My thanks to Librarian of Celaeno on Substack for provoking one of my comments which turned into a mini-essay. His original post related to an essay written about a conservative journalist who faced an online backlash for daring to suggest that a kid who scored close to 1600 in his SATs might be better served by gaining a degree than by becoming a plumber. It’s a mad, mad world we are living in. It’s been a while. I hope the season finds you all in good cheer and good health. Merry Christmas!
Good article- yet another paywall for comments! There’s a great point to be made about Peter Turchin’s Elite Overproduction- just because society tries to jam those without the cognitive chops into higher education, it doesn’t mean that the truly gifted should skip university and pursue a life in the trades.
Of course, with the political skew in the universities there is a lot to be said for the path of the autodidact, but just how likely is it that the feedback idiosyncrasy of the internet is going to produce the intellectual texture and richness derived from studying a subject in depth? God, I miss the BBC Four which only existed for the briefest of spans- between the time that BBC iPlayer was introduced and when the BBC went woke and decided to decolonise their content. There were a number of programmes which opened my mind to whole new theatres of intellectual curiosity. What’s more, such endeavours require both an audience and an expert class to produce them- the first of which may well be guaranteed, but the second could be in precariously short supply within a generation.
And, of course, that’s what the new wave of cultural censors are after in their hunt for Substack Nazis. They never cared that much about Fox News, because its content was too easy to scoff at, its viewers too easy to stereotype. Sure, they lambasted its very existence and lamented its large audience but it was never really a threat to their cultural dominance. Similarly, they never saw the occasional well-informed status quo conservative as a threat, because they knew full well a little political skew and mild skewering they could portray them as cultural anachronisms going the way of the dodo.
No, the source of all the outraged ire with regard to Substack is that they’ve become used to owning the cultural means of production, and simply cannot stand that a growing cadre of conservative and heterodox writers seek not only preserve a Western cannon, the appreciation of which was on the verge of extinction, but also to do so with a flair and imagination that ties in with our current cultural and political paradigm.
Some of the Nazis are very real by the way, with a far larger contingent only guilty of some past objectionable comment in the past couple of decades. But regardless of whether the Substack Nazis are real or imagined, they are only the first in what it likely to be a long list of intellectual offenders and the objectionable, all sure to be added to a McCarthyite list of ever-expanding intellectual deplorables. They didn’t like vaccine or lockdown sceptics, and hate that they happened to be right on any number of specifics. They don’t like the intellectual nuance of those who admit that climate change exists, but also maintain that it’s not worth deindustrialising the world over with cataclysmic degrowth agendas over, or indeed throwing the developing world back into semi-permanent malnutrition for a somewhat serious problem which is neither an existential threat or a civilisation ender (though some of the proposed solutions may well be the latter). They may not like the fact that there were a legion of largely voiceless heretics able to demonstrate their intellectual folly through juxtaposition, but what they hate is that anybody has the capacity at all to override their often disingenuously corrupt mass media gatekeeping and reach an audience.
What we are witnessing is yet another scouting mission to pre-emptively destroy opposition to the all pervading and poisonously disingenuous Narratives of our time. They might not like the fact that a large percentage of Brits still consider the British Empire a good thing, but they loathe the fact that there are still intellectual remnants capable of proving beyond any reasonable doubt, that despite its cultural imperialism and endemically casual brutality, it nonetheless was a long-term force for good in the world- if for no better reason than it evangelised the concept that all children should be educated, rather than a select and privileged few. Soon they’ll be censoring those who happen to make the point that despite all the follies and misdeeds of the British Empire, it did possess the merits of promoting a system of ideas which ended the legality of slavery and raised 90% of the world’s population out of the most abject and brutal poverty imaginable.
For them the goal is nothing less than the monopolisation and mass marketeering of instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality may prove the abject folly and stupidity of instrumental rationality time and again, but it lacks the emotive appeal of narratives which seem true, but aren’t, and as such doesn’t spread through the culture with anything like to virality of what Shelby Steele has called ‘Poetic Truths’- assertions which seem intuitively correct, but upon further examination prove completely false. Dry empiricism has become the domain of increasingly frustrated cultural critics with no real voice. Worse, there is growing trend on the Right to indulge in the same type of tactics- resorting to hyperbole and misrepresentation, unmindful of the fact that they face a fundamental asymmetry of fact checking and media strawman arguments. Simply put, whilst they might make a persuasive argument preaching to the choir, they lack the infrastructure or reach to sell the Big Lie to the frustrated and apathetic middle.
What the Left really doesn’t want is a class of heterodox and conservative writers, equally able to entertain, inform politically or espouse effusively on the soaring ambitions towards truth and beauty of yesteryear without resorting to illusions of a glorious bygone era. Life was shit. Life was hard. But the poets, architects, artists of sculptors of past eras make our cultural artefacts of today look like trash and a collection of clever intellectual conceits.
Noting the intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of our current era, the Left’s creatives apply the same broad brush to every aspect of our societies. There is nothing that they don't want to nihilistically destroy or discredit- for if they feel miserable, so should everyone else. Where they fail to inform is that in almost every area where there is room for criticism in the realm of economics the root causes can be traced directly back to government, or by extension a failure to enforce free and fair market competition- with competition the single most important criteria for human flourishing in a market system. The last thing they want people to hear is that government is the one pulling the strings of corporate oligarchs and not the reverse- government is the disease of which it pretends to be the cure. In a single conceit they’ve created both their own protagonist and a raison d'etre for the continued expansion of unelected bureaucracies with the structural ability to sidestep the democratic veto.
