Coherence

Why You Need a Logicialy Consistent System of Values

If you check someone’s Facebook media and find an “I GOT VAXXED” frame from 2020, it’s a pretty safe bet you’ll see a BLACK LIVES MATTER image behind it and an I STAND WITH UKRAINE declaration posted not long afterward. If you see an anti-Hillary meme, you likely find memes mocking climate change activists and race-baiting grifters.

None of these causes necessarily flow from the other. It’s entirely possible to accept the necessity of COVID vaccinations without supporting fiery but mostly peaceful protests or taking a side in the Russia/Ukraine conflict. You can dislike Hillary Clinton and still think climate change and racism are real problems. And to cut off needless arguments at the pass; I’m not saying that any of these memes are true or false, I’m simply saying they’re unrelated.

All these stances stem not from a reasoned examination of the varying facts, but from gut emotional responses. Most often these responses are acquired through contagion. Everybody in my circle thinks X is bad/great, therefore I wave signs that reflect their beliefs. These ideas are reinforced by their peer group, and so they accept them as true. It’s not an affectation or a fad so much as a by-product of socialization. And none of us, yrs. truly and my loyal readers included, are immune to socialization.

While the famous Jonathan Swift quote, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into,” is probably apocryphal, there’s a great deal of truth in it. Few people have the time, interest, or ability for deep study of political ideals. Those of us who do arrive at the library with an established set of preconceptions. We seek material that bolsters our worldview and give those facts more weight than ideas that challenge it. We expend more cognitive energy on refuting unpalatable ideas than on challenging our established beliefs.

This may sound like inescapable, but it’s really more like a Chinese finger trap. The more we expend our emotional energy on escaping the trap, the tighter our bondage. We can ignore the trap, but that leaves us unable to use our hands effectively. The answer lies not in struggle or willful blindness, but in pushing inwards.

G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw

The whole force and triumph of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he is a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his power consisting in jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in holding his own fortress night and day. He puts the Shaw test rapidly and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven or earth. His standard never varies. The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded Conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is exactly this, that his scales, such as they are, are held even, and that his law, such as it is, is justly enforced.

You may attack his principles, as I do; but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness of Socialists as much as that of Individualists. If he dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science. If he condemns the irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women.

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

You might think that a conservative Anglo-Catholic like G.K. Chesterton and a dedicated socialist like George Bernard Shaw would be natural enemies. But their warm friendship lasted for decades and through many public debates. Both Chesterton and Shaw saw in the other a kindred longing for Truth and a willingness to apply that Truth to every situation.

Shaw wanted to change the world for the better and dethrone the oppressors who would preserve their wealth and power at the expense of the poor and weak. He never vacillated from those ideas or from his high standards. Chesterton thought Shaw’s conclusions misguided, but always acknowledged the courage of his convictions.

Consistency mattered for both men. Chesterton’s ideas were as firmly rooted in Anglican and later Roman Catholic ideals as Shaw’s were grounded in secular humanism. Both men were quite capable of devastating one-liners and amusing put-downs. But there was always substance behind their style, and every affirmation was bolstered with supporting facts. They could agree with each other on some issues and agree to disagree on the rest.

Today’s online pundits don’t have convictions, they have feelings. “I want a revolution” is a feeling. A clear knowledge of why revolution is necessary combined with a heartfelt dedication to revolution is a conviction. Convictions give revolutionaries a sword they can use to overthrow or weaken the unjust system. Feelings give them the appearance of being a revolutionary without the unpleasantness of starting a revolution.

Feelings can be hurt; convictions can only be challenged. If your beliefs are based on a coherent and rational philosophical foundation, you have an answer for most objections. You don’t need to block probing questions or resort to personal insults. You can explain why your querent is wrong and why you are right. You can even find common ground in your shared ideals and agree to disagree on your differences.

That last suggestion will have many feelings-driven pundits clutching their pearls. In the world of feelings, there’s only room for two sides. To suggest that your opponents may get a few things right can only be a sign you’re a secret MAGAtard/Mossad agent/Russian Bot/etc. But any political movement that hopes to pick up steam needs to gain support, or at the very least neutrality, from as many sides as possible.

They also need to keep their enemies list short and succinct. Enemies require time, manpower, and resources, and political groups are generally short on all those things. To be effective, political theorists must distinguish between opponents who can be placated or brought into the fold and enemies who will settle for nothing less than your total destruction. They must also recognize the difference between those who can do you harm and those who can be safely ignored.

Chesterton and Shaw were opponents, but they were never enemies. They promoted their causes and got their messages out to audiences who found them both enlightening and entertaining. Listeners didn’t leave a Chesterton/Shaw debate hating one side or the other; they departed with a better understanding of both. So how did we get from civilized discussions to incoherent shrieking?

Carl Schmitt

It is only in an individualistically disintegrated society that the aesthetically productive subject could shift the intellectual center into itself, only in a bourgeois world that isolates the individual in the domain of the intellectual, makes the individual its own point of reference, and imposes upon it the entire burden that otherwise was hierarchically distributed among different functions in a social order. In this society, it is left to the private individual to be his own priest. But not only that. Because of the central significance and consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of his personality.

Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, (1919, revised 1924)

How politically savvy was Carl Schmitt? In May 1933, less than a year after he criticized the NSDAP for its “Abuse of Legality,” he joined the Party. When he was removed from his government and party appointments in 1936, he continued his academic career as one of Germany’s leading jurists and political theorists. And after Hitler’s 1945 fall and over a year in internment camps, he was cleared by the Nuremberg Committee and retired to his hometown. There Schmitt continued to write, lecture, and maintain correspondence with intellectuals in Germany and worldwide.

Many of my feelings-driven readers are likely clutching their virtual pearls right now. How dare I be inspired by a Nazi who makes Heidegger look like a White Rose member? Under NSDAP rule, Germany got Volkswagen and the autobahns. The autobahns are excellent highways, Volkswagen made excellent cars, and Schmitt wrote excellent books on politics in theory and practice. In an era of mediocrity, I’ll take excellence anywhere I can find it.

For Schmitt, the rot began with Romanticism and the French Revolution. As the orderly, rational, traditional world of Classicism crumbled under the weight of Industrialism and Science. The laws of God and State, and our free will to obey or disobey with predictable consequences, was replaced by an occasionalism that put every thought and every action in the hands of an inscrutable outside force.

As God lay on his deathbed waiting for Nietzsche to sign the certificate, deity was replaced by impersonal great forces like Nature and The People. When people today quote MLK’s “the arc of history bends toward justice,” they’re affirming that Higher Power and insisting upon the ultimate triumph of their vision of justice. Liberalism, according to Schmitt, is a product of Romanticism. It is rooted in an idea of inherent human goodness, something Schmitt (like yrs. truly) rejects as a pernicious myth.

Schmitt also correctly identifies Liberalism and Romanticism as bourgeois from their inception. The French Revolution was fought by poor people organized by dissatisfied members of France’s burgeoning middle classes. Today’s liberals are generally White, college-educated, and downwardly mobile. Their fears of losing their class status fuel them to emulate French Revolutionary leaders, but their hatred of the poor and undereducated leaves them warring against Populist Fascism instead of the real cause of their problems, the Banking and Corporate Aristocracy.

Classicism demands coherence and structure. Romanticism and its descendants look upon coherence as a burden and structure as a prison. They would match every thesis to its antithesis and tear down every rule as a tool of the oppressor. Only then can we reach our full potential, realize our inner goodness, and become truly human. Classicism sees the past as a storage house of wisdom and a foundation for the future. Romanticism sees it as a nightmare from which they are trying to awake, or as an Edenic paradise which they seek to recapture.

Ultimately, Romanticism focuses on aesthetics over metaphysics. Political issues become fodder for sparkling conversation and intriguing thoughts. Real action is cast aside in favor of declarations that entertain the listeners. Once these discussions took place in coffeehouses and social clubs. Today we find them on Reddit, Facebook, and Xitter. There they talk of things that have been and things that might be, but never get around to dealing with things as they are.

Today the liberal-romantic focus has shifted from the People to the Individual. But separating the Individual from the Tribe is harder than the Existentialists imagined. It’s telling that many of today’s loudest Liberals identify themselves by a laundry list of sexual preferences, gender identities, physical and mental disorders, favorite anime characters, and other incidentals. They prove themselves special and unique by claiming membership in multiple communities.

A philosophy centered on the Individual must ultimately slide into Solipsism. Combine hyper-individualism with “virtual reality” and information curated by algorithms and you get a world of atomized people talking to mirrors. It’s easy to get trapped in the Internet’s bright shiny surface and waste your time screaming at distorted reflections you imagine to be your enemies. Escaping the illusion is more difficult, but it can be done. Here’s how.

St. Thomas Aquinas (c1225-1274)

I’ve read several hundred thousand words of St. Thomas Aquinas, but I still have a lot of work ahead. During a writing career of two decades or so, Aquinas wrote an estimated 8 million words. Thomistic philosophy is the underpinning of most Catholic questions on ethics, politics, and just about everything else in modern Catholicism.

Aquinas began his meteoric rise when he read a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of Aristotle. In the 13th century the West had largely forgotten the Greek philosophers. While some monastic libraries preserved Greek manuscripts, few European scholars could read them and even fewer were interested in Pagan thought. Tensions between Orthodoxy and Catholicism further hampered the spread of Greek ideas and Greek language in the Catholic West.

St. Thomas Aquinas studied under another Doctor of the Church, St. Albertus Magnus. Magnus introduced Aquinas to Aristotle, and also to two of the greatest Islamic Aristoteleans, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes. These ideas had already been percolating among a few scholars, notably St. Anselm of Canterbury. But in Aquinas these ideas sparked an explosion that ultimately led to the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution.

Aquinas wrote many of his works in the style of a Disputation. Jacob Allee has written an excellent piece on Disputation, but this section explains one of the most important steps:

[S]tate the best objections possible to your own position. One should state as many objections as one could imagine a reasonable person might give. No punches should be pulled, no making of straw men should be done. It is to the advantage of the person writing their Summa that he or she challenges themselves with the best possible objections to their position.

