Why Nietzsche Sucks, or The Aesthetics of Intellectualism

“It is man's duty to discern fact from fiction, and for each man to challenge the world in this way every day” - Aristotle

Section 1: Looking Smart

I’ve been noticing a troubling pattern recently, and I’m sure you have too. After the conservative right wing spent decades as the political movement of censorship, hysteria, religious faith and mass panic over “moral values” (read: peen + vagoo = good), in recent times there has been a swing towards claims of rationality, scientific reasoning, and intellectualism, and I find this really troubling, considering that we on the left are the ones who really value discourse, rational discussion, theory and civil debate. So I’ve decided I’m going to take down these pretenders, these false brain giants, these intellectual paper tigers, these frauds, and destroy them in the realm of facts and logic!

I’m not afraid to take this gang on, I’m not afraid of anything. Except tiny ships in bottles. (How do they get them in there? Are there tiny people working on the ship?)

This group have started calling themselves the Intellectual Dark Web, clearly conjuring ideas of a renegade group on the run from authoritarian Politically Correct forces who want to censor them by… asking for basic respect for trans people… or not wanting to talk about Cultural Marxism. At least it conjours that image if you haven't already heard of the Dark Web as the illegal parts of the internet where people go to buy biochemical weapons and child porn.

Anyway, this is the Intellectual Dark Web.

Through a highly scientific process that I can't disclose at this time but I promise is really smart, I've determined that we should start by looking at… Ben Shapiro!

Ben Shapiro is an American conservative whose brand is built on the cornerstones of facts, reason, logic and civility. Ben's powerful big ideas, like a mighty castle of debate, are cold, carefully designed and impossible to siege, but also like a castle, are about 400 years out of date, don’t have proper plumbing and are home to the ghosts of creepy old white men.

The worst thing about Ben is that frankly, he really isn’t a very good debater at all. Anyone familiar with competitive debate should be instinctively repulsed by watching Shapiro try to defend his positions, because he… doesn’t. He obfuscates, he distracts, he gets pedantic, and the odds that in any given debate he’s taking on someone who is actually as well informed as him are approximately nil. The thing about right wing debaters is, they’ve been being told their ideas are inhumane and disgusting for a long time, so they’ve spent a really long time picking out facts and figures and talking points that in that exact specific moment make the less-informed person explaining why sharing is good look like a fool.

In many ways, Ben's mighty castle of ideas is a trap as much as it is a defense. He is entombed within his battlements, left to roam the empty dark halls of his own bullshit. It's like the Fall of the House of Usher really. 

I thought Ben Shapiro would appreciate that literary reference. He is after all, a published fiction author.

His novel, True Allegiance, is about a big strong bear of a man veteran trooper who just wants to keep America free, a liberal president who definitely isn't Obama, it's not Obama I promise, definitely not Obama, and a black gangster and community leader who tricks a white cop into shooting a kid to exploit the political reaction. You know how much white cops hate shooting black kids. That's why you gotta trick ‘em. I guess if you see on the news that a cop shot a black kid, you should remember it might just be a trick.

True Allegiance has dozens upon dozens of terrible reviews from angry or disappointed fans of Shapiro, saying that even they who agree with his politics 100% find the book to be tepid at best. Some reviews I’ve read even say that they were put off Ben all together after trying to read his fiction.

Ben’s novel is not just terrible - it is - it’s also a fascinating look inside his mind and his political beliefs in a way that you don’t get when you just deal with his usual brand of cold hard facts. See when Ben isn’t given the assumed guise of objectivity, the license to tell you that whatever he says is true, the freedom to direct your attention however he sees fit the way that he does in his many purely political non-fiction books, he kinda falls apart. When he has to include feelings as well as facts, and make his ideas sit inside an actual real world it’s really easy to see what total horseshit he’s selling you.

It’s a little like his bizarre hypotheticals that he creates during arguments (“let’s say that the sea levels rise… people will just sell their houses and move”) that taken just a little further are evidently nonsense, except that it’s a whole book. Something about Shapiro’s facts - which remember, don’t care about your feelings - have a really hard time integrating into the real world.

