Chapter 1: Coherent and Incoherent Ideologies
Chapter 1: Coherent and Incoherent Ideologies
21st Century Renaissance: A Re-Imagination of World Order
The following is an excerpt from the working draft of 21st Century Renaissance. The contents of this excerpt are not final and are subject to change pending final publication.
Chapter 1: Coherent and Incoherent Ideologies
On May 22, 1942 an American mathematics prodigy was born. A son of two first-generation Polish immigrants, this young man would go on to graduate high school by the age of 15 and receive a scholarship to attend Harvard University. In 1964 and 1967, he received his master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics at the University of Michigan. At age 26 he became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California Berkeley. Between 1978 and 1995, however, this same man would go on to killed 3 people and injured 23 others in a nationwide domestic terrorist campaign against western civilization. This American-born terrorist is the infamous Theodore John Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber (UNiversity and Airline bomber). The man who coerced the New York Times and the Washington Post into publishing his anarchist manifesto Industrial Society and its Future.
Six years later on September 11, 2001 a series of four coordinated commercial airline suicide attacks orchestrated by the militant Islamic extremist group Al-Qaeda killed 2,977 people and injured around 25,000 others. This was the first time since World War II that American citizens were attacked by a foreign power on American soil. But the tragedy of the kamikaze attacks themselves only tell half the story. In Driving Fatalities After 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism researchers Blalock, Kadiyali, and Simon attribute an additional 2,170 deaths to Al-Qaeda through the perversion of American transportation behavior in the months following 9/11. Instead of flying across the country, Americans elected to drive and take on more individual risk. Al-Qaeda likely killed more Americans through terror than through suicide attack. The Islamic extremist group, like Kaczynski, were successful in their mission. They exploited systems of convenience within the United States and terrorized western civilization.
But what does atheistic anarchism and radical Islam have in common? Are they not complete opposites? Radical Islam promotes a tyrannical, conservative social order while anarchism promotes no social order at all. Ted Kaczynski and Osama Bin Laden don’t appear to have anything in common other than a hatred for America. But is that really true? Only after you de-radicalize the ideologies of Kaczynski and Bin Laden does the picture become clearer. Libertarianism and conservatism share in their prejudice against economic central planning. These political ideologies value both human hierarchies and inequality of outcome. The conservative heuristic first do no harm and the libertarian heuristic trial and error are what a nation’s invisible hand uses to put food on the table. Without these heuristics being expressed, a society will devolve into chaos. The dystopia of Marx or a radical, liberal cult will emerge. Conservative and libertarian representation are fundamental to any anti-fragile form of government. Kacyznski and Bin Laden don’t hate America, they hate American leftists. More importantly, they hate sensible American progressives and liberals.
But can you blame them? Did Kacyznski’s prophecy not come true? Who objectifies women more, America or Al-Qaeda? Violence has no place in politics but when it emerges it must be paid attention to. Terrorism wins when it is ignored; when it is left to fester in the collective unconscious. You may fundamentally disagree with the means of Bin Laden and Kacyznski, but that must not blind one from seeing the truth in what they stood for. I do not want to live in anarchy or under radical Islamic law, but many people do and they’re not 100% evil or stupid or crazy for wanting to. The West is degenerate. Brave New World is not a story of utopia, it is a story of hell on earth. It is a story where the family unit goes extinct and pleasure becomes God.
Let it be clear, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ in common parlance are used completely arbitrarily. Every significantly large group has a far ‘left’ and a far ‘right’ problem. Bin Laden was just as much a far ‘right’ progressive as he was a conservative extremist and Kacyznski was just as much a far ‘left’ conservative as he was a libertarian extremist. Likewise, Karl Marx was just as much a far ‘right’ liberal as he was a progressive extremist and Jim Jones was just as much a far ‘left’ libertarian as he was a liberal extremist. When a political ideology transforms into a religion it develops an irrational and self-contradicting orthodoxy. If the orthodoxy is rooted in the values of hierarchy it is labeled ‘right’. This type of ideology believes in radical free will and promotes the disgust of those deemed ‘inferior’. It is typically associated with the mass extermination of minorities and those deemed ‘lesser’. On the other hand, if the orthodoxy is rooted in the values of heuristics it is labeled ‘left’. This type of ideology believes in radical determinism and promotes the disgust of those deemed ‘superior’. It is typically associated with human sacrifice, mass suicide, and the immolation of anything which is deemed ‘competent’ or ‘valuable’.
