Unhumanity: Part II The Tactics of Unreason
This essay is continued from a previous column. The first column named the nature of the ideals of civilizational suicide haunting the modern age as the Ideals of Death, and names the date of their onset as the Terror of France, ironically called the Age of Reason. The column explains the nature of the philosophies growing from these ideals, and notes the unvarying tactic of deterring rather than fostering introspection, reason, dialectic, dialogue.
These are the tactics of unreason, using speech to halt speech, using thought to halt thought, using accusation to answer accusation, using swords to stop words.
1. Antiphilosophy
In the Age of Napoleon, after the time of the Terror, fruit of a benighted period ironically called the Enlightenment, philosophy became anti-philosophy. Even as philosophy is based on theology, antiphilosophy is based on antitheology, which has various and sundry incarnations in the modern day: Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Fabianism, Fascism, Feminism, Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, Gender Ideology, Climate Ideology, Globalism, Diversity, which most recently is called Wokeness.
Let us first take a moment to justify the use of the term “antiphilosophy” to refer to modern and postmodern intellectual fewmets that comprise the modern mental activity replacing philosophy.
Before the time of the Terror, philosophy used reason soberly to investigate fundamental questions of metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, theology.
After, theology was dismissed as irrational and subjective hence not worthy of discussion. Metaphysics likewise was dismissed as non-empirical hence unknowable, hence also not worthy of discussion. Without metaphysics, there are no universals, which means logic becomes a word-game of no reality, and reality becomes a noumena thing human logic cannot reach. With logic and reality thus divorced from each other, ethics and aesthetics become unknowable matters of unsupported opinion. Without ethics, politics becomes a Darwinian power struggle without point or pity. All human institutions become a Darwinian power struggle, and all human relations become sadomasochistic struggles between dominant exploiters and self-deceived victims.
Antiphilosophy teaches a learned helplessness in the intellectual realm. In this worldview, no introspection nor discussion of truth, beauty, and virtue is desirable nor possible, nor can it be known how best to live. When all questions are unanswerable, there is simply nothing for philosophy to do. Philosophy is dead.
When philosophy is dead, all claims of logic and reason are unmasked as arbitrary social constructs, and all claims of truth as sinister attempts at power and dominion. Even saying twice two is four is an act of oppression. To think is to oppress. Certainty is bigotry.
When philosophy is dead, all that remains is a dismal cosmos of absolute and uninterrupted Darwinian war of all against all, set in an eternity of self-deception by those who continue to be deceived by belief in logic and reason.
When philosophy is dead, and reality is lost, the sole meaningful act in this meaningless cosmos is to undeceive those deceived by logic and reason; that is, to waken the benighted into the enlightened truth, which is the truth is beyond true and false, the morality which is beyond good and evil, that faith beyond faith that declares god to be dead, and you to be god.
This enlightenment, is, of course, purely benighted. In the same way “social” justice merely means injustice, and “systemic” racism means nonracism, so, here, “beyond” truth, morality and faith merely means lies, vice, and damnation.
This so-called enlightenment is nothing more than a crippling failure of thought and reason. It is an absolute lapse into mental incoherence and inaction, words replaced by gibberish, ideals replaced by delusions, dream, nightmares, hallucination, insanity.
But this is what is the self-anointed Enlightened Ones, ironically call “Woke.” Woke, in other words, means complete mental lethargy, combined by dreamlike delirium: Woke is slumber. For them, benighted is enlightened and enlightened is benighted; folly is wisdom and wisdom is folly; foul is fair and fair is foul; good is evil and evil is good. God is devil, and thou are god.
This pattern never fails nor falters. The core of the creed requires nothing be called by its right name.
The self-anointed Enlightened Ones dismiss those who believe in truth, virtue and goodness, or hold patriotic ideals, or family values, or who uphold any institution or tradition, to be deplorable subhumans. Their doctrine preaches all institutions, from matrimony to the marketplace, church to childrearing, to be sinister instruments of malign institutional oppression.
We subhumans fall into two groups: we are either (1) unredeemable hence reprobate exploiters or (2) benighted self-deceived sleepwalkers unknowingly cooperating with our own oppression. The third group, the superhumans, are the enlightened hence elect. This threefold division into the reprobate, the benighted, and the elect springs from the antitheology of Gnosticism, discussed below.
All talk of virtue and vice is meant to deceive and oppress the benighted, all loyalty to traditional institutions of family or nation, church or cosmos is self-enslavement, including the biological realities of nature.
