I. Introduction

In Naming and Necessity, Kripke makes the following argument:

• Ia. Identities between rigid designators are necessarily true, or else not true.

• IIa. “Pain” is a rigid designator.

• IIIa. Any name for a type of brain state is a rigid designator.

• IVa. The identity between pain and a type of brain state is necessarily true, or else not true.

• Ib. It is conceivable that pain is not identical to a type of brain state.

• IIb. If it is conceivable that pain is not identical to a type of brain state, it is not necessarily true that pain is identical to a type of brain state.

• IIIb. It is not necessarily true that pain is identical to a type of brain state.

• IVa. The identity between pain and a type of brain state is necessarily true, or else not true.

• IIIb. It is not necessarily true that pain is identical to a type of brain state.

• C.Pain is not identical to a type of brain state.

This argument is only sound if Kripke’s view of language is correct. There is a different account of language which is at least as attractive as Kripke’s, under which either premise Ia or IIa is false. Under the alternative account of language, when A and B are not ontologically basic entities, “A is identical to B” is the same as “Things with property X also have property Y”, which can be contingently true. There are some identities that are necessarily true if true at all, even under the alternative account of language, however, the identity between pain and brain states is not one of these cases.

II. The Alternative View

i. Motivation

Not all words are of the same kind. Even without any implicature, there are multiple kinds of meaning. I present three discrete categories of words. All words fit into one and only one of these categories, and each category has a different type of meaning. I will then address objections to this framework and examine its implications. Take a word like “milk”. There is 1% milk and 2% milk, but there is no 30% milk, because the dairy product that is 30% milk fat is cream1, not milk. There is no point at which we clearly go from high-fat milk to low-fat cream. “Milk”, like “heap” and “toast”, is vague. Contrast this with a word like “carbon atom.” A carbon atom has six protons. No atom can have 6.1 protons, and an atom that has 7 protons is clearly not a carbon atom. “Carbon Atom” is not vague. I argue that this is because “carbon atom” and “milk” are different types of words.

ii. The Three Types of Words

Ontologically Precise Words

Ontologically Precise words are defined purely in terms of primitives2, or are defined in terms that are defined purely in terms of primitives, or are defined purely in terms that are defined purely in terms that are defined purely in terms of primitives &c. That is, their definitions refer to permutations of ontologically basic entities in space (if there are spaces) or (if there are no spaces) collections of ontologically basic entities in specified relations to each other.

Suppose we accept the following ontology:

1)Quarks

2) Muons

3) Electrons

4) Numbers

5) Propositions

6) Sets

7) Spatio-temporal coordinates

Then “quark” would be an ontologically precise word because its definition would be:

(1) a quark3

An Ontologically Precise (henceforth OP) word can be broad enough to have multiple instances, even if some of those instances have different (non-spatial) properties from each other. For example, “carbon atom” could be defined as:

(2) a collection of 6 protons and some number of neutrons, all of which are within 3 angstroms of each other4

So even though there are multiple isotopes of carbon, all atoms of all of these isotopes fit the definition of “carbon atom.”

If S is the set of all collections of 6 protons and some number of neutrons, all of which are within 3 angstroms of each other, then every member of S is fully and clearly a carbon atom, and every thing not in S is clearly not a carbon atom.

For most larger objects, the definitions would become very large and complicated, but it is possible, in principle, to construct such definitions.

Fuzzy Words

Because OP definitions for most macroscopic objects would be long and complicated, for everyday life, we don’t think rigorously in OP terms. We don’t need to. Most of the words we use express fuzzy concepts which are an imperfect but extremely useful shorthand for OP statements. Fuzzy concepts do not have clear borders. One example of such a concept is the concept of milk. Imagine that there are 41 bottles of dairy product arranged in a line. At one end of the line is skim milk. The bottle next to it is 1% milk, the next bottle is 2% milk. The bottle at the other end of the line is heavy cream. Some of the bottles contain clear cases of milk, and some contain clear cases of cream (non-milk). But the ones in the middle are unclear. This is not an epistemological problem. It is not that we do not know whether or not the contents of the 15th bottle belong to the set of things referred to by “milk.” It is that there is no set S such that everything in S is milk and everything not in S is non-milk. Having such a set is a property of OP words like “carbon atom” but not fuzzy words like “milk.”

This is because “milk”, like all other fuzzy words, is not definable purely in terms of primitives. It is a useful word for communication, but this seems to have something to do with the ability of the word “milk” to conjure up mental images of clear cases, and the fact that we associate clear cases of milk with the word “milk” more strongly (but as a matter of degree, not kind) than we associate the 14% fat dairy product with the word “milk”. But the psychological function of fuzzy concepts is beyond the scope of this essay. The point is that while both OP words and fuzzy words are useful for communication, OP words have a kind of meaning that fuzzy words do not.

However, fuzzy words need to be distinguished from what I call empty words. Fuzzy words do not have ontologically precise definitions, but we could formulate an ontologically precise definition that very closely lines up with what we think of the fuzzy concept as meaning. For example, we could arbitrarily draw a line through the row of bottles, and use that to define “milk.” That is, we could, for example, define “milk” to be dairy products that contain less than 6% fat.5 While we don’t think of there being a clear cutoff at 6%, this definition lines up very closely with what we mean by “milk.”6

Empty Words

Empty words, by contrast, are words which are not defined in terms of primitives, and for which there is no OP definition that lines up with our intuitions about their meaning.

These words, like gibberish, have no propositional content at all. This doesn’t mean that they can’t sometimes be useful for human communication; the words in Jabberwocky are gibberish, but they have artistic and communicative content. Like music, empty words can be used as tools to mold the emotions of the readers, and can seduce people into believing things. They can be useful to explain rough ideas quickly, or to convey things that we have difficulty describing because we lack the adequate words. However, they do not refer to anything in the world. They don’t have the precise literal meaning that OP words have, or even the kind of meaning that fuzzy words have. (There is no clear case of a slithy tove.)

One objection is that it is always possible to invent a precise formulation for any word, so for any word that Helga claims is empty, Melinda can invent a precise definition. This is true, but you can also define “Brazilians” to mean the creature that English speakers call “cats.” It would then be true to say “Brazilians have four legs and fur.” A foolish botanist can come up with a “technical definition” of “berry” that excludes strawberries and includes pumpkins, but this is in no way a precise formulation of what English speakers mean by “berry.” What the botanist has come up with is a completely different classification of plants that she has misleadingly named “berry” just as I appropriated the name “Brazilians” to mean something which is definitely not Brazilians. You can easily come up with a definition for any word if you don’t care about making your definition line up with intuitions about what the word means.

A moral nihilist who accepted the framework I lay out here would think that “wrong” as in “murder is wrong” is empty, because wrongness is not defined purely in terms of the primitives in the moral nihilist’s ontology, and there is no OP definition using the moral nihilist’s ontology that closely matches the moral realist’s intuition of what “wrongness” is. We might be able to formulate an OP definition of “wrong” as:

(3a) Being such that I don’t like it

But even if this definition corresponds very closely to the usage of “murder is wrong” it fails to match the intuition of what “wrongness” is because speakers who say “murder is wrong” do not think that (3a) is what they mean. Even if “murder is wrong” is used in exactly the same circumstances as “murder, BOOOO!” speakers do not intuitively think that the two are equivalent.7

iii. Clarifications

As mentioned above, for most macroscopic objects, OP definitions would be very long and complicated. However, it is not impossible to have manageable OP definitions for macroscopic objects.

There are two ways of defining words. One is to define something in terms of its components, and the other is to define something in terms of its properties. OP words are defined in terms of primitives, but this does not imply that OP definitions must specify the exact configuration of the primitive particles that compose them. For macroscopic objects, OP definitions in terms of components would be massive and completely unusable, but OP definitions in terms of properties are often feasible. For example, “thing longer than one meter”8 is OP because spatio-temporal coordinates are in our ontology.

III. Relevance to Kripke’s Argument

Spatio-temporal coordinates can be used to talk in OP ways about more than just lengths. For example, what it is for a bottle to be fragile, is for that bottle to be disposed to shatter under the right conditions, that is, for the particles composing the bottle to change their spatio-temporal positions in certain ways, in certain conditions. (I’m not claiming that “fragile” or “to shatter” is OP, they’re fuzzy. The point is that we could give an OP definition which approximates the concept of “to shatter,” and this OP definition need not mention the individual particles that make up the bottle, or say anything about the relations between them.) Likewise, what it means for a body of matter to be liquid is a disposition to change spatially under certain conditions. For example, if you put your hand in a body of liquid, it will deform to fit the shape of your hand, it will flow downwards if you put it on an inclined surface, &c.

Most things we encounter in everyday life are defined in terms of properties rather than components. For example, the word “lightbulb.” The definition of “incandescent lightbulb” might include, for example, having a filament, but “lightbulb” would be defined, approximately, as “a man-made object that emits light when an electrical current is run through it.” There is no essential component of lightbulbness that is shared by incandescent and fluorescent lightbulbs, what is shared are the essential properties of emitting light and being man-made. The word “lightbulb” refers to all things that have these properties.

Similarly, water might be defined approximately as liquid9 that is thin10 clear11 refreshing, odorless, &c, where the &c stands in place of any other properties that were originally known to hold of water, and considered essential to being water. The word “water” then, denotes all things which have the properties of being liquid, thin, clear, refreshing, odorless, &c. When we discover a new property of water, for example that water is molecularly polar, what we have discovered is that things that are liquid, thin, clear, refreshing, odorless &c. are also molecularly polar. It is a discovery of the kind ‘Things that have properties A, B, C also have properties J, K, L.’ which is a contingent truth.

