Philosophy of Activism & Optics

There are a limited number of memes that a person can promote at a time or because of within their head at a time. If there are a limited number of memes that a person can promote at a time or because of within their head at a time, then one trick that you could get used to get people to stop promoting means that you don’t like is to infest with different means that you are neutral to or like better.

Bringing Up Issues It is important to bring up any issue that is worth resolving. Bringing stuff to attention doesn’t really take focus away from other issues unless it’s truly not important. Bringing attention to something does not need attention takes attention away from the more important stuff that really matters.

Hitler had some interesting ideas about propaganda. He viewed the masses as always being manipulated by one side or another, and so propaganda was essential. He believed that the German propaganda had been terrible in WWI, compared to the other side. So, he had an awareness of human irrationality and mob psychology, but didn’t see that he was caught up in a delusion himself. One of the dangers of using propaganda to manipulate others is that you start believing it yourself.

People that are looking to persuade others are almost certainly not open to having their minds changed on that particular topic. Most people tend to be open-minded on a personal selection of topics, and closed-minded on others.

What else can talentless low-IQ people do, when they still want to do activism, yet have low intelligence? Most often, they tend to do mindless protesting like idiots, or talking to people because that’s how or what works best with their emotions, especially when their emotions are caught by the parasitic activism that they were pursuing, etc. Some somewhat smarter people may write a blog that some people look at, but their activism outreach is still limited by their intelligence and abilities.

More capable people are often able to do more effective and farther-reaching activism. They tend to write books, run YouTube channels, speak on college campuses and public events, and they tend to be public figure is that many people know about. What I’m trying to get out of here is that the activism that any person is capable doing depends on their intelligence and their skills.

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It’s almost impossible to brainstorm and pioneer ideas solely by oneself these days, because the Internet, books, etc are always out there. It’s difficult to independently come up with things that nobody else has ever thought of, unless you burrow very deeply into things, ideas, and concepts that not many other people (if anyone else) thinks about. The rate of intellectual progress has slowed down.

However, not everybody has to be an original thinker to make important contributions. There’s also a lot of value in doing other things. Most critics are worthless. Rational legitimate criticism is a valuable thing.

• Information Bit Theory
• Industrial Society and Its Future: Some Principles of History

• Opposing Vectors System:

  Modern culture and current social dynamics can be modeled as a huge system of vectors arrayed against each other. Some vectors are logical/textual/ideological, but most of them are not. If one vector starts gaining more prominence, opposing vectors will eventually start pushing back. Sometimes, it’ll be enough to stop social change. Other times, some vectors will overpower the others.

Question: Which one is the most correct, and which ones are the best in different contexts?

Examples of ideologies more thing into less intelligent and less complex understandings of the world:

• Race Realism becoming Race idealism and Racism
• “Intelligence is mainly genetic” becoming IQ fetishizing or IQ obsessing
• Demographic equality morphing into woke propaganda and demographic quotas
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Effective propagandists have to understand what they’re doing. Most meme-posters aren’t posting propaganda to the normies to break down taboos. They’re posting propaganda to each other to feed each other’s delusions. It’s circular, and the meme-spergs become propaganda for the other side. e.g. the SJWs can say “Look at these stupid racists” and they’re right.

– Copy-Edited From Blithering Genius On Discord

Public intellectuals tend to be very mediocre, because if they have any original and important ideas, they threaten the status quo. It’s not just that they will be soft-censored by the establishment, it’s also that ordinary people want their intellectuals to be idea-free. They only want the appearance of intellect, not an actual intellectual. That’s why Hitchens was so popular, despite having no intellectual substance. Sam Harris has slightly more substance, but nothing that threatens the worldview of elites or most ordinary people. Atheism is threatening to religious people, but they don’t really matter. As long as you focus on Christianity, critiques of religion are well inside the Overton window.

– Copy-Edited From Blithering Genius On Discord

There’s a difference between comfortably doing that and knowing that you’re a fraud. Does Pinker know he’s a fraud? I don’t think so. Musk might. Krugman does. But not Pinker. I’m sure even Krugman has rationalizations about his many errors and lies. When you expose a normie’s hypocrisy, e.g. that they support illegal immigration but have locks on their doors, it bothers them. They don’t change their beliefs, but it bothers them. There is a cost to pay. If there was no cost to pay, nobody would vote.

– Copy-Edited From Blithering Genius On Discord

Potential political policies that seem likely to be widely debated within 20 years:

• Reforming age of consent laws to include age gaps.
• Ban on Factory farming.
• Ban on Embryo selection.
• Ban on AGI research.
• Deflation of higher education credentials.