The last thing the censors want is anyone intellectually capable of pointing this out, or indeed pointing out that rather than being edgy anti-establishment rebels, they are drones for Left neofascism- the definition of which (according to Benito Mussolini) is the merger of state and corporate power. As anyone who happens to have watched the Congressional Hearings on the Twitter files will know this corporate/state merger has the Democratic Party as its chief proponent. They not only want to own the narrative but also license it, and they certainly don’t want anyone capable of contradicting them given access to an audience.
Good point on Fox News. They weren't that far off the reservation and could be counted on to fall in line on anything important. Fox provides the illusion of opposition. Substack is uncontrolled and therefore subversive. It must be killed, or rather neutered to continue the illusion.
We peasants must be made to think we still have agency.
> Epistemic rationality may prove the abject folly and stupidity of instrumental rationality time and again,
Please elaborate.
> ... but it lacks the emotive appeal of narratives which seem true, but aren’t,
Yes. I'd like to read something even book length on the current dominance of the just-so story. Of course we've always had our narratives but, remembering Ray's Law of the Conservation of Irrationality, we used to 'park' our need for organizing stories -- narratives -- in religion. Remember Andras back on QC? I suppose his TFM narrative isn't quite a religion but it's close. But it surely is a just-so story and it sounds true. Surely all freely-made commercial transactions must, by definition, be in the interests of both parties? But then again so does the commie just-so story: Surely it is in the interests of the working class to throw off the capitalists who eat their lunch? Or the facist: Surely when the entire resources of the nation are focused thru one unified entity (the state) and focused on one national project, there is nothing that might not be achieved? Woke: Surely, since we are all created equal, if any Identity is doing poorly it must be because someone is Oppressing them? But whereas old-time religions were 12 course meals of narrative, currently popular narratives are twinkies -- quick hits of 'meaning' or 'structure' as shallow as a desert mirage.
> Life was shit. Life was hard. But the poets, architects, artists of sculptors of past eras make our cultural artefacts of today look like trash
Yup. We have more stuff now but our internal lives are junk *and* even our stuff is trash tho powerful. Let's have smartphones and Shakespeare.
Did you know that here in BC kids are no longer required to learn their times tables?
It's been a while since I've seen anything from you. A very nice article and from my experience pretty accurate on the humourless left wing. There is always the antidote of Tom Wolfe though.
“ No, the source of all the outraged ire with regard to Substack is that they’ve become used to owning the cultural means of production, and simply cannot stand that a growing cadre of conservative and heterodox writers seek not only preserve a Western cannon, the appreciation of which was on the verge of extinction, but also to do so with a flair and imagination that ties in with our current cultural and political paradigm.”
Man that is so true! Every single time the free speech Nazis (as opposed to the “Substack Nazis”) come at Substack with one of these attacks this is 100% the reason. It’s always cloaked in high-minded principle, but Katz went looking for the things he wanted to find. He’s had a bad attitude about Substack since he joined.
Good point on Fox News. They weren't that far off the reservation and could be counted on to fall in line on anything important. Fox provides the illusion of opposition. Substack is uncontrolled and therefore subversive. It must be killed, or rather neutered to continue the illusion.
We peasants must be made to think we still have agency.
Good to see you back on the keyboard Geary.
> Epistemic rationality may prove the abject folly and stupidity of instrumental rationality time and again,
Please elaborate.
> ... but it lacks the emotive appeal of narratives which seem true, but aren’t,
Yes. I'd like to read something even book length on the current dominance of the just-so story. Of course we've always had our narratives but, remembering Ray's Law of the Conservation of Irrationality, we used to 'park' our need for organizing stories -- narratives -- in religion. Remember Andras back on QC? I suppose his TFM narrative isn't quite a religion but it's close. But it surely is a just-so story and it sounds true. Surely all freely-made commercial transactions must, by definition, be in the interests of both parties? But then again so does the commie just-so story: Surely it is in the interests of the working class to throw off the capitalists who eat their lunch? Or the facist: Surely when the entire resources of the nation are focused thru one unified entity (the state) and focused on one national project, there is nothing that might not be achieved? Woke: Surely, since we are all created equal, if any Identity is doing poorly it must be because someone is Oppressing them? But whereas old-time religions were 12 course meals of narrative, currently popular narratives are twinkies -- quick hits of 'meaning' or 'structure' as shallow as a desert mirage.
> Life was shit. Life was hard. But the poets, architects, artists of sculptors of past eras make our cultural artefacts of today look like trash
Yup. We have more stuff now but our internal lives are junk *and* even our stuff is trash tho powerful. Let's have smartphones and Shakespeare.
Did you know that here in BC kids are no longer required to learn their times tables?
It's been a while since I've seen anything from you. A very nice article and from my experience pretty accurate on the humourless left wing. There is always the antidote of Tom Wolfe though.
Good essay. I agree they want to control all speech. They have to.
The confident don't need to control narratives. Only the insecure.
“ No, the source of all the outraged ire with regard to Substack is that they’ve become used to owning the cultural means of production, and simply cannot stand that a growing cadre of conservative and heterodox writers seek not only preserve a Western cannon, the appreciation of which was on the verge of extinction, but also to do so with a flair and imagination that ties in with our current cultural and political paradigm.”
Man that is so true! Every single time the free speech Nazis (as opposed to the “Substack Nazis”) come at Substack with one of these attacks this is 100% the reason. It’s always cloaked in high-minded principle, but Katz went looking for the things he wanted to find. He’s had a bad attitude about Substack since he joined.
You know how many Nazi's there are on the planet: 100%.