If this point is difficult to swallow, it may be because after the discovery that water is H₂O, the property of having the chemical structure H₂O was incorporated into the definition of “water.” Imagine that an intrepid explorer finds a strange putty-like substance deep in the jungles of Cameroon. This substance has a particular texture, color, weight, consistency, &c. The explorer soon learns that other explorers have found substances with the same texture, color weight, consistency, &c. in other jungles. These explorers convene and decide to name the mysterious substance “jungle putty” which quickly turns into the portmanteau “jutty.” Jutty turns out to have useful applications in glue making, and soon large quantities of jutty are being collected and shipped to glue factories around the world. Now imagine that a chemist in Madison finds that one of her samples of jutty has chemical structure A. Later, she tests a different sample and finds, to her surprise, that it has chemical structure B. Is she entitled to conclude that the second sample isn’t really jutty? And if so, if a different chemist finds that one sample has structure B, and is later surprised to find that another sample of jutty has structure A, is she entitled to conclude that substances with chemical structure A are not really jutty?

My intuition is that the clearly correct conclusion to draw would be that there are multiple kinds of jutty, not that one kind is “fool’s jutty.” We would say that some jutty does not have chemical structure A. Kripke disagrees: “We would say instead that just as there is a fool’s gold, there could be a fool’s water; a substance which, though having the properties by which we originally identified water, would not in fact be water.” (Naming and Necessity, Lecture III)

However, there is historical evidence that this is not what we would say. It was discovered that some of the liquid that is found in lakes, oceans, and rivers is slightly heavier than the rest, even when salt and other contaminants have been removed. After careful investigation in the 1930s, it was discovered that the heavier substance actually has a different atomic composition than the rest of the stuff in lakes, oceans, and rivers. The heavier liquid has nine neutrons per molecule while the other liquid has eight, because the heavier one contains a different isotope of hydrogen; deuterium. The chemical abbreviation of the heavier liquid is often written as D₂O. These substances are both H₂O, because deuterium is a kind of hydrogen, but they are clearly different substances and it is hard to see why the common knowledge “water is H₂O” was not just a less precise form of “water is ¹H₂⁸O.” We did not conclude that the heavier substance (²H¹H⁸O) was “fool’s water.” We call it “heavy water,” and consider it a different type of water, not a substance which is liquid, thin, clear, refreshing, odorless, &c, but is not in fact, water.

IV. Argument

“Water is H₂O” is (or was, with the original definition of water) equivalent to saying “Things that are liquid, thin, clear, refreshing, odorless, &c have the chemical structure H₂O.” This is a contingent truth.

“H₂O” is a rigid designator. “Things that are liquid, thin, clear, refreshing, odorless, &c” (henceforth (4)) either is or is not a rigid designator. If it is, then identities between rigid designators are not necessarily true if true at all, and Kripke’s argument is unsound because Ia is false.

In fact, (4) does not seem to be a rigid designator, because (4) is defined in terms of properties, not components. Just as “the inventor of bifocals” picks out a person by one of their properties, rather than some essential parts that compose them, (4) picks out all substances that have the properties it specifies. It is possible for there to be two bodies of matter that both fit (4) but do not share all their non-spatial properties. However, we can also define pain in terms of properties, as “the thing that hurts.” This seems like a trivial definition, and it may be, but if pain is not definable in terms of components, and only trivially definable in terms of properties, then pain must be an ontological primitive, and accepting pain as an ontological primitive is a commitment to dualism.

If it is conceivable that there are multiple distinct things (brain states) that are pain, (like there are multiple distinct things that are jutty), then pain is not a rigid designator, and Kripke’s argument is unsound because IIa is false. If it is not conceivable that there are multiple things that are pain, then “pain is the thing that hurts” is trivial, and no more informative than “pain is pain,” analogous to “a quark is a quark.” This means that pain cannot be defined in terms of properties, and because it also cannot be defined in terms of components, to accept that pain is a rigid designator is therefore to assume that pain is ontologically primitive, thus presupposing the falsity of what Kripke’s argument purports to disprove.

V. Conclusion

In conclusion, there is an account of language which is at least as attractive as Kripke’s under which Kripke’s argument against identity theory does not work. The argument does not work for one of three reasons. Either 1) “Pain” and (4) are rigid designators, so the argument is unsound because it is not the case that identities between rigid designators are necessarily true if true at all, so Ia is false. 2) “Pain” is not a rigid designator, so the argument is unsound because IIa is false. 3) “Pain” is a rigid designator but (4) is not, which can only be the case if pain is ontologically primitive. If pain is assumed to be ontologically primitive, the argument is not good because it presupposes what it attempts to prove.

Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

The strongest argument against immigration is that immigrants will bring bad ideas, vote for bad candidates, and thereby destroy the political and cultural practices that made the country an attractive destination to immigrate to in the first place.

In response, open-borders supporters will often claim that the Cato Institute’s research shows that immigrants quickly assimilate to the norms and political culture of the host country, becoming indistinguishable from natives by the 4th generation. A stronger version of the claim is that differences are mostly gone by the 2nd generation.

These claims come from two policy briefs by Alex Nowrasteh, a Vice President at Cato. The policy briefs are not academic papers and they did not go through the normal peer-review process, but they have been cited in academic literature and by Bryan Caplan’s book Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.

Nowrasteh and Sam Wilson use data from the General Social Survey, which groups respondents by generation:

• 1st generation (foreign-born)

• 2nd generation (children of immigrants)

• 3rd generation (grandchildren)

• 4th generation or higher

Nowrasteh and Sam Wilson graph the political attitudes and political party affiliations of immigrants and their descendants by generation.

The 4th generation category is 4th Generation Or Higher, meaning that it includes everyone whose family has been in America for at least 4 generations, including those which have been in America for 10 generations. Their graphs show that there is a difference in political opinions between 1st Gen and 4th Gen Or Higher, but the difference between 2nd Gen and 4th Gen Plus is smaller, and the difference between 3rd Gen and 4th Gen Or Higher is smaller still.

Nowrasteh claims this shows assimilation; most assimilation happening by the 2nd generation and then continued gradual assimilation through the 4th generation. But there’s a huge conceptual problem: Today’s 1st generation immigrants are not the great-grandparents of today’s 4th generation immigrants! Nearly all 1st Gen immigrants today came after 1965 and don’t have great-grandchildren yet.

To actually demonstrate assimilation, you would need to compare the opinions of immigrants with the opinions of those immigrants great-grandchildren. You would need to compare the opinions of today’s 4th Gen Or Higher group with the opinions of their great-grandparents (most of whom are long dead) and you would compare the opinions of today’s immigrants with the opinions of their great-grandchildren (mostly not yet born). Instead, Nowrasteh and Wilson are comparing the opinions of today’s immigrants with the opinions of other people’s great-grandchildren.

Today’s 1st generation immigrants are not the great-grandparents of today’s 4th generation immigrants!

Composition of the Generations

Consider a hypothetical model country where there is a wave of initial immigration from year 0 to year 50. Then there is a 50 year pause with very low immigration. Then there is another large wave of immigration from year 100 to 150. Actual immigration to America was roughly similar to this pattern. There was a large wave of immigration from the late 1800s to 1920, then a period of very low immigration from 1920 to 1964, then in 1965 a large wave of immigration started and continues to the present day.

Now suppose you do a survey in the year 150. None of the immigrants who arrived in the first wave (before year 50) will still be alive, so everyone in your 1st Gen category will be from the second wave of immigrants. Everyone in your 4th Gen category will be descended from the first wave of immigrants because the second wave has not had great-grandchildren yet. The 4th Gen category will be entirely composed of people who are the great-grandchildren of immigrants who came in the first wave, a long time ago.

The 3rd Gen category will be a mix of very young people who are the grandchildren of the second wave immigrants, and older people who are the grandchildren of first wave immigrants who came a long time ago.

The 2nd Gen category will also be a mix of the two waves, with more second wave people than the 3rd Gen category had.

Now suppose that everyone from the first wave and their descendants supports party A and everyone from the second wave and their descendants supports party B. A graph like Nowrasteh and Wilson’s would make it look like people fully assimilated by the 4th generation even though there would really be no assimilation at all! Everyone from the first wave supports Party A and everyone from the second wave supports Party B, but higher-numbered generations contain more first wave people and fewer second wave people.

Crunching the Numbers

I downloaded the GSS dataset which Nowrasteh and Wilson used and reproduced their results. I also calculated the average age by generation. The average age for each is about equal because that is how the GSS constructed the sample.

The survey years that Nowrasteh used were 2004-2014. The large modern wave of immigration to America started in 1965. Suppose that an immigrant came to America as soon as possible after the 1965 Immigration Act was passed and had a baby right away. In 2004 that baby would be 39 and in 2014 that baby would be 49. That means that every second-generation immigrant in this sample older than 49 is definitely not from the post-1965 wave. As seen above, at least half (and probably quite a bit more than that) of the 2nd Gen category are from the pre-1965 wave, not the post-1965 wave.

In the 2015 paper Nowrasteh and Wilson write:

For those policy and political questions where first-generation immigrants have statistically significant differences of opinions, the second and third generations do not vary compared to the fourth generation, meaning that political assimilation is complete by the second generation.

In other words, Nowrasteh and Wilson admit that 1st generation immigrants have different political views than natives, but they found that the 2nd generation has views more similar to 4th generation (though still not all the way there), and they conclude that this shows assimilation. But the 2nd generation category contains more people from the older waves of immigration, not just the children of people in the 1st generation category who are mostly from the post-1965 wave! In effect, the sample blends older immigration waves into the 2nd generation group and then interprets the resulting average as “assimilation.”

Other Issues

There are a couple other minor problems with the policy brief. They do not use statistical weights. I reproduced their results both with and without statistical weights, and the difference is small, so that’s not a major issue.

They also seem to misuse the concept of statistical significance. In the 2015 paper Nowrasteh and Wilson write:

The political identification differences between the second- and third-generations compared to the fourth generation (see Figures 2 and 3) are so small that they are statistically insignificant.