You cannot fully understand Kacyznski and his anarchist manifesto without going back to Karl Marx and studying his communist manifesto. Marx, like Kacyznski, was an atheistic philosopher that attempted to resolve the systemic problems of western civilization. Both men detested reform and believed that revolution, rather than renaissance, was the only way to solve the issues that plague the West. While Kacyznski hated progressives and liberals, Marx hated conservatives and libertarians. Contrary to popular belief, Karl Marx was not actually a student of inequality, he was a student of alienation. Laissez-faire capitalism is oppressive and alienating. During the 19th century Marx witnessed the exploitation of working class people at a scale never before seen in human history. Slaves chained themselves and masters could oppress in plain sight.
Marx was deeply disgusted with what he termed the ‘bourgeoisie’. Marx didn’t like the poor, he hated the rich. This is why every attempt at communism has devolved into a dictatorial pseudo-republic state. Stalin and Mao hated wealth more than they loved the dispossessed. Wealth is alienating. Wealth is unequally distributed. Wealth is somewhat random. What makes the West great isn’t just that the poor can become rich, it’s that the rich can become poor. Powerful people and powerful families are supposed to have expiration dates. The fundamental problem of human hierarchies and unequal outcome is that of alienation. Sure, the corruption of a human hierarchy is inevitable if left unchecked but the West has its checks and balances. While it is impossible to quantify the harm caused by Marxist ideology during the past century, researchers estimate that Stalin murdered around 10-20 million of his own people while Mao murdered somewhere between 15-55 million of his own people. For comparison, Hitler murdered six million Jews during the holocaust.
What ties Ted Kacyznski and Osama Bin Laden together is that which ties Karl Marx and Jim Jones. Al-Qaeda is just another cult. It has fundamentally nothing to do with Islam. Rather than forming a conservative cult, Jones formed a liberal cult called the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ. Contrary to the name, it had fundamentally nothing to do with Christianity. Jones controlled the sex lives of every cult member. He coerced women into getting abortions, he required sexual favors from the wives of cult members, and would rape many of the male cultists. Jones was called "Father" and "Dad" by both adults and children within the cult. Before Jones founded his cult he became enamored with communism and sought to fully understand and embody Marxist ideology.
In 1974 the Peoples Temple signed a lease to rent land in Guyana to establish a “socialist paradise” informally known as Jonestown. For the first several months, Temple members worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Four years later, this work schedule was reduced to eight hours a day, five days a week. Jones was inspired by the North Korean system of eight hours of daily work, eight hours of study, and eight hours of sleep. ‘Study’ was a euphuism for brainwashing and entailed watching Soviet propaganda shorts and documentaries on American social problems. During this time Jones would also preach to his cult and publicly interrogate individual cultists. Jonestown had to import large quantities of food because it stood on poor soil and could not sustain any agriculture. Everyone lived in small communal houses and the children of the cult were only allowed to see their biological parents briefly at night.
On November 17, 1978 Jones’ perverted venture would come to a dramatic conclusion. After receiving claims of abuse within the cult, U.S. Representative Leo Ryan flew to Guyana to visit Jonestown and investigate. During his visit, several members of the cult expressed a desire to leave and when these ex-members joined Representative Ryan’s departure to a local airstrip the following day they were intercepted by the Peoples Temple’s security guards. These guards shot Representative Ryan, along with three journalists and one other defector, dead. In the evening following the murders Jones ordered everyone in his “socialist paradise” to drink cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. Prior to 9/11, Jonestown was the single greatest loss of American civilian life through a deliberate act. 918 people died that day, a third of which were children.
It is easy to label anyone desiring a “socialist paradise” as 100% insane or evil or stupid. But keep in mind, the West is degenerate. Nearly every western hierarchy has been corrupted. There is not a single western institution in which one should not be radically skeptical of, including the western family. The western elite steal from and murder the poor in plain sight with impunity. The working class of the West is humiliated, alienated, and exploited at a scale never before seen in human history. The working class do not enact change, they are subject to change from the elite. There are no public servants in the West, only public masters.
