It is both. They are ignorant because they don't want to learn The Science™. And they do not want to learn because they are intellectually lazy bigots. This is a standard pathos + false ethos attack that James Lindsay described quite well. He described it as an ultimate Ad Hominem battery of attacks - you do not have scientific consensus, plus you probably also have some unresolved trauma and also your opinons are very close to what fascists and racists say.
So it is a blend: you are white supremacist fascist, Jones level MAGA conspiracy supporter, and on top of that you are also religious bigot who suffers trauma from priest child diddling and sexual repression. It is all one neat dehumanization package.
Of course there are other strains of this, e.g. old school eugenics intellectual progressivism - something very close to maybe current Grey tribe technocratic elite often with Fabian Socialist bent: most people are just stupid and they simply do not know what is good for them. We are the intellectual utilitarian avant-garde who will establish benevolent technocratic permanent beurocracy, where we will use psychological tricks, nudging, propaganda, economic and tax incentives and other means to make sure that the the sub 100IQ plankton can live their lives in moderately prosperous society. Of course they will fight us, but it is because they are stupid and barely above some animals intellectually. Also we are not using words like good and evil outside of tongue-in-cheek. The population is just object of our power, they are barely sapient and incapable of good/evil. And the best of us who achieved true Gnosis of utilitarian calculus are literally beyond Good and Evil in Nietzchean sense, they are applying their will to power in form of social engineering of raw material in form of nameless "population".
georgioz
5d ago
As one example, this is a standard broadly liberal ethos for centuries. It goes with belief in tabula rasa and belief that humanism is the correct (liberal) atheist ethical structure can be gained by using science and reason. The whole liberal schtick for decades was that all it takes is a proper education and we will all live in Star Trek space luxury communism society.
You never encountered opinions that let's say Trump voters are uneducated stupid heliolites or that all Christians are science deniers or some version of this argument? It was very popular attack since my youth with new Atheism.
georgioz
5d ago
Overall I think my question is underspecified, because I'm not entirely sure how to properly adopt an outside view here and set aside my own personal beliefs about what is good and consider a general principle that's simple enough for someone who isn't already me and is less intelligent than me to use to eventually arrive at some approximation of goodness (which I believe is equal to my specific beliefs about what is good, even if I don't always live up to them).
This is exactly the problem of most secular ethical systems. As you say, in the end they have to be honest and just admit that they are subjective, relative and underspecified.
Bootstrapping ethics and morality from bottom up does not work and it was admitted since Hume that it is bankrupt endeavor. The main problem being that if you adhere to any kind of humanism and secularism where you start with human mind as the presupposition, then you do not have access to any justified universals. The frustrating thing is that many people holding these ethical systems either do not understand this conundrum, or they are just willfully ignorant about them.
How does someone without the sophistication to understand second order effects not just get one-shot by virtue signallers who sacrifice the greater good in favor of optics and first order appearances?
This is often much worse for these supposedly "intelligent" people, especially if they adopt some form of utilitarianism and consequentialism, where they can rationalize their delusion and sometimes outright schizoid view of the world to promote a very let's say "interesting causes". Just look at Effective Altruism that is supposedly filled in with the smart people and they care about topics like insect welfare, rationalization of how purchase of 15th century UK luxury manor Wytham Abbey is actually in line with utilitarianism and many more.
The problem is that one of the objectives of the conspiracies is to stay secret, at minimum until they achieve their primary goals.
Not necessarily. In fact, many conspiracies actually publish their aims and goals out there with knowledge that people will not read them and if they will, that they will not verbalize them as it will make them sound crazy. They proudly share their plans of You will own nothing and be Happy as message of Sharing Economy necessary for several of the 17 Sustainable Goals for 2030 and 169 targets. It is now just a meme. It is at the same time Alex Jones level of conspiracy that "UN globalist wants you to own nothing and eat bugs", but it is also something that actual UN globalists write in their papers and promote it.
The same goes let's say with Soros. He literally pours billions of dollars into an NGO that has website that proudly says let's say how they help Syrians to immigrate into Europe. But when you say that Soros helps Syrian immigrants to move over to Europe, you are immediately marked as a conspiracy theorist. Saying the name Soros marks you as one no matter if what follows is true or false or whatever.
You are using presentist definition of race according to modern US Culture war. This was not so in the past. Hitler himself defined Jews as a race, it was a "terminus technicus" inside the Third Reich - the so called Judenrasse. In fact this whole issue was behind the whole Holocaust was not about race controversy by Whoopi Goldberg - because she is correct. From modern US race relation system point of view, the Jewish Holocaust is just White-on-White violence, similar to let's say Yugoslav wars or black-on-black genocide in Rwanda - which were also not technically "racist" in modern parlance.
This of course only reveals the inherent racism of the modern system especially related to affirmative action and similar race laws. There are numerous jokes running in the same vein, pointing to the inherent progressive contradiction - they at the same time have racial based affirmative action, but also deny race as a scientific concept, but also deny race as a self-identification identity/category similar to let's say trans. As in all dialectical leftist schizoid conspiracy theories, they just declare belief in the power of Progress to resolve/abolish this nasty Hegelian contradiction, which by itself is a proof of a need to do more more
researchgrift into theirTheory™bankrupt religious theology. In the end, they leave it as temporarily unresolved candidate to abolish in further revolution, but also heavily punish anybody who looks into the topic too deeply and in a way that makes them sound ridiculous.In the end they do implicitly endorse something like Nazi or Spanish colonial definition of "visible minority". So that Megan Markle - a wife of Prince Henry is considered as minority, but it would be tougher to say so about here son Archie, who is technically a quadroon under Spanish colonial nomenclature.
More options
Context Copy link