The Churchill Meltdown and Its Lessons

Why conservatards have lost the plot

See also my follow-up essay, History as Mind, as well as my previous piece, Hitler, the Ultimate Rorschach Test.

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History is the key towards liberation.

The truth of this statement becomes apparent when you consider that everything about our earthy existence is a product of the past. And I don’t mean this in the sense of a strictly materialist idea of cause and effect, or deterministic billiard-ballism. Our very minds, the thoughts we have, our morality, our motivations, have a history: they came about through a dialectical process of actions, events, reactions and more events, filtered through the nebulous but very real wider consciousness of our group, our civilization, and humanity at large.

The wider group-consciousness has itself a history, a life of its own: it is engaged in all kinds of feedback loops, acting upon our decisions and the degree of our free will, creating our world as it churns along. This wider consciousness is also influenced by us — our daily decisions large and small and our willingness to push through its limitations, to suffer through heroic battles aimed at expanding and adjusting it to better reflect wider reality. Once changed to better fit Reality, wider consciousness will then have an effect on other individuals, making it easier for them to affirm and further expand its new form. Hence the butterfly effect is somewhat independent of the material world: an act of decisive will with no witnesses around can change the world.¹

In that sense, history is a reflection, the instantiation of the collective mind —mind made flesh. When studying history, we are really studying different things simultaneously: the material past, this strange beast that is the collective mind, our own minds as they are rooted in the development of the collective mind over the decades, centuries and millennia, and the basic building blocks of the cosmos as present in people’s motivations, emotional reactions, thought processes and actions.

One of these building blocks is the relationship between our own level of development and what we can perceive in other people. Put simply, we only understand what people are (or were) up to who are on our level or below; the minds of people above us remain closed to us. And I’m not thinking primarily of IQ here (plenty of high-IQ midwits around), but rather depth of perception informed by depth of character.

To put all this in more practical terms as it relates to studying history: yes, there is the reading you do, the facts you gather, the sources you are familiar with. But there is also your mind that gives order to it all by creating narratives and hypotheses, by ascribing motivations and thought processes to historical actors, by reading between the lines; by traveling through time to experience events from the point of view of different people who once lived, even while you read the sources and try to figure out what the hell was going on.

You can only go as far as your own mind, conditioned by the collective mind (or a subset thereof), allows you to go. If you have a simplistic world view and have never dealt with moral ambiguity, you won’t recognize the signs of moral struggle in leaders and ordinary people of the past. If you have never interacted with a narcissist or psychopath and reflected on this experience, the signs of such traits remain hidden too. If you have never lived through and suffered from societal degeneracy, you won’t understand various people’s different reactions to same in the past. And if you were never on the receiving end of large-scale political corruption, scheming and deceit, or indeed believe this to be impossible, you won’t look for clues to such things in historical sources.

Someone who has broadened his understanding by way of experience and reflection will be able to empathize with and interpret the behavior of those who have a lesser understanding, those who are slaves to the collective mind of a certain time and place, and those who have moved beyond it via the crucible of suffering and learning. Someone who’s not there yet, on the other hand, can only understand the motivations of his own kind and below. And for the NPC, whose mind operates on the level of simple instantiation of the broadest of strokes of the current collective mind, even his own kind remains hidden to the degree that past NPCs played out a different program than today’s NPCs.

Someone who has a partial awareness of how the collective mind has (been) formed over the centuries will recognize the long-term context of ideas and motivations people in the past acted out. But those who are so repulsed by certain ideas and motivations that they cannot even think them, much less understand them, will always sedate themselves with cartoon versions of events, and react violently if someone who has developed himself more, and whose mind therefore pierces deeper into history and the motivations of humans in the past, challenges the (to him) laughable comic book story. Although “challenge” isn’t even the right word here; it’s enough if it goes beyond the cartoon story, even if you could make the case that the cartoon story is still contained within the more complex story.

If history is mind made flesh, you only have access to those aspects of it that correspond to your own development, your own mind.

Let’s look at how this all played out during the recent Churchill debacle. The meltdown of conservative anti-SJWs was something to behold.

The Conservatard Meltdown

As a little refresher,

Darryl Cooper

gave an interview on Tucker Carlson, talking about many of his research interests, including WWII. What sparked the outrage was that he recounted the story of how he told his podcast partner, being “maybe a bit hyperbolic,” “maybe trying to provoke him a little bit,” that Churchill was the chief villain of WWII. Why? Because in his reading, Churchill/Britain turned down Hitler’s repeated peace offers and sought to provoke, prolong and escalate the war for their own geopolitical interests.

Remember that you can only ever understand people’s actions, thought processes and motivations if they are on your own level or below.

One of the leading conservatard meltdowners is Konstantin Kisin, who published a bizarre video accusing Darryl Cooper of being part of the “woke right.” In it, he claims that there is a great danger in going from “we have been lied to about one thing” to “they lie about everything.” Which, on some level, is fair enough: the schizo spiral is very real. This is how people who live in a left brain hemisphere prison end up flat-earthing and no-virusing, losing touch with reality, Descartes-style: am I really in a dream? Does anybody really exist except me? Is anything real?

