Astral Codex Ten

Puritans

29 min read

Puritans

Article

Puritans is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 26, 2021 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic…""; “institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic”; “Then the later Puritans and Pietists, copying back from Counter-Reformation spirituality”. It most often appears alongside Achilles, US, 4chan.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: August 26, 2021
  • Last seen: August 08, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Missing School
August 26, 2021 · Original source
It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic, coincidentally ended up having all of these totally different benefits, any one of which would be sufficient justification for keeping it around!
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
Here’s one thing that looks to me like a historically extended push: from the earliest Reformers onwards, the constant drive towards character education. It starts with Lutherans trying and failing to reform the country peasants by teaching them their catechism5. Then the later Puritans and Pietists, copying back from Counter-Reformation spirituality, going deeper into themselves before they try to change the world; the first children’s books, the great spiritual classics like Pilgrim’s Progress. Then the secular 18th century experimenters like Rousseau; and the first state education systems – all universally agreed that the point of education is character, not technical skills; and mostly within a broadly Christian framework.
Inline links: 5
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
Therefore, we can feel contempt for him. I don’t have anything better than this obvious compromise, but I’m not satisfied by it. I would like to end up with an overall negative view of Tate. And if I do a simple calculation, (virtues - vices), then it seems like if his nonmoral virtues were strong enough, they could overcome the moral vices. If Tate was a really really good kickboxer, he might still end up in the black. It seems much more intuitive to say that no amount of nonmoral virtues can make up for his moral vices. But now we’re back at the full slave moralist package again! Some “compromise”! Also, suppose Tate wasn’t a rapist, he was just some kickboxing champion who was a jerk to people online and constantly posted about he was better than them because of his Bugatti. I still want to feel contempt for him! Now we have to rate the vice of “boastfulness” so negatively that it overwhelms all possible positive virtues, which sounds like some kind of ridiculous straw man of slave morality. All these problems would go away if we gave up on unified assessments of people. Then we could classify Tate as a very good kickboxer who also happens to rape a lot of people. But if we give up on unified assessments, aren’t we giving up on the very possibility of heroes? Isn’t this just the slave moralist denial of judgment? Also, I think Nietzsche would say something something vitalism. He seemed to think there was a coherent conceptual unity between being strong, being skilled, and being some sort of unconstrained wild person who didn’t care what lesser people thought. Is there some sense in which Andrew Tate loses some genuinely valuable virtue, however small, if he becomes a normal civilized person who says please and thank you and is really respectful to everyone? Does he become less powerful, in some sense where powerfulness is good? Is he less able to achieve his destiny of being glorious? I’m genuinely unsure what Nietzsche would have thought of Tate, but it probably isn’t something as simple as “he should be nicer”.4 I’m worried this still isn’t coming off strongly enough. You can argue “master morality is about being strong and good; slave morality is just about preserving your pathetic little feelings”. But most of life is people’s pathetic little feelings. People have proven over and over again that their decisions - about what to do, what to buy, who to vote for, even what to die for - depend more on what lets them feel dignity and self-respect than on any purely material considerations. Every so often, usually on 4chan, you see an actual bully really going at it, unrestrained. Some kind of shock jock, saying “Note to unattached liberal women above 40: you are ugly hags who have lost your chance with men and all your eggs have dried up and nobody will ever value you anymore, you should either beg for some fat alcoholic guy to take you in since that’s the only man you can get, or resign yourself to being a cat lady growing old with nothing to do but dwell on your regrets and what could have been.” Outside of 4chan, there’s a sort of universal alliance against these people, which the rest of us join immediately and unconsciously. Is this the dreaded “herd” of “slave morality”? If so, long live the herd. VII. Cotton Mather Fine. Maybe we do need a Superman to sort this out. What are our options? Preliminary question: where do the Puritans fall on this dichotomy? On the one hand, they’re Christian, so they have a strong slave morality heritage. They talked a lot