2nd Gen immigrants are about 10 percentage points more likely to be Democrats than 4th Gen or Higher in Nowrasteh and Wilson’s data, but the difference did not rise to the level of statistical significance. Keep in mind that not rising to the level of statistical significance does not mean the difference is not real, only that we cannot reject the null hypothesis with 95% confidence (the policy brief uses a 95% confidence level). The evidence could indicate that there’s an 85% chance that the effect is greater than zero, but that would be statistically insignificant at the 95% threshold. Elections are often won by only a few percentage points - far less than the 10 point difference in Nowrasteh’s data - so differences that could be enormously consequential will often fail to clear the bar of statistical significance in the test that Nowrasteh and Wilson use here.

Conclusion

The idea that immigrants fully assimilate has low plausibility. If you, your spouse, and your friends were forced to flee America and move to Eritrea, would you bring up your children as muslims? This makes Nowrasteh and Wilson’s claim of full assimilation by the 2nd generation an extremely strong claim that requires robust evidence.

Other research directly contradicts Nowrasteh and Wilson’s findings. Harvard researchers Giuliano and Tabellini have shown that immigrants to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s brought redistributionist attitudes with them, and made American policy more redistributionist.

Nowrasteh and Wilson’s assimilation research is flawed because their samples of 2nd generation and 3rd generation immigrants mix pre-1965 and post-1965 immigrants. Nowrasteh and Wilson show that their 2nd generation category is more similar to the pre-existing American population than the 1st generation category is, and claim this is evidence of assimilation. But it’s actually at least partly because their 2nd generation category contains many members of the pre-existing American population. Their finding is an artifact.

Today’s 1st generation immigrants are not the great-grandparents of today’s 4th generation immigrants. The 2nd generation category contains more people from the older waves of immigration, not just the children of people in the 1st generation category who are mostly from the post-1965 wave. In fact, more than half of the 2nd generation group is composed of people from the pre-1965 wave. Nowrasteh and Wilson claim that they found immigrants assimilating to the views of the pre-existing American population, but they have really just packed members of that pre-existing population into their sample (the 2nd Gen group), and then found (obviously) that the new sample average more closely resembled the pre-existing population.

Nowrasteh and Wilson 2015

Nowrasteh and Wilson 2017

Glaucon: Suppose Sam and John are neighbors. One day Sam invades John’s home and kills him.

Socrates: Clearly Sam’s action was immoral. It was murder.

Glaucon: Yes. But now suppose that Sam starts wearing a blue suit. Now is it ok for Sam to murder John?

Socrates: Of course not. Wearing a blue suit is not a morally relevant factor.

Glaucon: What if Sam wears a blue suit and a shiny badge? Then is it ok for him to kill John?

Socrates: Of course not.

Glaucon: Ok. Now suppose that Sam wants to kill John because Sam thinks John has a stupid face. Suppose that 51% of the town agrees with Sam - 51% of the town agrees that John should be killed because he has a stupid face. Does that make it ok for Sam to kill John?

Socrates: No.

Glaucon: What if it was 99%?

Socrates: Absolutely not. An angry mob - no matter how large - does not outweigh the rights of the individual in the scales of justice.

Glaucon: I agree. And therefore the state is completely morally illegitimate. The state enforces its edicts by sending men with guns to the homes of anyone who disobeys it. If a man wants to smoke marijuana, or live in an all white neighborhood, or buy a dishwasher that actually works rather than one that meets all of the government’s stupid energy regulations, the State will send a gang of armed thugs to his home to abduct him and haul him off to prison.

This is my thesis: that Man has inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. These rights are fundamental moral facts and the correct moral philosophy derives all morality from these fundamental rights. Since Man has inalienable rights to life liberty and property, murder, kidnapping and theft against innocent people is always morally wrong. Since it is morally wrong for anyone to murder, kidnap or steal from an innocent person, it is morally wrong for a group of people who call themselves “the State” to murder, kidnap or steal from an innocent person. That makes all taxation and most law enforcement morally illegitimate. All taxation and most law enforcement is really just a racket of extortion, intimidation and murder. The State is really just a gang of self-righteous thugs.

Socrates: Yes, the State which we live under today is morally illegitimate. However, it is possible in theory that there could be a moral state.

Glaucon: How so?

Socrates: Suppose that the State were abolished tomorrow and we suddenly lived in anarcho-capitalism.

Glaucon: May God hasten that day.

Socrates: In an anarcho-capitalist order, individuals would be free to contract with each other. They would be free to make any contract they both wanted.

Glaucon: Yes.

Socrates: Some contracts would surely involve living arrangements. For example, the relationship between tenant and landlord is a matter of contract. We might also expect some people to come together to form a gated community. Every member of the community, by joining the community, would assume certain responsibilities to the other members of the community.

Glaucon: Yes, the set of rights and obligations for the members of that community could be anything that they agreed to and it would be perfectly moral because they had all voluntarily agreed to it. By joining that community, they had all voluntarily taken on the rights and responsibilities of being a member of that community.

Socrates: Anarcho-capitalists have posited that in an anarcho-capitalist order there will be defense companies which operate a bit like insurance companies. A person may choose to buy services from one of several defense companies which operate in her area. I’m a bit suspicious of this idea of territorially-overlapping defense companies. I find it more plausible that a defense company would concentrate its services in a single area and that almost everyone in that area would be a customer of the local defense company.

Glaucon: I’m more optimistic than you are about the feasibility of territorially overlapping defense companies, but I grant that it is very likely that in an anarcho-capitalist order at least some of the Defense companies would be geographically concentrated in the way that you described. I.e. at least some of the defense companies would restrict their services to a geographical region in which they are the only defense company.

Socrates: We have been thinking of defense companies as being like the kind of company that we are familiar with today - with a CEO, office space, and maybe shareholders etc. Now let’s think of a different kind of defense “company.” Suppose that several landowners get together for mutual protection. They agree that each of them will pay a certain amount of money each month as membership dues. The landowners may also want to work collectively toward shared goals other than defense. They all agree that a council of landowners will be selected every 4 years by a vote of all the landowners. The council will have the right to make new rules which all landowners will be obliged to obey. The point of the council is to resolve the free rider problem. The landowners will have a moral obligation to obey these rules because by joining the arrangement they are agreeing to obey all future rules made by the councils.

However, the landowners understand the moral seriousness of taking on a moral obligation to obey rules which they have not yet heard promulgated. They don’t want to give the council a complete carte blanche. The landowners set certain restrictions on the kinds of rules that the councils will be allowed to make. One of the restrictions is that the council may not make any rule abridging freedom of speech or of the press or of the right to peaceably assemble. Another restriction is that the council may not restrict the landowners’ right to own weapons. All these restrictions are written down in the contract which all the landowners sign to indicate their acceptance of the arrangement. They call their arrangement a Republic.

Glaucon: And you’re saying this Republic is morally legitimate?

Socrates: I don’t see how the anarcho-capitalist can deny it. Libertarian Rights Theory says people have to obey contracts and if people sign social contracts in order to get a place to live, then the set of rights and responsibilities which they have could be anything. People would have the set of libertarian rights only if they were not in any social contract, which would usually mean they were living on their own land. Then freedom comes down to a question of land ownership.

Libertarian Rights Theory posits individual natural rights as axioms of the one true Moral Law, but most people would choose to sign contracts, and so it is a logical consequence of those natural rights that the moral obligations of most people for most of their lives would be determined by social contract, not by their inherent natural rights.

And there’s more. Remember when we said that the set of rules of the gated community could be anything, and it would be morally legitimate because everyone agreed to that set of rules? Suppose that the rules to live in the gated community were that one person, Jeff, was the king and had absolute authority.

Glaucon: I don’t like where this is going, but I grant that someone could sign a morally binding contract to obey a king.

Socrates: In this case it would seem that king Jeff is the landowner and everyone else who signs the contract is a tenant who obeys Jeff in exchange for the privilege of living on Jeff’s land. If land tended to concentrate into a few hereditary fortunes, then anarcho-capitalism would be unacceptable and the tenants might be forgiven for trying to assassinate the landlord and turn his landholdings into a commune. If land does not tend to concentrate into a few hereditary fortunes, then something like anarcho-capitalism with a feudal flavor would be justified. Several landowners might come together and form a Republic to provide for their common defense and to work cooperatively to advance their objectives.

It has been the perspective of libertarians that the Law ought to be Just, and that therefore we ought to discover the true principles of Justice and then overthrow the existing States in order to establish a Law based on these true principles of Justice. Since it is a principle of Justice that there is a right to life, murder is morally wrong and the Law should forbid murder. Since it is a principle of Justice that there is a right to property, theft is morally wrong and the Law should forbid theft. The Law should be the true moral ideology, implemented. That used to be my position. But I have now been persuaded otherwise.

Consider who is supposed to pay for the police who enforce the Law. It is the opinion of libertarians (and this opinion is correct) that it is not usually morally good to give charity to another person, because you have your own desires and your desires are no less important than theirs. It is not good when someone else has no home, but that does not mean that you are morally obligated to buy a home for him. Why should you pay for police who prevent someone far away from you from being robbed by bandits? It is your responsibility to hire anti-bandit protection for yourself. Of course it is unjust for the bandits to rob that other person, but that does not mean that justice requires you to pay for his protection. To pay for a police service that enforces the law universally amounts to giving charity to those who do not pay for the police service, or those who utilize police services in a greater amount than they pay for it.

And in practice the universal enforcement of law produces the same kinds of absurdities and externality problems as are produced by other government activities. Why should White Americans pay to stop Black Americans from killing each other? How does that make any more sense than Norwegian taxpayers paying the budget for the police of Italy? Huge proportions of Black Americans do not like the police and see the police as something like a foreign occupying army in their neighborhoods.