See: The Modern Problems with Conformity.

Most people lack awareness about all the other problems in the world. Most people only have a small bubble of the world that they care about, stay updated about, and conduct activism about. Issues that happen outside of their tiny little corner of the world will never get their attention, even if it’d more logical for them to be aware about such issues and to care about them equally to what they’re mainly focused on.

See: Wikipedia: Language Barrier.

When most people think of the “language barrier”, they’re thinking of the hard language barrier. The soft language barrier is more inconspicuous since it’s more complex and difficult to understand. I’ve described it in: “Sapir-Whorf Theory: How Language Influences Thought”.

By contrast, the hard language barrier is fairly easy to understand. Complex ideas can’t spread between people who don’t share a common language. The hard language barrier matters more for activist movements when they are trying to do activism on a global scale, rather than a local one.

Multilingual countries are probably more aware of the hard language barrier than monolingual countries, e.g. the United States. Since many monolinguals are so used to being surrounded by other monolingual people and have no need to know other languages, they never consider that they could achieve greater impacts with translations and/or coordinating multilingual activists.

The ongoing Middle East Enlightenment is an example of inter-language translations that are having a positive effect on the Middle East. Classical Western works are being translated into Arabic, to help enlighten the Islamic World and help them go through their own Enlightenment, in favor of classical liberalism, democracy, individualism, and other Western ideas. There’s been some success with this.

Freedom of Speech and Why It is Important - Blithering Genius.

When there is sufficient social rationality, it is counterproductive to censor (irrational) ideas that the society would ignore anyway. When there is highly insufficient social nationality, censoring irrational ideas could make the society more rational. For example, in East Germany, most East Germans believed in Christianity in the late 1940s, but East German education and culture corrected this. By the late 80s, most East Germans were atheist.

The technology of the modern world also makes censorship easier than ever nowadays. This censorship may be obvious (e.g. getting banned on social media, removal of videos from YouTube, etc) or it may be less obvious (e.g. interfering or impairing the search results on YouTube and Google, automatic censorship, etc).

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

Generally speaking, most (peaceful) protests usually fail to achieve their intended outcomes. The political and social power of protesters is usually too diffuse to influence most powerful people’s decisions. Powerful people also don’t usually give up their power voluntarily, hence why protests don’t usually persuade them to do so.

There are some notable counter-examples (e.g. the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the George Floyd protests (mixed success), 2016 Icelandic anti-government protests), but even in such cases, it seems that their goals were likely to eventually be achieved anyway and/or that other factors made the protests largely unnecessary.

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Invasive Protesting Is Even Worse Than Regular Protesting
Let’s consider the 2023-2024 pro-Palestinian protesting and the associated tactics as an example:

Supposedly, the most successful outcomes that could arise from such protests is that even greater virtue-signaling happens to the point where enough public pressure is applied against the federal government to make them stop supporting Israel, but that’s not what happens.

The most important thing to remember is that these temper tantrums are too idiotic to be effective. They don’t hurt Israel in any way, nor do they help Hamas or Iran in any way. On the contrary, they rally people who support Israel to their cause.

More importantly for those of us not in Israel: they kill the brand of institutions which tolerate them. The leftist universities which allow this thuggery are losing credibility, and influence over Western society, with every headline you see about this. And that’s great news. Do stupid things, win stupid prizes.

Criticism is about engaging in logical arguments. Cancel culture is about bypassing the logical argument by attacking the people making the logical arguments. Cancel culture was created because the left cannot survive in the “free-market” of ideas.

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To some extent, cancel culture is not a new phenomenon, since boycotts have existed throughout history. Cancel culture is just more prevalent and notable nowadays since social media and historically unprecedented moral dogma (coupled by a loss in the power process) have amplified it. There are arguably two aspects to cancel culture:

• The canceling of historical figures who did something that is immoral nowadays (e.g. Christopher Columbus and the American Founding Fathers who owned slaves). I’d argue that this one is always counter-productive.
• The canceling of living people who did something that is immoral.

Canceling people who’ve done something bad can be “good” in many cases according to the Pragmatopian perspective (e.g. the #MeToo movement canceling rapists).

Canceling people who’ve said something objectionable could be used to lessen a person’s influence, which can be a “good” thing if we don’t like them (e.g. canceling Inmendham for speaking in favor of child porn). I dislike any influence that Inmendham has, but canceling him just for being in favor of child porn makes it harder to draw attention towards more rationalist critiques of his worldview. Like, I don’t believe we should condone child porn, but I also think it would be more productive to explain why Efilism is irrational or not uniquely rational. Ignoring Inmendham’s other arguments just because he supported child porn is either an Ad Hominem Fallacy or a Red Herring Fallacy.

