Some of you will get what I'm talking about, others will think it's mumbo jumbo. Don't worry; stay tuned for our regularly scheduled Right Wing Hate Speech next time! And yes, I'm still a Nihilistic Atheist. God tried to tell me otherwise, so I bit him on the dick.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I'm sure you've run into this before. | |
| When you're trying to talk to somebody, I explain that they're sick, that their method of life is a suicide urge, that it's an ugly rot in their soul, and you just can't get it across to them. | |
| I had this experience the other day talking to an antinatalist on a YouTube comment thread. | |
| And he didn't even know he's an antinatalist, probably didn't know, just picked up the virus, the meme, the infection from our culture. | |
| I've been thinking a lot about that, about the nature of knowledge, the nature of communication. | |
| And it really struck me. | |
| Knowledge is revelatory. | |
| Our species acquires knowledge through revelation, not through reasoning. | |
| I know how mad that sounds, but bear with me for a little bit. | |
| Because we've all done the high school university a priori argument. | |
| Like, what is a priori knowledge? | |
| And allegedly, supposedly, and we can all agree that a priori knowledge constitutes things like two plus two equals four. | |
| In theory, a mind existing in a black, vast vacuum of nothing could still figure out mathematics. | |
| In theory, they could even figure out the entire universe if they had enough time and enough memory capacity to come up with all of that. | |
| And yet here's the weird thing. | |
| Humans don't figure out 2 plus 2 equals 4 on average, do we? | |
| It's the most obvious a priori out there, that 1 plus 1 equals 2, 2 plus 2 equals 4. | |
| This should be the very basis of a priori. | |
| It's the most a priori of a priori, and yet very few people figure it out. | |
| In fact, there's good arguments that math wasn't invented until after we had currency. | |
| And ain't that strange? | |
| There's tribes in the jungle that can't count past three. | |
| And what it boils down to is that truth is revelatory for us. | |
| Think about it. | |
| If we want to actually talk about a prioris, things that you just know to be true, there are certainly the obvious physical ones, hunger, lust, so forth. | |
| But on a deeper level, on an intellectual level, what's a priori for a human being? | |
| Love is a priori. | |
| Righteousness is a priori. | |
| Justice is a priori. | |
| These are things we just know that we already have in our brain. | |
| And the most basic of universal a prioris are impossible for us to figure out without an external example. | |
| And now what we've done, the amazing thing about science is that it combines both of these things. | |
| You can almost describe it as a meditation over numbers until the revelation strikes. | |
| A brain that actually operated in this universe, that actually understood the a priori nature of this universe, that could think and come up with ideas, should have figured out science a lot faster. | |
| And I don't just mean the scientific method, but I mean in 1910, you put a brain that actually thinks in that way, in that manner, it should have figured out the next two centuries of science should have been figured out within a few years. | |
| Maybe it hasn't done the experiments yet to confirm or deny, but it's plotted out the paths. | |
| Why is it that we're so unable to plot out those paths? | |
| Just checking my notes, people. | |
| Yes, and when you do come up with the scientific discovery, something like relativity, that there is no absolute location in the universe, that comes as a revelation. | |
| It's that if you meditate upon the numbers for long enough, the idea pops into your head. | |
| You don't figure it out logically. | |
| None of us do. | |
| And imagine trying to communicate the message of relativity or of quantum mechanics. | |
| The fact that the universe shatters into a billion possibilities every nanosecond, that anything that can happen does happen. | |
| The universe is infinite not just in scope, but in possibility. | |
| And I'm sure that somewhere such a brain does exist, such an a priori brain, but it's not us. | |
| And so you wind up with the inability to communicate certain things to people. | |
| If you went back to ancient Greece and tried to explain about relativity, about no absolute position, about the philosophical implications of this, you'd be completely speaking over their heads. | |
| And when you try and speak to somebody that's spiritually sick, you can't reach them, oftentimes. | |
| You know, nowadays, we like to describe behaviors as being unhealthy for you. | |
| That relationship is unhealthy. | |
| That lifestyle is unhealthy, which is a really weird way of describing a sickness of the soul. | |
| Because for one thing, health is objective. | |
| We can all agree on what a heart attack is. | |
| A heart attack is an objective reality. | |
| Obesity is objective. | |
| Your physical fitness level is objective. | |
| We may have debates on whether or not bacon is good for you. | |
