{"id":5245,"date":"2017-07-16T06:03:07","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T11:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=5245"},"modified":"2017-07-16T18:38:56","modified_gmt":"2017-07-16T23:38:56","slug":"milos-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2017\/07\/16\/worldview\/milos-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"“Dangerous” by Milo Yiannopoulos; A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in February the legacy media was gloating over the demise of Milo Yiannopoulos.\u00a0 Apparently the Left’s faux outrage machine had successfully smeared him over some unguarded comments he made about his sexual relationships as a young teenager.\u00a0 These were construed as “support for pedophilia,” which they decidedly were not as anyone can see who listens to what he actually said<\/a>.\u00a0 No matter, Simon and Schuster cancelled his book deal<\/a>, CPAC rescinded <\/a>their speaking invitation, and even Breitbart caved<\/a>, accepting his resignation as their technical editor.\u00a0 It would seem Milo’s enemies gloated too soon.\u00a0 He self-published his book, which currently sits at number two on the New York Times list of best sellers <\/a>for combined ebook and print nonfiction.<\/p>\n

What to make of Milo, his book, and the public reaction to it?\u00a0 When it comes to human behavior, the answer is always the same; go back to Darwin.\u00a0 Forget the futile game of arguing about who is “good” and who is “evil.”\u00a0 These categories exist only as subjective mental constructs, and are manifestations of emotions, not reason.\u00a0 In short, they are figments of our imaginations.\u00a0 Instead, look for the evolved emotional traits and predispositions that are driving the behavior.<\/p>\n

For starters, it’s always a good idea to look at ingroups and their associated outgroups.\u00a0 They are a universal and fundamental aspect of human behavior, and they will always be there, along with all their associated loyalties and hatreds, as well as the dual system of morality human beings apply depending on whether they are speaking of one or the other.\u00a0 They are also one of the most “dysfunctional” aspects of human behavior.\u00a0 The innate traits responsible evolved at a time when the ingroup consisted of the relatively small group of hunter-gatherers to which one belonged, and the outgroup almost automatically became a similar group living in the next territory over.\u00a0 At that time ingroup\/outgroup behavior obviously increased the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce.\u00a0 However, our brains became bigger, and we began associating in ever larger groups.\u00a0 Our powers of imagination expanded with our brains, and we became capable of identifying our ingroups and outgroups based not merely on physical proximity, but on race, religion, class, ethnicity, ideology and a host of other criteria.\u00a0 There is no reason to believe that such “modified” versions of the behavior will accomplish the same thing now that they did then.\u00a0 In fact, there is good reason to believe they will accomplish exactly the opposite.<\/p>\n

In this case, Milo makes it easy for us to identify the relevant ingroups.\u00a0 They are each identified in the title of a chapter of his book, and Milo has the honor of belonging squarely in the outgroup of every one of them.\u00a0 They include feminists (chapter 4), Black Lives Matter (chapter 5), Muslims (chapter 9), and so on.\u00a0 Many of them either overlap or have some affinity with the most significant of them all, the Progressive Left (chapter 1).\u00a0 The Progressive Left is an ingroup that defines itself according to ideology.\u00a0 In other words, the boundaries of its “territory” consist of a set of ideological shibboleths.\u00a0 As set forth by a member of this ingroup in a review of Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, these shibboleths are supposed to promote a “fair, multicultural, egalitarian society.”\u00a0 A fundamental theme of Milo’s book is that, in fact, the Progressive Left is creating a profoundly unfair, divisive society that, far from being egalitarian, is based on a rigid hierarchy of identity groups.\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n

We live in an age where one side of the political spectrum would like all debate, all challenge to their viewpoints, all diversity of thought to be snuffed out.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because they’re scared.\u00a0 Scared that their political, social and cultural consensus, carefully constructed and nurtured over the past few years, with its secular religions of feminism, enforced diversity, multiculturalism, and casual hatred for straight, white men, is built on a foundation of sand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The response of the Left to this assault on its ideology has been typical of ingroup responses that transcend species.\u00a0 They have made a furious rush to defend their ideologically defined territory, filled with rage towards this presumptuous outgrouper, for all the world like a pack of howler monkeys<\/a> defending its turf.\u00a0 In a word, Milo is right.\u00a0 They do hate him.\u00a0 Leftist reviews of the book include such well-reasoned responses as,<\/p>\n

America now faces greater problems than the mean-spirited shitposts of a preening hack.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why any troll, racist, sexist, or teenager would pay for the version of Dangerous<\/i> this draft presents when it exists on 4chan in endless supply is a mystery. At least the hatred there is more interesting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He’s a clickbait grifter who has made a name for himself spewing hate speech.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read them and you will find claims that the book is boring (it’s not), that it’s not selling (it sold out almost immediately on Amazon), that it discusses issues that are so yesterday (they aren’t yesterday for people who don’t happen to be obsessed with social media), and, of course, the de rigueur<\/em> claims that the book is racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and so on.\u00a0 What you won’t find, or at least I haven’t found so far, are well-reasoned arguments against any of the major themes of the book.\u00a0 That’s not surprising.\u00a0 The Left has now controlled the media, the academy, and the arts for so long that its ability to engage in rational argument has begun to atrophy.\u00a0 Instead, it seeks to bully, vilify, and bludgeon its opponents into submission.\u00a0 Conscious of its power, it has become increasingly authoritarian.\u00a0 Hence its fury at the “deplorables” who dared to defy it in the recent election, and its determination to refuse legitimacy to the results of that defiance.<\/p>\n

Allow me to provide a brief tutorial on how such a rational argument might actually look.\u00a0 In his book, Milo cites statistics according to which blacks are responsible for a disproportionate level of violence and crime in our society.\u00a0 A rational response would be that the statistics are wrong, and that levels of violence and crime among blacks are comparable to those among other ethnic groups.\u00a0 Concerning the gender pay gap Milo writes,<\/p>\n

Study after study show the wage gap shrinks to nonexistence when relevant, non-sexist factors like chosen career paths, chosen work hours and chosen career discontinuity are taken into account.\u00a0 They key word is chosen<\/em>… The wage gap is almost entirely explained by women’s choices.\u00a0 Men prefer technical jobs; women prefer people-oriented professions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Christina Hoff Sommers says, “Want to close the wage gap?\u00a0 Step one:\u00a0 Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A rational response would be to cite studies that demonstrate a systematic pay gap between men and women in identical jobs, or evidence of verifiable attempts to discourage women from choosing careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.\u00a0 Regarding Islam, Milo writes,<\/p>\n

Islam is not like other religions.\u00a0 It’s more inherently prescriptive and it’s much more political.\u00a0 That’s why I, a free speech fundamentalist, still support banning the burka and restricting Islamic immigration… Everywhere Islam exists you find political tyranny.\u00a0 Islam is as much a political ideology as a religion, which is why limits on it are perfectly compatible with religious freedom and the First Amendment… Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A rational response would be to demonstrate that the Muslim religion doesn’t inject itself into politics, that the states in which it prevails tend to be secular democracies, that Muslim theocracies are tolerant of gays, and they promote equal rights for women.\u00a0 I have seen no such responses in any of the many attacks on Yiannopoulos and his book.\u00a0 Instead, they tend to confirm his claim that,<\/p>\n

The practitioners of the new political correctness are not equipped for a world in which individuals can disagree with what is deemed appropriate thought.\u00a0 They rely on silencing the opposition with hysterics, instead of winning with superior ideas… Purposefully or unwittingly, a generation of Americans now exists that is terrified of critical thinking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the Progressive Left seldom meets the arguments of Yiannopoulos or anyone else head on.\u00a0 Instead they rely on the illusion that they occupy the moral high ground, and seek to vilify and anathematize their opponents.\u00a0 Unfortunately, outside of the subjective consciousness of individuals, there is no such thing as a moral high ground.\u00a0 Claims to moral superiority can never be objectively legitimate.\u00a0 They exist in a realm of fantasy where good and evil exist as independent things.<\/p>\n

In spite of the Left’s anathemas, Dangerous is<\/em> well worth reading.\u00a0 Yiannopoulos is a very intelligent man, and his book reflects the fact.\u00a0 He is well aware of the role of innate emotions and predispositions as drivers of human behavior.\u00a0 In particular, he is aware of the fundamental importance of ingroup\/outgroup behavior, or what Robert Ardrey called the “Amity\/Enmity Complex.”\u00a0 As he writes in Dangerous<\/em>,<\/p>\n