Canceling Richard Stallman for having said inappropriate things or behavior may be good for condemning behavior that we don’t support. But I don’t think it makes sense to cancel someone who has been so important and influential for helping the Free Software Movement. It’s thanks to Stallman that we have the gcc compiler, GNU Emacs, GNU software, etc. In spite of all his personal flaws, he was probably the perfect guy to lead the Free Software Movement.

Other cancel culture attempts limit free speech, which hurts society. Canceling a person with relatively small influence will hurt them a lot, especially if it hurts their employment opportunities, whereas canceling someone who’s rich with a lot of influence may just relegate them to a normal middle-class NPC life. Cancel culture and the threat of it contribute to social isolation and why many people have fewer friends in society. Cancel culture is most effective in its objectives if it causes a person to be imprisoned or face heavy legal penalties. Other times, it doesn’t seem to hurt famous people in the long-run, especially if they have enormous influence, and if what they said/did was harmless enough for people to forget about it over time (e.g. Donald Trump and the Access Hollywood Tapes) So, one reason for the arguable ineffectiveness of cancel culture is that many (political) events just get memory-holed over time.

Doxxing an anonymous person’s in-real-life identity may cause them to get canceled and face serious consequences in real life. Cancel culture is one of the main reasons, and perhaps the biggest negative consequence of getting doxxed.

The Cons Of Cancel Culture

• A punishment proportional to the wrongdoing is not guaranteed to be done.
• Sometimes cancel culture punishes people who would be more appropriately punished by the legal system instead.
• Canceling historical figures for doing things that were acceptable during their time and culture but would not be acceptable by today’s point of view (ethical blindspots), even though they were otherwise good people who did great things overlooks the nature of our deterministic, cause-and-effect universe, while simultaneously x
• Accepting cancel culture has the potential to cancel ourselves in the future if the future society vehemently rejects us for having ethical blindspots in our present-day societies.
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Unfortunately, most people live in echo chambers nowadays due to the modern problems of conformity. From personal experience, I hypothesize that there are probably some receptive people who are trapped within in various echo chambers who are capable of escaping them if they are exposed to the truth. If we want to have an elevated chance of persuading those people (however few they may be), then we might need to try popping some bubbles and echo chambers for the greatest social outreach for our movement as possible. We may get censored for doing so, and it may not be worth the effort since the chances of persuading people is always so low. But it is something that could be tried.

If this strategy is attempted, it may be most effective to write essays and create videos for persuading people who are trapped such ideologies. It depends on how this method is done, what/which groups are being penetrated, etc. In most cases, this is probably an ineffective tactic.

There might be ways to make this tactic more effective, but I’m not sure what they would be. I think about this a lot, since I know that it’s a major barrier to activism. I used to believe that this is ought to be an effective strategy for that reason. But now I’m not so sure after gaining more personal experience and becoming more black-pilled. The black-pilled truth might be that there is no general, effective way to get around it.

Video: Social Media as Social Control - Luke Smith.

Every social platform and most political system effectively function akin to skinner boxes. They give people the illusion of believing that they’re free thinkers, when everybody’s information and thoughts are actually being constrained by the designs, censorship, and social nature of the platforms. This is both an obstacle to activism, as well as a leading cause of ineffective activism.

Most of the ideas that people come up with for fixing things like fixing the academy, raising the birth rate, boosting economic prosperity, etc, are ideas that seem to work within their frames of thinking. They don’t expand their frame of thinking to realize that it may not be necessary to have so many academics in the first place, a low birth rate could be okay, or there are actually deeper economic issues which caused the effects that were seeing. Most people don’t think on higher levels. And often times, they’ll only think about what benefits them personally, rather than what would benefit society the most as a whole.

They are only proud of their ideas because the ideas seem to give them moral superiority, not because they’re well-thought out. And if they think their ideas are well-thought out, it’s only because they haven’t thought enough, are just ignorant, or are too dumb to think more deeply. Some examples:

• People may say that politicians should lower taxes to boost economic growth, but they ignore that taxes can’t be low for everybody, especially when government spending is high, there is a high government deficit and government debt, and there were actually better ways to boost economic prosperity.
• People may also say that the country should do more fracking, but they ignore that the world has a finite oil supply, and that it would be better to stop relying so much on cars.
• People often say that Congress should get funding to this for that, but Congress wouldn’t need so much emergency relief funding for natural disasters in the first place if people would just stop building urbanizing and living near hurricane, flood, or earthquake prone areas. This would be easier to accomplish if Congress didn’t subsidize insurance for natural disasters, which is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

It’d be nice if we could have a society that fixes problems before they happen, instead of after they happen. Unfortunately, most people are only inclined to do the latter since the former option requires thinking on a much higher level than what most people can do. We live in a determinsitic, cause-and-effect universe. Since people have selective attentions, they tend to only focus on things after they happen. For most people, there has to be something that causes them to think about those problems in the first place.

