Values not Facts Make the World Go Round

The great notion of the Enlightenment is the idea of Facts, Facts, Facts, and reason over emotion. But the thrust of the psychological revolution that starts, let us say, with the Romantic rebellion and takes over the world in the work of Freud and Jung, is that the unconscious rules over all.

This is very hard for conservatives and libertarians to deal with, because our world view is that it is reason and science that rules overall. Ignore reason and science and you descend into the depths, we insist. Chaps like alt-rightist Vox Day are deeply into the reason and science thing.

But the truth is that we humans view the world through the lens of our values. YouTube sensation Jordan B. Peterson insists on that -- and he gets it from Nietzsche, Jung and Co. What I call the German Turn.

Even a nice liberal like Jonathan Haidt understands this, when he refers in The Righteous Mind to French thinkers Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber:

They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning has having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasions, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.(p.89)

Here are a couple of conservative types suggesting the same. Christopher DeGroot, who says, apropos AntiFa and Black Lives Matter:

[Men and women] have certain internal moral values and, though they don’t realize it, constantly read them into external phenomena. This is not a rational but an affective affair, so though we may wish to correct people’s mistaken beliefs, and though we should try to do so, just as we should try to avoid violent conflict, it must often happen that reason is ineffective at this endeavor, and violence the only recourse.

I think it is fair to say that AntiFa and Black Lives have values, an "affective" view of the world rather different from Trump-supporting "deplorables,"Right, the #Resistance chaps on the left seem to think that violence is the only recourse.

And then there is Scott Adams, whose present line is "persuasion." And he's thinking that the mid-term election in November will see the biggest turnout by Republicans, ever. Because:

My hypothesis is that humans are primed by whatever they’ve already seen. So if they’ve seen a pattern, they’ve already fallen into it. And one of the patterns Republicans enjoyed in 2016 was having the other side be surprised. And they really enjoyed it — I’m talking about the kind of joy you can talk about over the course of your lifetime. And the Republican personality — I realize this is a gross generalization — is that it’s not always about the talk, it’s about the showing up.

Gosh, and I thought it was liberal Woody Allen who said that 90 percent of life is just showing up.

See what Adams is saying? You see a pattern because you are already looking for it. That is what Peterson says. Now all this is pure emotion: no reason in sight. And like the old commercial says, when Scott Adams talks, people listen. A week or so ago Adams suggested that a good persuader for Republicans would be "jobs not mobs." Well, whaddya know, pretty soon President Trump was tweeting #JobsNotMobs.

Yes, the whole point of Twitter is not facts but values, memes, and to spread your meme and get Twitter to ban the other guy's memes.

Yes, how is that working out when the Kavanaugh affair seems to have woken up the GOP faithful from the sleep of the ages?

One thing about our present moment is that our lefty friends seem to be doing a full-court press to drive right-wing memes out of the public square as "hate speech." And it is very angrifying, if you are a conservative, to read every day about another mild-mannered conservative getting  de-platformed by the SJWs working at Social Media Central.

Something to think about, SJWs: Some people say that the point of the First Amendment is to make sure that the subhuman haters, that all good people know deserve to be driven into Hell, actually get to say their stuff. Because, after all, we rulers want to keep an eye on them, and that gets really hard if we drive them underground. Right SJWs?

Now, I think that our lefty friends are knaves and fools, engaged in a Great Reaction to take the world back to the Stone Age or at least, in its socialist state version, back to neo-slavery, and in its milder welfare state version, to neo-feudalism. In any case, they are trying to force to world into a cramped and narrow template which is notable for its faith in political power and government. That's what I think.

I think that the fundamental lesson of our modern age is that the way we get the world to work for us is to submit ourselves to the will of the market rather than the will of the lord as in the agricultural age and its slavery and serfdom. Of course, our lefty friends think that submission to the market is the worst slavery ever.

And that really demonstrates the two values lenses through which today's contending parties view the world. Some of us think that subordination to political lords is the worst thing in the world, and some of us think that subordination to the invisible lords of the market is the worst thing in the world.

It all depends which of my reductive Three Peoples you belong to. Do you belong to the People of the Subordinate Self? Then you believe that the best thing to do is to subordinate yourself to your loving lord that cares about people like you. The last thing you want is to be subordinated to the wild and crazy market system.

But if you are a People of the Responsible Self you think it is perfect freedom to subordinate yourself to the market and responsibly navigate its storm-tossed seas. The worst thing in the world is to tie yourself to some pompous political chieftain that doesn't care about you, but only about your vote.

Now what about the People of the Creative Self? See, I think there are two kinds of creative people. There are the Progressive Activists that believe in new creative political memes and government programs. And there are the people like Peter Thiel that believe in Zero to One, the creation of something new in the market economy. One these two is not like the other. For me, the first kind is really dumb and stupid; the second has really got the world by the tail. But your mileage may vary.

Of course, although we all start with values, there are still the facts hiding behind the values, and the theories of the world that people deploy in the service of their values and which they use to make sense of the facts. Some theories work and some theories do not.

It's always a good idea to try and make sure that your values align with the facts and that your facts align with good settled science about how the world works.

Of course, all settled science works. Until it doesn't.