| You know, I love to harp on that there's health benefits to smoking. | |
| You know, certainly we can disagree on the facts or agree that we need more facts, but ultimately it's an objective opinion. | |
| Whereas your well-being is unique to you. | |
| When you do start to see the difference between healthy and unhealthy, you can, of the soul, the spiritual sickness, and even I'm using these terms, you can start to see the sickness in other people, but there's no way to explain it to them. | |
| There's a great book that Describes this phenomenon. | |
| Let me just confirm the title. | |
| The Wind in the Door by Madeline Lengel, which I might reread the whole series. | |
| It's been quite some time. | |
| It's an amazing, amazing science fiction series, where the young boy in the story, the brother of the sisters, the protagonist, is sick because the Pherendale, these organisms that live in his mitochondrial DNA, are no longer following their life cycle. | |
| They're not rooting down and becoming mature adults. | |
| They're playing at being a teenager their entire life. | |
| And as a result, he himself is sick. | |
| And so these spiritually corrupt people wind up doing things that feel good to them. | |
| And so you can try and explain that, no, it's not healthy to act like a teenager your entire life. | |
| That a 20-year-old woman using her looks to get attention and all the sex she craves, that this is going to hurt you in the long run. | |
| This is going to destroy and sap you and turn you into this ugly little Cro-Magnon creature, that there will be nothing human left to you. | |
| But she won't believe you because in her mind, the life feels good. | |
| So what do you do with these people? | |
| This is where we get to narratives, to stories. | |
| This is why our species tells stories. | |
| Because the story gives you a catharsis. | |
| It allows you to have that revelation. | |
| I mean, the whole feminist issue with women destroying themselves and going mentally ill from the constant bad boy sex and no love, it should be bloody self-evident. | |
| It certainly is to us men, but we're not the women living it, are we? | |
| Any piece of true fiction has redemptive qualities in it. | |
| It has an element in it that allows you to achieve some sort of epiphany. | |
| Even I'm going to use this an example of very bad fiction. | |
| Atlas Shruck is very poorly written. | |
| And yet reading it, you get to stare into the souls of socialists. | |
| There are a lot of problems with that book, but how evil and dark and rat-like the socialists were, that's not one of them. | |
| That's exactly what they look like on the inside. | |
| I see people daily with these sad dark beasts inside of them and they don't even know that they're there. | |
| And if you try to tell them that they were there, they'll mistake you for an oppressor or some sort of old curmudgeony fuddy-duddy or something like that. | |
| Of course, this leads to the question: if logic can't help you find your soul, what can and the answer is just seeking after the thing. | |
| Just seeking after the truth will find you enlightenment. | |
| And that's all it is. | |
| That's what most religions basically boil down to. | |
| The problem is that this isn't the sort of thing you can put in numbers. | |
| It's not the sort of thing you can do a good study on. | |
| So let me tell you a story. | |
| Two POWs in Korea. | |
| And they had brutal brainwashing techniques there. | |
| Well worth studying so that you can know how to resist them yourself should the day ever come. | |
| The first one cracks. | |
| And they start playing his voice on radio, broadcasting at the United States, going on about how great communism is and how evil and imperialistic Americans are. | |
| The other holds true to their oaths. | |
| They don't crack. | |
| And they spend the next 20 years in that camp forgotten about by their country until finally the world political climate shifts and they're allowed to go back home, a shell of a man that they once were. | |
| Who was the spiritual victor? | |
| You can't say from that story. | |
| If it was the first man, it's not because he cracked. | |
| It's because he never should have joined the military. | |
| And if it's the second man that failed, it's because he wasn't ready for the pressures of a military that was going to abandon him for 20 years. | |
| And yet he followed their dictates anyway. | |
| And of course you can easily reverse things. | |
| That's what I mean about it all being subjective. | |
| You can't really see another person's soul. | |
| You can see their body and you can see the sickness residing in that and how it infects their soul. | |
| But ultimately everybody has their own struggle that they have to deal with. | |
| Success in your struggle might lead to riches, it might lead to happiness, or it might lead to misery in a Soviet gulag. | |
| But that seeking after truth, that struggle, winning that spiritual struggle is ultimately the only thing we have in life. | |
| Your dignity is the one thing that can never be taken from you if you can only give it away. |