It’s really stupid to create jobs for the sake of people having jobs. But what’s even dumber than that is when someone says that we should create jobs for the sake of people having jobs, and they complain about how work is necessary for a society to function.

Converting / Persuading people to a different ideology should be thought of as a numbers game. You probably won’t convince most people, but if you spread the ideas out to enough people, eventually you will have a large audience if the ideas are reasonable good, and there’s a decent supply of people who are particularly receptive to them.

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Common methods used for activism include:

• Community building
• Artivism
• Communities of practice
• Conflict transformation
• Cooperative
• Cooperative movement
• Craftivism
• Grassroots
• Guerrilla gardening
• Transition movement
• Lobbying
• Media activism
• Culture jamming
• Hacktivism
• Internet activism
• Peace activism
• Non-violent resistance
• Peace camps
• Peace vigil
• Moral purchasing
• Petition
• Political campaigning
• Propaganda
• Guerrilla communication
• Protest
• Boycott
• Demonstration
• Direct action
• Performance Theater
• Protest songs
• Sit-in
• Strike action
• Hunger strike

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

Video is a powerful medium. People respond to it emotionally and intuitively. Seeing is believing, so to speak.

A person viewing the George Floyd death video would naturally empathize with the dying black man who appeared to be begging for his life. They would naturally see him as a victim, and the man kneeling on his neck as an oppressor. The man kneeling on his neck was white, and he acted in a way that seemed cruel or indifferent. It was easy to interpret the event as an instance of “racist police brutality”, especially since (1) the video only showed the end of the encounter, and (2) people have been conditioned to believe the myth that blacks are unfairly targeted by racist police.

Video is an important type of evidence, but unfortunately it can be very misleading. You experience video as if you are experiencing the event yourself. Watching videos creates a false impression of direct knowledge, and that impression is subconscious. You feel that you know something by direct experience, when in fact you have acquired fake knowledge from fake experience.

The problems with video are amplified by mass media and social media. For a video to be propagated, it must engage our emotions. Our brains evolved to learn abstract general knowledge from the information of direct experience. Our brains did not evolve to process information from videos that have been cherry-picked to generate emotional reactions.

Direct experience is a good source of information about reality, or at least about the aspects of reality that you interact with. Fake experience is not a good source of information about reality. If we feed fake experience into our brains, we will acquire fake knowledge.

As a medium, video almost always gives us a biased sample of specific events. If you wanted to get an accurate view of police interactions with black people, you would have to watch an unbiased sample of videos of such interactions. If you watch 10,000 randomly selected videos of police interactions with black people, then you will have accurate knowledge about such interactions. If you only watch a few videos of such interactions, and those videos were cherry-picked to support a narrative, then you will have false knowledge, but you will feel very confident in that false knowledge.

For most things, including police interactions, it isn’t practical to watch 10,000 randomly selected videos, or even 100. Luckily, there is a better way to develop an accurate understanding of reality: statistics. If you look at statistics on police interactions, you can acquire accurate knowledge about them (as long as the statistics are accurate).

Unfortunately, most people aren’t very good at abstract thought. Many don’t even understand averages and percentages. They will care more about a single death captured on video than a million deaths in the abstract.

– Blithering Genius, “George Floyd and the Madness of Crowds”

Likewise, there are many reasons Muslims care more about Israel/Palestine than about Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs aside from the alleged hopelessness of the latter situation:

• Arabs are the same ethnicity and speak the same language as Palestinians.
• Arabs have lost several wars to Israel and consider this a “humiliation”.
• Israel is located at the heart of “Dar al-Islam”, the region of the world Muslims have traditionally ruled.
• Israel maintains control over the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, generally considered the third holiest site in Islam.2
• China prevents incriminating videos coming out of Xinjang, whereas we regularly see footage of Palestinian victims.

– Noah Carl, “A response to Richard Hanania on Arab militants”

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NOTE: Elaborate On This:

Even though a lot of people saw the George Floyd video that made them think that all cops are bad for intuition, the video of the cop who encountered Gabby Petito, and her boyfriend a couple weeks before her dad death was saw by millions of people which made some people realize that some cops are good people. So if the public has a negative impression of something from watching a video, then making a viral video that makes people think the officer that could help counteract the other video.

