I am so glad you wrote this. I was terribly dismayed to see the reactions from some people who are purported to be top historians, V.D. Hanson being one, to the Darryl Cooper interview. I've been following and supporting MartyrMade for several years. All of Darryl's work is admirable on every subject of which he has an interest. He's a historian of which there are too few. Not only that, but he is humble, quick to self-deprecate, and if one listens, regardless of one's depth of historical knowledge, one can't help but glean a deeper understanding of the subject, and have a sincere appreciation for the man who brings history to life.
I didn't know him before all this and I'm still not familiar with his broader work, but I could recognize what you said so well just by listening to the Tucker interview. It's quite obvious.
Cooper takes an approach in his deep dives that is very similar to what you aptly describe in your piece. After listening only partway through his colossal podcasts about the creation of Israel, I didn’t know if I should feel pity, resentment, or respect for the Zionists. There is just so much to the history that cannot be put into a simple Manichaean frame, and he does a nice job exploring all the nuances.
I don’t think Hanson is a historian. He is a neocon propagandist, funded by the Claremont Institute. Claremont is the locus of Lincoln worship, and exists to promote the ideas of Harry Jaffa, - student of Strauss who boasted once of having invented a cult of Lincoln. Claremont is amply funded: Jaffa’s devoted to Israel and the spread of democracy, like Sherman did in Georgia. So some of that defense cash I suspect. They claim otherwise but their ridiculous ideas do support the neocons. Claremont is probably the major reason “conservatism” does not exist in America
This was excellent! My only contention with what you wrote is that Konstantin Kisin probably is smart enough to know what he's doing. He's operating, not with bad logic, but in bad faith. He's shilling for the high-level cabal behind today's ruling order, and they are very committed to maintaining the quasi-religion which counts the conventional WWII narrative among its foundational myths.
It's like our civilization has been kidnapped, much of the population has developed Stockholm Syndrome, and the kidnappers are playing a good cop/bad cop game as part of their PsyOp campaign to keep the hostages docile. If anyone starts to get angry with the kidnappers, Kisin jumps in with his routine of "Hey, fellow white people, aren't those SJWs crazy with their alphabet identities and climate change nonsense?" His job is to be controlled opposition, and he and his ilk have been very effective at this. But post-October 7th, with the civil war on the Left creating an opportunity to ask questions about the bigger Zionist picture, people are getting too close to the truth of the situation, so notice how quickly Kisin reverses himself and engages in the kinds of mental gymnastics and emotional appeals that he used to criticize when SJWs did it! Truth is, he was never on the side of the hostages; he is working with the kidnappers; and if the hostages start looking like they might escape their psychological prison, the Kisins and Ben Shapiros of the West turn on them viciously. "Get back inside with the other hostages, Goy!"
You'll notice that Benjamin Netanyahu got a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle when he addressed the American congress, and no matter who wins our elections, our public officials can always come together to give Israel everything she wants. If too many of us escape our psychological prison, we might start wondering about the curious influence a small country on the other side of the world has on practically *all* of our public officials and institutions, and how this peculiar state of affairs came to be. "Culture warriors" like Konstantin Kisin and Ben Shapiro exist solely to stop this from happening.
Well, I don't think that all of this is necessarily intentional on the part of the shills. The reason I say this is because I could easily see myself making the exact same points as Kisin did, if I were highly identified with the WWII myth. This is akin to walking around color-blind: you use all that logic and whatnot to dance around the thing you literally can't see, in this case the nuances and complexities of the picture, and Germans/Nazis as humans with their own ideas, motivations, internal conflicts and contradictions. That's what I meant with the incapability of "reading the room": what to those who see color is obvious, to the color-blind remains hidden, and so they go off-mark in spectacular ways, unable to notice their own blatant inconsistency. We have seen a similar dynamic with the pro-Zionists embracing cancel culture overnight.
While I don't think this is intentional in the sense of a coordinated cabal that consciously lies and manipulates (while being aware that it does so), and I think these people are really true believers, the net effect is that it looks *as if* it's a coordinated cabal, and the results are similar. There is a coalition of those heavily invested in the WWII myth. The coalition of the blind.