Next let's look at, uhh Stefan Molyneux the --

Wait, Molyneux shouldn't be in here. He's a disgusting racist who believes black people have smaller brains than white people. He's an honest to god phrenologist. He's like the shittiest outcome of victorian time travel. I'm really sorry guys, I don't know how he ended up in this list at all. Fuck… 

Who else is there in the IDW? There’s Sam Harris and the chuckle brothers. Sam’s… an islamophobe? Sorry, okay, I know I’m taking him out of context. He’s a boring islamophobe.

There’s Jordan Peterson of course. Jordan Peterson the scientist, who disregards science in favour of views he prefers, almost like his feelings don’t really care ABOUT THE FACTS.

Despite widespread consensus in the scientific community on the validity of self-identification relating to gender, Jordan Peterson was still able to make his bread and butter based on the brand of the lone rebel academic, casting scientific doubt on the TRANS IDEOLOGY.

Let’s talk about Dave Rubin, the Grima Wormtongue of the IDW, who welcomes these giants into his arena of debate, the marketplace of ideas, the Rubin Report, and then doesn't actually challenge anyone's ideas. Rubin’s job is to nod quietly while his guests say atrocious lies, and the Koch family pay him very well for it. Wait, did I say the Koch family? I meant small independent donations to the show. From the billionaire Koch family. Dave has pleasantly smiled and nodded at Ben Shapiro while he called him a sinner for being gay, Tommy Sotomayor (friend of KKK leader David Duke) who reacted with extreme visceral disgust when he found out Rubin is married to a man, and Stefan Molyneux…wait that can't be right, he can't be in the IDW, he's a neo nazi. Dave called Molyneux part of the “new center" with him? What?

It’s hard to tell what unites these people, considering they have different claims to the identity of intellectual: Ben Shapiro is a trained lawyer and debater, Jordan Peterson is an academic, Dave Rubin. They also all have, within the fishtank of conservative political thought, a fairly varied set of beliefs. Actually, here’s one: transphobia appears to be something that unites the Dark Web. Sorry, fuck! Intellectual Dark Web!

They all deny to some degree, the existence or legitimacy of transgender people, claiming - as any rational scientific, curious mind would - that the science is still out on gender and sex and that liberal social justice has gone too far in trying to let people just identify as whatever gender they want. As any rational, scientific and curious mind would, they worry that people just freely attack them and call them bigots just for expressing simple concerns about the children - won’t somebody think of the children? And just as any rational, scientific and curious mind would, I’m sure they’ve researched the history of trans people and discovered that the person who first coined the term transsexual and first researched trans people as a phenomenon said that the best way to tell if someone was trans was to fucking ask them. We are after all, dealing with intellectuals.

The problem is, these big special smartboys don’t believe that you could just go along with what’s “politically correct” in order to be nice to people and try to educate yourself on the issues later. It would be astonishingly easy to just be nice to people, and consider the facts and logic on your own time, but you have to remember, facts don’t care about your feelings. And so it’s only morally right, and rational for Dr. Peterson to go on with his quest for truth even if it makes his colleagues openly call him a pathetic loser and ends with people pouring glue in the lock of his office door because he won’t keep his bullshit to himself. But you know, Galileo was arrested by the pope for the sake of science. Of course, Galileo wasn’t trying to defend his right to call people by the wrong pronouns.

I’m sure there are people in Jurgen Purgenman’s life who would happily explain things to him, if he was ready to listen, and if he were approaching this issue with scientific curiosity, but that’s just the thing - he, and Bench Appearo and the rest of the (Intellectual) Dark Web aren’t trying to uncover new truth, they’re trying to defend the facts they already learned.

We can easily imagine people who already learned the world was one way and have trouble adjusting to information that contradicts that, as long as we imagine those people are 5 year olds, and not grown adults and respected public intellectuals.

And that brings me to an interesting place, right? Because another thing these guys all have in common is that they are actually anti-intellectuals but they claim the opposite. They are all using the Aesthetics of Intellectualism.

They rely on gotcha arguments, talking points, and facts and figures to create the appearance of winning arguments, rather than logically defeating their opponents. 

As noted Austrian Communist, Albert Einstein once said, “facts and figures are to a fool as inflation is to a pufferfish"

I lied. He didn't really ever say that. It's true though. That’s the aesthetics of intellectualism babey!

Alright, fellow bigbrains, let’s dive in and take a look at the Aesthetics of Intellectualism - how con men convince you they’re smart and rational, why they do it, and who’s really behind these bandages. Spoiler: it’s a bunch of white guys.