Preference Falsification seems related to astroturfing.

Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting a preference under perceived public pressures. It involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the underlying privately held preference (or simply, a public preference at odds with one’s private preference). People frequently convey to each other preferences that differ from what they would communicate privately under credible cover of anonymity (such as in opinion surveys to researchers or pollsters). Pollsters can use techniques such as list experiments to uncover preference falsification.

The term preference falsification was coined by Timur Kuran in a 1987 article, “Chameleon voters and public choice.” On controversial matters that induce preference falsification, he showed there, widely disliked policies may appear popular. The distribution of public preferences, which Kuran defines as public opinion, may differ greatly from private opinion, which is the distribution of private preferences known only to individuals themselves.

Kuran developed the implications of this observation in a 1995 book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. This book argues that preference falsification is not only ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. It provides a theory of how preference falsification shapes collective illusions, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Collective illusions is an occurrence when most people in a group go along with an idea or a preference that they don’t agree with, because they incorrectly believe that most people in the group agree with it.

– Wikipedia: Preference Falsification.

The Population Bomb was published by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, and The Limits to Growth was published by Donella Meadows in 1972. These two books caused a lot of people to worry about overpopulation, until public support declined for multiple misguided reasons.

The Selfish Gene was published by Richard Dawkins in 1976. Unfortunately, it is largely responsible for making a majority of educated people (especially people who are educated about biology) believe in kin altruism. Although Blithering Genius released a response book, Debunking the Selfish Gene, in December 2022, it is so far failing to become popular. More could be done to promote its popularity, but the window for changing people’s minds on this may be too late. It doesn’t seem as if there’s enough time to promote selfishness before the collapse happens.

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick was released in 1989. It shaped how a lot of people think about Chaos Theory.

The Bell Curve was published by Charles Murray in 1993. It promoted a lot of discussion about innate differences in intelligence.

Hypothetically, future landmark books may be able to shape public opinion. However, this will probably be harder to do in the Internet Age.

Related: When Will The Race Taboo Disappear?: Somebody needs to write the Magnum Opus - Seb Jen.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

How to Litigate the Left-wing Riots - James Weitz

The Right is wasting opportunities to bankrupt left-wing organizations that train or encourage protesters to commit crimes, including blocking traffic, that result in injuries to third parties.

Each political faction, e.g. environmentalism, has different jobs within it. Just like each army whether American or Russian has different jobs within it. A hot woman holding <ideology> flag is a very obvious role. Just like how Kiara holding a Communist flag gives a lot of power to the Communist ideology faction for spreading its influence. Or Lauren Chen and Lauren Southern bringing power to right-wing groups.

Reagan once gave a speech in 1980 that fooled people into thinking he didn’t use a teleprompter. It impressed a lot of people. Obama was nothing without his teleprompter.

Bloggers can avoid getting negative comments on their blogs if they do not share their blogs or places to receive overwhelmingly negative and unproductive comments. Besides avoiding notifying a user multiple times, another reason why it’s better to edit existing reddit comments than to make multiple comments is that it could give dissenters and idiots multiple opportunities to downvote your comments, which would decrease your karma faster.

See: Sapir-Whorf Theory: How Language Influences Thought.

See: Thoughts On Democracy: Big Tent Strategy.

For years, the McDonald’s restaurant chain had been under pressure from environmentalists to serve meals in something greener than the polystyrene clamshell. Suppose McDonald’s had decided unilaterally one day to make the switch. “This is an example of our deep environmental commitment,” the company spokesperson might have announced. “Paint the Golden Arches green!” As always happens when companies claim credit this way, the activists would have been furious and the public would have been skeptical.

Instead of following the typical course, McDonald’s entered into negotiations with the Environmental Defense Fund (now called Environmental Defense). They negotiated an agreement under which McDonald’s committed itself to abandon polystyrene, and EDF committed itself to police the switch, to hold the company accountable. At their joint announcement, the McDonald’s spokesperson said relatively little, while the EDF spokesperson called it a victory for the environmental movement. When reporters asked the McDonald’s rep if he agreed that this was a victory for environmentalists over his company, he said – the words almost catching in his throat – “yes.” Others at the company let it be known that they weren’t even sure the switch was environmentally desirable. But they were sure that environmental groups and the majority of customers wanted them to switch, and McDonald’s intended to respond to their demands.

The result: Environmental groups that might otherwise have attacked the change as too little too late, as more symbolic than real, as “greenmail,” took credit for it instead. More than a decade later, McDonald’s still ranks high on lists of environmentally responsible companies.

