Making Nobody Happy

I wanted to draw attention to this video, not because it’s such a detailed examination of this subject or of what it means, but because it’s such a small, limited case. And it includes several statements by Ibrim X Kendi that are very representative of his positions and asks the question, what would that mean for the NBA? It clarifies the fundamental conflict between the institution in question (the NBA) and the difficulty of integrating the ideals of anti-racism into such an institution.

As much as the term “Marxist” has been overused as an epithet, this video, including Kendi’s own arguments, really help to illustrate why anti-racism actually is a Marxist ideology. In fact I think it’s safe to say that it’s fundamentally Marxist and necessarily Marxist. Not as an indictment, but as an accurate descriptor of the ideological structure of the theory.

Anti-racism is clearly Marxist, which Kendi is very honest about. In fact it’s so Marxist that you can’t embrace it without also eliminating capitalism. And you can’t embrace capitalism without embracing racism, he argues.

That last point is one I think you could argue about, that it doesn’t obviously follow from the premises. It’s not clear that capitalism necessitates racism, in any classical sense of the term. But at the least, I do think it’s fair to say that you can’t embrace capitalism without embracing race. Why? Because capitalism is fundamentally in favor of allowing and even benefiting from the competition and cooperation between differing individuals and therefore between differing people groups.

If capitalism is going to allow for individual differences, then it must allow for racial differences also, assuming race has any validity as a category. If capitalism is going to be built on the premise that there are individual differences in nature, actions, desires, and outcomes, then by extension it is built on some acceptance of that phenomenon at an extended social level, which may include race. Capitalism is definitely committed to the first position, and that may imply the second at various levels of iteration.

Whereas anti-racism, by insisting on the fundamental equivalence of all races and all individuals, not at the level of equality of existential or moral value or freedom, but ncecessarily equivalent at the level of actual outcomes, denies you the right to be an individual and have different outcomes in life as a result of your individuality. The fundamental premise is Marxist and applies to individuals. Kendi just extends that idea to whole races. Whether black or white or any other race, you do not have a right to be different, do not have a right to your own character or qualities or strengths or weaknesses, differing desires or actions, or to the differing outcomes that diversity produces. Anti-racism is essentially anti-race. Because all invidivuals must be equal, meaning equivalent, therefore all races must be equivalent. And if all races are not in practice equivalent, then something must be distorting the outcomes. And that something is racism. Any divergence in outcomes that accrues by race must be, by definition, indicative of racism. That is Kendi’s essential argument.

And the fundamental question, as it was with Marxism, is: How much power do you think you need to grant someone for them to be able to strip away and equalize all differences that your individuality might produce? How much power do you need to grant someone, how much tyranny, how much inequality, how much license to enact potential injustices, for them to “correct” humanity for the sin of having different people?

You can’t be different from anyone else under anti-racism, because that would produce different outcomes. Your family can’t be any different. Your people, your race, can’t be any different, because that might produce differing outcomes. All must be the same, otherwise racial differences will emerge and racism will be present. And the character of that sameness shall be determined and controlled by the elite prophets, who will mould and shape humanity into what it should be.

And you have no right to refuse. Shall the clay refuse to be molded by the potter? You’re not an individual, or a family, or a people. You’re an offense. You’re meant to be generic substance in the hands of the elite, to be molded into their ideal figure. And there’s no room for individual differences in material in that sculpting.
So in a way Kendi is right. Capitalism is a system that embraces inequality, because it embraces the freedom to be different. To utilize and embrace your own uniqueness to further your own particular outcomes in competition and cooperation with others.

Capitalism embraces the freedom to be different, to have a right to your own particularness and to the results of that particularness. To test and exchange those results against and with others. People can be wildly different, with wildly different talents and strategies and goals, and produce a wildly different panoply of goods and outcomes. You have a right to your individual character, the particular character of your family, and the particular character of your people.
Anti-racism will not and cannot allow that. Neither capitalism, nor the individuality it embraces. You must be a stripped of your identity as an individual, family, and people to be freed from the particularness that accompanies them, the differences in outcomes. Then everything will be equal, because all will be the same. An equal share of whatever is left when all individuality has been stripped from humanity. That’s equity. That is his vision. The harmony of unity, when all differences have been eradicated by force and reduced to a single glorious note, guided by the grand conductors like himself. The state, in which we are all perfect, all equal, all the same.
How grateful we shall be to lay by the burden of our own individuality and the inequities of difference, for uniformity. What a load it will lift from our conscience, to not have to worry about such things any more. No more shall we have to worry for others or fret about our own responsibilities. We shall all rest easy when the great parent provides for us all and we are all gathered under her wide wings as one. What joy we shall know. Not in being ourselves, not in what we have done or left undone, but the joy in having all, because there is only one thing we can have and be, and all shall have it. What a wonderful world it shall be, to be equal kings and queens of an empire of beige.
Individuality costs us everything. It is the greatest and most terrible pain and burden we know. But you can’t lift it without stripping us of everything we are and all we have. It is what we are. It is what the world is. You can’t correct for it without being anti-race, anti-family, anti-individual, without being against humanity itself. It’s anti-human-racism. It hates us and accuses us for what we are and seeks to end it and end everything we are and have done. That isn’t compassion. It’s genocide against the whole human race.
Kendi isn’t for kindness to other races or harmony between them. He’s preaching a new kind of racism. Not against one race or another, but against race itself. Against the human race for being different. His idea is the forcible extinction of differences between people, or at least the forcible correction of all outward evidences.

That’s a whole new level of racism. Anti-human-racism. There’s an anti-human, genocidal undercurrent there that can’t be underestimated. It’s a rejection of humanity and the world for being what they are. Different, varied, diverse, particular, unequal, exceptional. A world where so much is beyond our control, and yet we carry such heavy responsibility for what we do with it.

The hunger for the kind of power you would need for any person to fix or change that is a hunger for godlike, tyrannical power. The power to challenge and rewrkte the very fabric of being. To remake the world. We have seen people with that kind of hunger before, and they aren’t known for being kind.
As with Marxism, in order to bring in the new world the old one must be committed to the flames. It must be decomposed and broken down to its most fundamental atoms so it can be rebuilt in purity of form and essence. And any price, any injustice, any trampling of individual rights or identity is justified in the pursuit of the promised utopia. It is worth crushing, butchering, robbing, and pulling apart people, families, even whole races to make way for the new man. The old world deserves its fate. It is entirely corrupt in its nature. And no part of it can remain to taint the new world, where oneness and equity are the inheritance and mandate for all. It is the end of all striving, all failure, all difference, all excess. It is the end point of history itself.
And it is glorious. It is paradise. It is a world stripped of the sin of individuality and choice and responsibility. It is nirvana. Cessation of self. Monism. Welcome it. Speak its name. Anti-racism.

PS. It’s almost impossible in the face of the thing to tell whether Anti-racism is the solution to racism or a new kind of super-racism itself. The statement, “all differences between races are racist,” isn’t so much a conclusion as it is a fubdamental moral axiom. And it seems to lie at the core of anti racism and its moral calculus. Any difference in any outcome that accrues according to race is racism, and therefore is evil. And you therefore have a moral obligation to correct it by forcibly confronting it.

Can this theory be restrained in any way? Could you constrain it qualitatively? For example, by saying that it only applies to bad differences? So positive differences get excepted. The answer seems to be, obviously, no. The simple fact that outcomes are not purely and simply binary (good or bad) but instead are complex and exist along a continuum (better to worse) makes that impossible.

Virtually every scenario you can imagine of measuring outcomes between races, even construed only as a measurement of positive outcomes, could be ordered as accruing in better or worse distributions along racial divisions. That is racial difference, that is advantage, therefore that is racism. There is no acceptable qualitative category of racial difference. So no, there is absolutely no qualitative way to constrain this theory.

What, then, about a quantitative restraint? Is there some limit to the amount of racial difference that is acceptable, or to the scale at which it can be meaningfully measured and parsed? Is there an allowable quantity of racial difference? Again, obviously no. That flies right in the face of the premise. The whole point of the theory is that difference itself is by nature racist and reprehensible. Any racial inequity is racism. That’s not a tertiary claim, that’s the primary claim of the theory.

There’s a curious movement I’ve heard about. It’s not new, it’s been around for a while, in many ways it has been around since the dawn of time. But now they have an acronym! MGTOW, or men going their own way. Predictably, they’ve been labeled as mysogynist, seperatist, male-supremacist, alt-right, anti-feminist incels. If you decide to look them up, the main things you’ll read about them are the judgements others have made about them, telling you what you should think about them. Especially what women think about them.

