Against Tryhard Intellectualism

Metapolitics & General
21

Replying to most of your responses as a whole:

I do agree that the amount of time spent on a particular thing is useful / not useful depending on what your goals are, that we can agree on. However I find a lot of your points dismissive when it comes to those particularities.

Yeah no. A summary is like a map, it’s a representation of the terrain. The most important thing is the terrain itself. A map might be helpful for identifying and locating the part of the terrain you wan to get to, but you will always be heading to the terrain itself. Saying ‘well its trivial because it doesnt make it into the summaries’ is untrue because, is the eifel tower’s beauty not important because you can’t see it, firsthand, on the map? no. Although you can make inferences based on proxy (having a good understanding of summaries) it cannot replace the raw, inexhaustible terrain of particulars and trivialities.

Also, assuming you have a goal, summaries are easy to navigate. Anyone can do that. Being able to spend years and years of ‘trivialities’ and understanding every nuance while still keeping on track is what is actually hard, that is what most experts that discuss ‘trivialities’ excel at.

22

I agree that just because we do not live in antiquity anymore we don’t have to pigeonhole ourselves, but it’s not without its consequences. Psychologizing aside (your point on “People want to be taken seriously, they want to become a “serious” intellectual.”) the approach of spending years reading through the canon of whatever you are interested in, in a structured and traditional manner, is actually the superior approach and beats reading summaries or YouTube video essays.

While there are plenty of people who want to be taken as serious intellectuals, and believe me I hate this type of person as much as you do, there is an equal and opposite tendency to want to be a ‘not-tryhard’ and that somehow you cross-pollinated your body of knowledge from across the internet ecosystem and that this is somehow superior. I don’t have anything wrong with this if it wasn’t for the fact that these people pale in comparison to, for example, someone with the training and background in philosophy from an elite institution.

23

That really is the question at hand and one you cannot correctly answer without a deep knowledge of philosophy. It’s certainly not the whole of western philosophy but that is definitely one of the primary drives of most western philosophers.

The question then becomes what the best way to derive the right questions is. Or, if you think you already have the right questions, how do you know those were derived correctly? If you settle for something surface-level or circular you can expect surface level results, or at best something that is a facade of sophistication.

And that is inevitably going to bring you to trivialities. What do you mean by ‘mean?’ Things you would hear Jordan Peterson would say except he did great damage to people’s perception of philosophy and was not good at any of it.

I think if you want to prioritize generalities without accidentally falling into summary-proxy then you have to focus on synthetic, a priori concepts that are not at all empirical. Things that are true that have to be derived yet do not hinge on empirical methods. That is the truest form of knowledge I think.

Hume was skeptical that this (metaphysics) was possible at all, or that it was even a legitimate ‘science,’ since it hadn’t made the same rate of progress as the natural sciences had at the time, and Kant’s project really is a response to Hume. So I think most arguments against metaphysics as an ultimate and pure form of truth and knowledge have already been argued against better, and critiqued far better, in that dialogue between Hume and Kant.

24

This assumes that it’s not always possible to summarize something, which is inaccurate. All of our categories are simplifications. That’s why we say “cat” instead of “brown creature with white stripes and claws and whiskers.”

Clotaire Rapaille demonstrates this with cultural codes, and such codes can be applied to all other kinds of systems, such as economic regimes and personalities.

Also, we’re talking about classifying the Eiffel Tower, not experiencing it. Raw experience (such as a baby’s) is unclassified.

When you’re trying to achieve white nationalism specifically, the important information is what’s important. That’s why it’s “important.”

I’m assuming that general categories are the most important, because their understanding affects all of our other categories.

So yes, first principles are the most important, and that’s why I consider Bill Gaede to be the most important thinker you could study. Because his first principles explain everything in a more consistent way – time, gravity, existence, consciousness, etc. It is hardcore materialism that rethinks how science is even supposed to be done.

25

Another thing I’ll say: I don’t like this idea that “learning is supposed to be boring.” Learning is most certainly NOT boring. It’s only boring when you force it. As Joseph Nicolosi points out, boredom is not when you don’t find something interesting, boredom is when you don’t give yourself permission to express yourself. It’s when you force yourself to engage with the material.

School teaches people that learning is boring, because they want an intellectually conservative institution. “Big” thinkers are bad for PR, because they can be catastrophically wrong, and thus embarrass the institution. But embarrassment is irrelevant to a true intellectual.

When you find a topic interesting, there is something about that topic that your subconscious wants to absorb. But our subconscious freely breaks dialectical categories. For instance: an obsession with Pikachu may reveal something important about the nature of economics. So, following your subconscious and expressing yourself is important, even if it isn’t professional.

The problem as I see it is not that most right-wing intellectuals are conversationalists. To a large extent, we rely on these people. My problem is that there are almost no utilitarians. And utilitarians are those who synthesize knowledge.

26

Yes, I am very sure there are many things you cannot summarize, but exist and can be experienced. Categories can be simplifications, but categories and definitions are also ‘things’ themselves although not in the strictly material sense.

That’s fine… but how do you know, really actually know, you have the right categories? What is the criteria for a category being true/untrue, useful/useless, etc., without devolving into circular or arbitrary reasoning. And where are you deriving your general categories from?

You’ll talk about first principles but then neglect that empirically derived first principles, such as that of Gaede, come after a priori concepts, which makes pure a priori concepts the root. The problem is you cannot derive pure a priori concepts through strict materialism. Materialism cannot define/explain itself (as in, if all is X then why do we experience it as Y) whereas pure transcendental a priori concepts can.

I have watched some of Gaede’s videos such as the one you mentioned, and while yes I could see how he has made great contributions in his field, and is definitely a genius, he is falling into the trap physicists and scientists tend to do where they think they can answer questions of a philosophical nature, which is not the domain of science or physics.

Learning can be boring, it shouldn’t be boring, but yes actually sometimes you have to force yourself to learn material. Its one thing to be bored with the particulars of a part of a general subject and another thing to just not have an interest in the subject at all, and that I would agree with you on.

And while you do have a good knowledge of Gaede, most of the arguments you are making for it being the ‘best’ (or whatever adjacent word) are pretty quickly and strongly refuted in flat ontology, which I think is the best middle ground to take towards the nature of existence. It also does not rely on some transcendental creator and puts humans (doing away with phenomenology to a large degree) on the same level as any other thing. This is my opinion, I don’t want to sound too arrogant, but it is my guess that flat ontology is largely compatible with the type of materialism you are talking about, provided some adjustments were made in terms of where a physics-based approach of reality lies in describing the ultimate nature of things.