Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Thoughts on Synthetic Religion

I throw my hat in with Mark Yuray (and M. Moldbug) in the argument about whether to restore the Great Tradition or to synthesize a religion based on reason.

Go ahead and read Yuray’s essay and the previous one that he references to get caught up.

I don’t really want to get into the details (in part because I go into some of the reasoning in more detail in my forthcoming e-pamphlet), but at least some of the personal influence for me is that I have been a part of various rationalist religion-replacement efforts not related to any Yudkowsky cult earlier in my life.

That experience also lead me to lend some more credence to the history of such rationalist cults going back to the Reformation, but also the various Marxist manifestations of such cults.

I’m just incredibly skeptical of any such efforts for similar reasons as to why I don’t believe in central planning in economics. There is too much hidden knowledge contained within a traditional religion. The trees of an engineered effort are liable to bear mutant fruits.

Because I have been part of such a failed effort up-close, and because it really had destructive consequences for most of the people involved, and because other similar efforts have often had monstrous consequences, I’ve cast my lot with the nostalgic Christians.

I am also contemporary Silicon Valley-ish in that I believe that execution is more important than ideation. The guys spending a lot of time coming up with new ideas will be outperformed by the people who take the field and jerry-rig solutions to problems as they present themselves. Also, building trust tends to be more important than most people operating on their own tend to figure out.

Ensuring that the guy next to you does not stab you in the ass is a hard problem that most people in most places fail to solve. It’s a particular problem for secularists, but less of an issue for more orthodox religions, because of the presence of (wait for it…) hierarchy and structure that limits schismatic behavior.

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The Orange Line’s Embrace of Black Militants

On New Years, Margaret Roberts at VDare noticed that Rand Paul and the broader Washington D.C. libertarian community has embraced (physically, morally, politically) black militants and their allies in the radical left.

In a move condemned even by Jennifer Rubin, Rand Paul poses with Al Sharpton. So now it appears that House GOP Whip Steve Scalise did not after all speak to David Duke’s EURO group, although the news is disseminating suspiciously slowly [Steve Scalise spoke to civic association meeting, not white nationalist conference, David Duke adviser Kenny Knight says, by Julia O’Donoghue, NOLA.com, December 31, 2014]. This presumably means that the Main Stream Media will be thwarted, for now, in its obvious intent to spread the smear to Senator Rand Paul via his father [If you’re a politician and your chummy past with neo-Nazis resurfaces, don’t worry. Ask Ron Paul, by Jeb Lund, The Guardian, December 30, 2015]. But there can be no doubt that, if Paul had been brought under more pressure, he would have groveled. Perhaps the most ominous trend on the American Right today is libertarians’ adoption of prevailing “anti-racism” dogma, to the point where they can increasingly only be interpreted as overtly anti-White.

“Three out of four people in jail for drugs are people of color,” Paul wrote late last year. “In the African American community, folks rightly ask why are our sons disproportionately incarcerated, killed, and maimed?” [Rand Paul: The Politicians Are to Blame in Ferguson, TIME.com, November 25, 2014]

Unfortunately for Paul, two assassinated NYPD officers were the predictable subsequent result of the ongoing Leftist agitation to which he was pandering. He had opened the door for his intra-party rivals to run against him on the traditional Republican issue of “law and order.”

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Yet it’s at this moment that Libertarians have decided to ape the electoral strategy of the Democrats: mobilize the fringes of American life against the core. Unfortunately for this strategy, however, it’s the core American population—the married, content, and patriotic—who are most likely to support the values of property ownership and limited government.

Rand Paul and his Left-Libertarians have turned their back on their natural supporters at the very time they most need a champion.

The fringes are easy to get riled up. But the core is the only demographic that really has much skin in the game with respect to property rights. The fringes have no property to worry themselves over.

