All of the information in the world is available at our fingertips, but we find ourselves in a world in which the man, woman, or AI program with the most influence can create their own reality.
Jordan, I have been reading you since Covid. You have built an audience questioning the official narratives. It now seems when people are questioning an official narrative that is held dear to you, modern day Israel or World War 2, it is not ok. If you can see how false narratives are written in realtime regarding for example, Covid, do you not think that historical events don't suffer the same fate? Even more so since the facts can't be checked in realtime? You don't have to agree with the conclusions, but the fact that this rather insignificant conversation on Tucker Carlson has caused such a stir is perplexing.
Various substack writers and twitter commentators I respect all in lockstep have written about this incident and piled onto Darrell Cooper, in a way the woke left usually does when they want to silence someone and render them obsolete. It is really weird to observe. And trying to paint him as a anti-semite, etc, the same way the woke left paints anyone a racist or a transphobe if you question their dogma. And at the same time, somehow trying to say that from this conversation, Tucker Carlson and Darrell Cooper represent the new "woke right." It is all totally bizzare.
This is well said. I like Tucker, but I don't love him enough to have been offended by Schactel's opinion of him (attack?). However, 'perplexed' is the perfect word to describe how I felt after reading it. Many of the people I respect and have learned from in this world over the years have glaring character flaws in some area or another.
I'm not trying to justify or blindly ignore an individual's flaws or mistakes. I just don't want to miss out on knowledge and truth they might be able to share, and that I might miss, if I condemn them entirely.
Embrace reason and truth, that's a good thing. Reassess one's worldview, that's a good thing.
Do the facts support that 19 arabs with box cutters hijacked 4 airliners and flew them into various buildings and locations? No they don't, but many people still hold that worldview.
I'm so old I can remember the cartoon with the message "No one on the Internet knows you're a dog. "
So it isn't the technology but the collapse of the credibility of the institutions. And it's their own fault for being serial liars. Not only about COVID either but the 2020 election, J6, Russia, the economy. I could go on.
I agree that the Anglosphere has done some inspiring things in the past but that's over now. Just different flavors of authoritarian places competing to see who can be the worst. Right now, the UK is leading. We need to focus on what comes next.
"The blackpillers have decided that it’s time to burn it all down, declare war on history itself, and throw the baby out with the bathwater."
The irony is that they wish to assume that everyone else is wrong.....but not them. Never them. Their interpretation, they think, is absolutely spot on.
Reminds me of the foolish feminists and gender-benders such as Judith Butler, who maintain that everything we once believed about gender was just a "construct." But that whatever Ms. Butler dictates to us is 100% correct. Supposedly.
I have to laugh....can they not see themselves? Nope.
Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" was published back in 1951, then overlooked for more than 70 years by most people. Ms. Arendt was not even the first to articulate these ideas. Gustave Le Bon had published "The Crowd" in 1895, there was MacKay's book 50 years earlier, and then Sargant and Meerloo published closely after Arendt on similar themes.
These ideas have been out there, but almost no one looks.
The Crowd is a sinister manual on the psychology of propaganda. Le Bon was its leading advocate. The five global corporations in control of 90% of American mass media have been officially designated as a free press. The psychological properties of groupthink in mass media are more advanced now than ever before and the PR industry behind it has never been prosecuted.
Yes. Have you? I refer to Le Bon’s affirmation, repetition and contagion routine. The original edition of The Crowd went to great lengths to explain propaganda as proximate to hypnotism and Le Bon’s enthusiasm for mass deception matched Edward Bernays. The Wikipedia article on the book paints an entirely different picture.
"Don’t take the black pill. Embrace reason and truth. Reject nihilistic nothingness."
Taking the black pill means descending into totalitarian control of your mind by others. You must give up personal critical thinking. Some people find it comforting not to have to grapple with the responsibilities of freedom.
However.....there is a big price to pay. The comfort lasts a very short time.
Eight to ten years ago, nihilistic nothingness had a huge lead in Palo Alto. There was a suicide chain of young adolescents kept top secret by school officials, city officials and the local press. They claimed that it was to stop more suicides, but it was obvious that the kids knew one another and that keeping it secret merely hid what was to blame: the lack of anything resembling "morality" in Silicon Valley. A number of young people that age wrote confirmation essays for their church that described where they were right now. At least half rejected confirmation because they had no faith at all, and most of them were somewhere around "My So-Called Life" scripts and on downward from there... and these were the kids that had parents that claimed to be people of faith.
The Valley is a deep, ugly slime pit that needs to be emptied like a cholera-laden sewage tank.
Thank you Jordan for this shout out … to always reach for the intellectual high road that was paved for us through the past centuries … to demand Truth to be at our center and Reason our guide…it makes our ‘todays’ a mere fencing match to sharpen our wits by…touchée!
An excellent article Jordan, given immediate support by those ignoring essentially all you have said and rushing to take issue with your rational, sensible, non confrontational and logical assessments and thoughts that for some reason, they are unable to accept or even consider, with an open and receptive mindset,. That's possibly the highest hurdle any commentator faces in expressing potentially non conforming, disturbing but factually accurate thoughts and views, which in the end is all we have based on our own experiences, interactions and communications with our like minded, informed contemporaries.