If you de-radicalize the ideologies of Marx and Jones, they are actually quite sensible. Laissez-faire capitalism is just as evil as communism. Humans are born with both negative natural rights and positive natural rights. A public attorney, a police officer, a doctor, and an elementary school teacher aren’t just privileges, they’re God given rights. Capitalism, contrary to Marxist ideology, is not actually a zero-sum game. Social status, however, is. The problem of relative poverty isn’t that of survival, it’s that of reproduction and prosperity. Poverty doesn’t cause crime in and of itself, relative poverty causes crime. Governments have just as much of a right to redistribute wealth as they do to protect their borders. The dystopia of Kacyznski or a radical, conservative cult will emerge if the liberal and progressive critiques of the West are not addressed. Liberal and progressive representation, like conservative and libertarian representation, are fundamental to any anti-fragile form of government.
If the conservative values first do no harm, the liberal counters with define harm. If the libertarian values trial and error, the socialist counters with reverse engineer. These four political perspectives will inevitably emerge within any form of government because they are all necessary perspectives for managing the fundamental uncertainties found in any practice of human governance. Like any other qualitative/data science, it leverages the game theoretic method: first do no harm (1), define harm (2), trial and error (3), and reverse engineer (4). Contrary to western elitist propaganda, the scientific method is not the only method of knowing. The scientific method is fundamentally useless when playing a game of uncertainty. In an uncertain game the players change, the rules change, the strategies change, and the time is infinite in length. If you want to try and understand how a ballistic projectile travels after being shot out a canon, use quantitative/physical science. Qualitative/data science, on the other hand, deals with informational uncertainty rather than physical certainty. If you need to trade financial derivatives or treat sick patients, you’ll want to hire a game theorist not a scientist.
Since words in the West are being redefined in an attempt to obfuscate reality, lets ground the truth in some specific concepts: Socialism is not communism, libertarianism is not anarchy, conservatism is not fundamentalism, and liberalism is not cultism. Throughout this book I will inter-changeably refer to the socialist perspective as “progressive”, but that is only because the term “socialist” has been perverted and abused by both the West and the East for more than a century. If humanity wants to survive the 21st century and not blow itself up, it must adopt a world order that contains mechanisms for conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and progressives to all dialogue respectfully and freely about government policy in good faith. The players, rules, and strategies of governance are always and forever changing. Good faith dialogue between differing perspectives is necessary because it’s impossible to know which perspective to apply to any individual problem at any given time.
While the fundamentally uncertain nature of governance must permit the conservative, the liberal, the libertarian, and the progressive to all have a seat at the table, it is important to note that each perspective has its own “home-field” advantage. Governments are not monoliths, nor are they uniform in scale. It is completely irrational to take one’s local politics and blindly carry them over to one’s national politics. On average, it is best to bias one’s city politics towards socialism, one’s county/district politics towards liberalism, one’s state/province politics towards conservatism, and one’s national politics towards libertarianism. For centuries, human civilization has been deluded into thinking that governance scales uniformly. Every ethical, monogamous marriage is governed by communist principles but to take that perspective and apply it your neighbor is absurd. Marx’s dream was to eliminate the nuclear family and replace it with the nuclear society. He interpreted “What God has joined together, let no one separate” to mean citizen and citizen rather than husband and wife.
The reason humans fall into the mistake of applying the same political perspective to all levels of governance is because every human being has a personality. Since systems of belief and decision-making under uncertainty is primarily meditated through the subconscious, every individual will have a default set of political instincts. An individual’s political instincts are a product of one’s personality, and an individual’s personality is a product of both one’s genetics and one’s environment. Some people are “born” conservatives while others are “born” liberals. Some people “evolve” into being a progressive, while others “evolve” into being a libertarian. Human personality can be approximated through measuring of one’s extraversion (1), agreeableness (2), conscientiousness (3), neuroticism (4), and openness to experience (5). Being low in openness causes an individual to bias one’s self into a conservative perspective, being high in conscientiousness causes an individual to bias one’s self into a libertarian perspective, being high in openness causes an individual to bias one’s self into a liberal perspective, and being low in conscientiousness causes an individual to bias one’s self into a progressive perspective.
