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June 12, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
13:39
Nobody is Born in the Wrong Body

This is just not correct.

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You may be familiar with a 20th century liberal philosopher called John Rawls, and you might know his famous Veil of Ignorance thought experiment from his most important work, A Theory of Justice.
Rawls invites us to consider the kind of world we would like to build if we didn't know what social station to which we would be born.
Given how we don't know the circumstances of what our birth will be, it is tempting to suggest that the world should be liberal, so that we will be born into a country that has no slavery, that has universal human rights, limited government, material prosperity, social freedom, etc., because this will secure to us a life of ease and comfort, which is surely preferable than choosing the alternative.
Given this natural and inevitable tendency, then, Rawls argues that this gives liberals the justification to remake the world in liberalism's image.
But we can push back by asking what all of this presupposes, because it's not that these things aren't good.
However, they aren't necessarily confined only to liberalism.
And if liberalism arrives at these things through a convoluted, incoherent, and, frankly, untrue anthropology of what man is and how the world should be ordered, then it seems they're not on such secure foundations as they might need to be.
So what Rawls' thought experiment has presupposed is that there is an I that exists prior to our physical incarnation upon the earth.
And this is a claim that the liberal surely does not believe.
The ontology of liberalism as a materialist philosophy holds that the consciousness, the I to which we refer when we speak of ourselves as something that exists outside of time and space, is a product of the brain, which is an organ of the body.
The physical body then precedes the consciousness it creates, and the consciousness is entirely dependent on the brain for its formation and character.
Indeed, we seem to have plenty of proof of this.
There are many examples of people's personalities changing after suffering brain damage.
So there must be some kind of causal mechanism in the brain which generates the I we consider ourselves to be.
Rawls, of course, viewed the veil of ignorance as merely a thought experiment and didn't endorse any of these metaphysical commitments that it would have entailed.
But this line of thought still permeates liberal philosophy and is indeed a core part of the assumptions of some of its most prolific outgrowths.
The liberation of the consciousness from the confines of its own body seems to be a fundamental conceit that is concealed within liberalism.
Every liberal attempt to discuss morality naturally asserts the primacy of the consciousness over the body which produced it, and if Kant is to be believed, it is the very seat in which true goodness really resides.
Kant sought to discover what could be considered good in itself, without reference to any external contingent effects, and the conclusion he landed upon was a good will.
A good will is the only thing good in itself.
But by what standard?
Positive intentions?
Are these not just a series of chemical reactions in the brain which produces them?
By what standard can we use to consider these to be good?
Kant would tell us it's because we are acting out of duty and not because of expected consequences, and the only method by which these duties can be derived is from reason, which just happens to be the primary tool of consciousness.
One could cynically claim that the bias of the consciousness is obviously towards reason, in fact.
However, this still doesn't answer the question of by what standards something becomes good or bad.
Kant gives us the formula, well in fact he gives us three formulas, of what he calls the categorical imperative, which is the method by which we would have to will a maxim to be a universal law.
For example, if I should hold that I should not steal, could I will this to be a universal maxim for all mankind?
For example, if I should hold that I should not steal, could I will this to be a universal moral maxim for all mankind?
If the answer is yes, then we have a categorical imperative.
There are several objections to this formula that aren't really very interesting for this discussion.
What I think is most interesting here is that this, I think, fails to justify itself.
If we can will that nobody ought to steal, and this applies to everybody in all times and all places, then we have indeed satisfied Kant's categorical imperative.
But why should we hold a prejudice against theft?
If the consequences have no moral bearing on the duty, how did the duty against theft come about?
Why is it wrong to steal if the consequences of theft are not a part of the moral calculation?
It must be that theft has some kind of negative outcome that informs the prescription against it, otherwise why do we care about it at all?
It seems that one could actually lay the charge against Kant that he has smuggled consequentialism into his deontological ethical system, which was meant to privilege the consciousness alone.
And in the desire to find the locus of morality only in reason, this not only denies the source of reason itself, which is the brain, but also leaves itself untethered from the world in which it expects to operate, as if morality is merely a hypothetical exercise.
No, morality is what happens in the real world, and it dictates events and our reaction to them.
It is not purely abstract.
It's also the fantasy of liberating the consciousness from the material realm that also underpins the transgender concept of being born in the wrong body.
This, of course, cannot happen, because it would have required us to have existed prior to our bodies, and that would need a lot of explaining from the transgender activist that would doubtless require them to invoke religious language to explain themselves.
Perhaps they could agree that prior to our incarnation, we are in fact a soul in some kind of celestial sorting room, which allocates consciousnesses to brains as the person is being born and occasionally makes mistakes.
Instead, I think a liberal really has to consider it more reasonable to look at things as they actually appear to be and conclude that the consciousness, being a product of the brain, is affected by any issues with the brain.