Jordan, I have been reading you since Covid. You have built an audience questioning the official narratives. It now seems when people are questioning an official narrative that is held dear to you, modern day Israel or World War 2, it is not ok. If you can see how false narratives are written in realtime regarding for example, Covid, do you not think that historical events don't suffer the same fate? Even more so since the facts can't be checked in realtime? You don't have to agree with the conclusions, but the fact that this rather insignificant conversation on Tucker Carlson has caused such a stir is perplexing.
Various substack writers and twitter commentators I respect all in lockstep have written about this incident and piled onto Darrell Cooper, in a way the woke left usually does when they want to silence someone and render them obsolete. It is really weird to observe. And trying to paint him as a anti-semite, etc, the same way the woke left paints anyone a racist or a transphobe if you question their dogma. And at the same time, somehow trying to say that from this conversation, Tucker Carlson and Darrell Cooper represent the new "woke right." It is all totally bizzare.
My take as well.
This is well said. I like Tucker, but I don't love him enough to have been offended by Schactel's opinion of him (attack?). However, 'perplexed' is the perfect word to describe how I felt after reading it. Many of the people I respect and have learned from in this world over the years have glaring character flaws in some area or another.
I'm not trying to justify or blindly ignore an individual's flaws or mistakes. I just don't want to miss out on knowledge and truth they might be able to share, and that I might miss, if I condemn them entirely.
I sure hope that's how others look at me!
Jordan, not a lot of people discuss nihilism so it was a pleasure to hear this. I’ve done ALOT of work on nihilism entering our city and wrote my book about it: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-history-of-you-a-book-that-connects
Ultimately we need to bring back spirituality into our world, city and lives. That’s the ultimate dose to nihilism and that’s what my Substack is about: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-unorthodoxy-roadmap
Thanks for your work on this topic. Very much needed.
Embrace reason and truth, that's a good thing. Reassess one's worldview, that's a good thing.
Do the facts support that 19 arabs with box cutters hijacked 4 airliners and flew them into various buildings and locations? No they don't, but many people still hold that worldview.
I'm so old I can remember the cartoon with the message "No one on the Internet knows you're a dog. "
So it isn't the technology but the collapse of the credibility of the institutions. And it's their own fault for being serial liars. Not only about COVID either but the 2020 election, J6, Russia, the economy. I could go on.
I agree that the Anglosphere has done some inspiring things in the past but that's over now. Just different flavors of authoritarian places competing to see who can be the worst. Right now, the UK is leading. We need to focus on what comes next.
"The blackpillers have decided that it’s time to burn it all down, declare war on history itself, and throw the baby out with the bathwater."
The irony is that they wish to assume that everyone else is wrong.....but not them. Never them. Their interpretation, they think, is absolutely spot on.
Reminds me of the foolish feminists and gender-benders such as Judith Butler, who maintain that everything we once believed about gender was just a "construct." But that whatever Ms. Butler dictates to us is 100% correct. Supposedly.
I have to laugh....can they not see themselves? Nope.
Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" was published back in 1951, then overlooked for more than 70 years by most people. Ms. Arendt was not even the first to articulate these ideas. Gustave Le Bon had published "The Crowd" in 1895, there was MacKay's book 50 years earlier, and then Sargant and Meerloo published closely after Arendt on similar themes.
These ideas have been out there, but almost no one looks.
The Crowd is a sinister manual on the psychology of propaganda. Le Bon was its leading advocate. The five global corporations in control of 90% of American mass media have been officially designated as a free press. The psychological properties of groupthink in mass media are more advanced now than ever before and the PR industry behind it has never been prosecuted.
Not sure where you get these ideas about Le Bon. Have you read the book?
Yes. Have you? I refer to Le Bon’s affirmation, repetition and contagion routine. The original edition of The Crowd went to great lengths to explain propaganda as proximate to hypnotism and Le Bon’s enthusiasm for mass deception matched Edward Bernays. The Wikipedia article on the book paints an entirely different picture.
We interpreted it differently.
"Don’t take the black pill. Embrace reason and truth. Reject nihilistic nothingness."
Taking the black pill means descending into totalitarian control of your mind by others. You must give up personal critical thinking. Some people find it comforting not to have to grapple with the responsibilities of freedom.
However.....there is a big price to pay. The comfort lasts a very short time.
Eight to ten years ago, nihilistic nothingness had a huge lead in Palo Alto. There was a suicide chain of young adolescents kept top secret by school officials, city officials and the local press. They claimed that it was to stop more suicides, but it was obvious that the kids knew one another and that keeping it secret merely hid what was to blame: the lack of anything resembling "morality" in Silicon Valley. A number of young people that age wrote confirmation essays for their church that described where they were right now. At least half rejected confirmation because they had no faith at all, and most of them were somewhere around "My So-Called Life" scripts and on downward from there... and these were the kids that had parents that claimed to be people of faith.
The Valley is a deep, ugly slime pit that needs to be emptied like a cholera-laden sewage tank.
Thank you Jordan for this shout out … to always reach for the intellectual high road that was paved for us through the past centuries … to demand Truth to be at our center and Reason our guide…it makes our ‘todays’ a mere fencing match to sharpen our wits by…touchée!
Well said. Thank you.
The core truths.
An excellent article Jordan, given immediate support by those ignoring essentially all you have said and rushing to take issue with your rational, sensible, non confrontational and logical assessments and thoughts that for some reason, they are unable to accept or even consider, with an open and receptive mindset,. That's possibly the highest hurdle any commentator faces in expressing potentially non conforming, disturbing but factually accurate thoughts and views, which in the end is all we have based on our own experiences, interactions and communications with our like minded, informed contemporaries.