An individual’s extraversion, agreeableness, and sensitivity to negative emotions (neuroticism) regulates one’s political instincts through conversation with self (consciousness) and conversation with others (language). The West has become degenerate, in part, because it operates on the object-orientated language of English. To speak English it is necessary to objectify reality. The essence of “boy” and the essence of “girl” must exist in the mind as abstract objects rather than relational functions. In this way, English speakers process information much more like the Chinese and the Koreans than the Spanish or the Arabs. The relationship between “chico” and “chica” is implicit to the Spanish speaker, but the relationship between “sonyeon” and “yeoja” to the Korean speaker is not. The West is degenerate because it believes objectivity is a cardinal virtue. In doing so, it will always select a calculation over a heuristic when given the chance. In doing so, it will conflate the objectification of reality with reality itself. In doing so, it will throw away any form of common sense.
How could a subconscious liberal ever trust a subconscious conservative? Anything the other says consciously to establish trust will be, by definition, a lie. This is the central problem of modern civilization. What separates the homosapien from all other animals is that of collective cooperation. To be a healthy human being it is necessary to self-evidently value both one’s own life and the existence of the homosapien species. The West and the East, the Republicans and the Democrats, the Muslims and the Jews can all agree that the extinction of the human species would be a grave tragedy. Does the dolphin care only about itself? About it’s family? About it’s community? Or does it care about the dolphin species? In order to think in such abstract terms, the essence of a species must be formalized. This requires both human consciousness and human language. It is not self-evident that a Japanese person and a Kenyan person are of the same species. Classically, this fact could only be proved through successful reproduction. The scientific and philosophical advancements during the western industrial revolutions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century gave humanity the ability to further formalize the essence of “human”. By doing so, natural rights, themselves, were formalized and eventually applied to every class of human being in the West.
What could be more tragic than the extinction of the human species? What about the extinction of earth? Or what about the extinction of life? This begs the question: What is life? Biologists claim to study life, but in reality they only study carbon-based life that evolves through natural selection. In order for good faith political discourse to exist between those of differing perspectives, each person has to have a coherent definition of life that is compatible with other coherent definitions of life. The West has become degenerate because the elites who preach the gospel of science and technology define life in terms of “objective consciousness”. The new atheists and the corrupt academics of the West literally worship objectivity and reason. Valuing a lack of value is, itself, a value. The scientific method cannot be the only true/real method of knowing while, simultaneously, claim to be fundamentally incomplete. It is impossible for the scientific method to make epistemological claims about the scientific method. The gnostic atheist, like the gnostic theist, is incoherent. The authentic Muslim doesn’t claim to know God exists, he claims to believe God exists. An atheist who detests faith, detests himself. One cannot make knowledge claims about God nor can one make completeness claims about reason. Neither an atheist nor a theist can act in good faith if his metaphysics are derived from pure reason. Again, the scientific method and objectivity are fundamentally useless when playing a game of uncertainty.
There is no such thing as objective consciousness. Consciousness is absurd. Consciousness is irrational. Consciousness is subjective. Objective consciousness is not an oxymoron, it’s a nonsensical paradox that violates the law of non-contradiction. Common sense stems from one’s subconscious systems of belief and is an expression of one’s virtue. Common sense is not fundamentally an expression of rational knowledge or cognitive ability. When the new atheists of the West pointed out the systemic lack of common sense found throughout the religious institutions of the West, they failed to realize that it was a lack of faith, not a lack of reason, that caused the absence of common sense. Music Theory, Genetic Theory, and the Big Bang Theory are all products of the Catholic tradition. Arabic numerals, algebra, and astrophysics are all products of the Islamic tradition. If it weren’t for the Protestant tradition, there would be no United States Constitution nor any Bill of Rights. Religion gave birth to reason and science, not the other way around.
It is impossible to derive a metaphysics from physics. Physics is natural philosophy and natural philosophy is an applied form of logic and logic is derived from a coherent set of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. A religion is nothing more than a coherent, anti-fragile set of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics wrapped into a subjectively pleasing aesthetic. In 1884, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. According to Nietzsche, “The sense of truthfulness, developed highly by Christianity, is (now) nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history; a rebound from ‘God is truth’ to the fanatical faith ‘All is false’”. The second industrial revolution initiated what is now called “socioeconomic globalization”. As the world came together during the late 19th century and ideas were being passed around from culture to culture more rapidly than ever before, every culture suffered a form of deculturation. The central axiom of each culture’s belief system collapsed and made all the values within it no longer tenable. With the death of God came the death of absolute truth and common sense. Technology transformed everyone into a hypocrite.
