The Toolbox (A Little Learning IX)

As the years go by I’ve switched between multiple learning-strategies. Invariably when I experimented with a new strategy, and it worked, I would accept that as a vindication of its inventor’s explanation of the logic of his strategy. Then I would shake my head in despair that I hadn’t heard of it much sooner and try to share my amazing “discovery” with anyone who cared to listen.

Until the next strategy came along.

It took me a really long time to understand what was going on. There may be some study-methods that are strictly superior to others (especially for certain purposes or certain students). But in general, different approaches are just different. No advantage without a drawback. The eye can only see so much, the mind can only think so much, there are only so many hours in the day. Intellectual discipline is mostly about training your eye to ignore some aspects of a topic in favor of others.

When I was still a teenager a mentor mocked the editorial introductions that are typically found in front of classical books, and encouraged me to skip straight to the main text. What a revelation! I had been struggling with those dry, meaningless introductions with zero interest or insight. By the time I got to the main text, I was frazzled and running out of time. “Oh,” I thought, “there’s a reason why we read collections of Aristotle’s writings and not collections of editors’ introductions to Aristotle.”

Jumping straight into the text, I landed on my own two feet and quickly oriented myself to the questions that motivated the author. I worked out what was slightly puzzling (and finally started to learn how to reason) and skimmed over what was truly strange. I misunderstood most of it (not that I necessarily realized that at the time…), but I was enjoying the material I was studying, and finishing with time to go back, review, and reflect.

Many, many years later I had the opposite discovery. After coming back to certain of my favorite authors over and over again, trying to clarify my ideas, I realized that my experience of the editorial introductions was now entirely different. I zipped through them quickly and in the process was reminded of a great deal I had forgotten, learned many points that I should have been aware of already, and was able to neatly skim over various traditional or popular interpretations to see where my own reading resembled or diverged from these.

The editorial introductions weren’t useless, they were just useless to someone who was starting from zero. It was as though I had been browsing the index, from A to Z, before starting on the main body of the text. A good index is the literary equivalent of a sniper rifle, but it takes a long time to learn enough to have a reason to use one.

You can make the same point about reading history for understanding versus reading history for dates, names, and facts. You can’t possibly absorb history before you have some sense of why it’s interesting or important. At that stage it’s key to know, for example, that you can “repeat the material in your own words”, i.e. say the same thing multiple different ways (because what you grasped was an idea, not a sequence of letters). But when you’re saying something in your own way, you’re definitely dropping out all the details (1715, Sans-Souci, William of Moerbeke), because the details are precisely what can’t be changed without changing the facts. And you’re dropping out nuance and precision, because “your own understanding” of new material can at best be one of several reasonable opinions whereas the point of carefully piling up the evidence into a rigorous case is show that each plausible alternative to your thesis is ruled out by the available evidence.

Personally, I got used to learning material this way, reconstructing it in my own words to digest it. Then for a long time I was frustrated and handicapped by my spectacularly poor mastery of the detail. It turns out that once you start to fill in the gaps in your knowledge, you start to get your own ideas about what happened, and then it’s really important to know whether X happened before Y or Y happened before X, ‘cuz X didn’t cause Y if Y came earlier. I sort of half-expected other people just gradually sorted out these facts in their minds as they learned more and more about the world. Maybe some people do; but in my case, I was frustrated nearly to the point of shame that I couldn’t remember the basics.

That’s where drilling comes in. Earlier I had been drawn more and more into the view that any time spent drilling or memorizing, unless aimed at overcoming some petty hurdle like a test, was misspent. It always made sense to let the details slide and use extra time to acquire additional general knowledge (or review it). But again, that was only true to a limited extent, for a narrow reason.

When I was first studying human history, I had absolutely no business forming an opinion about whether or not X caused Y. So I didn’t really need to know whether X came before Y or after. And since I couldn’t do anything useful with the factoid it would have been tough to force myself to retain it. Once I had different needs, a different study-strategy quickly paid huge dividends.

(The funny thing about “general sense” versus “drilling” is that I independently “discovered” one strategy or the other in multiple different fields before I finally put together that the two approaches complement and facilitate each other in every field.)

Some strategies don’t sell themselves as study-strategies but rather as advice about what’s worth knowing or as introductions to a new field of study. But branding and being are two entirely different things; very often the popularity of a canon or a field turns out, on close analysis, to owe its popularity more to its success as a study technique than its formal claims.

