John C Wright, the amazing Castalia House author who everyone is raving about lately, (and whose new book, The Book of Feasts & Seasons, with an amazing 4.9 Amazon rating,, is available at the Castalia House Store for only $4.99), has given this site some much appreciated linkage recently.
In one post though, he pointed out that he felt the work here was incomplete, because it didn’t deal with the spiritual. He is correct, of course. If you meet pure evil, face to face, you will realize that there is clearly something much deeper than a mere mechanism, which happens to produce evil as a byproduct of some other purpose. As one examines evil up close, the only answer which really makes sense is that the evil are soldiers, with a mission, serving some authority. They will sacrifice their own interests, destroy their own lives, and fall on their own swords, in a genuinely selfless pursuit of their evil purposes. They will even do evil when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no sense to it. Their evil mechanism is so self-sacrificial that it seems the type of thing which nature would eliminate over time. He is right about the spiritual lacking here, and I encourage others to not mistake its absence here for some endorsement of a non-spiritual world model.
One part of his response I take issue with however, is his assertion that the rabbits hate him because he exposes them to truth. A proper explanation of this touches on the spiritual, in part because a full understanding of the rabbit’s hate offers a window into the same hatred satan holds for the good.
In short, the rabbits do not so much hate John, as they hold him in contempt. Hate is more of a visceral rejection of some moral or emotional aspect of something. Hate can be applied to anything – you can hate a beggar or hate a King. Contempt carries with it a subtle air of rejecting something due to inferiority or weakness. Hate is a raw emotion that you express without regard to your enemy’s status. Contempt is reserved, solely for the weak, whom you can afford to hold in contempt, and it is most often expressed by cowards who only attack their lessers, and who hold little in regard beyond their own immediate safety.
Rabbits have contempt for John because he is kind, rational, and compasionate, and they see that all as weakness. The rabbits dislike John because he is a man who challenges the falsehoods they need to quiet their amygdala. However it is only because his goodness renders him harmless, that this dislike manifests as contempt. The real source of the rabbit’s hatred of John is his tolerance of them – the very quality they claim so ardently to espouse and champion, but which they only use to infiltrate and corrupt any organization too tolerant to reject them.
If John C. Wright took over the leadership of a violent neo-Nazi organization, and then began freely targeting those who insulted him with torture and death, that would be the moment that the rabbits would self-examine their own behavior, conclude they had been in error, and promptly alter their thoughts and behaviors to align with John’s. Immediately their contempt would transform into embrace and admiration, and they would soon champion whatever he espoused. I suspect the most avowed Nazi’s were rabbits, who gladly killed millions of women and children for daring to challenge their rabbit-think of the time. Just look at the SJW’s today, and you will see the most hateful Nazi of old.
To look at it more technically, were John C. Wright to gain the reputation of a violent slayer of leftists, that would instantly create a special set of two amygdala-stimulating circumstances in the rabbit, which could only be shut off simultaneously one way.
The first amygdala stimulant would be John’s assertion of truth, which the lie-loving rabbit would feel, as it triggered cognitive dissonance in their mind, and their amygdala began to fire up. They would become uncomfortable, and that would need remediation. Rabbits do not tolerate adversity well, even adversity wholly conjured in the ephemeral realm of the mind.
Option one to alleviate this dissonance, is to attack John and force him to agree with them, but if John is the rabbit-slayer, that would bring about a Larry Correia-sized pile of dead rabbits, and even the dumbest rabbit would see that such an attack on John would increase their amygdala stimulation several fold. Option two would be to alter their own rabbit thoughts, in such a way as to agree with John. This would alleviate that uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, as it brought their thoughts into alignment with John’s, and it would not offer them amygdala stimulation in any other form, either.
If the alternative is a violent end, the rabbit will alter their thoughts, and like any good Stockholm-Syndrome victim, they will suddenly find themselves agreeing vociferously with their suddenly-former enemy. The extent of their advocacy would actually become an amygdala relaxant, as the more extreme their agreement is, the less risk of harm they would face. Think of that as a cognitive version of the old saying, if you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, then bring the mountain to Mohammed. If the rabbit can’t alter John’s thoughts to quiet his amygdala, then it will alter its own thoughts to comport with John’s. Rabbits need the entire herd going in the same direction they are. If it is they who must change course to keep their amygdala assuaged, so be it.
