[I]’m a minor philosopher of what you would call science and I would call testimony, and the natural law of reciprocity, jurisprudence, politics, and economics.
One of the primary focuses of my work is the group strategy of different classes, cultures, states, and civilizations, and how different civilizations practice persuasion, their truth substitutes, and their way of lying – or whether it is one of the varieties of fictionalism, or, whether like the west, where we pay the high cost of truth before face, regardless of cost to the dominance or competence hierarchy, and where that truth is martial reporting, or what we call empirical testimony: meaning only what is observed under the presumption of realism and naturalism.
I am very good at what I do. And you may not comprehend until the end of this little post, the relationship between painful unwanted and disrespectful truth, the content of this book, the problem of other cultures – particularly the middle east – and the reason for western dismissal and disrespect for other ‘wisdom literatures’ which position themselves falsely as ‘philosophy’. In the west, philosophy refers to everything we do not know well enough to separate into a science. There are no other systems of thought that seek this transformation – in fact, other than the confucian, all are hostile to it. At present as far as I know, philosophy in the continental sense remains a failed attempt to restore the binding narrative of the christian church in secular prose. In the Anglo sense, philosophy consists of logic and the formulation of symbolic rules and that program finished in the mid 20th century to no avail – closure is not available to language, which is why language is infinitely useful regardless of how much knowledge we gain.
THE FRAMING OF THE BOOK’S PREMISE IS FALSE, THE COMPLAINT ABOUT WORLD WISDOM LIT IS NOT
The premise of the book asserts that philosophy in the west is as influential as what passes for philosophy (‘wisdom literature”) in the middle east, It’s not. I don’t know of any other culture that has produced philosophy, only wisdom literature. Because the west uses philosophy as a wisdom literature, we call the works of other people’s philosophy, but it’s just a respectful analogy to the function, not the method or content.
Philosophy is no longer taken seriously in the west – it’s continuously defunded, and universities now group it as do libraries as Religion. It’s little more than the equivalent of science fiction and fantasy literature, or word puzzles for the literary mind. If you study philosophy as a requirement for degree it will consist of a survey, formal logic, or the philosophy of science. The rest is just intellectual history, and the only useful advanced degree it applies to is the law, where cunning and deceit find use in the teachings of philosophy. Philosophy papers regardless of whether undergrad, grad, postgraduate or professional are as poorly written and thought as are the pseudoscientific social sciences. Religion in the west is split between secular and evangelical with all others in decline. Intellectual discourse in the west uses law, the sciences, and increasingly economics to decide political propositions. It doesn’t use philosophy. In general we consider science as the universal language of truthful speech, and philosophy a bit of entertainment for the intelligent but lacking agency (control over their environment).
Our people had a binding narrative of the Enlightenment, but it has been exhausted by the failures of democracy in the face of the equilibration of what was a 600 year western advantage in institutions, knowledge, genetics (demographics), and technology. The new binding narrative is oppression by whites, just as the new binding narrative in africa, the middle east, and india is one of oppression – rather than failure to adapt to modernity despite it’s benefit, and in china, the narrative of the century of humiliation by western technology. All this despite that we now know that our way of life is only possible for an ethnically homogenous polity of majority genetic middle class, that has suffered through many years of soft eugenic evolution due to institutions of meritocracy and harsh winters.
By 1960 we knew communism was dead, by 1980 we knew democratic socialism was dead, by 1992, we knew democracy was dead, but it has been the end of the british empire as it remains in america as the rest of the world was colonized by technology, medicine, economics, accounting, finance, and law – but was unable to adopt or be colonized by our uniquely european high trust rule of law and the political and juridical systems that depend upon it. We no longer have sufficient homogeneity, population, technological, and genetic advantage to run an empire that controls the world patterns of finance and trade that the europeans, and in particular the british built – every country must now pay their way. Americans cannot carry the world. So we return to the competition between civilizations core states, and cultures.
Aside from demographics, and democracy, and trust, the reason being that truth, and especially truth before face, ad the western pressure to put truth before face, and testimony before storytelling, and the requirement to disrespect people who do not, are what the world cannot tolerate. In our civilization you are tolerated until worthy of respect. We have practiced tripartism, with mobility, or what we call ‘Aristocratic Egalitarianism’ in that any man may use heroism and sacrifice to rise in status, but he is not worthy of respect if he cannot meet the standard of military testimony regardless of cost to him, his family, and others.
