Why Commitment to the Objective Truth is Important

Let's continue talking about laying the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in shared values. Last time, we talked about compassion. This time, I think we should talk about commitment to, and respect for, the objective truth. One reason why an extreme and toxic politics has proliferated on both the left and the right, is because of a lack of commitment to the objective truth across the board. Postmodernism, which has strongly influenced the Western left in recent times, openly rejects pursuing the objective truth, and sees speech, discourse and knowledge itself as fundamentally manifestations of oppressor vs oppressed power dynamics. There is clearly no room for respect of objective truth in this worldview. Meanwhile, the right is at least equally, if not even more, disrespectful of the objective truth, in its pursuit of power. In the past few years, the right has demonstrated a sickening level of 'will to power', never letting a crisis go wasted, trampling on both scientific and social truths in their attempt to create a politically advantageous narrative. Together, in slightly different but ultimately similar ways, the left and the right have buried our previously long-standing commitment to the objective truth, to the extent that people basically don't live in the same environment of objective facts anymore. This has made society and politics fundamentally dysfunctional, and is one of the biggest reasons for the polarization and tribalism we have right now.

Why is the objective truth important? It's because only when we know and acknowledge the objective truth can we begin to make fact-based decisions and take reality-based actions to improve things. Of course, knowing the objective truth is only the beginning. What decisions we make, and what actions we take, will also depend a lot on our values. Two people with different values can and will act differently even if they agree on the same set of objective facts. It is our values that make us want to rectify injustices where they exist, or resist tyranny in all its forms. If people with a different set of values were in charge during World War II, for example, they might not have had the will to stop fascism, even if they otherwise had the same facts available to them. They might have decided to make a peace deal with Hitler instead, not caring about how many people would suffer and die under his rule. Therefore, it is ultimately our values that determine our course of action. However, those values would only be able to be applied accurately if we know the objective truth, and know it accurately, in the first place. Knowledge of, and agreement with, the objective truth also forms a fair basis on which we might judge the ideas being sold to us in the marketplace of ideas. I think a major reason why some ideologies wantonly distort and obscure the objective truth is because they want to distort the marketplace of ideas. It's really about forcing their ideas down our throats, when a fair appraisal of such ideas would always lead to their rejection.

Postmodernism and New Left critical theory clearly have a problem with the objective truth. Their view that knowledge and discourse is fundamentally and inevitably shaped by power dynamics is incompatible with a commitment to freely pursue the objective truth, both in theory and in practice. In theory, such a worldview necessarily leads to the selective censorship of ideas, as argued by Herbert Marcuse in his Repressive Tolerance essay. In practice, this worldview has led to the phenomenon of cancel culture, and has clearly made many people afraid of speaking their mind. Some people have asked me, what if they acknowledge there is some truth in what postmodernism is saying, while not following it to its logical conclusion, is that OK? I think the important thing here is whether you are critiquing power dyanamics for distorting the marketplace of ideas, or dismissing the validity and necessity of the marketplace of ideas altogether. Far too often, the postmodern project is clearly of the latter worldview. It is clear that most adherents of postmodernism are not out to critique power dynamics so that the marketplace of ideas can be even freer. If that were the case, we wouldn't have cancel culture, so-called 'progressive stack' speaking systems, and the ostracization of people who don't toe the party line in many leftist spaces. The problem with the postmodernism-influenced left is that they don't trust the marketplace of ideas to arrive at the best understanding of the objective truth, and that the application of our long-standing values to the objective truth will result in fairer and more just outcomes in society. Old school liberals and progressives have long trusted this process, but postmodern critical theory ideology has destroyed that trust, to our collective detriment.

