Intellectual Insecurities
We should be unafraid to advocate for what we actually believe
Out of everything wrong with The Discourse, definitely the aspect I find most frustrating is the reluctance around asserting one’s beliefs. This might come off as a surprise given the unrelenting erosion of hurdles to free expression, but what I’m referring to here is the reluctance around asserting one’s actual beliefs.
Humans are really good at safeguarding their epistemological jewelry box. Although we possess remarkable rational faculties, it is often advantageous to believe in false things, or to believe things out of esoteric personal preference. For example, maybe you’re sexually aroused by the color red and wish you saw it more often around you. You could try the persuasion gambit, but you guys should paint more things red because it gives me a boner is unlikely to convince anyone.
What’s far easier are the shortcuts. If you can manage to start a religious cult that worships the color red as the symbol of salvation, or publish a fraudulent study extolling the health benefits of red, or just pretend that red is the only color currently in stock. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what pretext you use so long as you achieve your actual goal (read: boner) in the end.
The reticence to speak transparently occurs regularly within political discourse, outside the context of boners. I’ve previously written about the lengths Paul Ehrlich went to make sure his beliefs about the dangers of over-population remained safe from scrutiny, or how Meghan Murphy hides her aesthetic disgust of the sex industry behind a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. There’s nothing new here, this is just the the motte-and-bailey fallacy: the only necessary ingredients are indefensible but actual position couched behind plausibly defensible but fake position.
What is anathema to this obfuscation jihad is transparency, and so a common technique used to hide one’s actual beliefs are Meme Talking Points. Our current media ecosystem unfortunately heavily incentivizes pithy talking points, or reading just the headline so all this requires is blanching the complexity of a controversy into pithy pablum that becomes more palatable by virtue of its meaninglessness. So for example, a policy proposal such as “impose restrictions on the transfer of excess weapons, equipment, and vehicles from the military to civilian law enforcement agencies” can just be repackaged (and summarily dismissed) as “defund the police”.
regularly makes use of this kind of obfuscation as mentioned previously. He also cryptically asserted that Kamala Harris was intent on “shutting down independent media”, an inherently meaningless statement void of any specifics (Which media? Shut down how?). It was only after some prodding that he was willing to divulge the details which was a link to another link to an article on The American Conservative by Christopher Brunet that, despite the obvious editorializing, is nevertheless well-reported. You don’t have to take my word for any of the following.What Simon was cryptically referring to involves the anti-immigration publication VDARE and its ownership of a $1.4 million “castle” in West Virginia that was intended to be used as a cancel-proof conference space.
Because VDARE is incorporated as a non-profit organization, it falls under the enforcement jurisdiction of the state’s attorney general regarding any disputes of resource misuse. In VDARE’s case, NYAG Letitia James accused VDARE’s founder, Peter Brimelow, of improperly using the castle as a personal residence.
Is it a good idea to prohibit the personal use of nonprofit assets? Sure, I don’t have a problem with a rule like that. Did that happen here? I have no idea! Brimelow and his wife denied it, citing another house they live in. Was Letitia James pursuing VDARE for politically-motivated reasons? Probably! It’s a good reason why I’ve always argued against giving prosecutors absolute immunity. But all these questions are orthogonal to the discovery dispute Brunet was ultimately writing about and found so alarming:
As part of this investigation, Letitia James is demanding that VDARE hand over 40 gigabytes of emails which “could in fact reveal the names of [our] pseudonymous writers, as well as our donors.” VDARE’s donors and writers wish to remain anonymous because they will lose their jobs—or worse—if their identities are linked to what they support online. While the court has ostensibly extended a courtesy by permitting VDARE to redact their names from these emails, the estimated fees for such redactions are projected to come to $150,000. This presents VDARE with a stark dilemma: incur a hefty $150,000 expense to protect the anonymity of its donors and writers, or risk revealing their identities. The lesson here is that if your speech falls outside the Overton window, the state of New York will aggressively attempt to bankrupt and/or doxx you.
I absolutely support the donors and writers’ right to remain anonymous, particularly because it’s irrelevant to any underlying legal dispute, and it’s good the court agreed. Although I’ve never had to deal with 40GB worth of emails, I do have experience with redacting large discovery troves and VDARE’s $150k estimate strikes me as immediately suspect — I don’t see how it could cost so much given the robust find/replace tools widely available today, and given that it’s dealing with a singular format (redacting audio/video is such an absolute nightmare that I fully avoid).
Since they were understandably concerned about safeguarding privacy, I don’t know why VDARE didn’t seek a protective order limiting the dissemination of the discovery, or if they did, why it was denied, or if it wasn’t, why it was insufficient. Either way, I grant that responding to the subpoena was not bound to be cheap. Ultimately, VDARE refused to comply with the subpoena, was found in contempt of court for not obeying court orders, and then eventually announced last July that it was shutting down operations completely.