And I certainly don’t think the movement is a good thing. Generally speaking, their attitude is not a great sign. But I’m also disturbed by the lack of understanding and sympathy they get, compared to other groups, as if the complaints or concerns of men simply have no value and aren’t worth even giving a thought to. That, to me, seems a bit hypocritical, when we’re so willing to listen and to make excuses for so many other groups, even subgroups of men, such as drug addicted and criminal men. Are there some groups we’re happy to see fail and suffer? Groups we’re happy to see be alienated and turned into resentful and depressed and isolated misanthropes? Because we think they deserve it?

I’m not sure we’ve really thought that position through. And I’m not sure we’ve thought through what the consequences of having large numbers of isolated and depressed and resentful men in our society are likely to be. The cost tends to be pretty high, including in areas like drug addiction, alcohol dependency, criminality, and suicide. And those social ills tend to spills over into all parts of society, besides the lost value those young men could be contributing. Do we really think they deserve such fates? Or that we really don’t need what they could be contributing?

Whatever the specific arguments or beliefs of any members of the manosphere happen to be, one can be assured that they will be greeted with derision and criticism, and any complaints they have will be taken as proof of their “toxic” nature. And as I understand it, that actually is one of their complaints. That women get a free pass to say anything they want about men and will get praised as heroes for standing up to those male bastards, whereas anything men have to say is treated as childish whining and disgusting sexism.

Historically, men haven’t been encouraged to complain, but to simply grin and bear things. And that seems to be an innate instinct in men. Be strong, keep a stiff upper lip, don’t expose any weakness or it will get taken advantage of. As a result of taking this approach, men aren’t great at expressing themselves. In fact it’s a serious problem when it comes to their physical and mental health. They just aren’t likely to talk about it if something is wrong. And if something is wrong, they’re more likely to express it through aggression or apathy than any other means, and that doesn’t generate sympathy. We feel sympathetic for crying children, not screaming ones, although both are equally upset.

Fortunately, men’s lower level of average neuroticism means that they’re also less bothered by a lot of things. But when they are, which happens a whole lot more than you think, they don’t have the tools to express or deal with it. In fact some of the men I know who are the least emotionally expressive are, in fact, men with fairly deep feelings, but they are unable or unwilling to express them because they’re so far out of their depth in their ability to manage or express them. So they just ignore them and carry on. Or they get angry and aggressive, even destructive or self-destructive. That tension has to go somewhere. And just because they don’t know how to physically or verbally express their emotions doesn’t mean they don’t have them. They might just cope by having a drink or a smoke or starting a fight instead.

I’ve often observed that we don’t recognize similar behavior when it greets us in unfamiliar clothes. Like most men, I have the capacity to hurt my wife’s feelings. And she has the capacity to be emotionally distraught. But she is almost completely unaware of her own capacity to hurt my feelings, and has virtually no capacity to tell when I am emotionally distraught. I think a lot of men and women are fairly good at understanding their own sex and what they’re feeling, but are actually quite bad at assessing the other sex. I suppose that’s why, when I was young, there were so many magazine articles focused on figuring out what the other sex was thinking.

I would certainly be the first to admit that there’s plenty to be unhappy about regarding men. I myself have been in the receiving end of a lot of negative experiences with them. And around the world and throughout history they’ve done some pretty terrible things. If I was looking for a reason to reject or criticize men or want to free myself from them, I wouldn’t have any shortage of good arguments. It’s only my own proximity to the gender that prevents me from doing so. I don’t really believe I, or the human race in general, can get away from or do without masculinity.

I suppose one question worth asking is, is contemporary feminism a rejection of or criticism of masculinity as such? That seems to be what the MGTOW believe. Well, frankly, after taking a good, hard look at the general feeling among feminists, as well as the scholarship that is current and popular in the ideology, and having consulted with some more moderate feminists, I think the answer is yes, absolutely. But they’ve got very good reasons for doing it. So good that it doesn’t really count as sexism, because it’s just true. And therefore the response is merited. A lot of the work of modern feminist theory reads quite a bit like a list of official accusations against an enemy of the state. And I, as a man, am willing to sign the confession.

So, fine, I’m willing to admit that when it comes to having a good reason to want to criticize men, judge them as a group, emancipate yourself from them, even resent them and punish them, there is no shortage of good reasons. And women are doing a bang up job of listing them. One of the growing frustrations of women, however, is their dissatisfaction with the effect this enunciation seems to be having. It just seems to be bouncing off men’s thick heads and leathery hearts. All of this reputation destruction has had some effect on men, but clearly not enough. Men still persist in being men. And every time it seems their day has come or they’ve cleaned up their act, it turns out nothing has changed.

There are several possible explanations. One is that men simply suck, and complaining about it isn’t going to make a tiger change his stripes. Maybe they’re just too inveterate and obstinate and insensitive to care. Or, if men’s flaws are innate and endemic, then it’s possible that women’s objections are just coming off as too general and insurmountable for men to take in properly. I’m reminded of Stoic the Vast gesturing at his son and saying, “You just need to change this.” And his son replying, “But you just pointed to all of me.”

Or maybe men, more traditional and typical men, are feeling jealous of the understanding being granted to certain subgroups, such as homosexual men, criticism of whose typical social and sexual expressions would be considered prejudice and abuse, bringing many women to their defense. And they wonder why their own natural and innate social and sexual proclivities are so inexcusable. Or maybe they’ve seen the way that people respond to criticisms of some racial minorities, arguing that it’s wrong to judge a whole group by the actions of a few, and that making generalizations and drawing negative conclusions about a whole group is rank prejudice. And maybe they wonder why such arguments don’t apply to them, why they’re so much worse, so unworthy of a similar defense and understanding.

It might also be the case that many men just aren’t that interested in listening to blanket criticism from someone who doesn’t even know them and isn’t in any serious relationship with them. Men might care what their mothers think of them, or their girlfriends, but if you’re not part of their intimate social circle, they might wonder why the hell they should listen to you or care what you say, much less be moved or hurt by it.

It’s also possible that men are listening, and this is just the best they can do. One question that might be worth investigating, is whether women are actually capable of recognizing or understanding the effect they’re having on men. If, just for the sake of argument, women had a certain kind of unique power and privilege, and if they actually had the means to affect, control, or even hurt men by means of it, would they be capable to recognizing it?

The question of whether women are capable of recognizing their own capacity to harm others is worth focusing on. I’m sure women are fully aware that they’re capable of hurting one another. But do they believe that they’re capable of hurting men? Is that a fundamental premise in their mind when they’re dealing with men, the idea that they could hurt or harm them or affect them?

I think you could forgive women if the answer is no. It’s not immediately obvious that men can be hurt. In part this is due to a major difference in physical qualities. Men have thicker and more elastic skin that won’t tear or cut as easily. They bruise far less easily. Their larger muscle mass, thicker bones, and larger internal core volume make them more resistant to damage and environmental hazards. And testosterone not only increases aggression, making it easier to ignore threats, it also suppresses anxiety. It’s just much harder to hurt a man, given the same conditions. And that carries forward into their mental attitude and self-understanding. Not only are men less actually vulnerable (in the short run) to harm, they often perceive themselves and are perceived as others as invulnerable to harm.

Many men wouldn’t even admit to themselves that they are vulnerable and could be harmed. Partly because they are unusually resilient, but also because they know somewhere, deep down, that they can’t afford to vulnerable. Life is out to get them, they’re going to facing some scary stuff that would like to eat them up, including other men. And if they show any vulnerability those predators and competitors will sieze on that weakness and devour them. And women won’t respect them or see use in them. They can’t afford to be vulnerable.

One of the strange side effects of both the physical and psychological optimization of men for resistance to danger and harm is that they’re actually far more at risk from it. Men are, statistically, far more at risk of serious harm and far more more short-lived than women. Not just human men, but all male mammals. When you see and hear the colorful displays of the males of many bird species, you might think, “How lovely!” But a more reasonable assessment of risk would reflect, “How much more likely you are to be caught and die dressed and singing and acting like that!”

It’s surely a strange fact that those most likely to suffer harm are those least concerned about it, and those least likely to suffer it are those most concerned. Conscientious people are always worrying and obsessing about whether they did things right, when of course they’re the least likely people in the world to have made a mistake. But in fact that’s why they’re the least likely people, because they spend so much time worrying. Unconscientious people are far more likely to make mistakes, yet are far less concerned about doing so, and in fact make more mistakes for precisely that reason. Men, as a group, are the least safe of the sexes, but feel it the least, and because they feel it less they are the least safe. Women are much more preoccupied with safety, and so they feel their relative insecurity far more. The upside of this preoccupation is that they manage their safety (and the safety of others around them) with much greater care.

The question is, how much do men (and women) buy the hype? How much do men really believe that they can’t be harmed? I would say the answer is “Much less than you think.” Their bravado is necessary. It’s how they deal with and manage their actual vulnerability to the situations they’re going to be put (and put themselves) in. They know they need to fight and “man up”, because if they don’t they will be overcome or left behind or ignored. Other men will crush them and women will forget them. So they have to maintain a strong offense.

