dog'. You may wonder where the problem is. The label is in the question and this changes everything. In science, we will ask 'How should we call a young dog?' We start from the properties, and then we ask a question that will result in the creation of the definition and then the label. It follows that in science labels and definitions don't matter. They could even be all wrong, nobody cares, as long as the properties are correct. That's not the case with essentialism. Definition and, above all, terms are all that matters. Let's take a modern essentialism example: hate speech. Intuitively we all understand that it is a kind of speech that hurts other people. If you try to be more specific, you will fail. Lawyers couldn't put into the law, a precise definition of hate speech that can be applied and understand the same way by all people. Some have come up with a definition so vague that it can apply to nearly everything, and nobody knows really what one says will fall under the law. But one must realize that for those who follow essentialism, hate speech makes perfect sense. Its existence is a hard-core truth. For the essentialist method, the term is all that matters. I'm not sure if it's what Aristotle had in mind, but that's what we ended up with. This explains many other issues we have with the irrationalists. That's why they are so adamant to redefine words, for they constitute the reality, their reality. Propaganda, slogan... are all tools of the irrationalists.
Another problem with essentialism is that it asks questions for which there is no answer because there was no reason to ask them, in the first place. You all know the famous question: 'What is life?', and the many answers - life is like a box of chocolate. Life is like a taxi. Life is like a grindstone. (Book: Believing bullshit by the Philosopher Stephen Law). In science, we don't ask 'What is gravity?' We have theories, which describe the attraction that objects have, and we call it gravity. In science, we will never ask a question if we hadn't already studied the properties, and certainly not, one that includes already the label. Newton never asked himself what was gravity. He made observations from which he deduced three laws. You can replace gravity with the word puppy, it doesn't matter. But you can't replace hate speech, with anything else, let say flower. With essentialism, the words matter more than the properties they point to. I hope you start to understand the differences between essentialism and the scientific method and their respective consequences on how we see and understand the world.
How they solve the lack of precision of words
A third difference, between essentialism and the scientific method, is the lack of precision of words. Those who support essentialism, even if they don't know about it (note), use the doctrine known as 'define your terms', which has become very popular. According to Karl Popper, it is that doctrine that has transformed all of our discussions into empty verbiage or verbalism. People who use that doctrine, enter into an infinite regression for there will always be words that need to be more precisely defined. The focus of the discussion ceases to be the topic for which it has started, to become an endless work of being more precise. The solution adopted by science is not to seek infinite precision, but to state in what margin of error something can be used or not. This led to let words be imprecise because it is an intrinsic function of our language to be that way. Of course, there are legitimate cases for which more precision is required, but to erect it as a doctrine is to be blind to the limitation of language. Why is that, so many people insist to use essentialism and refuse to get some wisdom from science? To acknowledge the limitation of language is to acknowledge that regarding some topics, you have to switch to the scientific method. This implies controlling the output of your brain, and a portion of humanity refuses it (note). That's why intellectuals and artists, who are the most attracted to it, will never give up the doctrine of definition and the essentialist method. They want to live in a world ruled by words, and in which they are the masters of those words. With the scientific method, the properties of all the things that compose reality rule the world, and you have no control over them.
Note (a): Molière (French play writer 17th) - Le Bourgeois gentilhomme - 'Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien.' - 'By my faith, I have been saying prose for more than forty years, without knowing anything about it.'
Note (b): When someone tells you that you're not open-minded, the chance is that he/she means that you apply control over your brain output and that's bad, according to them. Their philosophy is to let it go to allow the brain to be exposed to all possibilities, hoping to have a revelation like the meaning of life. The lack of control is not to be full of life but emptiness. We are simply not meant to have no direction. How do you know what information is relevant or not? How do you coordinate all this information? How do you know that what you produce is beautiful and divine? Those who do not believe in God and believe that they can be open to everything believe that they are God. God is not dead, it lives within us, whether you believe in God, in a traditional way or not. It is the one who tells us about our limitations and our weaknesses and by doing so it shows us how to be more than that, the path of transcendence. For the non-theist, God is the underlying structure that our brain needs, to allow us to be civilized. To believe in God is to accept your limitations and weaknesses, the lack of a control process and to work to build and maintain, all your life, the mechanism that allows you to be civilized. To know yourself is about that process and to accept your place in nature. This can be done only as an individual and when you have done it, then you're ready to help other people.
To kill a ghost-in-the-machine
The days of innocence are over
The days of innocence are over from a political and philosophical point of view. The belief in the ghost in the machine that allows us to have one of those childish views on society and ourselves must be ended, without any more delay. What am I talking about? Before I go further with essentialism and a few other topics in this letter, we need to talk. I have observed some strange and odd patterns of behavior both on the side of rationalists and irrationalists for which a classical approach provides no answer.
I have come lately to the conclusion that we need to kill the ghost in the machine because we use it not only to delay our acceptance of the theory of evolution but also to avoid facing an inescapable consequence of a truth. For the rationalist, that truth is that a portion of the population cannot be convinced by reason and sensible dialogues, never. For the irrationalists, that a portion of the population will not be receptive to social construction and propaganda, never. The ghost in the machine allows us to believe that there is some spirit (part of our mind) that we can always reach whether from a rationalist or irrationalist point of view. If the ghost in the machine disappears, then what is left, to explain the existence of the people of reason and emotions, is biochemistry. You can't argue with a biochemical reaction, and the inescapable truth is that humanity has to split. There is no one-nation-under-one-flag. There are two nations, and any war, for that matter, is pointless, whether it is a hot one or a cold one, which doesn't mean that we won't have another one and that we will have to fight for our values. In the long run, we need to learn to live on the same planet and to make constant exchanges of population. There will always be rationalists in an irrationalist society and vice versa. My solution is to let nature decide which civilization will survive. I don't believe the irrationalists can build a civilization, but that's their problem. You wanted a change of paradigm for what defines a civilization. There you have it. Start by killing the ghost in the machine.
The spectrum of reason and emotions and half-cut beings
Being a person of reason or emotions is a spectrum, and some are cut in half. Intuitively they know that they will have a hard time whatever the side they choose. We call them the centrists. They are the one who does everything in their power to avoid the split. Why are they wrong? Because there are patterns of thoughts and some patterns are not compatible, and if you try to make them work together it produces impossibilities, incoherencies. They know about it as they know that some political choices they want to make are incompatible with each other. I don't have much to say to the centrists, as the extremists of both sides, except this: the perfect balance that often pleases the mind of the centrists is a trap that only allows you to escape your difficulties and responsibilities toward all the others. You can't go further in that direction. The choice is yours, but reason or emotions, individualism or collectivism, not both. Learn to take responsibilities and the burden that comes with them. It will define you more as a human being than the lack of choice, or to choose everything like a kid in a candy shop.
The dissimulation of what essentialism truly is
Essentialism is barely known and badly explained, and that is on purpose. When I started to read Karl Popper and discovered the word 'irrationalist', I was surprised not to find it, in any dictionary. I didn't give much attention to essentialism at my first reading, but when I did, it was not a surprise, it was a jaw-dropping moment. How could a whole method designed to understand the world not being mentioned, in any way, while used by millions of scholars and decision-makers to tell us what to do and what to think? I've done my best to explain to you what it is all about. I will discuss it further below, but for the most part, there you have it. Now, it's up to you to relay that information.
Six consequences of essentialism
A) Language as a framework to understand the world
Karl Popper explains, "For Aristotle's essentialist definitions are the principles from which all our knowledge is derived, they thus contain all our knowledge ... The scientific or nominalist definitions do not contain any knowledge whatever... they do nothing but introduce new arbitrary shorthand labels". Do you remember the analogy I used, when I explained that essentialism is like reading the world from the left to the right and for the scientific method (or nominalist) to read from the right to the left? Here is a practical consequence. For the essentialists, the definition will not only define a 'thing' but define a 'thing' literally, define reality (From definition to reality). For the nominalists (those who follow the scientific method and reason) the definition reflects reality but does not define it (from reality to definition). For essentialists, it implies that language is the framework by which you have to understand the universe. It is a way of thinking, which can't separate the language from the properties of the things it studies (for the nominalist, it's the contrary, only count the formula, the properties of a thing). The final result is the production of a story they call reality. In politics, it is the social construction of society. Hate speech is the perfect example. They have an intuition that they feel as if someone hates them when speaking about some topics. They try to enforce hate speech as a law, and that's how social construction happens. They never think about what characterizes or what function free speech has. From this, you can infer that an essentialist will never be able to define free speech, only by defining it through hate speech. Freedom of speech is anything that is not hate-speech. As we will see later, a direct consequence for the language to define itself is the generation of constant circular reasoning.
B) The feedback loop between reality and the brain is dysfunctional
When we interact with the world, we get a return of experience. Our brain can change how we interact based on that experience. Step by step, we optimize our interaction with the world. The mechanism which allows that is called a feedback loop and in that case, the interaction is between our brain and the world. Our brain program pattern that guides us to know what to do, it is those patterns that are changed, with the return of experience. Of course, such a feedback loop is directly involved in controlling our brain production. This is not one-time learning, because what we can do at the age of five is not the same as of the age of 15 and certainly not as of the age of 75. The brain's patterns are constantly reprogrammed. This capacity to adapt is vital to our survival. While I have a general hypothesis, based on biochemistry (note), this is not the point I want to make here.
Essentialists have a dysfunctional feedback loop and are not able to learn from their mistakes. My hypothesis is not about the question of will but of being able to adapt. The consequence is that they will keep the same course of action, no matter what, or change their plan, but without taking into consideration the negative return of experience of their former plan. They are unreliable as humans, and they don't take responsibility. They're unreliable on the technicality of their plan, and in the end, they forbid progress by their inability to manage correctly the civilization or society. All of this is caused by a dysfunctional feedback loop between reality and their brain.
Note: The question is now, why would the brain engage in a feedback loop with the world? I've already given an answer regarding the connection between the reward system and reason. The idea is that we need to help people to have a positive experience with reason-based decisions to impact positively the reward system. I think it's not the only mechanism involved, and it might exist something more basic, which works directly at a biochemistry level. The principle of least action is of great help here. Phenomena in nature often happen by following the path that consumes the least energy possible. The brain consumes a lot of our body's energy. The feedback loop has the task to develop patterns that will lessen the energy the brain has to spend to interact with the world. It means that at the beginning, the control of the output of the brain will require a significant amount of energy. Is it possible that some people have difficulties providing the required energy level to get that feedback loop to work properly and to transform their experiences, into brain patterns? In that case, essentialism is an answer to the difficulty that some have to produce the required energy to process the information and change brain patterns. By producing a social construct they don't have to spend that much energy. I'm not saying I'm right, but a case can be made to test it. Are there differences between someone who is fervent adept of essentialism and a socially constructed world and a true rationalist?
C) For the essentialists, all the knowledge that exists is to get from the language
Two positions exist. 1) The words are everything. They are reality like hate speech, bourgeois thinking, or capitalism. 2) There is no meaning. It's an illusion, which is what the post-modernists advocate. Both are based on the same concept. Words are all the knowledge, there is to get and the origin of it is to be found in essentialism. The existence of points 1) and 2), is the result of a byproduct of essentialism, which is circular reasoning. Essentialism explains, for example, where Marxism comes from, which is point 1) and post-modernism is a reaction to Marxism, which is point 2). From a historical point of view, the Marxists told us that they are here to reveal the meaning and true nature of our being, but it's all a lie. The post-modernists come to tell us that all those Marxist meanings have no meaning, it's all a lie. What post-modernism is, is an essentialist view on Marxism, which is itself an essentialist construct. What happens is that Marxism builds a society based on language (because knowledge comes from language), on redefining human nature and all that comes with it, economics, social organization... but it collapsed. The post-modernist came and said: look, it doesn't work. All those meanings don't work to build a better world, because there is no meaning at all, in anything. Both, the Marxists and the post-modernists think of the world with the same tool, essentialism. Both make the same error which is to believe that the way to get the knowledge is through language. However, there is a serious difference between the two.
Post-modernists are nihilistic in their approach to life. What it does generate is a mass psychosis, and the belief that the world will come to an end. While I'm writing those lines, there is a mass manifestation in London called the extinction rebellion whose participants believe that the world will come to an end because of climate change. Some even state that in 12 years, it will be too late, and they mean that we will go extinct. If climate change doesn't work, we have the asteroid end of the world solution. Well, it implies a full totalitarian planetary system, because you know we have to save humanity. Mass psychosis.
Interview of Heather Mac Donald author of 'The diversity delusion' by C-SPAN News in 2019. She's a scholar and was a student at Yale University in the 1970s, which makes her a firsthand witness to the rise of the post-modernists, in particular, Derrida, from an academic point of view.
"Deconstructionism embraced some very odd propositions about language. It said that language always failed, that language was about itself. It never referred outside of itself because language consists of a set of arbitrary signs. There's no natural relationship between the word for dog and a real dog. Because the verbal sign is arbitrary, somehow deconstructionists concluded therefore, we can't mean anything, and that literature is only about itself, it's not about trying to express the human dilemma, it's about its own failure to mean and the weirdest thing about deconstruction was it said there is no such thing as the human self. The human self is just a trope (a figure of style) of language. It's just a rhetorical fiction. Why would anybody believe this? It's contradicted by daily experiences. We know that human beings are more than language" "This was pre-identity politic... the language of deconstruction, which has this weird self-involved rhetoric that then gave rise, in a weird perverse way because you then had the self, rising up like a phoenix in multiculturalism, and saying, literary study is only about the self. Now students only want to study themselves. (They are studies for each identity)... but at the same time... you have that idea that the self is a fiction" Heather Mac Donald.
The circular reasoning of essentialism and all the ideologies based on it, produce narcissistic personalities who understand the world only through themselves. The post-modernists, by denying that there is meaning to get and that we must accept that fate, deny any meaning for the self. The young generation who follows essentialism will think that the world comes to an end. Because of this self-referencing view of the world, when they say "the world comes to an end", it is, in fact, their world. It's not only the cult of us, that post-modernism promotes, like any ideology based on essentialism, but also the cult of desperation. What really happens, the big picture, is that essentialism comes to an end for human civilization. The way they think comes to an end, not the world. For the people of reason, and rigorous thinking, who controls the production of their brain, we see the possibility of a bright future for all the people on this planet. That we achieve that goal is another question, but we don't believe that we are doomed.
D) Free speech is violence for essentialists
People of reason must realize that if a person considers words as the knowledge by which he/she understands the world (aka an essentialist), then some words will be equal to physical violence for him/her. Should we accept their request? No, because it's a fantasy, but stop trying the make a point that words do not equal physical violence, they will think that you try to deny their reality, which will be considered as another violence. You won't reach them. People of reason often think that it is some kind of political game to get the upper hand on their opponent and to shut down their right to free speech. Unquestionably it happens, but only as a secondary effect because irrationalists truly are driven by essentialism, and words are what define their world. Do people of emotions know what triggers people of reason? It is the lack of rigorous thinking and coherency regarding reasoning. But how could you determine this without full free speech? You can't. The focus on reasoning implies full free speech, while the focus on words implies hate-speech and the restriction of speech that comes with it. Don't forget, irrationalists have an existential problem. Whatever causes it, they can't handle it and put the burden on the people of reason, to avoid dealing with it.
E) Obsolescence and necessary reform of humanities
In May 2013, Sir Roger Scruton made a speech at the conference: Scientism and humanities, I quote:
"There really is a method in the humanities, but it has nothing to do with science. Dilthey said that there is a form of knowledge he called 'Verstehen' (german), which just means understanding and is the kind of knowledge that we have, we relate with each other. When I go into a room, for instance, and I see someone smiling, I am instantly in touch with his mood and his state of mind, this communicates itself directly to me. This isn't a scientific judgment I make. It's a kind of relation that I enter into with him, and we're all used to this, and we sort out things between us without forming hypothesizes about each other but rather by responding directly to each other as human beings and Dilthey thought that the human world is understood in this way generally through an intuitive apprehension of the reasons that other people have, the goals they have, the values that they have and this form of understanding can be transferred from person-to-person encounters to our encounters with human artifacts, with works of art, with systems of law and government and so on."
This quote will help us to link many concepts together. To the question 'How do essentialists know that their intuitive knowledge is right?'. They communicate with each other, they talk and share. When they finally agree, then their knowledge becomes the truth. This is pre-Galileo thinking. The experimentation was not necessary, a verbal exchange with others was used to validate or not a hypothesis. The explanation of Sir Scruton also points to the bonding that I explained in my two tribes' hypothesis. To break the bonding will mean to redefine what it means to be human. Irrationalists are now in charge of the knowledge in the occidental world, and the academics have let it happen, even if they strongly disagree with their role in that realization, because they refuse to cut the umbilical cordon to the bonding, to essentialism. By that, I mean that they still advocate that the teaching of how to think should be devoted to the humanities. Giving up on essentialism means that that role should fall to the science department and they have difficulties with that idea.
From a historical standpoint, being a scholar meant to be educated in all sciences and arts. It's only with the scientific revolution that a schism appears (16th). Later with the enlightenment and the revolutions that happen in the occidental world, a choice should have been made. But the academics decided to keep the status quo. Worse, they developed the idea that two cultures, two ways of knowing the world, were complementary and could live alongside. Not only it was not true but it was a lie as C.P Snow reminded us about it in his book 'The two cultures' - "They still like (literature people) to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of 'culture', as though the natural order didn't exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity, and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet, most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can't (note). It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn't come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training ... So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had". Snow later goes on to explain that the relation between the two cultures has deteriorated over the last 60 years (1890-1950). He recalls a conversation he had with the mathematician G.H Hardy (number theory) in 1930, about how the word 'intellectual' was redefined not to include people practicing science, only literature. There is no compatibility between the two cultures and the irrationalists, those who oppose reason have rebelled, and they are not the good guys. The revolutions we had, the civil wars and the great wars have partially their roots in that conflict between essentialism and the scientific method, between the irrationalists and the rationalists. I read recently that the U.N praises globalism to end the wars. Who will protect the population against genocide, which in the 20th century have killed more people than any war before? Who could have stopped Stalin and Mao? What will become of the people if there is no place to hide?
For the sake of civilization, face your existential issues. There are billions of people that need you. We are witnessing the end of an age, and we must prepare to enter into a new age driven by reason. There is no doubt that humans have a special relationship with words, language, and stories. We build a representation of the world with the help of stories. Also, there should be even fewer doubts that reason should drive our knowledge and actions. The humanities have a role, in particular, to help people to grasp the sense of life and its purpose, but it will become one of the planets orbiting the star, we call reason.
Note: Essentialism cannot handle modern concepts discovered by science, like distribution that affects the dynamics of social organization, or the mechanism of a feedback loop that allows a society or an individual to evolve and make progress. Modern knowledge use terms that have no emotional weight which is for an essentialist incomprehensible. On the contrary, a word like equilibrium will send positive emotion to any essentialist, when advocating for a solution to a problem. That this solution is viable or not is of no importance.
F) The powerless have no voice with essentialism
For the last years, I have heard many pledges for free speech, and it is often stated that it is a weapon for those without power and/or minorities. Therefore, we must protect the right to free speech above all rights. I fully endorse that obligation. However, free speech is not a weapon. It is the mean by which you use the weapon. What is that weapon? Let Alan Ryan, professor of politics at Princeton University explains - "It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth... once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you've had it." Nearly all people, educated in the humanities, think that there is no meaning to get, and no truth to get. They have no reason to hear the powerless. The reality is that they refuse to abandon a way of mentally build the world that leads to a complete nihilistic approach to life. To avoid to face their own desperation and failure, they have decided to erase our civilization, so that there would be no witness, no trace of it. This is purification in modern times, and what they seek, deep inside their soul is some kind of redemption. The project will not succeed, for they don't decide the future of a species. However, there will be great suffering from their decision. We must oppose it to alleviate the suffering as much as we can until the Dark Age is over. Isaac Asimov, biologist, and science-fiction writer wrote in 1941 'Nightfall'. It is considered one of the best science-fiction novels ever written. A planet, with six stars, enjoys constant daylight, but every thousand years the night falls. None of the stars light the planet. When the night fell, the population didn't start burning the cities because of the night, but because of all the stars, they couldn't see before that night. They suddenly realize that the universe was not made of light but darkness. That's what led them to madness. The academics and all the elites they have educated think that the universe is only about darkness and that there is no hope. When I look at all the stars in that dark universe, I see something greater than myself. I see a future, our future and I'm not alone to think that way. Knowledge and truth are the light of the people of reason. We know how to find them, and that's why we don't fear darkness and live in the light of the stars.
Free speech: essentialism vs reason
The riot against free speech that happened at Berkeley in 2017, which led to the burning of a building and the physical aggression of several individuals as stunned America because Berkeley was the place of the free speech movement in the 1960s. It's getting worse when you learn that the professors agree with the rioters and that they were the very students who protest for free speech in the 1960s. Both generations share the same ideologies. How to make sense of that?
We have misunderstood what the students of the 1960s were protesting for. Their cause was to liberate speech from reason. What the students of the 2017 riot were protesting against, are people who use reason to speak their mind and inevitably will oppose those who reject it. Essentialism produces irrational people who always end up being driven by their emotions and intuition in the pursuit to acquire knowledge and to take decisions. To reject reason is an act of liberation, for any essentialist.
The students of the 1968 French revolution were making the same claims: 'It is forbidden to forbid' or 'Imagination will take the power'. Mai 68', was an existential claim disguised as a political movement. For them, the real enemy was reason. When we look back to this revolution and with 50 years of experience, we can state that the real enemy of those students was themselves. It was, and still is for every one of us, the struggle to accept that we have to control our brain and that we are no God. You have to accept that there is one reality, which judges us, a third party, which will objectively assess our thoughts and decisions. That's what religions, or reason, or both do. They save us from ourselves, from the missing mechanism that is needed to control the world that our brain produces. Without it, irrationality leads the herd, but this is no civilization. Only a bunch of primitive roaming aimlessly, killing what is needed to survive, whatever that might be, until there is nothing left.
The structure of language and reality
The famous quote "the map is not the territory" expresses the idea that no matter how precise you draw the map, literally speaking, it is not the reality. The full quotation is far more informative, "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness" Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933).
To understand what the author is speaking about we need to answer the question, where does the map come from? According to the author, it comes from our nervous system and is a neural representation of reality. A second question is why the author talks about structures? He explains "If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in the structures, and structures alone." We have the nervous system, the language, and the reality which we link together by the statement - Language is a way for the nervous system to create a map of reality. (note: beyond the use of the nervous system, the author claims that the way we interact with the world is based on biological mechanisms that have their origin in a very distant past. Jordan Peterson makes a similar claim when he explains that the hierarchy found in our society has a biological origin that was observed in Lobsters which are present on Earth for millions of years. If the author is wrong about the neural system and our relation with the world, the implicit claim that it is linked to a biological mechanism that we inherited a very long time ago still stands).
Now let's make the relation with essentialism, I quote "In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use." The nervous system, as a structure, can only understand reality through the structure of the language, but it also needs a means by which he will communicate its reality and that again is the language. In other words, the language has its own structure which will shape the reality it describes and understand. We find here the explanation of why the essentialists think that language is the only reality that there is. They believe that language is the only tool we have to read reality, but it's not. Again, Alfred Korzybski explains, "If we use languages on a structure non-similar to the world and our nervous system, our verbal predictions are not verified empirically, we cannot be 'rational' or adjusted, We would have to copy the animals in their wasteful and painful 'trial and error' performances, as we have done all through human history.", and "An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions."
It means that you cannot through language understand reality and the knowledge that comes with it. With the increase of scientific knowledge, the belief that you can has died. Literature people know about it and are desperate because of it. They should let it go, but they can't, which explains the strong resentment against people of reason and science. Moreover, it explains their willingness to reject everything linked to the scientific revolution. They would rather live in a world that pre-date civilization. 'Define your terms' is a desperate attempt to get a grasp on reality, it's an expression of the social construction. They believe that the text (the definition of all things) is the reality. Since it's not, they failed to provide functional social answers, and they can't face that failure. The only way out is to impose by force their reality, which ultimately is to apply tyranny to make a fable comes true. Politically, economically, socially, and philosophically it is the Marxist and post-modernist projects. The outcome is mass-killing because it produces incoherency in our map of the world and we will fall back to our primitive self. We will then remember why we are the top predator of our planet, and why we have to control this. To use reason and be civilized is not a choice but a necessity.
The biochemistry of essentialism
The author had a theory about how ideas affect the brain and the nervous system, he called it the "spiral theory". I will only say that it's an obsolete theory however he said something very general that I believe is true. "If we teach ideas which are untrue, then the physicochemical effects produced are not proper-in other words, the human mind does NOT WORK PROPERLY, that is, it does not work naturally or normally or true to the human dimension. There is every reason why the standards in our civilization are so low because we have "poisoned," in a literal sense of the word, our minds with the physicochemical effects of wrong ideas." In modern terms, we would say wrong ideas produce brain patterns that enhance the discrepancy between the perceived reality (the map) and reality. That discrepancy makes people sick, they lose their minds. We are creatures produce by a world (a reality) to function in that world. If we start to produce a map of the reality that does not match reality, like we will do if we believe that the language is the reality that happens, then we become dysfunctional.
A brain maturation process issue
My thesis is that we face a brain maturation issue, not a sickness. Essentialists have a deficient feedback loop between the brain and reality and a misprogrammed reward system dominated by emotions leaving no place to reason. I also introduce the necessary idea of a third party to judge ideas independently from ourselves self (I call it now an external point of reference, but it's the same idea) which ensures a better match with reality. Of course, I advocate for the scientific method and science in general for being a far better means to map reality.
Historicism, magical thinking and the paradox of essentialism
There are three observations I wish to explain to give you a clearer picture of essentialism. Let's start with Magical thinking. In the hierarchy of concepts, magical thinking is above essentialism. It is the mechanism by which you ignore the existence of natural laws and consider that man-made laws are naturals laws. By believing that you give yourself the ability to create a fantasy world that sounds perfectly coherent and rational. Magical has at least two properties that define essentialism, a) It is a self-centered world that defines everything according to its own parameters which are immutable. You may have cosmetic changes, but it can consider the existence of natural laws not defined by humans. Essentialism faces the same issue with language and words which are the only reality that exists. The idea that words don't matter, only properties is unthinkable. b) anthropomorphism. Magical thinking flows from the belief that humans are at the center of the world and everything is defined according to their ability. Human laws are naturals laws because nothing outside what human can do exist. The same account for Essentialism, the belief that the language, define and use by humans, is the only reality that there is. Magical thinking leads to many primitive and radical thinking like the "scientific rationalization" of political questions. An example will be the Marxists believing that they have found the scientific law of society. Another example is when collectivists say that the science about climate change is settled. It's not a question about climate but science because by definition science is never settled. Science imposes that you don't know everything, you don't know the future, and that all information must be treated without filters of any kind, in particular ideological filters.
In the hierarchy of concept, historicism stands below essentialism. It is the belief that society has a destiny of its own and follows laws of its own. To find those laws is to find the future of humankind. That was the dream of Plato, which was revived by Hegel and just after by Karl Marx. That dream as a name, historicism, but those who read the history of our society to find laws see them as prophecies, hence the title, in full, of the second volume of Karl Popper's book - The open society and its enemies - the high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the aftermath. Historicism leads to totalitarianism because a prophecy cannot be wrong, and you can only support it or be against it. The role that essentialism play to make people believe in historicism is that it is a method to think about the world that forces us to see everything without external influence. To find the purpose of all things inside their structure. This is possible if you use the language as an expression of the world itself. Self-reference becomes proof of logical coherency. If you follow scientific thinking, instead of Essentialism, you will try to find what external parameters can influence the evolution of society and population increase will quickly come to your mind. Essentialists don't think like that and they don't feel the need to do so. To get rid of historicism you have to get rid of essentialism.
From an intellectual point of view, magical thinking and historicism are of low-level thinking, so low to our modern standard that it is unbelievable that highly intelligent and very educated persons fall for it, but they do and en masse. When you reject reality as your external reference point, everything you produce depends on yourself, and more precisely your cognitive abilities or power. What essentialists ignore is that by cutting things from their properties they use their instinct to define words. Their cognitive abilities are connected to their instincts which serve as an internal point of reference. Nonetheless, they are convinced that their fantasy world is the product of their cognitive power. Let me digress a little before I move further in my explanation. It is not uncommon when you're a child to believe that you have some power over the natural world. If you wish something bad to someone and something bad happens, it is your fault. At some point in our cognitive maturation, we have to realize that correlation does not imply causation and Jonathan Haidt has observed that that lesson is not correctly assimilated by many. He explains that in order to know if two events are in a causation link you need to use a third parameter. That parameter is equivalent to an external point of reference which is reality, but essentialists and more generally, collectivists are cut from reality, they use the language, their instinct, and emotions. They live in an inside world and because of that, they allow themselves to believe that they can design the world, which is in fact a fantasy. It is paradoxical that the people who are the more primitive believe to be the more cognitive. Some will think about Plato's allegory of the cavern, but there is a missing piece. Collectivists are not prisoners of their world, because it is a result of their belief that they can write natural laws. You can't convince them that what they believe is wrong if you can convince them that correlation is not causation and that natural laws exist independently from them and they have to submit themselves to those laws. It's not going to be that easy.