While members of the political right have enjoyed criticizing the left's lack of commitment to the objective truth and the scientific method, as if they hold the moral high ground here, there is actually a similar crisis happening on the right as well. For at least a generation now, the right has had a strong distrust of expert scientific opinion in many areas, simply because such opinion is usually not in line with the right's increasingly reactionary ideology. From the fact that LGBT people are 'born this way', to the rejection of 'intelligent design' in favor of evolution, to the strong evidence in favor of man-made climate change, scientific facts derived from empirical observation and the scientific method have been a thorn in the side of right-wing politics since at least a generation ago. Therefore, the right has indeed been anti-science for even longer than the left. This attitude informs the anti-academic stance of ideologies like neoreactionism, which has become more and more influential on the right in recent years, after fully breaking into the mainstream at the time of the pandemic. The post-pandemic right is essentially post-truth, and this is really not an exaggeration. Just look at how Trump and his allies have campaigned and governed. From spreading fake news about immigrant communities, to the drastic cuts to the funding of scientific research, the right is really waging war on science and truth right now.

Given that both the left and the right, as they exist right now in the 2020s Western political landscape, have substantial problems with respecting the objective truth, I believe that those of us who remain committed to the free and unbiased discovery of the objective truth must remain independent of the dominant political discourse of both the left-wing and right-wing echo chambers. In an age where partisan politics has been fundamentally corrupted by anti-truth forces, independent thinking is the key to restoring the truth.
 

Why We Need to Bring Back Love and Compassion

Today, I am going to start a new series, where I attempt to lay the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in some fundamental shared values. The value I am going to focus on today is compassion. Compassion, love for each other, following the 'golden rule', or whatever else you can call it, has long been a cornerstone of any successful society, and is a major driving force for society's improvement over time. I think a fundamental problem with today's Western political landscape is a lack of compassion, especially among the loudest voices on both the left and the right. This, in turn, is due to a combination of factors, including polarization and tribalism, obsession with ideology and philosophy, as well as the proliferation of dishonest influencers in the media. I will talk about how to tackle these problems, and bring back compassion.

The level of compassion in Western society has dropped rapidly in the past ten years or so. Many people might point the finger towards online political culture, especially of the right-leaning variety, which started the whole 'SJWs owned' thing. But although that culture is really toxic and is indeed part of the problem, what is often called the 'woke left' is equally responsible for trashing compassion, in my view. Let me explain.

Wokeness, the worldview and brand of activism heavily influenced by postmodern critical theory, likes to say that it is for social justice. However, it is not for the kind of social justice most of us knew before 2015 or so. The 'woke left' simply doesn't care much about justice at the practical, individual level. Instead, it cares about fulfilling its ideology, which is basically the dismantling of what it sees as interlocking systems of oppression. This ideology divides people into oppressor vs. oppressed groups, mostly based on their immutable characteristics like race and gender. And if you're somehow placed in an 'oppressor' group, they don't have much compassion for you. Even if you are in the 'oppressed' group, if you disagree with their worldview, they might try to label you as 'privileged' in another way, and by implication, less deserving of compassion. Therefore, under the postmodern critical theory identity politics model, there really is a lack of compassion towards many people, and in many contexts, especially when compared to the model of universal compassion old-school liberals used to argue for civil rights and gay marriage. Wokeness prioritizes its ideology of deconstruction over genuine, universal compassion, and its attempt to supplant old-school liberalism on the left in the 2010s led to a rapid loss of compassion on the left, and eventually across society more generally.

On the other hand, the New Right are clearly not into compassion either. During the 2010s, the angle they took was that so-called SJWs were too focused on compassion, to the exclusion of everything else. This implied that what was needed was less compassion. However, this is a dishonest way of framing the problem because, as previously discussed, the woke left suffers from a lack of compassion, rather than a surplus of it. By framing compassion as the problem rather than the solution, the New Right was able to mainstream their own extremely uncompassionate brand of politics. Instead of championing free speech on the ground that everyone deserves to be able to express their concerns, or that a free marketplace of ideas would allow us to get to the truth which is best for everyone, their 'free speech' is about nihilistically 'owning the libs', often by saying things that are deliberately bigoted towards minorities. This has allowed them to build a culture where deliberately antagonizing and hurting people for no benefit is not only tolerated, but actively celebrated. Today's online right, where being against interracial marriage and openly hating minorities is effectively normalized, is the end result. Thus the New Right effectively used the widespread frustration towards wokeness to dishonestly build an even more toxic movement.