This type of discourse has become unfashionable of late. Muting and blocking is a much easier way of dealing with questions you can’t answer. If you believe your opponents are dangerous and evil, debate only gives them credibility. Worse, it might inspire your peers to think you had secret sympathies toward these malefactors. Your ideas are self-evident, anyway; why else would all your friends accept them?

But if your opponents truly are dangerous and evil, you must understand what makes them tick. You need to respond to their seductions with facts, not slogans and insults; to find the weaknesses they are leveraging against you; to understand their appeal rather than dismiss their fans out of hand as stupid and malevolent. Preaching to the choir may give you a warm glow of self-satisfaction, but it leaves you ill-prepared to recruit new members or soothe a hostile mob.

Disputation helps you avoid building a strategy that’s coherent, logically consistent, and utterly wrong. When your intellectual structure leads to real world issues, Disputation forces you to justify the consequences or consider alternative strategies. It also helps your group avoid becoming a Cult of Personality; if your leaders can’t respond to tough questions, they shouldn’t be your leaders.

It must be noted that Disputation deals entirely in facts and citations, not feelings and emotional responses. “I hate X” or “I love X” are statements of feeling, not a fact. “X did Y and therefore Z” is a statement of fact. There may be hate or love behind that statement, but it contains information that you can confirm or refute. You can prove the statement wrong or incorporate its truths into your philosophy. Everybody is entitled to their own feelings, but not to their own facts.

Logical coherence is a necessary but not sufficient condition to success. You need to inspire emotions in followers and prospective followers. You also need some emotional investment in your cause. But to paraphrase Aleister Crowley, Love must always be under Will.

We live in a world where our emotions are constantly spindled, folded, mutilated, and manipulated by people who are trying to sell us things and ideas. Many spend their entire lives feeling what others want them to feel and believing what others want them to believe. Some rebel against the conditioning only to ally themselves with other feelings and beliefs.

Feelings-driven people are predictable. Once you figure out their emotional buttons, you can manipulate them with surprising precision. Logical people are much harder to pin down. Sit down at a chessboard with Garry Kasparov and try to predict his next moves. You’ll almost certainly be surprised, because Kasparov has already predicted yours and has several different counter-maneuvers for each.

A brief inventory of your cherished ideas will show that many, perhaps most, are grounded in emotion. Give each one a thorough, ruthless examination to see if you can ground them in logic and defend them against logical counterarguments. This will help you sharpen your mind and goals. It will also provide you with ammunition that you can use to discredit your feelings-driven opponents, as well as valuable information on what sorts of emotional appeals work best to gaining new adherents.

The 2017 “It’s Okay to be White” campaign was a brilliant example of emotional manipulation on a shoestring budget. The 4channers who created it knew that it would make social justice warriors scream anti-White rhetoric. They also knew that many politically apathetic White people would wonder “what’s so upsetting about saying it’s Okay to be White?” Their predictions came true as journalists, activists, and NGOs condemned this shocking example of White Supremacy in action and red-pilled many young White people in the process.

Tricking your enemies into time-wasting sorties has long been a useful military strategy. Political movements only thrive when they project an image of strength. Blundering into obvious trolls is a sign of weakness, not strength. When your opponent is looking for a fight, it’s easy to make them look foolish by sending them on a snipe hunt. If 4chan can do it, what’s stopping you?

Appealing to new members by lengthy logical analyses may get you a few smart autists. Hitting emotional pain points, then providing logical and coherent solutions, will draw people who are both passionate and intelligent. You’ll rouse far more people to action by riling them up than you will by detailed explanations of what they should do and why they should do it.

But it’s not enough to simply pull the right emotional levers. You also have to determine whose levers are worth pulling. Those who run entirely on feelings can be safely ignored or used to your advantage as you see fit. Their loyalty or enmity will only last for a few dopamine rushes. Sooner or later they’ll find a new target to love or hate and you’ll be forgotten like a childhood toy.

Arguing with the feelings-driven can be entertaining. Who doesn’t enjoy seeing an annoying idiot reduced to foot-stomping and tooth-grinding rage? But always remember that you’re not arguing with X the idiot, you’re trying to show other people that X is an idiot. And most of the time anybody who matters has figured that out already. Enjoy your trolling — I certainly enjoy mine — but don’t mistake it for anything more than a bit of fun at some doofus’s expense.

Don’t expect to win over your feelings-driven opponents, at least at first. They will respond to justified criticism by blocking their critics or drowning them out with slogans. But as their illusion of consensus breaks down, many will find themselves in an existential crisis. At that time, they may be vulnerable to reconditioning and, in a few cases, of an emotional and intellectual breakthrough.

Building a coherent political philosophy takes time and research, combined with ruthless pruning of irrelevant causes and ideas. But without that work, you’ll never accomplish anything besides updoots and asspats. Feelings-driven people are a mirror that reflects back their peer group’s beliefs. Logic-driven people are a fulcrum that can move the world.