The pursuit of truth itself had undermined the structures that gave birth to the pursuit of truth. Socioeconomic globalization infected every culture with the psychopathologies of nihilism and totalitarianism. The modern man had two choices: believe in nothing (1) or believe in a rigid, fragile ideology (2). Reduce all of life’s experiences to rational insignificance or adopt a rational Utopian construction of reality. If heaven wasn’t rational then, rationally, it shouldn’t exist. This was the central belief of both Marx and Kaczynski. A rigid, fragile ideology like communism and anarchism is nothing more than a cult. The true disease of modernity is neither atheism nor theism, it is rational gnosticism. Claiming to possess complete knowledge is symptomatic of an anti-social personality. The United States cannot blame Islam for 9/11, it must blame the degenerate, “woke” leftists and the irreverent, “conservative” populists. The United States of America is one nation under a set of political idols, it is not one nation under God.
Nietzsche warned that the only plausible outcome of rigid ideology is that of exceptionally intense warfare. He prophesied both WWII and the Cold War decades prior to their existence. The world is paradoxically more closer and divided than ever before. With the SARS-CoV2 pandemic of 2020, the last semi-credible public institution of the West fell. The US enabled the Chinese to compromise the western institution of medicine. The political cults of the West were defeated by the political cults of the East. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party cemented their ideology in history. An authoritarian, Republican administration violated its citizen’s natural right to freedom of association through the closing of synagogues, churches, and masjids by fiat. A few months later an authoritarian, Democratic administration would go on to violate its citizen’s natural right to bodily anatomy through the mandated use of non-sterilizing, experimental vaccines. The Brave New World of the West was now official.
The Federal Reserve is not God. The Republican Party is not God. The Democratic Party is not God. These American institutions are all bona fide cults. Have an idol? No problem. The West has a cult for you. Pick your truth: science, money, reason, pleasure, objectivity, children, democracy, power, entertainment, parents. An ineffable idea? Well that’s irreducible and too abstract; everyone in the West knows that truth is self-evidently rational. It’s either infinitely relative or inherently dead. If you want your “rights” you must first submit to an idol, and you must do so quickly. A coherent system of belief is not necessary for making consistently good decisions under circumstances of uncertainty. Have the machine learning algorithms taught you nothing?
The antidote to the child sacrifice condoned by the American Academy of Pediatrics is not new knowledge, it is new wisdom. Wisdom, like common sense, is nothing more than embodied virtue. It is humility and mercy. Classically, it is a genuine fear of God. Wisdom, unlike reason, models the world in terms of archetypal counterfactuals. Wisdom is fundamentally about what not to believe, not about what to believe. Those who claim faith and reason must be, by definition, in conflict with one another know nothing of either faith nor reason. Belief, like free will, is not a choice. As Pascal puts it, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing.”
A 21st Century Renaissance is in order. The Enlightenment taught the secular world about the sacred nature of the individual, and today I am here to teach the secular world an even deeper truth. The sacred nature of the individual exists only through the sacred union of the masculine and feminine. There are no natural rights in a world devoid of monogamous marriage. Men and women are equal in value, but they not equal in form. The left hand and the right hand are symmetrical, not equivalent. Faith complements reason and reason complements faith. Liberalism and progressivism are not in direct competition with libertarianism and conservatism.
The East is right: democracy is not a virtue in and of itself. Saudi Arabia and the People’s Republic of China do not need democracy, they need what the United States of American needs: a true republic. The West is degenerate not because it lacks democracy. The West is degenerate because it worships democracy. Plato was clear in The Republic, democracy is not a fundamental good. Democracy tends to grow the lower class and transform the losers of society into winners by fiat. The English word republic is derived from the Latin word publicus and means “of the people”. A government “of the people” does not necessarily have to be “by the people”. Throughout history there have many non-democratic governments that were “of the people”. Benevolent dictators weren’t particularly common in history, but they did exist. King David of Israel and Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb of Arabia were not democratically elected in any western sense of the word, but they are renowned for their leadership, humility, mercy, and selflessness. The free market of ideas can not solve every problem in the world. Truth is not derived through public opinion, it is derived through good-faith dialogue.
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FULL BOOK COMING SOON