To end all this, I think we need to start by simply demanding a return to compassion. We need to insist that compassion is universally applied to everyone, and that ideology and philosophy are never allowed to get in the way of this again. We need to insist that truly caring for everyone's wellbeing is a valid goal of politics, in and of itself. On one hand, the woke left should be called out for the harms that result from its ideology labeling certain people as oppressors based on their immutable characteristics. We should push this radically hateful way of thinking out of polite society, where it clearly doesn't belong. Indeed, we should teach our kids that it is always fundamentally wrong to think this way, so that this ideology doesn't find a way to spread to future generations. On the other hand, the New Right's toxic embrace of an anti-compassion culture that revolves around the nihilistic goal of 'owning the libs' should be firmly rejected too. Life is already difficult enough for most people as it is, if your mission in life is to make other people more miserable than they already are, there really should be a special place in hell for you. Again, polite society should be able to just say no to this cancer. If we can't even do this, there is no hope for the future of humanity.

Battle for the Soul of Libertarianism | Moral Libertarian Talk

Why we can't cede the libertarian movement to authoritarian pretenders

Today, I want to talk about why it is important that we, the people who actually believe in freedom, win the battle for the soul of libertarianism. After all, I've said repeatedly that labels don't matter all that much, that political philosophy is not the way to build a coalition to fight against extremism, that most ordinary middle class people probably don't care about political philosophy, and so on. Yet, I still believe that it is very important that true believers in freedom win the battle for the soul of libertarianism over so-called paleo-libertarians who pander to paleoconservatives, to the extent of sacrificing both civil liberties and free trade, 'beltway libertarians' who have no problem with neoconservative interventionism, neoreaction-adjacent pseudo-libertarian authoritarians who discredit us all, as well as AnCap-adjacent extremists.

The reason why we must win the battle for the soul of libertarianism is because it is simply the battle to define what freedom means, at least in the Western political context. Libertarianism is the only movement in the Western political landscape that consistently says it is for freedom first and foremost, and consistently speaks the language of freedom. If we cede the libertarian movement to people who don't actually put freedom first, or believe in freedom in a truly universal way, or else use libertarianism to justify their extreme agendas that have nothing to do with practical personal freedom, we will lose the language of freedom to people who don't actually believe in freedom, and will use it to justify its opposite. This will be a real tragedy, with serious implications across society, including implications on civil liberties, free speech and even world peace or lack thereof.

Another thing we need to recognize is that libertarianism has become the way it is because of deliberate actions by forces from certain factions of the ruling class, acting on the small movement in the form of big sums of money over various periods of history, in order to promote their broader agendas. This, in my opinion, is what has pulled libertarianism into an unjustifiably close association with the political right, to the extent that the movement is now in danger of being swallowed by right-wing populism. First, it was the 'taxation is theft' but civil liberties and wars don't matter people. Later, it was the Tea Party people. Lately, it has been people from the populist right looking for anti-establishment credentials. All these people are not true believers in freedom, and we must not let them define the libertarian agenda going forward. I think remaining committed to a meaning of freedom that makes sense for ordinary people is the key to seeing through these schemes.

To defend libertarianism from all the aforementioned forces, I believe we need to call out those who say they are freedom but are not really for freedom in any ordinarily meaningful sense of the word. We also need to continue to think about what freedom means, and the conditions under which it is achievable or not. I think that if we have a firm sense of this, we will not get tricked by the pretenders so easily.

We Need a Middle Class Revolution | The New Woke-Skeptic

The ruling class is behind the grandiose thinking that has caused division and polarization

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about why so-called 'woke thinking', i.e. critical theory-style thinking, has become so prevalent on both the left and the right, despite its demonstrated harms, and why our politics has become so polarized more broadly speaking. I have come to the conclusion that it is because the ruling class is basically in total control of the media (both the old and new media), and hence the cultural discourse. Members of the ruling class are prone to grandiose thoughts, and an impulse to want to remake everything, because they have too much time on their hands, and because they are indeed very out of touch with practical everyday life. Let me explain.