Empty and bewitching verbiages at work
"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multi-referential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: All these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle...". An example of empty verbiage written by Félix Guattari. Some people are literally hypnotized by such a text. Somehow they believe it transcends our understanding of reality. At the end of the letter, I have a chapter on brainwashing. It will shed some light on what's happening.
Verbiage with a scientific veneer
"In the Euclidian space of history, the shortest path between two points is the straight line, the line of progress and democracy. But this is only true of the linear space of the enlightenment. In our non-Euclidian fin de siècle space, a baleful curvature unfailingly deflects all trajectories"
This was written by Baudrillard, another post-modernist, and like most of his colleagues used scientific terms and concepts blended with philosophical statements to give his prose a veneer of authority. The purpose is to bewitch his readers who are illiterate regarding science. The mathematical meaning is that the shortest path between two points on a 2d surface is a straight line while on a curved surface it's not. (Euclidian space = 2d). The philosophical meaning is that enlightenment is no more true in this 'fin de siècle' (end 20th), he rejects the idea of progress, and while we are at it democracy too. Lovely.
The spirit of being clear and helpful
Encyclopedias written with the spirit of the scientific method are clear and useful for non-specialists. That spirit has been greatly lost, but it is a wonderful exercise to try to put yourself in the shoes of those who want to grasp, at least a little about your field of competence. There is also a willingness to share and to transmit knowledge necessary to understand the underlying mechanism of our civilization. My favorite example is Emile Borel, and a little book he wrote about number theory for laypersons in a French collection called "Que-Sais-je" (What do I know). Emile Borel was no amateur, but a big name in the realm of mathematics, nonetheless he had no issue to serve the people, instead of demonstrating his superior mental power. Wikipedia, another project about knowledge, is an essentialist mess. They are truly convinced to make a civilization level work, and that to be the more precise is for the greatest good but the more they try the worse it becomes. It is only a contest for narcissistic persons trying to prove that they are the best of the best. Clear and useful definitions for the public at large have no chance to be published. Emile Borel's writings for laypersons will be rejected by Wikipedia. Essentialists completely fail to understand the high level of mastery of a knowledge that is required to explain things clearly and concisely that is helpful for all, and the duty to serve.
Essentialism "not only encouraged verbalism but also led to the disillusionment with argument, that is, with reason ... because as philosophers begin to feel, is that one cannot argue about definitions" they aren't knowledge. In the end "Scholasticism and mysticism and despair in reason, these are the unavoidable results of the essentialism of Plato and Aristotle. And Plato's open revolt against freedom becomes, with Aristotle, a secret revolt against reason".
Note: About essentialists' verbiage, I recommend that you read Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's book "Fashionable non-sense", written after what is called today the Sokal Hoax. The hoax was a paper, imitating social science verbiage, 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', wrote in 1996 by Alan Sokal to show that social sciences have no methodology to distinguish a genuine academic work from mumbo-jumbo. The book includes many examples showing that the reason behind that impossibility, that is to say, to distinguish between the twos (a fake post-modernist article and a genuine one) is precisely what proves that it's mumbo-jumbo, and social science shrouded itself in science clothes.
Essentialism, deconstructionism, and knowledge appropriation
To invalidate the foundation of science and take control of it
To any person that has some understanding of the scientific principles, the use of scientific terms with a meaning different from which they were created makes no sense. For example, chaos theory is not proof that the world is chaos, and strange attractors are not mysterious objects. The butterfly effect is not a real butterfly that can change the world, but the expression that a very small change in the initial conditions or values of a system can produce huge changes. The same goes for the uncertainty principle which is not proof that the world is unintelligible since there is no certainty but simply that for very small objects described by quantum theory, you cannot know with precision the position and the speed of an object simultaneously, you got to make a choice. The list of expressions goes on and on and is not restricted to physics.
Scientists have analyzed texts from the most important deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and Francois Leotard and found nothing. For the most part, there is no error regarding their use of scientific terms and concepts, but their extension to literature, social science, philosophy... doesn't make any sense. Their sentences, their texts don't make any sense. Their works seem useless. I beg to differ. The function of their works is 'a knowledge appropriation', aimed to invalidate the explanative power of science and its relevance for our civilization. By expanding the number of explanations for science knowledge they have put down intellectual rigor and the scientific method, which are the tools used to select relevant results.
The deconstructionists have taken away the ability of science to make a case. Why would they do that? When they are attacked by science, they deny it to have any relevance by a metaphorical reinterpretation of scientific texts, and when they want to push for one of their politics, they use science to back it up (extreme climate change and the end of the world, planned economy...). Their aim is not the destruction of science per se but its control. However, the true predictive capability of science is destroyed as well as the scientific method and intellectual rigor. The reality, its existence and unicity, becomes meaningless, only the story is relevant.
An infinite number of interpretations leads to the collapse of society
Jordan Peterson explains, "The most powerful central claim of the post-modernists is that there is an infinite number of ways to interpret the world", however, he adds, "the problem is that not all interpretations are valid, and that is where the postmodernists are wrong" (note). If you endorse the post-modernism position, then any text is as valid as any other. How do we know which interpretations are viable? Not so long ago, when civilization was not even a word, any error of judgment would imply pain or death. Death is death, but your death will serve those who are still alive and learn about the world. Pain on the other is the most objective reality you can get. Nobody wants to be in pain, even someone who is suicidal. Pain is directly connected to our nervous system and no discourse makes it go away. You have no other way to learn the lesson. We all know why we don't want to burn ourselves because we experienced it and it's painful. Nowadays, we have reason and the scientific method to evaluate the validity of an interpretation, but that precisely what the post-modernists reject.
Jordan Peterson's explanation is common sense. We just tend to forget those truths, but at the same time, it allows us to connect them to an important concept, the feedback loop. Death and pain impose upon us to live by the feedback loop. Your action with the world and its reaction create a feedback loop, and it's that mechanism that allows us to select which understanding of the world is viable or not. To state that there is an infinite number of interpretations is the same as stating that there is no feedback loop. If there is none then reason is useless, and we fall back to our emotions. Without the feedback loop, society collapses, and we go back to our old primitive tribe.
What is the origin of the lack of a feedback loop? Essentialism because words are all the knowledge that there is, not definitions, nor properties of things like in science. Essentialism stops the feedback loop to develop as part of the brain maturation process, and any knowledge based on it will lack a feedback loop. It allows the production of incoherent thoughts, and at some point, the social structure won't be able to absorb the damages done and will collapse. The only potential remedy, if any, is to reinitiate the feedback loop for those people, but it may be too late for some.
Essentialism should be the main target of rationalists
How could that happen? The harsh reality is that for the last 50 years, almost every battle in academia, industry, politic... opposing the rationalists and the essentialists have been won by the latter. The first reason is that the power of deconstructionism is given by the very definition of essentialism; words are all the knowledge that there is and definition can be changed at will. This allows them to justify the attack and rejection of every text that serves the building of our civilization, even mathematic itself, which the feminists try to rewrite since the 1980s (read Higher superstition, chap. Auspicating gender). The second is that the rationalists continue to answer to those people as if they were not irrationalists, which I remind you, means to reject reason on purpose. Even if the rationalists know with whom they are dealing, they failed to recognize that the irrationalists have a method. They try to use the scientific method as if it could apply to them. They will tell them 'Can't you see what is happening or what will happen if..." which symbolize the use of a feedback loop, but they don't understand the feedback loop, and even if they do it would mean to repudiate their method which they don't want to. Rationalists are shooting their arguments wild in the sky. Sometimes they get lucky and put down one of the ridiculous claims of the irrationalists, but they achieve nothing. Rationalists need a target, and that is essentialism. In case you haven't noticed the targets of irrationalists are the scientific method and reason. The irrationalists exist. They live by their emotions like junkies, which generate violence and their lack of empathy. They reject reason and therefore, a means to understand the external world. They have no feedback loop, which accounts for their inability to take responsibility or to acknowledge they are wrong. To finish, they have a method to think called essentialism, get over with it, go on the battlefield with that knowledge, and fight for a reason-based civilization.
By attacking the idea that words are not the center of our world (the real center being the properties of things and reasoning), you can have a real impact on those who are still hesitant. Regarding the hardcore irrationalists, their minds require to reintroduce reason as a valid cause for positive feedback from their reward system. I'm not entirely sure if this is feasible.
Note: That argument against postmodernists is often used by Jordan Peterson but no author is ever mentioned to support his view. Here is one, you're welcome, "The statement that norms are man-made has often been misunderstood. Nearly all misunderstandings can be traced back to one fundamental misapprehension, namely, to the belief that 'convention' implies 'arbitrariness'; that if we are free to choose any system of norms we like, then one system is just as good as any other ... norms are artificial ... and include certain elements of arbitrariness. But artificiality by no means implies full arbitrariness. Mathematical calculi, for instance, or symphonies, or plays, are highly artificial, yet it doesn't follow that one calculus or symphony or play is just as good as any other." Karl Popper, the open society and its enemies, chap. 5 Nature and convention. The keyword is arbitrariness, also know as randomness. Randomness produces patterns and those patterns have an organization, even a structure. When we act on those structures we get a reaction and that is how we study their properties. Not all that is random as a pattern that is stable and can be studied but some do. When we study particles in physics we study patterns of energy. When I was a student I wondered if randomness was not the substrate of the universe, but that's another debate. The problem with postmodernists and collectivists, in general, is that they don't recognize randomness as I explained at the beginning of the letter. Randomness is the key to reality, that why the postmodernist type does not recognize reality, he has can make sense of randomness in the way they think of the world. It is precisely the lack of the mechanism of randomness in their thinking that makes them irrationalists. There is not only irony but beauty in that tragedy.
Essentialism and dehumanization
By carefully choosing how words are defined and by enforcing the use of the definitions given, the irrationalists are able to impose their reality. On the first level, it is used for propaganda to undermine the arguments of the opposition. At a second level, it's the fabric of a reality that will be used to criminalize their political opponents by inserting into law some definition changes. For example, they redefine racism, gender, freedom, history, etc. The real objective is to stop the opposition to be able to make their case by developing their argumentation and ideas. The suppression of different ideas is what pleases most tyrants, especially if they need to use only the law instead of the sword or the canon to silence their opponents. The third level is, of course, the reality itself, shaped for their brain. Unfortunately, the true reality will endlessly show up and their marvelous society will start to shake until it exploded. The fourth level is that the irrationalists are uncivilized. They do not build but try to escape what they cannot handle. Being civilized means that you focus on how things work to reproduce or enhance them. Irrationalists are only interested in the image of things, not their underlying mechanism. That's why their reality is 'fluid', constantly reshaping to avoid contradiction. It's a world in which you never have to take any responsibility for you just have to adjust the story or to put the burden on those who oppose you.
It is a strategy adopted by the romantics (which belong to the irrationalists), at the beginning of the 19th century, which has two motivations. The first is a disdain for reason and everything that comes with it, even remotely. The second is a political stand which implies never looking back, no matter the casualties. As dramatic as it is, the 'take it or leave it' strategy, has proven to be very effective, in the long run, by showing sheer determination. As a matter of fact, it helps to rally people to a cause. People need to feel that you have the strength to fight for them and that you seem to know what you're doing. Sadly, people are deceived.
Karl Popper explains: "It's a cult ... that does not propound connected and debatable arguments but rather propounds aphorisms and dogmatic statements, which must be 'understood' or else left alone (take it or leave it), and they tend to become the property of an esoteric circle of the initiated (the irrationalists)". Essentialism leads to esoteric discourse and it is used by the Marxists-postmodernists. Karl Popper continues, "...their admirers assert of all critics, that 'they do not understand' but these admirers forget... one can understand and disagree". For irrationalists there can be no disagreement, if you do, then you haven't understood.
"This is the origin of that philosophic method, which entered the stage immediately after Kant (Fichte, Hegel...Heidegger, Wittgenstein), of this method of mystifying and imposing upon people, of deceiving them and throwing dust in their eyes - The method of windbaggery. One day this era will be recognized, by the history of philosophy, as the age of dishonesty" "...these so-called philosophers do not attempt to teach, but to bewitch the reader". Schopenhauer, book 'Grundprobleme' (4th ed. 1890). Dishonesty is not to be understood as a bad character trait, but the affirmation of what you are, almost a virtue that you wear proudly. When there is no truth, no reality outside what you feel then being dishonest is a public statement that there is no such thing as truth. It's a virtue-signaling, telling to which tribe you belong.
Conclusion: They don't care if you do not understand their reality, they will ignore you. A bug is more important than you. You're nothing. If they can't escape a confrontation, they will lie, not only, to get what they want but because it's their duty to do so. There can be no understanding and when they get what they want, which usually is power, they will put you in a situation where you might die. Irrationalists believe in the rationality of their thoughts, using essentialism, which has contaminated all of our modern knowledge and culture. Between the scientific method and essentialism, there is no happy ending.
In this age of dishonesty, the philosopher Paul Boghossian, now asks people, who want to engage in an argument, if their ideas are falsifiable (falsification is a method promoted by Karl Popper). This is equivalent to ask if someone accepts that you may have understood his/ her ideas but still be in disagreement. The connection being, that if both understand the ideas of each other, but are still in disagreement, the only way to settle the question is to put to test the ideas, which means that they are falsifiable.
We have here the link between essentialism and falsification. If a theory like Freudism, Marxism, post-modernism, or even string theory is not falsifiable it will be 'infected' by essentialism sooner or later because it has no defense. Essentialism must be eradicated from our educational system. All elites must explicitly reject it and know how to handle ideas more rationally and how to put them to the test. If we want to settle the warfare between the people of reason and emotions, the first step is to make essentialism a relic of the past.
When laws build the framework for a socially constructed society
We all know about the great achievement that the common law represents and to which I will add Napoleon's code. Both have been adopted by many countries around the world, both have their roots in Roman laws and Christianity. The latter has provided a template of human nature needed to design and interpret laws. Alongside our laws, there are the very important concepts of rule of law, due process, and universality. Their gestation has required centuries and the best minds, combined with an unshakeable will, to transform them into certainties that we believe to be natural today.
That being said, the process by which laws are written, integrates, in its design, the doctrine of definition, aka essentialism. It produces a dictionary of dos and don'ts, the final result of which will be to build the framework of a socially constructed society. Since the laws are enforced by the state to which we all agree to obey, the state will grow and become the epicenter of society. In the same way, as the doctrine of definition, implies to define the terms, further and further, laws will define every aspect of the citizen's life and become dictates. The states will grow authoritarian, and society becomes a collective.
You can't amend the system. No matter how much time it will take, the outcome will always be the same - Essentialism applied to laws is the tool of social construction that produces a collective and authoritarian state-centered society. If I'm right, we have quite a problem on our hands. Apart from my personal conviction, are there any elements that support my point? The rise of the lawyers in the rank of the lawmakers, fit perfectly the rise of the intervention of the state in the daily life of the citizen. The parliaments have been turned into law factories, instead of solving problems. The point is that words are the focus of laws, which is what essentialism is all about, while problems and their solution require to focus on reasoning, which is what the scientific method is all about. Everyone can observe that politics have become completely disconnected from reality and the real problems of the citizens.
It seems to be an impossible task to reform our law system, but there is potentially a simple solution. If you add on top of our laws a value system, you pretty much shunt essentialism since the dictionary of laws will have to refer to a value system instead of itself. By doing so, we transform the simple recursivity, used by essentialism, into a feedback loop that integrates a control mechanism operated by the value system.
A value system requires a model of human nature. There are only two kinds of models: one based on natural rules, which is the evolutionary model, and the other based on socially constructed rules, which requires to follow the ideology called the blank slate. A model of human nature needs to have an internal coherency. The one defines by the theory of evolution is such a system because it gets its coherency from the laws of nature. It appears that the model of human nature that the Christians used, which has provided them their value system, is very alike to the 'Darwinian/natural system'. It means that the values system of the Christian can be used as a model. We might be able to enhance it, but there won't be many differences.
It won't be enough, and to know more, I suggest you read the chapter 'Justice 1 & 2', in the part called 'Political Clarity", at the end of the letter. I will add one more mechanism to the production of laws, which is helpful to avoid the temptation of authoritarianism, which is to accept that the evilness of people is part of what it means to be human, and you can't change it. You can only focus on doing the good to help counter-balance the evil. If you focus on evil, you will become evil. We already cover that question, so I guess you already know all about it. This reasoning, applied to laws, could be stated as: don't use laws to correct human nature. The only reason one would try it would be because of a complete misunderstanding of human nature and a disregard for the theory of evolution.
Note: On collectivist societies and justice. They always turn murderous because they base their society on a faulty model of human nature. Incoherencies produced by that erroneous model make the system unmanageable. Please observe, and that the purpose of my note, how they desperately fight to maintain a semblance of justice and due process. They could be more expeditious if they wanted to and execute you (as we will see with Stalin's order 00447). They wouldn't need your confession, which the communist systems are obsessed with. They could avoid a popular vote to elect their leader since there is only one candidate, but they persist in having an election. The French have an expression 'simulacre de réalité' which literally translated as a simulacrum of reality/deceiving reality, and, in some sense, that's exactly what it is. They worship their fabricated reality as a false God, to find meaning for the way they understand the world. They try to find legitimacy and there is none, and never will be. The killing of the heretics is the only way for them to survive, and their justice the necessary tool to laundry their murderous mind into a humanistic blood bath.
7 - Genocide and the trolley problem
The trolley problem expresses a variance in our morality when taking a decision or making a judgment. This has puzzled philosophers for decades and the best answer to explain that variance is our understanding that the brain has mostly two ways to make decisions. One is driven by emotions and the other by reason. This is very akin to the Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman's hypothesis of two systems of the brain. One fast (emotions are hardwired in our brain) and slow (reason-based thinking takes time). The existence of the two systems is the product of evolution.
A psychological experiment named: The trolley problem
1) A trolley lost its brakes and is heading toward five persons. There is a lever near you. If you pull that lever, the trolley will switch to another railway on which there is one person. The question is: do you pull that lever to kill one, or do nothing and let the trolley kill five?
2) Instead of a lever, you're on a bridge with a very tall and fat person. Pushing that person over the bridge will stop the trolley and save five persons. If you don't five persons will die. Do you push that person?
Statistical results show: No matter the age, sex, social status, education.... A majority of people will pull the lever for the first question, killing one, but regarding the second question will not push the fat person and kill five, as a consequence.
The trolley problem and communist famines
There is a well-known abnormality in history, and the trolley problem could help us to understand why. We know of the horror of the holocaust and the Nazis, but what about the horror of communist countries, which account for 50 million to 100 million death, wartime casualties not included. Alone, the two famines that happened in the U.S.S.R in the 1920s and 1930s account for 20 million deaths. Those famines were not the result of natural disasters but the destruction of the means of production and the killing of those who can run it. The destruction was motivated by Marxist ideology. An identical scenario happened in China in the 1960s for the same ideological reason and all countries which have turned to Marxism have experienced great economic difficulties. Why are all those deaths not regarded as murders?
The elasticity of moral condemnation
The trolley problem helps us to understand why. The Nazi built extermination camps to kill people. The fault is obvious. They push the fat person from the bridge, and we are emotionally triggered. On the other hand, the communists just push a lever, they put the people in a position where death was the only outcome. The moral fault is different according to the trolley problem, and that's why many in the occidental world are unable to look at those deaths as murders. The same reasoning goes for the Holodomor, the genocide of 2 to 6 million Ukrainians during the second famine in the U.S.S.R. The famine was used as a cover-up.
Controlling the emotional outcome
Totalitarian systems are extremely well-organized to control information. As a result, they control the narrative and therefore, the moral reaction to their actions. They intuitively exploit what the trolley problem shows about morality. They know exactly what they are doing and the consequences. When they are caught hiding, manipulating, and lying they explain that their actions are a necessary evil step to achieve communism. They will never give up their ideology. I heard that in Venezuela, it is now forbidden for doctors, by law, to mention the cause of death when a child dies by malnutrition. Well, I guess ironically that history will remember that not so many kids died from malnutrition, which is one more proof that there was no economic difficulty due to the implementation of socialism. Why do we have to go down that road again? Of course, Marx has nothing to do with it. It was not real Marxism in the U.S.S.R, in China, Cuba, etc. Let's do it again!
It is the idea to cast someone (your political opponent for example) as being a person or a member of a group that is notoriously known for their wicked character or ideology to get an emotional response, which positively leans toward your cause and negatively impact the cause of the other side. The victimhood strategy becomes Machiavellian when you're the wicked one. The connection with the trolley problem is the use of emotional manipulation to blind the world for what you're up to.
There is in psychology a mechanism called "The projection mechanism". It consists to project on others your own intentions. If you want to hurt people secretly you will see all others as potential aggressors. If you want to kill group of people for ideological reasons, you will cast them as perpetrators of genocide against people like you, etc. That the mechanism is unconscious doesn't change its goal, which is to use emotions in a victimhood strategy.
There is a deeper discussion regarding the projection mechanism and the maturation process of the brain. I will just scratch the surface because the maturation process is not a discussion to even in this letter, but the following question links the twos "How does it come that collectivists exclusively use that victimhood strategy against their opponent?". As part of the maturation process that any person has to go through to become civilized, there is the acceptance of your human nature and in particular that there are things you cannot do, like create your own natural laws. When that maturation process is not achieved unconscious mechanisms will drive you. Because of human nature, we have patterns in the way we think and understand the world. Those who have a failed maturation process, for whatever reason, share common patterns, one of which is to use the victimhood strategy. Sadly, for civilized people, it works.
The victimhood strategy in collectivist society impacts the social organization. In communist Russia, it was to look for your proletarian roots, in this 21st century we have erected a system called intersectionality based first on your race, then on your sex, and last on your disabilities. Once you know your place in the hierarchy build by intersectionality, you can use apply your cruelty to those that are below your rank. It's not an empathetic system by any stretch of the imagination, quite the contrary.
That being said, it is by any measure totally artificial. The victimhood strategy from a group perspective is a war strategy in order to destabilize the social organization of the society, by creating artificial categories that will fight each other to survive. It is a divide and conquer strategy. How do we know it is artificial? The lack of civil discourse and to attack the messenger instead of the message are signs of misbehavior and as a victim, it's not what you're looking for. You want justice but above all to resume your life. You want the whole story to stop, you want to be set free from the nightmares that keep you up at night, from the flashbacks that make you paused during the day and complicate your social life because they can be observed by everyone. All sane persons want to get better not to live as a victim, to live in a nightmare. This brings us to what regular persons do. They have projects and want to mind their projects. If your project implies to destroy your opponent, then playing victimhood is your best strategy, but it also makes you the monster. In the end, just look at which side wants to end the war, without killing anyone, or putting anyone in a situation in which it will die. Which side as a plan for not killing people?
There is now a particular case of the victimhood strategy which is not to cast yourself or your group as a victim to gain political power through emotional leverage but to force your opponent to be a victim with the purpose to damage them psychologically, to take away from them their ability to act, as individual and group, and to develop helplessness. As a group strategy, it disguises itself as a protective measure for the population. No matter the decrease in risk that such a protective measure offers when it replaces the normal way of life it becomes a dehumanization process because people have no way to repair themselves, and to forbid that reparation is a marker of a dehumanization process at work. People can live in a very high-risk and deadly environment if they can also live normally, part of the time, to repair themselves. On an individual level, it has been observed that people in psychotherapy, most particularly men, have a degradation of their mental state. We know today because it has become official, that male human nature is considered toxic. The toxicity is only against collectivist utopia, their resilience to fantasy is a threat for those who want to impose theirs. While men could need therapy too, it must be of short time and as soon as possible be oriented to engage in a project with a challenge of some sort.
8 - The last argument: an old tale on intelligence
The letter started with the genocidal desire of a German, and now it's time to end it, but I still have many concepts to show you, like that 2000 years old Jew puzzle of wealth sharing. The collectivists think they know how to share things, not quite so. This highlights how damaging is for the whole society, their issue with knowledge, and it is astonishing that they pretend to be the champion of knowledge and science. In fact, they are the antithesis of both.
The Mysterious shares of the Babylonian Talmud
In 1985, mathematicians Aumann and Maschler announced to be able to explain a two thousand years-old puzzling problem for a sharing of goods, wrote in the Babylonian Talmud.
The puzzle (as written in the Talmud)
Following the bankruptcy of a man's business, his assets will be equally shared between his creditors. They are claiming each, on the estimation that there are at least 300 units left of whatever currency you want, 3/6 part for the first, 2/6 for the second, and 1/6 for the third. In fact, we don't know the exact value of the man's asset. Three cases are examined, corresponding to three different evaluations of the asset. Each case solution has been written in the Talmud. One answer has puzzled mathematicians for 2000 years, hence the mystery.
a) If the asset is worth 300, then each creditor receives respectfully: 150, 100, and 50.
b) If the asset is worth 200, then each creditor receives respectfully: 75, 75, and 50.
c) If the asset is worth 100, then each creditor receives respectfully: 33.3, 33.3, and 33.3.
What is immediately obvious is that the scholars used three different rules for sharing. But of course, everyone is disconcerted by the second answer. What is the meaning of that sharing? Let's see the solution.
The solution of the Babylonian Talmud problem
The solution is in two parts: The algorithm that allows you to calculate the shares and the coalition which is the explanation behind the algorithm. Usually, only the algorithm is explained. I will explain both but focus on the coalition explanation because it is a real lesson of life.
The field of study that allows solving the problem is called Game Theory. It is the science of the interaction between two or several people and what outcome they can hope for and how to optimize that outcome. Examples of such interaction are Buyer/seller, sharing of a resource, non-aggression treaty... Amidst the many topics that Game theory deals with, one is dedicated to coalitions, which involve several persons forming groups. Coalitions are competing with each other. Game theory studies what factors can produce a coalition, how to keep it stable, and how to share the outcome between the members of a coalition. The latter is precisely what the solution of the Babylonian Talmud is all about.
We will consider our three creditors as a coalition. In a coalition, everything is fine if there is enough money. That's the 300 unit case in which each receives the part he/she is asking for. However, what happens if there is not enough money? One, at least, must accept to get less. But which one and what happens if he/she doesn't accept the deal? Well, if they can't find an agreement, the distribution is put on hold, and they get nothing. What's the solution? The one who might oppose the more has to have his/her share protected and that's the one with the smallest part. We have now data that show that people don't mind unbalanced shares if the justification is reasonable. However, below some value, they'll refuse any share and are ready to let the people go away with all the money or to block any deal. It's a way to revolt against unfairness. Similar behaviors have been observed with social animals. The one that might adopt that attitude the most is the one with the smallest part.
The beauty of the game theory solution is that the three cases are following one rule and only one that adapts depending on the asset to share (Remember that, adaptative rules depending on the context). We see three ways of sharing in appearance but that's only an appearance. Let move to the algorithm.
1) You ordered the list of the member of the coalition depending on the percentage they ask.
2) You take the member who asks for the smallest part.
3) You check if you can give what he/she asks for and if it does not imply that the other will have less.
4) If you can, subtract the money and go back to point 2 to the next member of the coalition. If you can't, then go to point 5.
5) Divide all the money left equally between all remaining members of the coalition.
In our example: creditors A, ask for 50 at least, B for 100 at least, and C for 150 at least. If you have 300 or more, just give everybody according to the share they represent: A = 1/6, B= 2/6, and C= 3/6. (50 - 100 - 150). The interesting part of the solution starts here. - If you have only 200, you can give 50 to member A who has the smallest part in the coalition. What remains is called the contested sum, which is 150 units (200 - 50 = 150). Creditor B asks for 100, but it will imply to be unfair to the most important member of the coalition, hence the equal division of the contested sum: each receives 75. (50 - 75 - 75). Why not giving 100 to the biggest creditor? Because the second creditor will have 50, the same as the least important creditor and this can be considered as unfair too. - If you have only 100, nobody can have what he/she asks for, therefore, you divide the whole money equally between all members (33 - 33 - 33). It's not fair for everyone, but it's the fairest share to maintain the coalition and get something rather than nothing.
