The Coalition of Overlapping Tents

finding your bare minimum

In a recent article my friend

Mark Bisone

effectively dismantled some aspects of my latest. He made excellent points about how little agreement there might be with respect to what might constitute delusion, for example. He also observed the inherent tradeoff associated with inclusion.

The New Knighthood

His treatment helped me realize that I was being entirely too ambitious in my attempt to identify some universal moral principles. All I really want to do is describe the heuristics I use in the hope that others with overlapping objectives find them useful. Put another way, I have no ability to proscribe the boundaries of any moral community other than my own, but believe that effectively communicating these limits can help us all identify where our respective spheres overlap and intersect.

Hypocrisy, Delusion, and Trust

The reason I equate hypocrisy and delusion with immorality relates directly to trust. Attempting to conceive of hypocrisy and delusion in some objective sense is a mistake that leads directly into an epistemological black hole. You don’t want to go there lest your brain be liquified in the warp. All you need in order to apply these heuristics effectively is to make a subjective determination as to whether or not someone is hypocritical or delusional from your perspective. After all, you are the one assuming risk when you decide to trust. This is a way to calibrate character judgements such that the faith you place in others is rewarded more often than not.

The Bare Minimum

My beliefs are too peculiar for me to demand any more than this bare minimum prerequisite. If I were to require those I place faith in to see the world exactly as I see it, to share the same religion or creed I would be very much alone, and I can’t survive alone. These heuristics were born out of this necessity. Adherents of traditional religions probably can’t see the point. They’ve a sense they can rely on their own particular communities, but this disposition has been exploited by the enemy mercilessly. Those communities have been hollowed out, as it is all too easy to find points of contention into which splinters of division can be easily inserted, even in the type of demographically homogenous communities that are all but lost in the post-West. My bare minimum employs these heuristics, and your bare minimum is probably different, but I think it critical that all of us that are on this side of the fight find their own bare minimum. What does it take for you to trust? What principles inform you and allow you to put faith in yourself and others? Does fellowship require as much overlap as you might assume?

The Lesson of the Struggle Session

One of the most conspicuous weapons of the enemy is the struggle session. In corporate America this has gone by other names, one of which is EE or Engineering Empathy. This strategy provokes and humiliates, and precludes the formation of strong bonds by forcing participants to focus on their differences. When you observe behavior that you find unacceptable, the temptation is to attribute this disposition to the most obvious differences. Race, religion, biological sex, sexual orientation etc. This plays into the enemy’s hands. What you may find if you look closely, is that there are other common themes present that tie together many of the behaviors you find most reprehensible. By focusing on and attacking those common threads you gain two distinct strategic advantages. First, you avoid alienating people who might very well be on your side. Second, you rob the enemy of its raison detra of employing unprecedented political power in service of “the oppressed.”

Faith in Nature

Being forced to endure an elite that is so obviously not only evil but grossly incompetent is rage inspiring. The enemy depends on you to give in to that rage. It is all provocation and humiliation. The humiliated lack the will to resist, the provoked provide justification for their continued rule in service of the oppressed. Engaging in flagrant hypocrisy by calling for the weapons of the enemy to be used, such as coercion and bad faith manipulation and deception is similarly self-defeating. If we are right and our understanding of the world is correct, nature or our God will deliver justice so long as we don’t succumb to base desires for spiritually bankrupt pursuits such as vengeance. Our enemies are all hypocrites, and most are quite delusional. All we need to do is to strive for accountability. We all need accountability, and calling for accountability is defensible with little effort. Vengeance on the other hand is not. It animates our enemies and provides them the energy they need to continue resisting their inevitable decline. We need not sully ourselves with hypocrisy to see our enemies punished. If we are right to hate them, their own hypocrisy and delusion will see them punished far worse in the long run than if we were to seek such an outcome deliberately.