I no longer believe that law ought to be the enforcement of the one true moral ideology. Law enforcement is something which is produced by men. It is a service - like insurance or home repair. (The term “law enforcement” suggests that there is a universal code of law which is being enforced. It might be better to use the term “protection” rather than “law enforcement.”) And like all other services, some people will pay for protection and some people will not. Some people will choose to purchase a lot of protection and some people will choose to purchase only a little. It is not a moral failing when someone who purchased only a small amount of protection is attacked by bandits. That is a risk which he chose to take based on the same considerations that motivate choices about insurance, medical care, and driving - an assessment of risks and rewards.

I no longer believe in ideological politics. I once believed that it was our duty to discern the one true moral theory, and then to found a regime which would enforce this moral theory as law (to the greatest extent that the theory permits people to force others to be moral.) I now believe in practical politics. Founding a universal regime amounts to paying for others’ protection, and we have no moral obligation to pay for others’ protection any more than we have an obligation to pay for others’ meals, shelter or recreation. Instead, we have a right to attend to our own protection; to build a safe haven within which we can flourish. The aim of politics is not to establish the Just Regime. The aim of politics is to secure the existence of your people and a future for your children. To build a desirable civil order for yourself and your posterity.

Glaucon: Then what of individual rights? Are they not the sacred underpinnings of all morality?

Socrates: Individual rights are not the axioms of the one true Moral Law if that is what you mean. Moral theories based on rights are necessarily theories of side constraints. The perspective of such theories is that is that during the majority of of your time on Earth you pursue some non-moral goal, you are free to pursue whichever goals you want, free to maximize your own happiness, and the attention that you devote to moral concerns is merely the attention that you devote to making sure that you do not violate certain side constraints while you are maximizing your own happiness.

Such theories are misconceived. Morality is not a sideshow in life but is the main purpose of it, and the act of pursuing happiness, of flourishing, of creating, is itself moral.

Glaucon: But how can we know what the Good is if we do not have axioms?

Socrates: Do you really not know? Do you really not know whether honor or depravity is morally better, or whether great art or doggerel is morally better, or whether misery or flourishing is morally better? It is the business of Man’s life, indeed, it is his duty, to promote prospering, flourishing and creating (both by himself and by others) as much as he can, to be honorable, vivacious and exultant. All of that is the Good.

Glaucon: So you are a Utilitarian?

Socrates: In a way, yes. But part of the good is our conduct. Living in an honorable, exultant, just way is part of the Good, independently of the products of our actions. Strict respect for individual rights is an aspect of justice, and justice is inherently good.

Glaucon: It still disturbs me that you have no theory with axioms which says what the Good is and tells us why we should be moral.

Socrates: That shouldn’t disturb you. Consider the skeptic who denies the existence of the external world, then realizes that he can wonder the sentence “what if my internal experience is not real?” and then thinks that he can doubt the existence of his internal experience, and then realizes that he can wonder the sentence “what if Reason is not true?” and then thinks that he can doubt Reason itself, and then becomes a totally confused Zen fool whose empty mind passively receives experiences with no thoughts about what those experiences imply and passively receives thoughts with no idea of whether they are true or false, and all the while considers himself to be the pinnacle of logical consistency because he followed the arguments of skepticism to the end. If God himself appeared before the skeptic and told him that skepticism is false, the skeptic still would not believe it. And he can do that. Since he has free will, he can shut his eyes and put his fingers in his ears and say “nyah nyah nyah I can’t hear you” and refuse to see the evidence that is right in front of his face. But his ability to do that does not mean that the evidence is not true.

Because you have free will, you can deny moral realism. You can say that you don’t believe that anything is any morally better than anything else. But your ability to say that does not negate what you truly know deep down.

Glaucon: If I believe in hard, axiomatic, individual rights then there are clear lines. There are things that I can say with certainty will not be permitted. Under your thesis the moral assessment of everything depends on context. Without hard principles it would seem that we are adrift.

Socrates: I wanted Libertarian Rights Theory to be absolutely true because I wanted there to be clear standards that we could follow to be 100% sure that we were acting morally. As long as our actions conformed to the clear moral rules, (i.e. did not violate the property rights of others) we could act without reservation. We could proceed with our endeavours confidently and with clear eyes and completely without reservation.

In contrast to that view is the view that we are part of the Great March Forward of Man. Man used to live as an ignorant, brutal, thoughtless savage. Then he began to philosophize, discover and invent. He learned to understand Nature and to tame it, he built palaces and cathedrals, contemplated the purpose of life, built rockets and reached to the stars. Isn’t this Great March Forward good? And isn’t it the duty of every man to be a part of that story, to advance it - maybe to advance it to the maximum extent that he is able?

Libertarians know that their preferred political policies are the best ones to advance that Great March. And it would probably be the case that the the things that the individual libertarian would want to do (building a stable home, raising a family, creating art, writing books, leaving something for his children etc.) would tend to advance the Great March. But it is not clear how exactly the libertarian fits into the Great March in his personal life. This is not a problem for Libertarian Rights Theory as a political prescription, but it is a vexing problem for Libertarian Rights Theory as a moral theory. One might be free (i.e. within one’s rights) to spend a day eating Cheetos on one’s couch and watching bad tv, but is that really morally equivalent to spending a day writing a symphony? Surely it is not equivalent. And if it is morally good to spend one’s time doing great things then does one have a duty to do great things? (It is a separate matter whether any state could effectively force people to carry out that duty). And then even if all his political ideas are correct, the libertarian finds himself in a predicament because if he has a duty to do great things rather than be lazy, then he loses the clear moral standards and he thereby loses the sublime clear-eyed moral confidence that he had before. He must now always have a worry in the back of his mind that maybe he could be doing more, or that maybe something he is doing is going against the Good in some way he has not thought of.

As soon as one accepts that it is morally better to write a symphony than to spend one’s days binging on tv and eating cheetos, then one’s actions within the sphere of one’s personal life are no longer morally free - they must be governed by something like virtue ethics. When one takes rest, and maybe even when one takes recreation, it must be only to prepare oneself for the work that one will do later.

Does that mean that we must give up the sublime, confident, unreserved moral clarity that Libertarian Rights Theory provides but Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism (at least prima facie) do not? No. When there are no clear standards on which to rely, one can make one’s sincere best guess of the right thing to do. It would be possible to make a better guess if you took the time to gather more information, but time is a scarce resource and you must also rely on your sincere best guess of how much time you should spend gathering information.

Even in a complex decision such as when to begin rest, or which task to prioritize, if you use your sincere best guess about the right thing to do, you can have the same moral confidence and clarity that you would have under Libertarian Rights Theory. In fact, in some cases you can act boldly - even more boldly than you could under Libertarian Rights Theory - because while bold action carries risk, you know that inaction carries terrible risk as well.

Yes, in a way we are adrift. The world does not wait for us to have perfect information or a perfect plan. We do not have time to wait to act until we have discovered the one true Moral Law. We must act now with the best moral knowledge that we have. In any bold action there is some risk that our actions could lead to disaster. It is a tragic fact of life that there is no known formula which can guarantee that everything will turn out for the best. It is our duty to face uncertainty and do the best we can.

Socrates: I now want to discuss economic theory. It is a well-established fact that the concentration of an industry (i.e. the propensity of an industry to be concentrated in many firms or in only a few firms) is determined by the size of the fixed costs and the variable costs in that industry.

Glaucon: Yes, in an industry with high fixed costs and low variable costs the optimal size of the firm is large and we expect to see just a few firms which each produce a large number of units. In an industry with low fixed costs and high variable costs the optimal size of the firm is small and we expect to see many firms which each produce a small number of units.

Socrates: Much has been written about the “proper role of the government” or the “proper relationship between the government and the citizen.” I think that much of this topic really amounts to a discussion of the optimal firm size in the government industry. Government is a service. It is not evil and it is not sacred. It’s just a service.

If the fixed and variable costs of providing government are such that the optimal size of a defense firm is small, then there will be many competing defense companies. If the fixed and variable costs of providing government are such that the optimal size of a defense firm is large, then there will be only a few defense firms for people to choose from.

If the defense industry naturally tends toward cartelization, then citizens may need to create defense firms in which they play an active role, analogous to the way that citizens created savings-and-loan associations to avoid excessive reliance on commercial banks.

If small reductions in a customer’s freedom can enable his defense company to more efficiently guarantee his safety, then it might make sense for the customer to give up a small amount of freedom in exchange for a large amount of security, or a lower cost of protection. This would be similar to the way that many insurance companies offer discounts to customers who agree to refrain from smoking.

If a defense company can more efficiently guarantee its customers’ safety by using a small amount of its customers’ personal information, it might make sense for the customer to give up a small amount of privacy in exchange for a large amount of security, or a lower cost of protection. There are many services today which require customers to provide, for example, their birth dates and social security numbers.

Glaucon: I am uneasy with this talk about compromising on freedom and privacy.

Socrates: That is understandable. Freedom and privacy are very important things. But wealth and safety are also very important things. A good life requires some of all four. We must not fall down the slippery slope of giving up freedom inch by inch to a tyrant, but we also must make sensible tradeoffs between freedom, privacy, wealth, and safety in order to obtain the best overall outcome.

There’s a fundamentalist Christian preacher in rural Mississippi named Pastor Bob. One day, Pastor Bob declares that several of the children in his church are possessed by demons. There’s only one cure: Pastor Bob must “rape the demons out of ‘em” in a special rape ritual.

You can scarcely believe what you are hearing. You have never encountered anything so hideously evil. You go to the police but the police tell you that Anti-Demon Care is perfectly legal. It’s actually life-saving medical care. You’re a bigot because you oppose Anti-Demon Care (ADC). Every Fortune 500 corporation and every mainstream media outlet affirms that the “rape the demons out of ‘em” ritual is a good thing and Pastor Bob is a hero.