If you're not accustomed to game theory reasoning, the solution might be difficult to understand, but read it again, and you will get it. It is worth getting over the difficulty.
It is smart but above all extremely fair. Think about it: the person who gets the less must be protected to keep the coalition alive unless there is not enough money, if that the case, everybody receives the same share. A Lesson of life.
Social organization is a 'chasse gardée' of the humanities
Game theory and in general science that applies to the social organization of the society is denied any rights to be used, taught, or even mentioned. That's why most people have never heard of that problem, its solution, and how it applies in our life. I will try to say what I think about it with some humor, but I'm grinding my teeth.
The usefulness of Mathematical principles of natural philosophy
I find it deplorable that the only use the humanities have come up with Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy from Isaac Newton is to put it under their butts to higher their position in society instead of reading and using it for the greatest good.
The Marxists advocate for equity, which can be summed up by equal outcomes. In the Babylonian Talmud problem, the outcome would be an equal share of 33.3, 33.3, and 33.3. I could have started from the best-case scenario which would have been to share 300: 100, 100, and 100 but that's not what a Marxist-postmodernist society produces. Explanation:
1) Pareto principle and Price's law
A) The Pareto principle in economics states that 80% of economic activity comes from 20% of its customers. The 80/20 rule is produced by random distribution. This result is known for a century and applied to many other activities. Random means natural, and nobody is trying to twist the game (search on the Internet: Pareto paper-clip).
B) Price's law shows that half of the work, in a company, is achieved by the square root of its employees. Some people are just extremely efficient at work. There is nothing wrong with the high performers nor with the others. It's just life.
Since equity is not natural, you will have to enforce it and by doing so, you'll block natural mechanisms A and B - those who produce wealth and those who get the job done. The result is that the wealth available will be minimized, not maximize, hence the 100 shares instead of the 300.
Some argue that the quantity of wealth stays always the same and therefore, there is no point in trying to get more wealth. That's what a zero-sum economy is based on. It follows that if some people get richer, it's because they have taken it from other people. This is a general concept of the Marxists, and it leads to the equity principle. So far, so good? Not really, we know today that the economy is not a zero-sum game. A customer/seller relation can be a happy one, while one can get more from that relation. What bothers me the most is that creativity and progress are not encouraged, even wanted. Do you seriously want to buy a Trabant car? Do you want to buy a communist painting? (No, Professor Peterson, I don't sell mines).
A non-zero-sum economy is considered unfair by the collectivists, but fairness has nothing to do with its reality and the success of the free market. F.A Hayek explains that the exchange of goods has a purpose, and all the purposes of all the economic actors produce processes and systems, while invisible at first sight, order the society in such a way that it makes it work better. Socialists since the beginning of the 18th century, even before Marx, are completely blind to those systems. The fairness is not in the transaction, but the creation of a system that that transaction allows. It's funny, sort of, that the collectivists always start from the individual to find general laws that apply to the whole society, and then make new laws at a society level expecting that it will help the individual. You cannot deduce laws for groups from the activities of individuals. They miss completely that the activities of the individual produce mechanisms that are far more complete and complex than what the activities of an individual show. If you study ants individually you will never deduce that the result of their actions is the building of an anthill, you have to start from the anthill to understand ants'. When they say that society is fundamentally the history of the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited they clearly use the language to define individuals, not mechanisms of society.
When inequality gives more to all than equity
For those reasons, a Marxist society will always end up having only 100 to share, and each creditor will get: 33.3, 33.3, and 33.3. It is ironic because in a capitalist society that will have more wealth, then the less important member gets more share than in a society based on the equity society while being inequitable (200, 100, 50) according to them. How could that be? As a consequence, the capitalist system increases global wealth allowing a greater share among its members, while the Marxist society avoids focusing on global wealth. Quality of the production, productivity, new products... all those things are secondary and in the end, lower the wealth of the society and therefore, its shares. One must be aware that a fundamental rule in the economy is to produce more wealth, and therefore, the society organizes itself to achieve that goal. That the case of the capitalist system, that's not the case of the Marxist society.
To become what you want generates unfairness and hopelessness
The more people become what they want and not what they are good at, the fewer there are, who are good at what they do until society can't be managed by those who have inherited it. This happens, of course, when a society chooses the equality of outcome over the equality of opportunities. The former choice is explained, as necessary, to correct the unfairness of those who can do less. The mean by which it is done is to lower the requirement of what it means to have good results at school and work so that everyone can choose what they want even if he/she is bad at it.
However, this generates a kind of unfairness that is never considered by the collectivists. It's personal expectations. Many people can evaluate their performance for a given task and their ability to do better but not at the work they are doing right now. They underperform, and they know it, which produces the unfairness of not being able to be good at something. This is a personal achievement and when it's not fulfilled, people tend to develop a feeling of hopelessness. Your days of fast learning and the luxury of having all the time to study are over. Only a few will be able to change their lives for the better. Many will look at themselves in the mirror and think about the unfairness done to them and the hopelessness because they can't undo it. The doctrine of 'you can become whatever you want' produces a large number of those people.
How does the equality of opportunity avoid that issue? It starts with the acceptance of human nature and therefore, the existence of differences between humans. When aware of this, young people will know that they might not be that good at what they want and may have to change their minds. Aside from given students as much knowledge as possible, the function of education is to offer exploratory mechanisms. The number of competent people increases as does the competition between them. This produce by a feedback loop, to force students to be more thoughtful about their orientation.
The world gets better, and some don't like it
Are there proofs of this? Since the middle of the 19th century, capitalism has reduced extreme poverty in Europe to a single-digit percentage (90% around 1850). High-level education and health have become a standard expectation by individuals. Around the world, all the parameters that define a good life are on the rise at least since the end of the Second World War. China has made great progress since it abandoned partially its equity rule by adopting a competitive market. During the cold war, all countries which have chosen the occidental way have done much better than the communist countries.
Note: The solution to the Talmud puzzle is known today as the: Equal division of contested sum.
From the Babylonian Talmud to the poor black neighborhood
Smart kids call for good teachers
A practical and insightful example is given by Thomas Sowell. In the poor black neighborhood in the 1970s, schools had classes with the most capable children. The teaching was done by highly competent teachers, the same as those in the best schools in the country (in that case the U.S.A). Why would a good teacher work in those schools? Because those children had a real chance to make it to the university and get a diploma, and for a teacher, it is a reward by itself. Sowell observed that the presence of those top teachers and the top-level education in those classes had a general effect on the school. Those classes don't exist anymore. The good teachers have left and the general level has decreased, as do the chances of those children to get a better life. A social construct solution has been put in place to help black students: it is the famous affirmative action.
The connection with the Babylonian Talmud puzzle is simple. Replace Wealth with knowledge and you understand the relation. By having the same level of education for all classes for a given grad, the level of knowledge for the whole school decreases. However, if you adopt classes with level, knowledge increases, for all children because you will need to hire better teachers, and the best classes will become the de facto standard of the school, and everyone's knowledge will move up, teachers included (only ideologues and stupid teachers don't care to look stupid which you will have both puts on leave).
Mistreatment of intellectually gifted children and the equity rule
In France, half of the intellectually gifted people (I.Q >= 130) don't make it to the university, and most of them will never have any degree (France is hardly an isolated case). How is that possible? A decade ago, I gave lessons to two groups of gifted children, for a couple of years. A lot of fun. People around me learn about it, and since then I receive from time to time demand for advice for their kids. All of them have one common problem: They have trouble with the school staff. Before I explain, you have to be aware that those children are subject to psychological violence and when their parents dare to object to how their children are mistreated they get the same treatment. All of this is hidden behind the school walls and the rule of silence applies. The hidden allow plausible deniability (find on the internet -> The greatest scandal in Canadian academic: Lindsay Shepherd case - her case is not about gifted but about the effectiveness of the rule of silence). Teachers know exactly what I'm talking about, but an overwhelming majority agree with the ideology behind the justification of that mistreatment.
Gifted children smash the blank slate
Why do gifted children have such difficulties with school staff? Because there isn't such a thing as gifted people, according to them! That statement is a lie, they exist, but a lie needed to push forward an ideology. We are blank slates. In other words, we are a social construction and it follows that we are all identical when it comes to the mind. However, by their very existence that's not what the gifted tell us.
The political application of the blank slate ideology, which takes its roots in Rousseau's education and the romanticism philosophy, is the equity rule. Since we are all even (the blank slate), if we don't end up by having the same abilities (after being educated), then something must have been stolen from us. It's a very different philosophy than the one that states: I have been given something, and I need to discover it and develop it. Attacking the equity rule is ineffective because it's only a consequence of the blank slate, therefore, asking that gifted children should be treated with their specificity will fail. They need specific schools based on teachers who reject the blank slate and explicitly endorse human nature from an evolutionary perspective.
There are two other reasons why gifted children have such a hard time in school. They develop a kind of personality that is perceived as aggressive. It's not, but they like a fast and competitive approach to learning and are often very demonstrative about it. Many also develop a sensibility to honesty and fairness far above non-gifted and go to the front line to defend it. Since they are unfairly treated, they are often, if not constantly, having a fight with their teachers, which is used against them. They are labeled as aggressive and having psychological troubles.
My experience tells me another story, the gifted have no particular issue. Feed them with knowledge, make them dream about knowledge, which implies that gifted children require gifted adults. One of my lessons was about elementary particles. I taught 10-12 years-old children about the properties of those particles (Hadron...), their classification, the history of their discovery, the CERN, particle accelerators, and a few more things. Why did I think it was a good idea? Because when I was 10, I learned in a French encyclopedia about the isotope of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium), the proton, the electron, and their electric charge. Gifted are starving for information, they love to have it, to collect it, and to play with it. While teaching needs an organized structure of knowledge, that structure is not the same for the gifted as for the non-gifted, but that's another story. Back to the topic at hand.
A zoology experiment or was that education?
Boys have a hard time at school nowadays but when it comes to the gifted, girls get the same treatment. Allow me to present Helena (it's not her real name) an eight-year girl with an I.Q of 151. Her mother went to school to get some advice from the headmaster. She got an official answer. The school will devote the resource to have a full-time psychologist to study her behavior. Let's have a picture of that proposition. Imagine Helena in a classroom with her classmate and teacher, with a psychologist to observe her during a whole school year. They wanted to observe the girl like a lab rat, but she is a human being so it's more about considering her as a freak. How much do you need to hate those children to come up with such a solution? A lot! Don't forget, it is all about what the girl represents, proof that their ideology is wrong. Needless to say that I advised the mother to move her child to another school as soon as possible. Do you want to know who the freaks in that story are? I know the answer, and so should you.
What it means to run a civilization
Since the 1960s, what is taught at our schools (occidental world) is tailored to fit the blank slate theory. Knowledge is the enemy. We have not only lost knowledge but the love of knowledge, especially technological and scientific knowledge, and how to use it in real life to enhance all the tasks you have to accomplish, have a better life. We have forgotten what it means to run a civilization and the path of progress.
Babylonian-Talmud and the spirit of knowledge
Like all Europeans, I have a classical education which means we learn to think through literature and the study of great authors: Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Schiller, Rimbaud, Voltaire, Flaubert, Molière... that education is based on the premise that the more lettered you are, the more capable you are to understand and to shed some light in the world. It's a lie. Most people are roaming in the dark, with no answer in sight. They just pretend. Another lie is that education is literary-centered, and it was always that way. No, it is not and the myth started when natural philosophy became Science, and the philosophers and writers cut themselves from the knowledge of the universe. One more lie is that scientific knowledge is dry stuff as Captain Picard would say. In the movie, 'Good Will Hunting' that's exactly what the mathematician tries to debunk to a group of students - The resolution of a complex problem is like a symphony, even erotic - who would have guessed that? Why aren't you emotionally impacted by reading one of Gauss's work, in number theory? Seriously, what's wrong with you guys?
Knowledge allows you to become autonomous as an individual which comes from the love for knowledge, the wanting to have responsibilities toward knowledge and to become civilized.
The love for knowledge: Don't you strive for knowledge?
The most important tool in human history - On what principle is the wheel based? Transform a rotation into a translation. The whole mechanical part of our civilization is based on that principle.
The most universal concept that exists - Why is entropy such an important concept? You have to spend energy to bring order. You can't escape entropy. Nothing in the universe can't. The second lesson with entropy is to define properly the system on which you apply it. If you don't, say goodbye to your Ph.D. A balanced system is when the increase of the entropy matches precisely the quantity of energy spent to maintain order.
Where do we come from - What is the function of the stars in our universe? To produce heavy elements and to transfer energy via photons. Stars also remind us to take care of our narcissism and not think too much of ourselves as the center of the universe.
Our responsibility towards knowledge
Do you know who Evarist Galois was? How did he die? What did he do the night before he passes the way? You want to know about a lesson of life, here it is. He wrote about the mathematical problem he was working on, trying to give more insights so that people could understand the solution he had found. His brother published his work. Galois had a duel during which he was badly injured and died two days later. It took several decades before the importance of his work was recognized. He is the father of group theory. If a movie were being produced today it would be about the duel and the girl involved, but the reality is that he felt a responsibility toward civilization, as a carrier of knowledge. Did any of your teachers ever mention, even remotely, your responsibility toward knowledge and civilization? Well, you have one. Now you know.
The war on researchers and the results of their work
The letter happens to be a much larger project than I expected, and one word after another, I find myself having ventured deep inside unknown countries of ideas and dangerous places. During my trip, a lot happened, and some very disturbing and related to the letter content. One, particularly, that I just learned about. I owe a great deal to the American neuroscientist Sam Harris, even if now our road has somehow parted. I discovered him when I was a member of the European skeptics. Harris has a podcast with millions of followers. After interviewing Charles Murray, VOX, a left-leaning magazine made a vitriolic article on him. The context of this story shows how high is the rock of knowledge from which we just have fallen and how many are doing everything in their power to forbid us to climb it again.
Everything began in March 2017. During a conference on an American university campus (USA), Charles Murray and several organizers were physically assaulted by leftist students. One of the organizers ended up in a hospital. The reason behind that hate was that Charles Murray wrote the book 'The bell curve - intelligence and class structure' with a colleague Richard Herrnstein in 1994. In response to this distressful event, in April 2017, Sam Harris invited Charles Murray on his podcast to explain what his book is really about, why his scientific results are still relevant, and why the topic I.Q and society matters. The VOX article was published after the podcast. However, that's not the end of the story because Sam Harris is a well-known and appreciated public figure. To correct several assumptions of Vox's article, a worldwide leading figure in neuroscience and intelligence, Richard Haier took contact with Vox to publish an article explaining the state of the art in the field of intelligence. They denied him any right to a voice. This was unexpected. If a recipient of the Fields Medal tells you that you have to check the math of your article about mathematics, you don't deny him/her any voice and call him/her a math-Nazi.
Sam Harris called his podcast "Forbidden Knowledge", hence the name of that paragraph. Several years ago, I found myself forbidden to rent a classroom (dedicated to being rent) in Strasbourg to teach some basics of rational thinking. Being forbidden to talk about reason in the land of René Descartes, that's a good one!
Knowledge about I.Q and race is important, especially to enhance the way our society is organized and the task it has to prioritize. However, the ban on knowledge has a far deeper consequence on our society. It implies a mental process by which knowledge is subordinated to an ideology and becomes a story, a tool for social construction. When a society rejects clear thinking with such vehemence, a Lysenkoism cult is ready to rise to which everybody will have to bow.
When a published mathematical article disappears
The mathematician, Theodore P. Hill was interested in a hypothesis in evolutionary biology and found that following a simple intuitive mathematical argument, he could help the field. He wrote an article and sent it for peer review. After many twists and turns, the paper was finally accepted in the "New York Journal of Mathematics" the 6 November 2017 (NYJM Volume 23, p 1641+). At this point, authors have to sign an agreement not to propose the article to another review, and the publisher in return gives them the date of publication. This legally binds both parties. After the publication, the author discovered that his article was replaced by another. It was no mistake, the publisher explained that he was threatened and to save his scientific legacy had to withdraw the article. It's hard to say that it never happened in the history of peer review, but it is so rare that no trace exists of such an incident in the memories of actual scientists. Officially, his article is published, and therefore, he has no right to propose it for another peer review. The article has simply vanished from the scientific world of publication and all people who supported Theodore P. Hill were threatened.
What was the subject of the article? Since the beginning of evolutionary biology and the work of Darwin, scientists have observed that males have greater genetic variability than females hence the name of the hypothesis, the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, or GMVH. This is the hypothesis I had in mind when I was explaining the difference of the spectrum in I.Q. measurement between males and females. But it is not specific to I.Q, it also accounts for why most homeless and prisoners are male but also why most chess masters are male as are nearly all great composers or Nobel Prize (I.Q, creativity, focusing power). This is of course forbidden knowledge, and something similar, to what happened to our mathematician, happened recently to the CERN physicist Alessandro Strumia. The difference between male and female physicists, he was pointing out, belongs in part to the GMVH.
One thing is sure it doesn't take a genius to understand that nowadays the kind of work done by a Murray, a Strumia, a Hill or anybody who follows the scientific method will be stigmatized, and their results erased from the tree of knowledge. The work of the mathematician Theodore P. Hill is not at the creation of the hypothesis, and was already observed in the 19th century and not restricted to our species. They can't make it go away by snapping their fingers, as a magician will do because they will have to disprove every observation made, and they can't. That's why they use treats. That the world they want, a world in which scientists live in fear, and if they dare to go against the creed, they will lose their job and not only in one country, but in all. Planet scale collectivism is such a wonderful world. Stalin, Mao, and Lysenko would be so proud of you.
When Bertrand Russell met Lenin (1920)
He met Lenin in 1920 as he recalls in an interview realized in 1961 by John Chandos. This is a small transcription.
a) "Absolute orthodoxy...he (Lenin) was quite incapable of supposing that there could be anything in Marx that wasn't right, and that struck me as rather limited".
b) Lenin answering a question about what was happening in the countryside with the peasants: "We are not establishing peasant proprietorship. It is you see, there are poor peasants and rich peasants, and we stirred up the poor peasants against the rich peasants, and they soon hang them to the nearest tree, ah, ah, ah (Lenin laughing)." Russell comments on Lenin's answer to his question "I didn't much like that".
Marx is not the victim of the misreading of his work by people like Lenin. He shaped precisely his writing so that the malevolent people will feel free to act badly. Let me rephrase that for you since it appears that the 100 million deaths will never weigh enough. Marx's prose gives moral ground to people to exercise their evilness by focusing on inequalities, and this is supported by the complete lack of any moral guideline for individuals. He did not forget about ancient wisdom, a set of moral rules, which are at the heart of civilization. He rejected them. Deceptions, lies, and manipulations follow. This is the line that separates civilized and primitive people. The Marxists and alike will never know, as individuals, when and why they are right or wrong. They only know what the collective tells them. This is a call to the evilness of people, without restraint, and all that the real bad people have to do is to take over the collective, starting by its elite.
I have been told that Leninism was not Marxism, it was based on but not the same as. This of course allows any Marxist to explain why everything went wrong from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R in 1989, it's wasn't real Marxism! Leninism's doctrine is mostly defined by the book Imperialism, which he wrote in 1917. But there is a reason for the existence of that book and all Marxists for the last century do whatever they can to bury it. The economist Thomas Sowell recalls us of the reality of that time in his book 'The quest for cosmic Justice'. After half a century, it was becoming obvious that the Marxist prediction of a revolution in an industrial country starting with England will not happen. This was acknowledged by Marx and Engel themselves. To justify the Marxist revolution, Lenin was not writing his own ideology but saving Marxism by explaining why the workers didn't revolt in capitalist countries. The Marxist argument that the rich get richer and the poor poorer was wrong because in those countries they get richer too, they were like little capitalists. To explain how so much wealth could be produced to corrupt the mind of the workers, Lenin came up with the idea of imperialism. It is to conquer land abroad that become colonies, to exploit them by sending their wealth to the homeland and sell them the production surplus of that homeland. Imperialism is defined as the latest state of capitalism. Now you know why the word imperialism is of such importance in the collectivist vocabulary as decolonization. The Marxists have to save all those countries from imperialism. This also explains why the word decolonization is now used in culture and not only in politics. Unfortunately, and as Thomas Sowell explains, Lenin's argument for his imperialism falls nothing short of a lie. The table he gave and their numbers are all made up. Sowell explains that like many people, inhabit by a vision, their arguments are only here to propagate that vision. "Marxism-Leninism is the ultimate in a common pattern among the intellectuals with a cosmic vision - Highly sophisticated defenses of primitive misconceptions. In this case, the misconception is that the rich are rich because the poor are poor ... That what is involved ... wealth is extracted from the many for the benefit of the few, whether among classes (Marx) or among nations (Lenin)." This is also known as the zero-sum game economic theory, but that's not how it works in reality. We produce wealth, we don't steal it and this is known as the non-zero-sum game.
Lenin's imperialism was for the show, the smarter understood back then that they will never get their revolution in industrial countries, so they come up with another idea, their real strategy was to subvert from the inside capitalist countries. They start to work on theories to break down our ability to think coherently and to oppose groups based on sex, race, age... The critical race theory is an application of the critical theory that started with the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. The feminine/women studies, the gender theory, etc. It is interesting to note that imperialism, or what it represents, was how the Spartans saw Athenian society. Exchange of good all over the Mediterranean Sea, expanding the influence of the Athenians. As a close society, that's not how Sparta worked. They expend only for internal needs like food, and by the use of force. Also, they started as soon as 1920 to create shadow directions of all the local communist party (France, Italy, GB...), that task was devolved to Trotsky (see Lysenkoism part and my quote of Thierry Wolton's world history of communism).
The Frankfurt School in a nutshell
In February 2021, the New York Times published an article about French president Emmanuel Macron rejecting the American woke culture because it is a threat to France's culture. Woke refers to the awareness of social and racial injustice. Woke culture is in fact a political movement that wants to take down the occidental culture because they believe it is the root of all evil. Woke culture is a product of the Frankfurt School.
In the 1920s, a group of German academics agrees that the war on economic inequality as push forward by Marx is a dead end, one of the reasons was that in capitalist countries the poor get richer too, therefore they have too much to lose by doing the revolution. They decided that the war must be brought on social inequalities. From a practical point of view, it was to enroll all minorities that have to endure the tyranny of the majority. With Hitler being elected in 1933, members of the Frankfurt School who were Jews, move to the United States of America and worked in universities like Columbia. That's how the critical theory and woke culture have become an American product. While post-modernism is a different movement born after the 1950s with the acknowledgment of the aggressive nature of communism and Stalin atrocities. Post-modernism helps the woke culture with at least two formidable weapons a) the rejection of reason on which the enlightenment is built and the whole industrial revolution and b) relativism which justifies the fragmentation of the society to weaken its foundation until it collapses. The project of the Frankfurt school is a demolition program that does not care about the consequences. Like the post-modernists, they have absolutely no political program of any kind to make a country sustainable. Woke-culture has departed so far away from reality and reason, that it has become a cult, whose members have to constantly show their devotion.
To know more about it you have to follow names like Habermas and Marcuse. There are four books whose author can be trusted 1) Explaining post-modernism by Stephen Hicks 2) Fools, Frauds and firebrands by Roger Scruton 3) The killing of history by Keith Windschuttle 4) Cynical theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
9 - The last thoughts: on men, their nature and rights
That last chapter is about nature, embracing/accepting what we are and human rights, their origin, and its consequences. I will give you two examples that would have been considered as fringe a few decades ago, but are now mainstream, which is scary:
1) Nature: During a conference on free speech, one of the speakers felt the necessity to recall that we have to agree on some basic facts. She called to mind that on average men are taller than women whatever the culture. A group of people were offended by that statement and left the conference. The reason was that to recall the difference between men and women was offensive. Obviously, nature doesn't matter for them.
2) Human rights: During a manifestation, two persons were engaged in an argument about child rape and culture. One was stating that no matter the culture, a rape will hurt the child. The other was arguing that in our western culture, we considered that it will hurt the child, but not in other cultures. This is of course cultural relativism, but there is something more. The second person is unable to put herself in the shoes of the child. The child's rights as an individual don't matter. The culture of the tribe is paramount. Collectivists don't see the rights of an individual as a thing, they don't exist for them.
Groups don't have human rights
A few years ago, I took a course on Human rights, and during the first week, I learned that we have to understand human rights as the rights of groups or states. For a French, it's a betrayal of the original text. In France since the revolution, we live with: The declaration of man and citizen rights. Man and citizen are in the singular form, not plural. That declaration is inspired by the enlightenment movement of the 18th century. Two words are at the center of the project: individualism and universality, which explain why the declaration has become universal. The enlightenment implies to build the society around the individual and that there are universal values for which all humans can live, and by which all humans can be judged.
The universality of rights applies only to individuals
Cultural relativism denied the existence of universal values. To define human rights as group rights, you have to deny the rights of the individuals. The betrayal is not only in the spirit of the original text but also a logical one. You can't define a concept like universal human rights by starting from groups. The universality of group rights has no reality, no body. Group, as an abstraction, can't suffer. In the same way, you can't think about the evolution of life starting from groups. It's not working. There is no group ADN. Individualism is an inescapable condition of universal human rights and at a concept level, there are connections with the theory of evolution.
Beyond human rights, it is enlightenment that is targeted
The change in the definition of human rights is one of the many attacks on the enlightenment project aimed to replace it. During the last decades, the great achievements of the enlightenment have been put into question. As Steven pinker recall, most intellectual in our western civilization believe that our society is doing worse generation after generation and that the enlightenment project, which started philosophically around the 17th century with René Descartes, John Locke, and Francis Bacon, is the root of all evil, a monstrous project and an insidious brainwashing machine. For Pinker, the enlightenment project has proven to be extremely successful to enhance people's life quality all over the world, and the data back up his statement. It's not a matter of point of view.
That's where we are today. Both views are mutually exclusive and irreconcilable. Pinker put forth many statistics to prove his point. One may ask: are we sure of the benefice of the enlightenment? Yes and if the number and reality don't convince you, don't forget to remember that the bloodshed of the 20th century was done in the name of collectivism, not by societies that put the individual as the core of their philosophical and political project. Sadly, it seems that no proof, no explanation count, not even reality. I often remember an explanation that Sam Harris gave in his book "the moral landscape": When you accept the premise that a woman can transform herself into a cat, the conversation on witches can be pretty rational. The opponents of the enlightenment and its achievements have premises that allow them to think to have rational thoughts on that matter, but it's not the case. For, they take care to never contest directly the data, nor to mention data that back up their point.
Note 1: another word that often comes with that declaration is freedom. It is a necessary mechanism if we want to put individual rights before group rights. The most important freedom is the freedom of speech, and we have started to understand that freedom is not a mere right but might be linked to a biological function that allows the brain to better process information, fight chaos. However, freedom of speech should not be recursive in the way that you shouldn't be allowed to use your freedom of speech to shut down the freedom of speech of others. Another point on free speech is that you don't need it when you have power. You just do what you have to do, but that's not the case for the people. It means that free speech is how people exercise their power to get things done.
Note 2: The Enlightenment of the 18th century is not the same as today. Back then, individualism was also linked to the blank slate. They simply didn't know what we know today about human nature. Neuroscience, evolutionary psychology... They didn't know most of what we know today about social organization, and how to solve the question of individuals living in a group through social dilemmas. The opposition between reason and emotions was not settled, nor was the nature vs nurture question. A definition of modern enlightenment has not yet been given, but it will necessarily include individualism and reason. However, we already know that a schism exists between the modern enlightened and it is about to recognize that reason and individualism are part of the Christian project from the beginning which implies that enlightenment is an evolution of that project. When I called myself a non-theist, I acknowledge enlightenment as an evolution of the Christian project, not a replacement. I also acknowledge that Christianity can be explained as an evolutionary mechanism to reach a higher level of civilization to solve problems that stopped it to go further, back at that time.
The incident about men being taller than women on average tells us that the high polarization of our society on such basic facts is more than a political split, it is two visions on how to understand the world. People who are on the side of reason, reality, and truth are desperate to understand the motives of the other side, the irrationalists. Steven Hicks talks about resentment (in the French sense which is bitter) and Jordan Peterson to add, that resentment is the feeling to don't have what others have and is then transformed is a hunt for power to get it. It is precisely those to accuse the society of being a hierarchy of power who hide behind it their wish to use that power to resorb their resentment. C.P Snow, author of "The two cultures", though it was disdain. Ayn Rand goes a step further with envy. She defines envy of the irrationalist as the hate of the good, the hate of virtues, not because of what they are but because they are incapable of having them. I will add to the list guilt, but no matter how you describe their feeling, we are barely scratching the surface. For Michel Foucault, reason, truth, and knowledge are meaningless, which gives some insight. Knowledge is linked to civilization, truth to reality, and reason is the tool with which we get to reality and the world in which we built our civilization. They feel guilty to belong to the human species, to be part of that civilization, but then we are facing a fundamental question: why?