about humility, altruism, frugality, and self-discipline. On the other, they sure did talk about them a lot. The Puritans were convinced that virtues were real and good. They were convinced that some people had more of them than others, and that made those people better. The Puritans would have burnt you at the stake if you accused them of believing in the Promethean human spirit conquering the natural world. But they did sort of believe in it - at least enough to believe it was their moral mission to colonize a virgin continent. My goal here isn’t to explore the weird Puritan theology around who was a good person (nobody, we are all incredibly sinful, but God chooses to redeem some people through no virtue of their own, and then those people are genuinely better off and do fewer sins). Rather, I want to examine two different forms (levels?) of slave morality. In the first form, you replace the masters’ virtues with different virtues. But those virtues are still real. You can still embody them more or less well. This sort of creates a new hierarchy. The Puritans wouldn’t have respected a Bronze Age barbarian warlord. But they did respect the local minister. And the local minister was probably a smart, competent, disciplined, hard-working guy. From your respect for the local minister, you can rebuild civilization. Instead of obeying a warlord, you obey the minister, out of respect for the God and the values that he represents. In the second form, you notice that the first form is just another hierarchy of masters. You (the wretched of the earth) used to be contemptible because you were weaker and poorer than the warlord. Now you’re contemptible because you’re less virtuous and disciplined than the minister. Even if there’s no local minister, everyone’s still keeping track of how you said the word “darn” once and are therefore unsuitable for God’s kingdom. So you decide to reject not just the masterly virtues (strength, wealth, etc), but also the slavish virtues (continence, dignity, altruism) in favor of . . . no virtues? The virtue of hating other virtues, which shows that you’re enlightened to the true nature of the world where all virtues are fake? I used to have this map on my wall: It’s Progressive-era propaganda about the superiority of the American North over the South, but I find it most interesting for its list of virtues. It starts with Liberty, then moves on to Free Speech, Intelligence, Obedience To Law, Knowledge, Equal Rights, Free Schools, Contentment, Love Of Country, Philanthropy, Benevolence, Happiness, Patience, Charity, Faith, Hope, Joy, Industry, Sobriety, Morality, Justice, Virtue, Truth, Honor, Peace, Light, and Immortality. I appreciate the Progressive virtues because of how skew they are to most of the ethical systems I encounter. They’re not leftist (Love Of Country? Industry? Morality?) or rightist (Equal Rights? Free Schools?). They’re not Nietzschean master moralist (Philanthropy? Contentment? Benevolence?) or slave moralist (Industry? Knowledge? Honor?). They’re Christian-ish, but not hair-shirts-and-self-flagellation Christian or God-n-guns-megachurch Christian. They’re the kind of Christians who you can kind of tell are going to end up supporting eugenics in a few years. I think I would classify them as a first-form-slave-morality liberalism, whereas most of the liberalism you encounter these days drifted at least a little into the second form. I’m not 100% on Team Early 20th Century Progressive, but they give me hope that there are weird-yet-coherent groupings of virtues we haven’t even imagined. I feel the same way about some old Soviet posters: These are obviously left-wing, in the sense that they’re literal Communist propaganda. But to the modern eye there’s something off about them, something that makes you want to call them right-wing or even fascist. They’re bold and optimistic. Even though the commissars who commissioned them probably rejected some traditional or capitalist conception of virtue, they still firmly insist that there’s something sort of like virtue or power which is attainable and good. I think these are first-form posters, and that most modern leftism is second-form. I think if you had to group barbarian warlords, Puritans, Soviet communists, and modern leftists on a Nietzschean/geneaological/aesthetic axis, it would go: (Barbarian warlords) | (Puritans, Soviet communists) | (modern leftists) So one very weak compromise - hardly even a compromise, since it predates Nietzsche - is to try to stick with first-form slave morality, in the hopes that most of the problems come from the second. VIII. Ayn Rand “Is Ayn Rand a Nietzschean?”