Reading the Non-Fashionable

It wasn't until I watched a Jordan B. Peterson interview with British North London luvvie Helen Lewis where she introduced Friedrich Nietzsche as "the Nazi's favorite intellectual" that I knew I had to read Nietzsche from cover to cover. I had always "known" that Nietzsche was somehow not respectable, and the reason was something to do with the Nazis. But what exactly? Only the Zeitgeist knew.

The same thing with Carl Schmitt. He actually was a Nazi, or at least a camp-follower, or at least a man that knew which side his bread was buttered. Eeeuw! But if you haven't read his The Concept of the Political you don't understand politics.

I had always understood that E.O. Wilson, author of Sociobiology and Consilience, was a bit of a kook. But there's an interview with the recently departed Wilson in Quillette. I see the problem. The witch-hunters of 40 years ago -- guys like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin -- were after him. And his theories, proposing like the psychologists that we are mostly our genes and our unconscious, go against the Blank Slate worldview that helps prop up the lefty religion of politics with everything, They went for Wilson because

it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism.

How about that passive voice: "it was thought at the time..."

Really, I shouldn't be so surprised and scandalized. If the COVID episode of the last two years has taught us anything it is that almost all humans almost always go with the flow of conventional wisdom. Of course we do: we are social animals.

I'm reading a piece of conventional wisdom right now, Richard J Evans' book The Coming of the Third Reich. Right now I am in the middle of the Gleichschaltung (or co-ordination) period at the beginning of Nazi rule where all the vast undergrowth of German social institutions, from gymnasiums to gun clubs, were Nazified. You had to have Nazis in charge, or else.

Of course, we are all horrified at what the Nazis did, but what is different, except in degree, with the present moment where all good corporations have signed onto the BLM critical race theory co-ordination directed by our liberal-left educated ruling class. And all public schools are teaching the evils of systemic racism -- except that they aren't, no siree, no such thing as critical race theory!

And how many conservatives still have jobs in the universities, senator?

My theory is that any ruling class worth its salt should keep the kooks and the crazies properly fed and watered, and for two reasons.

The first is that, you never know, the kooks may be right, and if they are we rulers will want to co-opt their ideas and make them our own.

The second is that we rulers want to keep an eye on the crazies. And the best way to do that is to let them operate in the open -- with maybe a few FBI informants signed on to keep tabs on them.

But the big question is: what unfashionable and de-plaformed kook should I be reading next? Holocaust deniers?  Critics of feminism? Ultra-nationalist whackos? Climate deniers? And would it be safe for me to read them without being corrupted by their lies?

Honestly, I don't know. But my antennae are always searching: for the kook that really isn't a kook.