Consider Read Old Books. Whether that phrase makes you think of multi-gig downloads from /pol/ or the Froude Society, at least half of the right-wingers I know have experienced the spiritual benefits of avoiding modern garbage for out-of-copyright gems. — But then when I see examples of what the most prolific old-book readers have been up to (what they’ve been reading, what lessons they’re drawing), I find it striking how often you could re-describe the project as Read Primary Sources. For people who have never read primary sources, taking a few shots of the top-shelf stuff can be a heady experience.

The reason it’s heady is because there is no way to understand a secondary source (where it’s right) or see through it (where it’s wrong) unless you have a good mental model of the kinds of primary sources the argument might/must be built on. When you’re used to pop-history (just two or three steps above Just-So Stories), primary sources are like manna from heaven. If you’re particularly enlightened by reading a certain source, it’s hard not to think you’ve unearthed a neglected masterpiece that ought to be memorized by high-school students. A few weeks later, maybe you realize there are thousands of letters or manifestos, or whatever, that are exactly like it. And then after you’ve gotten through five of them, you’re ready and willing to read the research of some poor fool who spent decades reading them all.

Try to scrutinize any amazing new approach to learning that seems to be working well for you. A hammer might seem like a god-send to you if you’ve been trying to build a house using only a saw. But once you’ve gotten sufficiently frustrated trying to build the house with only a hammer, it may be that you’ve hammered in all your nails and it’s time to switch back to the other tool.

 

[I’m still categorizing these notes together as “A Little Learning” to make them easy to find, but I’m going to try to stop developing themes across multiple installments in the series. From now on they will be self-contained.]

Advertisements

Unsolicited thoughts on dating

I haven’t “dated” anyone in a very long time and hopefully I never will again. (Ora pro nobis.) This makes me mostly unqualified to offer serious analysis, let alone advice, on questions of dating, mating, and courtship in TCY. But a friend was complaining about being a single reactionary in a degenerate city, and I might as well share these thoughts.

One reason dating is tough for right-wingers is because the whole concept of “dating” is a degeneration of our social institutions from traditions that had endured for centuries. Bracket the question, “How could we ever go back to pre-modern courtship?” That is a difficult problem, but even just focusing on the here-and-now:

1. Women who were raised right-wing probably aren’t gonna participate in the degenerate contemporary practices around dating (not at the same rate as whores, anyway)
2. Women who do participate will probably suspect that you look down on them for doing so (which you should)

The problem goes far deeper than whether you can bond over empty chatter about your least-favorite politicians and war criminals. (That is probably what most girls have in mind when they advertise their political orientation to potential mates.) Say your reactionary tendencies extend to religion: some of my readers aren’t religious, but run with it for the sake of argument.

Well, if you’re devout you probably aren’t gonna marry a girl who will object to raising your kids orthodox. That probably means she has to be orthodox herself, and in fact of the same denomination (because otherwise she’ll want to raise the kids in a way she considers orthodox, but you don’t). That means randomly meeting girls, you are unlikely to stumble on a match.

(Reminder: many “ills of modernity” are only vulnerabilities of modernity, exacerbated by the disappearance of ethnic homogeneity. The more ethnea you cram into a city, the less likely any two randomly chosen kids can start a life together.)

Now, if a girl really imprints on you she’ll convert to Tengrism to have your babies. Girls are hyperconformists that way. But ex ante, you are either:

1. Dating a lot of girls who aren’t serious candidates for starting a family, or
2. Restricting yourself to looking someplace you are likely to meet orthodox people, which would be someplace like a church where you’re unlikely to make a romantic match to begin with

That adds up to a lot of wasted time.

This is just exploring the difficulties of living in the City of Man from the perspective of one right-wing idea, that you want to raise your kids in a certain way and need someone compatible. Difficult! Multiply across multiple ideas…

 

Jaucourt on “la race”

RACE, s. f. (Généalog.) extraction, lignée, lignage; ce qui se dit tant des ascendans que des descendans d’une même famille: quand elle est noble, ce mot est synonyme à naissance. Voyez Naissance, Noblesse, &c.

Madame de Lambert dit dans ce dernier sens, que vanter sa race, c’est louer le mérite d’autrui. Si le mérite des peres rehausse la gloire des enfans qui les imitent, il est leur honte quand ils dégénerent: il éclaire également leurs vertus & leurs vices. C’est un heureux présent de la fortune qu’un beau nom, mais il faut savoir le porter. « Je serai le premier de ma race, & toi peut-être le dernier de la tienne », répondit Iphicrate à Hermodius, qui lui reprochoit la bassesse de sa naissance. Iphicrate tint parole; il commanda en chef les armées d’Athènes, battit les Thraces, rétablit la ville de Seuthée, & tailla en pieces une bande de lacédémoniens. (D. J.)
Race, (Maréchal.) se dit des especes particulieres de quelques animaux, & sur-tout des chevaux. Les Anglois ne souffrent pas qu’on ait de la race de leurs guilledins. Pour faire race, il faut choisir de bonnes cavales. Cheval de premiere race, est celui qui vient d’un cheval étranger connu pour excellent.