The empathy deficit hypothesis
The collectivists understand empathy as a group concept and this makes the whole thing wrong and will, in fact, cut them from their feeling toward other people. It creates classes, it revives race confrontation, etc. Empathy can only be understood from an individual to another individual, that's what makes you sick to kill other people in the name of an ideology and make you stop doing it. Many who are collectivists and turn their back to become autonomous individuals are motivated by their will to preserve the empathy link. Empathy is a natural mechanism belonging to the set of functions necessary for the tribe to survive. It is in us for millions of years. With this clarification, let's move on.
People who are subject to resentment, envy, and disdain have an empathy deficit toward other people and/or groups (social, economic, politic...) but the cause of that deficit is much deeper. At the very beginning of the writing of the letter, I developed a simple model of the nature of the collectivist mind. I called it the two conflicts: Inability to cope with reality as an independent mechanism on which we have no power and the inability to accept what it means to be human in that reality. They are unable to resolve the internal conflict which is to accept what they are, and the external conflict which is to accept what the world is. They come up with a model that won't stop failing them, while those who are not subject to those two conflicts will be able to navigate into the world more efficiently. Apparently, the consequence of my model of the two conflicts matches the idea of resentment, disdain, and envy.
However, there was more and I move from the model of the two conflicts to brain maturation. To access reality by the use of reason and to have an external point of reference was one of the reasons I abandoned my first model, but another reason was empathy. Empathy is one of the last function to develop, therefore something block or limit the development of some brain function. What is blocked is the development of reason as a means by which we access reality. Access to an external point of view is one of the main issues of brain maturation. There might be a link between empathy and that external point of reference. Without the latter, it is difficult to perceive the others as independent of you and an equal to you, it is difficult to perceive them as true human beings.
Empathy deficit and mass killing
What characterizes the collectivists/irrationalists is their lack of empathy for anyone who does not share their beliefs. It drives them to the process of dehumanization and mass violence. They were always like that, it just that they know how to play it nice to avoid backslash or to face justice. Now, that they master the game, not much hold them to open new Gulags and to execute in soundproofed base grounds those they don't like.
What strikes anyone who has read about the final solution of the Nazis is their extreme level of organization. The same level is achieved by the Marxists in hiding their killings as explain by Timothy Snyder in his book "The blood lands" - "Stalin raised a toast (1937): we will merciless destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts, yes, his thoughts! Threaten the unity of the socialist state...This led to Order 00447... The Kulak operation (1937-38) was carried out in secret. None of the killed knew they had been sentenced to death by a secret tribunal. Killings were always carried out at night and in seclusion. Everyone who took part in these operations was sworn to secrecy. A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people in 16 months ... Nearly four hundred thousand (400,000) people were killed under order 00447". The meticulousness of a psychopath hiding his/her killing to avoid being caught, to kill again, and again,... Most communists reject that it was done by real communist regimes, others argue that capitalism is killing as much if not more. Let ask a basic question: do communists have a plan to NOT kill people? Precisely my point, they don't. Back to empathy.
Empathy is an important component of the human experience for acting with humanity, taking care of others, cooperating, and building a society of trust, open and free. To which I add the fact that irrationalists often behave childishly, being unable to acknowledge their wrongdoings as if to deny it, will make it go away. Children can be very despotic to each other and it takes many years to see them taking into account the pain they can inflict because they will be able to see themselves taking that pain (the other, mirror of our self). If you put all that together and add the fact that empathy is one of the latest behavior to mature, then it won't hurt to put it on the top of the list of the many causes that push irrationalists to become sociopathic tyrants. What strikes me the most is how they are simultaneously driven by their emotions to taken any decision and emotionless when they mistreat anyone who is not part of their tribe. Something is really going on here.
Empathy, the missing link for trust
We know that the building of civilization requires trust and that on an individual level. The more complex and larger the more trust is required. Now we can rationalize why we need trust, and game theory more than any other field of knowledge has done it with reasonable success. When we look at the collectivists, they do not trust, they fear, and fear is what brings cohesion to their tribe. Fear is a hardwired mechanism needed to avoid danger and therefore to enhance our survival chances. If we state that the cohesion of a group is primarily based on basic mechanisms and since trust is not one of those, what mechanism produces the cohesion of the civilized tribe? The answer is empathy and it is the hidden variable that makes trust so efficient and useful.
Empathy and individualism vs fear and collectivism
Let's explore further that particular opposition between empathy and fear as instincts that allow people to be together. Empathy works at an individual level, while fear work at a collective level. You just have to look at a crow in panic, they run because people run and nobody can stop that crow. At the individual level, the authority is you, for the most part, you decide to not burn the house of your neighbors and kill people randomly because you don't want to arm them and they help you to achieve your goal as your do. At a collective level, you don't act like a criminal because the consequence will be terrible for you. Also, what you have to do is given by the same authority which makes sure that you don't act individually. What we can observe is that the fear society implemented by tyrants slowly becomes a safe harbor for those in fear. The stronger the fear, the more they believe there is someone in charge to protect them. To preserve the fear is what each individual will do because they 'feel' that it ensure the cohesion of the group and its survival and therefore their survival. Without fear, no more collective, and they will be left alone, without any protection or bearing to manage their life. That explains why they will go after one of their own if he makes a mistake. All shall live in fear for the sake of the collective and to survive.
The Russian dissident of the 1970s Natan Sharansky explained that there are two kinds of societies, the free society, and the fear society. The fear society is communist and more generally collectivist and I have shown to be the primitive tribe. The question is how to connect empathy and trust with freedom? The individual is the answer because to act as an autonomous individual, the individual needs to have freedom. Freedom to act and to think and I shall add that it should be praised by the others, to show that it is a social positive behavior. The collectivists fear above all, not their tyrant which is their protector, but the whim of individuals who will bring chaos. Individual actions are seen as a destabilization of society. (read addendum: on the nature of collectivism and individualism)
We got the cause/consequence all wrong
Why is it impossible to get the real number of the killing that happened in the U.S.S.R, and the question can be extended to all other communist states? Because they developed a high level of organization to hide their killing. In that case, one may ask, why would an almighty state hide what it does? They don't do it to avoid responsibilities that the international community could ask them to take. They do it because they can't face what they are, monsters. All opponents of the irrationalists/collectivists/Marxists are Nazis, racists, sexists... It's not about you, it's about them. They need to be the good guys because they can't deal with what they are doing and the suffering that comes with it.
That was the starting point of my hypothesis of the two conflicts. When they insult you, shut down your right, your ability to speak, and your humanity it's not because of you but because they can't solve their internal conflicts, so they externalize their suffering by putting it on your shoulders. I often use the concept of the tribe to show that we are acting as if we were two different tribes of human beings. The tribe of reason is the one which builds civilization (civilized tribe), and the tribe of emotion lives in it (primitive tribe), but they can't deal with it, that's not their reality and ultimately their goal is to put it down. From their point of view, the tribe of reason drags them in the civilization project and is responsible for the disappearing of their world, of their reality.
For the last two centuries, philosophers have played with the concepts of power and will, to explain the ultimate engine of people and civilization. I don't adhere to it, firstly because it looks like the projection of how irrationalists think to understand the dynamic of the world. The master/slave and the power struggle models are haunting all philosophy books since Kant, if not Plato. Secondly, I think that the answer to what we are facing - and make no mistake, the existence of a future for human civilization depends on our ability to understand and solve it - is linked to a complex dynamic system (CDS) solution. A few simple but fundamental mechanisms associated with a feedback loop iterated a great number of times. Philosophers are incapable of such thinking, the same way philosophy can't digest all the consequences of the theory of evolution. By using the framework of CDS we will start answering the issue of the irrationalist with reason, reality, and their will to kill in mass. My hypothesis is to follow the brain maturation process and focus on the missing or twisted empathy function. Empathy is a necessary mechanism for human beings, but the empathy of collectivists is wrong. If I had to justify one more time why we should focus on empathy I would say because it is linked to the most important moral values and we know that any human group needs to have a set of a few common moral values to be able to live together. In conclusion to the empathy deficit, it's not the end goal of that research, but Ariadne's thread that will lead us to the mind structure of collectivism. Why must we invest in such research? Because collectivists will always be among us, if my brain maturation hypothesis is correct, and that is an important hypothesis to settle because the stake is the survival of human civilization.
Robinson Crusoe and why it will never be real Marxism
There are people, many, who believe that all the Marxist experiments ran across the world, which have failed miserably especially for their citizens, have precisely failed because they were not real Marxists, and still think that Marx was the greatest philosopher for the last 2 centuries. Jordan Peterson, a specialist of totalitarianism used to explain in his speeches: "Those who say that it was not real Marxism, say, in fact - If I were in charge, we would have that utopian society - those who follow that thinking are dangerous people and you should run away from them. How many dozen millions of corps do you need? Well, it doesn't matter how many exactly, after the first 10 million you have made your point". While emotionally charged, his message is clear, don't believe those who tell you it was not real Marxist, they lie. While the corps tells us that we should stop running the experiments, it doesn't tell us why the Marxists failed to learn the lesson.
There are many answers but one strikes me more than any other. It came to me recently via a Russian writer, Vasily Grossman, who was among the first soldiers to discover Treblinka in 1944. That story is recalled by Timothy Snyder in his book "The blood lands". "He walked upon earth that is unsteady as a sea... Jews and Poles were gassed, burned and their ashes buried in fields (note: they were walking on fields made of the ashes of Jews and Poles). Grossman reached for a literary reference that his readers would have known and he thought about Robinson Crusoe. That idea came to him first when he arrives in Warsaw. They found Poles and Jews living together in the remains of one building, they were Warsaw Robinsons'. Like the hero of the novel written by Daniel Defoe, they were lost to civilization. To express his view on the matter, Timothy Snyder then quotes the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who lived in Warsaw at that time. His opinion on Robinson Crusoe was that "moral flaws from our experience, that if we were left alone, we might be good." (If you have never seen a second war picture of a destroyed European city, it's time you educate yourself)
The comment on Robinson Crusoe links together the atrocities of WWII and Rousseau's idea that societies corrupt men. It's an ideology known as the Noble savage, and often associated to the blank slate. The reason why the Marxists won't stop trying to build their utopia, no matter the number of corps of the previous tries, is because each time they build their utopia they build a society which by definition corrupts men. When it failed, they explain that it was not real Marxism, in other words, they were corrupted. It also follows that pouring the mind of people with knowledge (true knowledge of the world, not propaganda) will corrupt them since their natural mechanism for being good will be destroyed (do you remember Stalin toast?). If they resist the march of Marxism it's because they have been corrupted and they must be reeducated or killed. Their natural ability for good is gone forever and they carry the knowledge that could corrupt the mind of others. That's why they want to control what you've in your mind and in our modern times also your behaviors. Gulags are not meant to civilize you but to make you human, as they say. It's all a lie, they reject the natural abilities of humans, then build a system that will corrupt their minds and dehumanize people. It will never be real Marxism because Marxism is the corruption of the mind, it will not save them and they can't face it. It's not you that they kill but the monster within, it's a purification and it will never stop.
10 - The last words: For the world is hollow...
Excerpt from Star Trek - For the world is hollow
Every ideology builds a hollow world in which its people live. Any defiance to that ideology leads to punishment. If you dare touch the sky and realize that the world is truly hollow, and not real, you will be put to death. Among all those hollow worlds, collectivisms of the Rousseau, blank slate, Marxist, postmodernist type are the worst of all and take their roots in the primitive tribe.
Helping people to visualize the future
As a writer, I should end the letter with those words. As a thinker, I know that you are aware we are losing the battle against collectivism and I need to tell you something. Admirable people are fighting back with all that they have, and it takes more courage than many think. However, it's a lost fight because they all base their strategy on one thought, that collectivism is the source of the downfall of human civilization. My analysis is that it is not. The structures of our civilization need to be enhanced and we have failed to do so. Our functioning is deteriorating and without a solution, it creates a void that has been filled up by collectivism. Collectivism is our go-to response when we don't know, we go back to our primitive roots. It's instinctive, but not an alternative project of civilization.
As reasonable as my position sounds, people are not interested to think or even to hear about it and there is a reason. They have absolutely no idea what a next-generation civilization could look like, they cannot even conceptualize it. What I'm saying makes no sense for them. My next project is to present such a civilization. If I do my job correctly they will start to think about changing their strategy which is to shift all their energy and resources, not in the fighting of collectivism but the building of a new civilization solving what the actual is not able to do. Once the first structures will be built, we will move people from the old to the new civilization, and the collectivist problem will fade away.
There are several parameters that impose a society or a civilization to change the paradigms on which it is built, the most important one is population increase, and that is precisely the one we are dealing with in our era. We started to build cities 10000 years ago, and then institutions 2400 years ago to manage cities and their citizen, and now we have to move from institution to self-ordering system. Our institution can hardly manage 2 billion people, we have made them as bigger as possible and now the whole system is crumbling. Self-ordering systems will allow us to manage over 20 billion people. The size of institutions can only deal with the number of cases, not the speed by which you treat them. Here is what happens, people go in large numbers to make requests to institutions, but those can't treat their demands fast enough and are buffered. The buffer grows faster than the institution can empty it.
Collectivists come with one single idea, to give more resources to those institutions so that the demands will be treated with more order (more powerful institution = more order, and more order = solution to all issues, and order means, top to bottom for everything = heavy centralization). It doesn't work, and the only thing left is the power of institutions that they abuse. Collectivists do not build futures.
Self-ordering systems, as a principle, are generated at an individual level (interaction between individuals), and the action of all those individuals based on a simple number of rules produce a convergence of actions that give the expected result (Remember the example of the breakfast room). This also solves much of the power equilibrium that institution requires so desperately because it is diluted. You have to learn to think in systems and not in terms of power distribution and hierarchy.
Beyond the solutions and the new paradigms, there is one thing I cannot help you with. There will be a moment when we will have to leave our home for one not yet built. To make that move requires a leap of faith.
The rapid degradation of the project of human civilization
I would have wished to never have had to write the following lines, but here I am - June 8, 2021. Here is a statement I made a week ago:
"The reason why a Woman professor at Yale University has murdering fantasies about white people is not because of personal issues, but because she's the bearer of ideologies, that are genocidal in essence. There are millions of people like her in the western world, and I started my work because of one of them 3 years ago. What I have shown is that the ideologies they follow are rooted in primitive thinking for which the mass killing of "them", the other tribe, is a natural outcome. My work also shows that going after those ideologies, while a necessary step, is ineffective in the long run. We need to build a system in which those ideologies and primitive thinking can't have a place, but their complete elimination is not possible because they are part of our heritage. That's the whole purpose of my hypothesis on the maturation process. We have to orient our education to make sure that primitive thinking cannot hold ground."
A few days later, a scientific article was published in the journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association which starts with the following words "Whiteness is a condition, one first acquires and then one has - a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which white people have a particular susceptibility." This is a peer-review article, meaning that not only do peers back it up but it is considered scientifically sound. There is nothing scientific and nothing sound in that article. Why? The author of that paper is a collectivist and as such reject the Darwinian theory of evolution. To explain the differences among populations he endorses the social construct thesis, but by doing so his only way to explain that a population resists the social construction is a virus-like explanation. The naked reality of this text is that it is a call to genocide, and the only people who wouldn't want to see it for what it is, are those in favor of that genocide. Do you have doubts? As the paper states, there is no cure, well genocide will be the cure.
Warning: Among those who are engaged in the fight against collectivism, there is a trend to use the virus-like model to explain its spreading. This validates the collectivist thesis even if, contrary to them, they use it in a symbolic manner. Besides rejecting the Darwinian theory of evolution that the virus-like implies, this sets the discussion in an "Us" vs. "Them", which is purely collectivist and primitive thinking. I urge people to adopt an evolutionary model, the failed maturation process I have developed to explain collectivism is such a model. I don't care if you use it, take it, put your name on it or invent one yourself but for the sake of civilization stop using any virus-like models to explain the divide amongst us.
I - Addendum: Thinking in systems
I've tried to do my best to bring you a large number of important concepts and reasoning related to the situation of our civilization, to link modern knowledge to older ones covering more than 2000 years, while using the smallest number of pages possible. Even if all are useful, not all are of equal importance because some are the ones on which all others are built. They are the ones that define and bind on one side individuals and reason, on the other side collectivists and emotions. Most of those root arguments can be resumed in a few pages and this has been done by Donella H. Meadows, a pioneer in complex dynamic systems, in the 1970s, in her book "Thinking in systems". I haven't presented her work before because of the concerns I have. However, most of my propositions are related to knowledge, not based on her work, but resumed nicely in her book. My concerns are as follows. The author uses as premises, several connections she makes between modern knowledge. While they have been validated for the last 30 years, the conclusions she draws based on those premises, have not been endorsed. I do recommend the book, but be cautious regarding the applications she describes. They look sound but might be all wrong and some really are. For example, her solution to "The tragedy of the commons" doesn't work because you can't change a Nash equilibrium by using education, only by changing the outcome for the players.
When a system causes its own failure
I quote. "When someone tells you that population growth causes poverty, you'll ask yourself how poverty may cause growth". "Think about this: If A causes B, is it possible that B also causes A?", "You will be thinking not in terms of a static world but a dynamic one, you'll stop looking for who is to blame", "The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior". Here you have it if you build a system, and it doesn't work, don't blame those who are running it. The fault is on the system and therefore, the concepts that define it. Here is the blaming game often used by Marxists and the never-dying excuse 'it was not real communism'. By the lack of a feedback loop, Marxism and all the ideologies related to it will end up in misery. You can build the best system, but there will always be glitches and without a feedback loop, you can't take care of them. A valid feedback mechanism cannot be added ad-hoc, it must be part of the very concepts that define the system you build. That's not the case for Marx's theory nor any of its avatars.
Moreover, a feedback loop is not only a mechanism by which systems develop but the way we think to build modern and reliable knowledge. You have an idea, you test it and collect the data it produced by interacting with reality and then look if those data confirm or disconfirm your idea. Depending on the outcome we reject it, integrate it and if needed, we make some change to what we already knew, but the whole enterprise progress.
The ultimate missing piece of the Marxists: the feedback loop
Marxism, as well as postmodernism, is only a projection of a broader concept based on irrationalism, which is a direct expression of an emotional view of the world. I bring back the discussion to emotions because contrary to their political expression, they can handle a feedback loop. There is a famous interview between psychologist Jordan Peterson and the journalist Cathy Newman. That interview is a very important document. You can witness how Cathy Newman uses the emotional feedback loop (So you are saying ...) and the moment she stalled literally because her brain couldn't emotionally process reason-based information. This is a concrete example of why we switched to the scientific method. An emotional feedback loop not only builds unreliable knowledge but is also too restricted regarding the information it can process. That's why we use a third party like experiments or mathematical proofs, to produce the needed feedback. I once had a conversation with an enologist advocating for organic growth. I asked him how they handle vineyard problems. He told me that they talked. Not only, do they just talk, but they also don't even take notes. They do what the pre-Galilean scholars were doing. They discuss a topic until they find themselves in agreement. What they think at that moment is the truth, the solution. There is no experiment, of any sort, to control their thinking, just the tuning of their emotions. Their unwillingness to take notes got me thinking: Is the move from emotion-based culture to a reason-based culture, not connected to the move from an oral culture to a writing culture? We are just in the transition, perhaps. While this is an interesting idea that will have to find an answer, it is a low-resolution idea that lacks details, which would be useful to know what to do.
From self-organization to hierarchy
Self-organization as the engine of systems
"This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization". "It is the ability to structure themselves, to create new structures, to learn, diversify, complexity and evolve". Do you remember the quotation of F.A. Hayek about the collectivists fearing that the whim of individuals could lead to chaos? The production of self-organized structures is, pretty much, the program of an individualist-centered society, build upon a set of common moral rules. That program is opposed by collectivists, they oppose self-organized structure and in the process structures that are produced by evolution. Those two views of the world, self-organized or socially constructed are compatible, for they cannot happen simultaneously. The concepts (reason, free speech...) and structures (health care, family, workplaces...) on which each system is built are mutually exclusive.
Hierarchy as the backbone of systems
"One thing that a self-organizing system often generates is a hierarchy." "Hierarchies are brilliant systems inventions, not only because they give system stability and resilience, but also because they reduce the amount of information that any part of the system has to keep track of." "Corporate systems, military systems, ecological systems, economic systems, living organisms are arranged in hierarchies. It is no accident that that is so". "To be a highly functional system, a hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system." "Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers." There are two insightful pieces of information in the chapter from which those quotations are extracted. First, do you remember the discussion about patriarchy? What is important in that word is 'hierarchy'? It results from natural mechanisms, meaning not man-made, and that it is efficient, stable, and resilient. The males of our species are not the mastermind behind the hierarchy, they are only tools chosen by nature. Secondly, while I came to the conclusion by following a different path, I too advocate for a hierarchy in which the elite has to work for the people. When I explain that the sacrifice of the elite is what the social contract should be about, it is for the sake to protect the backbone of our society. There is a counterpart from the bottom which is to accept inequalities. We only have to make sure that their existence enhances the life of most, and that they stay as low as possible. If you get rid of them, you lost the hierarchy, and then it's a mess.
Traps generated by a feedback loop
A chapter of her book is dedicated to systems that produce traps due to a feedback loop and for each case, she tries to provide a solution to get out of it. We know today that several solutions she proposes are wrong but not all. Allow me to present two of them.
The first trap: drift to low performance
She stated that defining a system on previous performances, drifts the system to low performances (health care and education for example). She has a pretty good explanation for the cause of the drift. In that particular case, the equation that people try to resolve is based on the discrepancy between the desired state and the evaluated state of the system. The lower the discrepancy, the better. The problem is that we always perceive things worse than they are, which influences the desired state of the system by lowering our expectations. The discrepancy is not reduced by corrective measures to enhance the system, but by lowering our expectations. Year after year the system performance goes down the hill. The solution, she offers, is to set an absolute goal or external point of reference. My view on that matter is that when you set an absolute goal, you create a parameter independent of the system. When it starts to drift you will not be influenced by its state. That's one more reason why I advocate for a third party, an external element that serves as a reference point. This reminds us of Thomas Sowell's advice on education. Build schools in which the best pupils can have the best education with the best teachers. Also, there is a connection with the problem of the Babylonian Talmud, which is related to an economic question. Inequality in the spirit of enhancing the level always ends up enhancing the level for all because of a feedback loop driven by inequality as a natural and independent parameter from the system. Those who advocate for equality of outcome never consider the feedback loop, or to integrate an independent element, because everything is a social construction. This provides the technical explanation of why collectivist societies will invariably end up miserably.
Regarding the drift to low performance, I want to mention one last example which is the political system we call democracy. The general idea is that people vote to choose who manages the system. Those who want to be elected have one goal, to get a majority of votes. From an evolutionary point of view, the majority is not constituted by the best people with the best intention for the system, but by average people defending their personal project. To help to correct this you need to pursue excellence for yourself and the system and to be able to sacrifice your own interest if required. To achieve that you need something greater than you. A God is a solution, but as a non-theist, I advocate for an elite that is a valid role model and a common goal on which the society is built. What is the actual common goal of our society? Yes, precisely my point.
The second trap: success to the successful
It's the Pareto distribution (note). What we don't agree on is the origin of the principle. It's natural, while for her, it is the result of a man-made dynamic system and on which we can act. Her solution is diversification of the game played in economics so everyone can get a portion. My solution is locality. We need to keep small groups of people autonomous and diverse instead of moving to a planetary city. Let me illustrate that. If we took Price's law, which follows the Pareto distribution, for small cities of a thousand inhabitants, 31 of them (the square root) make 50% of the work needed to keep the city autonomous. If we take a city of a billion inhabitants then 31.000 are doing 50% of all the work. One million small cities of a thousand persons are equal to a city of one billion citizens, but the number of people doing most of the work is 31 million. More generally, locality maximizes the number of people who have a purpose. If we iterate Price's law, by applying it to the remaining 50% of work to do, locality makes a difference. While not in the scope of that letter, my solution opposes how cities have developed, in a concentric circle. We need a tree development approach.
Note: Modern understanding of Capitalism links directly to the Pareto distribution and as a natural mechanism it is central to answer the question of wealth inequality. However, it can indeed be manipulated to exacerbate the trend and make rich people even richer, far beyond any social necessity, and damage our society. When we talk about regulation, it is not to control the repartition of wealth and inequalities, but to avoid the manipulation of that natural mechanism. We agree that the people who try to manipulate the Pareto distribution must be stopped. To take them down is not to take down the system and that's where the confusion, between the two goals, produces a serious political misunderstanding. That's the best-case scenario, because, if you state that capitalism is man-made with no natural root, there is no discussion possible. But I guess a no dialogue scenario is what some people want.
The mathematical expression of the drift to low performance
Donella Meadows' explanation for the drift to low performance uses psychological evaluation of discrepancy between the evaluated and perceived result. There is another way to put it, which is more suitable for a mathematical formulation. However, that formulation follows Meadows' hypothesis, which is that every year the expectation is based on the previous year's achievements, and that expectation is lowered each year because, as she explains, we perceive things worse than they are. It's important to understand my position because if you do not agree with the equation, ask yourself if the equation follows Meadows' hypothesis and explanation. Besides, don't forget that this is a mathematical expression, not a proof of Meadows' theorem.
Meadows' theorem can be reformulated that way: if you set your objectives from previous results, it will drift to lower performances because they can never be fully reached, only equaled at best. But why is that? Because you can never exceed what was previously done if you base your expectations precisely on what was done previously. If you want to exceed the performances of previous years, you need to base your expectations on a value independent of the system. I will show you the mathematical expressions for the two cases: an objective based on previous performances, and one based on an absolute point of reference. Equations:
Let start with parameter C. It represents the rate of realization of your expectation from the previous year. According to Meadows' hypothesis, C must be inferior or equal to 1 (C <= 1). Ya and Ye are, respectively, the result achieved for a year, and Ye is the expected result for a given year, (n) being the current year, (n-1) the previous year ... Therefore, C = what you have achieved / what you expected to achieve.
Equation 1) is precisely what produces the drift to low performance and your expectation never exceeds what was achieved the years before. Ye(n-1)*C is equal to Ya(n-1). Your expectations will always be at best, what you have achieved the previous year.
Equation 2) is not based on the previous year to define the new expectation but on a value external to the system (A is that value). It means then you can ask people more, which will be a corrective measure to avoid the drift to low performance.
My thought is that equation 1) exist in a society with equality of outcome, and you have to base your expectation on those who can achieve the least. Equation 2) allow to base your expectation of those who achieve the best and that the society of competence I advocate for. From a psychological point of view, asking people to exceed why they already achieve works pretty well. Most people can do better than what they actually do.
Escaping the consequences of life: when relativism transcends determinism
At the end of her book, she goes full new-age, to which I do not adhere, but she states something interesting "To realize that no paradigm is true". She makes a relation between dynamic systems and relativism. According to her, since there is a constant evolution, nothing will hold forever, and therefore, relativism rules. I'm not interested in the relativist argument, but it brings back a question that keeps all rationalists awake. How does it come that so many intelligent people are attracted by relativism to the expense to lose the coherency that allows them precisely to act in an intelligent manner? A possible answer struck me: determinism! Life and nature are based on complex dynamic systems, and those are deterministic. It's always the same mechanisms that are applied and produce the same patterns. Relativism transcends that limitation. It is the joker card for those who can't deal with a deterministic world. The problem, of course, is that relativism builds unreliable knowledge, which does not allow us to solve problems, just to escape them until the system turns nasty. Escaping determinism is the most important issue that highly intelligent and educated people have. When they face it, they try to escape it. Relativism is their way out. Why do they want to escape a deterministic world? Here are the two questions they ask themselves: Why should my magnificent brain not be right? Why should my almighty brain be terminated? This lead to social construction (blank slate), to separate the brain and the body from evolution (Ghost in the machine), and to what we could call 'feudal enlightenment', a middle-aged power structure with industrial capabilities. The corporations replace the fortified castles. If we follow that path, we will first enter a dark age, which seems to have started to happen, and then a renaissance. We will be wise this time to get our values right and rather than to have a 'reborn' (renaissance in French) we should work for a 'move on' to the next step of our civilization. It's funny, sort of, because Europe entered a dark age precisely because the feudal structure was already belonging to the past. It's time that the corporations get the memo before it costs lives, a tone of lives.