It’s harder for me to judge how much women believe the image men project or what impressions they take from their own experience. I know that my wife is almost comically easy to hurt and bruise, and she knows it, and that she also knows that it’s very hard to hurt me in any significant way. And I’m not a particularly robust male, frankly. I’m not even taller than her, and that’s very atypical. Still, she knows she can tell the kids to go ahead and jump on me because I won’t get hurt, while she has to carefully protect herself or suffer immediate and painful bruises. And that understanding structures her whole approach to herself and to me.

I would guess that, for all that women in some ways don’t want to acknowledge the myth of male invulnerability (for many and obvious reasons), they actually deeply assume it far more than they would like to admit. I think deep down they don’t believe, or don’t want want to believe, that they are really capable of harming men. And so they don’t feel any concern in attacking them or inviting others to attack them, because men can’t be hurt.

Maybe this attitude springs from the tendency to generalize from embodied experience to psychology. Maybe the mere daily experience of men as these big, hulking, rhino-like things throughout your life just sells the story to some deep part of your psyche. Maybe the stoic, aggressive, inarticulate, insensitive, or confrontational habits of many men reinforce that impression at a behavioral level.

I think that deep down many women aren’t aware (nor many men for that matter) that they possess the real capability of hurting men. I don’t mean hurt them physically, which obviously they can do if they really try. No, I mean they can hurt them emotionally and psychologically. They are a threat, they can do harm, they are scary, they have power. But because men don’t react or express themselves the way that women do, women can’t recognize it. They can’t see it for what it is. And many men frankly can’t help them much; their own habits are so conditioned around keeping themselves unaware of their own vulnerability.

Women, on the other hand, are optimized for awareness of and communication about their own vulnerability. But as a result it’s hard for them to understand anyone who isn’t. And men aren’t. I once had to have an hour-long argument with my dad during which he got very angry and offended at my prodding, just to get him to admit that he was feeling anxious and worried about something. I once went for weeks in extreme depression, even sinking as low as repeated self-harm, before I realized that no one was ever going to notice it unless I just straight up told them.

Part of the reason for this may be due to the fact that other people are already busy with their own lives and just assume that if anything was really wrong with you that you would tell them, which is not a safe assumption to make about men. And in my own case part of it may have been due to my ability to project a perfect appearance of calmness, joviality, and emotional invulnerability, even in the actual moment when I was trying to explain to someone that I had been cutting my wrists with a knife.

The reduced social connectivity of men might help to explain how something like this happens, but in my own experience even close friends, my wife, and family members who saw me on a daily basis were unable to tell that anything special was wrong with me. And I’m a very communicative and emotionally intelligent man, comparatively, who has a lot of personal awareness also hasld a preponderance of female friends. So I was probably positioned better than most men to be able to share my feelings.

In a way, I’m not sure that either men or women know what to do with male vulnerability. Men don’t know how to express it and women don’t know how to interpret it. Distress in men is often manifested through aggression rather than anxiety. But we’re not used to interpreting aggression in that way, as an equivalent sign to anxiety. We usually interpret it as you being a freaking jerk. And I’m not here to argue that all the aggression of bullies is really just a cry for love and a reflection of their inner turmoil. Plenty of bullies are simply aggressive, antisocial psychopaths who were never socialized properly and who think they really are better than you and don’t care what happens to you, so long as it pleases them. But some aggressive reactions are the result of genuine distress, trying to find a way to escape or to change things so the pain will go away. When something frustrating and threatening gets in men’s way, the first instinct of most of them is to attack it. Knock it down, make it go away.

How we choose to deal with this kind of reaction will greatly affect the costs it extracts from us, as well as who bears them. Some men turn their aggression on themselves. And men have a great track record at winning this confrontation; their successful suicide rate is the highest in their class. Some men will medicate, to smother their feelings and distract themselves. This tends to draw them further and further down into a cul de sac of self-dissolution and distraction, an alienation from the harsh reality of others and most especially from themselves. They suffer an enormous loss of productivity and become drags on society and the people around them, instead of contributors. The third possibility is that they neither avoid nor absorb their own aggression, but instead take it out on others. These are the cases we see more, because of their extremity, though the other two cases are more common.

I can’t say, of course, what we should do about all this. The first step in helping is trying to raise some kind of understanding and awareness, I suppose. Men like Warren Farrell have been doing just that, and despite being at one point a hero of the women’s movement, a sort of ideal male ally, his efforts have landed him in the doghouse, cast out of proper society, for his attempts to extend the hand of care to men. Men are the enemy that needs to be defeated. The danger in our midst. You can’t side with them without siding against women. But Dr Farrell has argued, persuasively, that you can’t care about women without also caring about men.

As for myself, I do recognize that there are a lot of dangerous men out there, men that might need to be fought and confronted. I think most men feel this way instinctively about other men and are fully prepared to act on it. We will even kill each other, if necessary. That’s how convinced we are. But this universalization, this idea that it is all men that are a problem, or masculinity as such, men don’t know what to do with that. It takes away the avenue for the appropriate use of masculinity that men’s self-value has always depended on. It’s a kind of wholesale condemnation whose application seem to encourage rather than discourage the male diseases of apathy, self-medication, resentment, and self-harm. It closes off the path to the hero, claiming that it was a lie, and leaves only the archetypes of the self-indulgent adolescent, the harmless child, and the predatory monster as potential pathways for masculine development.

For myself, I feel pity for the men going their own way. That’s a tragedy. It’s like a universal divorce, the death of something precious. And if you can’t admit that it’s a tragedy then you’ve got some serious prejudice to deal with. But I also recognize that going their own way means that, for all that they are pitiable, their exodus may transform these men into enemies that I have to actively resist, confine, or even destroy. In the past, women have usually taken the role of raising the call for restraint and pity, for understanding and reconciliation. Maybe that’s one reason why it’s so sad to see them egging on such pitiless, genocidal attitudes, embracing the pillory and defeat of half the human race. It’s not one of the masculine tendencies we needed more of in the world.

The great question that sex as a feature of the world raises is, why not have just one kind of thing? What is the value, if there is any, of having divergent roles? And what are they and how deep do they go? How flexible are they, and what are the costs and benefits of either embracing or rejecting them?

The first and most obvious matter to note is that we do indeed have two kinds of things that make up the human race, and in fact the vast majority of all species above single-celled organisms. The two sexes exist as a monolithic dyad across billions of years of biological history. And that’s been plainly obvious to all species from the lowliest insects to the great oceangoing cetaceans since time began.

But why have more than one kind of thing? After all, it’s possible to have just one sex (or rather, no sex). And there’s a great reproductive advantage to doing so. You don’t need some other thing to be able to reproduce. That’s the main advantage. Each individual organism is reproductively self-sufficient. The cost of finding a mate is very high. For some species, mating itself is a fairly costly and dangerous affair, and in other species competition for mating is also costly and dangerous. Many species expend enormous amounts of effort upon either proving their worthiness as a mate (bower birds come to mind) or engaging in dangerous and exhausting displays to get attention (loud calls, colorful and outrageous physical features, scent displays, flamboyant behavioral displays).

If you were smart and just trying to stay alive, pretty much all of this would be a really dumb idea. Prarie chickens strut around like they’re on Broadway, rays compete to see who can jump the furthest out of the water (yes, that thing they live in and need to breathe), whales race each other to exhaustion, beetles try to throw each other off trees, deer grow horns (depleting their bodies of essential nutrients) and bang their heads against one another, while giraffes try to knock each other down with their heads. It’s pretty nuts. If you aren’t familiar with the kind of things animals do and have purely to get the attention of the other sex, you should spend some time studying it. If the goal was to stay alive, especially for males, they’re doing a pretty terrible job of it.

Females generally display a much more reasonable set of physical features and behaviors clearly optimized for actual survival, rather than mating. Their success in that arena seems to be more easily assured, so they prioritize practical viability. As a general rule, they don’t make loud calls, don’t engage in absurd behavioral displays trying to be seen, don’t aggressively confront and battle sexual competitors, and don’t have outrageous plumage that makes them easy to spot. Female peafowl, unlike peacocks, are pretty smart. They aren’t painted like a sports car, don’t have a huge costly tail dragging behind them, and don’t walk around shaking their tail and squawking all the time. Instead, they do the business of being a peafowl. Eat, grow, reproduce, don’t get eaten.

So why have two things? It’s almost an absurd handicap to take on, reproductively, even at its most basic level. And in practice it often results in huge extra disadvantages and costs, as we’ve seen. The collective cost of life that comes from being male is, for mammals at least, around a 20% survival penalty. And that’s a massive penalty, considering that the other mammals, the females, are paying an enormous investment to the detriment of their own biological efficiency and survival by having to give live birth to and suckle their young (these being mammals and that being what they do).

