We Are All Deplorables Now

Joyful vs. Diffident Victories 

No matter how impressive a philosophy, ideology, system, institution or modest set of prescriptions comes across as being, it should not be spoken of glowingly. It should not be fawned over publicly, or even in the privacy of its adherents' minds.

The antithesis of it should likewise not be spoken of disparagingly or demonized in the privacy of said minds. Tall orders, these two.

It's normal to ask why. Why shouldn't you feel the way you naturally do? Why pretend that your objectively accurate or wise beliefs stop short of turning you into a protagonist, and that their inaccurate or insane beliefs do something other than turn them into the antagonists?

Since the why is so normalized and psychologically embedded, we might conclude that it is reasonable to run with it. So when a snarky meme comes along and points out that taking pride in one's beliefs is puerile, not only is it acceptable to ask why, it's downright imperative to do so. But no one asks why when called upon to acknowledge the circus that is Party Politics vis-à-vis their individual voting history.

No one with an IQ above room temperature lionizes their 2016 Clinton-Will-Do vote (anti-Trump vote), or their Trump-Will-Do/anti-Clinton vote. Only the electoral flat-earther engages in such lionization. It is generally understood that the options are wretched, that party loyalty is gullibility, and that the more conscientious a voter is, the readier they will be to hold their nose in the booth and select one type of evil to stave off the eviler evils. Apparent anti-idealists love to point all of this out, especially when an inveterate idealist who sat out the last election gets all up in their grill about the impurity of it all.

But my criteria for "anti-idealist" is considerably stricter than that. Partisanism and idealism are compartmentalized at the outset, such that a hardened partisan and an independent bipartisan are capable of being driven by an identical devotion to (their respective flavor of) idealism. Teammates of the partisan and the bipartisan leave the negotiation table viewing their respective cohorts' contributions under a low-key version of the Halo Effect. Idealism makes this possible, on both fronts.

Consider the persistent readiness of the grownup-in-the-room to reach across the isle — citing the vital role of compromise in politics — and this being proportional to his veneration of balanced proceduralism aka fear of strongman-style governing. I see it as idealistic because it's doggedly closed off to any counterevidence showing the latter (violations of procedural or constitutional norms) in a positive light, even when that same evidence-set cedes ground to the former (checks and balances) ninety-nine times out of a hundred. If the occasional breach and overreach had truly been a stepping stone to something much worse, America would have gotten there a long time ago.

This idealized "We Can't Go There" mentality is best observed in people who still bring up Trump's boasting in early 2016 about the prospect of shooting somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue and not losing voters over it. When I follow up by asking "So if in place of Trump doing it, HRC had said the same damn thing, then you'd have voted for Trump just to keep HRC out?" the answer is never a yes (because a Yes would be rash and simplistic and everyone knows it). But then... this awful, scandalous statement from Trump was a throwaway statement after all, meaning HRC voters' electoral high-ground can be rationalized away just as it can be when it comes to their deplorable opponents.

If it had been HRC on the Hollywood Access tape, bonding with fellow high-status females about grabbing low-status fit men by the balls without any forewarning, spare me the fairytale about the saintly HRC voter who would've had this last minute pseudo-scandal weigh on their conscience to such a degree that they would, in droves, change their big Booth Moment to one of anti-Clinton / Trump-Will-Do. Not a chance.

How about you reckon with the title; You Are Deplorables Too.

Which is not to imply that there's been an influx of anti-idealists or cynics in any corner of life. Far from it.

It's nearly impossible to be an anti-idealist in the panoramic sense and remain internally consistent. The only way to manage it is by being as cynical about the onus of championing a given Philosophy Of Life and negating others as you are about having to choose between this or that Corrupt Politician™. Both tasks are mandatory, and both suck.

There is a definite continuity of "suck" at work here, yet imaginative idealists implant a kind of discontinuity that is most indefensible. The discontinuity says The Suck Stops Here, and you see it kicking in between any of the following:

(1) Party Affiliation ↔ Political Philosophy
(2) Political Philosophy ↔ Social Philosophy
(3) Social Philosophy ↔ Moral Philosophy
(4) Moral Philosophy ↔ Value Theory

I say nope. Every stage invites certain modes of conflicting interests, and each of those contains at least one nonnegligible ingredient worth treasuring. The lesson: The vanquisher's horns do not transform into the halo. At no point is your or anyone else's victory a clean one. At no point is the outgroup's loss something you and your gang can toast to.

That said, I'm fine with referring to voters who cast anti-votes as coalitional anti-idealists or as electoral anti-idealists, but this is playground stuff; nowhere near enough to register as anti-idealism proper. For anti-idealism proper to seep in, you will have given kudos to the above infographic meme and the text I added to it. Applaud anything that cuts through the obfuscation that fuels the usual faux culprits, like Money In Politics, presented as the drivers of confusion or tension.