Non-intuitive knowledge needs reason
All the knowledge presented in her book, mostly related to complex dynamic system and game theory, are counter-intuitive. It follows that without reason, you can't get a grasp on them and without them a chance to understand the dynamic of our society and to discover what dos and don'ts work. Not only, reason is needed, but that knowledge needs to be taught. They require that you go through a specific education process. It means a reason-based education, but it doesn't end here. It's our culture, as a whole, that needs to incorporate that knowledge and in the end, there is no other way than to build a reason culture-based society.
II - Addendum: Nature of collectivism and individualism
Autonomous individuals do not lead to chaos
But individuals are unpredictable, we can't trust them!
There are many reasons a group will choose collectivism. I have explained what I think to be a root cause of it, but it doesn't mean they aren't any other, and I like the one of F.A. Hayek "The common features of all collectivist systems may be described as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal..." "...and not its activities guided by the whims and fancies of irresponsible individuals". Collectivists believe that individual actions lead to chaos, and they fear it. From the book 'The Road to Serfdom - chap: Planning and democracy'.
It's often difficult to link abstract concepts to daily life situations, which would help to bridge the gap between what an author wants to say and what a reader understands, but in the case of the fear of chaos, I have one: My wife and I were taking a few days off in a hotel in the Black Forest (Germany). When I went downstairs for breakfast, I choose randomly a table, but I was swiftly corrected and learned that a table was given to each chamber. I asked why, and I got the most memorable answer of all. 'If we let customers choose their table it will be chaos'. If you are an early bird, you can witness a pattern in the breakfast room of hotels. People choose places the more away from each other and this is very efficient. The space between customers decreases until all the places are taken. In more prestigious hotels, someone places the customer but depending on the remaining places, not of their room number. People have still some choice if they come early, to enjoy a good place. In our German hotel, the individual has no choice. Be aware, chaos is lurking!
Complex dynamic system or how individuals avoid chaos
All collectivist and authoritarian people failed to understand that the result of individuals having seemingly random activities does not lead to chaos but to a general direction that precisely avoids chaos. The reason is that people don't like chaos and apply a small set of rules to avoid it. Because a human brain has patterns, people apply the same set of rules for every situation, which allows synchronization and coordination. The same kind of mechanism allows large flocks of birds to be well-coordinated while constantly moving. Same for ants, bees... while this has only started to become formulated scientifically under the name of 'Complex Dynamic System' (Evolutionarily Stable Strategy is part of it). An intuitive understanding exists for a long time. The theory of evolution is a CDS, simple rules produce complex systems but stable systems.
Marxism is not a CDS, but more a binary static model and definitely not stable. The lack of stability is because each part, on average, does not work without negatively impacting other parts. This is the result of the top-to-bottom concept on which is based the socially constructed and collectivist models. F.A Hayek in "The Fatal Conceit" explained it from an information point of view. The amount of information needed for the bottom to optimize its activities is far superior to the information that the top can manage and provide. The result is inefficiency. The solution is to ensure a minimal level of autonomy at each level, and that autonomy is protected, or if you want, the people should not fear the Gulag if they make an error that will statistically happen. Being authoritarian or totalitarian is a necessity to maintain stability. It is static because it does not have mechanisms by which it can evolve. In opposition, a model based on its ability to evolve will solve stability issues. However, Marxism has proven to be particularly persistent regarding the suffering it produces.
The nature of individualism and collectivism are not of the same kind
You can't easily convert an individualist to collectivism
F. A Hayek's comment on collectivism also introduces an important observation. While there are various forms of collectivism (communism and fascism are collectivism of our time) and differ in their goals, they both oppose individualism by their will to organize and control the whole society. They are centralized state societies. The nature of conflicts between collectivist societies is the power struggle, but their members share the same frame of mind. The nature of conflicts between collectivist and individualist societies is existential. During the 1920 and 1930, communist and fascist recruiters knew that it was easy to convert a communist to fascism and reciprocally, but it was too hard a task to convert an individualist to collectivism.
Civilization vs society level conflict
Since the end of WWII, the existence of left and right political categories has confused people, and some have used that confusion. Let me get it straight for you. For a member of an individualist society, Stalin and Hitler were dictators of the same kind of political system based on collectivism. For a member of a collectivist society, there are differences. If someone describes someone else as a fascist, chances are high that he/she is a collectivist, because they are the ones who differentiate the many collectivisms. An individualist, on the other hand, will say that Nazis were socialists because, from its point of view, they are collectivists. Individualists must understand that the conflict between collectivists is a society issue, while the conflict between individualists and collectivists, is a civilization issue.
Why socialist Germany attacked socialist Russia in 1941?
The historical answer to why Germany attacked Russia is the need for room to feed its people. But that answer is a non-sequitur because it does not answer why a socialist country would attack another one. Unless you consider implicitly that Germany was back then a kind of right political country, they don't need any other reason to attack Russia than being a socialist state. But again why the German did claimed they were National Socialists?
People are chasing their tail on that question since 1941. No matter what perspective you have to tackle the question, a non-sequitur, a break of logic will appears. The historical answer is correct, what is not correct is the left vs right political model to support that answer. There is a conflict, hence the non sequitur. The closed vs open society explanatory model proves here to be superior because it takes into account the fundamental reality on which collectivist societies are built.
You have to understand what a closed society is. It is a society that defines reality, no matter how far from the 'real' reality that reality is. It is organized into classes, and taboos are created so that people don't put into question the reality of the collective. The group belonging to that reality is seen as a race. Their understanding of race is like their understanding of reality, it follows their needs. For Germany, it was the Arian race and for Russia, the proletarian. That alone explains why Stalin killed millions of Ukrainians, and Hitler millions of Jews - they are not of my race. There is something more, the fear of corrupting the mind for Stalin and the blood for Hitler. Here comes the definition of the closed-society. Anything that can corrupt the group, its reality, its order is seen as a direct threat that must be eradicated. That's why a closed society cannot and never will be a society of merchants, they can't have exchange with the outside because they can't control every particle, every word, and shreds of ideas that will come. The nature of a closed society is to take what it needs, not to look for an exchange of goods. Any closed society will attack any other society no matter if it is open or closed.
Make no error, collectivism is the real danger, whatever the form it takes. In the 20th century, it killed one hundred million of its people (roughly) and there is no reason it couldn't beat that number if it's not facing a powerful opposition. The letter focuses on the Marxist type of collectivism, but before we explore its darkest places, we need to understand the origin of collectivism, and this is tribalism. It is so old, that it precedes language or the migration of our species on other continents. It is so old that we are hardwired to have tribal behaviors, and this is the doing of evolution.
A large number of concepts and explanations will follow regarding tribalism linked to collectivism and individualism, and it's easy to lose its way. Here is a little helper: do always keep in mind that the tribalism in collectivism does not recognize human nature, while in individualism, it is part of it. From this observation, many things follow. Collectivism does not recognize nature, only cultural blueprint, therefore you have only a function given by the society. Individualism, on the other hand, recognizes that humans are composed in part by nature (genes) and in part by culture (more for nature than culture), therefore they have roles and functions. Sexes designing a role implies that collectivism does not recognize men and women as being different but only an interchangeable human unit (the root of the gender theory). Individualism implies recognizing men and women to have roles and therefore, the smallest important structure is the family. Units in a collective do not need to have values to guide them nor to take responsibility. With individualism, each individual needs to be autonomous to assume its role, which leads to the need to follow values and to take responsibility for its error. It implies, for example, a feedback loop to learn from its mistake, freedom of thinking, and speech to communicate with other individuals and to acquire knowledge. Individualism requires the use of an effective reward system for individuals to act by themselves without the need for constant authority. In a collective, people are not rewarded for their achievement, whatever that is, only the collective. Well that a good start...
All authoritarian/totalitarian systems share one particularity. They consider every citizen as a culprit and, of course, a potential criminal against the state. Therefore, it becomes the role of politicians (those who vote the laws), Judges (those who apply the laws), and police forces to find what they're guilty of. It's very different from any free society whose justice system is built on the concept that every citizen is considered innocent until proven guilty.
The consequences of a world of culprits
It happens that many are naturally inclined to apply an authoritarian view, which is a serious issue in a free society. They failed to intuitively envision the consequences of their view, which is: The more culprit you look for, the more there are, and therefore, the more you have to look for. It shutdowns free speech and with it the ability for individuals to resolve problems, to engage in business on their own. Creativity and initiative go down, followed by productivity and the free-society slowly becomes a fear-society. They become less autonomous, requiring more and more help. The state fills the void and becomes bigger and will justify its raison d'être and grow by the existence of threats to the society and then people will accept the state as their savior and the tyrants will rule.
People should know very soon in their life on which side they lean, and there is one, called "The Blackstone's formulation" (1760) which is a simple and unique question. How we answer it determines what society we want.
"For a justice system, it is better than ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer?"
In other words, imagine that there are ten persons. You know that one is innocent and all others guilty, but you don't know which one. Do you set free all ten or put them all in jail? Statistically, people who support authoritarian systems (even if they don't know it), advocate for the suffering of the innocent (put them all in jail). Historically, our western society is built on the concept to let loose those who are guilty and to save the innocent (set them all free).
The Blackstone question was never intended to be a personality test, at best to tell people what kind of justice they want, but the observations show that's the case. What is never explained is why one person will choose the authoritarian way over the free society. Trust is the answer and as I have explained previously, it is linked to empathy. Western society is built on trust and is linked historically to Christian morale, but not restricted to, which asks to do the good around you, not to see everyone as a potential criminal. It is the empathy link that defines the westerners before the fear of others.
A few words from John Adams (18th) for a better understanding of what is at stake "It is more important that innocence should be protected than it is that guilt should be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen, that would be the end of security whatsoever."
What is happening to civilization?
Recognition and gratitude to Karl Popper
We have two big problems: collectivism and the elites and they are linked together. I guess you figured that out by now, but they are the tip of the iceberg. If we dive into the dark water of collectivism, we will have a look at the two root causes. I will state them and then go into details. However, before I start I have to speak my mind about one observation. Karl Popper is the author of a book which is one of the most important books written for the last century, and yet it is nearly impossible the hear or read any philosopher or intellectual making any reference or comment on that very book. This is quite remarkable and one may question if they truly want to fix the problem of our civilization. The book is a war book against those who want the breakdown of civilization: The open society and its enemies. He explains not only those two root causes but also the role of essentialism as a tool by which collectivists organize and produce their thoughts. It is a completely forgotten knowledge nowadays, for strategic reasons thanks to the collectivists. He explains historicism, a completely underestimated ideology, to understand the cult element of collectivism, which we can describe as the modern primitive tribe accomplishing a prophecy.
1) One of the main and natural causes of change of our social structure is population increase and the autonomous individual (which opposes collectivism by its very existence) is a direct result of it.
2) The primitive society, called the closed society by Popper, is based on the inability of its members to distinguish natural laws from man-made laws.
The connection between the twos is that to develop the autonomous individual you have to accept the distinction between natural law and man-made law. How it works will be explained.
The autonomous individual as the solution to population increase
Let's go back in time. Humans lived in tribes and our social organization was not that different from social animals today. There are two components an alpha and the herd. The alpha brings order to the tribe so it can function as a group to be more efficient for the hunting and the protection of the young. The tribes kept growing and at some point, the alpha can't bring order to the herd. The solution is a hierarchy of competence so that the alpha doesn't have to manage the whole herd by himself constantly. This means that at any level of the hierarchy an individual has to have the ability to make decisions on his own. That's how the autonomous individual is born, it was a slow process but it did happen.
Moving from the primitive to the civilized tribe
Two thousand four hundred years ago there was a war, between Sparta the city of the warriors, and Athens the city of the merchants. It is the first war recorded between the primitive tribe and the civilized tribe, between collectivists and individualists with the sense of the autonomous individual. Obviously, primitive does not mean stupid people with no knowledge and competence but it's related to the social organization of the society. Another observation is that the primitive tribe gives some autonomy to the individual, but for the most part, it remains a rigid society organized in classes and taboo so that the order of the society is never put into question.
In a primitive tribe, no matter how technically advanced it is, knowledge is subordinate to the truth of the dominant class. It can be resumed by the following sentence "I have spoken, it is (therefore) written, it shall be done", and the herd obeys. The law that the elite produces, is equivalent to natural laws, and make no mistake, they truly believe it because they don't make the distinction. This deep belief hurts the development of knowledge and limits strongly the autonomy of the individual.
The primitive tribe is a closed society not only because its social organization is just an adaptation to the alpha/herd model, but because the truths come from the inside. Their point of reference for knowing what is true or false is internal. The unity of measurement is their emotions, the feeling that it is true or not. On the contrary, the civilized tribe or open society gets its knowledge by using nature as an external point of reference. We use reason to measure the validity of our thinking by establishing a feedback loop with reality. If reality says we are wrong, then we are wrong and we adapt. Primitives are never wrong and they don't adapt. Civilized always considered that possibility to be wrong which allows them to enhance themselves and to build a better world.
The underlying model of all collectivism is the primitive tribe and there is a little dirty secret. Collectivism always works even unconsciously to recover the ratio herd/alpha at a level that makes the primitive tribe work and the autonomous individual useless. What you have to accept is that we are still wrestling with that question, and reason, truth, knowledge, and reality are hostages of that conflict.
How do we teach to become civilized?
Education should focus on brain maturation and I will explain what it is, with formal teaching which focuses on knowledge and not skills. As Thomas Sowell said, It's not that the collectivists can't produce a reasoning, it's that they believe that having emotions is reasoning. We become civilized, the brain has a maturation to achieve to get to that point. This means
1) to work on the reward system so that it favors reason over emotions
2) They must adhere to the principle of reality, that it is unique and its existence doesn't depend on what we would like it to be.
3) To learn to use reason as a feedback loop with reality, which implies learning to accept to be wrong and learn with reason to enhance oneself, your ideas, your projects, etc.
Essentialism or how the collectivists think
Essentialism started with Plato and was refined by Aristotle. A large chapter is dedicated to it so I will only make a quick explanation. Essentialism is related to language and is the tool by which the collectivists create a map of the world, to understand and navigate into that world. What opposes essentialism is another tool called the scientific method. With the scientific method, you observe the properties of things and when you have a theory and explanation you give them a name. Like gravity. We first observe it, find laws to describe it, and then give it a name and then a definition. Karl Popper says that with the scientific method we read the world from the right to the left. With essentialism we do the reverse, we read the world from the left to the right. We have a thing, we give it a name first and then we find its essence, hence essentialism. You get the essence of things with some intuitive knowledge, but what happens is that we use our emotions and therefore we connect words to them.
With essentialism there is a feedback loop between language and emotions, it's internal, while with the scientific method we observe properties that are in nature, it's external. To test if something is true or not you probe your emotions. For example, is this free speech or hate speech? For an essentialist free and hate speech have no property, but are the expression of a feeling. That's why they can't define it, like many other things.
Essentialists are irrationalists. The word is used by Karl Popper with the meaning to oppose reason on purpose. They are not crazy, they are predictable because there are patterns in their incoherent thinking, and they are mostly explained by essentialism. There is always a direct link between the way essentialism work and the primitive thinking that confuses natural laws with man-made laws. In both cases, there is no connection to the external world. When the philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries stated that there is no truth, therefore the quest for the truth is pointless. They meant in the realm of language without giving that precision. It's a fallacy because the way out is to use the scientific method, but that will imply to recognize that the language, of which they are the masters, is not all the knowledge that there is. In other words, they have to abandon the belief to be the masters of reality, they are only the masters of the fiction they wrote.
There are several definitions of essentialism, and some have not much to do with what I just described, but the definition of essentialism given by Karl Popper is the one you should take care of because it makes sense, it is understandable, usable, and has historic roots back to Plato and Aristotle.
Historicism is the ideology that there are laws to be found in the evolution of human society. Historicism is already in Plato's book 'The Republic'. He explained that there are four steps to the cycle of any society: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. It's extremely seductive especially for the rulers who think they have a way to predict the future. For example, following Plato, if you know that you are in the democracy period then the next step is tyranny and you will find it normal as a ruler to apply it. Historicism produces self-fulfilling laws. It was Hegel that revived historicism when working as a state philosopher for the Prussian, and later Marx under the influence of Hegel. According to Marx "The history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggles". If you follow Marx's historicism what you're looking for is the class struggles in society. In all aspects of life, you can always find something that you're desperately looking for. Some can read your destiny in the number of your anniversary date. Historicism is a bogus concept, but one that belongs to the primitive tribe. It means that historicism is a product of a way of thinking. You can't get rid of it by proving that it is a faulty concept, but by dealing directly with primitive thinking which consists of promoting the civilized way.
The power of persuasion of that concept comes from a deep belief and shared by many that natural laws and man-made laws have the same nature. They're not, but people who believe it, do not credit nature to pressure change on our society (population increase, I.Q variation...), they focus exclusively on human actions. All collectivisms are based on that belief, which explains in part their attempt to engineer the society, to engineer the people (the blank slate belief), and that they can escape evolution. We do not write our own destiny as historicism suggests. This tendency to see prophecy can clearly be observed with the Global warming cult trying to make us believe that we are all going to die. No, we won't.
The problem with the primitive tribe is that when they face a no-win scenario they transform themselves into the volcano people. They know that something is not right in their society and since the society is all the world (the closed society), no external cause, they start to think that they are the problem and a purification process starts. Their sacrifice will solve it and they jump one after another into the volcano. The more they jump the more acute the problem becomes and proves to them that why they have to jump. The result is mass killings and genocides. We are facing the question of the very existence of human civilization because they will not stop at Western civilization.
The autonomous individual is not an answer to collectivism, but the population increase. Those two ways of life are not in competition, for the primitive tribe died a long time ago. The autonomous individual is what it means to be human and the foundation of human civilization. This is the work of nature, not some artificial construct. It means that we can't go back to what we were 200000 years ago and if we try we will hurt our human nature as it is today and lose civilization. At the same time, the nature of what we were for millions of years has not disappeared. We still have hardwired survival mechanisms alongside our new faculties which mostly concern the brain. The problem is that the hardwire mechanisms exist within us from day one. We are primitive and we become civilized, a maturation process is at work here, and depending on its level of achievement you will be more of the primitive tribe than the civilized tribe.
Communism, the gentlemen agreement of the elite
Communism is not what you think it was designed for, nor for whom. The answer is for the elite and only the elite, as a coalition to avoid destructive competition between them. Because it's an unusual perspective, I wanted to make that statement first to be clear about what that chapter is all about. That statement calls immediately for THE question, 'what about the people?' You won't like the answer, but let's start with the beginning. A very long time ago in a very faraway country, a philosopher named Plato...
I quote "Since the ruling class alone has political power, including the power of keeping the number of human cattle within such limits as to prevent them from becoming a danger, the whole problem of preserving the state is reduced to that of preserving the internal unity of the master class. How is this unity of the rulers preserved? By training and other psychological influences, but otherwise mainly by the elimination of economic interests which may lead to disunion. This economic abstinence is achieved and controlled by the introduction of communism, i.e. by the abolition of private properties ... this communism is confined to the ruling class... the family must be destroyed, or rather extended to cover the whole warrior class." "The communism of the ruling caste of his best city (best state) can thus be derived from Plato's fundamental sociological law of change; it is a necessary condition of the political stability which is its fundamental characteristic." Astonishing, isn't it! I quote "Plato distinguishes three classes in his best state, the guardians, their armed auxiliaries or warriors, and the working class. But actually, there are only two classes, the military caste - the armed and educated rulers - and the unarmed and uneducated ruled, the human sheep." (Note: haven't you seen something similar recently on your streets, all dressed in black, and politicians defending their raison d'être?). Karl Popper, Book The open society and its enemies, volume I, the spell of Plato, chapter 4: change and rest.
The internal flaw of the elites' ideal states
Elite means a society of classes and therefore authoritarian to protect their class, but there is an unexpected consequence in the structure of that ideal state, a self-destruction mechanism. The elites must be competent, to make the society sustainable. I quote "The very idea of selecting or educating future leaders (note: amongst the leaders) is self-contradictory." "But the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties, which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to this influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous may be the most valuable." Karl Popper same book, chapter 7: The principle of leadership.
F. A Hayek came to the same conclusion in his book 'The road to serfdom' in the chapter: Why the worst get on the top. By the worst, we understand today, the most violent, but what both authors mean is the most capable. However, both understandings (our today understanding and Popper-Hayek understanding) do not oppose each other. Weak elites are a call for violent people to replace them or to be used by them. Some may hope (a desperate but false hope) that at some point the elite will find a way to use the people to avoid a collapse of the state. If so then you felt to understand the imperative necessity of unity the elites impose on themselves to preserve the 'blood'. When the elites of Athens betrayed their citizen in favor of Sparta, it was customary for them to take the oligarchic oath, I quote "I promise to be an enemy of the people, and to do my best to give them bad advice!" Karl Popper, same book, chapter 10. The goal of the oath is not to hate the people, even if it is a consequence of it, but to reinforce the unity of the elite by widening the class differences.
The internal flaw of democracy
I want to extend the explanation of "the worst gets on the top", but I also want you to know that what you're about to read is difficult to process because it's a nightmare in which we live now. I wouldn't have dared to make such an assumption a decade ago, and if I had I would have been mocked or rightfully ignored. Today, that assumption is part of our daily life and each of us can witness it first hand and even be the target and victim of it. Democracy as any edifices projects a shadow and we were blind to the dark places that that shadow hides and blind to the monsters crawling in those dark places.
The election process which is at the heart of any democracy allows the most manipulative person amongst the most intelligent (but they are not the most intelligent) to be elected and those show psychopathic traits. A resonance mechanism between the media, and to some degree with the cinema's world (the 7th art), with that particular political class has increased their abilities to get to the top positions. As experts in deception, they understand more than any other what the media need and how they work. They are predators that constantly observe how things work to take advantage of them. There is also a cooptation mechanism involved, and interestingly enough there is a cooperation between psychopaths and truly incompetent people, because both need to hide their doing which has nothing to do with the good of the people but to protect themselves, they will coopt each other. It doesn't stop here, because psychopathy calls for the monster in us, and people in contact or under the authority of those, in turn, will become inhuman. Are collectivists psychopaths or a kind of? While that question will have to be answered we can perfectly imagine that they are separated without changing one important outcome. They both want man-made laws to regulate the society without any compassion for the people who will have to obey them, they will take no responsibility whatsoever for their wrongdoing because they are convinced that people whether are too dumb to follow their rules whether they deserve what happens to them. Above all, they are animate by a vision and they are on a messianic crusade to transform the world.
The limit of laws and authority
People are told that there are rules and if we break them some tell us that hell is loose and some tell us that we are animals because only rules separate us from them. What is never told is the kind of rules we are talking about and here lies precisely the deception. The rules are not laws (man-made laws), they are natural rules (natural laws) and this makes all the difference regarding the origin and creation of society. I explained in the paragraph 'The lack of a moral code', that you got to have rules and the first reason being that the world outside our society is made of rules and if you want to survive you got to have rules to respect those rules if you want to have a chance to survive.
Now I will explain why we have a society. We start with two facts, 1) you got to have rules, and 2) those rules are natural, or biologically hardwired. It follows that society starts by a gathering of people that share similar rules therefore from the same species and then and only then with the help of language they make a consensus about the creation of laws to regulate their interactions, between them and between the institutions. The group preceded society. To follow the natural laws of the human species is what makes you human. It implies that if man-made laws stop you to follow natural laws then those man-made laws are inhuman. Natural laws trump man-made laws. People are not told why we have society and in particular how a tribe can exist and function without man-made laws. I wrote the chapter 'Tribalism' as an addendum to shed some light on that matter.
I want to give you an example of how man-made laws make regular people become inhuman. A woman just lost her husband. We are at the moment of the cremation. There is the coffin ready to be incinerated and in the room, a few people sitting on chairs separate each by two meters. The woman is emotionally overwhelmed and two men, her sons sitting on her left and right sides moved closer to her to show support, to show 'Empathy', a natural law. A man immediately reminds them of the rule of proximity. At that moment that man is inhuman, at that moment the man-made law is inhuman. It doesn't matter that you follow orders, that you follow the laws, if you subordinate natural laws to man-made laws then you're inhuman. That's maybe what you want but here is a little reminder. If your rules are man-made then you have no rules because you can always make one up to avoid any responsibilities, and that's what people do when the situation becomes ugly. That inhumanity is the mark of collectivism.
Note: That explanation account for why the French have had 5 constitutions and the American only one. The latter tries to take into consideration natural laws, while the former doesn't care. That's why France is in trouble since then. That attitude of negligence if not disdain toward natural laws is the signature of the 18th-century French philosophy and its collectivist tendency in which the city of Paris plays the role of a central state. But French are also deeply human, the French "art de vivre" is known worldwide. A divided nation since the revolution.
When it comes to understanding the actual situation, the book '1984' by George Orwell is often pointed to as the textbook of the elite to manage the people. To me, it looks like we have hidden variables and the elite motivations and objectives are amongst them. Let's change the angle by which we look at the events, tyranny is not the end goal, but a by-product of a new society in which only the elite exists as human beings. That the rest of the population is still alive doesn't matter they are just animals. What does the elite want to achieve? Communism! Communism was always about organizing the elite and this was described by Karl Popper in his critic of Plato. 'The Republic' from Plato is the textbook for the elite to organize themselves.
That's good news because we have the antidote. The book 'The open society and its enemies' is not only a book, but it's also a 'Kriegsbuch' (War book) according to the author himself (German interview 1974), in other words, a manual to fight the tyrants and to enhance our society so that they could never come back. Associate with recent knowledge we can propose a clear picture and produce the basis of a new civilization. The distinction between natural and man-made laws, the acceptance of the theory of evolution, reason over emotions, the scientific thinking and method over essentialism, Socrates over Plato and Aristotle, external point of reference and feedback loop with reality to control our brain, a hierarchy of competence and not of classes, etc.
I see a bright future ahead of us, even if the road will be difficult. Nature is not on their side, they are a vestige of what we were a long time ago. They believe that if we do not adopt their way it's the end of the world literally and in particular they are obsessed with overpopulation. We will have to deal with that problem in the future there is no doubt, but not now and certainly not the way they want to do it. First, we need to build structures that will allow every earthling to fit into the civilized tribe. Adaptable and modular structures that focus on local organizations. We also have to re-orient the power culture of our societies to a knowledge-oriented culture. Democracy is built upon two ideas: the ability to change the institutions and to avoid the concentration of power which is usually referred to by the balance of power. Beyond we will have to move from institutions to self-ordering processes as the central mechanism of our society.
Difficult decisions will also have to be made, in particular, and because of brain pattern some concepts and values must be adopted: reason, truth, honesty, forgiveness... but some rejected: relativism, ghost in the machine, equality of outcome... we will have to take an oath, all of us which mean of son and daughter that are not yet here. The oath is personal, not a group or family business. The oath is a test to determine if there is a brain maturation issue that limits the use of reality as a point of reference, to have developed a reward system that favors reason,... The oath is the oath of civilization and the primitive cannot be part of it. That's why I propose that humanity split amongst those who take the oath and accept the path of civilization and those who want to go back to the path of the primitive tribe. I don't know how that question will be resolved in the end, but our goal is to protect civilization, knowledge, and human beings. The primitive cannot come back. This is a clash of civilizations and we are all in, we cannot escape the fight.
Our actual elite is the last primitive tribe
Without Plato or any late philosophers, the elite would have produced a theory to justify the creation of a coalition of an elite who would have been a communist-like organization. The error they make repeatedly is to reject the autonomous individual as a solution to population increase and the belief that a dominant elite is a better solution than the hierarchy of competence can't replace them. They need to move from the primitive tribe to the civilized tribe. Putting down communism helps little because something else will replace it, they must change.
I hereby take the oath of civilization as an elite. I understand the unbalanced nature of the function between the elite and the people, that we can't be repaid for what we bring to the society, and reject any attempt to produce a coalition of the elite to control the people to rebalance the society in our favor. I will focus on helping people to have structure and social mechanisms that can help them to help themselves so that they keep their dignity as human beings. I will help to build and protect the hierarchy of competence to any group to which I will belong and I will take the responsibility to ensure that the social pump allowing people to move up is working. I will stand as a role model for all by my respect and observation of our moral values as a group. I will be the educator and save the innocent each time it is possible. I will support cooperation and be an initiator to end retaliation to relaunch cooperation.