Yeah I was in the environmental movement and did the right things. But. I still didn’t see through the carbon craziness till around 2010. I was a useful idiot who guilt tripped most people around me for their fossil fuel use. I wasn’t operating with bad intentions just muddy information.
And what do Kisin, Shapiro, Harris, and 55% of top political podcast guests "behaving badly" or in bad faith have in common? Even Tucker and Cooper were on the brink of solving this perturbing mystery without Sherlock Holmes. They shared an uncomfortable laugh and moved on before fully noticing. Which is verboten.
Yes, Kisin strikes me as pretty intelligent. IQ in the 130s. His co-host is a deliberate insertion to dumb down the conversation for the mid wit audience. But it was clear from the interview with MM/CY that he followed and understood absolutely everything.
So much of the modern West's mythos is based on WW2 that questioning it is akin to heresy in the middle-ages. Both left and right in the liberal-democracies (essentially two sides of the same coin) cling to the telling and retelling of the great WW2 saga and base their politics on its "lessons".
We need a complete revision of WW2 history. It needs to be demystified. Unfortunately those in positions of intellectual power in Western society (academics, publishers, directors, etc.) have an interest in maintain the myth of WW2, the beatification of Churchill and the demonisation of Hitler and Mussolini.
The USA got along very nicely without "debates" for over a hundred years. Say what you will about men like Wilson or McKinley or even FDR, they stand as titans compared to the likes of Johnson or Ford, to say nothing of Kamala or Donald. The only recent president of similar gravitas was Nixon, who, interestingly, famously lost the debate with Kennedy because (I swear the old Irish ladies in my neighborhood told me this) the latter's hair was so much nicer. On the other had, he beat Khrushchev in the "kitchen debate." That tells you all you need to know about the audience for "debates."
I recall the move to return to "debates" around Carter's time. It seemed like some kind of "return to the good old days" kind of nonsense, which Americans love to think is the answer to anything (e.g. the later Tea Party). Of course, the problem is the audience has mutated along the way, and now can barely grasp the niceties of a WWE contest or American Idol (the rise of TV competition shows is related I suppose; The Apprentice brought us Trump). [*] And the same with the candidates; people would talk about how sophisticated British and even Canadian politicians sounded (inspiring Joe Biden to plagiarize Neil Kinnock's speeches), and cargo-cult fashion, thought being "debates" in would class things up. Actually, both the debaters and the audiences were far better educated than in the USA. The results speak for themselves.
I've never liked or even understood the reason for debates anyway. They only superficially resemble Socratic dialogs, or scientific peer review. They reward speakers with good hair (JFK) or good jokes (Trump) and at best a superficial talent for "quick wittedness." It's interesting we talk about people "winning" debates, not "finding the truth." The best analog is a courtroom, where in some sense "truth" or "fairness" can be reached, but still we are all familiar with lawyer's tricks and showmanship stunts. Judges try to rein those in, but in debates they take center stage.
I can imagine a wise ruler , knowing he isn't an expert in some area, having a policy debated before him and then carefully reaching a reasonable conclusion. But these modern "debates" are just morons performing before other morons, like some TV competition.
[*] I also recall, a while later, how the Food Network started off with cozy programs demonstrating cooking methods, and then morphed into 24/7 competitions and games.
That book amusing ourselves to death kind of touches on this in that at least on the visual side of things, as soon as TV took hold, what you looked like would play a huge role in who you thought should rule over you. I think he mentioned that people generally liked Taft but he luckily didn’t have to go on TV as hulking 300 pound fatso. I think you are right across the board with this but with each changing medium people become more and more superficial in the appraisals of peoples characters, regardless of debates.
Amusing Ourselves to Death alongside Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind and Ellul’s Humiliation of the Word- read those three and it’s obvious what’s going on and how we got here.
Eh, I've seen Roberts debate, and I'm not so sure Cooper would lose. As for me, I lost all interest in what Roberts had to say after he said in public, with his bare face hanging out, that the deaths of Afrikaaner women and children in British concentration camps happened because the "ignorant farmers" were in the habit of using dung for medicine. (Evidently it is only the *nahtsee* genocide that may never be questioned.)
