Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Jargon of the Spergs

Jargon is an common feature in modern intellectual life, as a sign that a person has been initiated into a body of knowledge. These jargon terms are symbols for concepts that have more recognizable words that can also be used to describe the same concepts. But the jargon allows the group to insulate itself from outside scrutiny and to raise the status of the people who understand it within their own sphere.

The pseudoeducated public now sees plain language as low-class. People who use esoteric jargon are respectable, owing to the massive amount of resources that it takes to learn that otherwise useless jargon.

Teachers, even today, often assign Orwell’s essay on this topic, but then proceed to reward their students who churn out jargon-laden papers. After these students graduate, they refocus on promoting the secret language that they learned in the schools, to garner wider adoption of their dialect in a piecemeal fashion.

‘Queer’ and ‘gender’ theory are languages that encourage new emotional and philosophical associations with given jargon terms. Entire clubs in economics form around a given jargon term, aiming to change the emotional associations that people have around certain words representing certain policies. In some cases, like ‘inflation,’ a concerted campaign lasting over 150 years has gone into altering educated opinion on the subject in a subtle way that has had profound impacts.

These clubs formed around linguistic tics, once they have established the new definitions, then get to policing the use of their own language, to ensure that no one misuses the jargon, and places the enforcement of the grammar of the secret language as their highest priority.

This is not sensible behavior, because it impedes the examination, debate, and spread of useful knowledge. It is a sort of intellectual protectionism that limits the potential growth of a set of ideas, and closes off opportunities for exchange. The practice also tends to hobble the jargon-users, because they are more focused on erecting walls around their words and less about making the concepts which the words represent more intelligible to those who might benefit from it.

Because this practice has become endemic, the thinking fraction of the public has become uselessly derivative, thinking thoughts about other thoughts, speaking words representing underlying concepts that they either don’t understand or that don’t exist in the real world.

Since the only criteria for appearing thoughtful is to use the stylish jargon, you wind up with a lot of parrot-humans with colorful feathers that are good at repeating the terms taught them by their trainers, but not good at producing useful thought. These writers exist to repeat the consensus of their superiors, but are incapable of helping their superiors to make better decisions, because all their focus is on repeating the magic language which justifies one political policy or another.

This type of person may know that using words like ‘studies,’ ‘statistics,’ ‘reports,’ and the name of a prestigious institution will result in their words carrying more persuasive impact. It doesn’t matter if they have no understanding of the underlying material: they can appear to have authority by cloaking themselves in the pretense of scientific knowledge.

In the case of the typical person who believes themselves to be capable of thought, it results in mistaking the memorization of a set of jargon terms to be the possession of the underlying knowledge itself. If it develops that the intellectual body which justified the jargon has turned out to be corrupt, the people using the jargon may not react for decades, because they never understood what the terms were intended to represent in any case.

We are all in a state of profound ignorance about the universe. The contemporary mentality puts pressure on most people to appear knowledgeable about everything, to provide more legitimacy to the modern arrangement which places experts in positions of authority to direct all activity. The faith that people have in these experts is in turn justified by giving people the sense that they, also, have the scientific knowledge possessed by the experts, because of their understanding of the jargon terms which purport to symbolize the knowledge which confers power.

To state that something is a mystery to you, or a mystery to mankind, often results in anxiety. It’s easier to reference a theory about it that you don’t have the capacity to understand than to say that you don’t know. In schools, students who respond that they “don’t know” receive a negative mark, even if the statement is true. Even if the answer is not known, you are at least supposed to report back the most fashionable theory that purports to provide an answer.

It’s easy to learn the jargon, but more difficult than most can muster to gain knowledge of the concepts that those terms purport to represent. It often develops that the jargon represents no valid knowledge, but is instead a gateway to one academic language cult or another. Also, many bodies of knowledge are useless without a broad context, because they only examine a given set of variables which are likely impacted by other factors. Knowledge of certain concepts in economics will be profoundly confused without corresponding knowledge of history, and knowledge of history is likely to be confusing without a knowledge of historical art & literature, and those are likely to be misleading without an understanding of religion, and so on and so forth.

The sheer challenge of becoming learned makes it impossible for most to gain general knowledge beyond the borders of their own nation, which would make a genuine ‘multicultural’ education ridiculous. To raise an educated ruler, it would be challenging enough to provide a brilliant youth with a general education of his own country, culture, religion, and those of neighboring states with which he’s likely to have some relations with.

To do the same with the entire world is not feasible, but politics charges the modern university with this responsibility, so the teachers compensate by creating the sense of an education with a mix of extreme detail and vapid generalization. This is excellent at inculcating pride, but not so good at transmitting useful knowledge.