If you could factor out the risks and costs attendant to giving birth and suckling young you would have a clearer comparison of the survival differential between the sexes. Comparing males who have never given birth or suckled young and females who have never given birth or suckled young, how much greater is that divide? Especially considering that male animals can’t really get rid of their silly tails or less stable chromosomal structure (females benefit from X gene mosaicism) or horns, or even their loudness, aggression, or territorial protectiveness. Significantly bigger, is the obvious answer.

Pregnancy, birth, and lactation are enormously high-cost endeavors. Basically the highest cost things you could possibly do (apart from the crazy things males do that get them eaten and beaten), as they use up an enormous amount of physical resources and greatly inhibit your ability to survive (basic behaviors like feeding, hiding, and escape become absurdly more difficult). But they are at least in theory, voluntary. And women’s bodies are designed to help them survive them and conserve their lives.

What we think of as sex is largely tangential to the fact of it, or an addendum to it, an outgrowth from the main body. When people think of sex they think of excitement and pleasure. But those aren’t sex, those are the motivational structures we have that drive us to pursue sex and make use of it.

Sex itself, in itself, is the differentiation of genetic, reproductive, and morphological identity into two distinct, complimentary, interdependent, strategic identities. It isn’t merely an increase in the quantity of a species from one to two, but the redefinition of a species as something that is not singular but rather interrelational. We aren’t exactly one thing, we are one larger thing composed out of two distinct, interrelated parts. It’s less like having two fingers and more like having two dimensions. Sex exists, not in parallel, but intersectionally.

But humans think in terms of motivations. We, like all mammals (and many others), are given sex as a fact of existence. The question of motivation, what we do with it, is on our minds quite a bit. We don’t really think that much about the cart we’re pulling behind us, how it got there or where it is going. Nature doesn’t need us to. We’re focused on that juicy carrot. Our desire to make use of the fact of sex. We think of sex as something we do or want, an act we engage in. But it’s clearly nothing of the kind. Sex is something we are, something that engages us and expresses itself through us.

When we inhabit that role most distinctly, when we are most specially focused on chasing the outworkings of our natures, when we stand at the closest point of that intersection between the dimensions of our species, we call that sex. But it is a strange way to talk. As if the mere stimulation of some body part in one way or another constituted sex. That’s a bit like saying that the honking of a car’s horn as it speeds at you is the approaching car. It draws your attention, it engages you, it becomes the means by which your senses relate your mind to it. But pleasure isn’t sex any more than hunger is food.

P. S. By the way, I apologize, this entry was much less exciting that the title would lead you to think. But the answer you might give to the question does relate to this discussion. One answer you could give is “Because it feels great!” But that is, as Aristotle would say, an insufficient causal explanation. It explains your motivations, but not the actual teleology behind them. What are you really being motivated toward? Why is it the case that you are designed to be motivated toward such things, motivated to engage relationally with this other entity, with difference? Those are the really interesting answers.

It’s obvious that friction feels good on the old penis, and the boobs feel soft and pleasant. But to what end? Why bother with all these things we think of as “sex”? Not all other creatures do. Plants don’t feel pleasure, as far as we can tell. Fish don’t seem to, or insects, or protozoa. But they have sex, in the deepest sense. They are possessed of it and by it. They live and survive through and by the intersection of sex in their species. They have the motivation appropriate to rule the kind of creature that they are.

Mammals get extra fancy motivational mechanisms for a host of complex behaviors. But nature doesn’t demand that we understand its goals, only that we respond to them with some degree of consistency. Nature is perfectly happy if you misunderstood the question I posed in the title. That’s the idea, to keep you motivated. Whether you truly recognize to what end you are motivated is beside the point and above your individual pay grade.

I had an odd argument the other day. And it took me almost two weeks of letting it sit in the back of my mind to figure out what was going on. Clearly there was a struggle between me and the other person. I was struggling with what they were trying to do. And they were struggling with what I was trying to do. But I think I see now what was going on. This discussion is going to be even more vague and wandering and hard to understand than my usual entries because I really don’t want to reveal any of the details, for personal reasons. 

   The real crux, the point of disagreement, was over their attempt to linguistically maneuver their position so that it became the default position. The position that could be taken for granted as a baseline. And then any other positions could be evaluated in contrast to it. That was the heart of what they were trying to do. 

   My arguments, which were very difficult for them to respond to, essentially boiled down to a stubborn insistence that they couldn’t take their position for granted and then use that foundation to argue against others. I insisted that their position was a position, a theory, not a given baseline. Everything is a position, including what you take as a baseline “things as they are” to which you’re adding nothing and therefore are not sticking your neck out in any way and are invincibly defensible. 

   And that greatly perplexed them. And there was just a moment, when I wouldn’t back down but kept making the same arguments, when they actually seemed to consider them for a moment. “Then how are you supposed to know what to believe?” they asked. “How are you supposed to tell what’s true or decide between anything or make any judgements, if everything is uncertain and everything is a position and nothing can be assumed?” And I sensed that that was a moment of possibility. But unfortunately we got interrupted. And we never got to continue our discussion. 

    Maybe I was being belligerent. But I was also arguing what I knew. I knew that the positions they were arguing for had been challenged many timez, that there were plenty of people with alternative explanations and theories, and that it was only narrowness of focus that made them think that their own position was anything like a default. 

   But what really struck me were two things. First, the resentful nature of their objections. The sense that I was taking something necessary and solid away from them, and that that was a kind of absurdity. Didn’t I see that I was removing the foundations of thought? And the second thing I noticed was their 

fear. That, someone having decided to stand outside their solid position and declaring it to be as much a sargasso island as the others they perceived and criticized around them, they seemed to consider for a second that might actually be right. And if that was true, where could anyone stand? What if there was no solid ground? What kind of awful world was I suggesting? 

   It is a terrifying prospect. The suggestion that our mental frameworks float unsteadily on a sea of undifferentiated and shifting experience, each a lonely island untethered to anything but our own subjective experience. Relativism deals with this terror simply by embracing it. It accepts the sea and the uselessness of seeking anything other than the reality of our own entanglement, and makes that the measure of solidity. Since you’ve given up the idea of a fictional tether to some imagined solid ground, a bold heart can embrace the solidity and finitude of relativism as all the solidity and all the infinity of reality we will ever need or know. If there is no all, then any part is enough to be all that matters. 

    Not that I actually agree with relativism or subjectivism as positions, despite seeming to argue for them in this case. But sometimes you have to break down your false assumptions before you become able to ask the questions that actually matter. A method that takes it own premises unthinkingly for granted and uses them to criticize other theories can never be really useful. It not only fails to understand its opponents, because it has not truly entertained their alternative premises, it does not even understand itself, because it never exposed its own premises. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re wrong, only that they don’t really know why they’re right. 

   I’m fact, the question of what to do when we actually become aware that there are alternative explanations for the same phenomena is one that has been very thoroughly appreciated and explored for quite a long time. That is the very problem that gave birth to philosophy. The Greeks were quite aware of it as an issue to be addressed. That doubt, that concern, that problem, is the beginning of philosophy. But reaching the solution requires first an appreciation of just how difficult our position actually is.

    Socratic wisdom is the beginning of philosophy because it is the moment when you realize that you don’t know as much as you think you did, and stop taking it for granted that you already have all the answers and so don’t have to really think about them or engage in any kind of examination or discussion. 

   So what did the Greeks propose as a solution to the problem that Socrates forced into their consciousness? Because the realization of the problem didn’t break them or cause their understanding to crumble. Quite the opposite. It causes it to expand at an unprecedented rate. But how?

   Logic, dialogue, reason, discussion. Instead of just taking a position for granted, they learned to take it apart and put it back together. Learned to identify the underlying and hidden premises behind an argument, the bones that provide the solid foundations that allow it to do its work. Learned to identify the connective tissue, the kinds of leaps and deductions being made that led to the conclusions, that connected one solid structure to the next. I could extend the metaphor to learning to recognizing and trimming away the fat that obscures the underlying meat, but by now you should get the idea.

    Concepts are built much like living bodies, because in a way they are. They animate, they extend, they grow, they have order and purpose and a design of intelligence to them, just as all living things do. And you can address such constructs just as you address a living body. You can play physician of the soul. You can take apart your subject and see how it is constructed. You can compare it with other subjects. And you can observe your patient in living, embodied action and see what it is capable of and what it can do and what it grows into.

    Far from being cold and abstract and mathematical, such rational examination is an exploration of the very nature of life. It is the pursuit and understanding of beauty. It is the love of that which brings life and health and growth. 