Tell me, is the average bipartisan any more likely to nod along to that text than the average partisan is? Is the average "anti-authoritarian" any more likely to nod along to it than the average authoritarian is? Is the proceduralist any more likely to nod along to it than the oligarch is? Is the promising epistocrat any more likely to nod along to it than the kneejerk populist is? Is the strict constitutionalist any more likely to nod along to it than the crude majoritarian is? Don't make me laugh.

The nodding starts and stops with row one. It can move up to rows two or three, though that's exceedingly rare.

But wait, the options are wretched! Everyone worth talking to openly admits that the options are wretched! 

Yes they do. But venture beyond the world of bureaucrats or strategists or lobbyists or Corrupt Politicians™, and something magically changes. 

The magic: Your political philosophy is so much better than the Bought-And-Paid-For party you grudgingly support. Let it be known that you only abet one of the two ruling parties for the time being, in the hope of inching closer to the ideal; the wholesale good option. In the future, with revolving-doors out of the picture, you and your pre-coalitional allies will no longer need to reticently choose between varying degrees of bad. Ideal options, trivially imperfect options, or something closely approximate, will finally be on the table.

Despite this, you have a sneaking suspicion that not everyone will choose what your camp is set to choose. Those are the bad people.

With that, the captivating good-evil axis — often implied, rarely uttered — re-enters the psychological equation. You inhale it without even realizing it was there to be inhaled. The conclusions reached by you and your pre-coalitional team are held in high esteem, following from the non-coalitional axioms which you all swear by. The sturdily opposite conclusions, as with their estranged axioms, are all held in rancor.

This poses a problem for the rationalist who truly is sick of comfort zones, choir-preaching and ideological insularity. The rationalist figures that none of it stops at neatly identifiable coalitional divides, but also knows that digging beyond them means sifting through layers upon layers of pre-coalitional, set-theoretic beliefs. You picture yourself as something of a rationalist? You're as fed up with the panderer and the opportunist and the polemicist as the advertised billboard rationalist is? Then be done with them in all of their manifestations, to the point where the why becomes a petulant protest question.

Nothing prompts the why if you are as weary of post-hoc reassuring storytellers as you've led on. If you couch yourself in System 2 judgment, the bottom four sections of the eureka progression fall into place. But no one is helmed by System 2 (or System 1) thinking 24/7. It would shock me if Daniel Kahneman himself mustered System 2 habits for more than a couple of hours a day, regardless of how cognitively demanding the remainder of his day needed to be.

Yes, there is something to be said about all rationalists being mere rationalists-in-training. We may not verbalize the why, but it will easily occur to us to "why" from within. Even the granddaddies of rationalism are stuck with the internalized why, where answers all gravitate to "Go ahead and cast yourself as the protagonist, you'd be a chump not to".

A rationalist is a fancy ape, like any modern human. Some apes are fancier than others, but none are supremely fancy and none spend 24/7 on reflection mode in the cold light of day. I sure as hell tried, and for a time even convinced myself that I succeeded, despite falling drastically short (of the 24/7 mark). Regardless, this shortage doesn't undo the plain fact that rationalists are, historically speaking, the only ists who have been ahead of the curve in uncovering the pre-cliquish [evaluative] dimensions of disagreement. You have their works to thank in terms of understanding why and how ideological conflicts stretch well beyond the vote. That is to say, well beyond the (meme's) first two or three rows. Tensions are not properly captured by the formalities of cliquish politick or any other bumbleheaded partisan/bipartisan impulse.

The rationalist rolls his eyes at the choir-preacher because the views held by the choir aren't just a little imperfect; they're unforgivably imperfect. They're wrongheaded. Had they been perfect or just shy of perfect, what possible reason could there be to object to that particular choir being preached to and mobilizing? It would be senseless to be alarmed by this, knowing that a slew of other (truly flawed) choirs are organizing all the same, and doing so with the aim of undercutting the agendas of all rival choirs, including the unflawed one.

Verbalizing your "why" is amiss once you've stopped holding your coalitional and non-coalitional agendas in high esteem, and the coalitional and non-coalitional agendas of your frenemies — and some enemies — in linear disesteem.

Some enemies? Yes, #NotAll. The mortal enemy is a different story, and too uninteresting to waste time on, in light of universal opposition. The mortal enemy = the sociopath, the psychopath, the sadist, and so on. Exceptions can be made for them; demonize their "agendas" to your heart's content. But a happy middle — where we only cherry-pick data and pander to aligned enough ingroups once our backs are up against the wall — is not the way to go either. YouTube shows that even tame amounts of rhetorical-fortressing go a long way, which leaves only two paths; [A] take the above recommendation to heart, [B] go back to choir-preaching; bathe in the System 1 rat race.