– Peter Sandman, “Accountability and Credit”

At the beginning of each year, the Idaho State Government passes “new” educational laws to make it seem as if the Idaho State government is actively trying to improve public education for Idahoans. This gets a lot of publicity in state and local news outlets, and it has the effect of making most (likely) voters believe that the government is doing what it can to enforce good educational standards.

In reality, the “new” legislation is actually almost exactly the same as the old legislation, with just a few unimportant words changed here and there, so that the government can have plausible deniability that they aren’t actually changing anything. Replacing the old legislation with the same legislation as before doesn’t help anyone, although it does improve the public image of the Idaho State government, especially if nobody notices, which tends to happen when there’s no major publicity to point out how the new and old legislation are actually the same. I know someone who worked for the Idaho State Government who told me about this, but they could not make a public statement about this, for confidentiality reasons.

I’m sure that many other governments probably use a similar tactic, so that they create news headlines to make the public believe that they are serious about improving the public’s well-being. Sometimes, there’s actually not much of anything that can be done to improve some issues. Other times, there are effective reforms that could be implemented, but they never get implemented since they don’t have the support of the naive, ignorant people.

From the public’s perspective, a good way to prevent this from happening and unfairly benefiting the incumbent government would be to require all legislation to be written in a formal language. Any time changes are made to existing legislation, a program could compare the two legislation documents and summarize the differences.

In the video, Right-to-repair signed into law in Minnesota - we won! - Louis Rossmann, the narrator said that the manufacturers hate it when each state has different laws. So, when his proposed law is rejected in one state, he simply tries to pass it in another state.

The theory is that if you even get even one state to pass a right-to-repair law (even some nobody state, like Alaska), then it would be really expensive for a business to satisfy that state separately from the rest of the country. Thus, they would essentially be forced into de facto satisfying state legislation or product warnings nationwide. For example, the “this product has carcinogens” warning for Californian residents is displayed to product consumers in every state, not just California. The mind share of the Californian warning is huge. Everyone recognizes it.

Hypothetically, every iPhone could be legally required to display warning messages, similar to tobacco packaging warnings, e.g. “This product contains components known to the state of Alaska to be anti-right-to-repair”. Even better, if a second state, (e.g. Hawaii) passed similar legislation, then business would have to reprint all the labels. If consumers saw the change and reacted “Woah, now it’s known to the states of Alaska and Hawaii?”, then they might start to think more about what they buy.

Besides right-to-repair and harmful substances/components, this tactic could also be effective if companies were required to list the resource and environmental impacts of their products, which could help raise environmental awareness.

Endorsements can help any activist, but they usually aren’t something that the activists can control themselves. Whether or not activists get important endorsements tends to how well their ideas are able to appeal to people with power or influence.

When people (especially politicians) endorse a candidate who is running for political office (e.g. endorsing Trump for president of the United States), sometimes they’re doing so not so much to voice support the candidate (if at all), but moreso to virtue signal to people and their voters about their political positions and supposed beliefs. Many Republican congressmen actually hate Donald Trump, but they still endorse him anyway because they know that that’s what a majority of their voters and constituents would favor.

Hypothetically, any activist organization or political candidate could buy and endorsements. However, I would be skeptical of any organization that does that. Buying endorsements isn’t genuine support, is questionable and suspicious, is arguably a waste of campaign or donation money, and it can also indicate dishonesty and corruption.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

See: The Will to Power or the Will to LARP?.

The key to opening the Overton Window is to have good arguments and present ourselves as reasonable, intelligent people acting in good faith. This is the best way to fight the Culture War.

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas – Carl Sagan

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. – Buckminster Fuller

We’ll need to fundamentally change the frame of assumptions, in order for the rest of the public to start creating original, innovative ideas.

People will need to feel the consequences of modernity’s delusions, before they can recognize the solutions. We need something akin to Eastern Europe’s aversion to Communism.

Is there anyway to make the humanist worldview purity spiral so much until humanism themselves reject it since there is no longer coherent with reality? This would be similar to how I spiraled so much that I rejected anarcho-capitalism. Maybe after global oil depletion and the maximum inflation and the debt defaults, perhaps the humanist may realize that something is wrong once they realize that’s not possible to text the rich forever too pay off the debt or use resources sustainably.

Like, what would Blithering Genius say that humanity should’ve done before the World Wars, before the Great Depression, or other notable turning points in history?