This is the tax all european peoples pay that others do not pay and is the origin of most conflicts. So this is the underlying issue with respect for other cultures. We do not tolerate untruthful speech in untruthful language from our own, and we treat them with disrespect if they do. This is antithetical to the middle eastern ethic which does the opposite. It is heroic to lie in the middle east, it is face before truth in asia, the idea never occurs in africa, and in india a pleasant response is more important than truth.
It seems never to occur to the middle eastern peoples that their desperate attempt to preserve respect, suppress feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, is why the greeks wrote the fable of Hermes and The Cart of Lies, and why westerners (rightly) disrespect the untruthful means of speech, and the untruthful content of middle eastern speech, that asks us to respect that which is not worthy, and it is not worthy because truth before face is the foundation of our civilization and it’s the reason for the wests outstanding success in brief periods in the indo european expansion, the ancient world and in the modern world: Individual Sovereignty, Reciprocity, Testimonial Truth, Duty, Heroism and Excellence, Judge and Jury, and competing markets in all walks of life that are merciless to man’s ego, his family, and personal image. Markets make evidence of the truth of our ability and value to others.
Lies to defend an ego unworthy of defense for it has not learned respect by sacrificing the self to truth before face as the high cost of participating in our civilization. These children’s deceits sound to westerners like children trying to make up stories so that your parents don’t catch you in a lie. And this book sounds equally like the lamentation of children.
The abrahamic religions are nothing but vast networks of lies. They do contain wisdom, but wisdom told as lies. Not myths like europeans and hindus. Not wisdom literature like chinese and europeans, but very obvious lies that are insulting to us whenever you speak them. We tolerate this from our Christians, because christians ALSO practice our civilizations foundational rules of truth sovereignty and reciprocity. But we do not tolerate if from others who do not practice our civilizations founding rules of truth sovereignty reciprocity. (Nor our stoicism, which is our version of ‘sacredness’).
And the first set of lies the middle east must come to terms with is that the great civilizations of the ancient world: the egyptian, north african, levantine, persian, anatolian, byzantine, greek, northwest indian, were reduced to ruin by the arab and muslim conquests, and all their arts and their literature and their culture, institutions, traditions, knowledge, and the superior distribution of their genetics lost by the desperate attempt to produce the worst lie of all: that a man deserves respect without production of goods and services for others, without purchasing it with truth before face; that ignorance and superstition are the end of knowledge, and that lying and family are more important than truth and commons.
NOW, ON TO THE ARAB SPRING
Zizek is a practitioner of critique: a gossip. An entertainer. He has no ideas, no solutions and admits he has no ideas or solutions. The postmoderns do not produce philosophy but sophisms and deceits. Why would you compare yourself and your work to the continuation of Rabbinical Sophism (pipul) and undermining (critique) by freud, marx, boas, adorno, derrida, and their followers baudrillard and foucault. These people are as morally foul as was Rousseau, and the French Academy rewards such sophism as an art form. Zizek is not a philosopher. He’s a gossip. A clown entertaining the intellectual class envious of power they are unworthy of exercise, with feel good criticisms of others.
ORIENTALISM
There is no ‘reading’ of the law of sovereignty, reciprocity, nor ‘reading’ of the sciences. No reading of mathematics. A thing that is interpretable is not a thing that is uninterpretable (factual). One cannot testify to the meaning of wisdom literature. Yet it is ‘reading of text’ that has created Rabbinical Pilpul, Critique, False promise baiting into harm, numerology, legal ‘interpretation’. It is this very technique of pilpul that is advanced by the french jewish sophists you mention (the postmodernists). In the west we call this by it’s true name: Lying. Yet jewish, christian, and muslim theologians practice this art of lying as if it is a skill. It not only is not a skill, it is the cause of the Dark Ages of Superstition and Ignorance.
What you call dialectic is just Pilpul. Nothing more. If you cannot produce a system of measurement that is testifiable you’re just making up whatever deception you can get away with.
If you want to say that we only know we do not speak falsely by a competition between logic and evidence, and that we only know our logic and evidence is not false by competition in argument that might be true. But that is argument not dialectic. The difference is argument is pursuit f the testifiable, and dialectic is merely pilpul – pursuit of either deceit, persuasion, or compromise.