One has to wonder whether the mot of Madame de Lambert would have been quite so charming, or the retort of Iphicrates quite as impressive, had either been applied to hounds or horses instead of to men. It’s quite strange that at the exact moment in European history when the scribblers decided to reduce man to a mechanical animal, they simultaneously averted their eyes from all the previously established parallels between humans and the other mammals.

Nine Hypotheses on Women, Status, and Education

There is an inner tension in the reactionary mind between traditionalism and primitivism. All reactionaries hate the modern educational system; but what traditionalists resent above all else is its low standards, whereas primitivists are suspicious of the project of “education” itself. Traditionalists cherish Western civilization and have contempt for liberals who squander its treasures, primitivists take the liberals for its malformed fruit; traditionalists assume reactionary thought will be vindicated by its accuracy and erudition, primitivists are inclined to abandon the models of dialogue and inquiry entirely.

(Which is not to say, by the way, that every reactionary born alive is “either a little bit traditionalist, or a little bit primitivist”; we can be both traditionalist and primitivist at the same time about different issues, or even combine useful insights from both perspectives in our answer to a single question, oblivious to the need to reconcile them.)

One place where this tension emerges is in the question of female status, and in particular in the question of female education. Wearing his primitivist hat, any good reactionary can explain to you the dangers of over-educated women. Wearing his traditionalist hat, any good reactionary can tell you the importance of a genuine ruling class, one that is actually more competent than the loyal subjects it protects. But you don’t get brilliant colts from idiot dams.

A year ago I suggested that, in assembling the raw material for a new ruling class, over-educated wives would be a burden but probably inevitable if we wanted to (a) meet our phenotype-targets while (b) working from within the progressive world as it actually exists in TCY, including current-dominant status-conventions (conventions which would doom any intelligent woman who opted out of the college scam to permanently-reduced social status). This way of framing the problem implies it would be even better if we could find our budding overlords equally-intelligent brides without all that book-larning: better-suited to their role as wives, for one thing, and possibly better-suited to serve as the better half of a eucivic ruling class, as well.

I don’t remember exactly how much of that insinuation was tongue-in-cheek, how much was logical rigor (remember, strong premises make weak arguments, so always see if you can make the case under unfavorable assumptions first), and how much was motivated by the historical evidence that female education and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race (see here and here, for example). Either way, I have been revisiting the underlying premise about female status; not that I have reversed my  earlier position, but I have finally found some interesting evidence against the strongest version of it.

There have been ruling-class networks, networks whose high levels of female education was actually a distinguishing characteristic, which handled the female-status problem well. One specific network that I’ve had a chance to study was thriving for at least a century after the fashion for educating daughters arose (a century during which it weathered many of the worst dangers old-regime societies face astonishingly well); and the first disaster they suffered that could conceivably be counted against their fitness to rule had no easily-discerned link to female education, which had at any rate been unexceptional for approximately two generations by that time.

I’m not going to say which network this is (although some of you are so whip-smart you’ve already guessed); and I’m not inclined to gather evidence in favor of the thesis that female education is mostly harmless. Instead I’m going to ask: how did they do it? If there really were some ruling classes that solved the female-status problem, what might explain their ability to navigate the potential dangers of female education?

1. The educated women were kept busy educating their children. Where ruling-class children are educated at home by tutors, and ruling-class men only have on average 3-6 more years of education than their sisters, what the mother knows is exactly sufficient to help her sons excel at the grammar-school curriculum before they leave home for advanced study. (Note also that this gives mothers in the lower rungs of the ruling class, with less money to pay tutors, proportionally more responsibility.)

2. They were also used to translate their husbands’ friends work into different languages (from Latin to English, from English to French, etc.). Note that if the translator’s name is suppressed, the wife can take an active interest in the success of her translation (heightened, perhaps, by the reader’s impression that the translation is in the voice of the original author) without being exposed to direct criticism or sucked into the ongoing substantive debates. (If the translation sparked an acrimonious new debate, her sons were of course likely to take a special interest in defending it.) One can imagine similar sorts of “translation” between the formal notation of technical fields and a colloquial, popular presentation.

