Against Tryhard Intellectualism

Metapolitics & General
1

image

The problem that I have with elite theory as well as philosophy in general is the obsession with trivialities. It’s like watching the news or attending church – endless conversations about thinkers who in actuality really aren’t all that important. I feel like a lot of it is posturing: it’s about demonstrating all of the books you’ve read and then bloviating forever about a small handful of worthwhile points.

Take The Machiavellians by James Burnham. Here are the most important points of the book:

  1. Politics is fundamentally about power.
  2. Every large society is ruled by a minority.
  3. Political rhetoric does not necessarily explain political behavior.
  4. Ruling classes develop legitimating stories.
  5. Organizations naturally generate oligarchies.
  6. Elites have to circulate.
  7. People are not primarily moved by rigorous logical argument.
  8. Democracy does not abolish elite rule.
  9. Freedom depends on organized opposition and competing centers of power.

It’s over three hundred pages, just talking about this. Apparently you’re not informed if you decide to skip it.

The typical intellectual is like a very bad gold miner. He chooses a plot, and then spends years pinching every last grain and speck. Then he moves into the adjacent plot.

image

The point of studying is to change the world, not to enmesh yourself in some pretentious “tradition.” This means getting high-impact information in the most economical manner possible. BIG ideas, the bigger the better. And as many of them as possible, acquired in any way that works.

People are afraid of being wrong because supposedly it is some great social mistake – that the Nostalgia Critic is gonna come out and start doing skits. Being wrong is a meaningless thing to worry about. It is not possible to be right about everything, and you will make mistakes as you develop your semantic system. Sometimes it’s better to just let people correct you. And in that way, the critic becomes an extension of yourself. Why research everything when retards will just tell you the answer? Let them do all the work.

I use the term conversationalist to refer to mundane, elitist types of thinkers. This person does not really believe in his own ability to solve our political dilemma. Rather, this person sees himself as being capable of the next best thing: contributing to a tradition, and making it as a “figure.”

Thus, this person aims for respectability. Big words, thorough reading, insider knowledge, methodical education.

Let us contrast this with a serious white nationalist ie a utilitarian. This person probably doesn’t read philosophy or engage with any canon of thought. He doesn’t care about where his ideas “fit into” the greater dialectic. And he doesn’t really think about where he goes when he dies, or what his identity is, or which petty nationalism he subscribes to. It’s just “How do I solve it?”

He doesn’t really have any cherished positions – groyper, Nazbol, it doesn’t matter. It’s just white nationalism and whatever he thinks is true at any one time. So he has the flexibility to choose a better (or more efficient) idea if it comes along.

I do not really see this attitude anywhere. I think I know of maybe four or five other utilitarians beside myself. The rest are casual observers, conversationalists, or religious folk. You also have the hipsters, who engage in all manner of subcultural play, and the DOers, who just DO things and ask you why you’re not DOING anything.

The only negative thing that I’ll say about utilitarians (from what I’ve seen) is that they tend to be really arrogant overconfident pricks who sneer at everyone without a shred of self-awareness. I don’t know why this is, I guess once you realize how retarded right-wing discourse really is, you become retarded to compensate.

Or to put it another way: when you’re arrogant enough to think that you can solve these problems yourself, it gives you the clarity (and the confidence) to hit the target.

This is what we saw with Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs was an arrogant, arrogant man who treated his staff like trash. And yet he had the clarity to see through all of the noise (all of the humanity, professionalism, and conventional sentiment) to create truly revolutionary products.

By merely thinking “I can do it,” and then arranging your beliefs to fit that preconception, all of the nonsense falls away. Utilitarians don’t really fall for things like subculture, religion, or “law-like” sociology. They just kind of “get it.”

What is needed of course is not an arrogant atheist, but a truly free and open intellectual. One who looks for insight economically, but also listens when others are speaking. After all, you need to listen if you’re gonna be an intellectual. People who never listen get rusty: they finish ordering their ideas, then they start thinking in comfortable ways, and then they never have another new idea ever again. That’s why stuff like Christianity is bad: it’s just “believe, believe, believe” forever until the day you die. Maybe there’s another way of dealing with nihilism, or maybe there’s some other spirituality that makes more sense. Whatever, you get the idea.