Post-modernism, Marxism and to cut things from their properties
Emotional states as definitions of words
The consequence to cut things from their properties is the witch's cauldron from which darkness is coming out and we are facing two of them, Marxism and post-modernism. The question we must answer is by what intellectual mechanisms were they brought to life? It starts with essentialism, but what in essentialism makes that happen and the answer is the lack of properties, or more precisely the lack of taking into account properties to define things. This is achieved by connecting words to an emotional state. Diversity, women's rights, equity, to list a few, have a positive meaning while property, individual, money have a negative meaning, at least, for those embracing essentialism thinking. The real definitions of those things (concept, objects, history, ...) don't matter.
They don't tell truths, only stories
A year ago (in 2019) the American philosopher Stephen Hicks was engaged in an adversarial debate, like the English-speaking world is accustomed to, with the author Thaddeus Russell. At some point in the debate, the latter asserts that post-modernists do not tell truths but stories, in defense of post-modernism. While post-modernist philosophers try to not make that claim in such an explicit manner, that's exactly what they think. Like with relativism, the claim of the inexistence of truth is mocked for its own contradiction. How can you claim that there is no truth by stating it is the truth? However, that argument of contradiction doesn't work for post-modernists and for that matter Marxists as well, and they are not the least bit taken aback. It's not the logical contraction on which we must focus but the definition of truth. They reject it, but why? And here is what they don't tell you, and it has to do with essentialism, at least its consequences. As a side note, if one tells only stories, he has no responsibility to take care of.
Positive feelings as truths of the world
When there is no property to define things, then words are all the knowledge there is. If I have the word truth then everything else is defined by non-truth. If I look at my monitor, everything that is not a monitor is a non-monitor. If you have some notion of the set theory then if you take a set you have the elements that belong to that set and those who do not belong. I'm not trying to explain why they believe that there is no truth, but why the logical contradiction of the claim that there is no truth doesn't defeat their statement. They have a set theory frame of mind, which is linked to tribalism. You belong to the tribe or not, friend or foe. The Marxists are thinking the same way. There are the bourgeois and the proletarian and for the new Marxists the oppressed and the oppressor. This constant duality in all things is, according to Karl Popper, a consequence of an emotional state by which you understand the world. What is true is what makes them feel good. The statement that there is no truth, is true because it makes them feel good. The logical contradiction has nothing to do with the truthfulness of the statement, but the polarity of their emotions. Positive equal true, negative equal bad, not wrong but bad, really bad, and bad people must go away, they cannot exist in their world. That's why they don't accept any other views, the rainbow as the symbol of the ultimate positive emotions must cover all the planet.
Primitive tribalism is a binary representation of the world
The question to ask post-modernists is what is the definition of truth that allows them to know that the claim of the inexistence of truths, is true? The same way the question to be asked to the social-justice warriors is not what hate-speech is, but what allows them to recognize hate-speech when they hear one. Contrary to the social justice warriors, we know that hate speech is everything that does not follow their truth. They have no self-reflection and we need to send them back to their emotions and to face that here lies all their knowledge. Again in a modern mathematical language, which they are so fond of, it is the set theory linked to a vestigial of primitive tribalism, an element x is part of the set A, or not. It translates into Us vs Them, oppressor vs oppressed, minorities vs majority...
When you start from the properties of things, there is no such thing as - the word and what is not represented by that word. Therefore words are not tied to an emotional binary vision of the world. Also, Essentialism defines things, while in science we describe things. Nobody knows what gravity is but we have a very good description that helps us to use it. Essentialists put the word first because they want to define what it is, but they don't know so they are making stuff up. Plato explains that intellectual intuition is used to find the essence of each thing, which allows us to know what it is. They always end up asking questions about things for which nobody has an answer because they can't. What is love? Or what is life? Answers to those essentialist questions are of the kind - life is like a box of chocolate. When I say that they are making stuff up, what it really means is that they will define things according to their needs, they will use the language to build their fantasy and the language will become their fantasy.
Essentialists are extremely dangerous, they can justify very easily genocides, but the lesson to learn is that essentialism forces people to become their own point of reference and because of this they can't get out of this trap by themselves. You can't reason them. By rejecting essentialism we took the right direction to become civilized. We have allowed Essentialism to stay with us, but because it is linked to our instincts, the primitive in us will always try to make a comeback. Civilization has saved us, save humanity, to continue to be civilized and the civilization project, Essentialism must die. From a practical point of view, this means a complete overhaul of our intellectual activities and the end of the humanities as we know them in the university.
I use to run at the 'Orangerie' park near the European parliament. One day, there was a group of people at the main entrance and one of the women handed me a leaflet while shouting "We are the anti-fascists", to which I answered 'You mean you're the communists'. I was walking away when she answered me 'We are the anti-racists'. I could start by explaining that people should define themselves by what they are rather than by what they aren't but there is a far more important lesson to learn here. As I explain sooner, technically speaking, we are all racist. Choosing people who are alike is a hardwire heuristic and race is just one of the many possibilities of the alike function. Hardwire mechanisms are part of us, they tell us where we are coming from, who we are, and why. The communist woman was precisely doing this when shouting we are the anti-fascists and anti-racist, she was broadcasting to which tribe she belongs and she will dislike every person who does not belong to her tribe.
Collectivism is not evolutionarily stable
We usually associate collectivism with tribalism and tribalism with group activities that degenerate into violent actions. Our ancestors were tribal, but the tribalism they exhibit is not the one of collectivism. Collectivism leads to destruction, while the tribalism of our ancestors leads them to conquer all continents, control their food and resources, and build civilization. Something does not add up. The movie "2001, a space odyssey" is not a historical documentary, the monolith is not the cause for civilization, we are no blank slate, and we are not chimps. I wrote tribalism to bring some clarity and to show that collectivism is not evolutionarily stable, or if you prefer it is not a viable strategy in the long run.
How tribalism happens: From cells to tribes
Evolutionarily Stable Strategy
During the 1970s biologists and game theorists introduced the ESS which stands for Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. It is a computational model based on game theory and the notion of evolution (a great number of generations or iterations). An example of an application is the number of sexes species need. Why do most species have only two sexes? Why not three or more? The ESS runs the model, and it happens that all that differs from two sexes, is not a stable strategy as a rule. 'Not stable' means that the species will disappear, and pretty quickly.
Modern societies like in Japan or Europe are not Evolutionarily Stable anymore because they can ensure the reproduction of their group. It means that they have interfered with basic natural functions, and this has to do with the rejection, even partially, of human nature. The cause has to be found in the belief that you can rewrite the laws of nature according to your ideology or that you're confused about the distinction between natural and man-made laws. Those who state that immigration solves the problem express precisely that confusion, they do not understand that to preserve reproduction capability is to endorse the existence of natural laws. It appears that our species had to learn the same lesson again and again - We humans can build complex political and philosophical models which will guide our life. Any of these models are based on a set of ideas, observations, reasonings, let's call it a values system, but they are models, not reality, and in order to work they need to obey the laws of nature, which includes human nature, to ensure stable strategies to happen and one of which is reproduction.
For that particular case, the lesson that we forgot is that women are not the parameter that ensures the minimum birth allowing the group to survive, it is men and their sexuality built by nature. It follows that the reason why women want kids is to have access to resources. If society is organized in a way that they don't need to, no kids. In fact, men and women shouldn't want to have kids, as a purpose, it's an abstraction that can not be genetically programmed. To find purpose in our genetic programming is to have an anthropomorphic understanding of our instincts - in other words, the belief that they are here to serve us. Women seek resources. Where resources are, women are. Men just have to provide those resources and they will be able to satisfy their sexuality, that's how nature solves the problem of reproduction for humans.
When it comes to nature you have to find the basic rules that constitute a process that will produce order. By order, you have to understand - to make things happen. To affect a purpose, to reproduction to take an example, is to suppose that we do have kids by the power of our cognitive functions, and that is wrong. It is important to understand this because if you don't you won't understand the basic rule of tribalism. My best advice is to avoid putting human purpose on basic rules that were genetically programmed. (The idea that you can regulate by man-made laws the number of kids that women should have, beyond being absurd, is the expression of magical thinking, of the closed and primitive society). Let's take another example but this time with ants. If you try to put a purpose on each ant's motivation to do what they do, it is to try to produce a model of their society in which each ant is conscious of that model and they do their work following the goal of building that model, an anthill, as a purpose. Such thinking is erroneous. No ant has any understanding of its purpose or even the colony as a system, and yet it is a system, but its order is not produced by a conscious process but by genetic programming. To sum up, the order produced by natural laws and rules does not come from a model that individuals try to produce, but simply apply rules that are given to them. A self-ordering model will emerge that we can study as a model, which is just a picture of the result, but not of the underlying complex mechanism that produces order. The question is then, what about our cognitive function? That's when it gets tricky. Because our cognitive functions have been developed to produce man-made laws to solve complex problems that the basic rules followed by our instincts can't. We tend to suppose that systems that are ordered are the result of a purpose and will. For the religious people it's God, for the collectivists it's man-made, hence their obsession with social engineering.
Amongst the many issues that collectivism faces in the desperate hope to be an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (Which they will constantly fail since they don't even recognize the concept), my choice of the reproduction issue is not random. Reproduction is linked to the population increase problem. While other parameters pressure human society to evolve, and by evolve I mean to change the paradigms on which it is based, population increase is central. It is that central that I have come to think that the state of many civilizations around the world, when the European civilization encounters them, was representative of their advancement in dealing with that question. The success of Western civilization is to have been able to organize the society in a hierarchy of individuals based on competencies and to have discovered processes to build a stable system.
Autonomous processes are sorcery
Let's begin with a quotation, "Throughout history merchants were objects of very general disdain and moral opprobrium ... Merchant behavior violated patterns of mutuality that prevailed within primary groupings ... The hostility, in particular of the scribe, towards the merchant is as old as recorded history", "They engaged in something like the transformation of the non-material in altering the value of goods. How could the power of things change ... without change in quantity?", "Activities that appear to add to available wealth, out of nothing, without physical creation and by merely rearranging what already exists, stink of sorcery". "... traders were held in contempt even by Plato and Aristotle..."," ...as to Karl Marx, labor was the real source of wealth". F.A Hayek, book, The fatal conceit, ch. The mysterious world of trade and money. The difficulties that people had to understand how merchants were producing wealth or how metal could be changed into useful objects, resulted in authorizing those activities only outside the city. Today, all our technological advancements let us believe that we are civilized and modern, but the primitive in us, its thinking, is still strong, it doesn't take much to go back 50000 years ago, and that's what we are facing right now.
Part of the belief in sorcery is the inability to cognitively understand and therefore to be able to "see" the invisible mechanism that is ordering things while no one is behind to guide their actions. Invisible because they can be "touch" only by a cognitive activity, our senses are silent and useless. "The market transmits information about them (objects/things) rather than producing them... (like) the relative scarcity of different kinds of objects". In the galactic universe of Star Trek, the warrior race called the Klingon is seen as honorable, while the merchant race, the Ferengi, is seen as deceiving, up to no good, and thus since the beginning of the franchise (Star Trek 1966, episode - the trouble with tribbles). Regarding processes, "By its work (the Austrian school of economics) on ... the subjective nature of economic values it produced a new paradigm for explaining structures arising without design from human interaction", "The advantages of these market procedures were so contrary to expectations that they could be explained only retrospectively, through analyzing this spontaneous formation itself". F.A Hayek, book The Fatal Conceit, paragraph - why what cannot be known cannot be planned.
Another explanation has nothing to do with our cognitive ability and explains why even intelligent people reject the knowledge of self-ordering systems. They don't believe that such systems are reliable, they can conceive that systems can only if they are in control, that if they are in charge of everything they will run better, and the more direct that control is the better it will be (centralization). I will give two examples, and then the explanation, but what we are dealing with is instincts taking over cognitive functions. The first is of course my breakfast example. Managers of hotels are perfectly capable to understand the rule that produces a self-ordering system in their breakfast room - Find a place as far as possible but at an equal distance to others clients. But some like in the Black-Forest won't use it, they will want to affect a table to each room to be sure there will be no chaos. The second example is recent, which consists to demonize the immune system, and that only vaccines can ensure immunity against an illness. To state that a vaccine is the only way to immune people is an attempt to control the self-ordered system that represents herd immunity. What is going on? I give a complete explanation at the end of tribalism, but it has to do with risk. Many people organize their life based only on their aversion to risk, which means to eliminate risks. It is an instinctive reaction linked to the control of our environment for survival purposes. This is express in game theory by two social dilemmas, the stag-hunt, and the prisoner dilemma. One expresses risk aversion for instinctive reasons, while the other favors outcomes over risks and allows cognitive functions not to be destroyed. Risk-aversion characterizes women's way to control their environment and explains the feminization of society.
Risk, randomness, and reward system
Risk-aversion is instinctive, therefore very strong and not subject to reason, it implies group behavior and pushed to the extreme tyranny to impose to all a complete control of the society. We can find connections with the belief that elevates man-made laws as natural laws (Popper), and the rejection that we have flaws because it will question our ability to produce laws to control our environment (Sowell), but what is really behind risks-aversion is the inability to deal with randomness, the most fundamental natural process of all. How do we reconcile self-ordering systems with randomness? How life can happen if it is subject to random processes? Randomness can only function in a finite world with other basic rules, rules for particles, for molecules, and those constraints will orient randomness to produce patterns. All the species on earth are an expression of those patterns as do planetary systems, and galaxies, or more simply the composition of rocks. To give purpose to things is to explain without randomness their existence. Regarding human beings and the future of society, risk-aversion must be opposed and replaced by knowledge, and knowledge is exactly what is needed to evaluate risks to choose outcomes over risks.
Two observations regarding universities and philosophy. Universities have been built as temples of knowledge, but since the end of WWII, universities are more and more see as social status delivery services. This coincides with the arrival of women, who have now take control of the fate of universities, competencies and truth are no more pillars of those temples of knowledge. By a feedback loop, the destruction of the place that was broadcasting knowledge leaves people with the only tools at their disposal to evaluate risks, their instincts, and not their cognitive functions, increasing the feminization of society. Philosophy - the solution to risk-aversion starts by helping the reward system to "like" solutions based on our cognitive functions and then to increase knowledge. The solution is not to find an equilibrium between risk-aversion and outcomes, between a feminine approach for solving problems that life put on our path and a male approach, between instincts and cognitive functions, but that's how philosophy works and this has to stop. There are those who see shadows and those the real objects (Plato), those who live by following Apollo and those following Dionysus (Nietzsche), or life can be seen as two opposing nature chaos and order (archetype). The dichotomy is well-known with Kant and Hegel's dialectic and later with Marx and much later with the critical theory and the Frankfurt school. From that perspective, the solution to be found is always an equilibrium, it flows from that dichotomy that they are prisoners from it and they are the prisoner of it because they are the prisoner of their instincts. The truth is that that synthesis, that equilibrium they call for as a way of life never happens and they are forced to choose between an idle mental state like the hippies and the post-modernists, incapable to give a direction to the society, or to choose one side and to pretend that when we will have only that one side directing the society, an equilibrium (sort of) will be reached. That pretty much the collectivists' program from Robespierre's terror during the French revolution to the "take it or leave it" of the romantics and now the rewriting of the world by the critical theory based only their view.
It has become obvious for any civilized person that there is a revolt against reason, science, and those who historically have advocated and developed them. There is also a war on smartness and even more on erudition, to cultivate knowledge as the central pillar of society even if it is hidden behind a warrior class. The elite has abandoned erudition, in that observation lies the acknowledgment of a return to primitive and magical thinking. It is the long-standing war of our instincts over our cognitive function, the war between our primitive self and our civilized self. We forgot about that battle, and we have allowed events to happen that have led us astray, not in a dark wood, but into a nightmare. We have been so used to the world reshaped by the collectivists, the return primitive tribe, that only superficial changes are available to us. We will need to go back in time, 300 years ago and even 2400 years ago to remember what has to be done so that civilization happens again. We don't go into the past to revive old solutions, it will not work, but to understand what they were for. Based on that forsaken knowledge we will apply new solutions, systems, processes around the individual, feedback loop, external point of reference, scientific thinking, and design a next-generation of civilization.
Step One - Why do we want to be in a group?
By definition, humans want to reproduce and their life is organized to make it happen. But where does that will come from? Richard Dawkins in his book 'The selfish gene' explains how our genes put on us an imperative will to mate. We're survival machines, we are a vehicle for our gene builds by our genes to allow them to survive by replicating themselves. We often see natural selection as those who best survive, but in reality, it is about who has the greatest chance to mate. Genes don't care about the vehicle.
Genes want us to form groups, not necessarily to have a greater chance to mate, but to have access to a pool of genes for an evolutionary purpose. To be in a group enhance the blending of the genes. Now we have to remember that genes are selfish. In a specific group, the probability that some of my genes are the same is high, and therefore whatever happens to one vehicle, my gene can survive in someone else which is another vehicle. That rule is part of the explanation of the empathetic link we have and explain why family links are even more important. We share genes with other vehicles, but when it comes to family we share even more genes, hence the strong commitment to ensuring the wellness of family members.
How do you know that the members of a group share some of your genes? It is an 'Alike' function, a heuristic and hard-wired mechanism that tells us which 'pool of genes' is best for our own gene. Do you remember when I tell you that we are all racist? Well here is the explanation, but race is only one parameter amongst many others.
The observation of that function was done by the economist and Nobel Price Thomas C. Schelling with his 'Self-forming neighborhood' model and he did it independently from the gene explanation. (book: Micro-motives and Macro-behavior). In a nutshell, a function as simple as "alike" can generate a neighborhood of people sharing physical, religious, language, and/or socio-economic characteristics.
Starting from an area of perfectly mixed people (think about a black and white chessboard), Schelling shows that when one is leaving, the replacement uses the alike function to evaluate if he/she will fit well. That's how small homogeneous groups start to form and each time someone leaves, the replacement will increase the trend. It doesn't necessarily mean that one group will dominate the whole area, but that people with the most identical characteristic will bring together and become a majority. This is an organic function in all species.
Step three - How and why do groups persist
Let start with the question of how. Groups persist if their organization which is defined by a set of rules is stable generation after generation. Stable is what allows species to survive and the mathematical model used is called ESS (Evolutionarily Stable Strategy). Now, what are the rules?
As Richard Dawkins pointed out in his book, Lions do not jump to each other throats because the risk of retaliation may be too high a price to pay. Amongst predators, it is not a bad idea to try keeping the peace. Rules, like this one, are the result of evolution and have a connection with biological functions. In that case memory. Members of the group need to remember which individual win which duel. This limits considerably the number of fights that will happen. Imagine if each member has to fight against all other members constantly? It will be a blood bath and the group would kill itself. I will just point one important consequence, the memorization of the fights introduces a hierarchy. For survival reasons, you don't want to fight a member against which you already lost.
Play nice and make friends are very useful to become a dominant male among the chimps. Overly aggressive males can become dominant but do not last long. Beta males will team up and kill him. Amongst rats, it has been witnessed that dominant rats tend to let sub-males win some games. Sub-males know that they can't win against the dominant male and the dominant male let them win sometimes if it doesn't change the hierarchy. Every member of the group is happy, this is a stable strategy.
Another important rule. Cheaters are punished by the group or a dominant member. It has been observed that animals have an internal mechanism to evaluated unfairness. For example, they are able to evaluate not only the quantity but the quality of the food distributed among the members of the group. If one discovers a good source of food, he must share it and not try to cheat others by keeping it for himself.
An unexpected result from Robert Axelrod is that strategies with few and simple rules are the best. But Why? (I confess this is my favorite result). To elicit cooperation people need to read you, to know what you will do depending on their next move. The simpler the strategy, the more they can read you and this is directly connected to trust. In a computational contest organized by Robert Axelrod, the winning rule was Tit for Tat: Always start by cooperation and then do whatever the other player did on the previous move. Be careful Tit for Tat is an example of a winning strategy (because if it uses simple rules) but not necessarily the best strategy of all (non-cooperative moves can go on forever).
If a cheater, a type of non-cooperative fellow, can easily escape retaliation why wouldn't he cheat again? The fewer cheaters are caught, the higher the values of their loots on average. People are confused about the function of retaliation, which is not to focus on the criminal but on those who cooperate, to tell them, your efforts have values and you're more important than the cheaters. As a rule, people should always focus on the species needs. Then the group helps members to achieve their objectives.
There is a problem with retaliation and games like Tit for Tat. If you face a non-cooperative player, people expect that you do the same. But most interactions, in society, are iterative and there is a risk to enter what is called an infinite retaliation game. There is no good outcome for that game. The rule: an eye for an eye lead also to an infinite retaliation. To avoid it, modern societies have come up with mechanisms to resume cooperation. In the Christian world, for example, forgiveness is the mechanism by which cooperation will be reinitiated.
Reciprocity is when you do something for someone in the hope (based on trust) that it will return the favor or in cooperation to reach a common goal in the hope one those not defect. For example, many species are confronted with parasites, and when they are on your head or back you can get them, you need help. When you see a bird on the back of a hippopotamus, that's it. One feed on the parasites, the other get rid of them. The same mechanism exists in the world of fish. This is a reciprocity that is beneficial to both parties. The relation between men and women is of such reciprocity. For humans, reciprocity can be more complex, a lot more. To send men in space requires complex interactions in which each brings something. The reciprocity is between those men and the group which will provide food and shelter during the time of the project. It is that very mechanism that builds civilization. It might be a little confusing to see the reciprocity here, so let me give you a more practical example, but the mechanism is the same. In a survival competition on an island, a group of men finds themselves in a place where finding food was less easy. Fishing was the only resource and not rich. One of the men decided to devote his time to make a fishing net. His decision was not welcome, but the others accepted to provide him food until the network. It didn't go smoothly but in the end, it works and the group could have three times more fish to eat.
We can see the reciprocity with that fishing net, but there are underlying mechanisms that are not visible. The first is to have some trust between the people who are in the reciprocity loop. As we have seen, trust implies having elements in common and is the foundation of other mechanisms like cooperation. The second is delayed gratification. The delay can be due to the time required to produce the expected result. It takes time to build a family. The delay can also be due to the time needed to get the returned favor. The case of the fishing net. Delayed gratification implies something very particular, which is our ability to have some control over our reward system. That system is built to have an immediate return of satisfaction. In practice to be involved in a big project means greater reward, but you will have to refuse some immediate pleasure in order to achieve the required work. The delayed reward or gratification is the most important mechanism to build civilization and implies rejecting the carpe diem philosophy. We are in urgent need to develop delayed gratification in young people, in particular for men, because emotion cut them from what they do best which is to be involved in projects. They are objective-driven, not social relation-driven. They take pleasure in what they do, not talking about what they do.
I have shown reciprocity only in its cooperative mode, but there is also retaliation. If you cheat on me or betray me I will reciprocate to make you pay. This is commonly known as the "An eye for an Eye..." or Tit-for-Tat. Retaliation is part of life, members of a species who cheat must pay the prize. Humans can be deadly and retaliation is of a heavy cost. To avoid destruction, we have developed the concepts of laws and justice. Laws so that everyone knows what is authorized or not, in a way that everyone knows that everyone knows. Justice is to use a third party to apply retaliation to avoid too much destruction and try to allow the possibility to resume cooperation with the cheater. Tit-for-Tat can produce a dangerous situation, which is known as infinite retaliation and this has decimated more families in Italy than any other sickness. The solution is forgiveness and redemption which breaks the infinite retaliation mechanism. The great religions are not great because they dominate the world, but because they include moral elements that are in fact mechanisms allowing large populations to live together and engage in complex projects.
To finish let's talk about the "I scratch your back, you scratch mine". There is no doubt that it is about reciprocity, but there is something special here and not for the better. It usually happens between professionals or colleagues and it will be stupid to forbid it because it allows smoothing the machinery at a very local level that only individuals know all the parameters, but there is a catch, in fact, two. a) It doesn't care much about general rules, because that particular reciprocity often is based on rules that are defined specifically for it and are locals. When those local rules interfere too much with general rules it takes on the general good. When it happens we have to deal with real criminality, even if it doesn't look like it for those who are in that particular reciprocity. b) the relation between the participant is based on power, not on competencies and abilities. Generally, the scratch my back, you scratch mine is not an even relation, and one will be a prisoner of it, not a participant.
All in all, reciprocity is of extreme importance to allow individuals to solve local problems in order to be able to make it or enhance their life. Please take note that reciprocity is a local mechanism replicated all over the group, not a group-level mechanism applied to all individuals.
Studying the rules: game theory
Most rules turn around a handful of concepts: cooperation, fairness, cheating, retaliation, and those are now described by a mathematical model of game theory called a social dilemma. The word game in 'game theory' means interaction between individuals. During social interaction, a dilemma appears when the outcome to play selfish (non-cooperative, cheat) is greater than playing the cooperation, but there is a risk of retaliation and punishment which has to be taken into consideration in the outcome, hence the dilemma.
Robert Axelrod worked on social dilemmas and publish the result of his research in the book 'The evolution of cooperation'. His work has become famous because he shed light on how social dilemmas work, as their importance in daily life with unexpected. This has consequences on how to better understand evolutionary biology and psychology.
The first question that everyone asks himself is: Is it better to always cheat, always cooperate, or a mix of both, and in which percentage? The answer is cooperation all the way. Of course, in interactions between cheater vs cooperative, the cheater wins most of the games (interactions), but Axelrod observed that if you take the sum of the outcome of all games, cooperative individuals win. You don't lose everything when you lose and on average, a cooperative person loses less than a cheater. The sum of the gain, even small owned for a cooperative person is higher than for a cheater.
All plant and animal life has a genetically programmed behavior, but for animals, this isn't enough to know how to survive. Nature has provided them with a mechanism to allow them to learn from the adults with no need for a language, and regarding that aspect of life we, humans, are no different. We not only learn the right gestures (how to behave between members, what and how to eat) but mental tools which are needed to deal with complex social interactions. This is achieved by observing the reaction of the adult to situations. This mechanism also explains why role models are of such great importance. Unfortunately, artists have become the main role models, from the promotion of LSD in the 1960s (the corruption of the reward system) to songs with sexual advice for women (over-sexualization), the last generations have lost a purpose. But those new role models are not neutral but with an ideological message. Be slaves to your instinct, be serfs to our needs.
Initially, the paragraph about reciprocity had for title "reciprocal altruism". I have a concern with the use of the term altruism and it is a central dissent between collectivists and those who promote the autonomous individual, so let's talk about it. The word was coined by Auguste Comte to oppose egoism, but he was also a collectivist, and since Plato (which the collectivists love) egoism is associated with individualism. Therefore altruism has a strong political pedigree, positive for the collectivists. Ayn Rand considers that altruism is to ask for the sacrifice of the individual for the sole benefit of the collective, to have the good of others as unique moral. I stand more on the side of Ayn Rand, but I believe that Altruism shows something deeper regarding altruism and collectivism. There is a link between altruism and compassion, which is the immediate relief of the suffering of others. Compassion is different from empathy, and as I have argued in another document, compassion is essentially developed by women, while empathy is by men. An example by Ayn Rand is very illuminating. She explains that you don't help the poor by giving them something, but by avoiding being one yourself. That's good advice, but it's by far not enough. You need to build structure, system, and process so that the poor can help themselves. You want them to be autonomous not depending on the goodwill of others, and you will want them to help others in return. We have given compassion to Africa for the last 60 years, but not much helping them to have their own resilient structures that will provide food and work for the population.
Compassion is very useful for babies who can only cry to express their needs, but not as a tool to organize society. Compassion as a narcissistic component sends the message "Look, I'm a good person by helping all those people", and there is a hidden compensation, those poor people or even victims need to stay that way to continue to be helped. The notion of sacrifice, as observed by Rand, serves the purpose of the power elite who will ask (send) the others to scarify themselves to make society work and prove they are good people. There is nothing in letting people in the state in which they are.
Compassion and altruism are connected to our emotional self, while empathy is connected also to our cognitive self. That's what I wanted to add to the argument against altruism. With compassion, you have positive emotions by helping people which tells you that you're doing what is right. Positive emotions equal being a good person, and emotions are very self-centered. Without your cognitive self, you have no way to have access to reality and evaluate if you're really helping them, you just serve yourself. For a short period of time, compassion is ok, but since it activates the reward system, to use compassion to justify a social policy is simply justifying an addiction to positive emotions, you help yourself. The more you do it the more your reward system will send you positive feedback. At the end of the day, everyone who will suggest that you should stop being compassionate to help in a better way that person will be considered as a monster, a genocidal maniac who wants to kill the poor, but that person would be right. The reality is that compassionate people enslave those they help, and the rich enslave the poor. There is no self-forming neighborhood with them, they don't let people organize themselves, they practice social engineering which can be linked to their denial of randomness.