For those of you who don’t know, ‘the Orange Line’ refers to libertarians affiliated or employed by the Cato Institute, including the editorial staff of Reason Magazine. It’s also sometimes referred to as the ‘Kochtopus’ because of its financial connections to our friends at Koch Enterprises.

From a democratic-politics perspective, it’s even dumber for Rand Paul to be moved by the influence of left-libertarians, because those people will oppose him for other reasons, largely related to foreign policy but also economics, as soon as it is convenient for them to do so.

Indeed, the left-wing Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog accused Rand Paul of being an ‘asshole and moral pervert’ last year, among other things.

Libertarians, especially the academics, have positioned themselves against their natural base, aligning instead with the donor class and radical academics. Because politics is ultimately mock-war, alignment on the battlefield matters more than whatever the generals are talking about to justify that alignment. Who is shooting at whom is more relevant than what motivates all the shooting.

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Debating Tips for Tangling With Liberals

First of all, you should go forth and read Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” before you engage in any further debates with anyone.

Being accurate or correct has only limited bearing on the success of an argument. You, or your opponent, just has to establish the appearance of accuracy or correctness. The superior speaker can win an argument even if his position is false, nonsensical, or contradictory.

The personal character of the speaker, his reputation with the audience, and your relative reputation also have strong bearing on whether or not other people will be persuaded in the course of speech.

Contemporary liberals (especially those younger than 35) tend to be unread, untutored, and inexperienced in alternative points of view, no matter how educated they are or what their pedigree is. For this reason, you should carefully explain any references to older material, and if it is a debate by written correspondence, you should provide accessible citations to explain the position.

  • Maintaining your comportment is critical in any contested discussion. If your voice becomes strained or up-tempo, you become visibly agitated, or if you otherwise lose your temper, you are also liable to lose the audience.
    • Learning the emotional self-control to achieve this can only be done through practice.
    • Reliably being able to manipulate your opponent into losing his composure is a key skill to develop, so long as you can achieve it without visibly provoking it yourself.
  • If you know your opponent’s argument better than he does, it becomes much easier to anticipate what he’s going to say, and also to manipulate him to your advantage.
  • If you can counter the opponent’s argument by demonstrating a contradiction or error under his own belief system, it’s more effective than doing so under your own.

If you’re uncertain as to whether or not you have understood your opponents’ statements, you can repeat back to them your understanding, and then ask them if you have comprehended their statements correctly. This both prevents you from making a misstep and helps to establish a rapport to the other side of the contest.

Whenever you can find a point of agreement between yourself and the contestant, amplify that point of agreement, especially if it is a trivial point. If you can encourage the person to see them as in alignment with you before you get into the point of disagreement, then they will be much less willing to offer a spirited defense.

The majority of inexperienced debaters will be so thrilled to hear you agree with them on anything that they will be far more willing to cede a critical point later in the debate.

If you can find a way to rephrase a controversial argument in anodyne terms that would be acceptable to the opponent, do it, because most inexperienced speakers will be unable to recognize a rephrased argument, because they have only been trained to respond to a given argument using a certain set of terms.

Experience can teach you the various ‘trigger words’ of the typical American which will get them to froth and become enraged. In a debate, it’s much easier to get the opposing side to cede all of their points if you can navigate around these triggers.

Given that formal debate has almost been eliminated, even in academies, the chief concern in informal debate is in controlling the trashing-around of your opponent so that he speaks to your advantage.

To break the opponent’s resistance, you ought to establish your case in a dialectic fashion, carefully breaking it apart. While it may be sometimes sufficient to expose a contradiction in the argument of your opponent, to popular audiences, the sophistic presentation of the speech is much more important.

Since all audiences are now common audiences, the Socratic method is only useful at appealing to the minority with the cultivation to appreciate it, and even those are often more than a little bit crazy.

Finally, you should never waste time debating someone on their home grounds, surrounded by their friends and supporters — unless you are confident enough in your abilities that you can rephrase an argument so well that they have no idea that they actually started off disagreeing with you on the essential points.

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