(Hello all. First off, this is my first day using this site so if I did something wrong please forgive me and let me know 
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If there is one thing I am very convicted of, it is that even among higher-agency, high-iq individuals, the vast majority of people do not locate ‘the Truth’ of a thing by using the scientific method or attempt to take on an unbiased eye to the potential evidence at hand.
First off, this is clearly inefficient manner of operating if you take the view that humans first and foremost want to survive, reproduce, etc etc, and that anything even approximating thinking like a true scientist is both very costly and slow, and by the time you have fully thought through a thing, gotten to the grounds of ‘the Truth’ of a thing, it might be too late and your opposition has already captured the intellectual flag so to speak. (A lot of assumptions here and I am very open to being wrong about that.)
Secondly, I think it is safe to say that there are ‘Truths’ that occupy a different space altogether, impenetrable by any sort of type of scientific process. This might include religious, ideological and philosophical truths but mostly from an aesthetic angle or something that appeals to the individual’s taste. I do think that this type of truth is more potent and infectuous in general. Of course, within the camp of aesthetic truths you are for sure going to have high-brow, more aristocratic regions that the midwits ‘just dont get’ and aesthetic truths that midwits love.
Now that I’ve laid out those two ideas I want to move onto my ‘point.’ Is it possible that always adapting a contrarian stance is a good proxy for the correct aesthetic truths? Obviously you need a sort of high-brow common sense as well as taste to begin with, which I suspect to be quasi-genetic or epigenetic.
If you have spent years on Twitter you see something happen. Based Thing materializes, becomes the edgy cool underground esoteric stance to take or associate with. Then, due to the latent ‘truth’ or effectiveness of Based Thing, it trickles down to the middle of the bell curve, the midwits, the common person. Based Thing might still be named Based Thing, but in the process of replicating itself across its new host (the midwit), it has lost its original virility and becomes memeified, ironic, etc.
You could take transgenderism for example. I would argue that at first, being anti-transgender was Based Thing, then it became fairly widespread and I think most people harbor anti-transgender beliefs even if they never say so. That is generally a good thing, but now you have to deal with the fact that anti-transgenderism is no longer Based Thing but rather evokes the image of some Gen Xer soyajking about it because they are not allowed to complain about Israel or whatever. The rope (and bridge) are ‘durr hurr hurr’ jokes now.
So, Based Thing has become adopted by the midwit and has lost its virility. It is no longer biting, cold, scathing. I would argue that the move is to look for the contrarian stance in this situation, which to me, might go something like:
“I support transgenderism, particularly trans women’s rights, because I like seeing women get beaten up in sports by men. Also, I actually hate transgenders but the biggest factor in taking away transgender rights is the average woman’s opinion on this, so if we make a push for trans women to use women’s restrooms, women will have more negative experiences with trans women and by second order effect we completely eradicate transgenderism.”
Regardless of how ‘ethical’ this is, it is definitely edgy as well as a real and actionable stance you could take and populate. There is an inherent refusal to adopt the now-midwittified ‘aura’ of both sides of the transgender debate. In spite of the fact that it sounds like a goofy stance, I would say that the general formula does an exceptional job of
- Being edgy, scalding even. At the very least it is evocative.
- Resistant to being adopted by the midwit
- Because it is resistant to being adopted by the midwit, it possesses an inherent virility.
- The ‘you wouldn’t get it, it’s too complex for you’ is nothing like the Reddit version of that. Reddit is pretty much the midwit astral plane.
Any contrarian stance, if really effective, is at some point going to get bastardized and midwittified the same way a meme becomes irrelevant once a corporation makes a tweet about it. This is why the -ism is contrarianism and not an -ism of a particular stance itself.
Anyways those are my thoughts. If I get feedback or somebody else says this is all retarded I’ll write something more structured, this is basically a first draft and if this gets talked about more, I will develop my own, final answer to the title of the topic.