People you know - people who you thought were sane - treat the “rape the demons out of ‘em” ritual as if it were a morally complex issue. Your friends and family say they understand your concern about Anti-Demon Care, but they get upset with you when you say that Pastor Bob is evil. Using the word “rape” to describe Anti-Demon Care marks you as a far right shock-jock and is “unhelpful language.”

Podcasters who oppose anti-demon care for children and are nominally on your side want to talk about the “harmful side effects” of Anti-Demon Care. They say we need to “wait for the evidence” about the long-term effects of the “rape the demons out of ‘em” ritual.

This analogy is lurid, but it’s actually too charitable to transgenderism. Transgender genital surgery is much worse than rape. An adult raping a child is a terrible thing. An adult taking a knife and slicing up a child’s genitals is much worse1.

People who got excited about the Cass Report are morally suspect. If you think that we needed a systematic literature review to know that it is bad to do transgender procedures to children, then you have lost your mind. You should not need a peer-reviewed study to tell you that raping and sexually mutilating children is wrong.

It’s unacceptable to be a moderate about the trans kids issue. You should be extremely against it. This issue is a clear moral black and white, as clear as any issue ever has been.

I apologize to the people of Mississippi and Southerners in general for using them in this grotesque analogy. Our ruling class is full of anti-Middle American and especially anti-Southern bigots. Sometimes you need to reverse the politics to get people to see things clearly.

Not “modern feminism,” not “third wave feminism,” feminism must be totally eradicated.

Feminism teaches:

• Women ought to think of themselves as part of a collective with all other women.

• Women ought to act towards the interest of women as a whole.

• The belief that women were treated unfairly for most of history, and for that reason it’s not very important to be fair to men.

• Feminine traits are bad and embarrassing.

Feminism is a demographic special interest movement. Feminism is to women as Nazism is to Germans and Black Nationalism is to black people. You might not think that feminism has done as much damage as Nazism, but the core principle is the same. It is a movement which seeks exclusive rights and privileges for a certain demographic identity group, and while such movements always claim they are pro themselves, not anti-others1, the attitude that your driving purpose is to advance the interests of your own group invariably slides into supremacism. Feminists believe that the alleged history of oppression of women means that they have no obligation to treat men fairly. Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it succinctly. When asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg replied “When there are nine.”

1. Feminists Hate Femininity

1.1 Perception of femininity as low-status

Feminists think that femininity is bad and low-status. This is why feminists think that housework somehow doesn’t count as real work - or at least that housework is less important than office work. This is why there is an enormous effort to get girls into STEM, but no similar effort to launch girls into careers in nursing.

There is a feminist slogan “Chase Dreams, Not Boys” which seems to suggest that finding true love and having a family are not legitimate dreams.

Any person whose “dream” is to work in a corporate C-suite has something wrong with them. The entrepreneurs we should admire, like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk dreamed of building amazing things, and their high-level corporate positions were a side effect of their efforts to build things. Wanting the corporate position for its own sake is sick and poisonous. The corporate climber cowers before HR and slavishly conforms their opinions to the popular mainstream party line. They lose their unique identity in their quest for status. Furthermore, corporate culture is soulless and bad. Nobody should live in such a way that their LinkedIn profile is a huge part of their life. It is not a good way to live and nobody should aspire to it.

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1.2 Feminism in movies

The feminist lead characters in popular movies (e.g. Marvel slop) are never authentically womanly. They do not contribute to the story by excelling at female traits, rather they demonstrate their value by their ability to excel at male traits. The implication is that being feminine is lame.

When female characters in movies have any female traits at all, it is always an immature trait more befitting a little girl than an adult. This isn’t just in the movies. When feminist politician Kamala Harris described her reaction to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, she did not talk about affairs of state or her concerns for the future of the nation. She said that she ate an entire family size bag of Doritos by herself and didn’t share any with her husband. This sort of story is funny to liberals because liberals are generally ambivalent about maturity. Feminist movie characters sometimes have a few female traits, but they are always the vices of a little girl. There seems to be no room in feminism or in popular movies for a mature, adult woman.

1.3 The Campaign of brainwashing

The intense campaign of feminist brainwashing with which every girl is bombarded through school, movies, TV, and news media is not just a campaign for unjust treatment of men and rancorous relations between individual men and individual women. It is also a campaign to wipe all the beautiful and wonderful parts of femininity off the face of the Earth2.

All the wonderful things about girls and women: their ability to build warm communities, their familiarity with the particular rather than the abstract, their sensitivity, their sentimentality towards small things, their conscientiousness, their sense of propriety - are to feminists objects of derision. Feminist parents teach their daughters to suppress their natural feminine instincts; they teach that it is wrong to be emotionally sensitive and that girls ought to be “confident” instead. They teach that crassness, selfishness and immaturity are virtues.

Feminists cultivate an attitude that has sometimes been called “imitating men”, but really imitates only the worst kind of man. Career-obsessed, promiscuous, vulgar, hyperfocused on status and obsequious in the face of Power. Most of men’s worst vices and none of men’s virtues.

1.4 Holding our own side accountable

Unfortunately there’s also a strain of American conservatism that looks down on some feminine hobbies. One sometimes sees the idea that putting a lot of effort into makeup and nails is shallow. I think it has something to do with the Christian and WASP aversion to vanity. Certainly, a focus on your looks can be taken too far, but any hobby can be taken too far. There’s nothing inherently vapid about makeup.

2. “Gender Equality” is a horrible thing

Equality means crushing the individuality out of each person. That’s why measures to promote “gender equality” always aim to make women less feminine and men less masculine. The goal of “gender equality” is to turn everyone into gray, unisex, undifferentiated cogs in the machine.

We support equal rights. Every person should have the right to conduct their personal life as they see fit, and to enter into any voluntary arrangement with other people. But equal rights do not produce equal outcomes and they do not even produce equal opportunity. If a close-knit construction crew does not want to hire a woman because they want to have male camaraderie in their workplace, they should only hire men, and they should do so openly and without embarrassment. If a lady’s book club does not want to admit male members, they should say so openly and without embarrassment. We should completely dismantle the idea that people are somehow owed access to other people’s spaces.

3. We are not Men’s Rights Activists

Rights movements are almost always malicious. They are special interest movements which seek to extort resources from the rest of society. If we were to use the term “men's rights activism” that would make it sound like there was such a thing as legitimate women's rights activism.

Some men like to bring up “men’s issues”: like suicide rates, low-status job rates, and other areas in which men do poorly. Feminists sometimes think that men who bring up these issues don’t really care about “men’s issues” and are just pushing back against feminist rhetoric - and they’re right. Men who bring up higher rates of male suicide aren’t actually deeply concerned about suicide, they are pointing out that the feminist narrative is fundamentally bigoted, irrational and untrue. The thing which disturbs them is the bigotry, irrationality and falsehood of the belief system that they feel ever-present around them, not the suicide rates.

We oppose feminism because we stand for fairness.

4. Smash the mythos of feminism - Women were never oppressed

The Suffragettes committed bombings and arson. They bombed the home of David Lloyd George and burned down homes and churches.

The Suffragette and Prohibition activist Carrie Nation traveled around America smashing the windows of saloons and smashing their liquor bottles. She justified her actions by calling herself “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like.” If you swap the language about Jesus for “social justice”, this kind of incident could have happened yesterday. The narcissism, drama queen-ness, thirst for attention and lack of regard for others which characterize modern feminists are not new. They have been the defining features of the feminist movement all along.

The Suffragettes were bad. It’s understandable that people thought it was unfair when men could vote and women couldn’t, but this problem arose only because we made the mistake of having voting in the first place. Democracy is a failed system. Neither men nor women should be allowed to vote.

The historical division of labor in monogamous societies was that the men toiled in the fields while the women attended to the hearth and cared for young children. Of course if the roles were reversed, feminists would still say that women’s roles amounted to slavery. If women had to go out and work in the fields while the men stayed in the home, feminists would point to this as a paradigmatic case of oppression.

5. Reject the Language of “Patriarchy”

Conservative Christians sometimes say they are pro-patriarchy. This is a big mistake. It implicitly grants the feminist ideological frame - that society is run by men and that women are subordinate.

5.1 Contra conservative Christians, rule by men is NOT an inevitable part of human nature

In reality, American society today is run by women. There is state mandated discrimination against men in government hiring and government contracting. In the federal quota system, billions of dollars of federal contracts are set aside for women-owned businesses. Men-owned businesses are explicitly forbidden from applying. California attempted to implement sex quotas for corporate board positions. Disparate impact law de facto requires discrimination against men in private sector hiring.

Every company has a political commissar department called HR (staffed almost entirely by women) which rigidly enforces female-coded social norms. Politicians of both parties routinely promise to advance the interests of women as women. Even ruby-red Republicans recast the transgenderism in sports issue as an issue of women’s rights.

If “patriarchy” means anything at all, it just means men and women doing the things that they naturally like to do. There is nothing wrong with people’s natural preferences. The word “patriarchy” is not even helpful in describing Islamic countries. If you’re trying to communicate that men in some country treat women badly, then say that men in that country treat women badly.

5.2 Freedom of choice

Conservative Christian defenses of patriarchy don’t make it sound very fun for women. The Christians buy into the premise that women actually want to have girlboss office jobs (?) but that men must restrain women’s chaotic feminine nature and push women onto the sensible path of being wives and mothers, which will redound to the benefit of society. This way of framing the issue is unappealing to women, and it also misunderstands human nature. Most women naturally want to have families and participate in a local community. When people are free to choose, they choose natural gender roles, not artificial feminist ones.

The reasons why so many women today seek full time employment are 1) economic hardship and 2) a propaganda machine that would have been the envy of the Soviets and Goebbels. Through TV, movies, popular music, schools and Universities, feminists teach girls that their natural instincts are bad and wrong.

As anti-feminists, we are not trying to control women, rather we want to help women and men break out of the influence of brainwashing and choose to do what they innately and truly want.

