ON THE USEFULNESS AND LIMITATIONS OF BINARY THINKING (THE INSANE STUPIDITY OF ANTI-ESSENTIALISM VOL. 6)

In which I argue that the concept of sexual dimorphism is useful because it has PRACTICAL PREDICTIVE POWER.

HEY FOLKS,

This is the sixth edition of a series of critiques of postmodernism called THE INSANE STUPIDITY OF ANTI-ESSENTIALISM, which has been a collaboration between myself and Paul Cudenec of Winter Oak Press.

This series was inspired by a need to clarify the relationship between language and reality.

Basically, postmodernism can be traced back to existentialism, which was an intellectual movement characterized by skepticism towards grand narratives.

Though existentialism isn’t really cup of tea, I consider it philosophically respectable. People like Sartre and Michel Foucault certainly brought something interesting to the table, and I think that their basic message was that human beings need to be conscious of semantic spooks in order to become fully self-actualized individuals.

The later postmodernists were influenced not only by existentialism, but also Marxism, feminism, and critical race theory, and all these combined to produce an intellectual movement characterized by a culture of critique in which academics scored points by finding fault with the ideas of others, rather than advancing their own theories.

Technically, “wokeness” is decadent postmodernism, and eventually someone will come along and defend the honour of the original French existentialists, who don’t really deserve to be blamed for the intellectual sins of woke numbskulls.

Really, it’s a matter of balance. There is such a thing as two much critical analysis, you know.

Many debates, for instance, devolve into squabbles over semantics.

If you find yourself arguing over the definitions of words, the debate has reached a stalemate, because the essence that words describe are not the same thing as the labels that we apply to them.

Once you reach this point, the best thing to do is to take a step back, reframe the debate, and avoid using the word with the contested definition.

Alternatively, you could agree to disagree.

Dr. Scrotes from the What is Politics? YouTube channel has a great take on postmodernism.

ARE SPRUCE TREES A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT?

It’s this very typical post-modern brain disease where you start with an important and valid critique – that categories are artificial constructs, not fixed realities – but then, instead translating that into constructive lessons they just go straight into throw the baby out with the bathwater mode – eliminate all categories – each individual tree is different!  There are no species!  Spruce trees are a social construct!!  

And the result is that if you take this garbage seriously, it prevents you from being able to apply knowledge in any practical way.  All categories of things that exist in the real world  – even things like fruits vs vegetables, arms vs wrists, berries vs citrus fruits, or man vs woman as is topical nowadays – these categories are all imperfect and they break down at a certain point.  But we use them anyways, because they are short cuts that prevent us from having to re-invent the wheel every single time we encounter things.  

Like good luck figuring out which wood to use if you want to building a house if you don’t know the difference between a pine tree and a douglas fir!  Or imagine trying to be a surgeon if you refuse to acknowledge that a heart and stomach are separate organs because there’s no exact way to tell where one ends and the other begins, and all the organs are actually interconnected and work as one big system!  It’d be like being paralyzed on mushrooms staring at the ceiling. 

This is why academia has turned into a giant masturbation festival since post-modernist paradigms took over. 

Jizzle jizzle jam!   

Dr. Scrotes then serves up a platter of stinky intellectual cheese by lampooning postmodernist critiques of linguistic categories by arguing that the popular notion that there are four seasons is doubleplusungood oldthink.

“Experts like Big Bird and Elmo and Dora the Explorer will have us believe that there are only FOUR seasons – first you have the summer which is warm and sunny goes the conventional story, and then you have fall, which is cold and rainy, and then winter which is even colder and snowy, and then comes spring where it warms up and rains so that march showers bring may flowers, and the cycle starts anew!  

But it really realistic that these same four seasons happen like this every year for millions of years?  The evidence shows the opposite – the actual weather is a bold parade of conscious experiments!  Summer is supposed to be sunny – but last summer it rained 20 times!  And in Arizona, there’s never even any snow at all!   Winter?  Yeah right!  It’s sunny all year round in the Arabian desert! Yet muppets still cling to this fantasy of snowy winters with Rudolph and prancer and santa!  And in India they only have two seasons!  And in Australia it’s summer in December!  Maybe it’s about time we do away with this whole mythology about “seasons” entirely.  The weather is a choice!”

Dr. Scrotes also explains why this is important.

LISTEN UP!

Nevermore is not advancing a critique of trans ideology because we want to hurt people’s feelings - the fact is that there nothing freeing about rejecting linguistic conventions in order to justify false beliefs.

As Dr. Scrotes puts it:

Believing nonsense that isn’t true is not liberating, it’s delusional and potentially fatal.

It’s liberating in the same way that smoking crack is liberating.  It’s a mindless rush that you’ll come crashing down from because it doesn’t actually give you any tools except for false confidence.