3. So long as major positions of cultural status were nodes in private social networks rather than roles in public institutions, corporations, and so on, being friends with literati was a suitable substitute for personal glory. Even more importantly: so long as the cultural-status hierarchy is at the same time a private social hierarchy, educated women cannot bid for status by reaching out to “patronize” impoverished literati independently. To offer friendship to someone whose friendship was not coveted (by other nodes in the  network) would defeat the purpose.

4. Continuing the same point: for a woman to seek status by independently patronizing intellectuals implies she is either substantially independent of her husband or she is disproportionately influential in some social clique. How do you avoid a surplus of independent women? Marry them off young, make sure they have lots of children, and keep the clan tight-knit enough that she has no standing independent of her brothers and brothers-in-law in the unhappy event she becomes a widow while her sons are still minors.

5. Three additional thoughts on early marriage. No woman wants to be unloved. In societies where desirable women attract high-status suitors, high-status women are never unmarried for long. No woman can raise her status by extending her childhood or widowhood (and thus her capacity for over-educated mischief) unless she can have it believed that she is actually more desirable than other women who (re-)marry quickly.

6. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that this network was unusually harsh on fornication. Reactionaries who are soft on male promiscuity and infidelity generally appeal to realism or asymmetry. But on a societal level, the logic of these arguments only adds up if you assume that the cad is only sowing wild oats among the peasantry — a form of restraint unknown in recorded history. If powerful men routinely take lovers, within a generation they will routinely take high-status lovers… and the status of unmarried women will start to rise (because lack of a husband no longer indicates lack of romantic success).

7. Most reactionaries, I think, would agree there is nothing wrong with arranged marriages. But there is one respect in which letting young adults make imprudent choices is more eucivic than forcing them to defer to their parents. Part of the reason why parents can arrange better matches (better, that is, for the child and for the clan as a whole) is because they have the maturity and emotional distance to be patient negotiators. But a patient negotiator gets the best deal for himself — better than what the terms of his offer really merit — by stretching out the negotiations. If one family is patient and all the others are impatient, the patient family can snag disproportionately good matches for all its children. But if all families are patient, then you just get late marriage, small families, and lots of pretty 20-somethings with idle hands. Perhaps we should take it as a sign of a healthy ruling class when young men still enter into impetuous marriages to their friends’ sisters, the daughters of their fathers’  allies, and so on. Individual parents, of course, should protect their children’s interests; but if the norms of the ruling class as a whole allow opportunities for young adults (of comparable social status) to flirt and become obsessed with each other, it may well defuse a serious collective action problem.

8. Returning to the finish the thought in Hypothesis #4: what prevents women from having disproportionate power over any (culturally-influential) social circle? One possibility is that a wide disparity in the intelligence and education of ruling class women is what creates the danger that we see in e.g. the Borgia and Medici women, or in the salons of the Enlightenment philothottes. If the wives of N men are all equally prepared to participate in their husbands’ discussions, they will all have equal roles on occasions when they are included in the discussion, and all N of them will exercise very little influence over the group. But if exactly one of the wives can participate, the fact that she is the only female actor will engender dynamics that give her outsized influence (in the extreme case, transforming the circle into “her” salon and giving her an independent capacity for patronage). If this is correct, it is not female education per se that creates thot-leaders, but weak competition.

9. A final hypothesis. Female misbehavior and improper influence tends to be sexual in nature; chaste women are much more harsh in their judgment of improper female influence than chaste men; so, paradoxically, while a society is still in a stable moral equilibrium, a small number of women in positions of unusual political power drastically diminishes the informal cultural power of women (because these women are so much more severe than the men in punishing sluts and other deviants).

Usury: the basics

Last month, I got dragged into yet another one of Theso’s or Reinhardt’s quixotic debates about usury. I want to say this once so that I never need to tweet about it again.

