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I'm not sure how else to start this so I'm just going to dive straight in.
A long time bug-bear of mine is something I've come to refer to as the "Leviathan-shaped Hole in the discourse". It's something that has come up multiple times in the last couple weeks and while I've written about it at length back when this community was on reddit and in the comment section of SSC proper back in the day it's been pointed out to me that I haven't really written about it in a while and that I should probably revisit the subject for those who are just joining us. Aknoldewdgment to @Fruck, @hydroacetylene, Et Al.
The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.
The long version might require a bit of background to explain.
I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent. If anything it was the inverse. I'll be the first to tell you that I am not that fucking bright. I had dreams of being a professional fighter and/or skate-border, but as I moved up the food-chain it became increasinly clear that natural talent was no match for natural talent coupled with the time and money to train full-time. If I were smart I may have figured that out a head of time. In anycase 9/11 Happened and I enlisted. I spent 10 years as a Combat Medic and another 18 months as a feild operative for a Prominant Humanitarian NGO in East Africa before deciding to return to the states and go to college on the GI bill.
As one might imagine, going from being a "Muzunga" in Nairobi to being undergrad at the University of California was a bit of a culture shock. And it is that sense of culture shock that has stuck with me and signifigantly shaped my worldview since. It's one thing to stick out visually, to be visibly older than all the other freshmen, or to be one of half-a-dozen white guys in an otherwise black neighborhood. But it is another to realize that you genuinely walk different, talk different, and think different from your obstensible peers. I was first introduced to rationalism through one of my professors and a fellow-student, and the desire to make sense of whatever the fuck was going on was major part of the initial apeal. I was actually at one of the first SSC reader meet-ups hosted by Cariadoc where I got to meet Scott, and bunch of the other movers and shakers, face to face but as much as I was a fan of the general ideas (systemitized wining Yay!) it was painfully obvious to me that we had fundementally different conceptions of how how the world actually worked. Which in turn brings us to the real topic of this post.
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society. Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necccesarily hold. Yes, If A & B then C, but that's a mightily Laconic "If". This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion. As such, in order to argue against a liberal in a manner the the liberal will regard as valid one is forced to go through a whole rigirmarole of defining terms that nobody's got time for. Thus the liberal inevitably wins every argument by default. However, winning the argument does not neccesarily equate to being "correct" as one can make a dumb argument for a smart position and vice versa.
The "Leviathan shaped hole" is named for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I find Hobbes signifigant in that he was one of the first guys in the enlightenment/modern era to approach political science as an actual science with theories that could be either proven or falsfied. However these days he's mostly regarded as a joke, a cartoon characterchure of an absolute authoritarian drawn by people who've never really bothered to read or engage with any of his arguments and I believe that this does our society a disservice. It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so. I'm reminded of an argument I got into with another user regarding the killing of Jordan Neely. The Argument has been made that Daniel Penny acted unlawfully by interposing himself between Neely and his intended victim and subsiquently killing Neely. To call Penny a "murderer" and a "vigilante" implies the pressance of a sovriegn authority that penny was obliged to defer to. Hovever if that's the case why did it not act? The simple answer is that it was not pressant and thus the accusations against Penny ring hollow.
One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.
Agreed. I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, and in doing so have met and worked with a lot of people who think very differently from the norms expected in "liberal society". It seems to me that there's something of a cult, of people who have only ever been in "liberal society" places and can't begin to even conceive that there are people out there who really do think very differently. They speak of "multicultralism", but all they really know is that those other people sure dress in some cool costumes and have fancy dances and tasty exotic food. The idea that these people also have very different values from them is unthinkable.
The type of person I have described is of course not every single "blue team" person. They're probably a minority in most places. But they definitely do exist, and I've met a number of people like that. I get the impression that their numbers are growing, spreading into more places, and becoming even more strident in their beliefs. I don't know how this ends, but I can't help but think something ugly is going to happen eventually. And along those lines,
It seems rather funny in current year. Especially back in the 70s or so, there was such a culture of "revolution" and "overthrowing the system" and other such things being cool. They're still in love with the idea of protests and riots. Look how they cheered on the BLM protests of 2020! But then, Jan 6 happens, and oh, it's the most terrible horrible thing ever! Well, when you were talking about protests and riots and revolutions and overthrowing things being totally super cool, exactly what did you think it meant? It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.
The default state of everything is "I will love my friends and hate my enemies." It's a wonder of values that anyone ever decided to do anything else.
If you understand the current-day progressives as simply falling into the same human foibles that every other ideology has faced -- rather than taking their claims of enlightenment at face value -- then you truly begin to understand them. They aren't special, they aren't chosen, they aren't annointed, they aren't on "the right side of history," they aren't all-powerful, they aren't all good: they're humans, just like you and me. If they can tear down statues, I can tear down the idol of themselves they've built in their own heart, an idol of self-righteousness and pride. I even see in myself -- especially in the past, when I was younger, when I was drawn to progressive politics -- those features, that self-doubt that made me want to take the great figures of the past and spit on them, the deep and overwhelming desire to be right and just and dutiful, the desire to be better than others. But these are human follies, not progressive ones, they are sins of the flesh, not sins of the woke.
And so it goes, on and on, the spinning wheel of time, rhyming as it goes.
When they're young a lot of people (myself included) had no patience with what was going on. The answers were so simple and obvious, why weren't the people supposedly in charge doing anything about it? Clearly the only way to make things better was to clear away most of everything in the way of government and institutions and bureaucracy and the rest of it, and the new, uncluttered, post-revolution society would be so much better.
Then I got older, discovered more of how the world works, and the important fact that inertia is a physical law, and I understood that "tear it all down!" would only result in the same old thing a little further on.
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