Since the 1970s, social psychologists have been aware that emphasizing differences between groups leads to mistrust and hostility.\u00a0 In a series of landmark experiments, the psychologist Henri Tajfel found that even wearing different-colored shirts was enough for groups to begin displaying signs of mistrust.\u00a0 So guess what happens when you tell everyone that their worth, their ability, their right to speak on certain subjects and – shudder – their “privilege” is, like original sin, based on what they were born with, rather than any choices they’ve made or who they are?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like the men’s health gap, the black murder gap is very real, and simply isn’t discussed by black activists.\u00a0 I suspect it’s a matter of tribalism, or ingroup\/outgroup psychology, a common occurrence in politics.\u00a0 Like feminists who blame their everyday grievances on an invisible “patriarchy,” or Wi-Fi enabled Waffen-SS wannabes who think Jews are responsible for everything bad, or Democrats who blame the Russians for Hillary losing the election to Daddy.\u00a0 It’s very easy to dodge responsibility if you have a boogeyman to lump the blame on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These quotes reflect a level of awareness that most leftists never reach.\u00a0 They also allude to the reason that the utopias they are in the habit of concocting for us have never worked.\u00a0 An ingroup can be as egalitarian as it pleases, but the assumption that the identity groups they invite to inhabit their multicultural world will necessarily be similarly altruistic is delusional.\u00a0 Ingroups and outgroups will always exist, and they will always hate each other, as demonstrated by the bitter hatreds leftists themselves tend to wear on their sleeves.\u00a0 Until the innate behavioral traits responsible for ingroup\/outgroup behavior and the dual morality inevitably associated with it are understood, accepted, and a way is found to effectively control them, they will continue to be as dangerous as ever.<\/p>\n

The book is an interesting read for many other reasons.\u00a0 Its detractors dismiss discussions of such controversies as Gamergate<\/a> as water under the bridge, but they should be of interest to readers who aren’t obsessed with the very latest twists and turns in the culture wars.\u00a0 Such readers may also have heard little or nothing of the many contemporary thinkers mentioned in the book who, like Yiannopoulos, are challenging the dogmas of his opponents.\u00a0 Their work is seldom found in newspaper columns, and the book is a useful guide on where to look for them in contemporary social media.\u00a0 Other than that it includes some thought provoking comments on Andrew Breitbart’s<\/a> dictum that “politics is downstream from culture,” the reasons for the counterintuitive nexus between the Progressive Left and radical Islam, the remarkable cultural similarity between current “conservative” and “liberal” elites outside of superficial political differences revealed to the surprise of many in the recent election, the many contradictions between the avowed ideals of the Progressive Left and the other “haters” called out in the book and the various forms of racism, sexism and bigotry they practice in the real world, and so on.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the book is something it has in common with virtually every other similar work you’re likely to find, whether it comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.\u00a0 It tries to counter claims of moral superiority with claims of its own moral superiority.\u00a0 One can “win” such a contest by being more effective at manipulating moral emotions than ones opponents, but in the end it is an irrational, dangerous, and futile game.\u00a0 Consider what is actually being manipulated – innate emotions and predispositions that have no intrinsic purpose or function, but exist merely because they happened to improve the odds that certain genes would survive and reproduce.\u00a0 There is certainly no guarantee that they will even accomplish the same thing in an environment so radically different from the one in which they evolved as the one we live in today.\u00a0 On top of that, those who seek to manipulate them often do so in pursuit of goals that have little if any connection to the reasons they exist to begin with.<\/p>\n

The only way our species will ever manage to get off of this merry-go-round is by finally learning to understand the fundamental drivers of behavior, moral and otherwise.\u00a0 An individual who is fully conscious of the nature of the emotions that are the motivators for all the goals and aspirations he sets for himself in life will also be an individual who is capable of discarding the illusion of objective moral laws as a rationalization for those goals and aspirations.\u00a0 I don’t oppose the Progressive Left because it’s immoral.\u00a0 In the end, I oppose it for the same reasons that are actually motivating Milo.\u00a0 I don’t like to be bullied by people who assume they have some imaginary “moral authority” to tell me how I should behave and think.\u00a0 We could “win” by beating the leftists at their own game, and seizing the “moral high ground.”\u00a0 It would be a hollow victory, though.\u00a0 As has happened so often in the past, we would end up by becoming clones of the monster we had just slain.\u00a0 We need to stop playing the game.\u00a0 There has to be a better way.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in February the legacy media was gloating over the demise of Milo Yiannopoulos.\u00a0 Apparently the Left’s faux outrage machine had successfully smeared him over some unguarded comments he made about his sexual relationships as a young teenager.\u00a0 These were construed as “support for pedophilia,” which they decidedly were not as anyone can see who … Continue reading ““Dangerous” by Milo Yiannopoulos; A Review”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46,69,73,24,105,6,166,28,135,5,68,21,13,1],"tags":[385,384],"class_list":["post-5245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amity-enmity-complex","category-censorship","category-culture","category-demonization","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-human-evolution","category-human-nature","category-ingroups-and-outgroups","category-morality","category-popular-culture","category-the-media","category-us-politics","category-worldview","tag-culture","tag-milo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1mB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5245"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5272,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions\/5272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}