1. Usury is a sin.
2. Usury is accepting interest (i.e., profit) on a secure loan.
3. A secure loan is one where, from a legal point of view, the lender assumes no risk; it merely deprives him of the use of his money until he demands repayment.
4. For a loan to be risk-free (in the context of the theological concept of usury), all of the following conditions must be met:
   • It must be impossible to discharge the debt
   • The creditor must have speedy/effective legal recourse in the event of default
   • There must be no possibility of the debtor’s assets being inferior to the value of the debt
   • There must be no possibility of multiple creditors having conflicting claims on the same assets.
5. A loan wherein the lender is exposed to the same economic risks as borrower (for example, if he is to be repaid out of the profits of the business the loan is financing) cannot be usurious.
   • (The creditor is in effect a silent partner in the debtor’s enterprise.)
6. A loan cannot be usurious if repayment (either of the principal or the interest) is voluntary, or secured only by an asset or some abstract status.
   • (A social expectation that a debtor demonstrate gratitude to his creditor with some gift, on top of the original loan, is not usury.)
   • (A loan secured by the debtor’s word of honor cannot be usurious if it is not legally enforceable.)
   • (But a loan which both parties expect to be enforced by extralegal means – e.g. by a mafia loan shark – is secure, and thus any interest is usury.)
7. A loan to a corporation cannot be usurious, unless the debts of the corporation become fully-secured personal debts upon the failure of the corporation.
   • (Otherwise, a corporation that fails must have some legal process that discharges its outstanding debts after distributing remaining assets among creditors.)
8. A loan to an individual can only be usurious in a jurisdiction where loans are not discharged in personal bankruptcy.
   • (If a loan can be discharged in personal bankruptcy, there is ipso facto a risk that the debtor will default.)

The concept of usury is germane primarily in a society where debts could not be discharged. Originally, debt slavery and indentured servitude allowed creditors to actually assume ownership of their debtors, if their other assets were insufficient to cover their debts. The body of the debtor is the ultimate collateral for a debt-free loan. As ancient societies sunk into the usury crisis, some allowed creditors to whip or torture defaulted debtors; this encouraged them to make efforts to repay, and if ultimately the debtor died on the rack, this would at least uphold the principle that debts are undischargeable and debts must be honored.

There is nothing wrong with (literal) debt slavery. There isn’t even anything wrong with corporal punishment for debtors, if the sovereign feels the need for it. But in societies where the entire future life of the debtor stands as security for the loan, the creditor does not take on any real risk — indeed, realistically he stands to profit if his debtor’s misfortunes allow him to acquire the latter’s assets and even his family at distressed prices — and it is unnatural greed for him to demand interest payments on top of that. (Instead of rationing out risk-free loans to those willing to pay the most for them, he should lend to those he judges most deserving or most grateful.)

A lender may well say, “But with this same money, I could expand my business, or found a new one, and make a great deal of money. I won’t lend it out if I have to forgo those profits.” Well then by all means, use the money productively! Buy whatever you need to expand production, and then reap the reward for the risk you’ve taken in order to better serve your neighbors. The prohibition on usury is not merely to punish greed for its own sake, but rather to promote entrepreneurship.

However, the question is remote from our present circumstances because there are no secure loans in American society, so any lending is risky and deciding who will use a (fully dischargeable) loan responsibly is, itself, a form of entrepreneurship.

Hypothetically, I could see the case for indicting the holders of FDIC-insured savings accounts as usurers. Those deposits are as secure as any loan in the history of mankind, backed as they are by the full power of the state, even if the bank that holds the deposit fails; but the “interest” on FDIC-insured accounts is so low, the question becomes trivial.

Theso often argues that federally-insured student loan debt is usurious. Yes, it is nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy court; but there are no immediate consequences for simply refusing to pay. Wage garnishment is not structurally equivalent to indentured servitude or a public whipping, even if the debtors lack any honest way to scrabble out of their financial hole. I’m not sure Theso is wrong, but I’m not sure he’s right, either.

(Fundamentally it’s hard for me to think the student debt crisis wrongs debtors when it is so expensive for the taxpayers who are cast in the role of unwilling usurers.)

Many Roman Catholics who doggedly condemn the modern financial system for its usury tie the theological critique of usury to an economic critique of the financial system as whole, lumping usury in with speculation, financial manias, and structural instability. I’ve never read a good critique along these lines. Most papists don’t seem to recognize that the pre-condition for usury is the absolute security of the loan on which usury is charged. A financial system in which usury was possible would have be a very safe one, because every usurious loan would be secured by the entire property, person, and liberty of the debtor. If a financial instrument is risky — and especially if the risk is contagious, meaning that each insolvent firm’s losses can be passed on to its creditors — that implies the liability it creates can be discharged and is not usurious.

What should imperfect people do?

I.

Recall that I advocate using fatties as a template for how to incorporate imperfect people into a movement.

> Try to use fatties as your template.  Fatties (gluttons) are funny.  Sometimes you shame fatties for being fat because you’re not as nice as you should be.  Sometimes you tease them because they’re your friends.  You don’t stop thinking someone is fat just because he has done good things for your movement; in fact, you may neg him harder, because in some cases he may act as a representative of everyone in the entire movement, and you want him to make a good impression.