Section 2: Big Numbers

When I was a tiny baby in engineering school, on an intercollegiate maths course, one of the first things I was taught was Fermi Calculations. If you've ever played a good ol’ fashioned game of guess how many jelly beans in the jar or any similar kind of pseudomathematical guesswork, you've done a Fermi Calculation.

A Fermi Calculation is a fast and sloppy estimate trying to make the most educated possible guess at something using known quantities. The example we competed to guess at in class was something that (at least at the time) wasn't available through google at all - the number of train drivers employed by TfL (Transport for London). My estimate was the closest in the class, out by only about 5 people, and although I'm clearly telling you that to brag because I want you to know I have a big strong muscle brain made of beef and gains I also want to illustrate how much of a crapshoot Fermi Calculations are.

It was a few years ago now but to the best of my memory I made my estimate by saying this: “tube trains come to the platform about once every four minutes on average, and it would take about four hours to ride the full length of most train lines across London - one end to the other and back again - so to maintain that service there are probably about sixty drivers per line" and then a few small adjustments for reserve drivers and shift changes and so on.

Now, I am genuinely quite vain about my mathematical ability. I wouldn't tell you my appallingly awful calculation there if I wasn't trying to get to this point: bad fermi calculations can produce very accurate guesses, and, good, logical calculations can produce terrible guesses. In that class I learned two things about this kind of maths: it's a great way to bullshit people; and it's a fantastic way to spot a bullshitter.

Now, this isn't to disparage all calculations, playing with figures, and for that matter Fermi Calculations. In business, in engineering, in science, Fermi Calculations can be a great way to provide provisional figures until you have more information available, and if you see an academic doing calculations in an actual scientific paper, although it's worth checking it is generally going to be more trustworthy than this nonsense.

What I am trying to get at is that when Ben Shapiro takes the current rate of suicidality for trans people and says that if all children are told they can determine their own gender they'll all be trans so the rate will apply to all of them… that's… obviously bullshit. Obviously you can debunk this by saying Ben, the reason trans kids are suicidal is transphobes like you, not statistics or by pointing out that the mental health of a population that encourages children to express their gender independent of stereotypes and outdated expectations will be significantly better overall, but what I think is interesting is that this is very wrong if you pay attention, and to someone like me who's heard Fermi Calculations often enough to know, someone talking with the arrogant wrongness of Ben Shapiro just pulling numbers out of his ass just sounds incorrect, but to everyone else, it sounds right. Not just right. It sounds smart.

And that is the Aesthetics of Intellectualism.

Or at least, one of them. Another key element is civility. The ability to stay calm and not get worked up is perceived as a crucial element in being the rational Dr. Smartboy Brainmind, which frankly, I find offensive. Yes, I am offended at the concept of being expected not to be offended, welcome to snowflake city, population: me.

When Bench Appearo or whatever other glib, smirking chud is calmly debating the basic existence or humanity of a marginalised group, I think it’s actually pretty fair for people from that group to get worked up, and the tendency for liberals, moderates and centrists to side with the party that can “keep their emotions under control” betrays, to me, a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. Ben’s feelings are discomfort, disgust, denial and cognitive dissonance. The feelings of, say, people who need access to abortions are terror, panic and life threatening existential dread at the possibility that Shapiro’s proliferation in the media will have an actual influence on public opinion or worse, governmental policy. Those feelings are worth listening to and “facts don’t care about your feelings”, as a response to that… makes me need to take some deep breaths and sit down with a cup of tea… so that someone doesn’t go home in an ambulance.

Another key aesthetic is confidence, or I could go as far as to say unbearable smugness but for now let’s say confidence. Speaking with authority and certainty on your topic of expertise is crucial to looking smart. This is basically how an entire industry of YouTube thinkymen talking making video essays is propped up ahem http://patreon.com/curiovids

Enumerating the aesthetics of intellectualism themselves isn’t necessarily useful - I hope you can start to notice them for yourselves, and maybe notice that a recurring theme is that every aesthetic must be presented with a particularly masculine streak to it. Throwing around fast figures is not coincidentally related to the overrepresentation of men in STEM fields. Civility and rationality is pretty clearly tied into the age-old trope that women are controlled by their emotions instead of reason and logic. Confidence - well, confidence is very largely based on trust, and hot take here: society trains us to trust men speaking confidently about things, rather than to evaluate the validity of their statements.