Unless you're bankrolled, choosing [A] is death for a number of metrics, namely exposure. I don't have emboldened sophists in mind when I recommend the [A] path. They'd just laugh it off. So this post is clearly ducking the game-theoretical implications of following through on such advice, with the knowledge that sophists will never take it on board. Rather, I am referring to select commentariats who are cautious and mature enough to accept the gravitas of their and everyone else's blinkered truth-detecting kits. The same commentariats who, for whatever reason, forget this when they move away from meta-minded "Conversations About Conversations" and pounce on some down-to-earth topic.

It's understandable to feel relieved when your agenda wins the day. But very few people stop at non-celebratory relief when they discover the ballot box tally — or the Supreme Court Justice appointment, or the audience feedback to a live oratorical performance/combat — having gone their way. The sense of relief is promptly overtaken by a keen sense of jubilation, which is not an innocently self-directed feeling. It is other-directed; the momentary losers have to see the momentary winners showboating so that their loss stings that much more.

A disclaimer: My urging everyone to avoid sore-winner displays doesn't mean I've experienced ego-dissolution or overdosed on eastern philosophy. I remain as temperamentally open to schadenfreude as I have been during (or right after) my most irascible moments in the past. This is not about personal growth, I assure you. It's just me emphasizing that the gain of ideological victories is almost never a clean gain. It will be unclean for as long as (a nontrivially high number of) tensions boil down to varied priority-statuses we ascribe to signature issues, rather than to nonstarter-style disagreements over the issues themselves.

Taxes are a great example. I still see flat tax advocates implying that redistributionists get some sick pleasure out of seeing the rich get taxed to oblivion to their consternation. But the call for redistribution is a purely defensive one, not an attack-mode one. In the worst cases, redistributive policies are sought for the purposes of self-preservation. Not exactly an "Eat The Rich" foaming-at-the-mouth vendetta.

Philosophically, I have no case to mount against the The Haves existing in a world where a few Have Nots also exist. This, provided that we exclude the subset of The Haves who view their fortunes as weapons with which to acquire legislative puppets and political power. Or the legacy-enabled subset lacking in any discernible talent or acquired skill. If we're talking about the talented, skilled, non-Machiavellian, non-plutocratic wealthy individuals who spend their fortunes on nothing but luxury goods and philanthropy, you will not locate a representative sample of redistributionists calling for their heads. This is why the "envy" retort is such a canard. If someone were to suggest that medieval Europe's nobles and royals came to be loathed and targeted — by the peasantry that eventually overthrew their order — on the basis of hereditary envy, with quests for a just society playing no part in the equation, I venture that flat tax advocates would unanimously laugh such a person out of the room. In light of that, I demand an explanation as to what makes envy re-insertable once the undeserving rich of 2018 are the objects of our exasperation.

If Rawlsians (I know, I keep using Rawls vs. Nozick as a springboard example for "conflict") find themselves in a remarkably industrious spot, where they can handily lock-down everything the Original Position and Justice As Fairness prescribes, but also not have to tax the deserving rich at higher rates to get there, surely going about it that way would be an added bonus. It's not that difficult to picture this in reality, especially once you factor in wild-cards like post-scarcity.

The point is, Rawlsians finally get to level-up the worst-off as much as humanly possible and accommodate the more privatist goals sought by opponents like Nozick. Then and only then should they rejoice at this, even though they are not, strictly speaking, willing to rate Nozick's misbegotten priorities above their own. Finding something "off" with individual earners being taxed unevenly is, in and of itself, fair play. Making the elimination of uneven tax margins your master project, with everything else playing second fiddle, is not. That's where the Nozickian loses the evaluative plot. I salute the 'just holdings' concern tout court, and assign what I take to be an appropriate priority-level to it.

Hopefully the same can be said of the (rare?) Nozickian capable of seeing where Rawlsians are coming from, if not with respect to their priority ranks, then at least on their concerns simpliciter; the steeply uneven effects of brute serendipity and misfortune; the infuriating extent to which blind and fluky lotteries — genetic, dispositional, social, etc — shape people's lives. Maybe the refined Nozickian feels the same added bonus by tending to those concerns in more or less the same way, whenever possible, even though nothing would be at stake with regard to his minarchist project either way.

But there is yet another reason why redistribution can be unforgivably baggage-laden, even if you find yourself in a world where principled objections to it don't surface anywhere within the Distributive Justice catalog. Yes, even when everyone is either supportive of or apathetic toward enforceable redistribution, serious challenges can crop up.

