The Idealists Are Gaslighting You

as we all know, the idealists are gaslighting you. the object-level policy Wonks of xitter fame have adopted a language, the ruling orthodoxy of written thought, and prioritisation of that language is Moral. this is the language of sensible policy proposals, of real things, so they speak, of the Issues, bread-and-butter stuff. you know, the thing the People think of. this really is the proposed argument, for what it’s worth.

but first: what is a “language” anyway.

well, language is the thing what we use to communicate with each other. there’s a lot of people talking about the semantics and syntax of what we say, and then of course they will strip it down to some formal logic that will adequately explain why we do what we do. this ‘universal language’ would obviously be unintelligible to most people, but nevertheless it’d assuredly reflect the truest essence of human communication.

this is a product of viewing things as essences rather than use-values. the idealists Honestly believe that things are more than what they are *to us*; that a spade what they pick up and hold is more than a spade, it has a soul. that they can create some order beyond themselves as humans, with their very powerful human minds.

they’re searching for the ‘human spirit’.

now, don’t get me wrong, formal semantics has various utilities beyond navel-gazing. it is, for instance, very good at creating a model for language at scale, and with a lot of this stuff you can a large language model. the large language model serves real purposes beyond convincing a schizophrenic dude that his mother is trying to kill him. an LLM is a decent enough complex search engine, albeit with hiccups that make it unreliable. you can get it to do truly abominable but functional programming (until you need to patch it). you can also get it to depict complex images in a variety of styles which procedurally mimic human ways of drawing, sparking yet another debate about the human soul (now called ‘art’), and how it flows through the artistic Ley Line running through humans but nothing else, and onto the paper, and the chatbot can’t do this because it doesn’t have the Ley Line.

anyway, all this means use-values at the end of the day, and so you know, formal semantics isn’t pointless. it gave us MechaHitler and ChatGPT essays, that’s a win for the Species i guess.

nevertheless, the people who approach language as this formal logic still do so under the honest belief that they are decrypting some essential human language. that they are revealing something about themselves. or, per Richard Montague: “I reject the contention that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages.”

the thing this Wanker is saying is basically that there is a being of pure theory behind ‘formal’ and ‘natural’ language and it is exactly the same in both of them. this hidden Textwall what God posted before hitting send on the seven day creation, and we are now all discovering because we reached a higher order of True Sapience than the society which came before us.

this Godspeak, okay, inasmuch as it’s real it’s this common thread where human language arises because it is useful. you know, grug spots wounded mammoth, needs noise or sign for ‘wounded’, needs noise or sign for ‘mammoth’. all rather intuitive. someone needed or wanted to make that noise or make that sign and it is used to describe reality. now we’re all very good with the noises and the signs and it got more useful as the things it described got more complex and we needed more signals for more things. and you know, we’ve got these mouths and vocal chords and larynxes and digits and different words are shortened or lengthened for a certain utility and you know, there’s a lot of stuff happening but generally you’re just doing useful shit.

so these people come along and they break it down to their bases, semantic and syntactical value, and then they go right, there is a finite amount of all these things, we can assign them all Numbers and Functions and do Maths with it all. and this is correct. they can absolutely do that.

and so you know, you’ve managed to translate a bunch of common use values in language into a bunch of numbers and functions. and you feed this to something what reads numbers and functions and it can then speak human language.

like how a lot of boomers think ai is jarvis, formal semantics guys will see this as something in function more like the star trek universal translator. but no they’ve just compared use-values. there’s no guarantee it can account for every possible innovation, because to do that you’d need some universal theory of human development, which is a bit outside the scope of formal semantics.

these people are really fucking clever in a real sense that matters but the problem is they didn’t get their Online Marxist Theoretical Training like us other clever people and so they aren’t trying to piss off Saint Bruno like he’s their dad. instead they default to the idealism of the civil society what allows them to exist as this thing, intellectuals. and you know, because civil society is proposing something, a positivity, it requires a thought system to accommodate all its Law and Order. these systems will operate on their own premises and generally govern things for the benefit of the guys in charge. that distinct premise is idealism, and idealism is useful. and yeah, anyone who’s in the Meat of the world understands that the law and reality aren’t really the same thing and we’re all just trying our best or whatever. it’s not perfect, but hey, it’s the best possible option.

but intellectuals will often deliberately position themselves away from the Meat so they can Think more, and we call this an “ivory tower”. and they kind of just huff their own farts. disconnected from the real world they can kind of just say whatever so long as it’s using the Good Terms what Civil Society ordained. as a result, intellectuals have their own language, useful for the purposes of this caste of Thinkers.

this is not to say that idealist intellectuals don’t produce ideas that are useful to the Meat-people. kant’s critique of leibniz is useful. hegelian immanent critique is useful. and formal semantics is useful. we can use these to look at the world and understand it.

but by marx’s time they’re huffing their own farts so much you’ve got the young hegelians and they’re producing shit that’s only really just window dressing. it’s useful because you can quote it at social functions with all the other Intellectuals. marx, this jewish lumpen varmint who the other intellectuals just kind of consider genetically inferior to them, he’s the one screaming at them: THE SPADE IS A SPADE.

