I really thought this essay was building up to a stronger point than "how can they be too powerful if I can write a dissent on Substack without being harmed."
Just for starters, they did everything they could to shut down Substack and it is only the bravery of the owners that thwarted that plan. You have whole teams at elite institutions like NYT and Wapo dedicated to deplatforming dissent.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard is both part of, and representative of, the elite that dominates K-12 education, the rest of academia, Hollywood, the media, government, the FBI/CIA/military, NGOs, Tech, SV, Wall Street, corporations, etc.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard and the rest of the elite have become bastions of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of Harvard students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities and the rest of the elite have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
The converse point is that Harvard and other universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not.
Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on 'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)”
These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.
Have you noticed that the same people who insist one minute that they're the tough guys and "liberal elitists" are a bunch of wimps will day the next minute that those liberal elitists are all-powerful tyrants subjecting them to Nazi-style persecution? How is that possible?
For people who claim to believe in competition, they don't seem to be open to the possibility that the ideas of liberal democracy could have outcompeted theirs. No, the other side *must* be cheating. That's who they need conspiracy theories.
good article but here are a few things to think about:
as you point out, Yarvin (and nearly everyone) believes the media controls the popular zeitgeist. But the internet remains a kind of Wild West. if you wanted to jam up the Cathedra's control what tool would you use? the internet, chat forums, and social media platforms which are significantly less centrally controlled.
Recently, The Washington Post examined data and determined the the 2016 election was NOT impacted by Russian trolls or bot farms. Did these bots/farms exist or were they a figment of our collective imagination? If they did exist who controlled them?
How much of the discontent & discombobulation of our current cultural/political moment reflects the specific subjectivity of Silicon Valley right-wingers? Read Peter Thiel's biography. how much have our politics been captured by the discontents of an elite class who feel they've been cut off from access to power and they therefore have determined to burn down "the system?"
If you were a billionaire with access to the most sophisticated technologies who feels alienated in a mass society and cut off from power and you feel the form of government is illegitimate in large part because the masses are incapable of exercising agency and you're willing to engage in behaviors others would find abhorrent (to save humanity!) - what would you do if you were a "patriot?"
What if you have friends? Secret societies are fun, aren't they?
How difficult would it be to re-align politics by tapping into the frustrations of millions of Americans whose concern are disparaged or ignored by the Cathedral? Perhaps with the use of new technologies you could manufacture dissent? If your project was long term you could focus on youth! Perhaps you could "re-barbarianize" the youth, particularly frustrated young men who feel purposeless and need a grand narrative, a hero's journey!
if you want to fight these people and their ideas you need to understand how they function - really function, and the only way to do that is to make who they are, their ideas, and their *means* transparent. Everything needs to be illuminated. good luck.
The instruction manual disguised as a book about corporate entrepreneurship is called Zero to One. Read it as if it were a guide to building a secret society for a conspiracy because that's what it is.
This is all so very fun and exciting in a world devoid of mysteries. right?
Damon, the protect democracy the American people need to understand the extent to which we are psychologically manipulated by elites using media into reductive and simple minded warring camps. This knowledge needs to go bone deep.
The allure of being a rebel remains strong in America. Who wants to be a sheep in the flock? Being in a rebel minority feels cool and dangerous. America started in rebellion to monarchy. Now, trendy intellectuals want to rebel for monarchy or some other authoritarian form of government. Maybe they are right that the majority of people who favor liberal democracy are brainwashed by the cultural elites, or maybe they are astoundingly narcissistic to believe that they know better than the majority. I am no fan of the authoritarian wing of the far left, and am disgusted by the excesses of cancel culture. But, the solution is not throwing out the baby with the bath water. A flawed and frustrating democracy is better than any dictatorship. While I might be in favor of a theoretical benign, incorruptible, trustworthy, and public interested philosopher king whose political views align with mine, unicorns are a fantasy. Messy democracies trying to hash out incompatibilities between diverse populations works best for everyone in the long run. It seems the best our democracy can hope for at the moment is banding together occasionally in the face of existential crises (Covid apparently wasn’t big enough, maybe the next pandemic will be). Trying to undermine democracy because you have taken the red pill - well look who claims to be woke now? America’s various great awakening’s have shown us to be littered with true believers claiming moral superiority over the uninitiated. Beware of true believers and zealots from the left or the right.
The fundamental anti-enlightenment distrust of the individual persists. It seems wrong but the idea that there is an alternative, worthy counterpoint to the enlightenment cannot be dismissed easily. Yarvin and that ilk obviously don't make the case but it does seem like there should be one.
The "Red Pill" hypothesis has taken what anthropologists know about societies and amplified it 100 fold. Why can't we accept the fact that - as a species - we humans cannot make conscious or unconscious conspiracies work for more than a few years or decades? The conspirators only get as much as decades if the conspiracy is backed by the force of arms after which everything falls apart.
