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Category: Culture

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    The Great Inversion: Sacred Unreason

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    1–2 minutes

    We’ve entered a mirrored reality where “Truth," once a shared value, is now a partisan slogan to reflexively discard. Enlightenment Reason has been traded for an easier secular theology.

    Deconstructing religion as an unreasonable, modern ideology, has ironically installed a more rigid orthodoxy. "Suicidal empathy" (narcissistic nihilism) supplants objective facts, branding reality as heresy.

    When truth/facts/reason is the enemy of the collective, we haven’t reached the enlightenment utopia where we shape the world with desire; we’ve simply returned to a pre-rational age of unified, unquestionable belief: the medieval dark ages and the Spanish Inquisition.

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    American Progressivism’s Evolution

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    1–2 minutes

    It is said European progressives often draw on communist ideals, while American progressives are often said to stem from anarchism. But Lionel Shriver argues it’s not anarchism—it’s narcissistic nihilism.

    She agrees with Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy,” but sees it as inaccurate; there’s no real empathy, just performative theater. (They don’t actually help the disenfranchised, but don the garb of caring and outrage until they fool themselves into belief.)

    The difficulty is the conversion from Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” (who grasped the illogic of the struggle to universalize “anti-cruelty”) into the “non-liberal non-ironist.” This new (extreme) progressive demands instant, whole-hearted allegiance based on emotive beliefs and status rather than reasoned progress.

    The other side: American Conservatism’s Evolution

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    The True Artist’s Labor

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    1–2 minutes

    Art constructs novel frameworks and languages, unveiling unconsidered modes of existence—existential, contingent, and often initially weak or opaque. Its power emerges slowly through prolonged contemplation.

    True art refines anti-mimetic ideas over time, resisting easy translation or quantification; once embraced, they become intuitive shorthand.

    Pretending to be an artist means clinging to surface image and form without the laborious practice of channeling profound, noncompliant authenticity into a visual language. The lazy artist trades in style alone, parasitically enjoying freedoms earned by diligent predecessors; the dilettante parrots platitudes like a spoiled child.

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    Managed Morality

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    1–2 minutes

    Modernity (and post-modernity) grants the individual moral agent freedom to argue from any abstract standpoint, shifting criteria and position endlessly.

    Yet managers and therapists—experts in hierarchy—reintegrate these "drifting" selves into society’s functional machinery. Their authority stems not from subjective rightness but from systemic utility: smoothing cogs back into place.

    Individual beliefs, despite any rational grounding, need social usefulness; otherwise, they become mere delusions to be "managed" into obscurity.

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    Belief’s Vacuum

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    1–2 minutes

    G.K. Chesterton observed: "when men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything."

    Curiously, wielding reason to logically disprove God’s existence elevates reason itself to supreme status. Yet the same tool that dismantles one paradigm can erect equally unmoored ones.

    Without an ultimate anchor, rationalism becomes vulnerable to irrational leaps, enthroning fleeting ideologies or comforting fictions in God’s vacated place.

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    Misanthropology’s Dream

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    1–2 minutes

    Beneath the push for superintelligence lies a quiet “misanthropology”: human cognitive biases are the flaw holding back our species’ high-IQ potential.

    The thinking goes: strip away the messy, animalistic, and all-too-human elements—irrationality, emotion, limitation—and pure intelligence could unlock limitless progress.

    The vision of benevolent AGI guardians is less about a graceful new world than technocratic fantasy: experts finally freed from human frailty, watching over and commanding us with flawless, impersonal reason.

    * from Geoff Shullenberger

    The sales pitch for AGI anthropomorphized is akin to Gandalf, a wise, benevolent wizard, yet a more accurate depiction might be Anton Chigurh, a driven, autistic sociopath.

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    abstract virtue vs. concrete power

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    1–2 minutes

    Under tension, raw power—force plus capital—decides outcomes.

    A dominant singular power provokes collectives to amass counter-force through sanctions, alliances, or equivalent leverage, forging a temporary balance. Over time, this equilibrium hardens into a moral “good”: stability becomes sacred, disruption heretical.

    Yet this belief is a deception. When abstract virtue replaces concrete power, reality is ignored in favor of a comforting illusion.

    Realists simply reassert force, trampling the dream. Moral outrage that power “shouldn’t” rule or "kindness" should triumph changes nothing—it once again mistakes moral noise for actual sway.

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    The Morality Trap

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    1–2 minutes

    In exposing hypocrisy, we appeal to moral laws and values that others created: their rules and standards are the measure of their duplicity.

    We urge reform by demanding they follow their own code. Yet they built these rules with power. Treating them as moral arbiters only empowers them further, blocking real change.

    The paradox lies in believing morality granted their power—when power first enabled them to dictate morality.

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    The failure of advice

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    1–2 minutes

    “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

    Henry David Thoreau, Walden

    They must become beasts or machines (not humans) as their labor is all they can offer, and is often not enough.

    The idea that one could “dwell on their ignorance” to overcome it is a “stolen hour against one’s creditors.” They must become machines (not humans) as their labor is all they can offer, and is seldom enough.

    The reality of life provides no dignity, just perpetual abasement and brutality.

    So, any advice you offer is irrelevant: it comes from those who have not lived the life that precludes thought and does not contend with the enslavement to circumstance so common to most people.

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    Anthropomorphism: Narrative Mapping

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    1–2 minutes

    Anthropomorphism is not mere projection—it’s a cognitive tool. By mapping the unknown onto social frameworks, we render the abstract intelligible.

    To grasp God, we imagine a person: omnipotent yet emotionally legible. This storytelling impulse helps orient behavior within mystery.

    Like quantum mechanics, the divine resists mechanistic explanation, yet we persist in naming, assigning traits, and crafting narrative.

    Humanization becomes a scaffolding for sense-making—a mythopoetic bridge between chaos and comprehension, guiding both reverence and moral order through a path of familiarity.