The meta-narrative and it’s priests must be preserved from danger, discomfort and labor.

Or the Furry Ones will come…

If this relates even tangentially, I was thinking about setting up “New Lyceum”. It has all the correct aesthetic, connected to dear Pericles? Aristotle comes later…. However I need to produce the correct template format that I can hand off to people so we can run our own robust groups in real life. It will be a grab bag of aesthetic, actual/fruitful discussion topics and to need to get to work, a NRx family pet, and a prototyping of minimum finances to run the group with some heart, charisma, and believing in the dream.

If people in the middle east can be convinced to blow themselves up, I’m sure I can get people to study probabiliy, heuristics & biases, opsec, history, & career focus, + exercise.

Note: not Plato, specifically them.

However as it stands I am not ready. But this *will* happen. I hope we keep the non-moral highground as I’m not…. Pericles, I am a SanguineEmpiricist. After I am done prototyping i’ll hand it off so people can run their own stuff.

Thoughts? Our own little robust groups & sessions would go one hell of a way.

I will +1 this, but I hope that this was a foregone conclusion to most.

‘To the liberal social theorists, we say: You have not understood the
difference between natural hierarchy and pathological hierarchy, and
thus in your understandable zeal to erase the latter, you have de-
stroyed the former: you have tossed the baby with the bathwater.
Value ranking-hierarchy in the broadest sense-is inescapable in
human endeavors, simply because we are all holons: contexts within
contexts forever, and each broader context pronounces judgment on
its less encompassing contexts. And thus, even when the egalitarian
social theorists assert their rejection of hierarchy, they do so using
hierarchical judgments: they assert that nonranking is better than
ranking. Well, that’s a hierarchical judgment, which puts them in the
embarrassing position of contradicting themselves, of secretly em-
bracing that which they vocally condemn. They have a hierarchy that
denies hierarchy, a ranking that hates ranking.
What they are trying to do, of course, is get rid of pathological
hierarchies, and in this endeavor I believe we can all follow them. But
the only way to get rid of pathological hierarchy is by embracing
normal and natural hierarchy-that is, embracing normal holarchy,
which integrates the arrogant holon back into its rightful place in a
mutual reciprocity of care and communion and compassion. But
without holarchy you have heaps, not wholes, and no integration is
possible at all. ‘

I wouldn’t say that we need a miracle. Deus ex machina doesn’t exist for people like us in the real world. It’s more than likely that simply waiting for favorable progress will result in (a) the further entrenchment of the Cathedral, especially given demographic trends, or (b) any number of catastrophic scenarios, such as Nick Bostrom’s unfriendly AI calling the shots, runaway nano-assemblers covering this world in grey ooze, nuclear war, and so on. The sudden rise of NRx looks rather less likely.

With all that said, we should do everything we can to better our position in a practical way. This first means analysis: Looking at strategies for ‘exit’ in a meaningful way. It also means outreach.

It’s possible that with improved brain computer interfaces, nanomedicine, life-extension research, cognitive neuroscience research leading to improved nootropics, and so forth, we’ll soon have a two-tiered society: An enhanced overclass, and an unenhanced underclass. If this is diffuse enough, and I think that it might be, it could in itself present an opportunity for NRx growth and outreach. More, and more inherently capable, elites — and suddenly far less prone to populist sympathies!

Will comment again tonight, but morning is needed to unfog…

Or, we can become organic: a truth symbolized indirectly that reveals more of itself to those with capacity and experience to understand it.

The modern time is replete with examples of people not understanding what they read, but using it as a basis for their arguments nonetheless.

We don’t need to do anything except keep existing and worrying about patching our own faults. When an Ubermensch, a Prophet or The Hero comes and breaks the ice by doing something significant in the real world (could be something we don’t flag as important imediately), maybe the floodgates of good fortune open and more NRx start following in the footsteps of his destiny and we suddenly find ourselves virile and active as we’ve never imagined, setting stones for the future, possibly completely under the radar of the mainstream, Universalist narrative. We’ll have to do it differently. How? I hope the Zeitgeist of a different future will lead us.

Now, I invite you all to tip your *fedoras* and *crab pincers*
I’m not a particulary religious person (at least not consistently), but I do realize we need a miracle and every miracle needs an interpretation, which is what I just gave here. in advance.

1. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. See here for its impact on turning students into radicals.

2. American Pragmatism’s influence on progressive education. See here for its history and influence.

Now (1) is explicitly leftist, while (2) is much more inline with Cathedral values, especially in spreading democracy via education. Both are the most influential in terms of widespread use in Western teaching.

As for NRx, in general for a pedagogy to get off the ground, I think you’d the following:

(i) An epistemology of some kind. Teaching something that reliably gets at truth. Not just reasoning with beliefs either, e.g. logic and statistics. But an epistemology that includes things like reasoning about decisions and goals, i.e. judgment (as well as knowledge of the heuristics-and-biases research program). Moreover, other abilities that are epistemic in nature, but more concrete, like building know-how and skills.

(ii) A moral and political program. I’m not sure how’d you go about doing this. Depending on your view, you could eschew the political program, and stick with the moral, e.g. teaching classical virtue theory from the Greeks. Or you could eschew both in your program and leave morality up to religion. There is a risk here of going full Totalitarian via indoctrination. Depending on your NRx school, will depend if you think this is a bad thing.

(iii) An education that contributes to your (exited) society. For instance, if you live in a techno-commercialist NRx state, you might place a premium on engineering, hard sciences, mathematics, economics, finance, and business.

I would probably add under (i) some other entries that include understanding of areas that are forbidden under (1) and (2). You might call this “forbidden knowledge” (FK), using Shattuck’s terminology. Some “Dark Enlightenment” areas would fall under FK.

Notice also that (1) and (2) have large amounts of their curriculum committed to (ii). (1) is nearly all about (ii), and (iii) doesn’t get a look in (why create a person who can contribute, when you can create an extra Communist footsoldier?). (2) is still about (ii), but does have aspects of (i), but if you read the last 10-30 years of progressive pedagogy the focus on (i) has pretty much fallen off the rails, e.g. epistemic relativism via the influence of (1) on (2).