There’s this game that kids play that goes like this: first you ask the other person to repeat the word “toast” for 45 seconds, then you ask them what goes into a toaster. They usually answer “toast.” The correct answer: bread.
In the same way, we are conditioned by the mainstream media, but also by the people around us. If enough people are walking around us saying “toast,” it’s what we say at the ballot box, or in conversation with the new boss or girlfriend. We may even use it as a stepping-stone in our own career, building theories on theories.
One of the things we’re conditioned to do, if someone asserts that decisions should be made based on a standard and not a rule, is to ask “but who decides?” and alternately “but who watches the watchers?”
In our modern society which is predicated on equality of all human beings, we are conditioned to think such questions are intelligent. We are also conditioned to shoot down anything but rules, because rules are a two-edged sword: in prohibiting conduct, they make everything else legitimate and encourage us to push as close to that line as possible.
Think of it this way: if we say your hamburger meat can contain no more than 0.05% roach gonads, then in the next cycle your hamburger meat is most likely to contain 0.045% roach gonads. We’ve defined a positive objective by making a negative rule.
A standard on the other hand is less precise. “Don’t allow any meat that a decent human being shouldn’t eat” is the opposite of a rule. It requires interpretation. This makes the crowd mad, because not everyone can make this decision successfully.
As a result, they will start asking the usual questions and accuse you of having a subjective standard. However, they’re using words they don’t understand. It’s an objective standard; it just requires judgment. They are assuming that because not everyone can make this decision, it’s somehow unrelated to reality, when the opposite is true.
Not every decision should be made by every person. You don’t entrust your car to just any mechanic, and you don’t get medical care from just anyone on the street. We don’t even entrust politics to the average person, at least beyond the vote. Our leaders tend to come from our elites. (We change those elites for political reasons sometimes.)
The social fiction is that we’re all equal and anyone can rise. The grim reality is that your abilities determine your ability to rise, or should, because otherwise, you’ll rise to a position of incompetence and then start wrecking the futures of the rest of us.
Our witless prole drift culture likes to draw absurd distinctions like fact/factless, subjective/objective, political correctness, socially acceptable, etc. These are all proxies for what the crowd likes, and what it doesn’t. They can’t say that (it would be subjective) so instead they invent nonsense rules.
This allows them to conclude that if not everyone can perceive something, it is not factual and is subjective. Never mind that they’ve just put a subjectivity standard of what people can perceive and made it into an objective one. They specialize in double-speak and nonsense because it hides their insanity.
Conservatism — and why do we even use that word? because we like conserving truth — stands for the opposite principle, which is the idea that everything is objective. We measure results. We assess likely results. We make reasonable estimations and quality and probability.
If you want to know a path to health and happiness, it is this kind of sanity. Instead of playing in a sandbox in our minds made up of our wishes and desires, we focus on how things work in reality, and choose from among the options offered so that tomorrow is better than today.
But according to neurotic liberals, that’s a “subjective” standard.
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I’m glad to see that you’re finally coming around to my reasoning.
Conservatism is first and foremost a belief in the truth. It’s radicalism arises when we recognise an error and push forward change to correct it.
Stevens has been saying this for years, if not a decade.
Interesting.
When I raised the issue a while ago he took me to task for it.
Sorry, my bad.
It appears that I was taken to task by a certain A. Realist.
No worries, it happens.
I for one don’t hold internet grudges. ;)
“Our witless prole drift culture likes to draw absurd distinctions like fact/factless, subjective/objective, political correctness, socially acceptable, etc. These are all proxies for what the crowd likes, and what it doesn’t. They can’t say that (it would be subjective) so instead they invent nonsense rules.”
Right! I’m reading what Lakoff has to say about Democratic politics and framing the message. He claims that our political sides have to do with how mean Daddy was to us. Liberals come from families with “nurturant fathers.” At first I thought that narrative made good sense and it even made me feel kinda sorry that my dad was so tough on us sometimes. But then Lakoff’s narrative collapsed in my mind because he forgot to tell his readers that when someone grows up in a household where dad had authority, eventually his children grow out of that child role and they are prepared for responsible adulthood. In liberalism, people think of the State as some kind of lactating mother/father figure.
If politics are based on capturing the narrative, then we need not worry because stories wind on to unexpected conclusions and when people live a story, they get smacked up with reality eventually.
If politics are based on an understanding that we have rules of thumb for what is right, then when things happen we stand by our principles, which apply to various realities.
I had a great conversation with my 22 y.o. about independent thinking. It was great.
In other words we are said by George Lakoff to have political beliefs based on who and what we think we are, and whose story fits in with that.
So it’s not that liberals don’t mind lying. They believe a person can redefine him or herself, and that the truth is whatever you say it is, because the story is the truth.
In my life I’ve found that I built up illusions only to have them fall down and have reality smack me upside the head, and that it’s more economical to stop pretending anything and to build up from my true foundation.
“So it’s not that liberals don’t mind lying. They believe a person can redefine him or herself, and that the truth is whatever you say it is, because the story is the truth.”
This is profound. The story, and the words that make up the story, are reality, to a liberal. It is what they say it is, and they are what they say they are. You are, consequently, whatever they say you are…
Well pointed-out (:>
Excellent point, though how should a leader be judged? Simply those of successfully asserting their will over the masses (for the masses are unable to decide)?
Such as, who could determine the smartest man on earth except for the smartest man himself (or most holy, etc.). Who ordains authority? We could say God, but then they may all claim this. So who is the truly ordained – him that succeeds, or would that be evil triumphing? Presumably the triumphant and good then, but then we are circular for who can judge good and they must again self-select.
Perhaps then nature is the rule of God (if we would like to sacralize this idea) and simply those who have the best long-term plan to survive and thrive are as such only those who can “obey God” and we can see that conservative values have this property. All evil societies then would eventually destroy themselves, though it may succeed for a while – so here we could see low first-world birth rates as a self-evident sign that the modern West has strayed from the path of God (and natural law).