LANGUAGE
All language consists sounds or its symbolic references in a continuous recursive stream of disambiguation each consisting of measurements in analogies to experience, from a system of measurement the speaker and the audience understand. Westerners seek to produce testifiable measurements in argument, and limit our unjustifiable arguments to arts, music, poetry and literature.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL CLAIMS
In the west epistemology consists of constructing methods testimony: logic, empiricism, operationalism, rational choice (incentives), reciprocity, markets all create evidence we can testify to. I think the author is rebelling against the remains of christianity and judaism and not against anything currently western. Western testimony, at least in serious thought, is ‘deflationary’ as in the sciences, whereas french, german, jewish, christian and muslim is inflationary (loaded and framed), or conflationary(conflating history and myth, truth and wisdom, real, supernormal) or fictionalized (idealism, magic, supernaturalism). But most evidently conflating the norms, traditions, values, and myths, with facts. In other words, while chinese language is structurally poetic it’s content is purely rational. Meanwhile much arabic prose (which is confoundingly difficult to translate) is structured poetically and it’s content is poetic.
WHAT YOU’RE MISSING
Western ethics (reciprocity) are scientific. And always have been. For 5000 years. That is why we invented reason and science. We applied our law to everything.
STRAW MAN COMPARISONS OF WESTERN INTELLECT
The ‘philosophers’ you are mentioning are socially, politically, economically and institutionally unimportant, mostly jewish authors of sophisms constructed from pilpul (excuses and deceits) and critique (criticism, undermining, straw manning) without proposing an operational structure to replace the current. In other words, they seek to undermine western civilization, but do not propose an alternative open to equal analysis and criticism.
It’s entirely destructive. Kant was also trying to create a secular theology. All of these ‘thinkers’ you call philosophers are attempting to create a secular religion using deceit, just as the founders of the three abrahamic religions sought to create a supernatural religions using deceit. Why are you even vaguely interested in the works of these people? It’s a sophistry of hatred of western civlization. Your criticizing our enemy – the very enemy that is attempting to undermine our civilization through academy media and arts, just as the jews and christians undermined our greco roman civilization through false promise of life after death, attainment of status at the expense of the aristocracy, who closed the schools, destroyed our arts in the ancient and modern world, and kill their philosophers and de-platformed ours in the postwar academy and press, and in the present internet age. Christianity did not ‘spread’ in the west, it was imposed by force of arms by the byzantines, and spread as a system of lies by the church – and it took until 1500 before they succeeded in northern europe. Just a few years before we reversed the tragedy of the semitic conquest of the west using lies appealing to women and slaves.
Gramsci? Heidegger? Seriously? Rousseau, kant, hegel -people you mention or imply – all tried to create a secular theology to replace the supernaturalism of christianity and the authoritarianism of the church. The ‘enlightenment’ was a counter-revolution AGAINST anglo empiricism reason and law. Marx, Freud, Boas, Cantor’s math, Adorno et al’s cultural Marxism, Derrida, Gramsci, Foucault, and all the POMOs, Rand and Rothbard’s libertarianism, the current political correctness, the forcible immigration of underclasses into Europe and America’s eugenically distributed population – these are all counter revolutions AGAINST the anglo civilization, just like the chinese, and now the middle east. Thankfully Much of africa was saved from the Muslim conquest and these people will be able to prosper because they do not need to unlearn the abrahamic system of lying to protect self image and status they have no reason to possess.
So which europeans are you railing against: The Second jewish anti-western revolution? The french anti-anglo revolution? The old german anti-anglo-anti-french revolution? The Russian anti-anglo, french,german, italian revolution? Which? Because so far you’re discussing people who write fantasy literature for other consumers of fantasy literature, the sole purpose of which is to destroy the western civilization you’re apparently complaining about overly criticizing you.
The west talks about the muslim world in terms of stability, economics, the stupidity of the postwar borders imposed by europeans instead of ethnic borders, and just waiting for muslims to do what every other civilization has done: impose costs upon european civilization by resisting a modernization into consumer capitalism and its benefits despite the obvious enthusiasm people have for the results of that prosperity. We paid the cost of the marxists in via the russians, the chinese, the southeast asians, the south americans, and our own ‘useful idiots’. We are now paying the costs of the modernization of the muslim world. And it’s the most expensive so far, if for no other reason than we no longer have such an asymmetric income compared to the rest of the world. Meanwhile China is desperately trying to restore the credibility of authoritarianism in the world, and Iran is trying to recreate an empire, while the west waits out the economy and government’s failure, so that persia can return to her previous trajectory.
So I disagree with every premise in the book so far.
The rest of the book never answers the question whether non-europeans can think. in the sense europeans understand thinking as measuring, reasoning, and testifying, no. In fact I simply gave up criticizing this book because it’s just as sophomoric as the work of the french anti-western jews.