However, to accuse Cooper of all people of such schizo-spiraling clearly shows that Kisin and his crew of melt-down syndrome poster boys operate on a level of mind far inferior to Cooper’s: they are completely incapable of “reading the room,” of judging his character, motivations and intent, of grasping the way he thinks. For others who listened to the interview, or even superficially read some of his tweets about all this, it is as clear as day that, whether you agree with all of his takes or not, he is a deep, sincere and nuanced thinker who has done a great deal of hard work on the topics he speaks about. Who you know you could easily ask for clarification on this or that point instead of taking one or two isolated sentences and freaking out about them, a request you know he’d meet with an insightful response. If you understand how a mind like Cooper’s work, there will be absolutely no misreading the situation.

Besides, if the meltdowners cared to look and were able to understand, they could read this post by Cooper where he made it explicit:

I make sure to read the heretics, revisionists, and extremists on any topic I study. There are insights into capitalism you’ll only hear from Marxists, others you’ll only hear from AnCaps. I read self-published schizo books that are 90% trash, but dig up 1-2 unique insights.

You’ll never get the whole picture from one source or perspective, and the more emotion clouds a given topic, the less people in one box will be willing or able to think outside of it. The key is to not simply jump from one box into another.

That, my friends, is indeed the key: you must not jump from one box into another box. You’d risk becoming a true convert, who as we know are always the most fanatical, and get stuck in an obsession with one particular “school of thought.” We all know people like this, and it’s not pretty. These are the one-trick phonies who can’t help but blabber the same old talking points whenever they are triggered by someone not making those exact same points, that is, most of the time. Which is to say, Cooper is not only aware of the schizo spiral and the danger of getting trapped in one angle, in revisionism for revisionism’s sake — he’s capable of expressing this danger eloquently. To those minds who know from experience what he is talking about, the truth and depth of his thought is completely obvious, and the accusations of the meltdowners just look dumb, childish and mildly amusing. Dunning-Kruger doesn’t just strike again, it’s on a massive campaign.

Another outstanding example of what happens when a mind is confronted with a more highly developed mind is Kisin’s and Seth Dillon’s response to Cooper declining a debate with British historian and politician Andrew Roberts. Read this exchange (@martyrmade is

Darryl Cooper

):

Talk about being utterly incapable of reading the room and understanding how Cooper’s mind works:

To the meltdowners, this is pRooF that Cooper’s claims are all wrong, because otherwise he would happily dEbAtE the guy, right? This is the sort of comic book-level take you’d expect from people who literally see history as comic books.

To others, what Cooper did here obviously shows character and insight: he praises a man who is out to get him. Then he admits that he would be crushed in a “debate” like this, because the guy is a renowned historian, a professional British politician and therefore an experienced debater. Cooper knows that hostile debates like this are not about having a deep and nuanced exchange of ideas, but about taking rhetorical shots at your opponent, which is its own skill separate from intellectual insight and deep understanding. To misread Cooper’s message as admitting defeat and proof he doesn’t know what he’s talking about is a stunning example of blindness when faced with a superior mind.

The meltdowners’ misreading shows something else: namely that they have no grasp at all of how the study of history works, of even very superficial philosophical questions around all this. As I outlined above, there is such a thing as historical facts, that is, raw data. A debate about whether this or that order was issued, whether a witness made this or that claim, or whether an artifact really had been found at that site, can be subject to something resembling a scientific debate. But all the rest, like connecting those things, telling a story about what happened, the motivations of different actors, sources and witnesses, much less moral judgements, cannot be decided by “facts.” They depend on the mind looking at these things, on mind understanding mind.

Given this picture, it is obvious that someone who has a great command of the sources and who has great debate skills can make a completely convincing case for almost any historical narrative. It doesn’t mean it’s a good take though, that it helps understanding, or that it makes us think truthfully and deeply about events. Again, it all depends on the level someone’s on. Whether Cooper would put it quite that way I don’t know, but his refusal to debate Andrew Roberts and his openness about it show that he is aware of these things at some level.

Anyone who has looked into WWII will know that the story is extremely complex and there are hardly any easy answers. But as it so often happens with history and current events, there is the deep historical analysis, coming at it from different schools of thought, and then there’s the mythos for public consumption, reprinted in textbooks, schoolbooks and newspapers. The mythos is what everybody has in mind when thinking about the event — the comic book story. Some of these historical myths are pillars of the collective mind, of the thoughtspace we operate in at a given time. The WWII story clearly is such a pillar-myth.

Every myth, every “absolute presupposition,” as the great philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood put it, is bound to give way eventually, under increasing pressure, to a new story to settle on, propelling the Weltgeist forward. It is these myths and stories that form the bedrock of the wider collective mind. After the breakdown of a set of stories and the following short period of change, interesting things can happen — opportunities for real understanding.

The WWII comic book story, too, was bound to be challenged eventually, and I for one am deeply pleased that it happened the way it did, bringing attention to Darryl Cooper. I can’t think of anyone better getting the spotlight here. Whether you like his takes or not, even if you think he’s wrong about a lot of things, he absolutely showcases how the study of history should be done — his advanced historical mind especially standing out in contrast to the meltdown syndromers. History is grueling and humbling work, depending as it does both on source chasing and developing one’s mind. The dynamic between Cooper and his detractors, furthermore, holds valuable lessons for the philosophy of history and the relationship between minds across time and space.

Godspeed, Mr. Cooper. You’re doing fantastically.

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1. This jives well with Ruppert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which posits that every species, indeed every subgroup, is in contact with a sphere of “habits” that define its existence. These global habits can be changed gradually through individual effort, making it easier for others in the group to do likewise, even without physical contact as we usually understand it.