and they don’t listen and he recognises they won’t listen but he’s still lampooning them. not in the fashion of max stirner, who was the first man since diogenes to present himself as some picaresque noble savage, but you know, by tying his critiques to real forces and negating the arguments of the young hegelians in real terms not by working with their proposals but instead saying, the spade is a spade and it doesn’t have a soul.

the thing is, though, a lot of intellectuals don’t fucking get this. so they will pull out the big old lexicon and then argue that he’s not conforming to the systems what he is critiquing so thereby he can’t critique them. he’s not using their Language, and their Language is like 95% of their social existence so if you attack the axiomatic shibboleths of their Textwalling you’re basically threatening to murder them.

so they’ve got no choice but to like, conclude he actually doesn’t Get It because he’s not tapped into the Ideas Bong that they’re all passing round. and this is kind of why it feels like philosophers are gaslighting you all the time.

this doesn’t mean the anti-intellectual angle is correct, either. i’m not dismissing Big Words because i am intimidated by them. i use lots of Big Words and Oblique Terms. but generally i try to make them mean something. these guys don’t.

with policy wonks, it’s kind of the same. these guys have this thing, policy. and policy is Moral because it has political sanction from the State (to them, a coherent and permanent thing), and God’s blessing thus achieved, policy can solve everything that can or need be solved.

they can’t put it like this because it does in a sense reveal that their thought process is basically inseparable from classical fascism (or the pophist understanding of, say, stalinism, or just ‘totalitarianism’ in general), and that they think the state really does control every aspect of people’s lives, which is self-evidently false in a regime of private property. this isn’t Moral because of their understanding of the history of ideas, where fascism was soundly defeated, until trump allowed them to debate the meaning of fascism in relation to a real force again. and maga is pretty explicitly iconoclastic with regards to the policy-idols so they can’t conclude fascism is Moral.

so you know, they instead rationalise it as: well, i’m thinking of what’s possible. revolutions (another thing vanquished by the history of ideas) and whatnot are impossible/immoral/irresponsible and so you know, now this means the State is here for good, we should work with it. as long as we understand the policy, we won’t save Everyone, but we’ll save Enough.

this is true in a sense. but policy wonks also have a big blind spot other than their basic idealism, in that they don’t really have a coherent theory of power.

you see, the big think tanks what liberals actually Listen To are actually backed up by these big old bags of money. and you know, these big old bags of money have strings attached, and the strings and the money are all real and important. these interests are not always leashed with some omniscient intent by a sinister capitalist cabal, but you know, a think tank funded by a billionaire is far less likely to suggest policy that’d harm the billionaire’s interests.

there is nothing to stop an individual from using their wealth to kneecap themselves because, well. while elon owns tesla he also habitually abuses ketamine and hates women so he bought twitter and thus made everything so much worse for himself. but you know, at a broader systematic level in terms of conglomerates, stripped of the pretensions of would-be tony starks, it is pretty much just “money talks” at the end of the day.

this is a product of the fact that, you know, this whole thing of liberal law and order’s just a system used to govern reality as seen by ruling interests. it has to look a bit like reality, but only inasmuch as it the reality that the ruling class themselves impose. if we detach ourselves from the idea that the ruling class are godly things and can’t mould mountains like clay, this means their systems don’t actually measure up to reality in a perfect way.

so you’ve got this disconnect, the fact of Meat-people and Stately Meat-people, and then the orthodoxy by which the ruling class instructs the Stately Meat-people. The task of reconciling these things falls to the Stately Meat-people, but there’s still going to be friction. The Stately Meat-people understand this, but the policy wonks don’t.

i mean, the policy wonks, they’re good servants of god to be honest. they took all their civics classes and they learned how to use the language of leadership. they are being good citizens and their contribution to the discourse, this state Liturgy, is a plea to nobody but the benevolent intent above the wicked boyars In Charge Right Now: save us!

in the case of broader systems, this is religion, but for policy wonks it’s more like a religious cult. and they will be really vicious to those not part of their cult. cut the policy wonks to see what bleeds and you suddenly get these foaming-mouth maga squadristi who think you are genetically inferior to them and should be annihilated.

the electoralist left is just what happens when this kind of consciousness comes into its own with a theory of power and decides to embark on the sisyphean task of climbing state hierarchies. you see, sure, every attempt to do this before winds up in humiliation or co-option, but you know, this time it’ll be different, we just need more Discipline. we need Better Leaders.

because history’s still just about states and princes and the virtue of the raw ideas held by each.

when these idiots scold you, for not loving their Saint, remember that they are trying to convince you a spade has a soul. they are trying to convince you God is real and loves Democracy. they are trying to convince you the crisis is some outside force sent by satan, not a product of the system itself.

they think you’re a scared little fucking peasant, and that if they scold you enough with the language of priestly power and threaten you with hell, you and the other peasants will stop asking for things.

the Idealists are gaslighting you. they do not think there is power in your hands.

proving them wrong is as simple as calling a spade a spade.