The two tribes: A clash on what it means to be human
The "two tribes" is the name of the first model I used to understand what meant the return of genocide as a political tool. The use of the term tribe shows my awareness, from the beginning that we were dealing with something old within human society. Everything started with my investigation of that curious use of the word race as a form of political categorization and this leads me quickly to the word tribe and then I remember my reading of Karl Popper, the open societies, and its enemies, which lead me to the term primitive, hence the primitive and civilized tribes. The problem with the two tribes' model is that it is a descriptive model. Unfortunately, descriptive models are incomplete to understand what's going on and to take measures based on their information, but moreover, you can put in them your own deception with too much ease. So I came up with the "maturation issue" model which includes the two tribes' model but goes much further and is an explicative model, which means you can make predictions and test them.
The anomaly in collectivists' tribalism
I have always kept the difference between the primitive and the civilized tribes as a difference between instincts and cognitive functions, but there is more and that's why I wrote tribalism. There is an anomaly between the primitive mechanisms used by our ancestors which were the builders of human civilization and those exhibited by the collectivists, or the primitive tribe. Some are not listed because they are considered so organic that no one can imagine our species could have made it that far without them. For once, the acknowledgment of reality. It implies that you have to take into account information if you want to eat, but also not be eaten. To achieve that task you need to have a dialogue with the outside world, adjust constantly to it, and optimize your needs within it. That dialogue and adaptation are done by a feedback loop that we call reason today. You don't need to be conscious of the existence of a reality, you don't need to have a word to design it, but you certainly can't ignore it.
Another element to explain the anomaly is erudition. Knowledge was considered crucial and its transmission was of high importance. The development of agriculture and cities was not only the result of a collection of knowledge but a mental process to collect, enhance and pass on that knowledge. It means that part of the social organization of the group was dedicated to that mental process. To understand this imagine two tribes that meet, one has agriculture the other not. For the latter, to adopt agriculture, it would have to have those mental processes, to know what to do with the knowledge shown by the other tribe. When the Chinese encounter the European they didn't adopt their ways, but that was not the case for the Japanese. Despite being as smart as the Japanese, the Chinese lag behind in their social organization and some advancements needed to be fully called civilized are still not have been done today. For example, they still struggle with the concept of the autonomous individual. Other considerations can be taken into consideration like an appreciation for beauty, human nature, natural laws, self-reflection, etc.
Before I conclude about that anomaly, let me tell you a story that just happens in Australia. A school has forced the boys to apologize to women because of what they are, male. Do you guess what happened? Nothing, if we put aside the polite anger of the parents and a few lines in some newspapers. Let me remind you of the purpose of that letter, to speak before it's too late, and the topic is genocide, so I will tell you what that school has done, a genocide. Of course, it's not the last step, which is death, but we are already a step above dehumanization which is the acceptance by the society, institution, and its members of that dehumanization. The only thing missing is a means. When it will happen the society will not care. There is an attempt to propose a curfew for men in England, to inject female hormones to males, to forbid access to part of the society to white males, to make misogyny a hate crime, etc. What I just did is to warn you, so consider yourself as being warned but never dare tell anyone you weren't or that you have followed orders. I will give you a piece of advice that if you have to participate in a mass killing, fight it even if you and your family pay the price, desert or kill yourself. Genocide as a result of collectivization is part of the downfall of civilization. Without civilization we are not human, there is no family and no individual that's why none of us can escape its fate. Whether we endorse collectivism or we fight it there is no other path in that case.
The answer to the anomaly is that collectivism has a feminine spirit, meaning that it endorse feminine human nature as the blueprint to define its values and objectives. However, women are not the cause of it but weak men, which I have defined in the document 'collectivists red lines', as fantasy enablers, because they don't say NO to women. The motivations are many, but they share with women the belief of the superiority of instincts over cognitive abilities, emotions over reason, the heart over the mind. They think that passions must drive our life and not intelligence. They are religiously convinced of this as expressed by Julien Benda. He traces back that phenomenon amongst intellectuals, essentially men, as soon as 1870. Other authors have shown that the romantics were already affected by that change which is around Goethe and Rousseau. Karl Popper links Rousseau and Hegel to Plato. The latter was not per se a romantic but certainly favor instincts, a more Spartan way of life, and not an Athenian one, and promoted the alpha/herd hierarchy to manage the city or society.
It makes little doubt that the great religions played an important role to help men to control the weak men. The scriptures cut the weak men from promoting women in order to feminize society. After centuries of domination of those religions, one could have thought that weak men would have died, but they didn't. Why? My first answer is the elite. They never make it to civilization, to the hierarchy of individuals because by their political and financial power they can elude their responsibilities and continue to live in a world of wishes, a world in which women play a determinant role. The transfer of the elite's way of life to the people is most obvious starting in the 19th century all the way to our 21st century. More speculative, but incredibly interesting is the role of the reformation from the perspective of the weak men. Protestantism gives more place in society to women than Catholicism, and interestingly, in Europe, it is precisely the Lutheran countries that have the most developed equalitarian societies between men and women. I don't say that Swedish or German men have internalized their feminization, but that they returned to the social structure of the tribes from which their country take its origin, before the Roman civilized them. The Christian and the scientific revolution have not erased the cultural mechanisms of those old European tribes. What has to be done is clear. Darwinism with the acknowledgment of human nature and complex dynamic systems with processes and rules that produced self-ordering systems will define our future or civilization will go down in flame.
When it comes to women, we need to go back in time to try to understand why they accept the deal of the weak men. Make no mistake, they are deceived, but they also accept the deception and take advantage of it. It is common nowadays to see women using weak men to oppose men who say no to women, no to their fantasy and their violence (Because social interactions dominate The internet, it has become a violent place where injustice reigns supreme thanks to women. Women never seek the peace). Collectivist women have a high proclivity to use violence and abuse of authority toward citizens that do not comply with their fantasies.
The following argument is based on the idea that the respective brain of men and women has been shaped by their respective role in the tribe for millions of years. The mechanism that calls for optimization of our brain is the necessity to control our environment for survival purposes. The environment for women is the camp, while for men it is outside the camp. More specifically, the danger that women can face at the camp can only come from other members, essentially women, while for the men, it is the terrain and danger of all sorts, but not the other human, the other men. This could explain why women are interested in humans and men in things. By being interested you have to understand, that their respective reward system is activated and it will please them to have those activities. That hypothesis is well-known and has been observed and recorded by studies. I speculate based on that hypothesis, we also find here the ability of men to have a feedback loop with reality, which we call reason. Social interactions are mostly emotional and rely on our instincts. Therefore, the feminization of society is to see it only through social interactions (this helps to explain the anthropomorphism views on many topics of collectivism). Cut from an external point of view, they create a world that justifies its own existence and reality, through a power hierarchy (that's why they advocate for emotional intelligence). Competence means nothing, you don't need them to control that world, that we call fantasy. The fantasy has become a utopia when we put political motives to justify the comeback of a feminine world.
Let's go one step further. It is possible, that the social organization of the tribe was regulated by women. I believe that most people will consider that speculation as reasonable because it is not unheard of to find tribes led by women even if that leadership is very subtle. In the movie "300", the Spartan king receives an emissary from a powerful army. Before killing that emissary, which will mean war, the king looks at his queen to get a non-verbal agreement. That powerful king and formidable warrior ask for the permission of a woman. Contrary to what men think, a society organized around a class of warriors is very useful to women in an area where many other groups exist. When a tribe is isolated like in a rain forest, the tribe is smaller they are hunter-gatherers. Life is in an idle state with no evolution. It is interesting to note that to control the birth rate, women need to control the tribe. When in charge, men will always increase the population due to their sexuality. The question I can't answer but will have to get one at some point is if nature has genetically programmed us to have feminine leadership. If that is the case then it means that it will always come back and we need to organize the society to block it because civilization is incompatible with feminine leadership, for example, knowledge is not its primary concern.
The feminization of society is first a return to the reign of instincts over cognitive functions, and it is allowed and backup by weak men. The transfer of leadership from men to women can be observed by the so-called equality laws which are not, it is to take down men from any position of power but more importantly, positions of knowledge and only weak men will be allowed in the surrounding of the new leaders. The expression mansplaining exposes precisely what the feminized world of collectivism is the more afraid of, knowledge. But it goes far beyond leadership, it is to give women the status of deity, to worship women, and behind it to worship instincts. This can be seen with the sanctification of Greta Thunberg. You need to understand that it is not woman's nature that is the center of that new cult, but the return to our primitive self, the primitive we were before the great migration that happened 100000 years ago. We have to realize, even be stroked and hurt, by a simple fact, those primitives do not know how to grow wheat and rice, and by knowing I don't mean the technical knowledge even if it is part of it but being able to organize a group to make that project happen, because they live in a fantasy and that fantasy is their only truth, they feel it in their bones and no facts nor personal experience will change those feelings.
Ayn Rand has written, in 1969, the most comprehensive text to describe the collectivist's herd. No matter what they are called or call themselves - the hippies, the Antifa, the socialists... What she wrote was true yesterday, true today, and will be true tomorrow. Excerpt from "Return of the primitive" chapter: Apollo and Dionysus.
"The hippies are a desperate herd looking for a master, to be taken over by anyone; anyone who would tell them how to live, without demanding the effort of thinking. Theirs is the mentality ready for a Führer." "The hippies are the living demonstration of what it means to give up reason and to rely on one's primeval "instincts", "urges", "intuitions"-and whims. With such tools, they are unable to grasp even what is needed to satisfy their wishes - for example, the wish to have a festival. Where would they be without the charity of the local 'squares' who fed them? Where would they be without the fifty doctors, rushed from New York to save their lives-without the automobiles that brought them to the festival-without the soda pop and beer they substituted for water-without the helicopter that brought the entertainers - without all the achievements of the technological civilization they denounce? Left to their own devices, they literally didn't know enough to come in out of the rain."
"Their hysterical incantations of worship of the "now" were sincere: the immediate moment is all that exists for the perceptual-level, concrete-bound, animal-like mentality; to grasp "tomorrow" is an enormous abstraction, an intellectual feat open only to the conceptual (i.e., the rational) level of consciousness." "And how can one desire or feel? The obvious truth is that these Dionysian desire-worshippers do not really desire anything. ...All of them are looking desperately for somebody who will provide them with something they will be able to enjoy or desire. Desires too are a product of the conceptual faculty." "But there is one emotion that the hippies do experience intensely: chronic fear. If you have seen any of them on television, you have seen it leaping at you from the screen. Fear is their brand, their hallmark; fear is the special vibration by which they claim to recognize one another."
I have essentially focused on the primitive tribe because they show much of the sign of what we understand of tribalism in our modern times. I have shown the nature of their tribalism - its feminine spirit - but behind it is the weak men. What is more important is not words that you attach to things, but their properties, and the result of those properties for the primitive tribe is to be unstable or to be a non-stable evolutionary strategy. You can't fix it, because it was never meant to work. The primitive tribe exists only because it is defined through what the civilized tribe is. They have no projects, only anti-projects, they have no concepts only anti-concepts. They exist only by opposing what exists because they are not the builder of civilization, they do not solve problems, they oppose the way problems are solved and promote their opposition as a viable political view, but it's not a political point of view, but insanity and madness. I don't have to persuade you on this because you all have started to witness it firsthand. Well, then, why do they win? The civilized tribe has forgotten what it means to be a group, our tribal self, worse we are affecting negative feelings to what tribalism is. That's why they can take us one by one and we don't oppose them as a group, I mean truly. Let me take you back to the origin of things, again. We have to remember the US.
When we became civilized we lost the magical thinking as Karl Popper explained. Magical thinking is a function that allows us to believe that our laws are what build reality. That was well and good when we were a few on this planet and our social organization was very simple, very primitive. But we shift from a map of reality created by our instincts to one that is created by our cognitive functions. Such a map is far more precise and allows us to answer much more complex questions like solving the problem of adaptation due to change in climate, moving from Africa to Europe for example, and of course the population increase. We did manage all those challenges, and pretty well but in the process, we lost the tribe in us (by lost you have to understand that we biologically evolve to allow our cognitive function to solve greater challenges, and we have to thank nature, but it also mean that we can't go back to the primitive that we once were). The happening of religion is an attempt to reproduce artificially that lost, according to Karl Popper again. I will add that the evolution of religions follows the evolution that our society needed to face even greater challenges. The evolution of the structure of the human group and religion show the same phenomena, to move from the collective to the individual, in order to gain the necessary flexibility to allow large groups to function properly. The technical explanation is simple, in large groups, the Alpha/herd hierarchy cannot work because the alpha cannot deal with all the problems that arise, only a hierarchy of individuals that can take local decisions, avoiding the top of the hierarchy to intervene, can make large groups work.
The great religions did what they have to do, a critic of their failure to fight collectivism will not bring us very far, for the primitive tribe is not after religion even if it's part of their strategy, but after civilization which started long before any religion. We consider that human civilization started with the building of the first cities 10000 years ago, but if we take the mental process that characterizes the civilized man then it started much sooner between 50 to 200 thousand years. However, one thing is clear, religions do no more have the collective power and the will that it procures to the individual to oppose collectivism. The tribalism recreated by religion has dried out. The idea to revivify the great religions, while extremely tempting will not work, in fact, it will block the chance to promote new ways for civilization. They were not created to solve collectivism, the return of the primitive tribe, but to enhance the civilized in us. It is precisely because they have achieved their goal that the primitive tribe has returned. Their failure to stop it is not due to a lack of energy, but to the fact that they lack the proper tools to do it. They were never designed to do that.
Tribalism which gives each individual more power than he would have as a standalone individual doesn't exist anymore, but we need to create it precisely because of the group dynamic it creates. They must share values and concepts, associate with a general project of civilization, the whole ritualize in daily life. The autonomous individual takes care of his own life and family but within the framework defined by the value system and civilization project. Any attack on those must be answered immediately by all the energy without consideration of well-being for the individual and its family. Without the value system and the civilization project, there is no group, and without the group, the autonomous individual is no more autonomous and ceases to exist. It's not enough. A value system is considered as a set of values that you have to follow and concepts your endorse, but because patterns exist, there are values and concepts which will drag you down, therefore there is inside a value system a list of anti-values and destructive concepts that need to be explicitly stated and rejected.
And there are fundamental mechanisms of life that you must protect. The first will be natural laws. It's not enough that you accept their existence, you must protect them. The collectivists protect nature, believing they protect life. You don't protect life by protecting a tree, but the very mechanism that allows trees to exist. They do not accept natural laws because they do not accept to be a result of those laws, which means that you cannot define what you're and erase differences as you see fit. The second is randomness. I have in the letter link randomness to the acceptance of risk, life is a risky business, and an attempt to reduce risk by putting the responsibility on others is to reject randomness and a one-way ticket to tyranny. Randomness is also expressed in distribution laws Wealth accumulation and I.Q are two different examples (Pareto and bell curve). But there is another way to present randomness, it is to play a game of incomplete or imperfect information, it is to accept the existence of the unknown. While everything starts with the acceptance of natural laws to differentiate the primitive from the civilized according to Karl Popper, F.A Hayek adds that processes that build self-ordering systems are self-adaptive to the unknown. We must create a civilization that has rules that produce processes that produce self-ordering systems. We started with the economic system, we must go further with Health-care, Justice, and education. You can find that extraordinary and advanced thinking in his book "The Fatal conceit", chapter 5, under "unspecified purposes". The text is so rich that I could quote several pages. Read it by yourself. Caution, corporates often use that idea of unknown to fight governments that impose regulation. I suspect they know full well that text. What they forgot to mention is that it has nothing to do with regulation, but centralization and they are nowadays, even more, centralized than governments. Hayek explains that the adaptation to the unknown, the future is about information available. Process and self-ordering systems have more information than let say institutions, and corporate can be considered as institutions, but also decentralization leads to take into account more information, that why it's more efficient.
Here is why you have to have a value system. It builds patterns, processes, and self-ordering systems that are mostly invisible to the individual but on which he will be able to thrive. We assist today in the destruction of those invisible foundations and human civilization is at risk. Hayek explains that traditions integrate part of those invisible mechanisms. They might not be that rational, but they are fundamental to our life as a group and individual. The deconstruction processes from Hegel (dialectic of opposition from which a synthesis will rise) to Derrida's technique of texts reinterpretation are blind to those mechanisms. Reason cannot know everything, because it is a dialogue that you have with reality, but only on the things, you know. When you question reality, which is what you do when asking if what you do or think is reasonable, if it respects natural laws, you can only do it if you have formulated it, and that can happen only if you have some understanding of its existence. From here start the journey of faith, the other aspect of the unknown. I have developed a next-generation civilization, which I tried to be as rational as possible, showing the articulation of all its concepts between each other and their origin in the history of ideas, there is one thing I cannot do, nobody does, to certify that it will not only work but be able to evolve. To be part of something that goes beyond the Greek and Christian models requires a leap of faith in the unknown. In those difficult times, the reason why an ever-increasing number of rationalists find themselves in good company with the traditional Christians (not fundamentalists or literalists) is that they believe that some values and concepts must be respected in order to produce mechanisms that allow life and to refuse to support explicitly some ideas and values that will be destructive to us, even if it is no visible, especially on the short term. The battlefield on which the fate of civilization will be sealed is not the existence of God, but the choice of a value system. On this battlefield rationalists and believers are on the same side.
A particular example of such a non-apparent mechanism at work can be observed with our cognitive functions. Our brain works with or by patterns. This is rather a strong statement because it means that the belief that you can manipulate concepts, decide arbitrarily of their links, without interferences of the brain which has its own neurological necessity, is wrong. The brain has its ways and they are the product of evolution. When you design a philosophy you have to take into consideration what your brain will do. A value system is an optimizer of your cognitive function. This gives a new dimension to the expression - know yourself. On the contrary from Rousseau and Marx to the critical theory and post-modernism, the concepts they associate together disrupt our cognitive abilities, it kills the self and the only thing left is our instincts. But we are no more animals, so we will use our cognitive functions, believing it's for the greatest good, but we will act like monsters. How do we know when our cognitive function is dysfunctional? When reality is an obstacle, randomness is a fairytale, when beauty is seen in the blood of the killing and not in our achievements.
One last word and to catch my tail on the feminine spirit of collectivism but from the civilized tribe perspective, I want to go back to the notion of risk and beyond to beauty and art. Rousseau is the philosopher who wrote down the first social dilemma. Our ancestors had some intuitive concept of game theory as the Babylonian Talmud attests, but J.J. Rousseau gave us the Stag hunt social dilemma. Rousseau tells the story of a village in which people have to cooperate to get a stag, instead of going each for a hare. He explained that people are not cooperative because of fear to have nothing to eat and if they see a hare they will leave to stag hunt. Since the 1970s and the development of game theory we have another social dilemma, the prisoner dilemma, that serves as a model of human interaction and the Stag hunt is no more used, but a comparison of both social dilemmas is particularly useful to understand the situation in which we found our self today. In their modern form, social dilemmas are represented by a 2 by 2 table - the outcome for cooperation and non-cooperation (2), for two persons (by 2). Amongst the many characterizations of both social dilemmas, one explains that the Stag hunt is the right model for people choosing their outcome based on the risk taken, while the prisoner dilemma is a model adapted for people choosing outcome over risk. The divide is more important than we might think. With the prisoner dilemma, the people evaluate both parameters outcomes and risk, which means there is a tradeoff, if the risk is too high they will choose to reduce the risk. With the stag hunt people always make their choice on the risk, and only the risk, the outcome does not matter. It means that if they can choose a case in which zero risks are proposed with a negative outcome they will choose it.
The prisoner dilemma reflects men's mentality while the Stag hunt reflects women's mentality (on average, and weak men are not risk-averse, but fantasy enablers). Women have a natural risk aversion when it comes to decision-making. The Stag hunt social dilemma design by J.J. Rousseau allows us to trace back the feminization of society at least to the 18th century. Also, that knowledge allows us to understand an observation that women usually make less profitable decisions than men. For example, women will decide to invest (ex: take a loan) in fields in which they have the most chance to get their diploma, while men will choose a field in which they will get the best salary, for them the difficulty of the task is secondary, but not eliminated. Most women can't find a job with their cultural studies diploma, not because the society is unfair, but because they make a choice based on risk aversion, not outcome like men.
Art is the glorification of human activities and achievements, Art is beautiful because we view our ability to produce our environment as beautiful (from the great pyramids to the cathedrals), religious art is beautiful because we gods or god, the makers, as beautiful. Art has stopped producing beauty when it became a tool to entertain women. That shift expresses the feminization of society and it was completed at the beginning of the 20th century. The glorification of men's or Gods' achievements, has disappeared so has beauty. We must find back our way to beauty and with it the exaltation of life. There is a connection between taking risks and art which is creativity. To favor outcomes over risks means that you will face problems that you have to resolve, creativity is the tool to resolve them. The same account for art. Beauty rises from our technical competencies but depends on our creativity. Men are creative, they take risks to transform a possibility into reality, a bunch of trees into a house and they create beauty when they tell their stories about how they win the day.
The present addendum followed a bumpy road, and its presence is only due to its complete rewritten in 2021. After the work was done, I realized that I was in possession of a possible new definition of tribalism. If it is a good one, I have no idea but I hope that it will enrich your perspective or help you to propose yourself a better one.
What we need is the following concept: Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, neighborhood theorem, selfish gene, male sexuality. Everything is seen through the lens of the concept of Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, with the objective, to ensure the survival of the group. As I have shown the task to have the required birth rate is attributed to the male. Males have no conscience of it, it is defined by the specificity of their sexuality. They make no calculation. Here we can use the selfish gene introduced by Richard Dawkins, in a broad sense, which is that genes are programmed by nature and program us to accomplish a specific task. We don't need to be conscious to do things that are needed to survive. Here comes an observation that leads to the new definition of tribalism
Genes want to be passed on, and they are truly very picky to choose who will do it. For example, men are programmed to select young women (below 25 years), and women to select well build men and have the resources to provide what is required for the kid which explains why they like older men. These are not only more wealthy but higher in the hierarchy, meaning more protection. Genes are interested to control the quality of how they are passed on. Now let's take the neighborhood theorem. People tend to regroup according to an alike function. If we consider that, that alike function is controlled by our genes, then to be in a group is part of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. Genes that come from the same group are considered by the genes as providing an Evolution Stable Strategy, genes outside the group are considered as a potential risk, and therefore genes push people to choose other people alike to ensure the best genes that will ensure an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.
Tribalism is part of an evolutionary strategy to ensure the pass on of good genes, meaning genes that will ensure the best stability for reproduction.
If you allow me a game of words I would say that I'm not entirely satisfied with my work on essentialism, I haven't been able yet to catch its essence. So I add that Addendum, allowing me to try to show how essentialism is part of our intellectual endeavor, one that is forgotten because the collectivists want it that way. They want to make think that their view of the world is natural and the only one. It's neither.
Essentialism is a way to think about the world and ourselves in that world. While still used by collectivists who have taken over the places that produce, manage and transmit knowledge, the knowledge that essentialism is their way to think has been lost. The new way to think about the world is the scientific method which focuses on describing the world and the object in that world, we reveal their properties. On the other hand, Essentialism tries to explain what it is, and what each object in that world is. The famous question "What is life?" is an Essentialist question. What the essentialists try to do is to find the essence of all things, hence the name essentialism. But there is an unavoidable flaw in that method, you have to assign a word to the object of your study first. The word is not an arbitrary label of what you define but what your define itself. That's how language becomes the reality, the properties of objects do not matter and that's how essentialism is liked to social construction. In practice people used their emotions to choose the word to define an object, it follows that the language is directly connected to their instinct and not to their cognitive functions. Essentialism allows a bunch of tyrants imposing totalitarianism and genocide to state that their actions save democracy. What defines democracies, its properties do not matter to them, it's the emotions they put in the word democracy that is all, and they associate it with the good of their action, they see themselves as saviors and prophets who guide the herd to an eternal future and bliss.
Essentialism traps people to believe that the language is all the knowledge and truth that there is, but what they do, is think through their instincts. It is the maturation process that saves them from essentialism, not reasoning with them. The maturation process is the battle for the reward system, it can have only one master - your instincts or your cognitive functions. To help your cognitive functions to win that war, you need to make room for them. In practice, you have to control, not suppress, your desire for sexual pleasure and even more to control your fear. Not only the fear of death but the fear of being outcasted and the fear to have no descendence. Associate with Essentialism, there is the doctrine of definition which is about defining precisely the words used to make a point. What about the scientific method, well words don't matter, only the properties. You can call substitute the word gravity for and word you like, what you're not allowed to do is to change the properties. With essentialism words mean everything therefore to define them is central. The problem is that without properties, the doctrine of definition falls into an infinite recursion - you have to define the terms, then the terms of terms, and so on. You have the illusion of being precise, and producing knowledge, but you don't. Smart enough essentialists can see that it produces nothing, at best self-reference, but they don't want to give essentialism, to give up on their instincts and emotions to drive them in life. It's understandable, but then you cannot be part of the building of civilization in any way you will end up trying to destroy it. It is said that the scientific method uses words and definition to transform a long story short, while Essentialism with its doctrine of definition to transform a short story (word) long. Verbal diarrhea of words is what the essentialists have ended up with, and that was already observed by Schopenhauer in 1840. The only way left to convince people is to bewitch them with words. The collectivists, which are essentialists, are very good at it, from Hegel to Foucault.
V - Nine books for the great picture of our times
All large size texts, whether letters, books, or articles, give a reference list of books to be read about the text at hand. Usually, the list is ridiculously large, and to expect the reader to read them is even more ridiculous. I give a list of about 40 books, but here are nine books that you should absolutely read (I may add a few in a near future). They are critical to our understanding of the situation in which our western world finds itself today and they all point to the same set of concepts and ideas. They will help you to understand because they build bridges between the world in which you live and the world of ideas: historical bridge, ideological bridge, philosophical bridge, economical bridge, educational bridge, environmental bridge, and biological bridge.
The Open society and its enemies (The spell of Plato, The false prophet: Hegel and Marx) By Karl Popper
In Vol. 1 he explains the problem of the elites, in Vol. 2 the problem with collectivism. The main idea is that we are going from a tribal society to a reason-based and individualist society with the Greeks and then with Christianity, but there is a rebellion that has taken the form of collectivism. A monstrosity that calls for the end of truth, the pleasure of emotions and blood, war, or genocide doesn't matter, the beast has to be fed. Popper also reminds us of the Peloponnese war and the beginning of democracy and the betrayal of the elites back then like an echo to our modern elite.
The blank slate. The modern denial of human nature by Steven Pinker
In his book 'The Blank slate', Steven Pinker explains three patterns that are linked to collectivists/irrationalists thinking: The blank slate itself, use mostly for social engineering, The ghost in the machine, the belief that the mind and the body are separate - Very tribal. The good savage (Rousseau at his best). The belief that society corrupts men. Civilization is bad. From a tribal point of view, it makes sense. The relation with Karl Popper's book is the magical thinking and the Ghost in the machine, the idea that the mind can project its will on the world.
Explaining Postmodernism. Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen Hicks
His thesis on German philosophy is that it takes its roots at the counter-enlightenment movement, opposing reason. The anti-reason philosophy is an example of how tribalism keeps coming back. Popper mentions also Plato and Aristotle as a source of that tribalism. There is a connection between post-modernism and German philosophy with Heidegger and Nietzsche, making also the connection with Marxism. Marx owns a great deal to Hegel, which itself owns a great deal to Aristotle.
The road to serfdom by F.A. Hayek.
The root cause of serfdom is that politicians, elites, and intellectuals are convinced, without any doubt, that the best solution for a country or the planet, is a planned economy. What Hayek demonstrated is that it will always end up with a totalitarian collectivist society with a central state controlling everything and in which the worse people get on the top. A planned economy will get rid of individualism, democracy, freedom, the rule of law, free speech, and truth because those ideas are incompatible with it. He also showed how a planned economy is the link between communism and Nazism. The latter were anti-capitalist, to say the least, which qualified them to be on the left side of the political spectrum (Do you remember when I explain the difference between collectivist and individualist societies?). While Hayek's book, as for Popper's book, is considered among the most important books of the 20th century (they talk about us, our nature, and how it drives us to produce such or such society), the work of Hayek is systematically discarded by the collectivists from any list.