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Blithering Genius has multiple essays where he stresses how people and life in general our selfish. However, two of the most important essays that stress the importance cooperation and nuance on this topic are: “Game Theory And Society” and “Family And Society”. They explain that life is cooperative because it is selfish, and how cooperation and selfishness actually go together, rather than against each other. These are important, since the knee-jerk reaction to “humans are selfish” is often “okay, but why should we care about others?”

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Because traditional religions are incapable of solving the problems of modernity. Christianity doesn’t have any solutions for promoting reproduction, preventing mass immigration, preventing overpopulation, preventing mass delusions, etc. See the “Can Christianity Save Us?” chapter from Lucifer’s Question for more detail. It’s also irrational to support religion as a means to an end, especially if you don’t actually agree with its beliefs. It doesn’t matter that Rational Humanism is unproven. If it’s more reasonable than all other proposals, then we should try it out because it’s the most likely to succeed.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

Much of the black pill is about realizing that the potential set or pool of people that we’d actually want to communicate with isn’t very large. I personally want to believe that there’s a lot of people who just don’t have the right knowledge for figuring out the Truth. Due to the experiences that I had before and when I had first discovered Blithering Genius’s content, I want to believe that there are still many others out there that are similar to me that just need the right spark, before they adopt and build upon a similar worldview.

Maybe I could become black-pilled and gain a more realistic perception of how unlikely I am to persuade people if I recognize that most people are Normies and idiots and that culture is mainly created by Normies and idiots. Normies and idiots are mainly the way they are due to genes. So, trying to persuade someone of pragmatopian/pragmatospherian ideas is futile because you cannot change a person’s genes. So, it’s not worth trying, and it will almost certainly be a waste of the time for ~98-99-100% of people and on ~95% of attempts.

Not only is it a complete waste of time to debate topics with people who are too unintelligent (too low IQ) to understand them, but it’s also waste of time because they will assume ideas about my beliefs and positions since they won’t bother reading everything that I’ve written beforehand to understand my positions better. Simply put, my positions and beliefs are too different from the average normie to effectively debate anything because they don’t bother to read everything first, and they can’t be forced to.

The amount of intelligent life out there that would ever be interested in most of the ideas that we write about is probably really low.

Most people literally believe that the truth is evil, hence why most people reject it. Or they believe that the implications of the truth are evil.

Pushing and pulling values onto other people:

• People like people who help them satisfy their values or their delusions.
• At the same time, people hate people who try to push their values onto them.
• Unfortunately, the values that most people have are not aligned with the values of a rational and sustainable civilization.
• Hence people hate ideas that would make society more sustainable, since those ideas do not align with what they think would be best for society, due to their delusions.

Regarding YouTube videos, it becomes clear why a Pragmatopian YouTube channel is unlikely ever be widely popular or successful. Such as a channel would be advocating for values that most people don’t want. People are only going to listen to YouTubers that say what they want to hear, or things that will reaffirm the values that they already have. In order for such a YouTube channel to be wildly successful, it might have to somehow trick people into hearing what they want to hear. But it must do so slowly to make people overcome their delusions, while subconsciously implanting ideas and values into the irrational unthinking normie masses.

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As hopeless as it may be, I still believe that there are many reasons why we should be somewhat optimistic, and why there is still hope that we can still persuade a sizable people. It is true that we will probably never persuade most people, but we have to keep trying anyway because a global civilization collapse is unrecoverable and extremely undesirable.

I believe that any number of people that we can convince is a positive win, especially if the people that we convince have power to do actions that will positively benefit society, slow down the collapse, or even prevent the collapse. Convincing any possible number of people of any good ideas if you can is a good idea because it’s about making the best of a shitty situation. The more people we can convince, the more likely it is that we can persuade everybody to travel, congregate, and create a community of like-minded people who could withstand any foreign threats or create a functional community that could potentially outlast the collapse of civilization.

Of course, this would require people who specialize in many different professions. For example, having people who specialize in nuclear reactors to keep eternal or basically eternal energy source forever. We also need people who specialize in all the different branches of engineering, people who specialize in education, legal systems, and essentially any specialization they require an intellectual and higher IQ mind. NOTE: Elaborate more on these thoughts, if you think of anything.

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I also believe that there are many things to be hopeful, as of 2024 July 2. For example, I believe that Trump winning the election will probably be better than Biden winning the election in most regards, aside from how he would support Ukraine less against Russia, and how he’d expand fracking to increase the inefficient use and depletion rate of the world’s natural resources, and maybe a handful of other things. But overall, I believe that a Trump presidency and deep state would probably be better than four more years of Biden and the Democrat deep state, even if he doesn’t do too many considerable improvements to the current condition.