Yup, I needed that. I struggle with my fellow humans. I am so very inclined to begrudge them, at times all of them; 60 years in and I’ve become a misanthrope. It’s a terrible state of affairs, Im afflicted with a bitterness I cannot shake. That formulation, our author’s argument about these “comic book Aficionados” (dunderheads) it is a nice tool for me to escape this unhappiness. I let them live rent free in my head no longer.
It really does get under your skin, often. It did for me too, that's why I wrote this. To witness the dumbness and cruelty of minds, and their raging drive to destroy their betters, even or especially when done in nice, intellectual-sounding words by those who are oh so convinced they know it all, they are better than you, and how dare you see what you see, experience what you experience. This blog is in some sense my way of cutting through this dark cloud, if just for myself.
"Courage", as the French say. May you find some sunlight to cheer you up. We all need it.
Any reading recommendations on the very interesting concept you mention about mind/intelligence being greater than IQ and containing aspects of consciousness including depth and character? I have been struggling to formulate adequately to myself my deep sense that the obsession with measured IQ is a dark ego trap that leaves out a lot of the picture of human consciousness but I admit I am poorly educated in the topic formally.
As @dsimpson said, give McGilchrist's work a go, it's brilliant and eye-opening.
My own view of IQ is that it definitely is something real, as far as such statistical clumping can be real. It sort of determines which levels of discourse you can participate in - high-IQ discourse often involves quickly throwing around difficult concepts, 2nd degree meta reflections, things like that. But it alone says little (maybe nothing, except for limit cases) about your grasp of reality, i.e. how these complex concepts relate to deeper truth. The latter seems to be related to a kind of holistic right-hemisphere thinking that is able to grasp whole "reality chunks", even difficult ones, in one go, non-verbally. But I'd say what I referred to as "depth of perception informed by depth of character" even goes beyond the left-right hemisphere split; or rather the right-hemisphere idea is partly more like an analogy, or proxy, in this regard.
The "problem" with such depth-perception is that you can't measure it the way you can administer IQ tests: because it's a very subtle affair that requires the one judging it to have that depth of perception himself. We are talking about something qualitative here that exists "between the lines", that is, outside the world that can be directly represented via language.
You could try Ian McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary, or The Matter with Things. IQ tests primarily or exclusively measure left brain skills - logic, verbal reasoning, linear thinking - whereas the right hemisphere focuses on a holistic view of direct experience. It tends not to disappear down rabbit holes, nor does it get angry, defensive and paranoid - very left hemisphere emotions.
Solid write up. The concept of a historical collective mind is 🤯. From a state of wanting to challenge myself, I hate that this is a well-worded echoing, and precipitation of my own thoughts, but I’m here for it lol. The beginning, regarding understanding motivations and such based of of personal mind, collective mind, etc gave me a lot to think on.
Dan Carlin led me to Daniele Bolleli which led me to Darryl Cooper. Been a paid sub of Darryl’s since day one. Can’t thank him enough, along with many substackians, for helping me to crack open my thick skull.
On the schizo-spiral front, Martymade had an episode (Jul 10, 2024) called The Peculiar Institution/Antisemitism Crossover. The motivation, to include a bit about anti-semitism in a series about the history of slavery in America, was that there’s some conspiracies regarding Jews owning slaving ships way back when. He spend most of the time detailing just how one can easily go from inquiring to so deep in the rabbit hole, that they may never get out. His awareness of it is outstanding. His Epstein series rides that line. But Darryl knows enough to keep himself in check, to say “Hey, these ideas have doorways that can go to crazy places, but the base information is out there and that’s what I’m providing”. It’s up to us to filter that information in a way that can square with the world around us in a reasonable way, even if it is mind blowing information. For every person that says “You’re crazy, Churchill was a saint”, there’s someone out there’s that’s like “Yeah, of course he was a villain”. Again, just another example, as you gave, that Darryl is as introspective as he is outwardly exploratory. What he does takes a level of personal discipline that these “meltdowners” unfortunately don’t understand.