So to recap: A non-profit publication was sued by the attorney general for allegedly misusing organizational resources. The organization was served with a subpoena which they claimed was unduly burdensome. Following years of litigation, the organization decided to shut down operations instead of comply with the subpoena.
Again, I have no interest in providing cover for a prosecutor. I’m an uninvolved bystander and I have no idea how onerous this discovery demand actually was — maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The problem is we’re several hundred words in and a loooong ways out from the original meme talking point assertion of “Kamala Harris wants to shut down independent media”! You have to squint really hard to sort-of kind-of connect the dots between Kamala Harris = Letitia James, and Independent Media = VDARE specifically, and Shut Down = Subpoena Records Over the Course of a Resource Misallocation Investigation.
Simon’s immediate reaction to my asking for details is particularly telling:
You are a piece of filth. You do not care about truth or fairness and your pretended morality is just a front for your bitter, seething tribal hatred.
Because I wasn’t familiar with this particular cryptographic cypher, I’m an ignoramus. He either experienced some remorse or attempted a cover-up (Simon is welcome to clarify) and quickly edited out the highlighted sperg-out tantrum. You can see the interaction yourself, I didn’t insult the guy when I asked for details but he nevertheless reacted by emotionally decompensating on a public platform. The best explanation for outbursts like these are showcasing an intellectual insecurity, a known fragility that requires constant vigilance against any sort of scrutiny.
In the same way that because I get a boner from red is unpersuasive talking point that requires repackaging, recirculating talking points about potentially burdensome discovery disputes within a nonprofit litigation is bound to fall flat. It’s boring, dry, complex, nuanced, and if you speak about the issue transparently and without obfuscation you’re bound to reveal a dissonance between reality and your disproportionate emotional attachment to the topic. I’m sorry, why are you so hopped up about a discovery dispute again?
It’s indeed a vulnerable position to be in when reality does not correspond to your emotional reaction. It’s an experience we’re all familiar with, when a stranger’s innocuous slight sends us into a hyperventilating rage just because of the frail state we happened to be in at the moment. Avoiding emotional dysregulation is something we all learn as adults, and sometimes we fail. It happens.
The problem is when this frailty extends into intellectual discourse, a realm that can only function when it’s uninfected with emotional brittleness. When your beliefs lack a certain oomph, or when you lack confidence in your own beliefs to state them transparently, it’s far far easier to instead hide it all beneath layers of obfuscation. It seems plausible that some have internalized the shame levied upon them by the woke scold brigade. Maybe all these people yelling at me are right?! Best to clam up just in case. It’s an unsustainable coping mechanism if the end result is Reeeee-ing when someone drags out the blanket you’re hiding underneath.
Jonathan Haidt has written extensively about the alarming rise of anxiety disorders, and we should keep watch for all of its manifestations. We can address intellectual insecurities in different ways, and one is definitely to abate the culture of intellectual intolerance that has been so prevalent among the Left and the institutions it captured.
That can only go so far however. The other part is figuring out to build emotional and intellectual resilience, particularly when it debilitates those you’d least expect to lack masculine confidence (and this is true regardless whether you believe the patriarchy or biology as the source of this assertiveness). This requires identifying the coping mechanisms used to self-soothe.
Recognizing insecurity as the driving force also identifies the deflections. Obfuscation is an obvious tell for lack of confidence. Repeating mantras (read: talking points) is a well-known comfort exercise. There’s also social cohesion from being part of an echo chamber that repeats the same slogans, almost like a group community prayer. I’m saying it, but I’m not the only one saying it. If other people are saying it, then it’s less likely to be wrong. No one is immune from any of these pitfalls, not even me!
Our ancestors have squared off against much more dire tribulations, and it would be a shame if our own courage is stymied at the level of being unwilling to speak our mind, and to speak our mind transparently.
Side note, but I'd love to read a technical overview of how redacting specific types of information from large data troves works.
From an IT guy point of view: the fact that e-mail is a single format doesn't mean that it is easier to redact. In a sense, "books" are a single format too, but they can be written in all sorts of styles, languages and contain any data. Same with e-mails: people use them creatively.
40 GB is a lot of data from human point of view. We are used to huge disks nowadays, but in pure text, 40 GB would be something like 14 000 typical books. Of course, those e-mails aren't pure text, but it is still a lot of information-rich content.
In this context, it depends a lot on what you mean by "anonymization". Does it mean just stripping e-mail addresses and proper names away? That can be done relatively quickly, but people leave other traces of their identity in texts, which are much harder to detect automatically. If someone mentions that he likes to go to a certain restaurant for its excellent Merlot, it is already quite a good identification of that person.
At the end of the day, it all depends on what level of anonymity you require. If it is only expected that a bored court clerk looks over the records once, maybe it is enough to redact out e-mails and proper names. But if the entire package of data can be expected to be leaked online with a command "sleuths of the Revolution, identify all the fascists to get them canceled", then 150 thousand dollars may even not buy you the required level of anonymity.