When conservative Christians defend “patriarchy” they make it sound like women’s innate nature is bad.

Contra the feminists who despise feminine traits, we should be clear that there is nothing wrong with natural feminine instincts. We should be clear that being a woman is just as good as being a man.

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6. Why is it not enough to reject “Third Wave” feminism?

Some people want to say that the historical feminist movement was good, but that equality was achieved in the 1970s and so feminism is no longer necessary. There are three problems with this approach.

6.1 It asserts that we currently have equality, when in fact men today are not treated fairly

The first problem is that it leaves no room to talk about the ways in which men are treated unfairly in modern society. If one adamantly insists that “equality has already been achieved” then one doesn’t have the opportunity to address the issues on which men actually do not have equal rights with women, such as family court and affirmative action.

6.2 It affirms the feminist narrative

The second problem is that if it really were the case that women were oppressed for thousands of years, and only had equal rights for a few decades, then it would make sense to wonder if any holdover effects of the alleged millennia-long oppression are still present today. The self-described feminist Regan-Arntz Gray writes:

I see myself as primarily committed to anti-sexism. But I think it would be dishonest to reject my feminist identity… because women’s equality seems to me precarious. I see a lot of misogyny and a lot of misandry given the spaces I interact in online. But the truth is that the misogynistic content is more threatening. 

Misogynists can write about why we need to repeal women’s right to vote as if it’s a live issue because it actually is way closer to being a live issue than the reverse. Women were “granted” the right to vote, and implicit in that “granting” is the threat that it could be taken away. People act like it’s absurd to worry about such things, to worry that women’s rights could be rolled back, as if a few decades of legal equality eclipses millenia of subjugation. But it’s not random that women’s freedom was restricted and not the other way around. Men and women aren’t equally at risk of a future in which they’re liberties are restricted on the basis of sex. And feminists know this just as well as male-supremacists do. (emphasis added)

Regan’s argument would have some merit if direct physical violence were the only form of oppression. But in the modern world oppression is more often conducted by the velvet glove of the state than by direct person to person violence. And a large percentage of women have supported the establishment of laws and norms that are unjust to men.

As mentioned above, the government explicitly discriminates against men. Welfare programs are designed to steal billions of dollars from men and give it to women. Women can and do have women-only spaces, but male-only spaces are generally illegal. Family court is a mockery of justice.

6.3 It’s not true

The third and most fundamental problem is that it’s not true. The Suffragettes were not good people and their cause was not just. Second wave feminists were bigoted female supremacists just like third wave feminists. We should not lie about these past movements just for the sake of building alliances and political expediency. We should stand for the truth.

The Road Forward

Feminist ideology is deeply entrenched. It might seem an impossible task to completely change the attitudes of all of society on such a fundamental issue. But we don’t have to change all of society at once.

We just need one subculture to reject feminism. One subculture is enough for us to live good lives within, and it is a base from which to launch efforts to eradicate feminism from the wider culture. Right now the subculture to target is American Conservatives. The conservative commentariat has gotten way more radical in the last 10 years. The internet is producing a cultural shakeup and people are hungry for something new.

It will be fairly easy to get conservatives to start being anti-feminists. Contrary to popular belief among liberals, conservatives are not already there. It is unheard of in normie conservative circles to condemn the Suffragettes and it’s very rare in normie conservative circles even to state that women should generally be housewives. But liberals are correct when they intuitively perceive that conservatives are not as deeply committed to modern gender relations as liberals are. While normie conservatives sincerely believe that the Suffragettes and women’s entry into out-of-home work were good things, those are shallow beliefs for conservatives. Conservatives will change their minds about modern gender relations when we invoke their deeper beliefs in fairness, equal rights, and the importance of liberty rather than democracy.

We need to make feminism anathema. In the subculture which we will foster, feminism will not be seen as a valid political position with which we happen to disagree, it needs to be unacceptable. We need to teach the awful history of the feminist movement, including Carrie Nation and the bombing of Lloyd George’s house. We need to explicitly talk about the narcissism and immaturity which motivated the leading feminist figures. Every child needs to learn about the stomach-churning injustice of family court. We will know that we have won when we have a place of our own where being a feminist is as taboo as being a Ku Klux Klansman.

Feminism is a demographic special interest movement. “Men’s Rights Activism” is a sad parody of feminism which also seeks to be a demographic special interest movement.

Anti-feminism stands for fairness, justice and the truth.

There are charities that treat and prevent AIDS in Africa.  Some people think this is a morally good thing.  I don’t.

Suppose that you go to a bar and you meet a guy named Chett.  After chatting for a minute, Chett demands that you give him gas money.  You see, Chett explains, Chett is about to go hook up with a woman he’s just met on tinder but the woman lives a few miles away and Chett only has a small amount of gas in his motorcycle.  He tells you that there are two routes he can take: 

1. Risky Road is short and he won’t need any more gas, but the road has not been maintained and it is dangerous. 

2. Safe Route is safe, but it’s a long 9 mile loop and Chett doesn’t have that much gas.

Chett tells you that you should give him $10 to buy more gas.  $10 isn’t very much money to you, but if you give it to Chett he will be able to buy gas so he can take Safe Route instead of Risky Road.  You could save a life!

Do you think you are morally obligated to give Chett $10?  I don’t.  Not only are you not morally obligated to give Chett $10, it is not even a morally good action to give Chett $10.

Now let’s consider the situation with charities for AIDS in Africa.  AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease.  The vast majority of AIDS patients chose to risk death because they wanted to have sex, like Chett driving his motorcycle on Risky Road.  The fact that Africans are far away and Chett is close does not make Africans more deserving of our help.  The fact that Africans are black and Chett is white does not make Chett less morally deserving of our help.  Since there are no morally significant differences between the case of Chett and the case of an African adult with AIDS, we should conclude that it is not morally obligatory to donate money to a charity that helps African adults with AIDS.  If you share my intuition that it is not even a morally good action to give money to Chett, you should conclude that donating money to AIDS charities is not even a morally good action.

Here’s another thought experiment.  Suppose that you are in an airplane that crashes on a desert island.  You and 100 other passengers survive.  In the center of the island there is a whirlpool which can suck people down to their death.  If you fall into the whirlpool, it is possible for a person on the edge of the pool to pull you out, but there is a very small chance that they also will be sucked in.  You and 99 other people decide that if any of you ever see someone stuck in the whirlpool, you will pull them out.  One person, named Steven, says loudly and publicly that he would not save anyone from the whirlpool.  He says that anyone who would help someone in the whirlpool is a “sucker.”  One day you see that Steven has fallen into the whirlpool and he is about to drown.  Do you have a moral obligation to save him?

The thought experiments about Chett and Steven illustrate circumstances in which it is plausible that it is not morally obligatory - and indeed not even morally praiseworthy - to save a person’s life.  In the case of Chett, he chose to put himself in danger.  You’re not obligated to pay for Chett’s gas anymore than you’re obligated to pay for his beer or his motorcycle.  While it is true that there is a tradeoff between Chett’s gas budget and his risk of death, the same could be said of many other decisions.  When purchasing a house there is a tradeoff between risk and expenditure; houses in safer neighborhoods cost more.  Taking a vacation to a developing country involves a small risk.  Driving in a car or flying in an airplane involves a small risk.  Since people make risk/reward tradeoffs all the time, the act of donating money to someone to decrease their risk of death should not be seen as categorically different from the act of donating money to that person to spend on anything else.  If you’re not morally obligated to give money to Chett to spend on beer or motorcycles, you’re not morally obligated to give money to Chett (or anyone else) to spend on risk reduction.

In the case of the whirlpool on the desert island, Steven would not save you if the roles were reversed, so it is plausible that it is not obligatory - and not even supererogatory - to save Steven, especially if saving Steven involves any significant risk or cost to yourself.

Now let’s look at a third case in which it might not be obligatory or even supererogatory to save a person’s life.  Suppose that in the 1760s James Watt had to choose between spending 100 hours working on his improved steam engine, or spending 100 hours donating to and caring for poor orphans on the streets of Birmingham.  Working on the steam engine is clearly the better option when judged on long-term results.  As harsh as it is to say, the result of caring for Dickensian orphans is a few moments of comfort for those orphans while Watt’s steam engine played a key role in the Industrial Revolution which has produced unprecedented prosperity for billions of people.

The vast majority of cases in which Effective Altruists claim that we can save lives for low cost (e.g. mosquito bed nets) resemble James Watt’s choice between helping starving orphans or improving the steam engine. You could spend $5000 to replace your suit today, or you could take that $5000 and build a business which will eventually produce enough wealth to permanently support hundreds of people. Instead of building a business, many people would choose to spend an extra $5000 as a partial down payment on a house in which to build their family. But building a family is also an investment of sorts. If you are reading this essay and engaging with Singer’s argument at all, if you even consider making large donations to save drowning children on the other side of the world, you are already in the top 1% most altruistic people on Earth. If you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to have children of your own - rather than spend the money to save dozens of someone else’s children -your children will be very likely to be in the top few percentiles of altruism because they will inherit both your genes and your cultural norms. In the long run, producing a few well-raised high-IQ, highly altruistic children will be the most effectively altruistic thing you can do.

If instead you spend your money and effort to save Bangladeshi children from drowning, you will not create any new effective altruists. Universalism is a Western idea and Bangladeshis do not share it. In fact, substantial proportions of the third world not only reject the idea that they should reciprocate our acts of kindness, they actively seek to attack and destroy us. 26% of Bangladeshis say that attacks against civilians in the name of Islam can sometimes or often be justified. Among Muslims worldwide there is double-digit support for enforcing the death penalty for apostasy. A hard-headed cost-benefit analysis of a measure to save lives in a Muslim country needs to account for the possibility that an increase in the population of that country could make it more difficult for the West and its Effective Altruists to operate. Most Effective Altruists are blind the the realities of tribal conflict. An increase in the relative power of the West would likely lead to a more peaceful world with more people willing to donate to charity. An increase in the relative power of Islam would likely lead to more war, more terrorism, and less charity.