    Wisdom, the pursuit of the philosophers, is more than mere knowledge. There is a deeper, living, embodied dialectic to it. There is a struggle, a process, a balance, a union, a tension, a love. It’s not merely a knowing, it is a relationship. It’s not static, not crystallized or ossified. It is alive, an animating spirit that walks. 

    For all that I wax eloquent about the greatness of wisdom, there are many small and simple things that people can learn to do to start to follow it and to sort their way through the chaos that confronts us. Some of them are more like techniques and others are more like virtues.

    Logic is useful. The ability to identify hidden and unspoken premises, the ability to recognize fallacies and spot inherent contradictions, those are all wonderful skills. Imagination and humility are also very useful. You can only examine what you can conceive, and recognizing your own limitations and mistakes is part of the path to self-knowledge that keeps such wonderful yet flawed creatures as ourselves on a sensible trajectory. Learning to be afraid of the right things is one classical definition of wisdom, and is quite practical and not excessively scholastic.  Learning to love the right things and see their beauty is another virtue worth cultivating. 

   I don’t think you have to be a genius to make sense of the world. Or to be right about it. Or to walk a proper path through it. In fact in some cases it might be a hindrance to be a genius, we have such a proclivity for falling in love with our own theories and constructions. We are often willing to bend and break the world to preserve them rather than give them up. But we do owe many thanks to those geniuses through the ages who have helped make things clearer and done some of the work for us. They’ve helped to blaze a trail we can follow. 

    The interlocutors of Socrates often walked away frightened, resentful, and disappointed. They often saw their discussions with him as exercises in futility and disappointment, with him having stripped away everything they were certain of and leaving them with nothing. And yet these sorts of discussions were the beginning of philosophy, attempts to set the feet of the Greeks upon the path of wisdom. I think the ultimate reaction of Socrates’ efforts shows how much people appreciated it. 

  Should we conceal negative facts about specific groups, such as minorities? This is a growing question in a time where we are desperate to report everything bad about certain groups and nothing bad about others, while trumpeting everything good about some groups and saying nothing good about others.

   I think Thomas Sowell put it best. Ignoring reality doesn’t help you avoid it, and it sure doesn’t help you fix if. And focusing on your pride can often get in the way of making use of the tools others have used to improve their own lives. 

   As hard as it is to face certain realities about ourselves or about whole groups, just because you decide to accept them as real doesn’t mean you can’t do something about them. It doesn’t make them destiny for a particular individual, or even for a whole group. As he once said, there isn’t a predetermined amount of criminality or lack of education or illegitimacy. My own family had virtually no education two generations ago, and by the next generation had educations ranging from high school to doctorate degrees. That’s a pretty big leap, from nothing ever to the maximum possible in the space of just fifty years. 

    We have far more control over many things about ourselves than we think, because we aren’t groups, we are individuals. And we can choose to think and act as individuals and take control of our own lives. And we can choose what group behaviors to follow and imitate. 

   Although we will always be ourselves, we do get to decide what to do with that and how we will use what we are given. And that’s an immense amount of power. Even whole cultures can be transformed radically in relatively short amount of time, if the cultural passion for it is strong enough. I believe Sowell pointed to the Scottish enlightenment and the acquisition of literacy by black Americans after the Civil war as quite shocking examples of rapid cultural change. And there have been many other rapid cultural transformations. 
   Of course you can also lose an enormous amount in a short amount of time too. And I believe Charles Murray has argued elsewhere that that’s something that’s happening rapidly to large sectors of white America. You can have a rapid negative transformation as well as a positive one. 
    It’s useful to face reality. If you can see it, you can do something about it. The real question is, to what degree can you address the problem, and how quickly, and by what means?
    Liberals generally would argue the answer is: yes, now, and through government policy and the application of legislative, regulatory, social, and legal force. Conservatives would generally argue the answer is: possibly if you’re really committed to it, slowly and steadily, and by working at it diligently and investing in it and making wise choices in your own life. I think there’s merit in both approaches. The second is more likely to succeed if it has the support of the first, but the first will achieve nothing if it does not have the support of the second. 

   There is an unacknowledged problem arising from the reality of gender transitioned people as a technological product. Which for sport especially is a problem. They aren’t another sort of human, another gender or race or phenotype. They’re something we made and maintain with medical technology, that we only recently invented and is being used to seriously and deliberately alter their innate physical characteristics.

   If you’re going to allow technological products into sports then you’ve opened the doors to a seismic shift in the conditions of competition. Doping is only the first issue that it becomes almost impossible to maintain a consistent position about. 

    This, of course, applies to any transgender person who has had any kind of modification to align their body with their desired sexual identification. Entirely different questions are raised by transgender athletes with no technological modifications. Men with unmodified male bodies who identify as females, and the reverse. At the very point that you decide to let them compete unmodified, without technological alternation, you raise the fundamental question of what it means to have men’s and women’s sporting categories, and why we even have them.

    If they don’t reflect essential, identifiable, competitively meaningful physical differences and characteristics, for what reason are we excluding anyone from competing freely in whatever sport they want? And why do we even have gender segregated sports? What exactly are we separating, and why? 

   There aren’t any coherent answers to these questions. Or at least, no answers that don’t make a mess of everything that already exists. What kind of basis are we left with for discriminating between male and female, other than self-identification? And if that’s the only valid criteria, why on earth should we have segregated sports based on differences of mere identification? Isn’t that like having seperate Olympic events for declared Democrats and Republicans? 

   This, then, is the dilemma. Either there are innate physical differences, and it’s necessary to conform to them as a transgender who wants to compete, or physical differences are insignificant and its only identification that matters. But the second option, as I’ve said, calls into question the whole basis for sex segregated sports, and the first makes a mess of the Olympic prohibition against using overt technological means to achieve the physical requirements to compete.

    Why have a prohibition against doping, hormones, and other forms of technological modification of the body, if conformity to gender norms by means of technological modification is justified and allowed? And where do you draw the line, either among who should be allowed modification or over how much modification it’s OK to do?

    Why shouldn’t everyone have access to similar modifications, on the argument that they are disadvantaged by being sufficiently masculinized or feminized within their own gender, in a way that is not in line with their conception of what and who they should be like? If you can juice your androgens, why can’t I? If you can compete in class with physical advantages, such a larger bones and more fast twitch muscles, thanks to the ability of technological modifications to make you eligible, why can’t someone else? 

    It’s wishful thinking to believe that you can radically alter the territory of eligibility without creating some conflicts. Especially when it comes to such essential criteria. My point isn’t to offer solutions, merely to point out the problems that inevitably arise and must be resolved. Regulations around gender and around accepted uses of technology are fundamental to the rules of play in sporting competitions. We can choose to rewrite the book if we wish. But it still has to be a coherent book in order for the game to work. 

I think the unspoken concern here is the same concern women have with men. That if we’re not the same, we might be worse. If black people aren’t the same, indistinguishable in their qualities and capabilities, from whites, they might be worse. Which is itself a problem, because, first, you’re tacitly assuming that there aren’t flaws or tradeoffs or limitations to being white (or male); and second, by arguing that you are in essence the same with interchangeable capacities (what we call character, distinctiveness), then you must have an equal share in their flaws and limitations. You can’t argue that you’re exactly the same, but also better. That’s incoherent. If the races are interchangeable, then we need to correct for the preponderance of black musicians and athletes and preachers just as much as the preponderance of white physics professors and insurance executives and crab fishermen.

There’s no sense in arguing that you’re just the same as someone AND that you also have certain special and distinct qualities that justify you occupying a unique territory. That’s trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe there are some genetic and cultural and historical inheritances we all possess that have some similar emergent results, especially when all three line up favorably, and especially at the tail ends of distributions, where the extreme and rare and highly visible individuals exist, people like Cole Porter or Bill Gates or Michael Jordan. Most of us live in a broadly overlapping middle space of our race and gender and nationality.

And maybe those exceptional individuals aren’t representational or average and aren’t a natural default, and it takes all those genetic, cultural, and historical elements lining up perfectly to make a life like that possible. Maybe instead of being afraid of how we’re different we could learn to love and value those differences, both in ourselves and in others, and be thankful for everything we gain from one another’s uniqueness.
The great thing is, there is wonderful flexibility available today, more than at any time in history. You can learn about the cultures and history and abilities of a vast historical and cultural array of all kinds of different people, and if you feel a desire or affinity for them, to seek them and aquire them and participate in them, you have unprecedented opportunities, compared to any point in the past. On the basis of available information and experience alone.

And so Glen Loury and Thomas Sowell can be giants of economics, rubbing elbows with Milton Friedman and Adam Smith and John Keynes, despite their radically differing backgrounds. It’s easier than ever today to belong to a group and a heritage, yet still find your own individual distinctiveness. And Western civilization helped give us that opportunity.