Why Knowledge Matters. Rescuing our children from failed educational theories by E.D Hirsch
The author shows how the ideologies developed in the three books mentioned above help to produce an education that destroys knowledge, our kids, and our ability to produce a functioning civilization. Furthermore, he explains how the romantic ideology has taken over our educational system, which is another name for the Good savage ideology explained by Steven Pinker. Today pedagogues reject human nature as the bedrock to build the educational system and in which knowledge and individual competencies are the enemies. We also know which ideas are right and which are wrong. We know why, we have the theory, the models, the experiments, and even the history of each idea and how they are connected or incompatible with each other. All of this is not used, usually hidden and if not emotionally contested for ideological and political purposes.
The return of the primitive: the anti-industrial revolution by Ayn Rand
This is an extended version (published in 1999) of the original book - The new left: the anti-industrial revolution, published in 1971 by Ayn Rand. The first chapters, all written by Ayn Rand, explain what happened to all generations born after the Second World War and it is not pretty. We have been submitted to a monstrosity that seeks to return the social structure and behaviors of humans to the primitive tribe.
Three chapters are of high interest. 1) The 'Cashing-in: the student rebellion' is about the student rebellion that starts in 1964 at Berkeley and spread all across the western world which was particularly violent in France in 1968. The author tries to give an understanding of the event from the insight. While many students didn't exactly know what they were asking for, external groups knew exactly how to use them. The 1960s was a collectivist revolution that took over the education system of the western world. From what we can observe today, the brainwashing machine is perfectly working and the university is no more. 2) 'The Comprachicos' is the best description I have ever read about how young people have their minds destroyed and rebuild to become a soldier of the collective. The monstrosity is in the perversion of the reeducation. Ayn Rand explains: The Comprachicos traded children, they bought them and sold them. In between they make monsters of them physically. For what purpose? To Laugh. Those who are doing this to our young take intense pleasure at it, and our young cannot imagine that such people exist in the world because they have no experience of life. She also recalls that in China, for millennium children were put in porcelain vases in which they grew and become deform for the pleasure of their master. What are gaining collectivists at producing monsters? To rule! 3) 'Apollo and Dionysus' is a chapter about what happens mentally to these young people. The brain-machine was already in place in the 1950s and the 1960s revolution was only the takeover of the last bastion. She takes the Woodstock festival as an example of the return to primitive instinct. People were literally crawling in the mud. She explains that mentally those young are in the same state, they are mentally in the mud and if someone does not help them to rise they will stay in the mud for their entire life. They do not have the energy nor know what to do and how to do it. However, they are already in a stage for which only the collective will get them out of the mud. The collective will tell them that nothing will be asked of them only to obey and that can go back to the mud when done. The live instinct has been destroyed, the autonomous individual is gone.
Human diversity, the biology of gender, race, and class by Charles Murray
The book, in its two first chapters, shows that we have the data AND the reasoning to declare that gender and race are not a social construct and never was. This is modern knowledge that has been collected for the last 50 years. Most of you know nothing about it and when presented to them you laugh at it with your superior wisdom. Ideas are not clothes that you can change whenever you want. Ideas define how we live and if we are wrong, death follows. Ideas are not child plays. The social construct is the mechanism on which collectivism builds most of its philosophy and society, to which gender and race belong.
The book tackles other important social questions like intersectionality, the great male variance, and class. Regarding classes. I fully agree with the author, class does exist and there is a correlation with our genes. However, the way we deal with class in our society will make all the difference. We need to remember how Karl Marx used classes as a Trojan horse for collectivism. We have to make sure at every level of organization of our society, classes are not the expression of a power struggle but of competencies. Inequalities are an expression of differences not of superiority/inferiority. From a practical point of view, you don't ask yourself how those who struggle can have financial compensation, but how to organize a part of the society so that they can help themselves. The use of natural mechanisms to solve natural inequalities.
About the technicality of the book. There is no doubt that some parts are technical and beyond the education of many readers, BUT and that's a big 'but', not all of it is technical and those parts can be read by all and give you vital information about human nature. We all need that information to well-build our society, and there is a lot of work to do.
About Charles Murray. He is a hero, a warrior of knowledge, a civilization hero. He is taking a lot of risk with the publication of that book. What he tells us, is known by the scientific community, for at least 2 decades, but nearly zero of them is ready to jeopardize their comfortable lives to help the people to build a better society, with better information. He has already taken a lot of heat with the publication of the Bell curve 25 years ago with his colleague Richard Herrnstein. Like other heroes as Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, or F.A. Hayek, he is right and tells us the right things.
You will also learn about one important new concepts called intersectionality which is a modern take on the social structure of the primitive tribe. Intersectionality is not only erroneous but dangerous.
The fraud of feminism, by Belfort Bax
Feminism has entered, what is called, its fourth wave, considered far more radical toward its aims and method. Some advocate that feminism is progress, no matter the kind of feminism. Others think that the fourth wave has gone too far and we must return to previous feminism. The reality is, no matter the wave, feminism is a collectivist project and as such was radical from the beginning because collectivism tolerates only itself. To seek group equality is an empty claim because you can't extract the quality of an individual based on the group he belongs to. Moreover, if those differences are natural like between the members of the two sexes then to advocate for group equality is a denial of human nature and the Darwinian revolution. Regarding equality of sex, it was never about equality, but justice in the sense to make men pay for a fabricate group prejudice, which reveals the true nature of the warfare, it's a power struggle. Since men are always considered as a group and never as individuals, it's a collectivist power struggle, feminism is collectivism.
I choose this book not merely because it opposes the actual orthodoxy about women's nature and therefore will challenge you more than many other books on the topic, but because it is a testimony that the claims of 21st feminism were already present in 1913. What were they already asking back at that time? Chapter 1: more than leniency, feminists asked that women should not be held responsible in court, even in case of murder. Chapter 2: The denial of difficulty to make a reason-based judgment and that sex lies deeper than culture. Chapter 3: the hate of men (misandry). Chapter 4: Women consider themselves as divine, deities and expect to be treated as such. Chapter 5: The use of chivalry to be granted privilege by men. Chapter 6: The deliberate and systematic use of lies and fallacies to make their cause. They feel entitled to do so.
The elite and weak men, which I characterize as fantasy enablers, as done great damage to women and the denial of women's nature with political objective-based on ideological root having nothing to do with reality. They have become a pawn to allow the elites to reestablish the alpha/herd model. They are lost in a world they do not understand anymore because they don't know themselves any more about their nature, their role, and their relation with men. Only anger, entitlement, manipulation, irresponsibility, irrationality, emptiness, and narcissistic love guide most of them.
Women have two weaknesses, they never envision being wrong, and if the group or the civilization collapses because of their decisions, they will feel no guilt of any sort. The first has for consequence to be unable to deal with reality and accept natural laws. The second is an inability to lead groups and to handle basic elements of morality. Morality works if you can understand, even just feel, the right and wrong, doing something wrong. If you can't feel guilt, you can't be moral.
The question of hysteria is also raised. Women are prone to hysteria. Modern psychology has put all sorts of fancy theories and names to explain it but always through the lens of collectivism which implies without taking into account human nature and natural laws. Moreover, they gave it a sexual origin, which is in line with Freud's teaching (Eros & Thanatos), but regular orgasm cannot solve hysteria. Hysteria is the expression for women of a strong discrepancy between their map of reality and reality, or their wish and what they can do. Their brain simply short-circuit. The problem with hysteria (or simply of mental breakdown) is that it is used by women to get what they want, to avoid responsibility, to bully those who oppose them, in particular men but it is also dangerous because they can become psychologically and physically violent.
The new generation has been lied to regarding women nature, boys and girls, and forced to accept a fantasy, but the civilization is collapsing, and it is your task to build it back with the help of women, at least those who know what they have to do in that project. It's not a question of hierarchy but task repartition and focusing on the civilization project together.
Apocalypse never. Why environmental alarmism hurts us all, by Michael Shellenberger
Since the 1970s, all generations have been fed with the belief that environmental crises were so serious and there were so many of them that we have to do whatever it takes to solve them or to be doomed. Moreover, it was stressed that we had a moral obligation because we were responsible for them. It was all make-up of reality and lies, the promise of doomsday was to force to act. Nobody denies that there are issues, but not only civilization isn't always the cause, but internal mechanisms can be beneficial to resolve them, and some solutions sold to you are making things worse. All of this has been hidden to you, on purpose because the game played by those who manipulate you is to put down civilization with the expectation to return to the primitive tribe.
I chose that book, to wake you up. It lists a dozen of false claims and lies that have been told for the last 50 years. The end of the world is not for tomorrow, nor the day after, enjoy your life. Climate change is not announcing the end of the world, the rain forest is not going to disappear, there is no plastic island somewhere on the ocean, Nuclear energy is not dangerous but safer than all others, polar bears are doing fine, Malthus is nowhere to be right, Whales will still be there when you will path the way.
Environmentalism is not about the happy gathering but an act of predation to impose the restructuration of the society that will have cruel repercussions on people's life and a crime against civilization. Civilization, that's the word that environmentalists don't want to hear, but being civilized is to accept natural laws and this act makes us human. The pursuit of civilization is an affirmation of our willingness to be human, the will of its collapse is to become a monster, a primitive, and a predator to our own species.
The fatal conceit - The errors of socialism by F.A. Hayek (1988)
The author put on the front of the stage the most advanced concepts there are to read to understand our situation which is self-ordering systems to understand how a civilization work or not, and the anthropomorphism and animism of the socialist mind. The connection between the twos is that if you failed to accept the existence of self-ordering systems, you fall back to anthropomorphism, you moved from civilization to barbarism. The author explains this in the first paragraph of the first chapter, but what does it mean? There are rules and codes which are embedded in what we call traditions. Morality is part of it. Those rules produce processes. The building of a family can be seen as a process, higher concepts like integrity, impartiality, and freedom, and there are processes which we know to be needed to make things work which we call process, like due process. Processes build systems and some work together to produce order. Order means stability so that life can happen and goes on from generation to generation. What I just described is very similar to what I explained in the letter about Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) and complex dynamic system (CDS).
Here is the main idea of Hayek. Those rules, processes, and systems are not necessarily visible to us, and in particular how they work together to make life happen or to allow the human civilization to exist and move on to the next step. Because it is not visible, to accept its reality is not given. Some can't and need the explanation of a will, that gives purpose to processes and systems and that's given by a human being. For collectivists, everything is understood through the will of human beings. Some of you will think about the prime mover, and make a link to God. In that case, you have to leave God out of the equation presented by Hayek, it's much deeper because when you believe in God you accept that his ways are not necessarily meant to be visible. Believers also have great respect for tradition. Collectivists do not believe in God, nor traditions. They put humans as the main character of life. That's why they believe in social engineering, that their laws are natural laws, they reject the concept of risk and randomness by believing they can control everything. They failed to understand that the rules they impose produce processes and systems that will not provide the self-ordering of our society and life will not go on. Like gravity, randomness is known to us by its actions, but we don't know what it is, where does it come from and when did it start. We accept that there is something above us, invisible to us and that we are not the ones who give a purpose to those things. We don't ask, who has created randomness. There is no answer to this and we accept this. Much more we accept to build a system of thinking that accepts this. When the scientific method asks us to define the properties of things before we put a word on them, it protects us from asking questions that can't have an answer. That's not the case for collectivists who use essentialism. They will ask questions for which there is no answer but since they have a word they will nonetheless try to find a source, and that will be human beings, hence the anthropomorphism of collectivism.
It's the second time I have had a live example of a complex and very important concept to help you to picture what's going on. (read: Breakfast room in Dark Forest hotel) For the last decade, in my street, the city has taken measures to limit the speed of cars because of the high numbers of accidents, despite being a residential area and a small street. So something weird is going on, here. The city is managed by collectivists, and we know that they hate cars, but this does not explain the craziness that they have shown recently. They have erased the main pedestrian crossing, and people still are using it as if it were still there because it is a natural way to go out. They have moved legitimate parking spots that exist on the side of the street, on the street itself so that cars have to slalom. It's even crazier because the problem is known, visibility. The people who go out from the residential area onto the street (pedestrians or cars) have poor to no visibility to know what is going on the street. Car drivers on the street have poor to no visibility of the people coming out of the area. The reason is the existence of parking spots at the entries that act as walls. The solution is to get rid of those spots. It means that we face an infrastructure problem, but that's not how collectivists think. They believe the cause of things is human, so to provide order you need to control the people, in that case, the drivers of cars. To put them in a situation where they have to slow down to the point that there will be no more accidents. The knowledge provided by Hayek explains here that it is not the cars they hate but the drivers of the cars, and that they will completely be blind to the solution which lies in the infrastructure.
I can only convince you that Fatal Conceit is very important, but it requires many concepts and it will not be easy for you to understand how to use that knowledge, but we have to start with something and that something is to read that book and to accept that it is fundamental. So you will have to read other books partially through that book, links will be made and it will be the beginning of the understanding. For example, when he explained that to evolve as a group we need to be in a discovery mode, which favors competition over cooperation it will be useful to know about social dilemmas, in particular, the stag hunt and the prisoner dilemmas. In the former, you limit risk by cooperation, but it limits your ability to explore the world. On the contrary with the prisoner dilemma, you look for the outcome, you take the risk that allows you to explore the world. Cooperation is then to understand in a form of coalitions that compete with each other. What Hayek meant was not to stop cooperation, but to reject Rousseau's ideas on cooperation. The notion of outcome and risk is also linked to knowledge. The culture of no-offenses that is spreading is a culture of no-risk that doesn't allow the acquisition of knowledge. It's a no-discovery culture and it stops us from acquiring the very tools that are needed to allow us to solve the problem that we aren't able to solve yet. The rise of that no-offense culture is a sign of that "for-the-time-being-failure" to find new ways, new traditions that will allow building new processes and self-ordering systems. We are in an in-between era of human civilization, but it won't last and civilization will take its course again.
Hayek was aware that he was in uncharted territory, not for using self-ordering and anthropocentrism concepts and a few more, but to use them to explain the much deeper mechanism that makes things happen, our civilization to exist, and explain the divide amongst us as an existential one. That awareness can be observed when he sums up part of what he already has written by "Most knowledge ... (arise from)... the continuous process of sifting a learnt tradition", "and I confess it took me some time to recognize this", he added "This decisive insight is one that only a very critical rationalist could recognize", showing that he was aware of the conceptual leap needed to understand his latest work. One of the consequences, as he mentions, is to accept that reason may be incapable to explain traditions, at least all of them, but that we will still have the obligation to follow them to survive. In other words, we will have to accept as axiomatic a set of concepts that will constitute our values system. That value system will evolve, but can not be discarded as the collectivists do. We, and with us, the civilization, will not get out of our existential crisis without a shift of the paradigms that define our traditions and thinking without work like this one.
VI - List of misleading books. On an ideological warfare
The collectivist Utopia is purely an anti-civilization project
I have lived most of my life believing that books constitute a place where ideas are exchanged with the ultimate goal to sort out the wheat from the chaff and find some truths on which we can build our society for a better future. It's a lie, it's all a lie. An ever-increasing number of books are used to destroy truths. Their authors and those who praise them, are engaged in ideological warfare whose objective is the destruction of knowledge and the return of tribalism in its most primitive sense, the abolition of civilization. I oppose them, and we need to call them out, hence the list. I used the word misleading because they never say what they are up to, which is to oppose nature, reality, their universality for the sole purpose to build their utopia. We call truths the knowledge we acquire from those (nature, reality, universality). We need that knowledge to build a human civilization and we need civilization to be better humans. Without being civilized, humans are monsters.
The beauty (or the irony or the usefulness, pick one) of such a list is that only those who defend knowledge and truth can propose it and ask you to read it, for we have nothing to hide. That's not the case for the other side, they consider truth as a dangerous material. They want to burn books, to erase the knowledge that they contain, to erase it of human memory. Let me give you a recent example. A history department of an Australian university has asked that the age of aboriginal tribes should not be mentioned. The reason is to allow aboriginals to state their belief which is that their ancestors originated from Australia. This is in complete contradiction with the theory of evolution and the fact that the human species has a unique point of origin which we know to be in Africa. By the simple erasing of a knowledge that would take no more than a line in a textbook, that history department put down the whole knowledge of the human origin. Their task is very easy because they do not need to be coherent in their actions. One day they can put to the pylori a knowledge and the next day use it to attack another one. They just need the superficial illusion of coherency and to push emotional buttons. They don't have to build houses that will shelter the people and grow the crops that will feed them.
I'm far from being alone to call out the war on truth, and certainly not the first. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called the 19th, the age of dishonesty. F. A Hayek, in 'The Road to Serfdom', dedicates a whole chapter explaining the end of truth. What is at stake, is not the data or facts but the process by which we use reason. Our modern obsession for fact-checking only highlights the coup against reason, I quote "The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends" by F.A Hayek. Karl Popper explains how essentialism keeps scholars in the middle age and helps the rise of false prophets like Marx and Hegel. If you don't believe them or any who are on the same line, then listen to what the post-modernists say, "We don't tell truth, for there is none. We tell stories". What are you going to do if you disagree with someone that follows that reasoning? Stories don't ask to be checked, they don't imply responsibilities. Roger Scruton analyzing the left intellectuals has founded on a will to avoid any real question, hidden behind verbal diarrhea. Like magicians, they attract our attention to keep secret their little war on what it means to be human. After quoting a small excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre (book: Fools, Frauds, and firebrands), Roger Scruton explains "A writer that imagines that those are the challenging questions that Marxism has to answer is clearly up to something. He is trying to turn our attention away, not only from the real theoretical critiques of Marxism ... but also from the terrible practical consequences to which Marxism has led, with its vain millenarian prophecies and its 'totalizing' vision of a post-political Utopia". He adds later that communist Utopianism leads to the erosion of truth, explaining the constant excuses for what communism does to the population. Later "Since truth is revolutionary ... for the communists ... all truths become the properties of the revolution", with the effect that even the very act of opposing the revolution makes you part of it because everything is explained through it.
Ending the unlearning of thinking
To call them out is not to oppose their ideas, for there is none, but what they are hiding. It is a void world of words that they throw at you, and its sole purpose is to mobilize your brain to stop you from reasoning and be able to seek the truth and to continue to question reality. Generation after generation, people unlearn to think until the world of empty words that the bewitchers propose to you becomes the only reality that is left to you, but in the process, you lose your humanity and civilization ceases to exist.
The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama.
This is a clear and well-articulated book and you will learn a lot by reading it, but so many authors and topics are missing that would change the validity of his thesis that one can only put it in the category of misleading books. The main thesis is that we have reached, as a civilization, the end of history, if we consider progress as the engine of history and the disappearing of men who are ready to sacrifice themselves for that progress and civilization before any material and personal concerns. Sacrifice is a very important topic when it comes to knowledge, creativity, and intelligence and is needed to allow civilization to exist. However, the author revives Hegel's idea of historicism, which he correctly attributes first to Plato, making also a link to Rousseau (I agree) and ended with Nietzsche and his concept of the last man, hence the title. However, the author follows the irrationalist thinking which has provided Mysticism, Marxism, and post-modernism throughout our history. The author paints a grand scene of our history and civilization which reminds us of Karl Popper's work with his book 'The open society and its enemies', but he got so many things wrong that you can point to one in every paragraph. I quote "Hegel believed that Christianity paved the way for the French revolution...". Yes, there is a connection, but what would strike any French is the omission of the elite as a root cause of it, the infamous aristocracy. The French even make a movie about it, called 'Ridicule'. The French elite was completely cut from the reality that the people of France had to face every day, the work to enhance life quality was not done. Many Observers today, show great concerns about the actual elite worldwide. This was already an important topic in Popper and Hayek's work and unbelievable missing information from Fukuyama's book. Another example, I quote "...then it is not only possible but inevitable (in italic) that rights will gradually be extended to animals...". Karl Popper gives a definition of tribalism that is very useful here, it is the confusion in the difference between natural and man-made laws. Rights are given, they are man-made. Many things are wrong here, 1) It is extremely presumptuous for humans to believe that their rights can be transferred to animals. 2) animals are governed by natural laws and their very biology is designed to follow them. 3) we know that those who want to extend human rights to animals, no matter how they did introduce the reason, are guilty of hiding their hate of the human species, which they see as a predator of nature, a destroyer of all things. To extend their rights is to attack their particularities. Animals are just a tool in a political power battle. In the same way that socialists want to defend the poor only because they hate the rich, the anti-humans want to help the animals only to destroy humans. Beyond that observation, natural laws are nowhere to be seen in the book, nor Darwin's theory of evolution which has given us extraordinary insight into what it means to be human. I will just point out another issue about the genetic of the population that Fukuyama mentions via Thomas Sowell's work on economics (1979, 1983) while forgetting to mention the latest work by Murray and Herrnstein (The bell curve - 1989) which is central regarding that topic.
The second sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Perhaps the most emblematic book of the women's revolution movement of the 1960s and the symbol of the second-wave feminist. Her most well-known statement is 'One is not born but becomes a woman'. This is a rejection of biology for social engineering and the prelude to gender identity. It expresses the confusion between role and function and at the same time, it is an opposition to the roles that are designed by nature. It's the affirmation that culture is all that there is, not nature. Women now live with the consequences and they are terrible because they have lost their world in their willingness to be freed from their role. The loss of their world means also the loss of the knowledge of their nature and in the process, they lose themselves. They don't know anymore who they are (identity crisis) and what to do (responsibility toward the group).
The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
This is a post-modernist book. He hides his intentions, changes the definition of concepts to put forward his story as the only viable one. His true motives appear in chapter XIII starting with "These last paragraphs point the directions in which I believe a more refined solution of the problem of progress in the science must be thought..." The main thesis of the book is that there is no such thing as progress when it comes to science. The author does not recognize truth as an end-goal of the science project, but rather science follows an evolution pattern similar to the one described by the theory of evolution and therefore without an end-goal (life has no end-goal, it just exists and evolves). The author thinks in terms of purpose, and we find the same necessity to find purpose in inanimate things or systems based on processes (society and science for example) in animist thinking, which predate religions.
Since the author imposed that the notion of progress is related to an end goal, the author tries also to convince us that the quest for truth is not legitimate, because without an end goal there is not 'A Truth' to get. The reality is that because the author rejects the idea that there is such a thing as truth, then progress doesn't make much sense. He begs the question. What the author refers to is the concept of changes (very collectivist of him), which opposes the concept of the constant evolution of things, and those changes happen during a power conflict that will generate new paradigms, like a revolution will do (a collectivist one, of course). Kuhn cannot see that science progress is done by the accumulation of knowledge and/or to reduce the margin of error of the truths we already have gleaned (reread the chapter on essentialism), which are processes in constant evolution with a final goal, which is having a point of reference to know if they are doing the right job.
The Mismeasure of a man by Stephen Jay Gould
The book was published in 1981 as a general reaction to I.Q researches and more precisely the g-factor which is an attempt to define a variable that is more related to natural abilities (Haier 2017 - The neuroscience of intelligence page 10). In 1996 a revised edition is published including a severe ideological attack on the book 'The bell curve'. Murray and Herrnstein answered their critics and in particular those of Gould in a 1996 edition (chapter afterword). It's a pretty technical discussion. Scientifically and science they are all three scientists, Gould's point of view is not supported by colleagues working in the field of intelligence. The authors of the bell curve explained clearly on what ground the battle happens. I.Q, g-factor, and books like theirs destroy the hope of the people who want to use the manipulability of human beings in reaching the goal of equality.
Gould's book is not scientific by any stretch of the imagination. He uses his knowledge and position as a scientist to make the authority fallacy. Gould writes "The evolutionary unity of humans with all other organisms is the cardinal message of Darwin's revolution for nature's most arrogant species". Arrogant, really? That's not a statement, that's a judgment. Not to mention that he enrolls Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution in his crusade against the arrogant species. The unity to which he refers is that we all have common ancestors, but that's not the work of Darwin. The whole evolutionary mechanism is not about unity and diversity, but how life adapts and by which selections happen. The theory of evolution is not about us, but about the process by which life continues to exist and it certainly doesn't care about our ideologies.
The book was written nearly forty years ago. Did something change regarding I.Q? It is still used by those who need it, like psychologists and they all use it, without the need to make ideological statements. They try as much as possible to not be in the spotlight to accomplish some work that we all enjoy as a matter of fact. Richard J. Haier, a world leader in the field of intelligence, wrote a book "The neuroscience of intelligence" in 2017 (which is on the list) and mentions positively the work of Murray and Herrnstein. Intellectuals gather around Gould and professionals around Murray and Herrnstein, it says all that we need to know.
Mary Shelley was completely devoted to the romantic ideology (the ideology of the good savage which states that society corrupts men) as was her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Frankenstein is an ideological and political book stating that science is a monstrosity. It produces ugliness which is connected to wrongness in the collective mind. Nature is beautiful and therefore it is the right path to follow which is the romantic credo. The book, by its success, can be considered as the starting point for the use of art by the Romantic Movement (book, painting, plays, movies...) to undermine the industrial society. The consequence, in terms of competence degradations, was not immediately observed, because it happened over several generations but we are less competent than the previous generations. From one generation to another, knowledge has not been transmitted. We have also the elite that supports their view and has provided resources to those artists. The main symbiosis between artists and wealthy people is more of a share of the same ideology than for money.
VII - To save the mental heritage of civilization
Civilization Mental mechanisms
One must give the devil his due, the primitive tribe, which is represented by the collectivists and the irrationalists in our modern times, has done an impressive work of destruction to what we inherited from our ancestors. You won't see any destruction of paintings or cathedrals, at least for the moment (I wrote this at the beginning of 2018. Today, end of 2020 I can only observe that it appears that things are going faster than expected). The destruction is focused on the mental mechanisms by which people become civilized and build a civilization that will shelter them. It is insidious because the real objective is usually hidden under several layers of babbling, which explains the difficulty to detect or to point to it without doubt, but it is nonetheless very effective.
The state of our cultural heritage
We will have no other solution than to reexamine all the intellectual, academics, and artworks, that have been produced for the last millennia (let start from the 19th century) and to extract the parts that are anti-civilization, anti-autonomous individual, anti-reason, anti-human... or pro-emotions, pro-primitive tribe, etc. To extract those does not mean to delete them, but to write books about them (Books are not the only way to pass on the knowledge but also what it means to be civilized - plays, music, paintings, laws...). The work of Karl Popper on Plato's thinking is a fine example of the kind of work that has to be done.
Books with fundamental knowledge
Books to perfect your knowledge
Annex A: the context of the German YouTuber affair
To understand how it all started you need some context but you also to understand what a Youtuber is. YouTube is a well-known website and business, actually owned by Google. The function of YouTube is to allow people to put a video online and allow other people to see them in the best technological condition and at the beginning, it was a real technical feat to make it work. At first, it was designed for families, but quickly it became a place for content creators. Most video creations are of entertainment type, others are educational, nature discoveries, travel, political.... Creators are bringing value to YouTube, and at some point, they decide to pay for content creation by inserting ads on the video. Today, a Youtuber is a content creator who earns money from YouTube. Some are so successful that they have become a millionaire. Each Youtuber has one or more channels, and each of them is dedicated to a specific topic.
Where does the audio recording come from?
The German Youtuber belongs to the skeptic community (Critic of the society with the intention to enhance it, but they never go practical. Most skeptics are progressive, not conservative, leaning on the left side of the political spectrum), and had a political channel. I say had because aside from the racial and genocidal view, it was revealed that he was part of a group of people dedicated to dox other Youtubers, usually, people who do not agree with his view. To dox, the act of doxing is to reveal personal information from other Youtubers. On The Internet, especially if you have a political channel, being dox is a real treat. The communication between members is done through a private server. The German Youtuber is apparently the administrator of that server. The YouTube community didn't approve of all that kind of behavior. His credibility was so strongly impacted that he decided to delete its channel.
The audio recording in which we can hear the German Youtuber making his statement over French comes from that server. One person from the group decided to send it to a French Canadian Youtuber, who in turn decided to reveal the real view of that German Youtuber.
Everything started during 2017 when a German Youtuber decided to mock the alt-right about race, stating (in a video) that they were too dumb to understand basic biology and the race concept. The problem is that he made several scientific errors. A few Youtuber scientists have tried to attract his attention to those errors, but he refused and doubled down with a new video and new errors for which he received new corrections. He tripled down. At that moment, a French-speaking Canadian (Ph.D. in Biology) released a three-hour video explaining most of the faulty scientific reasoning of the German Youtuber. The German Youtuber during a virtual meeting with some members of the doxing group, who have a scientific background, was told several times that the Canadian was not wrong, in other words, his critics were valid, and he should correct his view (scientifically speaking). It is during that meeting that he lost his temper and revealed his racial and genocidal view of French people. Let sum it up. A left-leaning German Youtuber fighting the alt-right against race, made a racial and genocidal statement, nostalgic about the final solution design by the Nazi.