In short, celebrated EA tactics such as mosquito nets and cash transfers to extremely poor people are not actually very effective. The recipients of the money would not reciprocate, so the money tends to reproduce both genes and cultures which are not interested in reciprocating acts of charity. By contrast, doing the normal work of civilization: having families, building businesses, strengthening your own tribe, etc. will produce a large community of highly capable and highly altruistic people who will be able to achieve almost anything.

Does this mean that we should not care about the vulnerable and weak?  Should we adopt the attitude of the “Nietzcheans” and “Vitalists” who think that “might makes right”?  No, we certainly should not.  We should have compassion for the vulnerable and weak.  We should hope that some miracle will allow them to survive and thrive.  We wish that we had the resources to save everyone.  But we don’t have sufficient resources.

When the “Vitalist” sees the Amhara massacre the Tigrayans, he thinks “Not my tribe, not my problem” or even “that’s nature taking its course, the whole world is struggle.”  That vitalist attitude is barbaric. Massacres of innocent people are not somehow justified because they are “natural.” Even though we will spend our own resources on our own people, not on the Tigrayans, we should treat the news of any massacre of innocents with solemnity. We should mourn the passing of their souls.

Yes, I am saying that you should decline to give assistance to the Tigrayans, and the drowning Bangladeshi children, and many other unfortunate people throughout the world, but this is not a call for callousness. It is the recognition that we are not universalistic gods who can fine tune the whole world.  We are particular human beings with our own lives to live, our own quests to fulfill. Our task is to nurture the light of civilization in our little corner of the world, and that requires that we put our own family and friends first.

So if you’re wearing your expensive suit and you encounter the child drowning in the shallow pond, should you leave him to drown? I think not. If you are ever in the extraordinarily unlikely situation in which you are wearing a $5000 suit and you come across a pond in which a Haitian child is drowning, you should save the child - but not because the value of saving the Haitian child’s life exceeds $5,000 - you should save the child because to not do so would brutalize your own heart.  It is bad for your soul to let a child drown in front of you for the same reason that it is bad for your soul to watch snuff films. Contra Singer, failing to intervene when a child is drowning right in front of you really is different from failing to intervene when a child is drowning on the other side of the Earth.

We should busy ourselves with the work of civilization. We should build up strong families and communities. We should build up wealth and technological power. We should strengthen the factions of Good and fight against the factions of Evil. This is our task.

On one side it is hypothesized that there is no God.  On the other side it is hypothesized that there is a God.  The theist’s position is less clear than the position of the atheist.  The theist certainly means that there is a conscious being who governs the Universe, but beyond that it is hard to say what exactly God is.  Atheists sometimes satirize belief in God as belief in a magical white-bearded sky man, and they say that science has disproven the existence of such a sky man.  But belief in God is certainly not the belief that a magic sky man built oceans and mountain ranges, and the sun and the moon.  It is hard to articulate what exactly the believer in God believes, but it is something like a strong sense that there is more than just the material world, and that our lives are part of a deep drama that is not articulable purely in the terms of material substance.

The Problem of Evil

Another objection to the existence of God is the Problem of Evil.  The solution to the Problem of Evil is that struggle and adventure are inherently good.  The Problem of Evil seems to posit that there could be a world without any hardship.  What would that even mean?  A world without hardship sounds like a world of infants who float from one pleasurable experience to the next, a world of instant gratification, without even the need to exert oneself in order to ensure that the perpetual feast will continue.  A world without hardship would be a world with nothing to struggle for, nothing to accomplish, nothing to fear, nothing to anticipate.  A good God would not make us perpetual children inside a safe walled garden.  Without anything to overcome, we could have no achievement.

The Task of the Theist

Over the last three centuries the industrialized world has lost its religion.  There are still churches of course, and many of them even have robust attendance, but even in those churches there is no escape from the pervasive atheist emptiness of modern culture because the members of those congregations no longer believe that their faith is rationally justified.  Either they explicitly reject reason (like the Evangelicals), or they continue to go to mass, but they do not embrace their religion with their whole self, because they have compartmentalized their religion in one part of their minds, and their rational, analytical faculties in another part of their minds, applied to the tasks of living, outside of church.  All their capacity to figure things out, their curiosity, their ability to plan, their mental prowess, the  fierce conviction that one has in propositions which one has worked out for oneself, are applied to matters of daily life, never to matters of the spirit.  They are willing to entertain the very strong empirical claims of Christianity1 because they think that atheism is false, not because they think Christianity is true.

I am not saying that those Christians are insincere.  They certainly are not closet atheists.  They believe that atheism is not true because they sense the problems with atheism which I identified at the start of this essay.  They have a sense that the material world is not everything and that some kind of God exists - and they think they are satisfactorily addressing those intuitions by adhering to the religion of their ancestors, going to church every Sunday, and affirming Christianity in front of their children.  The humility to admit that you do not know everything is certainly not hypocrisy.

But religious practice without rational content is not enough.  A religious attitude like that produces children who have no religious sensibility at all, and adults who, after a long time of practicing liturgy without really believing in any reason for doing it, find that they themselves can no longer remember why they thought religious practice was important - and who suspect that it was just habit all along, and who see their children sidelining religion, their grandchildren ignoring it completely, who see religious practice dying with themselves and who do not strongly feel - or cannot remember why they would feel - that anything is really being lost. 

The churches (some of them) should be commended for having by means of ritual kept some sense of the transcendent alive among some people, but as they have abandoned reason, they have lost the fire of true conviction.

The task of the Theist is to know God through pure reason, and to build up the bodies of theology and ritual which together with rationalist religious beliefs are necessary to fill the spiritual void which has been left by the decline of Christianity.

The Left controls everything.  They own the media, they own Hollywood, they own academia, they own the Fortune 500 companies, they own the government bureaucracy.  If all of these high-powered jobs are done by liberals, it must be because conservatives are not smart enough to do them.  Therefore, conservatives cannot build their own elite.

If that argument sounds convincing to you, consider this analogous argument:

It’s 1920 and we’re in French Indochina.  The native Vietnamese must not be intelligent enough to build their own elite.  Vietnamese people must not be capable of holding high-powered jobs, because look at all the high-powered positions in French Indochina today - they’re all held by Frenchmen!

But of course the Vietnamese could and did build their own elite, their own regime, and their own media apparatus.

The reason why elite positions in 1920s Indochina were all held by Frenchmen is because people were hired to those positions on a tribal basis.  Conservatives in the West are in a similar situation today.  If you’re a conservative and you want to work in the mainstream media, or Hollywood, or academia, you have to hide your views.  When conservatives are in power, they hire the best man for the job.  When left-liberals are in power, they make sure to hire someone who shares their ideology.  Over the course of decades, this has flushed all conservatives out of the halls of power.

The Conservative-Liberal IQ gap

Before I proceed I want to address a point raised by Nathan Cofnas about the IQ gap between conservatives and liberals.  As I wrote in a separate piece, the deeper problem with Cofnas’ view is that he misunderstands what conservatives actually believe, but here let’s focus on the IQ gap.

First, the IQ gap between conservatives and liberals actually shows that the conservative average IQ is about 2 points higher.  Cofnas is talking about the data on whites only.  White conservatives have average IQs 8.5 points lower than white liberals.  But this is unsurprising.  Smart white conservatives are allied with white rabble, and smart white liberals are allied with black rabble, so of course when you compare whites with whites, the liberal IQ is higher because the white rabble on the conservative side bring down the white conservative average.  

Tying smart conservatives to Qanon is as unfair as tying smart liberals to Hotep theory.  The popular perception that conservatives are dumb arises from the fact that the mainstream (liberal) media loves to write stories on Qanon and almost totally ignores Hotep.

Given that the all-races conservative IQ is higher than the all-races liberal IQ, It is not clear why Cofnas thinks that the white liberal-conservative IQ gap is such a problem for conservatives.  Cofnas correctly points out that you need lots of smart people to staff the media outlets and think tanks that a successful movement needs.  But if liberals are trying to staff their institutions with black liberals and other nonwhite liberals who on average have IQs 2 points lower than the white conservatives who staff conservative institutions, wouldn’t that be an advantage for conservatives?

There’s also the distinction between social conservatism and economic conservatism.  GSS data shows that people with libertarian economic beliefs (economically conservative) tend to have higher IQs.

[T[he observed relationship between intelligence and conservatism largely depends on how conservatism is operationalized. Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008).

Politics is Ethnic

Ethnic Group, noun

A group of people who more or less share cultural practices, and are more or less related by blood, and whose shared cultural practices are part of a tradition in which all members of the ethnicity were fully immersed

Examples:

1. A French officer who is invited to Prussia by Frederick the Great will marry a Prussian woman and his grandchildren will be fully Prussian.  In genetic terms we would say: Prussian ancestry is mostly from medieval Germanic peoples, with some French contribution.

2. Afrikaners are an ethnic group of mostly Dutch ancestry, but some other European and small amounts of African and South Asian ancestry.

3. A Ukrainian baby who is adopted by Polish parents will grow up in Polish culture and will be Polish, albeit not quintessentially Polish.  If he has children with a Polish woman, his children will certainly be Polish.

4. It is less clear whether a Portuguese baby could become fully Polish.  An African or Korean baby could not become fully Polish, and even if they had children with a Polish person, their grandchildren would not be fully Polish.

Politics in America is more ethnic than most people realize.  The conventional wisdom is that Blacks and Hispanics vote as racial blocks, but whites split their vote more evenly.

Here are the election results by race for 2020:

Here’s 2012:

However, the seemingly more even split among whites conceals large differences between different white groups.