- the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate. There’s a real answer here. Rand started out respecting, maybe even loving Nietzsche. She once said that: [Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra is my Bible. I can never commit suicide while I have it. …which maybe reveals more about her psychological situation than I expected from the answer to a “who’s your favorite philosopher” questionnaire. But later on she broke from him. It’s hard to figure out her exact position - she has a bad habit of treating anyone who disagrees with her in any tiny detail as the Antichrist, such that it’s hard to figure out whether she thinks of someone as a 99% fellow traveler or an arch-enemy. Still, there are substantial differences. Nietzsche is more chaotic - he expects the superior man to defy all external rules in favor of his own glorious destiny. But Rand is attached to rules - most of all the epistemic rules of Reason, but also the usual moral tenets like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Nietzsche’s masters take the Ron Swanson approach to justifying their actions: …whereas Rand’s masters are prone to giving twenty-page-long arguments for why whatever they’re doing is the right choice according to Objectively Correct Moral Law. Rand’s approach has lots of advantages. The Nietzschean master, like Andrew Tate, is an awful guy to have around. It’s hard to fit him into a functioning civilization, except maybe an autocracy with him as autocrat. Nietzsche’s pitch is “hey excellent people, you should try to become this guy”, never “hey normal people, you should support my project of creating these guys, out of your own self-interest.” The latter wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Rand’s masters, while still probably very stressful to be around, have been tamed. They follow civilized rules of honesty and nonviolence - not, of course, because they’re too weak to defy them, but because following civilized rules is objectively the coolest thing of all. Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t. But, by coincidence, their excellent actions are doing you a service. They might only invent rocket ships to enact their Promethean conquest of nature and prove their own greatness. But you still get to ride in one. Rand also spares more of a thought (or at least an afterthought) for the little guy. Capitalism needs all types - even the company janitor genuinely contributes to whatever glorious accomplishments are going on, and deserves to feel good about themselves. She wants everyone to be the best, most ambitious, and most fighting-for-their-own-aesthetic/moral-vision they can be. But if that means being the company janitor, that’s fine. And if you love rockets and you consummate that love by becoming the janitor for a rocket company, the Objectively Correct Moral Law is 100% on board. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think this is a more productive answer than Nietzsche has for this question. The disadvantage of Rand’s approach compared to Nietzsche’s is that it only works if you believe her proofs about why the Objectively Correct Moral Law is definitely objective and correct - most of which seem to me to be either hand-wavy or balderdash. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down - why is the most masterful thing to be a positive-sum capitalist instead of a negative-sum warlord? Rand really really wants to justify a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, to the exact people most capable of benefiting from defecting against it, without bringing in altruism or the common good at any point. It’s an extremely sympathetic goal. But I don’t think she makes it. Still, this is why I’m fond of her. If you really read her books - as opposed to skimming them while subvocalizing “this is that evil woman who loves selfishness” under your breath the whole time - it’s obvious that she believes, with a deep and burning belief, that good things are good. She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in. When people react to her books with loathing - without even a hint of fondness - I get suspicious that they’ve gotten so deep into slave morality that thy can’t recognize goodness when it hits them over the head with a sledgehammer. Elsewhere, I wrote: Edward Teach (Sadly, Porn) is famous for making up fake novels to criticize, and it is a little known fact that the "Ayn Rand" character along with all her novels are 100% his work. They operate as a diagnostic test based on his psychodynamic theory of envy. The instrument presents a picture of some exceptional people achieving great things who don't apologize for their greatness, and doesn’t explicitly ask the patient - I mean, reader - for their opinion. If the reader has no strong opinion, or says something like "Good for them, I guess," she passes the test. "I like these people and will use them as a role model" also passes. Some specific criticisms (see below) may also pass. If the reader says "Ah, people who are better than the pathetic sheep around them, just like I'm better than all the pathetic sheep around me!", she . . . still passes the test. That's not what it's testing for! You fail the test if you absolutely freak out about some combination of the Rand characters themselves and the potential existence of arrogant people who identify with the Rand characters. The secret is that it's not a screening test for the kind of people who would get featured on /r/iamverysmart. It's a screening test for the kind of people who would comment on /r/iamverysmart, ie the self-designated Tall Poppy Police, ie the people who build their ego off being the enforcers of the rule that you're not allowed to look better than anyone else. These people's basic mental stance is to hate people who seem too excellent. They don't think of it in these terms. They think of it as calling out arrogance, although if you look too closely you'll find their definition of arrogance covers anyone who seems excellent and but doesn't spend all their time apologizing and abasing themselves and denying it. The brilliance of Teach-Rand is how he-she draws this tendency to the foreground For example, why the whole "Objectivism" thing? Not because value is necessarily completely objective, but because the idea that any value might ever be even partially objective freaks out the Tall Poppy Syndrome people. Mention value at all, and they say you must be trying to secretly smuggle in the assumption that you are more valuable than other people (and therefore you are less valuable than other people, and therefore they are better than you). The same is true of Reason. Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this. (how do you decide what's true without Reason? By bias-based-reasoning - "You say X, but I can imagine a way that would come from a place of believing you're better than other people, therefore, Not-X is true. You say that's a logical fallacy? That must come from a place of believing you're smarter than everyone else and the only person who can use Facts and Logic.") The Teach-Rand test is designed to catch the sort of person who, if someone says that on a right triangle a^2 + b^2 = c^2, responds with "Oh, so you're claiming to be some kind of right triangle expert who's better than the rest of us? You really need to work on that arrogance problem! Super cringe!" Any criticism of the book that doesn't come from this particular place is irrelevant to the test and doesn't count against your grade. (which is good, because the books are bad in a lot of ways. But that's fine - Rorschach blots don't also have to be great art!) Still, I don’t think she’s the superman (superwoman?) who successfully transcends the dichotomy Her philosophy is only as strong as its proofs of Objective Correctness, which I consider weak. Without those, you need some subjective motivation to glue things together - of which altruism is the most popular. But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?” If you force yourself to reject that motivation, to just repeat “no no no, I’m only doing this because rockets are really big and make cool explosions”, aren’t you cutting out a part of yourself, in exactly the way Nietzschean masters are supposed to try to avoid doing? I find something very compelling about Rand. I think she goes some of the way to answering the Andrew Tate objection to master morality. But she’s a means and not an end. A real superman would have to figure out some way to reintroduce basic human kindness. IX. Matt Yglesias Yglesias’s mantra - “good things are good” - is too perfect and profound to come from anyone other than an esoteric master of Nietzschean philosophy. Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle. Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. Our weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents. When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.
Inline links: 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qsg1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81d5434-5610-41dd-878e-9de6446d91b1_913x832.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!O9yN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffc156151-6861-4a76-8e2a-ba3882952e08_4096x2717.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6V8D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f1f70cc-b468-4b04-b894-a8b75b3330e5_1024x683.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FF8B!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a1ac7aa-d19e-43e8-8462-210325b902be_810x545.png, a real answer here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OtNv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ae1aaf2-6cc3-488c-b0a7-5df62eee457b_225x225.jpeg, Elsewhere, Sadly, Porn, /r/iamverysmart, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MzIr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff03d1a9d-5ffc-45ff-84bc-db3388915bbc_259x390.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hYvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0f9b152-da12-4525-b062-b4c14d8b8005_383x373.png
