Read on Twitter
Until you can reliably kill someone with a sick burn, Twitter is to politics what porn is to sex. Unequivocal moral proclamations, like outlandish sex acts, are revolting if you try them in real life.
Yes, I make outrageous moral proclamations all the time. The content of moral philosophy is mostly irrelevant, itâs just the slime we secrete when we are trying to manage trust at global scale https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1139549822459899905
People will accept whatever idiotic taboo you can dream of as long as itâs painful and a large group of people is using it as a barrier to entry. Examples: veganism, genital mutilation, and pederasty
I need you to understand that moral principles are not real in the same way that the material things around you are real. It's a hard lesson to learn because, as with so many truths, saying it doesn't equal understanding it
The distance between proclaiming a thing and embodying that thing is vast, but calling a it a "distance" is itself a metaphor, an unreal thing, a simulation of the invisible by analogy to the visible. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1103345840704282625
Twitter is the perfect laboratory to observe this, because we all constantly emit all these moral convictions AND WE ALL KNOW that they don't obtain in the same way as any physical object you can hold in your hand
4chan and Twitter are both experiments in radical free speech, and 4chan is freer than Twitter. Teasing apart the notion of free speech requires an uncomfortable meditation on the nature of liberty itself
Free speech means speech which has no consequences, full stop. Consequences are the opposite of freedom, whether good or bad. And note: an action with no consequences is meaningless.
So speech, to be maximally free, must be meaningless. Consider that the establishment allows black people to say the word forbidden to whites, that therefore black speech is more free. This is an act of contempt, it means they believe black speech has no consequences
Ultimate freedom is ultimate pointlessness. Anons are more free than real name accounts, because it's harder to make them pay for their words, but those words also have less weight. Doxing is an attempt to stick someone with a bill.
The minute an anon gains a following, he is less free. Speech that can compel or direct others is an obligation, both to exercise stewardship and to lie to people in socially prescribed ways https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1035964689484722177
And yet in all the world what could be worse than absolute freedom? Lasch wrote that liberation from the superstitions of the past causes us to have trouble even perceiving ourselves as real. We can generalize this to all forms of liberation
Freedom = No Consequences = Collapse of Meaning. You don't get to be free and meaningful at the same time, just like you can't be hot and cold at the same time. You should view all would-be emancipators with supreme suspicion, they are trying to derealize you
Some amount of freedom is good, because when every trivial action is weighted with cosmic implications, it crushes us. A sense of a meaningful life relates to freedom the way that state revenue relates to taxation. Laffer curves in everything.
Good freedom is that freedom which destroys itself by binding to a worthy attachment. This is freedom's highest imperative, to be instrumental in its destruction, and if it fails, it becomes grotesque.
Natureâs imperatives are a baseline of coercion. We never escape them, but we have partly deferred them. In this state we are, as Nietzsche observed, very FREE spirits, which means that we have to find a new source of coercion or else we go mad https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1134883752318910465
I have used this analogy before and Iâll use it again. Ideology is part of our extended phenotype, itâs something that we do just like beavers make dams and bees make hives. Itâs not something alien to us, even though itâs not contained within us https://twitter.com/z3nblack/status/1163018320750239744
In a situation of excess freedom, the human secretes ideology to provide him with a sense of purpose. He does this by inventing a moral contradiction, becoming convinced of it, and then shouldering the ensuing pathos
It is impossible to believe "drinking this poison doesn't make me feel nauseous," because material reality resists. In contrast, one can believe a moral contradiction in perpetuity, because morals are less real than materials
Ideology is built out of contradictions, which are projected into behavioral space in the shape of conflicting imperatives, which limit our choices, which makes life feel meaningful. The more successfully you embody your ideology, the more fulfilling your life becomes
One of our American ideological contradictions is to believe that our imperatives are liberating. This is facile, because the moment you truly believe in an ideal, you discard anything that could authentically be called liberty
Of course it does no good pointing out the contradictions of an ideology to its believers. Thatâs like smacking a masochist. The only reason you would do so, in any case, is to try to install your own ideology in its place.
Conviction properly understood is a SURRENDER to an imperative beyond the quotidian needs of âanimalâ life. Man alone is the idealistic animal, and nothing could be more human than hypocritical idealism, because idealism is always subjugated to animal necessity
Convicted belief, authentic conviction, is the closest thing in the world to murder. It lives exactly in the boundary between taboo and transgression, between animal and human, between ideal and necessity.
Given that, what could be more terrifying than convicted belief, which holds belief to be more important than life and death? From far away it looks enchanting, up close it looks like terrorism.
Genuine conviction is called fanaticism, and we rightly fear it when people fully believe what they profess, but at least nowadays, true conviction is almost non-existent. We half believe, half feign belief, and this creates a tepid self-reinforcing social pressure to believe
Ideologues treat ideology the way fetishists treat their fetish, with a circuitous disavowal: âI know the shoe is only a shoe, nevertheless I need my partner to wear it.â https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1048660670240047104
Itâs a decadent problem (all paraphilia is decadent) that we float in the void of freedom, disconnected from meaningful attachments, thrashing around for a way to feel real. And my proposed solution is horrible, horrible: I want to let conviction back into the world
But all this is not to say that a sense of purpose is an end in itself. Ideology is the tool that we use to orchestrate collective action, and the sense of purpose is an emotion we feel when we leverage ideology to cooperate
One can easily follow the dictates of ideology right off a cliff, all the while nursing a sense of profound fulfillment.