> Even if you won’t neg the fatty yourself, you should be (quietly) grateful that whenever there’s infighting, people mock his obesity — it might help him get his act together (especially if you supplement with positive reinforcement), but at the very least it will discourage others who are tempted by gluttony.  A tiny bit of mutual nastiness helps keep everyone in line.  It’s better that people hear that they have a problem from a friend than from a rival, and better from a friendly rival than from a political opponent.

> If his obesity were particularly shameful, no one would respect him, and that might unfit him for leadership roles.  But he would have to be a pretty disgusting glutton before you decided you would prefer to kick him out of the movement entirely.

II.

From the perspective of a “perfect” person (in the paradigm case, a physically fit right-winger) the imperfection of the other person (the fatty) are a matter of empirical fat: the fatty weighs XYZ pounds, is at N% body fat, has tits, and so on. (Note that the fit right-winger who is perfect with respect to the paradigm case may be, e.g., a junkie or a thief or God knows what else. But we’re discussing one issue at a time!) Likewise, the fatty’s political principles are matters of fact: the perfect observer can gather the fatty’s political orientation from his statements, and evaluate the strength and soundness of these principles on the basis of the fatty’s actions. Also a matter of fact are what the fatty has accomplished in terms of research, networking, organization, creation, support for his friends and allies, and offering sound advice and council.

The perfect observer should not accept arguments from the fatty that obesity is no big deal, or that his gluttony is less of a fault than some other form of disordered living. He should certainly not accept arguments that embracing obesity (or at least turning a blind eye to it) is an essential part of right-wing thought. Nor should he tolerate arguments from the fatty to the affect that obesity is inevitable or irrelevant, that valuing physical fitness is a trivial and vain distraction from “real” political issues, or that criticizing gluttony and obesity splits off potential support from fascist hambeasts.

The observer does not need to ever contradict these positions, if the fatty does not defend them. (Indeed, far from being necessary, such statements may well be a waste of time.) Likewise, if the fatty does not appear to be shameless or proud about his gluttony and corpulence, the observer is under no positive obligation to shame him. (Remember, enemies will do a fine job of finding your allies’ weaknesses and tearing them down; don’t expend any effort on something an enemy will do for free!) But if the fatty does actually defend his gluttony or broadcast his obstinate perseverance, perfect observers have some obligation either to collectively establish that gluttony is not normal, or to disassociate themselves from the fatty.

Whether observers should encourage the fatty to prioritize restoring order to his diet and physical regimen is a situational matter. In general, of course, they must uphold the norm that moderation and discipline are healthy and praiseworthy. But the advice they give to an ally and friend should depend on particular circumstances. Physical fitness is not easy, making lifestyle changes is not easy, and good people cannot do every difficult thing at the same time. The advice the perfect observers give to their fat friend should depend on his value in the political ecology. For example, a fatty who is otherwise well-equipped to be a public spokesman must hit the gym. A fatty who has the resources to run for office must hit the gym. But a fatty who is in the final months of finishing a novel or making partner at his law firm can afford to accomplish those goals first before rededicating himself to reversing the consequences of years of slovenliness and laziness.

The only genuinely hard question is what to do when the fatty’s shame at being fat (which is proper) extends to misrepresenting his physical state. Such misrepresentation has two aspects: pretended to have an ordered diet and exercise regimen and pretending to be physically attractive. In other words, the fatty can admit to be being physically repulsive while trying to evade moral blame (“muh thyroid”), or can admit to having a disgusting diet and unhealthy lifestyle while pretending to have escaped the effects (“muh bad angles”). The judgment is particularly difficult when his imperfections are an open secret among his closest collaborators, but hidden from the public; it creates the impression that his collaborators are at best hypocrites, or at worst actively approve of his sins.

III.

Now, to understand the position of the fat person himself only requires us to reverse the perspective of observer and observed. The fatty should recognize all the same facts as the perfect observers. But beyond that, he has deeper insight into his own thoughts and dispositions; for example, he knows or suspects to what extent his political beliefs may have been shaped by his obesity, and may be aware of a twinge of resentment or pain when his allies attack fatties on the enemy side. He also has much deeper extent into the roots of his gluttony than an outside observer: he knows, or thinks he knows, how deeply his sinfulness is entrenched in his soul.

I would advise a fatty to throw himself at the mercy of Jesus Christ (if he has not already) and to pray to be delivered, among any other sins, from his gluttony. But he should also accept that without the grace of God he will be a depraved and unregenerate glutton for the rest of his life, and he must work quietly and industriously to contain his sinful urges and thus avoid the worst consequences.