I was battling with a “meltdowner” on substack. He was saying Darryl wouldn’t qualify as a research assistant. And kept calling him Dipstick Darryl. I asked him “What are your credentials, by way of a body of work?”. He replied “Dude lol. I have a PhD in History from Cambridge”. I reiterated that I asked for a body of work. I posed Darryl’s 3 main points that his WW2 series is going to tackle. I asked dude to provide some kind of actual counter or opinion besides calling Darryl names. He sent some platitudes my way about “I actually agree with you” etc. He then warned of the intellectual dangers of continuing to listen to Darryl, implying some kind of “schizo-spiral”, as you call it, was waiting for me. No credentials were ever provided besides a ‘stack of all pro-Zionism takes, the latest being “Ashkenazi IQ figures are underestimates”. His ‘stack name is in Hebrew. I can’t figure out if he’s a “shill” or an imposter, or a troll or just a lunatic. It’s whatever.
I’m now going down the rabbit hole on your stack, and I appreciate your ability to put into words what many of us, actually interested in history, cannot.
Thanks a lot for this very insightful comment. The schizo spiral argument when used to silence someone else (omg people might get sucked into a black hole!) is utterly insulting to those of us interested in learning and advancing. As you say, it's our responsibility.
“Accept the myth, else schizo spiral” is arguably a fallacy of two choices, “You’re either with us, or you’re against us”, and yes, it’s an insult. We are just attempting to investigate some culturally empirical facts, and then other sources, to attempt to organize very complex histories into a more cohesive understanding.
Darryl was just on a podcast where him and his host brought up the idea of a “load-bearing myth” in the sense that it can hold the weight of time and resist scrutiny over that period of time. Things like the American revolution, American civil war, civil rights. I love a term like this. Explains what it means helps me to understand the examples themselves.
That post from Kisin though referring to an “actual historian” is beyond ironic. Because I’m pretty sure he would be one of the first to have a total meltdown if liberals/leftists used credentialism to discredit anyone on his side.
I enjoyed and appreciated this, thanks.
I am so glad you wrote this. I was terribly dismayed to see the reactions from some people who are purported to be top historians, V.D. Hanson being one, to the Darryl Cooper interview. I've been following and supporting MartyrMade for several years. All of Darryl's work is admirable on every subject of which he has an interest. He's a historian of which there are too few. Not only that, but he is humble, quick to self-deprecate, and if one listens, regardless of one's depth of historical knowledge, one can't help but glean a deeper understanding of the subject, and have a sincere appreciation for the man who brings history to life.
I didn't know him before all this and I'm still not familiar with his broader work, but I could recognize what you said so well just by listening to the Tucker interview. It's quite obvious.
Cooper takes an approach in his deep dives that is very similar to what you aptly describe in your piece. After listening only partway through his colossal podcasts about the creation of Israel, I didn’t know if I should feel pity, resentment, or respect for the Zionists. There is just so much to the history that cannot be put into a simple Manichaean frame, and he does a nice job exploring all the nuances.
I don’t think Hanson is a historian. He is a neocon propagandist, funded by the Claremont Institute. Claremont is the locus of Lincoln worship, and exists to promote the ideas of Harry Jaffa, - student of Strauss who boasted once of having invented a cult of Lincoln. Claremont is amply funded: Jaffa’s devoted to Israel and the spread of democracy, like Sherman did in Georgia. So some of that defense cash I suspect. They claim otherwise but their ridiculous ideas do support the neocons. Claremont is probably the major reason “conservatism” does not exist in America
This was excellent! My only contention with what you wrote is that Konstantin Kisin probably is smart enough to know what he's doing. He's operating, not with bad logic, but in bad faith. He's shilling for the high-level cabal behind today's ruling order, and they are very committed to maintaining the quasi-religion which counts the conventional WWII narrative among its foundational myths.
It's like our civilization has been kidnapped, much of the population has developed Stockholm Syndrome, and the kidnappers are playing a good cop/bad cop game as part of their PsyOp campaign to keep the hostages docile. If anyone starts to get angry with the kidnappers, Kisin jumps in with his routine of "Hey, fellow white people, aren't those SJWs crazy with their alphabet identities and climate change nonsense?" His job is to be controlled opposition, and he and his ilk have been very effective at this. But post-October 7th, with the civil war on the Left creating an opportunity to ask questions about the bigger Zionist picture, people are getting too close to the truth of the situation, so notice how quickly Kisin reverses himself and engages in the kinds of mental gymnastics and emotional appeals that he used to criticize when SJWs did it! Truth is, he was never on the side of the hostages; he is working with the kidnappers; and if the hostages start looking like they might escape their psychological prison, the Kisins and Ben Shapiros of the West turn on them viciously. "Get back inside with the other hostages, Goy!"
You'll notice that Benjamin Netanyahu got a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle when he addressed the American congress, and no matter who wins our elections, our public officials can always come together to give Israel everything she wants. If too many of us escape our psychological prison, we might start wondering about the curious influence a small country on the other side of the world has on practically *all* of our public officials and institutions, and how this peculiar state of affairs came to be. "Culture warriors" like Konstantin Kisin and Ben Shapiro exist solely to stop this from happening.
Well, I don't think that all of this is necessarily intentional on the part of the shills. The reason I say this is because I could easily see myself making the exact same points as Kisin did, if I were highly identified with the WWII myth. This is akin to walking around color-blind: you use all that logic and whatnot to dance around the thing you literally can't see, in this case the nuances and complexities of the picture, and Germans/Nazis as humans with their own ideas, motivations, internal conflicts and contradictions. That's what I meant with the incapability of "reading the room": what to those who see color is obvious, to the color-blind remains hidden, and so they go off-mark in spectacular ways, unable to notice their own blatant inconsistency. We have seen a similar dynamic with the pro-Zionists embracing cancel culture overnight.
While I don't think this is intentional in the sense of a coordinated cabal that consciously lies and manipulates (while being aware that it does so), and I think these people are really true believers, the net effect is that it looks *as if* it's a coordinated cabal, and the results are similar. There is a coalition of those heavily invested in the WWII myth. The coalition of the blind.
Yeah I was in the environmental movement and did the right things. But. I still didn’t see through the carbon craziness till around 2010. I was a useful idiot who guilt tripped most people around me for their fossil fuel use. I wasn’t operating with bad intentions just muddy information.
Exactly right. Sam Harris is the same. A shit load of people behaving badly emerged around the Covid debacle have alerted me to clever bad actors.
And what do Kisin, Shapiro, Harris, and 55% of top political podcast guests "behaving badly" or in bad faith have in common? Even Tucker and Cooper were on the brink of solving this perturbing mystery without Sherlock Holmes. They shared an uncomfortable laugh and moved on before fully noticing. Which is verboten.
Yes, Kisin strikes me as pretty intelligent. IQ in the 130s. His co-host is a deliberate insertion to dumb down the conversation for the mid wit audience. But it was clear from the interview with MM/CY that he followed and understood absolutely everything.
Pat Buchanan's book 'Churchill Hitler and the Unnecessary War' is a great first step at challenging the post 1945 paradigm.
So much of the modern West's mythos is based on WW2 that questioning it is akin to heresy in the middle-ages. Both left and right in the liberal-democracies (essentially two sides of the same coin) cling to the telling and retelling of the great WW2 saga and base their politics on its "lessons".
We need a complete revision of WW2 history. It needs to be demystified. Unfortunately those in positions of intellectual power in Western society (academics, publishers, directors, etc.) have an interest in maintain the myth of WW2, the beatification of Churchill and the demonisation of Hitler and Mussolini.
The USA got along very nicely without "debates" for over a hundred years. Say what you will about men like Wilson or McKinley or even FDR, they stand as titans compared to the likes of Johnson or Ford, to say nothing of Kamala or Donald. The only recent president of similar gravitas was Nixon, who, interestingly, famously lost the debate with Kennedy because (I swear the old Irish ladies in my neighborhood told me this) the latter's hair was so much nicer. On the other had, he beat Khrushchev in the "kitchen debate." That tells you all you need to know about the audience for "debates."
I recall the move to return to "debates" around Carter's time. It seemed like some kind of "return to the good old days" kind of nonsense, which Americans love to think is the answer to anything (e.g. the later Tea Party). Of course, the problem is the audience has mutated along the way, and now can barely grasp the niceties of a WWE contest or American Idol (the rise of TV competition shows is related I suppose; The Apprentice brought us Trump). [*] And the same with the candidates; people would talk about how sophisticated British and even Canadian politicians sounded (inspiring Joe Biden to plagiarize Neil Kinnock's speeches), and cargo-cult fashion, thought being "debates" in would class things up. Actually, both the debaters and the audiences were far better educated than in the USA. The results speak for themselves.
I've never liked or even understood the reason for debates anyway. They only superficially resemble Socratic dialogs, or scientific peer review. They reward speakers with good hair (JFK) or good jokes (Trump) and at best a superficial talent for "quick wittedness." It's interesting we talk about people "winning" debates, not "finding the truth." The best analog is a courtroom, where in some sense "truth" or "fairness" can be reached, but still we are all familiar with lawyer's tricks and showmanship stunts. Judges try to rein those in, but in debates they take center stage.
I can imagine a wise ruler , knowing he isn't an expert in some area, having a policy debated before him and then carefully reaching a reasonable conclusion. But these modern "debates" are just morons performing before other morons, like some TV competition.
[*] I also recall, a while later, how the Food Network started off with cozy programs demonstrating cooking methods, and then morphed into 24/7 competitions and games.
I swear, watching political debates actually reduces one's IQ, especially these days. It's incredibly idiotic.
Someone the other day said “Who won the debate? I did. Because I didn’t watch.”
That book amusing ourselves to death kind of touches on this in that at least on the visual side of things, as soon as TV took hold, what you looked like would play a huge role in who you thought should rule over you. I think he mentioned that people generally liked Taft but he luckily didn’t have to go on TV as hulking 300 pound fatso. I think you are right across the board with this but with each changing medium people become more and more superficial in the appraisals of peoples characters, regardless of debates.
Amusing Ourselves to Death alongside Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind and Ellul’s Humiliation of the Word- read those three and it’s obvious what’s going on and how we got here.
But what to do about it now is anybody’s guess
Eh, I've seen Roberts debate, and I'm not so sure Cooper would lose. As for me, I lost all interest in what Roberts had to say after he said in public, with his bare face hanging out, that the deaths of Afrikaaner women and children in British concentration camps happened because the "ignorant farmers" were in the habit of using dung for medicine. (Evidently it is only the *nahtsee* genocide that may never be questioned.)
Yup, I needed that. I struggle with my fellow humans. I am so very inclined to begrudge them, at times all of them; 60 years in and I’ve become a misanthrope. It’s a terrible state of affairs, Im afflicted with a bitterness I cannot shake. That formulation, our author’s argument about these “comic book Aficionados” (dunderheads) it is a nice tool for me to escape this unhappiness. I let them live rent free in my head no longer.
It really does get under your skin, often. It did for me too, that's why I wrote this. To witness the dumbness and cruelty of minds, and their raging drive to destroy their betters, even or especially when done in nice, intellectual-sounding words by those who are oh so convinced they know it all, they are better than you, and how dare you see what you see, experience what you experience. This blog is in some sense my way of cutting through this dark cloud, if just for myself.
"Courage", as the French say. May you find some sunlight to cheer you up. We all need it.
😉
Any reading recommendations on the very interesting concept you mention about mind/intelligence being greater than IQ and containing aspects of consciousness including depth and character? I have been struggling to formulate adequately to myself my deep sense that the obsession with measured IQ is a dark ego trap that leaves out a lot of the picture of human consciousness but I admit I am poorly educated in the topic formally.
As @dsimpson said, give McGilchrist's work a go, it's brilliant and eye-opening.
My own view of IQ is that it definitely is something real, as far as such statistical clumping can be real. It sort of determines which levels of discourse you can participate in - high-IQ discourse often involves quickly throwing around difficult concepts, 2nd degree meta reflections, things like that. But it alone says little (maybe nothing, except for limit cases) about your grasp of reality, i.e. how these complex concepts relate to deeper truth. The latter seems to be related to a kind of holistic right-hemisphere thinking that is able to grasp whole "reality chunks", even difficult ones, in one go, non-verbally. But I'd say what I referred to as "depth of perception informed by depth of character" even goes beyond the left-right hemisphere split; or rather the right-hemisphere idea is partly more like an analogy, or proxy, in this regard.
The "problem" with such depth-perception is that you can't measure it the way you can administer IQ tests: because it's a very subtle affair that requires the one judging it to have that depth of perception himself. We are talking about something qualitative here that exists "between the lines", that is, outside the world that can be directly represented via language.
You could try Ian McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary, or The Matter with Things. IQ tests primarily or exclusively measure left brain skills - logic, verbal reasoning, linear thinking - whereas the right hemisphere focuses on a holistic view of direct experience. It tends not to disappear down rabbit holes, nor does it get angry, defensive and paranoid - very left hemisphere emotions.
Thank you, will check out
Solid write up. The concept of a historical collective mind is 🤯. From a state of wanting to challenge myself, I hate that this is a well-worded echoing, and precipitation of my own thoughts, but I’m here for it lol. The beginning, regarding understanding motivations and such based of of personal mind, collective mind, etc gave me a lot to think on.
Dan Carlin led me to Daniele Bolleli which led me to Darryl Cooper. Been a paid sub of Darryl’s since day one. Can’t thank him enough, along with many substackians, for helping me to crack open my thick skull.
On the schizo-spiral front, Martymade had an episode (Jul 10, 2024) called The Peculiar Institution/Antisemitism Crossover. The motivation, to include a bit about anti-semitism in a series about the history of slavery in America, was that there’s some conspiracies regarding Jews owning slaving ships way back when. He spend most of the time detailing just how one can easily go from inquiring to so deep in the rabbit hole, that they may never get out. His awareness of it is outstanding. His Epstein series rides that line. But Darryl knows enough to keep himself in check, to say “Hey, these ideas have doorways that can go to crazy places, but the base information is out there and that’s what I’m providing”. It’s up to us to filter that information in a way that can square with the world around us in a reasonable way, even if it is mind blowing information. For every person that says “You’re crazy, Churchill was a saint”, there’s someone out there’s that’s like “Yeah, of course he was a villain”. Again, just another example, as you gave, that Darryl is as introspective as he is outwardly exploratory. What he does takes a level of personal discipline that these “meltdowners” unfortunately don’t understand.
I was battling with a “meltdowner” on substack. He was saying Darryl wouldn’t qualify as a research assistant. And kept calling him Dipstick Darryl. I asked him “What are your credentials, by way of a body of work?”. He replied “Dude lol. I have a PhD in History from Cambridge”. I reiterated that I asked for a body of work. I posed Darryl’s 3 main points that his WW2 series is going to tackle. I asked dude to provide some kind of actual counter or opinion besides calling Darryl names. He sent some platitudes my way about “I actually agree with you” etc. He then warned of the intellectual dangers of continuing to listen to Darryl, implying some kind of “schizo-spiral”, as you call it, was waiting for me. No credentials were ever provided besides a ‘stack of all pro-Zionism takes, the latest being “Ashkenazi IQ figures are underestimates”. His ‘stack name is in Hebrew. I can’t figure out if he’s a “shill” or an imposter, or a troll or just a lunatic. It’s whatever.
I’m now going down the rabbit hole on your stack, and I appreciate your ability to put into words what many of us, actually interested in history, cannot.
Thanks a lot for this very insightful comment. The schizo spiral argument when used to silence someone else (omg people might get sucked into a black hole!) is utterly insulting to those of us interested in learning and advancing. As you say, it's our responsibility.
“Accept the myth, else schizo spiral” is arguably a fallacy of two choices, “You’re either with us, or you’re against us”, and yes, it’s an insult. We are just attempting to investigate some culturally empirical facts, and then other sources, to attempt to organize very complex histories into a more cohesive understanding.
Darryl was just on a podcast where him and his host brought up the idea of a “load-bearing myth” in the sense that it can hold the weight of time and resist scrutiny over that period of time. Things like the American revolution, American civil war, civil rights. I love a term like this. Explains what it means helps me to understand the examples themselves.
Anyway, appreciate the back and forth.
Excellent!
I recommend IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black for an example of an exhaustively researched history project based on primary resources.
Thank you, Luc, for articulating things in the way that you do! It’s like a therapeutic salve on the mind 🧴✨😄
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
That post from Kisin though referring to an “actual historian” is beyond ironic. Because I’m pretty sure he would be one of the first to have a total meltdown if liberals/leftists used credentialism to discredit anyone on his side.
Give this a SHARE