As Carlos Van Bueren once said “You can say anything between a pair of quotation marks, and gullible sheep will just nod along as if Carlos Van Bueren is a real person”

But I’m still curious: why is transphobia the uniting element between these powerful minds? Is it because there’s something special about the topic, like a red flag to a bull, that just opens all the jars of bullshit sauce in their skulls? Is it that they know something we don’t about how the scientific method diverts around specifically this topic? Or is it that all oppression in society in balanced on the oppression of women by men  like the world’s most bigoted house of cards and if gender is constructed and maleable then all these systems could come crashing down and that’s why soulless pill salesmen like Ben and Jordan need to work so hard to stop society accepting trans people?
Nah it couldn’t possibly be that.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfOFQZpzd30 - Liz Wheeler says society will crumble and there will be no more family unit if we take trans people seriously.)

Oh.

So the Aesthetics of Intellectualism is just a system that people use to reinforce oppression, that prizes certain qualities over others and treats people perceived as lacking in those qualities as inherently worth less, as inherently less valuable and lower in the hierarchy. Which… I feel like there’s a name… for that...

Section 3: The Only Book You'll Ever Need

I've been talking about these guys as scammers, and now it's time to look at the people they're scamming. It's essential to consider the way in which somebody gets drawn in by the aesthetics of Intellectualism.

It's been said and said again and said to death that the people Jordan Peterson appeals to are people  alienated from themselves and others, but I think it's not said so often what alienation means in terms of perspective, and in terms of needs. These guys will usually have no good starting point when it comes to educating themselves, but understand that there's much to understand. They may be short on time and not have a solid basis of political, social or economic theory already, and they're looking to understand that big other that they currently can't fathom.

And that's where we encounter The Only Book You'll Ever Need. The Only Book You'll Ever Need is in the best-sellers section at the front of the book shop, or the front page of audible, and it was written by almost invariably) a white man who works in one of the academic fields that gives him free reign to claim that he understands all human behaviour by way of some sort of universal theory - History, Psychology, Neurology, Economics, Anthropology.

The Only Book You'll Ever Need may or may not be based around a novel interpretation of all of human history fitting it to the author's universal theory, but if it does, now would be a good time to consider what Sherlock Holmes famously said:

“I am a big smart boy and everyone loves me.”

No… wait

“One must be careful never to twist facts to suit theories, rather than theories to suit facts.”

It is the job here, of the aesthetics of intellectualism, to convince the audience that the author has the answer to every question, that they are infallible, that they are the best value choice. 

The constraint on the readers’ time, the presentation of books as products, and the fact that, frankly, reading is hard work, means that under capitalism, readers feel the need to make the highest value purchase, and feel certain that they’re buying the book that will help them the most in the shortest amount of time and the lowest amount of effort.

That’s why these books are increasingly organised as lists, selling the idea of their contents as bite-sized, easily digestible information that you can easily use to reshape your life. 7 habits of highly effective people, 21 lessons for the 21st century, or possibly the most straightforward possible version of this title: 12 Rules for Life.

If you’re looking to buy a book that will help you as much as possible as fast as possible, the odds that you will buy a book to learn about theory, or history, or simply something you’re interested in (think: wind surfing or architecture) go down dramatically. Now you’re looking to buy a book as if you’ll never read another book, or at least never need to read another. This book should improve your life so much that next time you buy a book it’ll be a leisure purchase. So it’s only natural that books that market themselves as The Only Book You’ll Ever Need will win out in that competition.

The problem is, as has been observed many times before, Jordan Peterson's self help comes with an automatic passage into his conservative christian beliefs. This isn't simply a trojan horse, this is a feature of the Only Book You'll Ever Need, and it's political philosophy as self help.

So people like Peterson are going to teach you to ascend - to do better and be better - but the political implication of this is that you're going to become superior to everyone else. Dr Cider-crisis just wants to help you, and everyone, be better, by restoring the natural order of men over women, and the people who want to stop him just can't see how much help he's giving everyone. They're trying to censor him, and you, and every point of view they disagree with, and not because he's a massive sexist but just because they're too weak to understand because they aren't living by the 12 rules and eating only streak three times a day. They're weak, and that's why they must be destroyed, and they're also strong in this way that they control everything and want to censor everyone. They're weak and strong and we have all the answers and we're superior but also there's an imminent threat that must be destroyed.

