What is power-knowledge?

Power-knowledge is a meme or claim that compels you to profess it and causes people to spread it.

In the past, believing in some local monotheistic religion was the dominant power-knowledge.

Power-knowledge often operates by making a claim that anyone who doesn't believe it (or at least who doesn't profess it) is a bad or ignorant person.

People are very sensitive to this. If the local infosphere is saturated with the idea that they have to believe X to be good people, they will generally just go ahead and believe X.

So to set up a piece of Power-Knowledge, you need an idea X, with an attached subclaim that people who don't believe X are bad. It also helps if you append that good people have to spread X in order to be good.

People will naturally start attacking ideas that go against the Power-Knowledge, because the human mind propagates the consequence of ideas and assigns value to them, and the Power-Knowledge always assigns itself the highest value.

The problem with Power-Knowledge is that once it gets sufficiently powerful, it is able to warp social epistemology so much that it can make just about anything true.

Modern feminism is a fantastic example of this. Feminism relies on a set of empirical claims to convince people that in order to be a good person, you have to be a feminist.

This has several effects. The most obvious is that a lot of people become feminists.

But it also means that anyone who challenges the empirical claims of feminism is now a super-bad person; not only are they not feminists, they're trying to convince others to also not be feminists!

This is how we get Vox arguing that women are better off being sad...

... because if it was better for women to be happy, then that would refute feminism, and feminism is good because without feminism women wouldn't have the best possible lives. See, it all makes perfect sense.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/11/13/20959863/women-happy-chores-gender-gap

If you challenge this, you are labelled a "misogynist", which is a slur-word; it is almost always a lie and a smear. But it works, because people keep the feminist Power-Knowledge in the backs of their minds.

The alpha and omega of Power-Knowledge in contemporary society is the intersectional social justice memeplex.

Anyone who resists it is a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot. A deplorable.

Its control of the discourse is so strong that even the opposition mostly agrees with it.

If you were to say:

"Actually ethnostates with traditional gender roles and an (actually working, non-sham) medical cure for homosexuality would be better for everyone in the long run"

-- then you would be committing an extraordinary blasphemy.

Part of our weakness is that we don't fully comprehend Power-Knowledge.

Most people are vaguely aware of it. But very few people grasp just how far a Power-Knowledge meme can go.

They don't grasp it because, when they look around, they see all the justifications and excuses from the Power-Knowlege.

Yes, of course Roman and Celtic Britons were 50% black.

Yes of course it's better for women that they're stressed and sad.

The BBC/Vox told me so!

And then, when they hear alternative ideas, they immediately jump to the Power-Knowledge's pre-sighted straw men versions of those alternatives.

Anyone who doesn't believe that Roman Britons were black... is a RACIST!

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How do you beat a Power-Knowledge?

With great difficulty. Because if you try to start "beating" it, there are now 500 million people who think you are evil. You are a racist/homophobic/misogynistic bigot! You must be cancelled!

The Power-Knowledge defends itself.

A lot of the effort of defeating a Power Knowledge is about organising the opposition to it. Getting a message out there. But another important part is formulating a viable alternative.

People have a bias towards believing neat, confident memes.

In a battle between

"2 + 2 = 5"

and

"2 + 2 = something but I'm not sure what"

, the simple and wrong "2 + 2 = 5" wins.

The easiest thing to work on that I'm pretty sure will work is to stop people on the right from (Moldbug) "Rebelling Against the Guidance Counselor"

"Rebelling Against the Guidance Counselor" is when people on the right start defining themselves by the straw men that the SoJus left constructs.

Example: instead of learning to appreciate the female role in life, some men actually start hating women.

I am not going to develop a useful strategy to roll back Power-Knowledge right here, but the first step is (heh) raising awareness.

Next time you see someone engaged in this kind of circular, bottom-line reasoning understand and maybe point out the aspect of Power-Knowledge.

Funnily enough, a video game gets closer to the truth than any other official media: