iambiguous:
If the question is, “who now occupies the Oval Office as president of the United States”? and John says Joe Biden and Jim says Donald Trump and Jane says Hillary Clinton and Jean says Barack Obama, I would not argue it “all works out” if we agree to accept that all of us as individuals are allowed to have our own answers to questions like this. Our own private, personal answers to questions that revolve around actual empirical facts, or mathematics, or the laws of nature or the rules of logic.
Imagine human interactions if that were the case?!
Imagine instead, however, that the question is, “Is Joe Biden doing a good job in the Oval Office as president of the United States?”
Yes, the facts of war are facts.
And you represent a side in a war.
Your position boils down to “and about your personal opinions, I don’t give a fuck.”
That’s fine.
But here, in the realm of opinions beyond the facts of war, we can be given to discussing the niceties of the inconsequential.
For example, your rhetorical position v your actual position, and how they both draw a picture or not of a pathology
Your actual position: communist. We can agree on that.
Your rhetorical position: dasein existentialist. Ah. Here we have something to dig our teeth into.
What does this (rhetorical) position entail? An infranqueable contradiction: that no intellectual position is tenable. But this, of course, is an intellectual position. And, when push comes to shove, you do come down one way or another on specific issues, like abortion: not only must it be allowed, but government resources must be utilized in promoting it. More interestingly, the position has a name: dasein. Now, dasein is literally a position proposed by a famous intellectual.
So, the anti-intellectualist holds an intellectualist position. That the position itself holds that no intellectual position can be held, does not change the fact that it itself is an intellectual position, a position arrived at intellectually.
But here is the truly interesting part: why? Why even bother? Why the disinformation campaign?
Aside from its obvious political uses, essentially to convince anybody without a strong intellectual backbone that it is useless to think about anything and better to go with the (communist) flow, because it’s not like ilp is a hotbed of opinion-making for the world, we can perhaps find a pathological explanation.
So you are an intellectualist. This has been established. And your position is communism. But communism is one of the trashiest, most easily destructible intellectual positions ever created. It is so full of holes and idiocies that any high-schooler can show you what is wrong with it, if he dedicates 5 or 10 good minutes to it. Ah, but you are no idiot, and you still hold to it. Why? Obviously it cannot be its intellectual worth, which is as close to zero as a university graduate has produced. It is, of course, a pre-intellectual pathological need. Communism checks many boxes: belonging, destruction of the self, a self which is disliked, revenge. These are not rational feelings, you do belong to several layers of several groups, you do like yourself, there is nobody attacking you. But, at some point along the line, something very heavy triggered those feelings, and communism was readily available as an instant response. Being a fairly smart guy and trained thinker, you see, clearly, the poor quality of its value. But it is far more important to you than any intellectual accomplishment, not rationally, but pathologically. So you concoct a riddle. The purpose of this riddle is for the fact of this intellectual inconsistency, and the feeling of weakness it was conjured to address, to not be looked at. Thus, the riddle cannot be solvable. If it is solvable, the original problem must, or will, again be looked at. The original problem has already been solved in the pathological mind, you know the actual worth of communism intellectually, and you know the feeling of weakness it addresses. There is nothing there to solve, either, for the opposite reason. It is for this reason that the riddle, the position, the dasein, is evidently self-contradicting. This structural self-contradiction is what will guarantee its insolvability. Some additional resources will be taken to in order to keep it operational, like heavy insulting of anybody that starts grabbing on to the contradictory aspect, so that in making it about the relative personal worths of each, the problem of the contradiction can hopefully be made to fade into the background. It is never tricky, never difficult, for there is no actual riddle. If the contradiction is approached, anything can be used to fend off, there is no actual path within it back to the contradiction.