As far as how I study, I go about it like this:

  1. Browse the internet randomly looking for stuff that’s actually interesting. It can be anything: the Cambrian Explosion, postmodern Italian design, the history of paperclips. I follow my subconscious and where it really wants to go.

  2. All the while, keep questions in my thoughts pertaining to politics. Ex: Why does all IRL activism turn into a larp?

  3. Talk to ChatGPT about the problem. ChatGPT of course is very limited: it hallucinates, it doesn’t know everything, people will get mad or make fun of you for using it.

  4. Ask ChatGPT to list out hundreds of books with simple one-line descriptions of what’s inside them. These are books that could be tangentially relevant, ex: books on systems theory, technology, psychology, marketing.

  5. Pick one that’s really interesting and then get the EPUB / PDF.

  6. Upload it to a project folder in ChatGPT and then ask it to summarize the first chapter of the book. Then create a second chat within the project and have it summarize chapter 2. And so on.

  7. If the book actually looks worth reading, then read it. Or if only one or two chapters look worthwhile, read those.

  8. Make a spontaneous connection between one of the major points in the book and the material consumed in step 1. Ideas should start flowing now as you reorganize your semantic system.

It’s not perfect. But this is how you actually figure stuff out, not by being a schoolboy and citing your “bibliography” in “Chicago style.” You just follow your curiosity and acquire a diversity of experience. You also study intentionally and economically. So what if you get stuff wrong? Who cares, you can fix it later. Just solve these puzzles. Get them solved, stop getting hung up.

I swear to God, my life has been a never-ending Renaissance since I started doing this; every few days I figure out another piece of the puzzle. It’s made studying actually really fun and exciting. I can look at anything, anything at all – from my workplace, to my trip to the store, to what shoes I’m wearing, and somewhere in there could be the next big insight. So I’m paying attention at all times, looking for patterns everywhere.

Really what white nationalists needed to realize all along was the untapped potential of the internet. It contains the sum total of recorded knowledge, as well as tools to parse this knowledge economically. Just humble yourself and stay focused on the prize.

2

Let us contrast this with a serious white nationalist ie a utilitarian.

Wait does this mean white nationalism and utilitarianism is synonymous to you? What about a deontologist white nationalist? Where do they stand? Why is the utilitarian one the real one?

3

I think he meant it just as an adjective meaning “practical”, not the ethical tradition.

4

I have met quite a few tryhard intellectuals.

They decry things they view as “Low Brow” but then they ALWAYS turn around and cheer for the lowest common denominator.

Every single time.

Anyway: i kind of wish it was Bill Gaytes who got cancer instead of Steve Jewbs tbh.

5

I don’t really know what deontology is. I think “hardcore” white nationalism is just the love of white people.

6

I’ve met a lot of tryhard intellectuals and one interesting I find about them is how “pretentious” they are. It’s a vague term, but maybe one way to specify is that they’d hate Socrates if they randomly met him not knowing he is Socrates. I sometimes wonder if this has a correlation with how certain communist countries hate intellectuals.

7

This is just incredibly ignorant. You would not believe more than half the things you do if you were actually well read in the topics you call ‘trivialities.’ Also yes a lot of people posture themselves as intellectuals. But nonetheless real intellectuals exist while embodying most of the complaints you’re making. This whole thing is just a straw man argument to me.

Please don’t think I’m trying to be rude, you clearly have a very high IQ but respectfully you have no idea what you are talking about.

Wtf dude. There are some books that can take a full year of study to really comprehend and you think you are going to get somewhere by treating bodies of knowledge something ChatGPT can tour you around like a carnival. Apparently people do not like this but learning anything to any deep degree is not supposed to be fun or novel. Good lord.

8

Tryhard intellectuals are irritating, I agree. If I’m reading you right, I think I get the type of person you’re talking about. I’m also not a fan. They’re the type to talk at you rather than with you, and they constantly reach for citations or niche labels for common sentiments, anything that you might not know off the top of your head.

It’s just being petty, really, they’re just trying to show off or belittle. It’s just a form of masturbation for them, like a gym-bro going fatty spotting at Walmart. They probably are genuinely intelligent, but the way they use it is just a form of competition.

It’s much like the idiot who gets pissed when they’re overtaken in traffic. The other party doesn’t have in mind that it’s a race, but in his mind he’s an excellent driver. Therefore, he’s at the proper speed, and they’re doing something wrong.

This is a false dichotomy, and neither of these are how I view study or thinking at all. Study, to me, is just obtaining blocks you can use to build concepts in your mind.

Think of a young boy playing pretend. He’s only got a stick. Looking up, he sees a plane in the sky. He could imagine the stick is a plane. What should the stick actually do, though? What do planes do? He remembers his father had read him a picture book about it! He recalls that pilots fly planes from place to place, and can now form that concept in his mind.

As he grows older, maybe he studies more, he now understands the basic forces of flight, how a turbojet works, where the plane might be going. He saw a documentary about the Spanish civil war, read a book about fighter planes, saw a picture of the Spanish countryside.

Now, suddenly, he can fit all these blocks together. He can picture himself, a volunteer pilot in a vicious dogfight for Madrid. He can imagine the inner workings of the engine and propeller, the rounds making their way through the diagram of the armament system he saw once.

None of these are big ideas, they’re small blocks that form a big, exciting, idea of a scene in his mind. Not once will it be truly useful to some tradition, and it won’t move the world.

You can do this now quite easily with internet access, and the way you go about it is pretty similar to how I do.

This is how it just used to be done though, it just takes a while to change things. You couldn’t always explore via link. Bibliographies and stuff like that are incredibly useful when you have to actually search a room full of paper for an idea that you’re interested in. Academia just lags tremendously.

This whole section I agree with, for the most part. It seems like just filing the serial number off of Fascism, though. Fascism, at its heart, is movement. Motion. A fixation on the end rather than means. Fascism is a hydra, you can’t pin it, it can endlessly pivot to whatever is useful in the moment. White nationalism can use a similar tactic, but that’s not the heart of WN.

WN has a set standard, a means. Democracy has open elections or it’s not democracy. Communism has to distribute capital or it isn’t communism. White Nationalism has the White race as its founding principle, and in a similar way, cannot pivot. White Nationalists would revolt at importing Moroccan battalions to do their dirty work, but that’s what secured Spain’s future.

If Xi’s China was a white nation it would be a WN’s wet dream. China’s ethno-nationalism is just a byproduct. It’s simply the most useful way to organize a country racially. It’s realpolitik, just like how order and duty work better than anarchy and sloth. That doesn’t mean White Nationalists are wrong, per se, but that they often don’t see the whole picture.

You’re drawn to the fascist influence in white nationalism, not white nationalism.

9

You’re drawn to the fascist influence in white nationalism, not white nationalism.

Truth nuke.

10

Belief is exactly the problem. Think about how much time and effort it takes to do libertarianism justice alone. To understand all of the nuances of one thinker and connect them to several others. Well-read people STILL misrepresent their opponents – it is simply impossible to know everything given our limited time and energy. And you DO learn a lot, but is that information high-impact?

It’s better to look at things as broadly as possible.

11

A great example of this problem is Moldbug. Moldbug has a lot of important stuff to say, but in order to do justice to those ideas, you have to have read all of the relevant material that he’s pulling from. So in order to verify the 10 or so important ideas, you have to read maybe 30 different works.

Isn’t it better to just get the gist of his ideas and move on? Like pick out the most original / important ideas and then synthesize them with other important ideas?

We should respect differences in magnification. But greater magnifications require an entirely different approach.

12

What I really mean is that some ideas affect our most general categories, and others affect our most specific.

For example, the belief that oil is a fossil fuel affects our most general categories, whereas the belief that Moldbug was misrepresented by his critics is highly specific. If you were to criticize the belief that oil is biogenic, that would have a greater chance of changing the world than merely clarifying Moldbug.

Conversationalists at best challenge our mid-range categories: they argue that reactionary politics and capitalism are incompatible, or that nobody understands natural law. They usually piddle over nuance, and it is true that nuance can lead to general-category revelations, but such revelations also have to be excavated from a conversation involving many thinkers. In order for nuance to amount to anything, you need to read a lot of stuff that isn’t very important – which wastes time.