That is to say, a glutton must experience total despair: he must acknowledge that he will always be a glutton, and has no power to free himself from his satanic lust for ice cream and indolence, but that he must every day go through the slog of minimizing this lust and balancing it against its horrifying consequences. A despairing glutton will always be a glutton, but he may hope to be a self-controlled glutton, a thin glutton, a fit glutton. He starts with understanding that the sin of gluttony is a form of disordered living; he goes on to tracing gluttony out to its baneful effects; then the glutton looks inward at his own sinfulness, the causes, and tries to figure out how to dis-connect them from the causal nexus that leads to unhappiness and suffering.

This, in turn, requires looking at the disposition of an ordered soul, the virtue of moderation, and trying to understand the teleological function of this disposition in terms of the emotional states it creates and the ways they serve the health of the organism. A glutton cannot follow his instincts and expect to arrive at the natural good they promise, but he can see what natural goods accrue to moderate men and force himself to take the steps that will, in the long run, deliver to him the same goals.

IV.

If you review my suggestions, I think you will have a very easy time explaining to others (right-wing or left-wing, perfect or imperfect) why the right has so much trouble with fornicators and homosexuals.

It is notorious that homosexuals do not just want to be tolerated (i.e., free from punishment or persecution for their sexual activities), but allowed to transform their sin into a badge of pride and parade it around the public square. Nearly all right-wing homosexuals accept that homosexuality is abnormal, and most are eager to admit that they (or anyone else) would be much happier if they were not gay. But they typically think of their desires only as inconvenient, not as impulses that push them to do what is actively harmful to themselves and to others.

In other words, they think that their inconvenient desires are riskier or costlier to satisfy, but they do not question whether they need to be satisfied at all, and only very superficially consider whether they satisfy an actual need that human beings have. And even right-wing homosexuals only rarely and very hesitantly will admit that their gay lives are not just imperfect but sinful and their sodomite desires are the gentle whispering of the Devil. This failure to recognize the reality of sin corresponds to, and likely causes, the inability to see their error as a failure to function as a human being.

Given a sinner who cannot abstain from sodomy and is honest about this failing, signs of pride — defending sodomy, appearing in public with homosexual partners — greatly compound the sin itself, and should be avoided. Yet nonetheless any repentant sodomite should start by… refraining from sodomy. (Imagine!) And they should also try to hold back from situations which inflame their sinful desires.

But the model of despair and self-improvement I have suggested above implies that a Christian homosexual should understand not only the damage his disordered desires inflict on his soul and his body, but should also contemplate the natural end of healthy, ordered desires. The mockery of gays “in the closet” is, I suspect, a more powerful wound to our national spirit than even gay marriage itself. A repentant sodomite who contains his desires, refrains from sodomy, and goes on to live the life of a family man and a patriarch is every bit as admirable as a repentant glutton who, through iron will, eats only what he needs for health.

Obviously this is a high standard. Many are called and few are chosen. A repentant sodomite who stumbles, sins, and is caught and humiliated would undoubtedly give anything to not be in that situation. But I doubt any “closeted” sodomite who dies surrounded by his grandchildren and at peace with his God has ever wished that he were instead wasting away in a hospice, with only his HIV to keep him company.

But the same logic applies to fornication.

Ultimately there are very few gays, there is almost no risk that they will succeed in convincing the right to overlook their sins, and very few even try to flaunt their sins. But there are very, very many fornicators. Many of them defend fornication; many of them defend fornication on (they claim) right-wing principles; many persuade other right-wing men to fornicate, and nearly all (I can think of a handful of honorable exceptions) wish to be honored for the virtuosity of their fornications.

This is a difficult situation. The numbers are too high to “excommunicate” them all, of course. The numbers are even too high to chastise them all; it would be a huge waste of time, and they could easily find enough support from fellow fornicators to comfort each other. Yet as difficult as it may be, the underlying logical structure of the situation is the same as the (comparatively easier) cases of the glutton and the sodomite.

While it is difficult to know how observers should react to their allies’ fornications (and equally difficult to know how to reassure the celibate that they are making the right choice), the choices faced by the fornicators are simple enough, even if the path of virtue is rocky. They have to go in the closet! Closeted fornicators need to acknowledge that they are in the grips of sinful dispositions beyond their control, and try to replace the disorder of their own lives with the order of chastity and matrimony. That means no promiscuity, no “protection”, no abortions, no whores. Like the closeted homosexual, the closeted fornicator must choose a wife and try to mimic the life of the family man, even though he is not drawn to it. The path that an ordered love would pursue willingly, the closeted fornicator must force himself to follow, teeth-gritted, one step at a time, ignoring his aimless lusts and following instead the calm, clear voice of reason and virtue.

