Grievance Poisoning in the First Degree
Is "I am so great" an actual philosophy?
As an undergrad, I spent a couple of years as a philosophy major, before dropping out. Therefore I never quite reached the level of solving the mystery of consciousness, or understanding what the fuck Wittgenstein was talking about. The main thing that I took from my small philosophy education was much more practical: the ability to tell when someone is just talking out of their ass.
Encountering the writing of genuine philosophers at the age of 18 makes you feel, intellectually, like a slow mouse being toyed with by a cat. That’s because, like most 18-year-olds—and, if we’re being honest, most humans—I was used to developing whatever philosophical or ethical or political positions I held via the time-honored process of “thinking about how I feel in my gut for two seconds and then conjuring up justifications to support that feeling.” This is how most people decide their positions on most issues! Socrates figured out how to prove this long ago, in such an embarrassing fashion that they made him drink poison. The microscopic depth of our reasoning on most things can be seen in any Youtube video of a snide comedian making normal people look like idiots by asking a few factually informed questions.
Philosophy offered my first exposure to genuine systematic thinking. These people didn’t just decide what was right and wrong based on their emotions; they thought about the metaphysics and then the, you know, phenomenology(?), and then the various other levels of philosophy, and then, finally, upon that tower of inarguable logic, placed the scales of morality. Some philosophers are wrong and some are crazy and some are impenetrable and I would certainly never recommend that you try to follow all of them at once, but I am grateful to them for teaching me the basic lesson that your beliefs should be based on principles. Your values should be in line with your principles. There should be underlying reasons for your conclusions. These principles and values and reasons and conclusions should all fit together in a reasonably coherent way. This lesson alone was well worth those years of half-assed attendance by me.
You may not agree with someone’s principles and conclusions, but the fact that they have some set of coherent principles means that they are, at least, trying to reason things out on an honest basis. This sort of argument is, it goes without saying, the minority of what people experience in the real world. The most common reference point most Americans have for this might be the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which we are all forced to ponder in public school. Say what you will about these documents, but they contained arguments with foundations. All men are created equal, and therefore, X. Despite their hypocrisies and inconsistencies, the founding fathers did at least offer centuries of Americans at least one single example of an attempt to lay out political principles coherently.
The opposite of this—people making political arguments based on pure emotional backfilling—is so common that it is usually not worth remarking on. I want to make an exception, though, for the particular category of “Dumbass emotional arguments masquerading as genuine philosophy.” We can’t make fun of every public pseudo-intellectual or politician who hastily scrounges up laughable justifications for their positions. (We may commit that sin ourselves sometimes.) But we can and should make fun of public figures who do this while also posing as some sort of modern age philosopher kings.
Give me a break, buddy!
Which brings me to Palantir. Evil surveillance company from hell. You all know it. Alex Karp, the lapsed academic who became Palantir’s loudmouth CEO/ Satan, published a book last year called The Technological Republic. The book is not just an attempt to situate Palantir as the solution to The West’s various social crises; it is also a self-conscious effort to position Alex Karp as a public intellectual of the first order, a man who is both thinker and doer, who has systematically diagnosed the ills of our economy and culture and built the terrifying, capitalist totalitarian private market solution for them.
The book’s website prominently features this quote from a George Will review: “Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind—more than one million copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.” Now you know a guy is thirsty for intellectual respect if he’s waving around that quote.
Anyhow, today, Palantir has gone mildly viral by posting on Twitter, “Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief.” Followed by 22 bullet points that sum up the book’s arguments. At last, a version of the book that tech people can read! The instant reaction to this bullet point list among non-tech people was “Wow, this is some fascist shit.” Which is true. But I want to make an even more rudimentary point that is, I think, a very important piece of context: This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at—given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect.
To illustrate this, let me re-order some of the key points on this list into more honest groupings.
I WANT TO BE FAMOUS AND POWERFUL BUT ALSO I WANT PEOPLE TO STOP SAYING MEAN THINGS ABOUT ME
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
TECH PEOPLE LIKE ME ARE COOL. HEROIC, EVEN
16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.
I WANT TO BE AN EXTREMELY INFLUENTIAL POLITICAL FIGURE WITHOUT PEOPLE MAKING FUN OF THE CRAZY SHIT I DO OR HAVE DONE
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
THE SPECIFIC WAYS THAT PALANTIR MAKES MONEY ARE ACTUALLY NOBLE ACTS OF PATRIOTISM
4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.
12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
DECADES OF BEING INSULATED FROM NORMAL LIFE BY GREAT WEALTH AND INTERNET ADDICTION HAVE CAUSED ME TO EMBRACE A GRAB BAG OF NEO-FASCIST IDEAS THAT ARE COINCIDENTALLY FLATTERING TO PEOPLE LIKE ME
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
Seen like this, Alex Karp’s self-serious techno-fascist listicle becomes more preposterous than scary. Is this really a bold and sweeping “cultural critique” deserving of great public respect? Or might it more accurately be described as “Alex Karp putting his own insecurities, craving for approval, and lust for money into bullet point format?”
It’s a list a child would make! “MY PHILOSOPHY: 1. You must be NICE to me. 2. My hunger for candy shows that I am SMART.” It’s embarrassing! Have some self respect, dude. You are a right wing billionaire weapons merchant. You are the human face of technological totalitarianism. You are the embodiment of just how close America is to a horrifying public-private partnership of fascism. You are the closest thing that we have to Dr. Evil. Stop acting so thirsty. It’s unbecoming. Your job is not to grovel for praise from Silicon Valley people who have not finished a book in the past 14 years. Your job is to keep doing cartoonishly evil shit until a hero finally vanquishes you. We all know you’re awful. Don’t work so hard to be awful in new and more tedious ways.
Previously, in Awful People
You’re a Bunch of Cowards! (ICE agents)
Adult Babies (College presidents)
Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation (Pamela Paul)
Getting Yelled at by Dumbasses (Fascists)
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I think the virulent plague of narcissistic psychopathy spreading among the tech and financial elite might be an inevitable result of a system (the collective human psyche) being overwhelmed by conditions (unimaginable personal wealth and power) we simply aren't mentally, emotionally and spiritually evolved enough to bear without serious injury and catastrophic consequences. Our society is in the hands of mad men.
Wow. That list is the most disingenuous list of vague, loosely coherent tripe I may have ever read. WTF? These aren’t even arguments or hypotheses or apologetics. It’s like the bully running home to Mom and whining that their victim stopped submitting to the abuse.