Northeasterners and Southerners are clearly distinct ethnic groups.  They speak different dialects, have different religious beliefs, and have fought wars against each other.  The book Albion’s Seed by David Fischer explains that the original White Americans comprised four distinct groups, descended from different waves of settlers from different parts of Europe, and that these four distinct nations still exist to this day.  The groups are: Northeasterners (descended from the Puritans), Mid-Atlantic (descended from the Quakers), Southerners (descended from the Cavaliers), and “Greater Appalachians” (descended from the Scotch-Irish).

Looking at the 2020 election results for the Northeastern states we see that the Democrats won Massachusetts, the heart of Northeastern Puritanism, by 66-32 - on par with the 2020 Hispanic margin.  Democrats won Connecticut, Vermont, New York and Rhode Island by similar margins.

In the Greater Appalachian state of Kentucky, Republicans won by 62-36 (a 26 point margin, much higher than Romney’s national 20 point white margin or Trump’s national 17 point margin with whites).  In West Virginia it was 69-30.

In the Southern state of Alabama, Republicans won 62-37.  The breakdown by race is even more striking.  77% of Alabama whites voted Republican.  Note that the 90-10 split among Alabama blacks is the same as the national black split.

The 58-42 split for whites nationwide conceals a lot of ethnic bloc voting.  If anything, the R/D splits probably understate the ethnic differences.  Anecdotally, a New England “conservative” is to the left of a Kentucky moderate.

So the analogy to Vietnam/Indochina is apt.  Not only do left-liberals act as a tribe to take over institutions, left-liberals in fact are a tribe.  To a first approximation, being a liberal in America is a matter of ethnic partisanship.  Northeasterners are raised with liberal values, and they are taught to disdain their ethnic group’s ancient rivals - especially the Southerners.  

The Northeasterners are the dominant ethnic group in America.  They rule over the other ethnic groups of America and try to impose their religion on them.  The Northeasterners crushed their rivals in the Civil War, conferred great prestige on their historic universities - the Ivy League, built or wrested control over the mainstream media and Hollywood, and have gradually imposed their will more and more on the Greater Appalachian and Southerner ethnic groups who have long chafed under their rule.

Once we recognize that the American government is run by a dominant ethnic group which rules over other ethnic groups, it becomes plausible that the subjugated ethnic groups might be capable of independence.  The genetic differences between them are small, so there’s no reason to expect the IQ differences between these ethnic groups to be large…

What About Converts?

Or is there a reason to expect large IQ differences between the four white American ethnic groups?  Do smart children who are born into Greater Appalachian and Southern families tend to move to Blue States for college and employment?  Do they abandon the culture in which they are raised?  Do they assimilate to Northeasterner culture?  Do they adopt Northeasterner norms in hopes of gaining higher status?  I’m not aware of any good data on this so I’ll give my best guess.  I think the answer is Yes - but only to an extent.

There will always be some converts.  There will always be some people who dislike their own ethnic group and reflexively side with its political enemies (think ex-Evangelical “New Atheists”).  There will be some people who sincerely are persuaded by the values of a different tribe.  There will be some people who gravitate toward power and adopt the customs and taboos of the powerful as they seek employment and status for themselves.  And, much more commonly, there will be some people who simply move to where they find jobs, mates, and friends, and absorb some of the values of the people around them

But anecdotally I have seen that conversion usually only goes part way.  Think of the small-town girl who rejects her Dad’s “judgmental” views on homosexuality and abortion, but never adopts the sexually libertine lifestyle of her blue-city peers.  The good Southern boy might drift away from traditional conservatism, but he is far more likely to become a moderate or libertarian than a left-liberal.

The data on IQ by state seems to support my anecdotal experience.  West Virginia, a white American backwater if ever there was one, scores only 5 points behind Massachusetts, the home of the Ivy League.  Of course the states with more blacks tend to be more Republican and tend to have lower average IQs, but if we look at the states with nearly all-white populations, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah rank ahead of Maine and Oregon.

I am not denying that many smart children of Red America grow up to assimilate somewhat to the values of our Northeasterner rulers.  What I am saying is that

1. There are still plenty of smart people on our side

2. Most of the members of our own ethnic groups who grow up to assimilate to Blue-State culture do so only part-way (and could probably be won back)

We don’t need to win over Northeasterner elites.  We need to rally our own kind and reach out to those of our own kind who have drifted away because they were just trying to fit in with the dominant culture.  We need to articulate why our ethnic group’s customs and ideas are just as intellectually defensible as Northeasterner customs and ideas - and that the dominant culture’s values i.e. left-liberal values, i.e. Northeasterner values, were never universal, were never the inevitable result of Science and Progress, they were ethnic/cultural particulars all along.

We want independence for our people.  We have all the human capital we need.

Nathan Cofnas has a piece in which he argues that the Right has a “stupidity problem.”  In Cofnas’ view, the reason why the Left controls the institutions is because the Left is generally smarter than the Right.  Cofnas believes that the Right does not have enough smart people to create a counter-elite.  It follows that we on the Right should not try to create our own institutions and the only path forward is to persuade the current, Left-wing elite to embrace Right-wing ideas.

I think that Cofnas is wrong.  The reason the Left is in control is because a specific historical political faction, made up of specific organizations and specific people, conquered the institutions.  Had that faction failed or had a different faction gained power, things would be totally different.  

Cofnas is not the only one who believes that conservatives are low-IQ rubes.  The other Substack Centrists, like Richard Hanania and Claire Lehmann seem to agree.  The Substack Centrists are disturbed by the Left’s recent excesses.  But it is not clear that they can be allies of conservatives, because as Cofnas’ piece demonstrates, they don’t really understand how American Conservatives think.

For example, Cofnas claims that a national divorce would be worse for the red states.  He says that

“The Conservative States of America would most likely be a middle-income country… 

In fact, red states have a GDP per capita of about $70,000/year.  The World Bank defines a middle-income country as having a per capita income between $1,045/year and $12,695/year.

…that squanders its national budget on hunting down abortion doctors…

Does Cofnas actually believe that abortion law enforcement takes up a large share of a country’s national budget?  Is he aware that the Republican position on abortion law is much closer to the global median than the Democrat position is?  Maybe Cofnas’ quip about abortion is a joke.

 ...and erecting Pyramid of Giza-scale Ten Commandments Monuments.”

That is not a reasonable description of conservatives, it is the Democrat’s caricature of conservatives. It is on par with the Fox News caricature of liberals as blue-haired, communist Starbucks baristas with gender studies degrees.  The blue-city-dwelling Democrat (Cofnas grew up in New York) imagines conservatives to be Bible-thumping, evangelical, overweight hicks who love TV.  In reality, only 38% of Republicans are evangelicals.  Among elite conservative circles such as the employees of Republican think tanks, most people focus on higher-brow issues, such as the National Debt, Constitutional Law (the conflict between the rule of law and judicial activism), and foreign policy - not tacky monuments to the ten commandments.

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Cofnas contrasts conservatives with

“...the “libtards” who invent vaccines and run academia, big tech, and our major corporations”

This gets to the heart of the issue.  A core ingredient of being a right-wing dissident is realizing that the people who run pharma companies, academia, the Ivy League, and major corporations are actually not that smart.  More intelligent than average, sure.  But they’re not exceptional.  The way you get to be in the top ranks of a corporation - especially in a politically adjacent field like pharma - is similar to the way you get to be a University president.  It’s not by being a highly effective worker, it’s by playing office politics (and having connections in the Federal regulatory bureaucracy).  There’s a certain type of personality, the “networker”, “the “girlboss” etc. which does well in a corporate environment, and that personality type is only slightly correlated with intelligence.

Elites do not get to their positions through merit, they get to their positions by displaying conformity, and the most important way to signal conformity is to loudly profess the same opinions as everyone else. 

“Instead of striking out on our own, the right needs to figure out how to turn smart people away from the left.”

Cofnas claims that the right’s best strategy is to try to win over the elites, a position which I think is extremely naive.  If you’re the kind of person who can be persuaded by reason and evidence - if you’re the kind of person who values truth more than social status - then you don’t get to become an elite in mainstream institutions.  The only way for the Right to make progress is to create our own institutions and build our own elite.

Arguing that Republicans are generally dumber than Democrats, Cofnas writes:

“It was a conservative Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who nicknamed the Republican Party “the stupid party ". National Review writer Noah Rothman notes that the Republican Party is known as “the stupid party” to its critics “both within and outside its ranks.” It’s hard to understand why the party of conservatives should have this reputation if conservatives are just as smart as liberals.”

Actually, the line about “the evil party vs. the stupid party” is usually attributed to Sam Francis.  Francis was not saying that the conservative base was stupid, he was saying that the GOP establishment was too moderate and was not playing to win, while the Democrats were ruthlessly playing to win.  Francis accused the GOP establishment of being “stupid” because it was trying to be respected and accepted by the mainstream left, in the hopes of eventually winning them over.  In other words, the strategy which Francis thought was “stupid” is the one that Cofnas endorses.

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“If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?”

That’s an easy answer.  The process which determines who gets published in Nature and Science (the metric which is used to determine university prestige) is based at least as much on political conformity as on merit.  Also, liberals didn’t create the major universities.  The major universities were founded centuries ago and liberals took them over.

Cofnas describes himself as an enemy of the Left, but I think I’ve demonstrated that he has a weak understanding of who conservatives are and what they believe.  This misunderstanding is not entirely Cofnas’ fault.  Conservatives have been quite bad at articulating their ideas.  But it does show that Cofnas and other Substack Centrists are not in a great position to work with conservatives to advance right-wing goals.

Like the leftists among whom they were raised, the Substack Centrists seem to believe that believing the scientific truth about race and sex differences is the essence of being a right-winger.  It isn’t.

Moral #1: Smart Republicans need to do a better job at communicating their ideas.

Moral #2: The reason our institutions are controlled by liberals is that liberals as a tribe rule over conservatives as a tribe, not because they’re much smarter.