Let's face it: the ruling class are currently in control, not just of government and industry, but of our entire cultural discourse. Ordinary middle class people are only able to 'choose' from what the rival factions of the ruling class are championing. The odds of an idea created by ordinary middle class people breaking through are very, very low, in a media landscape where loads of money and connections are required to launch any influential campaign. By ruling class, I mean people with either a very substantial amount of intergenerational wealth, or a network of connections among influential circles of society, or both. To be in the first group you basically need to have very rich parents, and likely very rich grandparents too. To be in the second group you need to have at least attended an Ivy League school, and you likely need to have parents who have connections in influential circles, or at least know the right people. It is clear that not everyone can be like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or Taylor Swift, or even an influential journalist working at the New York Times or Washington Post, and this is likely to already have been decided at birth for most people. Ordinary middle class people who make an ordinary amount of money, who went to an ordinary university and know only ordinary people, have no way to break through into the cultural world created by the ruling class. They can only passively consume the media funded and created by the ruling class, which means that they can only choose to side with one rival faction of the ruling class or the other, or else tune out altogether.

The problem with the ruling class's control of the cultural discourse is that they are much more likely to have grandiose thinking, and are much more likely to be out of touch with how practical everyday life works. Both these factors strongly predispose one to 'woke thinking', of either the 'woke left' or the 'woke right' variety. After all, when you have all that money and all that power, you inevitably slip into the 'hero' mindset, where it is easy to start dreaming of grand plans to remake everything. You also stop appreciating how practical, incremental change can improve the lives of many people, while ignoring the very real pain disruptive change can bring to people. Thus you end up dismissing the value of working within the society we've actually got to improve things. If regular middle class people drove the conversation instead, I think we would see a lot of these grand narratives about our culture being dominated by something like 'interlocking systems of oppression' or 'the cathedral' lose their hold on our imagination.

Using a 'shared values' approach, rather than a political philosophy-based approach, to combat woke thinking also fits into this vision of middle class revolution. The fact is, only a minority of ordinary middle class people care about political philosophy, or even understand political philosophy in the first place. Most simply don't have the time to care about this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I believe that the continued development of political philosophy is necessary, because it can give us important insights and arguments to use. However, a broad-based, middle class movement cannot be based on political philosophy, period. After all, fighting ideology with ideology is the ruling class way, because of the ruling class's grandiose thinking style, and this has given us the 'woke left' vs 'woke right' phenomenon. On the other hand, fighting bad ideology with our long-standing shared values like freedom, compassion and objectivity is the middle class way, and I believe the most effective way to win the battle of ideas in the public marketplace of ideas.

Finally, there still remains the question of, how do we get there? How do ordinary middle class people snatch back the cultural narrative? There is no easy answer here, but the first and most important step would be to consciously realize the situation we're in. We need to recognize the ruling class-backed narratives for what they are, and think critically about them. We need to stop listening to celebrities, mainstream media journalists, TV news talking heads, podcasters and other influencers telling us what to believe, because most of them are basically spokespeople for one of the rival factions of the ruling class. We need to realize that it's OK to pick neither side of the ruling class's culture wars, and it is actually more productive to come up with an independent view yourself. We need to resist the peer pressure to conform to ruling class narratives, and find creative ways to break the 'coalitions' the rival factions want to create in their war against each other. If we do all this, we will have progressed a long way, and the next step will likely become apparent when we get there.

There Really is a Woke Right, and it is a Grave Threat to Freedom

The evidence is solid, despite the loud and desperate denials

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether there is a 'woke right'. Some moderates have long used the the term 'woke right' to describe reactionary right-wing culture warriors who engage in cancel culture and other forms of free speech denial, but this term was only embraced by a small minority, until James Lindsay and several other key influencers on the right began promoting it in recent months. As you might expect, some on the right have been quite defensive, and dismissive of the idea that the right can be 'woke' too, going so far as to accuse Lindsay and others of promoting left-wing ideas (this clearly has the same energy as far-left activists trying to paint Barack Obama and Joe Biden as right-wing). It is in this context, particularly the right's defensive, tribalist and almost anti-intellectual response, that I began thinking about whether a 'woke right' might indeed exist.