For the Elect, the Woke, Enlightened, the only meaningful virtue is to awaken the sleepwalkers to the unreality of virtue; the only meaningful political act is to burn down all political institutions, banish family and church, defy nature.
This is invariably done by pretending to expand or improve the institution: such as by expanding democratic principles into the economic sphere by abolishing private property, or expanding marriage to include the union of sodomites, or expanding worship by replacing an altar with a looking glass, and claiming godhood. Each is merely asserting a power logic or nature denies to men, such as claiming to be able to redefine marriage by redefining the sexes by redefining biology. Each man can now define and revise reality to suit himself, as a god.
The worldview of the self-anointed Enlightened Ones is an anti-philosophy because it actively discourages investigation into questions of truth, beauty, virtue; it dismisses theology and metaphysics; it holds reason to be unreal and reality to be unreasonable; it consigns beauty and virtue into the realm of the subjective; it halts all judgment, halts all discussion, halts all thought. All that remains is a Darwinian war of all against all locked in an unlit abyss of mindless chaos where only destruction and self-destruction are laudable.
Philosophy seeks how best to live. Anti-philosophy seeks death.
2. Antidialogue
Antiphilosophy has several essential features. The first can be called antidialogue.
Philosophy relies on dialog or questioning; Antiphilosophy rests on deterring dialog or questioning by accusing the character of the questioner, or threatening him, perhaps with ostracization, by threatening livelihood, by threatening life and limb. The first is called ad hominem and the second is ad baculum. Both are informal logical errors, and both comprise the sum total of the available intellectual resources of apologists for this worldview.
No antiphilosophy reaches conclusions by a rational chain of reasoning. The steps in reasoning cannot be defended in dialog or examined in dialectic. There is nothing to defend, nothing to examine. Reason plays no part.
Instead, it is easier to assert any questioning of their lunatic dogmas, or any smallest or mildest lack of affirmation thereof, is solely caused by moral and mental shortcomings, bigotry or illiteracy of those who pose questions and to punish any questioner with whatever weapons, metaphorical or literal, happen to be at hand. Philosophy thrives in the air academic freedom; antiphilosophy requires the dank mushroom-darkness of censorship and self-censorship to thrive.
For all the countless articles, monographs, books and papers written under the influence of antiphilosophy, the oceans of ink spilled penning paradoxes in arcane and opaque jabberwocky, none has the slightest ability to defend any part of their doctrine, save by these two accusations: you are either contemptibly ignorant or irredeemably wicked. In either case, you are deplorable.
Marxists cannot and do not defend Marxism. They merely level the accusation that voicing doubt masks malign class self-interest. Once the motive for the question is unmasked as malign, no question ever need be answered.
Cultural Marxists likewise cannot and do not defend Cultural Marxism. To question is racist. Feminists likewise cannot and do not defend feminism. To question is sexist. To question the sexual revolution is to be homophobic and transphobic, that is, not just evil, but insane. To question Climate Ideology is to be a Climate Denier, which is akin to being a Holocaust Denier, that is, a Nazi.
The essential thing is to level the accusation. That the accusation itself makes not even the slightest particle of sense is insignificant.
To make things simpler, any question on any topic, any curiosity, any desire to think for oneself, is likewise Nazism. Everything is Nazi, White Separatist, White Supremacist. Any man voicing a doubt is a White Supremacist, even if the man himself is a minority. That Nazism is National Socialism, that is, a variation of Marxism, passes unnoticed.
3. Routine of Abuse
Wifebeaters, sadists, and other psychologically dubious persons addicted to abusive narcissism apply a certain invariable routine to their interactions with others.
By no coincidence, this routine forms a core part of the doctrine and practice of the self-anointed Enlightened Ones, the Elect, the Woke.
These routines are (1) Denial (2) Inversion (3) Projection (4) Self-Righteousness.
This forms the handy acronym DIPS. The next steps if these do not silence opposition are Hatred, Intolerance, and Terror, but we need no extend our acronym describing them to such length, lest we be accuse of an earthy sense of humor.
Vox Day, summing up the routine in three pithy laws, explains that the self-appointed Social Justice Warriors (1) Always Lie (2) Always Project (3) Always Double-down.
It is routine for the Woke, when caught in the midst of their evildoing, to deny what all men see with their own eyes. Referring to a popular thriller where a young wife was bullied by her criminal husband into doubting her own senses and sanity, this is called gaslighting.
