Tuesday 26 June 2012

Can mainstream Christians/ conservatives/ decent people re-think their assumptions?

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A lot of reactionary writing is based on the idea that 'people' can (that the elite can), and perhaps will, re-think their basic assumptions - by going-through a sequence of challenges of these assumptions, to dismantle the insane evil that is Leftism/ Political Correctness (before it is too late).

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The problem is, of course, that no simple adjustment will work, because people are locked-into delusion by multiple false beliefs and false assumptions - so that any single challenge to a false assumption will appear wicked, absurd or impossible.

This also means that no conceivable sequence of single challenges to false assumptions is possible, since each individual step on the path seems wicked, absurd or impossible - so the process cannot get-going.

What is apparently needed are multiple simultaneous challenges to multiple false assumptions, each one being driven-through to its consequences (and with the assumption that absurd consequences imply false premises).

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But is this even remotely plausible?

I mean that there will be a bout of wide-ranging, rigorous and sustained analysis of multiple Leftist assumptions?

Of course not.

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(The fact that I have myself, in fact, gone through exactly the kind of re-thinking which would be necessary is enough to convince me of the impossibility; in that the process took me a very long time - more than a decade - and a tremendous amount of effort; such that I know that very few people would either have the time or be prepared to make the kind of effort I did.)

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What is possible, indeed inevitable given the self-hating suicidal tendencies of Leftism, is either that the people with this particular set of false ideas will be replaced; or that the false ideas will be chucked-out lock-stock and barrel, not by any kind of subtle and balanced critique but by reacting-against them as a whole - by asserting (pretty much) the opposite.

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Options: Not re-thinking but instead replacement or (over-) reaction:

because in practice politics is necessarily simple...

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12 comments:

JP said...

I think that if you get enough "single hits" to your assumptions, you'll start questioning the whole edifice even if you don't get all your assumptions challenged at once.

It is not enough to chuck out the people with the false ideas. It is also necessary to chuck out the people who put those false ideas into everyone's head. Those factories of falsehood - the schools and the media - must be purged, or they will simply replace the old crop of indoctrinated people with a new one.

Bruce Charlton said...

@JP - "I think that if you get enough "single hits" to your assumptions, you'll start questioning the whole edifice even if you don't get all your assumptions challenged at once."

But it isn't happening, is it?

"It is not enough to chuck out the people with the false ideas"

I think it would be enough - so long as it was clear that they were being chucked out en masse *because* of their false ideas...

Warren Kinston said...

The assumption in this blog is that assumptions are crucial. I can understand that point of view but it seems too narrow. There are other factors in knowing beside assumptions. One of these, for example, is the choice of perspective. If a person alters their perspective, then suddenly the existing assumptions become less pertinent, and a new pattern of assumptions emerge. Whereas assumptions are typically multiple and often knit in a system in the mind, a perspective is unitary (ie there may be multiple possible perspectives, but a person typically uses just one or two).

I suppose the main point here is that it is usually a mistake to fight fire with fire. As Ibsen said, you have to go about.

Cantillonblog said...

It is too happening, BGC. Many others are treading a similar path. Look at the rate of growth since 2007. A few months back the orthosphere didn't even have a name. If we continue growing at this rate, we will have won within a century. And what is a mere century to us?

Sheldrakes work ought to be a reminder that every man that treads this path makes it easier for those that follow.

Jonathan C said...

With your help, I've reversed my positions on almost everything political and religious, in a lot less than a decade...unless you count the time in the niche that got it all started; namely game.

I started reading game boards about 14 years ago. The recognition that everything I'd been told about women was the reverse of the truth, and my real-life experiments that confirmed the truth of the new viewpoint and of what really fires women's loins, opened me up to the possibility that everything else I believed might be the opposite of the truth too, for the same reasons.

I know I'm far from alone; many men got their start on the red pill because their frustration led them to resources on seduction, and from there they discovered the rest of the manosphere. Funny how a man's sex drive can lead some men to truth...because a women's sex drive remains a cosmic expression of truth even when everything she says is a leftist lie.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Jonathan C - it sounds good that you have reversed your position (and with my help!) - but you really must not imagine that 'Game' is 'the truth' about women.

It may approximate to 'the truth' about corrupted women, intoxicated women, women in a state of (no doubt partly self-imposed) existential despair, women gripped by pride, unrepentant women - and so on - but not about women per se.

'Game' is a technique of exploitation - and as such it must be 'realistic' in the same sense and to the same (partial) extent that people who devise advertizing, or sell gambling, or sell sleazy media and journalism must be 'realistic' - it is a realism of the bottom line (seduction), which itself is corrupting of both the exploiter and the exploited.

