The strongest argument for liberalism is that non-liberals are stupid and crazy. Conservatives tend to be cretins, and if liberalism is the heights of high-society fashion, conservatism is like donning a pair of ripped carpenter jeans. Signalling conservatism is signalling low status. And that’s because conservatives more often than not are low-status. It takes psychological resolve and resilience to give the finger to all the glorious and respectable and reputable institutions of the Cathedral. Everything societally good and respectable on the highest level stems from the Cathedral. To step outside is to face ostracism and exclusion. So who exactly would […]

Alternative title. Rotherham: There Still Is No Such Thing As Cultural Marxism. Alternative title. The Brits Are A Holy People. The Brits are a holy people. In fact, you will not find a holier people. Modern feminism emerged from Britain, spurred on by J.S. Mill. Universal rights. Poor laws. Tolerance. Equality. Individualism. The Magna Carta. No More Taxes, King John. Liberalism. Liberalism. Liberalism, again. Britain was fertile soil for the development of natural rights, and although their philosophical roots precede John Locke and are brilliantly expounded by the Salamanca School, the scholastics in Spain, the Spanish were not the sort […]

The point of the guide is to provide an onslaught of material efficiently packaged. Each one of these modules can be expanded out into multiple essays—books, even, but they’re sufficient for brutal effectiveness. Apply liberally. Some of them are more serious than others. Some are just plain ridiculous—don’t begrudge me my fun. I expect not to be called out on my failure to pass the ideological turing test on some of the modules, mostly because (1) I understand I didn’t pass, and (2) the purpose of not passing is because deconstruction on multiple levels is possible, given that your opponent […]

John Derbyshire once wrote about the necessity of sitting your kids down and having a talk about the black problem. In keeping with tradition, I’m broaching another uncomfortable subject: the regulation problem. But, of course, I’m not going to be writing about it as stylistically pleasing as did Derbyshire. Instead, it’s going to be a bit of a slog through. Let’s start from the sometimes-adopted-view that we should eliminate all regulation because of the positive selection effects that would occur. The idea is that the dumbs, failing to look before they jump, will over time slowly select themselves out of […]

It’s too often that we again and again come across stories of Bureaucrats Gone Wild: Yet Another Children’s Lemonade Stand Shutdown. Except for the outrage stoked by conservative news sites, and rightly so, there isn’t much thought put into exactly why we just see the same scenario blindly playing over, like a skipped record, like a tragic farce in Greek theatre. There are all sorts of structural problems bandied about, but it seems to me that the best explanation for obnoxious bureaucratic overreach is because a certain type of person is drawn to the public regulatory field, and in a […]

Like stereotypes, clichés are defeasibly true. A picture is worth a thousand words. And another cliché is—actually, I don’t know if we have any good societally pervasive clichés left referring to how the average person doesn’t updates priors in his epistemic net by a careful study of relevant texts. Anyone who believes that this is how people by at large come to form beliefs is projecting. People do not form beliefs this way. They form beliefs through hearsay, through the assigning of epistemic weight to trusted ingroup sources, through pre-existing and probably even biologically present priors. This is because we […]

I keep liberal friends on my friend’s list, if only to have insight into liberal dynamics and views. It’s an attempt to mitigate standpoint theory, which accurately describes what I’m getting at here, namely what I call ‘thede-induced blindness’. The term hints at underperformance relative to one’s actual abilities, given the strong pull of loyalty toward one’s own thede. Let’s take the example of ‘cultural Marxism’. Not a few days ago, a liberal acquaintance posted something to the effect of: “Cultural Marxism is everywhere!”—of course it wasn’t in a serious tone. Then came to the enthedening process. It seems thede-induced […]

Part of the attraction of libertarianism for contemporary conservatives is that it functions as a defensive strategy. One some level, very deep down, they subtly understand that capture of the state and its regulatory agencies is an impossible task—at least as things now stand. There’s a subconscious acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of the Cathedral. When your comprehensive doctrine has no chance at mimetically infiltrating institutions of governance, the strategy shifts to advocating the removal of comprehensive doctrines from institutions of governance. In reality, there technically can be no absence of comprehensive doctrines—all I mean by that is that loosely conceived […]

Pluralism works in the event that you’ve secured cooperation among groups. That is, no one particular group attempts to force the comprehensiveness of that group’s religion on other religions. It’s difficult to find a group that finds the milquetoast state of affairs brought on by pluralism to be acceptable. There’s an internal sense of fulfillment when Muslims are allowed to govern themselves according to Sharia. But because all groups with almost no exceptions have comprehensive doctrines, we arrive at a very familiar scenario. Cooperation brings utility, but the dominant strategy is to seize higher utility by defecting from cooperation and […]

I’ve sat in a dark room and asked myself this question many times: where are the intellectual conservatives—and in particular, where are the conservative political philosophers? The answer for the latter is that they simply don’t exist. Is there a single one? When referencing the 20th century, why does T.S. Elliot count as a serious conservative thinker? He was a poet—a wonderful poet, but still a poet. C. S. Lewis was an apologist and had very little to say about meta-politics, except for some great remarks in the Abolition of Man that with minimal effort could be ported over to […]