I’m descended from peasant farmers. We never demonstrated a special talent for anything but dying young and uneducated, right up to my grandparents’ generation. But my dad and brother are both doctors. No one saw that coming in all the long generations of struggling to survive. No one guessed it was possible. Gratitude for the abilities and accomplishments of others is useful. Ambition to match or to join in or exceed those accomplishments is useful. Resentment isn’t. If what you want is to actually push yourself forward.

If you really do care about a particular quality and/or trait and do want to increase it within your group, there is something you can do about that. There are two fairly rapid means to alter the existing makeup of a group. One big one is sexual selection. Take a generation or two and select specifically for the trait that you want, favor the sort of partners that you want your children to be like, and within a fairly short timescale you can radically alter and adapt the distribution of qualities in a group. You just have to make sure that you are maintaining a culture that favors and selects for those qualities, wherever they can be found.
And because specific individuals and therefore whole cultures are somewhat malleable within themselves, and have qualities they can favor and develop, you can also work on the nurturing side of life to affect your outcomes by developing and promoting a social and familial culture that really values and encourages certain traits.
If you want to be represented more in academic or financial fields, if you want to cultivate intelligence or education as a trait, you can do that. You can maximize your nurturing and development of that trait by making it a primary cultural value and really seeking to encourage your youth to strive and compete and develop themselves in this area.
You can also look at what conditions and cultural qualities other groups cultivate that have helped foster development in this area. The Jews are around one standard deviation more intelligent then everybody else, and heavily overrepresented among doctors, financiers, and academics, and part of that is no doubt genetic, but there is also likely to be a cultural component that complements and develops those capacities that can be imitated and acquired and perhaps even used to drive the further development of the genetic component.
As more and more whites, especially in certain areas, fall behind other races, it also becomes apparent that whiteness alone isn’t sufficient to produce or maintain certain sorts of qualities and advantages. Intelligence and the capacity for positive intellectual and financial outcomes can be lost as well as gained.
What doesn’t work is doing none of these things and then complaining when nothing changes, then asking people to alter the outcomes and standards by force to compensate. That has never worked for anyone, ever. Especially if you’re up against people, like many Asians for example, who are willing to be truly competitive and strive to foster and master the skills necessary to maximize their accomplishments in these areas. If they’re willing to pay the price and make the investment, then chances are that they will succeed out of proportion. No one becomes great at something by lowering their standards for it and investment in it. Trying to shift the definitions and measurements so doing well means something less than it used to will only reduce the future likelihood of developing those capacities.
Personally, I don’t have the kind of aggressive ambition and dedication that many other people, and even whole cultures, seem to have. So I don’t expect to become a CEO. But I do have things that I care about and strive to develop in my children. I have my heroes that I push on them. And they happen to include Thomas Sowell and Glen Loury and John McWhorter and Condoleezza Rice. Because those are the sort of people I want them to become.

Not because of their race, but because of their character and wisdom, which are it confined by racial boundaries but are available to all as a fundamental human inheritance. Those are the people who have the traits I admire and want to foster. And I chose a wife who likes those sort of people too. So we’re doing our bit through culture and sexual selection to select for that heritage.

What I hear from those in favor of the liberalization of thought (in this context, religious thought), and their criticisms of those who err, as they see it, in their certainty and systematization. The skeptical, or at least effete, criticism of passion and conviction. 

A: I’m not taking anything for granted or adding anything. My position isn’t a position, it’s just given.” They’re the nutballs with extreme positions. 

B: I don’t have to wrestle with or engage with any of that discussion or be subject to it; I’m free of doubt, because 1. I already have the answer or 2. I know that there isn’t an answer. 

    Skepticism and absolutism are both easy and convenient. They both make an end run around the trouble of realizing that you have a position, and the resulting need to struggle with other people and their positions, by claiming that there isn’t any struggle to be had, and that their position isn’t a position.

    Absolute relativism and absolute absolutism aren’t really that different from one another. Both are a kind of tyranny of the self. Both carve out a space around your own personal feelings and beliefs and ideas that gives you the breathing room we all so desperately crave. One of a perfect defense, and the other is a perfect offense. One keeps out all intrusion because any invasion would be such a big intractable problem, and the other preempts all intrusion by refusing to grant any legitimacy or significance or meaningful claims to outsiders. In fact they’re both doing these things, they just do it differently. The attitude is different, but the trajectory is the same. 

    The only kind of challenge either approach admits is a kind that isn’t really a challenge. Nothing that truly differs or is opposed is actually considered as a possibility. If real, substantive counterfactuals were let in, they would tear down their neat little system. So people who want to play the game can’t be allowed to make any real claims.

   Both approaches make a claim to an uneven playing field. One holds up certainty as a shield. The other hold up uncertainty as a shield. Which tactic you choose depends largely on two things: 1. Your personality, and 2. Your context.

   If you’re the sort of person who favors certainty, who needs it, then you’ll use it to protect yourself against uncertainty and as a club against other opposing certainties. And if you’re a person who fear conviction and favors uncertainty and needs that freedom and space, then you’ll use it as a defense against certainty. Both of them fear difference and it’s resulting conflict and cope with it through avoidance or confrontation.

    These basic types can gives way to some interesting evolved subtypes. A more certain person who has seen the limits of too much certainty may be able to fight against it without reservation in part because they take it for granted. They have a hard time conceiving what it would be like to be truly skeptical and rebellious, so it’s easy enough for them to argue a bit of skepticism when they assume that’s the bedrock, default position that people will default to and that it just needs a little softening. If you’re coming from a point in history where a given position has become corrupt and ossified and over-structured, it’s easy to be in favor of liberalization.

     But if you’re coming from anarchy and wilderness, you will likely see the value of some structure. Whether your myth is a return to the wilderness or the establishment of civilization depends very much on your personal tastes and context. And what is needed does, in fact, vary. The problem is when people get stuck on one and can’t see the value of the other, or the very similar dangers of both. 

   I perfectly see the irony in arguing against skepticism and doubt and the systematizers, when I’m one of the most naturally skeptical people I know and loathe the limits and controls of the systematizers. But in fact, my resistance comes from a very long and deep personal journey into the limitations and pathologies of my own natural tendencies. People like my wife or mother-in-law, who are both very orderly, can toy with disorder and skepticism and use it as a defense against the pressure of the structure and the social influence of others (which they feel far, far more than I do). They can do this because their own hearts are safe in the bosom of assuming orderliness as a natural default position, one that needs tempering with a little wilderness.

   I happen to have a much clearer idea of just how dangerous someone like me actually is. Because I don’t take their values or position for granted. To me it is a position, not a default, and one I don’t feel obligated to support or agree with, unless I can be properly convinced that it’s correct on its own merits. I don’t take for granted that their stable, civilized positions have any necessary value or valid claims, unless they can be proved to my satisfaction. And I can see the appeal in flaunting and violating them just for the hell of it.

   And because I know how many people there are like me, and how few are like my wife and mother-in-law, I see a greater danger in their adjusted positions than they do (which were developed in reaction to themselves). Maybe they’re not a danger for them, but objectively, if they were handed off and applied to others of a different temperament, a more usual one. Well then.

    Descartes embraced a very intense skepticism as part of his philosophy. But deep down he was a man of great faith. He assumed that his skepticism was safe because he believed that his faith was assured and would be proved and ligitimized by the questioning process. He believed he could give up his faith because he would build back to it. 

    Which was all well and good and rather courageously faithful, in a way. But his students that came after him kept the skepticism and dropped the faith. In different hands, his tools for exploring his faith became tools for deconstructing, removing, and deligitimizing it. What was meant to be a capstone of belief became a cornerstone of doubt. Yeah, yeah, they said, all that stuff about the limits of human understanding and the subjectivity of belief is great. But not as a curative for intellectual hubris. As a foundation for intellectual skepticism and subjectivism. The medicine became the meal. The antidote for authoritarianism became anarchism. 

    Well, “He didn’t mean it that way,” is the usual response given. Which is often the retort of those who have watched their own politics or ideological wagons get seriously out of control. “We didn’t mean it like that.” And usually there is some truth to this. There were unacknowledged premises and assumptions and prejudices and conditions, against which the position and technique was being applied, that were deeply central to the beliefs and assumptions of the person making the argument. There was an untold second half of the story, an unheard other side of the argument that was being responded to.

    And unfortunately most people fail to imagine the possibility of someone who hears your arguments and believes them but doesn’t share your same assumptions and prejudices and conditions. People don’t realize that the balanced element of their position isn’t actually contained in their position, but rather in the tension it holds with another assumed position. And that this is what most people are doing most of the time.

   Very few ideologies shoot right down the middle of two fully articulated positions whose assets and faults, virtues and dangers are fully appreciated. Very few people can even identify, much less imagine themselves out of, their own most easy and natural assumptions. And it’s very hard for people to see how their own ideas could be wrong or go wrong.