When a few people began talking about the 'woke right' two or three years ago, my initial attitude was skeptical. After all, wokeness arose from postmodernism and critical theory, philosophies which are firmly rooted in the left, and have only been (openly) embraced by left-wing people and movements. Just because something looks similar to woke doesn't make it woke. I mean, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism are authoritarian and anti-LGBT, and so is fascism, but religious fundamentalism and fascism are clearly two different things.

However, over time, I have observed that the similarities between the woke left and the new movement of culture warriors on the right are simply too many to ignore. Both despise free speech, and distrust the marketplace of ideas to the point that they believe they have to actively shut down speech and ideas they disagree with, often using unscrupulous means. This, ultimately, stems from a belief on both sides that society and culture are controlled by an all-pervasive power structure, that would not allow the truth to emerge simply from free speech and free debate. There's a clear oppressor vs oppressed worldview at work here on both sides, although there is clearly disagreement on which groups are the oppressor and which groups are the oppressed. There's also a 'let's turn the tables of oppression', revenge on the oppressors is legitimate feeling on both sides, and the 'oppressors' are seen as one indistinguishable bloc, so it would be okay to hurt all of them without considering individual guilt or lack thereof. Above all, for both sides, the biggest goal of politics is to dismantle the power structure and disarm those who are propping up the power structure, and this has to be done at all costs, including costs to individual liberty, as well as actual harms to actual people. The last point is important, because not many ideologies in the modern West would condone this 'whatever it takes', 'the ends justify the means' attitude, for good reason.

It is clear from the above analysis that the woke left and the New Right culture warriors share not only superficial similarities or even just tactics, but rather, they ultimately share the same kind of worldview about culture, human nature and the general epistemology of society. Given this, I think we are talking less about two things that are only superficially similar like fascism vs religious authoritarianism here, but rather two things that actually share the same core nature, like Italian fascism and German Nazism. Just like we can put both Italian fascism and German Nazism under the same general umbrella called 'fascism', I think we can justifiably put both the 'woke left' and the 'woke right' under the same general umbrella called 'wokeism'. Indeed, failing to do so would severely limit, and even distort, our view of reality.

Building the New Woke-Critical Movement | The New Woke-Skeptic

A shared values approach is what we need going forward

In my recent article titled 'There Really is a Woke Right, and it is a Grave Threat to Freedom', I analyzed how the current batch of culture warriors on the right actually embody the essence of critical theory-style thinking, and are hence actually a 'woke right'. The 'woke right' sees a liberal 'cathedral' centered in academia, dating back to the Whigs in Britain several centuries ago, as the oppressor of what they see as 'true conservatives', and they believe the overturn of liberal values, at all costs, must be pursued. This is why they are a grave threat to freedom. With this in mind, the fight against wokeness has become at least a 'war on two fronts', broadly speaking. Moreover, besides the 'woke left' and the 'woke right', there could also be more niche versions of woke thinking that don't fit into either the left or the right as they currently exist. An example of this is extreme gender critical feminism. 'Woke TERFs' think of gender issues in a way consistent with the critical theory model, with all biological males as oppressors and all biological females as the oppressed. Their resentment of trans women stems from this ideology, and is not amenable to reasonable compromise. I think all this means that, going forward, the woke-critical or woke-skeptical movement will need to be able to consistently point out the flaws of all branches of woke thinking, in order for it to be an intellectually honest, sustainable and fruitful movement.

