Friends,
I despise inconsistency. And my friend, this world we live in makes it damn near impossible to be consistent. Why? Because everyone looks at reality at an abstracted level. Their level of abstraction may be morality, or race, or nationalism, or gender, or familial love, or economics, or more likely they have more than one type of abstraction (i.e. having “deep convictions” about both American global primacy and the sanctity of all human life -huge contradiction there) that they compartmentalize in their head and which make them do mental gymnastics in order to prioritize which concern tales primacy when there is a conflict between their views. Take race and gender -the race/gender flavor of dissonance actually came up in a recent discussion where someone took issue with me describing sexual assault allegations as a “quick and easy way to deal with problematic men.” They challenged me on this and I described how these allegations had demonized specifically black male sexuality and there was literally no response.
They knew rape was wrong but they also knew that many a white woman’s lie about being raped by a black man had led to a black man being lynched. In this situation, wat do?
Now pay attention because here is one of the two times Ayn Rand was ever right and worth referencing (please keep in mind aforementioned “universal reality based on natural laws”): “There can be no such thing as a contradiction. If you find you have a contradiction check your premises; one or both is flawed.”
So let’s assume both race and gender are both flawed. What other lens/school of thought/bias/level of abstraction could resolve the#reparativerape contradiction my friend struggled with?
Well we could move laterally and examine it through a different abstraction like sexual orientation, marxist, Christian, or instead of moving laterally we can move up the chain of causality and see where race and gender et al. share a common root. It is from that point where can be begin to perform more useful analyses of reality and put forward more informed deconstructions of the world around us (read: opinions).
Until then we’re arguing fantasies that exist in different fictional universes. “Can you fit more Banthas into a tardis at warp 9 or would its mithril construction prevent that?” -did that make sense? No. Good because that incoherent, inconsistency is exactly what I see 92.3% of the time in comments sections. And really it’s analogous asking if a black escaped male slave is justified in raping the white female plantation owner who had his disabled son euthanized. Frankly, I’m surprised Tarantino hasn’t filmed that scene yet and I would love to see a film-maker play out a scene like that (minus the absurdist disabled son element) in order to see if they could make an audience cheer rape.
Do you hate nazis? Of course you do -it’s easy and you’re a lazy fuck. So in American History X Edward Norton, a neo-Nazi gets raped in prison by fellow NNs. Awesome, right!
No. It’s a horrible thing to watch. No Nazi should get raped. But as always lets be consistent: rape is a form of violence on the same continuum as all forms of violence and so consistency dictates that we instead say no Nazi deserves to be treated violently. But whoa, now we’re sounding anti-semetic and contradictory because we all know that unless you categorically condemn and denounce a whole generation of early 20th German people you are an anti-semitic.
HO, CONSISTENCY!! Cans’t thou mayhaps once again resolve our contradiction so that we can go on enjoying gefilte fish in our lederhosen with no compunction?
Consistency: Mayhaps I can…mayhaps I can…
First, is it really consistent to call one man a Nazi and another a Sioux Indian in light of the fact that they share the same biology and physiology? *** CONDITIONING ASIDE, THEY AS MEMBERS OF THE SAME SPECIES RESPOND COMPARABLY TO THE SAME CONDITIONING -THIS RESPONSE/SUSCEPTIBILITY TO CONDITIONING AS OPPOSED TO THE NATURE OF THE CONDITIONING ITSELF IS IS WHAT SHOULD BE DISCUSSED ROOTED AS IT IS IN CAUSALITY*** -sorry for capsing
If we further streamline our earlier statement about no Nazis deserving violence to “no humans deserve violence” you’ll notice two things:
1. You can’t argue with that statement. Not without adding another contradiction.
2. The magnitude and scope of that statement and the subsequent imperative which follows is immense. Preventing violence against humans is something you could devote a life of work to. On the other hand #preventnazisfromgettingraped is something that may trend on social media for two days -trivial, equivocal shit. Remember, “to be great is to assume great concerns.”
You might say that removing all nuance, labels and separation from people excuses bad behaviour, but I would argue that the application of and identification with said nuance, labels, and separation are what give rise to bad behaviour in the first place.
In summation, i hope this rant has stayed on a tack of coherence or if not, at least made some errant overtures toward it. In the words of Peter Joseph, “I am less interested in what people think and more interested in how they came to think it and how they maintain it as valid.” Right now there are a lot of dumb arguments out there predicated on constructs completely decoupled from reality and its rules. Under these circumstances it is impossible to be consistent and sadly whenever a contradiction erupts between two, say…capitalists about the degree to which government should have its hand in the economy, the tendency is to redefine oneself as an “anarcho-capitalist” or “neo-liberal” accordingly rather than to question and re-examine the assumptions behind government and economy to see if they are still empirically defensible.
More than anything develop a system founded in the principles of natural law then challenge that system by using it to deconstruct every situation you can. If it proves inadequate then strip away what is unnecessary until it becomes simple, universally applicable and lacking contradictions.
Then act on that.
Best,
-Andre Guantanamo
Write-Errantry 