I’ve been told by not a few people that I should dedicate some effort to getting myself and ‘my ideas’ out there through the debate circus which has come to be one of the forks of Left and Right wing livestreaming. I would be very good at it, they say. When I look at the people I’m being compared to, people like Destiny, Vaush, Sargon of Akkad, and myriad of upcoming others, well, I don’t doubt I would be. One should not be ignorant that there is significant money to be made in becoming one of the faces in this sphere, yet one should also not misunderstand the purpose of all of this to be truly educational. Perhaps somewhere in their earlier days these individuals cared about facts and truth, but that concern simply goes out the window as one finds that most people who are willing to risk making a public fool of themselves do so because they think they can make a fool out of you, and often both parties part in self-satisfied belief that they have achieved this when their fan base lionizes them as having unquestionably trounced the other. You know what they say: spend too much time among idiots and you’re likely to become one yourself.
None of the people I listed strike one, as a disinterested outsider, as particularly bright. Not even slightly more traditionally established people like Sam Seder are bright once you look past their seeming erudition due to being able to vomit ‘facts’ at someone. A lot of these people seem bright mainly because they genuinely argue with a hostile audience of idiots who cannot perceive when they are wrong. When these people debate others of an equal measure of intellect and knowledge, what tends to happen is that they do not recognize this and continue to treat the other as if they were another run of the mill moron. They argue past each other and are none the wiser. When they meet someone of a genuinely higher intellect who is making a deeper point than the usual spat over facts and theoretical policy consequences, they seem to simply be incapable of understanding their point as meaningful, as having sense, and so brush them off as obscurantists. One here is reminded of Chomsky’s famous debate with Foucault.
But, those who would have me debate tell me, the point of debate isn’t really to convince the other person. It is to expose their vast audience to one’s ideas and to recruit those who would listen to our ranks. Were one to think in the usual fashion, this would be true enough. Indeed, one wants to spread ideas, and that cannot be done without exposing as many as possible to them. In this sense, however, there is a danger in taking this pragmatism of presentation too far. Here I have in mind the example of Jason Reza Jorjani, who takes a most radical pragmatic approach to presentation even if he does not debate. Jorjani is, in the true sense of the word, an opportunist. He would, if he could, present himself to all sides of social, political, and ideological positions as someone that is not an enemy, but an ally with a common cause. He would go so far as to talk to communists with their own lexicons just as much as he does with reactionaries and conservatives, and he would do so with the purpose of performing a kind of ideological entryism. Jorjani has no real ideological allies, he has tools. He is no more a communist than he is a libertarian capitalist, or within the standard orthodox political box. But as he presents himself, Jorjani has found a reception towards his ideas only on the Right, and really with the more radical reactionary elements in it. They do not, however, know who he really is or what he really believes, and inasmuch as he thinks he can make them tools, the truth is that he has made himself a tool for them. His social validation as being a certified philosopher, a former professor, an intellectual writer of books his audience does not really understand, simply functions to make him appear to them as yet another legitimization of their dogmas and illusions. Yes, Jorjani has gained a following, but one that would hate him if they understood him. In a way, this pragmatic opportunism stems directly from Jorjani’s own Nietzschean aristocratic views, one in which he is among the aristocracy and has every right to manipulate others through ‘noble lies.’ That essentially encapsulates what Jorjani’s opportunistic gamble amounts to: an attempt to bring people to his side through the careful use of rhetorical lies; half truths spoken as if in full agreement and with enthusiastic fervor, but which are in his own works to be contradicted and qualified.
The belief that debate should merely be viewed as an opportunistic endeavor to spread one’s views, and that one should ‘present’ one’s views in the favorable language of one’s audience, makes sense. How it ends up playing out, however, is ultimately a betrayal not just of one’s ideals, but of Truth. This is also why I do not believe the rise of infotainment on the Left as well as the Right is something praise worthy or acceptable. What these people do is most often to spread misinformation under the excuse that they are simplifying things so that the ‘stupid’ masses can have the satisfaction of knowing what is locked in the high towers of academia. While a very rare few, perhaps dozens out of hundreds of thousands, may end up looking deeper and finding out they were lied to, there are against them the hundreds of thousands that simply accept the initial tale and repeat it because they like and trust a source they believe they understand, that being their entertaining ‘educators.’ In the case of truth, simplifications are only lies. The world is not an abstraction, and to pretend that one has been faithful to the truth in cutting corners of necessary argumentation over details is like pretending one has been faithful to making physics intelligible by merely providing a nice balloon analogy for the big bang.
One should not want to spread an abstraction, a falsehood, on account that this at least introduces one’s ideas. Just look at what has happened to French philosophy in the wake of its uptake. Actual philosophers who specialize on Deleuze, Foucalt, Lyotard, etc. are to blame for the memes which these thinkers have been reduced to under the umbrella of ‘postmodernism’. I refuse to do the same for Marx and Hegel. If you cannot understand the beginning of their works, you cannot understand the rest, and it is better for you to admit that you know nothing instead of pretending that you know something because I have told you an analogy that you find familiar, but which is ultimately false.
I will eventually engage this sphere, and the reason indeed is going to be to present the views which are generally unknown to the broader audience of thinking laymen. When this comes about, I shall be by and large misunderstood and derided because I will indeed refuse to present things in the frames which are comfortable for my opponents and the general audience. The Truth shall be stated in its own language, which is not too alien from the common understanding, and to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, it shall be apparent. For those who would dismiss me based on initial confusions due to unfamiliarity, I shall have nothing to say, for they are not contestants in philosophy.
Left of Wreckage 