There is of course, an interesting insight in there. Leftists have no true free agency, because they have no ability to tolerate any truth which requires simultaneous tolerance of adversity. They do not choose right, but rather choose to avoid being brained by the biggest violent threat, who by application of threat, cows them. They choose not what is correct or moral, but rather choose selfishness, cowardice, and ease.
You will see this this lack of free agency now, as police begin to realize that those whom the rabbits have been riling, are suddenly killing cops. Even the mere possibility that the police may begin to turn on the leftists, has begun to make the rabbits suddenly change course. Are these rabbits suddenly good, civilized people? Did they suddenly find their way to a righteous conclusion, through logic and morals? Of course not. They are the same idiots publishing the home address of the police officer who shot Michael Brown in the NY Times, only now they are afraid for their own safety. The most noteworthy thing about it is that it takes so little threat as a Police Officer’s raised eyebrow, to cow them back into ranks of the seemingly civilized. Their amygdalae are exceedingly sensitive.
Most interestingly, if given the apparent option of free agency by any absence of threat, the rabbits choose wrongly, in a most predictable fashion. Which brings you back to the spiritual. If they only respond to threat, then what is the threat driving them to consistently choose wrongly, if no other worldly threat is applied? If the rabbit has no free agency, (and it appears they do not) then given the consistency of their choices, they must have allegiance to something which requires they choose wrongly, in the absence of threat. Why do they lean toward the darkness?
The interesting thing is, if one examines it long enough, it is very tempting to conclude that we must merely apply threat and force to the left, and make them choose right. Since the evil are so easily cowed, why not be the Grand Inquisitor, and force all men to choose good? The good were going to choose good anyway, and if the rabbits have no free agency, then why let them choose wrongly? This of course, was satan’s position, and at times, I find myself irritated to the point that I’d enjoy seeing the rabbits beneath our boots myself.
Which brings us back to John C Wright. He, and the other good men of the world, never actually choose to create a world that cows the rabbits into slavery, even slavery for good, and therein lies the root of the problems which crop up when the rabbits approach their apex. Whoever forces the left’s hand it seems, whether lucifer or man, will always be the most evil and ruthless the leftists happen across.
Rabbits are merely an intellectual slave race, gladly whipped into evil by the most cruel they encounter, and always eager to serve the most vile among us, if only the vile will threaten them. They are satan’s minions, designed as little more than a foil for the good men of the world. As you examine their position, you can come back around to God’s view, however.
If it is weakness which produces the contempt of the left, it is a recognition of the rabbit’s patheity which will produce sympathy among us. Who could ever wish such a waste upon anyone? The rabbit, given a precious life, sees it spent lacking freedom, enslaved by evil, and unable to accomplish anything of merit, beyond frightfully nipping at the ankles of the great men who forge God’s history and mankind’s legacy. It ids a pathetic fate to be doomed to, which can only be rendered less pathetic and more just, if they are allowed to choose it themselves.
God is after all, just.
Rabbits hate the Rule of Law, yet they will refrain from evil (theft/murder) if the punishment is swift and sure. When all is relative, these people are lost, drifting with no purpose. One would think that having hard and Just guidelines (negative law) would be beneficial to this type of mind, like a hyperactive kid under tight control. The big bind is that they have no ability to see it, until it is too late.
And too late is just around the corner!
Suppose that there is this predator that destroys Leftists en-masse, and the Bunnies adapt their thinking to coincide with the predator in the hopes that he will leave them alone, but he doesn’t? What would be their recourse if Option 1 or 2 does not work?
I’d say flee, hide, or turn the wolves on some other group. But the thing is rabbits don’t have to all survive K-selection for their strategy to work. All it takes is a few who can hold out until resources again become freely available, and they can multiply up. This is very much a big-picture game for the genes involved.