These are obviously left-wing, in the sense that they’re literal Communist propaganda. But to the modern eye there’s something off about them, something that makes you want to call them right-wing or even fascist. They’re bold and optimistic. Even though the commissars who commissioned them probably rejected some traditional or capitalist conception of virtue, they still firmly insist that there’s something sort of like virtue or power which is attainable and good. I think these are first-form posters, and that most modern leftism is second-form. I think if you had to group barbarian warlords, Puritans, Soviet communists, and modern leftists on a Nietzschean/geneaological/aesthetic axis, it would go: (Barbarian warlords) | (Puritans, Soviet communists) | (modern leftists) So one very weak compromise - hardly even a compromise, since it predates Nietzsche - is to try to stick with first-form slave morality, in the hopes that most of the problems come from the second. VIII. Ayn Rand “Is Ayn Rand a Nietzschean?”- the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate. There’s a real answer here. Rand started out respecting, maybe even loving Nietzsche. She once said that: [Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra is my Bible. I can never commit suicide while I have it. …which maybe reveals more about her psychological situation than I expected from the answer to a “who’s your favorite philosopher” questionnaire. But later on she broke from him. It’s hard to figure out her exact position - she has a bad habit of treating anyone who disagrees with her in any tiny detail as the Antichrist, such that it’s hard to figure out whether she thinks of someone as a 99% fellow traveler or an arch-enemy. Still, there are substantial differences. Nietzsche is more chaotic - he expects the superior man to defy all external rules in favor of his own glorious destiny. But Rand is attached to rules - most of all the epistemic rules of Reason, but also the usual moral tenets like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Nietzsche’s masters take the Ron Swanson approach to justifying their actions: …whereas Rand’s masters are prone to giving twenty-page-long arguments for why whatever they’re doing is the right choice according to Objectively Correct Moral Law. Rand’s approach has lots of advantages. The Nietzschean master, like Andrew Tate, is an awful guy to have around. It’s hard to fit him into a functioning civilization, except maybe an autocracy with him as autocrat. Nietzsche’s pitch is “hey excellent people, you should try to become this guy”, never “hey normal people, you should support my project of creating these guys, out of your own self-interest.” The latter wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Rand’s masters, while still probably very stressful to be around, have been tamed. They follow civilized rules of honesty and nonviolence - not, of course, because they’re too weak to defy them, but because following civilized rules is objectively the coolest thing of all. Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t. But, by coincidence, their excellent actions are doing you a service. They might only invent rocket ships to enact their Promethean conquest of nature and prove their own greatness. But you still get to ride in one. Rand also spares more of a thought (or at least an afterthought) for the little guy. Capitalism needs all types - even the company janitor genuinely contributes to whatever glorious accomplishments are going on, and deserves to feel good about themselves. She wants everyone to be the best, most ambitious, and most fighting-for-their-own-aesthetic/moral-vision they can be. But if that means being the company janitor, that’s fine. And if you love rockets and you consummate that love by becoming the janitor for a rocket company, the Objectively Correct Moral Law is 100% on board. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think this is a more productive answer than Nietzsche has for this question. The disadvantage of Rand’s approach compared to Nietzsche’s is that it only works if you believe her proofs about why the Objectively Correct Moral Law is definitely objective and correct - most of which seem to me to be either hand-wavy or balderdash. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down - why is the most masterful thing to be a positive-sum capitalist instead of a negative-sum warlord? Rand really really wants to justify a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, to the exact people most capable of benefiting from defecting against it, without bringing in altruism or the common good at any point. It’s an extremely sympathetic goal. But I don’t think she makes it. Still, this is why I’m fond of her. If you really read her books - as opposed to skimming them while subvocalizing “this is that evil woman who loves selfishness” under your breath the whole time - it’s obvious that she believes, with a deep and burning belief, that good things are good. She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in. When people react to her books with loathing - without even a hint of fondness - I get suspicious that they’ve gotten so deep into slave morality that thy can’t recognize goodness when it hits them over the head with a sledgehammer. Elsewhere, I wrote: Edward Teach (Sadly, Porn) is famous for making up fake novels to criticize, and it is a little known fact that the "Ayn Rand" character along with all her novels are 100% his work. They operate as a diagnostic test based on his psychodynamic theory of envy. The instrument presents a picture of some exceptional people achieving great things who don't apologize for their greatness, and doesn’t explicitly ask the patient - I mean, reader - for their opinion. If the reader has no strong opinion, or says something like "Good for them, I guess," she passes the test. "I like these people and will