   That’s partly because they are correct that the positions they have taken do represent a kind of balance or curative. But they fail to realize that they contain assumed counterfactuals against which they are balancing, and that their balance or curative would cease to be such the moment that assumed counterfactual was removed. So the problem is that they’re right. They are in the proper position, applying appropriate leverage. But they’re wrong, or at least dangerous, so long as they don’t realize that their position, and their ability to maintain that position, is dependent on the existence of an assumed counterweight. And if they actually succeeded with their arguments, truly succeeded, so those became the default, their weight would quickly pull the next person down into a new kind of extremity on the other side of the issue (into anarchy instead of tyranny, for example). 

   And because the sort of battles we fight and the sorts of things we take for granted are in large part due to our personality, it means we will keep leaninging into them, regardless of how the balance or conditions are shifting. Open people will keep pushing for liberalization even when it’s becoming a problem. Orderly people will keep trying to add structure, even when it’s becoming a problem. And people who have been burned by one or the other will likely keep fighting them, fighting the old enemy that hurt them, even after the battle has been won, and will keep pressing the assault until they drive the enemy out of territory we actually need them to occupy and manage.

   We are very bad at knowing when to stop fighting, even when to stop winning. Because we take either our own position for granted, or we take our enemy’s challenge to our position for granted. And people who fail to see the value and power in their opponent’s position will fail to preserve its balancing function when they overcome it, and so imbalance and overcome their own. 

   Some people fall back on skepticism and ignorance at this point, a kind of false humility that spares you the effort of engagement. You don’t know what you think you know, I don’t know what I think I know. If we would all just chill out and stop trying to push our beliefs on other people, we would all be better off. But that’s a fallacy. You don’t know that they shouldn’t push their beliefs even if you don’t like them, even if they get unbalanced or offensive. They might have good reasons. In fact the process of pushing and engaging and pushing back may be the very mechanism of enlightment, as well as the fountain of ignorance, extremism, and discomfort. 

    You can’t simply argue skepticism as a convenient assumption to dismiss the valid claims of someone else’s beliefs. You have to actually test and discuss them and work through them and figure out what can and cannot be supported, or what is most likely or best supported and reasonable, and test the practical outcomes if in real world practice, if at all possible. You have to take the perspectives of others seriously. You can just dismiss them and their inherent tensions and and conflicts as meaningless quibbles a priori.

   If there is no basis for determining any of these things and everything we say comes down to subjective differences in perspectice and interpretation, then what are we talking about? What is the point of discussion except to assert our own prejudices and assumptions with no valid basis for arbitration or competition or testing?

    Skepticism is a very convenient belief to cite to defang the arguments of others. As is provincial absolutism. Both are very good at shutting down discussion. Both are remarkably convenient, and both have a habit of catering to and preserving our personal tastes and desires from the discomforting incursions of others. And both are lazy and risk-averse and antithetical to the true nature of life and growth. 

    I’m perhaps a bit more sympathetic toward someone who believes something in spite of, or in full knowledge of, the less desirable consequences of those beliefs for themselves than I am toward someone who believes something that is terribly convenient for their own preferences. There’s a kind of courage and conviction to the first, even when it’s wrong, that you have to respect. There’s a consistency. There’s an acknowledgment that holding a real truth as your belief means it may demand something of you, something you may not want or like or prefer. It isn’t a thornless rose.

    But beliefs that shift and adapt themselves to whatever it is comfortable and agreeable and easy and popular to believe are hard to separate as actual beliefs from accommodations to social or personal tastes and incentives. And such criticisms can easily be argued by either side of a dispute. However much one position may seem more or less noble or more or less indulgent and easy, these judgements are not very illuminating when used as a guide for objective truth or falsity.

    People have such differing and contradictory desires and fears, even within their own minds. We all have our tangled reasons for doing and believeing what we do. The argument that people only believe things that are to their own advantage, and so therefore if they believe something that is to their disadvantage, then it must be true, is highly specious. For one, it ignores the actual complexity and bloody-mindedness of humans. We are rational. But we’re also profoundly irrational. And we aren’t simple, we aren’t just one thing. We contain many needs, desires, interests, and conflicts. A belief may be worth embracing despite being to some disadvantage if it advantages us in some other more significant way (for us). And because we don’t not know the inner details of other people’s lives and minds, and often hardly even know our own, it is often not clear at all what is really driving those deep judgements and motivations.

   The degree to which I could say that I’m courageous, if the social consequences of taking a certain stance or action don’t really matter to me, is in doubt. You may not have located what I am afraid of and really care about and do see as significant. We’re all afraid of a hundred different kinds of things, and simply by instinct some more than others. The real question, which isn’t always easy to answer, is which should we be afraid of, in a given situation? Or, more positively, what should we desire and love? Because we have many desires, and many are in conflict with one another.

    So it suffices to say that I’m skeptical of evaluating anyone’s beliefs purely on the basis of their apparent motivations or intentions. Even my own. 

On of the most cult-like elements of wokeism, or critical theory, or whatever you wish to call it, is its persistence in seoereting you from your culture by any means necessary. It’s adherents are orphans of time, isolated and cut off from their family, their culture, their history, all the traditional anchors of the self. Your history exists to be criticized and deconstructed, your family must be challenged and deconstructed. You’re told of your your family, your history, your life, your cultural artifacts, not that they might be sinful, but that the only question is finding the sin and exposing it. They are all inherently sinful. And your job is to be the inquisitor taking them apart.

This is a typical tactic of all cults. People must be separated and orphaned from their traditional identity structures, as they might provide competition or refuges against the annointed vision. I’ve known people who did fall into cults, and one of the first tasks undertaken was to separste them from their parents, so they have to look to the group for what their parents were providing. And so on to friends, community, culture, and all other competing loves. So all other refuges and avenues of stability and sanity and meaning and self are eliminated as options. So the full self can be devoted to the cause and the society to be, the new structure, the new history, new family, new culture.

That’s why socialism has so often emphasized the breaking down of local and familiar affiliations. As long as you had loyalty to someone just because they were your father, you might not inform on them to the state. So long as you had loyalty to someone just because they were your neighbor or countryman, you might not consent to letting them be purged as an agent of oppression. And both of these were considered serious problems in the Soviet Union. Familial attachment and community attachment were an impediment to the state’s monopoly on your love, loyalty, meaning, and morality.

Never mind that the state can’t really love you or care about you as your parents do. The promise is there. These are things standing in the way of your happiness, and you can’t reach that paradise or vision of righteousness unless you can let go of all lesser attachments and subject them to the rule of the vision.

There’s a sacrificial instinct in humanity, an understanding that giving up something now can help you secure something better. And the more precious the sacrifice, the more pleasing it is, the more devout you are, the more righteous you become, and the more you do to advance the kingdom. And that instinct isn’t exactly wrong. But it can certainly go wrong. That’s the trickiest thing about it.

Wokeism demands human sacrifice. It is a greedy and devouring and merciless god. Unlike the Christian God who pays the penalty for us, who forgives us and loves us and provides the ram, wokeism possesses no such mercies and offers no such redemption. Only sacrifice, forever and of all. Sin is innate in all things. It is not a question of if you and your family and culture and gender and history were sinful, but only how. And only exposure and crucifixion can cure them, only fire, only sacrifice.

The sacrifices must be continual. You must always be giving something or someone up to show your devotion. In the big things and in the small things. Bring your movies, your books, your jokes, your music, your friendships, your food, your profession, your government, your money, your speech. Bring it all so that it can be offered up, in hope that the perfume of it will rise up to the great judge, and that it will satisfy her, so that she will pass over you for today.

For she is a devouring and perfecting flame that promises all and devours all, a god of guilt who judges all the powers and products of man and demands they be given up, because only in her hands can they be pure and righteous and just. Only when all differences and all particulars, all earthly loyalties and all freedoms are consumed and made obesiant to her, will all be perfect. Then all will be as one, in her. This is the kindness she offers, the equality, the love.

And her name is Ammit.

    A man can’t be too impressed by a woman’s status, because it usually means that she is just further out of his reach. A woman can be impressed by a man’s status, because she has the chance to capture and secure it. For a man high staus only makes a woman less available, because she won’t be likely to consider anyone with less status than she has, and will only be looking up.

   Men don’t put much stock in a woman’s status. They care about who she is, in a more immediate sense. First, that she’s a woman, period. That’s an innately valuable trait, compared to men, whose value is either contingent or competitive. Second, how available and interested is she? Is she willing to give you the time of day, or at least not reject or ignore your advances outright? Because that’s worth a heck of a lot too. That’s already enough to make most women worthy and valuable prospects to most men. An innately valuable woman who doesn’t immediately reject you, who doesn’t think you’re scum or some sort wild beast? That’s pretty great. 