I believe the best way to combat woke thinking is simply to point out the flaws with thinking that way, and the associated real world harms. Critical theory-style thinking is bad because it removes the role of personal agency and personal responsibility in the determination of social outcomes, and by extension, removes the justification for virtue, morality, independent thinking, and ultimately freedom itself. Instead, it sees everything as a 'system', with individuals being no more than pieces in the system. Furthermore, give that the goal is always to take down the system as a whole, it doesn't care about harming the individuals within the system, or otherwise treating them unfairly. This, I believe, makes it a very dangerous mode of thinking. Extremists on the 'woke left' believe that all men are responsible for 'patriarchy', all white people are responsible for 'white supremacy' and so on, thus justifying their 'turn the tables of oppression' style of reverse sexism and racism. This attitude is not only divisive, it has also caused real world harms like the neglect of men's issues and needs on the left. On the other hand, extremists on the 'woke right' believe that all establishment experts are bad, thus justifying a completely anti-science attitude towards everything from environmental science to public health. Moreover, they also believe that LGBT people are products of liberal ideology, thus justifying their support of policies that are harmful and unfair to LGBT individuals. Both the 'woke left' and the 'woke right' are clear examples of why this mode of thinking needs to be thoroughly challenged, and ultimately defeated. It is for the good of humanity's future that we must win this battle of ideas decisively.

I used to mainly combat woke thinking with classical liberal values and philosophy. I actually don't think that is the best approach anymore. Don't get me wrong: classical liberal values and philosophy are indeed a good antidote to woke thinking, they are effective against both the 'woke left' and the 'woke right', and we should continue to develop those arguments. However, what we need to recognize is that political philosophy is like religion. We all have our own beliefs, some of us have stronger beliefs than others, but at the end of the day, we have to acknowledge that, in a free society, not everyone is going to share our beliefs. It is sometimes said that, in a democracy, religious people can hold views that are influenced by their religion, but they still have to make their case in terms of secular, common values in the marketplace of ideas, if they want to build support for the change they want to see. I think it's a similar deal when it comes to political philosophy. Classical liberal philosophy can inspire us to take certain positions, but we still need to build a coalition to achieve what we want, and that would have to include people who aren't true believers in classical liberalism, and people who might not even be into thinking about political philosophy at all. This is where the 'shared values' approach to combating woke thinking is clearly superior.

The 'shared values' approach to combating woke thinking lies in simply promoting and emphasizing some of society's long-standing shared values, that provide a check on the flaws and ill effects of critical theory-style thinking. For example, universal compassion would prevent people from thinking of some individuals as belonging to or associated with 'oppressor' groups based on their immutable characteristics, and treat them unfairly because of this. Objectivity would provide a check on philosophical theories that paint a picture of an 'oppressive system' based on limited anecdotal evidence, and also prevent a blanket anti-expert anti-science attitude from developing. Intellectual seriousness would prevent broad brush thinking in general, and encourage us to look into the details of each issue before coming to a judgement as to what the correct answers are. Anti-tribalism would prevent us from lazily agreeing with the people on our own side, even if their ideas are not sound. And so on. And then, there is also an additional overall effect of focusing on applying these values in our lives, in that it prevents us from succumbing to grand theories of oppressor vs oppressed thinking, or similar conspiratorial-style thinking in general. When you are dedicated to treating everyone with the same compassion, and understanding the nuanced truth of every issue, your brain gets used to thinking about issues multifactorially. You become much less susceptible to grand theories about how society works based on false simplicity.

In conclusion, critical theory-style thinking, what is often called 'woke' nowadays, is prevalent among both left-wing and right-wing culture warriors alike. This kind of thinking paints a picture of structural oppression that is simply not there empirically, and justifies illiberal means of 'tearing down the system' that inevitably harms many people along the way. Moreover, when groups of people have been assigned to be part of the oppressive power structure, harming them becomes well-justified, even if they do not personally deserve it themselves. Overall, this is clearly a dangerous mode of thinking, and one that is incompatible with the long-standing values of our society. While liberal philosophy has provided effective arguments against this mode of thinking, we need to understand that not everyone is into political philosophy, or believes in classical liberalism. If we are to win this battle of ideas, we would need as many people as possible to be allies. Which is why a 'shared values' approach, where we emphasize the role of values like compassion, objectivity, intellectual seriousness and anti-tribalism, is superior, and should be pursued going forward.