As you may know, the Difference Principle leaves Rawlsians eager to counteract the ills of brute bad luck via monetary redress. They concede that money is not a panacea, only to then, all too hastily, declare those who are occupationally and financially disadvantaged as the worst-off. How exactly do they gather this? The Original Position? Please. That's far too abstract a thought experiment to be of any service hands on.

All anybody can do to gather who does and does not count as the worst-off, is speculate tirelessly. Rawlsians can speculate too, but they can't claim to know that their speculations are the best ones. They have no way of knowing that the hardships faced by the impoverished and the unemployable are the most severe hardships out there. What if, unbeknownst to anyone, high-earning STEM graduates plagued by inceldom and friendlessness are the actual worst-off demo? What then? These would be socio-sexual, non-economical hardships. 

On this score, that which is innately advantageous to incels and loners is subject to luck-counteracting schemes which benefit plenty of badly off groups, but not the high-earners themselves. Whereas everything innately disadvantageous to incels and loners will never — on practical (and arguably ethical) grounds — be subject to anything resembling a luck-counteracting scheme that everyone is encouraged to vote on. As a result, incels and loners are cast out of the leveling-up equation altogether, despite quite possibly faring worse than every other suffering group and individual taken into account by said equation.

What's more, suppose that the socially and sexually satisfied individuals who are low-earners and non-earners — now boosted by the revenue generated, in part, by the salaries of those incels and loners — turn around and casually mock incels and loners for daring to complain about their unconventionally taboo problems. Problems that even credentialed advice-givers won't broach in public for fear of being lumped in with the epitome of loserdom that is sexual dormancy due to (face it) ugliness.

The casual mockery can and has taken on more organized forms since the Spring of 2018. It is curious that, with this subreddit in particular, a few of the mockers are boastful single mothers. Statistically, we know that unwed mommies are more likely to be on the dole. By mocking the hand that feeds, they become the personification of the redistributive baggage that straightforwardly analytical ethicists often feel is hugely overblown. Whereas I say; nonnegligible stuff, hugely underblown.

And no, just as Rawlsians cannot help loners by giving them enough money to "buy friendships" or other lifelong companionships, they are just as powerless to help incels. A Rawlsian aiding in the fight to legalize prostitution may be helping prostitutes and johns, but a fully legalized sex industry is of no solace to the incel. Incels have made it abundantly clear that transactional sex will alleviate none of their core problems. Is it any wonder, then, that ethicists who go on about the desperately badly off refuse to touch this conundrum with a 1000 foot pole? Yes, it is. We do a huge disservice to moral advancement by looking the other way every time acclaimed ethicists plummet into inconsistency due to a combination of reputational navel-gazing and intellectual cowardice.

A word on the correlation between isolated STEM types and the higher-earner: Turns out those stereotypes about the sexless STEM grad are mostly true; unathletic as hell and, though not exactly incels, many are what's now referred to as nearcels. Disproportionately single, they pay more in taxes than they get out, and their talents/skills are societally beneficial. Meanwhile, the socio-sexual domains of life in which they're slated to remain ungifted (if you're black-pilled) or "unskilled" (if you're red-pilled) are ruinous only to themselves. And perhaps their immediate family members who want to see them ascend, but that's it.


I don't want to end this by hammering redistribution, so I'll turn my ire onto speakers who are convinced of their own Halo Effect because they support... uh… some strange synthesis of Natural Law ↔ Just World Hypothesis ↔ Nationalism ↔ Non-Aggression Principle ↔ Anti-Statism ↔ Rank Traditionalism ↔ Communitarianism.

[I shit you not, I actually listen to these clowns on/off and they pack all of this in without batting an eyelid]

Anyway. A tutorial on how not to do things: Lauren Southern at 28:00 from this Q&A:

After voicing some of her frustrations with libertarian impracticality (when it poses obstacles for her other pet issues, of course), she says:

• "...and it's actually heartbreaking, because I love Ayn Rand; I love libertarian ideology; I ran for the Libertarian Party when I was in university..."

She flatly says that libertarianism and Randian Objectivism are loveworthy. She doesn't think (her preferred brand of) libertarianism is something to reluctantly settle for; something less disconcerting than the alternatives. No, she is here to venerate that shit. Molyneux too, right beside her. Settling for something else isn't just comparatively worse, by their lights, it's absolutely bad.

This is how you spot a "Joyful Victory" ideologue. How to spot a fanatic? Expose them to this post and solicit their feedback. If they read it in full and walk away with "My Victories = All Upside / No Downside" unscathed, they're a fanatic atop idealist. Ugly combo.

Don't emulate this. Don't fight fire with fire. We'll all burn for it.