I imagine that my question is purely hypothetical, though. I don’t think the bunnies have ever faced a threat that isn’t fooled by their acquiescence before. Have they ever faced such a threat?
Mostly other rabbits who were wielding the wolves, ironically. I think comfort can rabbitfy even many K-strategists. Solzhenitsyn wrote of burning in the camps, and how they deserved everything which came because they didn’t choose to fight to the death with the Communist agents when they came to take them away. I’d say the Jews of Nazi Germany were pacified by wealth, to the point that when the Nazi’s decided to kill them all, they just blanked out, and let themselves be rounded up and killed. It happens.
I expect we will see a case of it or two when Europe begins its nationalist phase soon. Rabbits will either take the side of the nationalists, or join with the enemy. I don’t think they will be allowed to sit on the fence, especially after bringing in all the Muslims. It would be as if Chamberlain had created Hitler, placed him in a position of power, and then tried to stop Britain from containing him, right up until he was killing Brits. After the war, it will hard to see the rabbits as anything but a danger to future peace, and I expect a few nationalists will decide to eliminate them as a threat before they create a new war to replace the one just finished.
Not exactly on topic, but I encountered an article by a lefty that sees aspects of your dichotomy but takes it in a different direction. Example:
“The flip side of heightened threat bias may not be as sharply defined, as Hibbing notes, but a relative freedom from fear clearly allows for a greater willingness to explore, less fear of others and the unknown, heightened curiosity, a propensity to innovate, etc.— all aspects of the Big Five trait of ‘openness to new experiences,’ identified with liberalism, as noted above. It allows for other aspects of liberalism to flourish as well, particularly a greater capacity for complexity of thought and self-reflection that comes with greater cognitive development—development that’s more favored by decreasing fear. As the world becomes a safer place overall with the advance of civilization, these liberal traits, bringing more deliberation and less impulsive action, are less likely to incur dangerous consequences, which means they have less of a social cost, even as their potential benefits rise.”
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/02/fox_news_has_nothing_but_fear_heres_how_we_fight_back_against_lies_and_win/
I’m curious what your take is. I see lots of denial at work, but it’s still interesting to see a lefty explicitly argue in favor of seeing the world like a rabbit.
Hey Martel,
To them, their view makes sense. I can’t criticize them, though. I dealt with a narcissist who was on a totally different plane than I was, and for years I was totally clueless to the rules of that relationship. I know what it is to be the idiot, and look back at how stupid I was.
As an example, I saw this on FR a few days back. I googled the quote, and it appears genuine. (Eds note, just found a site sourcing it to a satire site, but still, it does accurately represent the leftist, anti-gun view.)
To the leftist, the world is harmless, people want to avoid conflict, and you are best served not worrying about risk. It is a very deeply imbued, fundamental form of cognitive programming, designed to relentlessly seek out and pursue that world. If you accept those givens, then yes, Conservatism is bad and unpleasant, and everyone should spend their days navel-gazing. The model of human produced by ignoring threat is superior. If gunmen will lay down their guns and turn themselves in, then why would anyone carry a gun, or even consider fighting.
What they seem unwilling to contemplate is that humans may be well served to heed the instincts bred into us. I think they fear everything associated with that, because embracing it means the world is becoming K-selected, which is bad for them, and unpleasant in a way we cannot imagine. I strongly suspect that in ancient times, evolution programmed the un-adaptable rabbits to flee K-selection and migrate outward, by imbuing them with a terror at the mere thought of K-selection. Today that programming makes them intellectually flee from it, and construct models designed to tell themselves that avoiding it is not only pleasant, but intellectually and morally superior as well.
As r/K takes over the field, you will see that type of thing disappear, because the people who offer it will move elsewhere, to avoid running into r/K. I haven’t heard anything from Jost on the subject in a while, so I assume he is moving into other areas.
The real strength of r/K is not that it is partisan, but that it explains the divide from both sides, and shows the benefit of each side. Once that is laid out, the rabbit has to accept that K might be, in some way superior, which is an amygdala trigger their brain can’t tolerate. It will drive them from the debate.
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