Frenemies on the Right

In general I think there should be more unity on the right. Big issue. Today, a minor issue: nazi-bashing. “No punching right” is a strategy that works because when a right-winger punches some “right-wing extremist group” to signal how moderate and principled he is, that only encourages the left to label every policy they don’t like as “right-wing extremism” to force the right-wing to denounce it. If you say “I’m on the right, but I draw the line at hate groups”, suddenly every right-wing group will be a “hate group”. If you say “I’m on the right, but I draw the line at neo-nazis,” every right-wing principle will be exposed as “nazism”.

That’s how I understand it.

It was disappointing to see Vox Day, who probably did more than anyone to popularize and explain this strategy, embrace nazi-bashing last October. Not because I am a nazi (*twirls villainous moustaches*), but because the entire purpose of the strategy is to dismantle the Left’s rhetorical super-weapons. The more effort he invests into arguing that he’s not a nazi and he hates nazis, the more pressure he’ll be under when Heat Street (are they still around?) urges him to condemn obviously-nazi-things like bloodright citizenship.

Vox Day defended himself by noting that he is not attacking nazis for being too far to the right, but for being too far to the left. This was unworthy of him. “Teh dems are teh reel nazis” is the chorus of D.C.’s conservative castrati, which I doubt Vox is quite ready to join. Whether nazi-bashing is virtue signaling doesn’t depend on the true relative position of National Socialism on the continuum of political ideologies, but on whether it is the most extreme of the “bad boy, go to your room” insults in the Leftist arsenal.

(That’s not all: as all QL readers are surely aware, there is no objective orientation of the political issue-space into left and right, independent of the need to organize against leftist parties. But I wouldn’t expect Vox Day to think in this way, so I can’t blame him for searching for the objectively-gauche characteristics of the Nazi Party.)

Regardless, Vox has shown good judgment in the past so, as I type this, I can only hope he knows what he’s doing. He also lives in the EU, where being designated as a nazi leads to jail time. And even if the strategy he is following is collectively suicide for the right, it may well be that he can successfully emphasize the differences between his homebrew libertarian-nativism and the tenets of National Socialism.

(All I wanted was Zionism for white people!, says the increasingly nervous novelist for the sixth time.)

NRx’ers don’t have either of these excuses so I don’t know exactly what the hell they think they’re doing when they nazi-bash. Some of them may have been inspired by Moldbug’s critique of demotism. But ask yourself this question: is the rhetorical function of claiming that Roosevelt’s America, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany all had the same form of government to smack down Uncle Adolf? I don’t think so.

The tenets of National Socialism and the role of the word “nahtsee” in your rhetorical strategy are two distinctly different things. (This, by the way, is a Moldbuggian axiom: an ideology’s label and its structure must be treated separately.) Even if you don’t want a NatSoc metapolitical strategy or social policy, nothing is forcing you to go out there and nazi-bash, disavow, distance, or otherwise punch the people leftists identify as being to the right of you, politically.

But here’s the dirty secret about formalism. (Ready?) Neo-cameralism, wherein a board of directors who collectively owned the productive capacities of society wield absolute power over it, sounds strikingly similar to the ideal-type definition of fascism developed by the USSR and its puppets. This wasn’t even something the commies believed to be true about the regimes they derided as “fascist”, it was a clumsy attempt to fit historical fascism into Marx’s theoretical categories, which all twentieth-century capitalist states supposedly approximated, to a greater or lesser degree. And the original proposal for formalization, wherein each institution’s/faction’s relative social power is commuted into voting shares in the government, sounds exactly like the corporatist social policy implemented by Mussolini’s Fascisti.

Has anyone who claims to be nazi-bashing from a neo-reactionary perspective thought this through?

A “constitutional conservative” can at least imagine coming out ahead after defecting from the Right’s optimal metapolitical strategy. So can a “but Israel does it!” populist. Hell, even Dick Spencer could hypothetically pull it off — despite the hellish aura the media projects on him, his policy proposals read like they’re straight out of Kant’s Perpetual Peace.

Personally, I’m just an easily confused nationalist populist who happens to want to see all sovereign power vested formally in a unitary ruling body. (Is that so much to ask?) I don’t have a dog in this fight. But if you, dear reader, are committed to neo-cameralism as the final solution, please don’t nazi-bash. Worse than being bad strategy, it’s embarrassing.