Peaceful protestors keeping within the velvet ropes when entering a public building carrying American flags is called an treasonous armed insurrection; violent rioters whose arsons are visible on camera are called peaceful protestors; shooting in self-defense is called murder, and murder is called justified, depending in the race of the attacker and victim, or depending whether the race of the criminal being confronted by police. If the defendant is Caucasian, to act in self defense is called a racist, even if those he shot were Caucasian. Acts of police brutality are also called racist, even if perpetrated by non-Caucasian policemen.
When such things are caught on film, as these days they so often are, the Woke ask, if not demand, the onlooker to disbelieve the evidence of his own eye. The film no doubt was deceptively edited.
It is routine for the bullies to invert the roles of bully and victim, so that the persons under attack are condemned as aggressors, while the aggressor bursts into tears like a cry-baby, pretending martyrdom. Such men are called cry-bullies.
The final goal of cry-bullying is coercion. The cry-bully whines that any disagreement with his position, be it ever so mild or humble, is tantamount to urging assault against him, which is the same as an act of political terrorism, no less violent than throwing a stick of dynamite into a crowd. In the alternate, the cry-bully whines that he is so psychologically unstable or unfit, that any disagreement with his position, be it ever so mild or humble, forces him to commit suicide. Moreover, any disagreement with his position, since it may prevent other men from joining him in his identity, is akin to attempting the destruction of that identity, which is like attempting the destruction of a race, which is genocide.
Since any that any disagreement with his position, be it ever so mild or humble, is tantamount to terrorist genocide, any degree of violence whatever, directed against any target whatsoever, is condoned, perhaps even required.
Silence is also violence, since it is interpreted as unspoken affirmation of terrorism and genocide. Hence, coercing any public display of applause and worship toward the cry-bully and his idols is justified.
Naturally, the cry-bullies cannot prevail with these antics of answering speech with violence if the authorities charged with keeping the peace did not routinely allow cry-bully riots to be classed as mostly peaceful protests, that is, speech, and to class speech as hate-crime, that is, violence. It is only with the tacit or open support of tyrannous authorities that this anarchy is permitted to run wild. Hence it is properly called anarcho-tyranny.
In pretending martyrdom, the cry-bullies accuse their accusers only of whatever exact evils they themselves are doing or promoting. This is called the Iron Law of Projection, because there are never any exceptions.
The precision of the projection is eerie to the point of being psychologically abnormal. When Hillary Clinton, for example, thought it would be convenient to accuse Donald Trump of breaking into Democrat National Committee computer servers where incriminating evidence of her wrongdoing was stored, including her wrongdoing of colluding with Russians to interfere with a presidential election, she did not accuse him of colluding with the Chinese or Jihadist Islamofascists, but with the Russians, that is, with her own partners in crime. That the Democrat Censorship Industrial Complex and Deep State accused Trump of rigging and election was merely their announcement that they would rig the next election, which they called “fortifying.” It is as if the evildoers are under a psychological imperative publicly to confess their crimes in every respect except naming others as perpetrators.
Finally, it is routine when caught in the midst of evildoing, long after the evidence is overwhelming and no doubt remains, for the Woke to redouble their efforts at self-affirmation, self-justification, and self-declaration of their own self-righteousness. Retractions are rare, and apologies are impossible. Not even the slightest pretense of being fair-minded, non-partisan, or sane is attempted. They merely scream louder, as if trying to silence an internal whisper they cannot silence.
Rather than apologize when they wrong others, they demand an apology, which to them is never an admission of wrong it is always an admission of weakness, a token of surrender. Remember that there is no such thing as right and wrong in their universe, only power and weakness. Like a wifebeater beating his wife, the demand is made that the bruised and bleeding victim take the blame and promise never to offend again.
This is not merely self-righteousness, which is a wicked but not abnormal outgrowth of pride and folly. This is sadism: it is the desire to see a human face trampled under an iron boot forever.
Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Fabianism, Fascism, Feminism, Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, Gender Ideology, Climate Ideology, Globalism, Diversity, which together is currently called Wokeness, all share the protocols of unreason and the routines of abuse. The partisans of these causes indulge in denial, inversion, projections, and self-righteousness, that is, gaslighting, cry-bullying, confessional accusation.
These tactics spring directly from the core elements shared across all these incarnations of the same ideal.
These various incarnations spring from a common worldview: that of an esoteric heresy, or virus, which spreads by mimicking the host it infects and subverts. Gnosticism is the most ancient name for this brain-destroying mental virus, but it forms a continuous theme in Western intellectual tradition, reaching from the mephitic caves of antique mystery cults to current faculty lounges, boardrooms, and social media sites.
This will be discussed in a coming columns.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
