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People say we are in a cold civil war. This is wrong. We LOST a cold civil war, because we had sticks and our enemies had guns. The best plan any of us has is to retreat to the countryside, because that's what you do when you lose.
By now, every white collar in America has been through a woke struggle session. When a WOC tweets "white lives don't matter," she gets a promotion. The game we are playing does not have the rules that you think, because you don't understand power
If you are a "republican" or a "paleocon" who thinks there is some use to be salvaged from reasoned argument, appeals to the constitution, or to fairness, or anything you learned in school about American civics, you are the reason we lost
This is the attitude we must destroy: "Fairness and principle expose the other side". Expose them to who? Themselves? They know. To their enemies? We know. The liberalism of the center-right will always lose, because it will always give aid to its enemies https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1278772933138268163
There is no neutral majority (there is no one neutral at all) just waiting to see if, maybe, the right catches them in one more lie, then finally THIS TIME they will notice that the leftists are akshually evil lizard people
The impotence of the right is found in our inability to process and adapt to new paradigms. In a way, this is obvious, as we are defined by our desire for enduring ways of life, but it still requires dynamicism to preserve ancient sanctity against novel threats
Until recently, there were many intelligent thinkers on the left, and we weaken ourselves when we fail to integrate their correct insights into our worldview. We do not have to accept their desired ends in order to learn from them social construction https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1126903461671460864
Postmodern thought is not a decadent irrationality, nor is it some wicked assault on truth and justice. It is an inevitable series of true realizations in the wake of techno-industrial expansion. The left has adapted to these truths. The right has run from them
Technology has "de-centered" Man from his understanding of nature; we only ever understand the world through metaphors, and technology provides metaphors that let even dimwitted people perceive the limits of knowledge https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1203430871895699456
The classic and wrong "conservative" approach to these topics is feeble hand-wringing over moral relativism. The belief that one's own morality must be cosmically absolute derives from a lack of moral and epistemic imagination.
If there is hope for traditional beliefs in the future, it will only be inside a framework of relativism and uncertainty. This is its best hope in the disenchanted scientific world, because even if Science is fake and gay, technology isn't https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1121900804711956480
What's difficult to understand about the current moment is that, although we perceive a great and terrible power, it's not clear who is wielding that power. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.
The postmodern theory of knowledge intersects with the ascension of woke power in the thought of Michel Foucault, the #1 most cited researcher according to Google Scholar. We will see why this is important. https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1171911758715523073
Foucault taught that power does not inhere in individuals, but in networks of people, that it is manifest between everyone and everyone else at all times, that it cannot be possessed, only enacted, and that it coerces by manufacturing "truth"
"Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced by constraint. Each society has its regime of truth: the types of discourse it accepts; the mechanisms which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned"
Power is induced by "truth", which is contingent and socially constructed. This makes conservatives bristle, because they rightly know that there is an immutable reality, but they refuse to understand how much flexion their own minds have with regard to the absolute
The dissident right breaks from the "mainstream" right precisely when realizes, along with Foucault, that "truth is not the privilege of those who have liberated themselves." Moldbug's famous dictum is "The sovereign determines the null hypothesis"
Moldbug also identifies the distributed nature of sovereignty, and he gives the name "cathedral" to the "decentralized conspiracy". The cathedral is not any specific people, it is a network of power relations defined by incentive gradients and sustained by our institutions
Even so, I suggest you avoid fixating on "the cathedral"; it soon becomes an embarrassing mental prison, a fully general scapegoat that clouds what it was intended to clarify. There is no truth that can be rescued from power. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1020322404751441921
The cathedralite has no power of her own, but she is able to exercise power on behalf of the cathedral by acting according to its truth. Anyone, no matter how lowly, is able to wield Foucauldian power to control others as long as they act in accordance with power's truth
Knowledge constrains action; Foucauldian power operates by means of knowledge; the sovereign sets the null hypothesis. Cathedral power justifies itself thus: "there is no evidence that my truth isn't true"
Power is decentralized. If a single node in the knowledge/power nexus flips, the cathedral treats it as damage and routes around it. If a Harvard dean or NYT editor goes rogue, they get ignored or ejected.
Everyone knows more or less what power expressed through truth demands. We can sense it; we know the magic words we can say to give orders to others. "That makes me uncomfortable." "That's hateful." "That could offend some people". The words sound innocent but they aren't
If you challenge a person who is enacting power, they can escalate. Your nearest authority knows the "truth", and will side with power. If he doesn't, his superior will, or his, and so on. In rare cases, these things go to court, where truth is constituted as law and precedent
Usually your little rebellions won't get that far, because your social group, acting in concert, will reject or correct you. No one needs to tell them what to do. The algorithm "everyone move towards your neighbor" creates emergent patterns called flocking
Truth is manufactured by academia and disseminated through media. "Citation" is the mechanism that is used to manufacture truth. Their science is not empirical, it is prescriptive. Once a decree is published, it can be "cited", and becomes "evidence" https://twitter.com/jcbonthedl/status/1280277382910410757
Power-Knowledge is not broken by simply pushing back against it. In many cases, resistance can reify it, as many in this sphere have noted. This is because facts are only loosely correlated with knowledge. La Wik on Power-knowledge contains a synecdoche of this
Power is the source of social discipline and conformity. To challenge power is not a matter of seeking some âabsolute truthâ, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of social, economic, and cultural hegemony within which it operates
In some ways, Foucault's ideas are quite reactionary, and he drew criticism from his leftist colleagues, because his ideas, taken to their logical conclusion, undermine the idea that any kind of "emancipation" is even possible. This is undeniably true. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1075401124918714370
Foucault recognized that humanitarianism is a form of totalitarian control, and that sincere concerns for rights and justice are inadequate for challenging power. If we ever want to reclaim power, we must create truth that is discontinuous with humanitarianism.