use them as a role model" also passes. Some specific criticisms (see below) may also pass. If the reader says "Ah, people who are better than the pathetic sheep around them, just like I'm better than all the pathetic sheep around me!", she . . . still passes the test. That's not what it's testing for! You fail the test if you absolutely freak out about some combination of the Rand characters themselves and the potential existence of arrogant people who identify with the Rand characters. The secret is that it's not a screening test for the kind of people who would get featured on /r/iamverysmart. It's a screening test for the kind of people who would comment on /r/iamverysmart, ie the self-designated Tall Poppy Police, ie the people who build their ego off being the enforcers of the rule that you're not allowed to look better than anyone else. These people's basic mental stance is to hate people who seem too excellent. They don't think of it in these terms. They think of it as calling out arrogance, although if you look too closely you'll find their definition of arrogance covers anyone who seems excellent and but doesn't spend all their time apologizing and abasing themselves and denying it. The brilliance of Teach-Rand is how he-she draws this tendency to the foreground For example, why the whole "Objectivism" thing? Not because value is necessarily completely objective, but because the idea that any value might ever be even partially objective freaks out the Tall Poppy Syndrome people. Mention value at all, and they say you must be trying to secretly smuggle in the assumption that you are more valuable than other people (and therefore you are less valuable than other people, and therefore they are better than you). The same is true of Reason. Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this. (how do you decide what's true without Reason? By bias-based-reasoning - "You say X, but I can imagine a way that would come from a place of believing you're better than other people, therefore, Not-X is true. You say that's a logical fallacy? That must come from a place of believing you're smarter than everyone else and the only person who can use Facts and Logic.") The Teach-Rand test is designed to catch the sort of person who, if someone says that on a right triangle a^2 + b^2 = c^2, responds with "Oh, so you're claiming to be some kind of right triangle expert who's better than the rest of us? You really need to work on that arrogance problem! Super cringe!" Any criticism of the book that doesn't come from this particular place is irrelevant to the test and doesn't count against your grade. (which is good, because the books are bad in a lot of ways. But that's fine - Rorschach blots don't also have to be great art!) Still, I don’t think she’s the superman (superwoman?) who successfully transcends the dichotomy Her philosophy is only as strong as its proofs of Objective Correctness, which I consider weak. Without those, you need some subjective motivation to glue things together - of which altruism is the most popular. But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?” If you force yourself to reject that motivation, to just repeat “no no no, I’m only doing this because rockets are really big and make cool explosions”, aren’t you cutting out a part of yourself, in exactly the way Nietzschean masters are supposed to try to avoid doing? I find something very compelling about Rand. I think she goes some of the way to answering the Andrew Tate objection to master morality. But she’s a means and not an end. A real superman would have to figure out some way to reintroduce basic human kindness. IX. Matt Yglesias Yglesias’s mantra - “good things are good” - is too perfect and profound to come from anyone other than an esoteric master of Nietzschean philosophy. Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle. Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. Our weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents. When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.
Inline links: a real answer here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OtNv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ae1aaf2-6cc3-488c-b0a7-5df62eee457b_225x225.jpeg, Elsewhere, Sadly, Porn, /r/iamverysmart, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MzIr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff03d1a9d-5ffc-45ff-84bc-db3388915bbc_259x390.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hYvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0f9b152-da12-4525-b062-b4c14d8b8005_383x373.png
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
Nietzsche has good psychological insight, but I think that he offers a distorted perspective for analyzing social morality. What you see as "hybrid" moral systems from a Nietzschean POV (Puritans, early Soviets, post civil war progressives, Yglesias ... ) are pretty typical in their merger of embiggening and ensmalling virtues. My guess is that only sick, disordered societies are dominated by either slave or master moralities (obviously, most societies have have had both b/c it's hard to be a slave w/o a master or vice versa).