Like if I tell you: “Stop limiting yourself to the conventional narrative about how we’re confined by gravity to be stuck on the ground!  Flying is a choice!”   […] 

That might sound liberating – if you’re high… but if you take that idea seriously and you act on it, you will jump out the window and fall to your death.

Amen to that.

What you about to read is an important contribution to the emerging field of anarchist metaphysics. It is about binary thinking, which is the cornerstone of Aristotelian logic.

Now, lest we seem like we’re defending Aristotelianism, let me be clear that we understand very clearly that quantum mechanics has shown that not everything is describable in terms of Aristotelian logic.

However, the fact that quantum mechanics defies both logic and rationality DOES NOT MEAN that logic and rationality should be chucked in the proverbial “Fuck It” Bucket.

Logic and rationality are EXTREMELY USEFUL COGNITIVE TOOLS designed to help human beings navigate reality, and they are excellent for that purpose. Abandoning classical logic because there are contexts where it doesn’t apply would be like abandoning the English language because penguins don’t speak English.

In the future, I will probably compare and contrast Aristotelian logic with non-Aristotelian logic (yes, there is such a thing), in order to further lay the beat-down on the asinine and inane aggro-delusionist claptrap known as postmodernism.

For now, I’ll simply make the point that Newton’s “Laws of Physics” are not true on every level. They cannot be used to accurate predict the actions of sub-atomic particles, for instance. Technically, Newton was wrong But that doesn’t mean that his ideas aren’t useful concepts. If you’re driving a snowmobile off a cliff and you want to want to know where you’ll land, Newtonian physics could really help you (if you’re good at math).

(This guy picked me up hitchhiking one time, by the way!)

And that’s something that I don’t think woke-ists understand - that the value of ideas is in their usefulness, which is to say their PRACTICAL PREDICTIVE POWER.

An idea is good if it allows one to model reality in a way which allows you to successfully adapt to the real conditions of the energetic matrix within which you are embedded.

A simple way to determine whether an idea is good or not is to ask oneself whether it has PRACTICAL PREDICTIVE POWER or not.

Let me show you an example using a formula.

The formula is: If (x), then (y).

In this formula, (x) represents a known, and (y) represent something that can be assumed to be true because (x) is true. This is known as deductive reasoning.

If we accept as all humans are mortal, and that I am human, it follows logically that I will die. I have DEDUCED the specific fact that I am mortal from the general premise that all humans are mortal.

If it is true that I am mortal (which I eventually will prove), I have correctly used a known premise to predict a future event - my death. Given that reconciling oneself to one’s mortality is important to long-term psychological health, I am better prepared to make intelligent life decisions because I am certain that I will not live forever.

If the premise that one starts with is true, and if one has not committed a fallacy (an error in reasoning), the deduction will be true. In other words, a specific fact has be derived (or deduced) from a general principle.

Deductive reasoning is a core part of classical logic, an ancient school of thought of which Aristotle was the most famous proponent.

Whether you are a fan of Aristotle or not, Aristotelian logic has stood the test of time.

(By the way, it’s useful to differentiate between deductive and inductive reasoning. I’ll quickly point out that inductive reasoning doesn’t support the astonishing conclusions of trans ideologues either. The only rhetorical trick they’ve got is pure brazenness - by feigning tremendous moral conviction, they dignify their absurd claims that the opposite of what is true is, in fact, literally true. The technical term for this is LYING.)

WHY THE IDEA THAT HOMO SAPIENS IS A SEXUAL DIMORPHIC SPECIES HOLDS UP

The idea of “female” is useful when it comes to child-rearing because numerous accurate predictions can be derived from it.

If an infant is born with a vagina, it can safely be assumed that she will experience menstruation after she hits puberty.

The linguistic category of “female” accurately predicts, for the vast majority of people who are born with female sex organs, that that human will experience menstruation, ovulation, pregnancy, and menopause.

Although there will anomalous individual females who do not experience each of these things - not all females are capable of conception, for instance - the linguistic category of female retains its PRACTICAL PREDICTIVE POWER.

Think about it: The statistical likelihood that someone born with a penis will experience ANY of these biological phenomena in their lifetimes in statistically ZERO.

The fact that there are exceptions to every rule does not render linguistic categories worthless. It simply means that a higher degree of specificity is required to describe anomalous phenomena.

Sex also determines psychological priorities which are downstream of biology, such as mate selection, which is arguably the basis for all other human political organization.

Ignoring the psychological differences between women and men is so obviously, blatantly disingenuous that it’s impossible for me to believe that anyone is actually stupid enough to believe this crap.

I get that there are a lot of dum-dums out there, but I simply don’t believe that anyone is stupid enough to believe that a man can get pregnant. I think trans ideologues are faking it, which is probably why they prefer denouncing their opponents to debating them.

My question to such people is this: Who do you think you’re fooling?

You folks know that you’d only embarrass yourselves if you engaged in honest and open debate, which is why y’all default so readily to the “that’s offensive” cop-out.