Hang on, I know what this is! That's fascism!

In a sense, Jordan Peterson is in the intellectual tradition of many famous thinkers - Joseph Campbell, Nietzsche, even Aristotle. They all used their talents to create works that read in isolation open the door to terrible inhumanity. Aristotle justified slavery using the same mighty logic that led him to the conclusion that gravity worked because rocks enjoyed being on the ground. I’m not trying to say that these people all contributed absolutely nothing, just that they all strove for some sort of unifying theory - the only book you’ll ever need.

Nietzsche put forward a concept known as will to power which, while arguably not inherently a fascist principle, was then used by Nazis to justify the holocaust and their moves toward imperial conquest. Nietzsche himself was even a bit self-helpy, writing in short digestible aphorisms and quotes and talking often about how to become the übermensch.

And here's the thing - a lot of edgy young guys who want to show off that they've read philosophy are clockable from a mile away by the fact they've only read Nietzsche. I know that if you're one of these guys, you don't want to hear this, and I know this because I used to be one of you, but:

You're kind of a type.

If you come into a political or philosophical discussion and come at people with Nietzsche, and they can tell Nietzsche is all you've got, I guarantee people are rolling their eyes pretty hard and waiting for you to leave.

Section 4: Nerds

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I had a friend once who took serious umbrage with the idea that his feminist girlfriend might have problems with his behaviour. “after all" he'd say “I'm not one of these big buff guys.”

He was talking, of course, about chads.

I can't be a misogynist - I'm not a chad.

I think that we should talk about post-masculine identity, not in the sense that masculinity is over, but more in the sense that it has occurred, and been recognised and studied, and the ideas of feminist theory are out there now in the public consciousness. Post-masculine identity must include forms of masculinity where men don't want to confront their own behaviour, but make a false equivalency between the stereotype of the Chad, and the set of behaviours deemed toxic.

Pop Culture Detective has a great video on this called The Adorkable Misogyny of the Big Bang Theory.

Toxic masculinity has been called out, and a lot of people have figured out that they have to hide it, and one of the safest bets for doing that is to swap out all of the traditional aesthetics for new ones. Toxic masculinity, just like fascism, wears a new face daily.

Instead of big muscle time it’s now big brain time. Instead of physical conquests these men want to have high-level important ideas. Out with the big dicks and in with the big IQ points.

But I know it sounds at least a bit like I'm saying that toxic masculinity and fascism are kind of just the same thing. This essay will have a sequel...

Toxic masculinity keeps doing this careful dance around trying to eternally avoid just cutting that shit the fuck out and being a nice person. Where the rational, logical solution would be to just do the “politically correct” thing and hope you figure out your differences in beliefs later, this cultural shift is into simply disguising being a bit of a dick as being rational.

I think it's worth saying directly: we hold our beliefs based on feelings, and we use whatever facts and logic we can to back up those feelings after the fact. That's human nature, that's the way we all work. The job of a skeptic - an intellectual even - is to challenge their own feelings, and challenge what makes them feel secure and see if the logic actually supports their beliefs. Arguing that your side has all the facts and the other side only has feelings is absurd, when what drives us all is emotion. Logical arguments only change your mind when you're open to hearing them, because that's when your feelings can shift. When people like Ben Shapiro try to tell you they have nothing but facts, they're scamming you, plain and simple, because measuring facts and scientific data against each other is only ever going to change something if the feelings are there too.

It's just that the science also entirely agrees with the legitimacy of trans people and the existence of non binary people Ben read a fucking study one single time GOD.

The fact is, and remember, this fact careth not for thine feely weelies, that if you ever could be only facts and no feelings, nobody would like you because you'd be BOOOOORING GODDD SO BOOOOORIIIIING.

And the other, maybe less important fact is, Ben and his ilk don't care much for facts at all. They aren't empiricists, they aren't rationalists, and they certainly aren't scientists.

The scientists aren't the people who would look at the sky and say, it's blue, that's all I need to know. They also aren't the people who refute it by saying aha! It was red one time! Now shut up forever!

The scientists look at the sky and say The sky turns red once a day in this part of the world. Why is that?

Richard Fenyman, renowned physicist and co-creator of the atomic bomb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo