The Churchill Meltdown and Its Lessons
Why conservatards have lost the plot
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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,
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
):
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.