History will be written by the victors no longer. History will in fact not be written – it will be compiled, automatically. We are now firmly within meta-history. What does this mean?
It means that when you are having an internet fight over politics – questions of value and morality, or even of economics, whenever you are saying anything at all - ”history” is not ”written” by ”whoever won the argument”. ”History”, from now on, is which words you will write into a search engine to find the story later.
Example. James Damore. A limpwristed autistic nerd cumbrain who wrote a long autismo text deconstructing the formal claims of the intentionally irrational and ad-hoc mainstream beliefs google now requires you to claim allegiance to, in a naive, idiotic attempt to make sense of it all. He was literally, formally, objectively correct and spoke plainly and clearly. I’ve read his fucking stupid memo. It’s like, baby logic. Extremely simple, extremely stupid. But technically correct and logically sound. Giving him a grade in formal logic, he passes. it’s coherent and logically consistent.
But just now, when I couldn’t remember what his name was, because I wanted to write it into this article, the way I looked it up was by typing ”google sexist memo controversy” into a search engine.
Do you understand? Do you see?
James Damore won the argument. Objectively. I am literally a logician. I have papers, credentials. A university of big brained nerds have all agreed that I am good at logic. Formal logic AND Philosophical Logic, I’ll have you know. Yeah I read Kripke, I’m a pretty cool guy actually.
Anyways, as I have logically proven, I can academically vouch for him. I’m literally an expert on who’s right. James Damore won the argument. But I am the last person in the world who will ever remember that. History will remember him as [google(company)] [sexism] [sexist memo] [feminism] [Jordan Peterson] [alt-right].
This is what I mean when I say, “They Don’t Want To Win, They just want you to Play Their Game”.
The “culture war” is not about winning the arguments, it’s about deciding the terms of engagement. Here the word “terms” is a double entendre. They want you to use their words. it’s not important who goes to which bathrooms – it’s not important who can get “married” non-religiously – it’s not important who bakes what cakes. All of these particulars are completely arbitrary and interchangeable. They want you to use their words when discussing those arbitrary issues of the day. That’s it.
This functions both organically on a social scale, and formally on a programming scale. it’s a social phenomenon that is replicated in computer data management and programming, by people who have been exposed to the social phenomenon. It is quite literally a mind virus, and it spreads from biological host to technology, and back.
All language carries with it metaphysics, implications. All words are pictures, and as pictures carry implicit relationships to all other pictures and concepts.
Examine the difference between saying: “A gay man” and “A man who needs to have anal sex with other men in order to live, and if he is not allowed this, then his life would be worthless, pure suffering, he would wish he was dead. It would be inhuman torture to prevent him from having anal sex with men.”
Is this saying the same thing? “A gay man” is much more pleasant, dont you think? – nothing vulgar, sterile even. It’s almost like saying it without even having to think about sex at all. Just a nice pleasant fellow who is shaped like a ken doll and holds hands with handsome men. Please do not talk about feces, it is rude. Please do not make me imagine feces in my head, it is rude.
The “Culture war” is not about “winning the argument”. It’s about deciding which words you use to have the argument. “Should transgender women have access to women’s restrooms” - the moment you accept the term “transgender women”, and you understand what is meant by it, and you use the term to mean the same thing, in an effort to make yourself understood by them, on a simple rhetorical level – you have internalized your opponent’s metaphysics. You have lost.
The “war” metaphor equivalent would be letting your enemies dictate terms of engagement, which moves are legal, which items you are allow to use - As the keen reader of sun tzu that I know you are, you get the point.
What is unique about the “left” in huge quotation marks, today, is that this format has been recognized and more or less knowingly instrumentalised. You could get all down into the nitty gritty and figure out how it’s the bioleninist weapon of choice because it’s a rhetorical way of exploiting any kindness, any courtesy or politeness, to gain ground. But all of that is really only of academic interest, for it’s own sake. What matters is this:
It is a very simply little trick of semantics, that you can use to trick people. It is going to be the end of the world. We’ve known for some time that You Can Fool Some Of The People All Of The Time. What we now know is that you can in fact fool most of the people, all of the time. They have, they are, and they will. It’s a self perpetuating thing. No one’s at the head of it. There are a lot of opportunist, mostly sociopaths of some kind who see it as a wave to ride into some easy money, who claim leadership roles, and become the mainstream equivalent of internet lolcows. Maybe there once was someone behind it all – doesn’t matter. If there was, it’s out of their control now. Now all we can do is wait for it to hit critical mass, and just, see what happens.
It’s getting into the American military. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe no one is going to make a big deal about it and everyone will act like responsible normal adults.
I was at the louvre earlier and I saw how they’d obsessively catalogued shit like hieroglyphic shopping lists and cuneiform street signs and whatever the fuck, because there were so few things that got written down back then, these were a huge fucking deal. I had to wonder how modernity’s writing would get remembered, and how there’d be so much they’d absolutely have to pick some crazy way to boil it down into something digestible to the future’s me (some dumb bitch with audioguide headphones). They mentioned nobody caring about the results of finally deciphering hieroglyphics because it ended up having nothing to do with the Bible, which was all anybody cared about at the time. It seems like history is getting flooded with data getting stored by our currently hyperliterate population, and what gets remembered is determined by a mixture of virality now (nobody of the literati shuts up about nietzsche, so his books keep getting printed and people keep learning it to seem smart) and interests later (3 different people have dragged illich out of the closet in the past month because he keeps predicting America’s future).
tldr I agree, you’re right, whatever you intend to convey by your writing won’t even make it into a passing reference in a footnote in the future, unless it piques the narcissistic navel gazing of future generations, or gets mentioned in every book written for the next 10 years.
i think theres some bad stuff on the horizon randy. i have a bad feeling about this stuff lately