It’s better instead to challenge one’s general categories as much as possible. That way, you are more likely to arrive at the correct answers in one’s mid-range and nuance-level categories. That’s because you understand what a civilization actually is, you don’t fall for Nazbol explanations of culture or economics.

13

Yeah, and that is, to a certain extent, the point. These things take time. A problem I see with a lot of people taking a similar position to you in regards to the idea it’s fruitless to read through all of that work, or that these so-called ‘tryhard intellectuals’ are focusing on trivialities, but these people have also created the most bulletproof arguments against this sort of birds-eye utilitarian generalism. But you’re just not going to ever find out about that if you keep your narrow point of view.

Also in regards to Moldbug - I do not agree with the bulk of his beliefs but yes, you do actually have to read 30 or so primary sources in-depth to understand what he is talking about. Not everything can be quick or easy, like understanding things at his level is very hard to get to. I think it’s very foolish to try and separate the wheat from the chaff of things you haven’t even researched.

An example of this could be ontology. ‘Is this a chair?’ while pointing at what obviously is a chair. It seems very trivial. Does it solve anything? etc. The materialist perspective that what is of primary importance is what the smallest unit of all things consist of is easily dismissed when you even have a basic understanding of ontology, but you’re only going to realize how stupid a belief most materialism is after you spend quite a while studying ontology.

TLDR trivial things seem trivial until you dedicate years of your life to studying them, then you realize most of your beliefs/ideas you considered important were misinformed, ignorant, or actually more trivial than what you previously considered. You cannot reach that level of knowledge by maximizing surface level knowledge or dismissing decades of intellectualism as ‘trivial.’
repeating myself a lot here but thats the point. I am probably assuming/psychologizing but I feel like your approach has a psychological fear/neuroticism behind it of getting older, and wanting to somehow compress the decades-long process of gaining knowledge & wisdom through what you would consider to be a more ‘efficient’ approach. Willing to admit I’m wrong, this is just a hunch of mine.

14

Don’t you mean broad point of view?

15

Whatever type of generalism you proposed, yes, that can be considered a narrow point of view as it prioritizes performing a very narrow type of operation on as many surfaces of knowledge as possible.

16

Well it depends on what your goals are. Sure, you can spend the rest of your life studying a fire hydrant – you will never run out of material. But does this matter RELATIVE TO more generalized kinds of knowledge? No, it doesn’t.

Sure, studying that fire hydrant may eventually yield more general-category knowledge. For example, some basic discussion of form vs. function. But if you’re getting your general-category knowledge from a fire hydrant, you are wasting a lot of time and energy.

17

I don’t know about any of that stuff. As far as materialism goes, you’re only a true ontological materialist if you explain phenomena with physical objects. IE Bill Gaede.

Materialism as “what’s important in life,” that’s not something I care about. All sorts of things can be important depending on your point-of-view.

18

We know most of it is trivial because it never makes it into the summaries. If you care about getting the very best information to achieve white nationalism, the most general-category knowledge is the most important. If you want to be an expert on Moldbug, then of course you will economize your studying differently.

My point is that people are only economizing for mid-level stuff: what thinker X said to thinker Y, why thinker Z is misinterpreted, etc.

19

Well you’re right, it is influenced by a fear of aging. I’m a perfectionist with lofty goals, and I take forever. So I’ve always been in a state of crisis with time.

But you know what else is in a crisis with time? White civilization. We don’t have time to get every single detail of De Jouvenel’s theory right. If people want to study that, great. But there should be a core of generalists who get the gist, get the most important knowledge using the least amount of work, and then move on.

20

The big idea I want to get across is the fact that we don’t live in antiquity anymore. The intellectual as a guy who reads book-by-book and cites all his sources is not something we’re all pigeonholed to anymore.

Really this thought process comes from a combination of class, material constraints, and indoctrination.

  1. People want to be taken seriously, they want to become a “serious” intellectual.

  2. Historically, knowledge was difficult to procure.

  3. People grow up in a formal institution, and they rely on this institution to get a life.