I really thought this essay was building up to a stronger point than "how can they be too powerful if I can write a dissent on Substack without being harmed."
Just for starters, they did everything they could to shut down Substack and it is only the bravery of the owners that thwarted that plan. You have whole teams at elite institutions like NYT and Wapo dedicated to deplatforming dissent.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard is both part of, and representative of, the elite that dominates K-12 education, the rest of academia, Hollywood, the media, government, the FBI/CIA/military, NGOs, Tech, SV, Wall Street, corporations, etc.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard and the rest of the elite have become bastions of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of Harvard students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities and the rest of the elite have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
The converse point is that Harvard and other universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not.
Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on 'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)”
These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.
Have you noticed that the same people who insist one minute that they're the tough guys and "liberal elitists" are a bunch of wimps will day the next minute that those liberal elitists are all-powerful tyrants subjecting them to Nazi-style persecution? How is that possible?
For people who claim to believe in competition, they don't seem to be open to the possibility that the ideas of liberal democracy could have outcompeted theirs. No, the other side *must* be cheating. That's who they need conspiracy theories.
good article but here are a few things to think about:
as you point out, Yarvin (and nearly everyone) believes the media controls the popular zeitgeist. But the internet remains a kind of Wild West. if you wanted to jam up the Cathedra's control what tool would you use? the internet, chat forums, and social media platforms which are significantly less centrally controlled.
Recently, The Washington Post examined data and determined the the 2016 election was NOT impacted by Russian trolls or bot farms. Did these bots/farms exist or were they a figment of our collective imagination? If they did exist who controlled them?
How much of the discontent & discombobulation of our current cultural/political moment reflects the specific subjectivity of Silicon Valley right-wingers? Read Peter Thiel's biography. how much have our politics been captured by the discontents of an elite class who feel they've been cut off from access to power and they therefore have determined to burn down "the system?"
If you were a billionaire with access to the most sophisticated technologies who feels alienated in a mass society and cut off from power and you feel the form of government is illegitimate in large part because the masses are incapable of exercising agency and you're willing to engage in behaviors others would find abhorrent (to save humanity!) - what would you do if you were a "patriot?"
What if you have friends? Secret societies are fun, aren't they?
How difficult would it be to re-align politics by tapping into the frustrations of millions of Americans whose concern are disparaged or ignored by the Cathedral? Perhaps with the use of new technologies you could manufacture dissent? If your project was long term you could focus on youth! Perhaps you could "re-barbarianize" the youth, particularly frustrated young men who feel purposeless and need a grand narrative, a hero's journey!
if you want to fight these people and their ideas you need to understand how they function - really function, and the only way to do that is to make who they are, their ideas, and their *means* transparent. Everything needs to be illuminated. good luck.
The instruction manual disguised as a book about corporate entrepreneurship is called Zero to One. Read it as if it were a guide to building a secret society for a conspiracy because that's what it is.
This is all so very fun and exciting in a world devoid of mysteries. right?
Damon, the protect democracy the American people need to understand the extent to which we are psychologically manipulated by elites using media into reductive and simple minded warring camps. This knowledge needs to go bone deep.
The allure of being a rebel remains strong in America. Who wants to be a sheep in the flock? Being in a rebel minority feels cool and dangerous. America started in rebellion to monarchy. Now, trendy intellectuals want to rebel for monarchy or some other authoritarian form of government. Maybe they are right that the majority of people who favor liberal democracy are brainwashed by the cultural elites, or maybe they are astoundingly narcissistic to believe that they know better than the majority. I am no fan of the authoritarian wing of the far left, and am disgusted by the excesses of cancel culture. But, the solution is not throwing out the baby with the bath water. A flawed and frustrating democracy is better than any dictatorship. While I might be in favor of a theoretical benign, incorruptible, trustworthy, and public interested philosopher king whose political views align with mine, unicorns are a fantasy. Messy democracies trying to hash out incompatibilities between diverse populations works best for everyone in the long run. It seems the best our democracy can hope for at the moment is banding together occasionally in the face of existential crises (Covid apparently wasn’t big enough, maybe the next pandemic will be). Trying to undermine democracy because you have taken the red pill - well look who claims to be woke now? America’s various great awakening’s have shown us to be littered with true believers claiming moral superiority over the uninitiated. Beware of true believers and zealots from the left or the right.
The fundamental anti-enlightenment distrust of the individual persists. It seems wrong but the idea that there is an alternative, worthy counterpoint to the enlightenment cannot be dismissed easily. Yarvin and that ilk obviously don't make the case but it does seem like there should be one.
The "Red Pill" hypothesis has taken what anthropologists know about societies and amplified it 100 fold. Why can't we accept the fact that - as a species - we humans cannot make conscious or unconscious conspiracies work for more than a few years or decades? The conspirators only get as much as decades if the conspiracy is backed by the force of arms after which everything falls apart.