Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 13
These guys are definitely trolls, and they'd have field-day "debunking" my work, but still, I have a guilty pleasure watching them troll online influencers. This is not serious sense-making, but it is fun. There's so much bullshit, self-deception, ignorance, and corruption worth criticizing in the online influencer, heterodox, anti-mainstream, intellectual dark web ecosystem that much of it doesn't even deserve the respect of a serious Tier 2 analysis. There's a time for serious intellectual deconstruction, and then there's a time to just have a laugh. Treating unserious people as though they deserve serious intellectual consideration is a kind of trap — the trap of wrestling with pigs. For example, treating Trump or MAGA as an intellectually serious project is already to capitulate too much. You will lose brain cells just doing that. Sometimes nonsense is just nonsense. Especially in this post-truth era of audience and algorithm capture.
The problem with the entire intellectual dark web influencer space is that there's no epistemic standards, no fact-checking, no accounting for bias, and all of it is fueled by career-seeking. These people don't give a fuck about epistemic rigor, they are speaking for the sake of speaking, because it makes for a nice easy career. Hyper capitalist social platforms reward verbal diarrhea.
As someone who works in this space, with a deep view from the inside, it is so clear to me why social media influencers are so easily corrupted. Producing meaningful intellectual work is so mentally laborious that it cannot be done consistently on a daily/weekly basis. But to be successful in this field requires constant near-daily uploads of content, which can only be done when the content is vacuous, speculative, opinionated, verbal diarrhea.
And it gets even worse because the more serious and truthful your intellectual work, the more effort you put into it, the less popular and successful you will be, because the algorithms are designed to serve slop — intellectual junk food — to the masses. So there is literally an inverse relationship between the intellectual rigor of your work and your success, fame, and profits. That is the epistemic disease of our online media system. The incentive structure is perverted. Slop is amplified, serious intelligence and maturity is buried into irrelevance. The people in charge of the algorithms don't have enough intelligence, maturity, and integrity to restructure the system for anything but profit maximization. So here we are. As the comedians say, laughter is sometimes the best medicine.
As you consume online content, draw a clean line between who is intellectually serious and who is not. It's fine to watch fun stuff just for fun. The problem occurs when people start taking unserious talk as serious sense-making. Politics is a serious domain, it should not be treated as entertainment fodder to feed the algorithm beast. If you want to understand politics, go to a serious intellectual political scientist — like Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Stephen Kotkin, John Mearsheimer — not an opinionated, motormouth, pop influencer like Russell Brand or Jimmy Dore.
If you fall into the trap of taking unserious people seriously, you will become unserious. And when you become unserious you will become profoundly self-deceived. Seriousness is the only way to have a chance of solving the problem of self-deception. All unserious people are self-deceived. This is a iron law of the universe.
This is a rare interview where Kastrup talks about politics rather than metaphysics.
I was pleasantly surprised that his politics is so mature. He's intelligent enough to see right through the BS of populism. Good on him.
For me it's important to compare a public intellectual's metaphysical, philosophical, and spiritual views with his politics. Because most of the time I see speakers with great spiritual views, but then their understanding of politics is 180-degree backwards as they live in some anti-mainstream online echo-chamber. Someone will speak of love and God and health and ending corruption and justice and peace and truth, and then vote for Trump. This kind of shit is intellectually unacceptable. So it's always important to not just hear someone's abstract theoretical beliefs, but to see how that pans out at the end of the day.
Do not underestimate the mind's ability to speak of God, love, and peace, and then vote for Hitler. It's more common than you'd think. Never assume you know how someone will vote. Ask them. It's too easy to sit around and bullshit with niceties, generalities, and abstractions. "The government is corrupt. The system is rigged. The media is biased. The economy is broken. War is bad." Yes, but does that mean you're voting for Hitler or his opponent?
It's not enough to criticize government. That's too easy. You have to ask people what their solutions are. People can have the same criticisms but opposite solutions. "The economy is bad. Egg prices are too high." Okay, but is your solution to regulate and tax giant corporations or to deregulate and give them tax cuts? People are so distracted with self-righteous criticism they have no logic solutions. Government is super easy to criticize and super difficult to improve.
Over the next few years you're going to hear a lot of news about Trump making deals. This deal, that deal. But remember, Trump is a con-artist, so you should not take any of these deals as they are portrayed and hyped up in the mindless media cycles. Most of Trump's deals are going to be fake, just like everything about Trump is fake. Trump does not care about making solid deals, he cares about his image as a deal-maker. Making solid deals is difficult, requiring intelligence, compromise, maturity, truthfulness, patience, long-term thinking, sacrifice, and hard work. Trump is not interested in any of that, only his image of success.
So I'm just reminding you to connect these dots and do not forget his true nature. Do not fall for stories of his deals, since they will mostly be scams designed to make himself and his ignorant supporters feel like they are winners. No Trump deal exists or means anything until at least 6 months have passed and the fruits of the so-called deal have been measured and analyzed. What you'll see is that his deals evaporate like dry ice in the Sahara. That's what happens when you deal with a narcissistic, sociopathic, fake businessman.