Political correctness also includes truths about women - in the same sense as Game - i.e. PC also 'works' in modern society where women are mostly unrepentantly corrupt and advocates of corruption (as are men, of course).

Jonathan C said...

Dear Prof. Charlton, while the exploitative and manipulative parts of game always get the press, the "game" materials that have been most decisive for me don't fit that stereotype, and probably would have "worked" just as well in Byzantium:

- Learning that despite everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) I was told or learned from the media growing up, women are not attracted to feminine, obsequious, submissive men who do everything women ask; rather, they are attracted to stereotypically masculine men (something I didn't remotely suspect until I was about 30). I was utterly shocked and flabbergasted to learn that women are attracted to men who stand up for themselves, have standards, and don’t do everything the women want--I really can’t convey how radically that inverted EVERYTHING I knew about the world.

- Learning basic social skills like the basic physical procedures for initially showing romantic interest. (The ultra-submissive "tell her how you feel about her" method often seen in movies is the most repellent way, even for the most virtuous women.) I simply had no clue how relationships get started, and the media examples of that are utterly wrong.

- Learning how mistaken I was in thinking I needed to make my conversation more “interesting,” by which I meant intellectual and erudite. Now I do more teasing, "vibing", playful talk and body language. (I took up several physical hobbies like singing just to get acquainted with my body.)

What I call game, lots of people would just call "not being a loser". I think you might be unaware of the extreme degree to which men just a few years younger than you have been raised to be utter wussies. Nobody ever took me aside and told me that women are viscerally repelled by men who act the way feminists say they want men to act (and as I was acting); I needed the game community to learn that.

In polite society, it is today verboten to acknowledge that women are attracted to behaviors that are even faintly masculine. When I occasionally allude to such things in conversation, my SWPL friends immediately change the subject. I am repeatedly surprised by the gulf between the minimum level of masculinity women require to consider a man as a potential romantic interest and the maximum level of masculinity one is permitted to speak approvingly of. It's part of the leftist honesty gap, I suppose.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Jonathan C - Yes but... is 'the game community' *really* about the (Mormon-type) _ideal_ of fertile monogamous marriage between young and sexually inexperienced partners?

Methods can only be evaluated by their goals; all this stuff is merely a means to an end.

The most admirable relationships I have personally observed (on average) are among evangelical-type Christians (I don't know any Mormons) - and their behaviour is very far from anything recognized by 'Game'.

On the other hand the whole structure of evangelical churches tends to lead to relatively traditional sexual roles. Church groups are invariably led by men, for example - so that pretty much all of the men are in dominant roles, therefore relatively attractive.

Jonathan C said...

A good point about goals, yes. And I would be curious, if you're willing, to hear you expand upon the observation that "their behaviour is very far from Game."

But let me reiterate the point I was trying to make: questionable goals led me to one narrow but utterly counterintuitive aspect of truth (game), which opened my eyes to the possibility of societal inversion of truth, which (helped along with a dollop of outrage) led me to many other truths (the insanity of modernism/leftism, traditionalism, transcendence, the soul, the death of science) and the concept of moral inversion.

It was like unwinding a wool sweater...I pulled on one loose yarn, and with time, the entire thing came apart in my hands. It's a partial answer to your question of how an elite leftist can re-think his basic assumptions. It started with the collision of a belief system with hard reality (in my case, women's sex drives) and an intense desire to resolve it.

This is not to imply that it's plausible this re-thinking can be "wide-ranging"; most of the elite aren't going to undergo the same reorientation...at least not until after the collapse.

Columnist said...

Political Correctness is enforced by constant indoctrination. So it won't die out.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Columnist - it is *necessary* that Political Correctness be enforced by constant indoctrination - if/ when the constant indoctrination stops, then PC will die out.

Samson J. said...

I think you might be unaware of the extreme degree to which men just a few years younger than you have been raised to be utter wussies.

Yes, older men like Dr. Charlton often have a very hard time grasping this. Have some patience with them.

@Columnist - it is *necessary* that Political Correctness be enforced by constant indoctrination - if/ when the constant indoctrination stops, then PC will die out.

Yes... it may sound an odd thing to say in this corner of the blogosphere but in fact I often find it encouraging the extent to which *non-PC* ideas are still around even given the massive amount of propaganda we are daily faced with. I really believe that if the propaganda were removed - and this could happen more easily than some folk think - much of PC would collapse overnight.