Anyway, be it resolved that the concept of “female” is a useful category because it has PRACTICAL PREDICTIVE POWER. If one views thought as a means of achieving real things in the real world, the concept of sexual dimorphism is an extremely useful binary.

Indeed, it is kind of a key concept if one’s goal is successful reproduction, which is traditionally the litmus test for biological success.

I rest my case.

As I mentioned, this essay is presented in continuation of a series called THE INSANE STUPIDITY OF ANTI-ESSENTIALISM.

You can find the first five instalments here:

Seeing the whole truth with a three-dimensional outlook

by Paul Cudenec

Seeing the whole truth with a three-dimensional outlook

I am frequently disappointed to see people clinging rigidly to binary positions, imagining that opposing one particular nasty militarist empire, corrupt political party or manipulative dogma automatically involves throwing one’s lot in with the rival that has been presented as its polar opposite.

And yet, at the same time, I have often declared myself to be firmly on one side of a pair of polar opposites, such as being for truth against lies, for right against wrong and for life against death.

Does this therefore mean that my viewpoint is contradictory?

The first thing to bear in mind is that there is always a third element implied by the existence of any two things or concepts, namely the relationship between them.

This relationship describes not just the differences between the one and the other, but also the context in which they co-exist.

If you make two dots on a piece of paper, for example, and then draw a line between them, the line shows the distance separating the dots, but it also connects them.

If I say that the table is to the left of the sink, I am not only indicating the different spaces they occupy, but also describing the context in which they can be seen together.

Sometimes we describe the relationship-of-difference in terms of physical attributes rather than spatial positioning. The green umbrella is bigger than than the black one, we might say, identifying two physical differences, while at the same time reinforcing the essential similarity of these two objects in both being umbrellas.

But there are other instances where the distinction that we make relates to quality, rather than to mere size, colour or shape.

We might describe one person as being more honest than another, one sculpture as being more beautiful than another, one argument as being more just than another.

In order to make such judgements, we draw on our understanding of certain essential values.

These values tend to be defined in binary terms – honest versus dishonest, beautiful versus ugly, just versus unjust.

As with other binary pairings, there is a thematic link underlying the contrasting qualitative opposition.

Black and white are opposites, but also united by their belonging to a monochromatic reality, as corresponding basically to the absence or presence of light.

Beautiful and ugly both refer to aesthetic appearance often considered to reflect intrinsic quality.

Because we are dealing here with values, tools for judgement, these oppositions are obviously necessary.

We have to be able to hold in our minds the two ends of the qualitative scale, know that they exist, so as to be able to judge the position, on that scale, of the thing we are assessing.

These important essential concepts, the two points at either end of the qualitative scale, amount to the third element that I mentioned as always being implied by the existence of two things or concepts.

They mark out the relationship between the two, the context in which their qualitative value can be ascertained.

But this qualitative dimension has been heavily undermined in contemporary thinking.

On the physical level these absolute terms are indeed often not literally applicable, because they belong to the higher and abstract level of essence.

And since our degraded modern thinking does not recognise the validity of essence (regarding any such recognition as the thoughtcrime of “essentialism”), it therefore denies that these qualitative notions are real in any sense.

It insists that because human behaviour is a complicated matter, we cannot use the tools of “good” or “evil” to assess it; that beauty and ugliness are purely subjective labels with no fundamental meaning; that truth is always relative; that because there is such a thing as grey, there can be so such thing as black or white.

When this necessary binary tool for qualitative distinction is cancelled by our culture, people’s ability to think is disabled.

Denied the qualitative dimension, their outlook is reduced to the point where they can only see fundamental opposites on the lower level of physical form.

To refer back to the start of this essay, this is how they come to favour one particular nasty militarist empire, corrupt political party or manipulative dogma over another.

They are blinded to the awareness that the issue lies not with the superficial differences between the empires, parties or dogmas in question, but with the qualitative similarity that they are all nasty, corrupt or manipulative.

This is also how people might come to the erroneous conclusion that it is contradictory to oppose binary thinking on the horizontal scale of physical form and, at the same time, to use binary terms as a means of describing the vertical scale of quality.

Their confusion stems from the fact they they cannot even see the existence of the qualitative dimension, because their thinking has become flattened to fit a one-dimensional world in which that dimension is deemed not to exist.

We therefore have to rediscover a three-dimensional outlook which enables us to see behind the facade of modern life, behind the Spectacle that has been constructed to deceive, divide and disempower us.

We have to incorporate into our thinking – our political as well as metaphysical thinking – the understanding that truth, meaning, beauty, goodness, nature and essence are all real.

Along with this, we need to understand why it is that that such concepts have been declared illegitimate by a contemporary pseudo-philosophy which has evolved within a system built on lies, emptiness, ugliness, evil, artifice and superficiality.

Once armed with this holistic perspective, we will quickly see where this modern world is situated on the scale of quality and can begin to take steps to put things right.

[Audio version]