   Add on top of that beauty and charm and the multi-dimensional fertility of femininity, which most women possess more than enough of for most men, and you’ve got a treasure worth seeking. You can see why men swipe right three times as often as women. Now, if you add to all that some compatibility and mutual similarities (if you can afford to be picky about such things rather than having to live with and adapt to them), you’ve struck gold. At that point you’re just gilding the lily. Most men would have already been convinced of the intrinsic desireability of most women long before they got that detailed and picky. The question for men isn’t whether they like a woman, it’s how high-value of a woman can they get to like them. 

Don’t underestimate the value of playing a role. It means you’ve found a way to become integrated into something bigger than yourself. It may not engage the totality of who you are, but what can? The better the role, the more it will be able to do this, in time. But there is a special kind of value to be found in learning to play that role and fulfill that purpose within a larger interconnected context, in submitting yourself to something bigger than yourself.

One way that roles go wrong is due to people trying to wield the power of a role without being willing to accept its limitations and downsides. When you try to cheat the role, when you refuse to pay the price, when you refuse to accept its limitations and instead seek to find a way around them or avoid accepting the support and checks and counterbalances that role requires, that’s when roles go wrong. That’s when they can become abusive and distorting, either to us or to those we affect through them.

Roles are something we are forever pushing back on and reinterpreting through the lens of our own uniqueness and limitations and requirements, and they in turn are constantly pushing back on us with their uniqueness and limitations and requirements.

The mind is organized around proportions, not absolute values. I’ve already talked about how ancient measurements were like this. Judgements about wealth and status also seem to be calibrated this way. Not by absolute values, but by relative values. So today I want to talk about music.

Music is similar. The tonal scale is fairly universal. Ancient shell instruments have been cleaned and repaired and are still able to play, and essentially play largely the same tones as a modern recorder. Why? Because the notes, however and whoever and whenever we conceive them, aren’t specific sound values, they are expressions of relationship and proportion. And the understanding of those relationships is universal and durable.

After all, in traditional musical structure, found the world over, our twelve notes repeat again and again. Clearly from the perspective of actual harmonics, all those various Cs are all different. They’re different sounds, different frequencies. So what is consistent? Relationships. Intervals. That’s what you play, and why you can transpose the same song into so many keys and hear essentially the same song.

What we hear by nature as tense or resolving or harmonious chords are specific relationships between notes that are universally identifiable, regardless of what time or place you live in. The more harmonious the relationship between two notes, the simpler the mathematical relationship is between them. We hear relationships between frequencies, the structure of ratios between them, as the defining values of musical notes. Not the frequencies themselves. Those are the tokens. But it is at the level of type, relationship and proportion, that we really hear and judge music.

Not that other people in the past and in other cultures and even within Western culture haven’t approached music in ways that are structurally different. A larger tonal scale, more preference for dissonance, sometimes even using overlapping methods for tonal coordination. But we still recognize it as music and it is intelligible to us, if not familiar. Because it still operates according to the same principles.

Compromises, of course, have to be made when you’ve only got two hands and ten fingers and a certain sort of ears. There are limits on what humans can actually discern. Tiny differences slip by unnoticed, so we only define tonal differences within terms of relationships we can easily perceive. You can cover all the really important and obvious tonal relationships with a fairly simple system, the one that most everyone uses.

When people started carving holes into conch shells tens of thousands of years ago, it seemed fairly self-explanatory to them what intervals needed to be covered to be useful for making music. And we’re still using those major intervals today. And that explains the universality of music across time, culture, location, and language.

Enough for now about music theory. The important thing is that the mind is organized around relationships, around abstract conceptions of harmony and disharmony and proportion, rather than specific values. This made enormous sense in a world before standardized measurement. And standardized measurements are still much more arbitrary and relational than we think.

Measuring by relationships allows our judgements to be more broadly applicable across differing circumstances. Because they’re not tied down to a specific value, the values and even the things being measured can change and adapt and be swapped in and out. The tokens change, the language changes. But the underlying structure, the relationships, stay the same.

Different cultures prefer women who are heavier or thinner. But certain things like proportions transcend these specifics and are valid across all these widely differing cases. In language, the words change, the words are the most arbitrary elements; the grammar, the relationship between the words and how we use them, is where the real structure is. So long as the grammatical relationships are maintained, almost any set of arbitrary words can be used. The musical notes are like this. So long as you maintain the same intervals, a song sounds essentially the same played with any set of notes.

Human freedom is like this. The tokens have wonderful flexibility. But the types stay stable and consistent. We fall into them without thinking. They are part of the real underlying architecture of the mind and the world. Reason itself is organized like this. The integers can be switched in and out and change. But the principles are firm and allow us to apply what is actually fixed and intelligible, a kind of ideal of harmonious relationship, to any set of values.

The main way this perspective differs from how many people think about the mind is that it relocates what is fixed and what is the organizing and guiding measure to the level of something more like an intelligent principle than any specific set of rational integers.

This actually has enormous relevance to the problem of how a human brain can be built and how it functions. We tend to think of DNA as a blueprint, and that the way it is used is a concrete and fixed process, a machine, a computer laid out in copper and silicon, with everything in distinct and specified positions laid out by the instructions. But the data contradicts this conception. Even for a functioning brain, studies have shown that the likelihood that the same set of neurons that were activated when a memory was accessed will be activated the next time, given a month’s time, is only one in twenty.

The structure of the brain is constantly shifting, not fixed. Memories aren’t encoded in one specific place that stays fixed for all time. Rather, they seem to drift and reorganize in their actual specific embodiment, while the organizing principles and algorithms persist and remain. So even when you’re dealing with a complete brain with a fixed neural structure, the way it works and processes and encodes information is not actually properly fixed in the way we usually conceive of such things. Our computers wouldn’t work if the function and positions of its elements were constantly in a state of flux. Imagine if books worked like that!

When it comes to building and designing a brain, the problems are even greater. The simple fact is that, as immense as the data storage capacity of DNA is, there just isn’t enough room in it for the amount of detail necessary to build a human brain. And it’s very important that it be built right. It’s immensely complex, complexity built on complexity, from a single cell up to an integrated whole. And the whole human body has to to support it and work properly for it to work. Your brain has more connections in it than there are stars in the universe. And, as we’ve seen, it is a dynamic and evolving, not a static, system.

You can’t store a blueprint of that complexity within DNA. It simply doesn’t have the capacity. It’s not clear, at this point in technology, that anything does. And humans aren’t all identical; we’re enormously variable and adaptable. With so much innate variation and flexibility of brain structure built into our systems, you would need a method for storing all the possible brain structures and selecting one at random. You simply couldn’t do that with any currently existing data storage system. So how does DNA do it? Simple. It doesn’t store a fixed blueprint. It stores a program. A living algorithm that understands brain building. It doesn’t need specific instructions like those of a Lego set. It just needs to know the higher principles of design and have them properly fixed. Then it can build, and even adapt and alter and readjust, whatever it needs to.

Again, it is not the values, the specific positions, that are fixed, it is the principles of design. The harmonious and functional proportions, the intelligence. And the brain figures out these problems and negotiates them by running experiments and simulations, a process equivalent to testing and thought. It interprets the feedback, measures it against the guiding principles, and adjusts the direction of the process. Which is, at a neural level, much the same as what philosophy does at an ideological level. Bit by bit you build an intelligible and functional system simply by following the universal principles. You test, you experiment, you send out test signals, you evaluate the results, you reject certain directions and turn toward others. You follow the principles of reasoning and navigate your way dynamically through the territory.

What this means for us as humans is that life is both freer and more confined than we imagine. It is much more flexible in its actual constitutional elements than we might have imagined. You can build a decent wheel out of rubber, metal, wood, stone, plastic, frozen newspapers, all kinds of things. But you can’t build a very good wheel out of a cinderblock. Not because it’s made of concrete, not because it’s too light or too heavy, but because it isn’t round. Round in the specific manner, in particular, that is germane to being a wheel. And that’s a far more abstract, yet specific, concept than you might suppose.

The principle of roundness is far more fundamental to the concept of a wheel than the material. Not that materials can’t be more or less optimized to a given use, to the principle of function, the teleology of the thing. And that optimization can be of great significance. But if you don’t have the concept and its teleology clear to begin with, you’re going to be hopelessly fumbling in the dark when it comes to optimization. You won’t be able to judge function properly, you will misidentity the nature and powers of the concept, you won’t be able to detect misalignment, you will blame the wrong factors for failure and success.

Teleology is primary, optimization of materials flows from that higher ordering. The ancients like Aristotle knew this long ago, but somehow its been forgotten. So the world, and ourselves and our actions, are much less confined in their details than we might suppose. But they may be far more confined by their teleology, in the necessary shape of their proper relationships and proportions, than we suppose.