To think you are born in the wrong body is probably a mental health condition, not the product of a divine misallocation.
Whether you believe in spirituality or not is not the issue here.
The problem is that, on its own terms, the materialist worldview finds itself in places which it must invoke non-materialist concepts to properly explain to itself.
Moreover, the transgender philosophy has raised the importance of the comfort of the consciousness to such a degree that it has rendered the body itself as the fundamental source of oppression.
Simply existing in a physical state with which the consciousness somehow believes it does not align is now sufficient to justify surgical reconstitution.
But where do these desires originate if not from the body itself?
If the brain is no longer responsible for the things the consciousness believes, then where does the desire to become the opposite sex originate, and how does modifying the body satisfy the consciousness if there are no other connections between them?
This metaphysical confusion is also how it can be asserted by liberals that, in fact, patriotic nationalist sentiment is somehow lowbrow, or thuggish, or ultimately irrational.
You have doubtless heard liberals make bizarre moral pronouncements, such as, you can't be proud of your country, because it was just an accident that you were born there.
What they're saying is, you didn't choose the country of your birth, and therefore you can't be proud of it.
It is but a historical accident that you were born there, and not somewhere else, and therefore you get to claim no credit for the good condition of your country.
This is preposterous for many reasons.
The first is that it ignores the concept of cause and effect.
It is not, in fact, an accident that I was born to my parents.
Indeed, it could not be further from being accidental or due to random chance.
It is actually inevitable that I am a product of my parents, and I couldn't have been a product of anyone else's.
Had I different parents, I would have different genetics, and I would be a different person altogether.
The only time someone with my name and position in the world would or could be born is to my parents and their particular genealogies.
Secondly, it presumes the same celestial sorting room as the transgender argument for the pre-existence of the consciousness.
We are formless minds just waiting to be allocated to a body upon the earth, in Rawlsian fashion, with no prior knowledge or power over where it will be put.
The celestial sorting room which randomly allocated me to England and my parents who were born there instead of to some other place in the world was just an accident, as if history has no bearing upon us and we are all born anew at year zero, with history beginning only at the inception of our own consciousness.
But it's the opposite of this.
Far from being an accident of birth, it was instead ordained by the nature of reality that I would be a product of my parents.
It was in essence written in the stars at the formation of the universe and dictated by history that they would live where they live and give birth to me.
Far from being accidental, it is instead a product of destiny that you will be born in your country to your parents, and it could not be any other way.
Thirdly, this does not mean that one cannot take pride in one's country.
The liberal perspective holds that unchosen inheritances are nothing to be proud of.
The power of the will is in its decision-making capacity.
The goodness of its morality is through conscious choice.
The things we are born into, which are not a product of our agency, are therefore at best, morally neutral to the liberal, although in the case of the nation-state and its majority culture, it can easily through this prism be framed as a force for oppression.
However, this doesn't really properly characterise in what a country actually consists, as it is far more than merely a question of whether one consented to be a part of it or not, and our effect on it is much deeper than the liberal standard would imply.
The character of a country is drawn from the gestalt of the people of which it is made up.
The character of the people in general becomes the impression a person draws from it, through many small interactions, of which we might not bear much thought.
The nature of the way the people in the culture deal with their problems has a real and tangible effect on the kind of country people consider it to be.
The intent, the method, and the consequences are all important features of how a nation solves its problems, and we can call it good or bad because of them.
Moreover, if we can make such judgments of the nation as a whole, then we can also ascribe any virtues to the individuals of that nation, as it is them collectively who carry the culture within themselves and project it outwards in their actions.
If a group of people, even a very large group, have general characteristics that are worthy of approval, then we can say so.
And the people who comprise that group can be generally proud of themselves for being the thing that they are.
Conversely, if a group of people have general characteristics that are not good and are prone to vice or criminality, then we can say so.
And that group ought to be ashamed of itself and mend its ways.
And lastly, we are really speaking of ourselves when we say that we are proud of our country.
We are a product, to some degree, of our environments.
And if we have been made into good people that we like by our upbringing and habits, then we can say with some strength that the society in which we were raised has played a large part in that.
It's not the only important thing, and we are moral agents with the power to choose, but the society in which we are raised is certainly very influential.
If we find that society to merit our approval, then we can approve of it.
It's only if we don't like ourselves that we would look at the civilization that has raised us and decide that, in fact, the civilization is at fault.
Not only does that save us from any kind of self-reflection, but it also gives us an excuse not to change.
The point I'm driving at with this video, and I'm sure you've noticed by now, is that nobody is born in the wrong body.
It's not possible to be born in the wrong body, and this sets up a false dichotomy between mind and matter.
The body you have is yours, it's the only one you'll get, and your consciousness is not separate to it.
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