Incredulity, Obsession, and The Problem of Positivism.
Readership: All
Theme: Problems with The Red Pill
Length: 700 words
Reading Time: 4 minutes
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
Hosea 4:6 (KJV)*
* Knowledge includes both practical knowledge and spiritual discernment, as well as “the knowledge of God”.
Overview
In the Exposition of this month’s theme, A Failure of Knowledge Transference was identified as one type of problem with The Red Pill. Now that I’ve covered the basics of modelling and 9 Types of Red Pill Models, I can get into the problems associated with models and how this leads to a Failure of Knowledge Transference.
There are 6 main areas of knowledge transference that have been ineffective.
- Models are misappropriated.
- Models are misinterpreted.
- Models are misunderstood.
- Models are misapplied.
- The Practical Application is Difficult, Elusive, Insurmountable, or Unacceptable
- The Absence of Actionable Knowledge
This essay will cover the first.
Intro
As discussed in Red Pill Modelling 101, The purpose of devising, examining, and implementing models should be to increase our knowledge, refine our understanding, form realistic expectations, hone our discernment, and develop wisdom.
However, when reviewing Red Pill lore, individuals are prone to fall into an error of extremes, which I’ll call Incredulity, Obsession, and The Problem of Positivism for the present discussion.
Incredulity
Some people fail to see the similarities between models and real life and are quick to dismiss them as deceptive / illusory fantasies or pseudo-science. For example, the common rejection of The Soul Mate Myth. They might also accept some theories, but be condemning of models that are more appropriate for others. For example, crab people and grifters. At worst, they’ll assume that models are merely fantastic fables with no real application, and that evidence which is apparent to others is absent or invalidated and therefore other possibilities are rejected or subverted, also without considering the ramifications. While this lack of imagination is a growing problem (to be covered in a future po$t), it does not discount the value of models mentioned above.
Obsession
At the other extreme, some people latch onto a particular model, and they jump to the conclusion that it is some sort of monolithic Law of the universe that is unavoidable, unchanging, and must necessarily apply to everyone indiscriminately. Then they juxtapose this paradigm onto every living example they come across, without considering whether the context and the evidence matches up. For example, Rollo’s schtick with vasectomies, and Vox’s condemnation of MGTOW.
The Problem of Positivism
The Problem of Positivism arose as a pessimistic reaction to post-truth skepticism and is prevalent in the post-Enlightened West. It is the erroneous belief that “Science ≡ Truth” and anything that cannot be scientifically justified is necessarily false or a pseudo-science. The problem is not so much that scientific theories are often false or inaccurate in some way, but that (1) people will believe false conjectures if there is sufficient ‘scientific’ evidence of it being true and (2) they’ll refuse to believe true speculations that lack sufficient ‘scientific’ evidence. Another problem is that (3) recent scientific inquiry is corrupted by progressive funding and heavily biased by and predisposed to W0ke sentiments.
Both Incredulity and Obsession are aggravated by The Problem of Positivism. That is, if one believes a certain Red Pill model to be scientific-ish, then an obsession becomes an immutably sacrosanct idol which is brought out and shined up at every occasion in debate. Whereas, a lack of scientific rigor reinforces the skeptic’s incredulity.
Conclusions
Properly understood, science and philosophy and models should be used to conceptualize phenomenon, to inform and guide inquiry, and to aid communication of abstract ideas, NOT as some sort of fail-proof litmus test of truth.
Properly understood, Red Pill / evo psych models are just that — models. If a man mistakes a model for ‘The Red Pill Gospel’, then that doesn’t elevate the model to the status of a religion, nor does it render the model false if/when he discovers that it fails to accurately describe his reality. It only means that the man is an unimaginative dolt who doesn’t know what an archetype / model / theory is good for and/or cannot integrate that knowledge into his awareness.
Related
- Sigma Game: The True Curse of High IQ (2024/5/25)