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I also still believe that there are many people that we have the potential to reach out towards. There are still many people out there who have never heard of ideas of Blithering Genius and Zero Contractions. Many of them may initially be skeptical of some of the content, like I initially was back in late 2021, but if we can figure out a way to effectively advertise these ideas and spread them to as many people as possible, that would still improve the condition to some extent, especially if we could get one, two, or a few more notable intellectual thinkers on our side to spread our ideas among the public much wider than we can.

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Additionally, the ideas of Blithering Genius, Zero Contradictions, and the rest of the Pragmatosphere are only written in English. The language barrier is another great obstacle to spreading our ideas that we will have to overcome in order to spread our ideas to even more followers. There are still many other languages that we should translate these ideas into in order to mass more support and gain a greater chance of persuading more people towards our cause.

Of course, we are lucky that most of the world’s smartest people speak and use English, so our writings are available in the world’s most popular language with the most intelligent population. We are also lucky that the more intelligent people of any society tend to be more likely to learn and speak English than languages. The advancement of AI translation of many different languages will also reduce the language barrier, but it still won’t be enough for optimal activism. Search engines still favor webpages that are written specifically for the search user’s preferred language, rather than being available in only one language and unavailable in others without the assistance of AI translation.

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We won’t need to convince 100% of humanity to steer society away from global collapse. For that matter, we may not even need to persuade 100% of countries to join our movement. Of course, the people that we were the best chance at persuading are going to be people from the highest IQ countries. And within those countries, we don’t have to persuade 100% them. If we could persuade anywhere between 20 to 80% of the public to accept these ideas, then that would can be a sufficient political force to do real changes that could positively affect the destiny and future of humanity.

We can get away with persuading lower percentages of the public if we manage to attract people with more power to our side. On the other hand, if we attract mostly people with comparatively less power, then we will need to persuade much more of the population, hence the persuasion percentage range of 20 to 80%. The power of the people is very diffuse, but any number of people that we can get onto our side is still a positive benefit for our movement.

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Additionally, the outlook on Western fertility rates currently seems grim, with the Great Replacement ongoing. White people in the West are gradually being replaced by less intelligent and less individualist demographics who are less likely to fix modern civilization. Nevertheless, after several decades or so, there might be a rebound in favor of more conservative-minded individuals who are more likely to support right-wing policies rather than detrimental left-wing policies.

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Encouraging the most intelligent members of our community to donate sperm and their gametes will also have positive contributions. Of course, only a small percentage of the children born every year are born to sperm donation, but again if we can get hundreds or thousands of babies who are more likely to have intelligent genes, that is still a positive benefit for our movement.

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I also suspect that we may have better chances of persuading more people, as humanism and other delusions continue to break down, and as it becomes more and more evident that these ideologies cannot accurately predict or fix the future. As people continue to lose hope in critical things like democracy, dating, altruistic beliefs, and other humanist causes, there may be more potential to persuade hopeless and disillusion people towards a more Social Darwinist and Pragmatopian worldview. Of course, we unfortunately cannot count on this, since changing demographics over the next few decades will cause more people to have genetics that are less likely to see through all the bullshit and finally accept more of the hard truths. Eventually all the (humanist) gaslighting will finally run out of gas to burn.

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Once the scale of technology and civilization both decline, people will have to deal with lower standard of living. People will have to spend more time doing household chores, and less time watching TV shows, movies, and video games. People spent more time doing homemaking tasks before new household technologies were popularized in the 1960s and the 1920s, because the new innovations freed up people’s time to do other things.

If people watched fewer movies, TV shows, or video games, then society would probably become less deluded. And honestly, I would rather live under a society where most people did more housework, rather than filling their minds with fake knowledge that doesn’t describe how reality actually works. Perhaps if society collapses, and when people have to do more labor on a daily basis to sustain themselves, they’ll watch fewer television, movies, and video games, which could make people think more rationally about the world. So that’s another feature that could help fix society and its culture, as we get closer to the event horizon of the collapse. If we’re lucky, this could help prevent a worse and irreversible collapse from progressing, and maybe even reverse it.

Note: Before the mid 1900s, people had to be familiar with classic Roman and Greek history, myths, and literature to appear educated while socialized or have high status or whatever. As mass media boomed, and the Hollywood film and video game industries took off, people started polluting their minds with fake information instead.

Question: What else could society do to get people to fill their minds with less fake knowledge?

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If we don’t try (to persuade people), then we’re all going to die from the collapse of our civilization and its consequences. More laconically: If we don’t try, then we’re all going to die. More laconically: If we don’t try, then our civilization is going to die.

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