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American Empire On the Brink?

With all the news about Ukraine, it’s possible to talk more specifically about what the reversal of America’s World War II gains will look like.

Some months back, I asked whether the loss of Crimea constituted America’s Suez moment — a strategic loss that international diplomacy prevented the imperial power from stopping. The war has only gone worse for America’s ally as the months have gone by.

The two major US allies swinging in the Russian direction are Germany and China. It seems that almost no one in the American think tanks or the government proper fully understand what is at risk. One does, but the general opinion is more aligned towards the nonsensical American war narrative that calls for greater armaments for Ukraine, something that NATO military authorities and Merkel besides have undermined with their own rhetoric.

It’s not entirely clear what sort of rational justification that this war might have had, but the haphazard moral justification was that it was in favor of true democratic self-determination for Ukraine. None of you probably buy that justification, but it is something that both the mainstream left and right tend to believe in fervently. German intelligence leaked that it estimates that 50,000 people have died in the conflict already, but the US press continues to report false numbers.

The US is in a difficult situation: financially, morally, militarily, and diplomatically. The reckless wars, the international spying scandal, and more have made the US a more unreliable international partner. After World War II, Europe embraced the US as a necessary counterweight to the USSR. After 1991, the US tried to dominate both Eastern Europe and Russia in the same way that it had done further west. That policy is unraveling quickly due to over-reach, and forgetting that diplomacy has to go both ways.

The additionally silly thing is that the US is not even behaving like a rational power, in that most of its interventions do not serve any reasonable definition of the ‘American national interest.’ This is because the US has a corrupt government which alternately panders to factions of oligarchs and the masses of hungry people, while mollifying the productive minority with television and other forms of trash media.

This can’t last for much longer. What will give it the extra several pushes are the increasingly open repudiations by America’s former postwar allies.

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The Striver Marriage

Above a certain class water mark, marriage has become more of a lifestyle product than a sacred rite which makes one man and one woman ‘into one flesh.’ Charles Murray writes about this phenomenon, informed from a statistics-heavy perspective, in his recent book on the increasing class divisions in White America entitled “Coming Apart.”

What is the striver marriage? It’s seen as a capstone lifestyle good, ideally achieved after both partners earn a master’s degree and both have secure positions at golden brand name corporations in a premiere city like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, or Mordor-on-the-Potomac. Failing that, a good job in a tony suburb will do.

The idea behind this marriage is that it is a union between equals. If one or both partners cook, they cook as an obsequious passion, usually under a popular dietary trend rather than an ethnic culture. It’s much more common to hear someone who is passionate about ‘paleo’ or ‘gluten-free’ cooking than it is to meet someone who cooks within a family tradition that might have been more familiar to previous generations.

The strivers are expected to have only a few children, and those children need to go to either a good private school, or otherwise to an exclusive magnet public school. In some more daring cases, the parents may home school their children, as was normal for the middle class or better in America before the growth of mandatory government schooling.

Strivers will usually go through a set of ‘long term relationships’ lasting a couple years or so, and then they may move towards marriages, in which some portion of them will last about as long as their past relationships did.

These types of people, who make up the part of the SWPL class that actually has purchasing power, receives endless criticism and resentment from all quarters. Poorer racial minorities hate them for their patronizing attitudes and habit of bidding rents up. Leftists harry them for being bourgeois while aping some of the outward fashions and life patterns of bohemians. They hate themselves, also, because it’s the only group that they are publicly allowed to express dislike for. Conservatives dislike them for their snobbish attitudes about food, culture, and dress, along with their comparative irreligiousity. Jack Donovan dubs them ‘elves,’ and calls for their annihilation.

Striver marriages do not bear much fruit, because people have the urge to reproduce themselves as they are, and the costs for reproducing this hothouse line of people are absolutely enormous, despite none of their educations being particularly rigorous or demanding. Their educations are simply expensive, mostly ornamental, and more about being useful to state power than being useful to civilization.

The majority of these people do not achieve the ideal — their careers are unlikely to be all that successful, they get out-competed for real estate by well-heeled foreigners from more dynamic economies, and they have trouble transitioning from ‘hooking up’ to low-status monogamy.

The word that we use to describe these ‘marriages’ does not describe the same thing in reality as past versions of marriage, leading to a lot of confusion about what it means. In other more secular European countries, it’s more common to avoid the formal term, but in the US, there is still the insistence on misusing language to describe what baby boomers would have called ‘going steady,’ except with more lawyers involved in the breakup.

Considering that this is the pattern of life of the slowly rising administrative class, any relationship pattern that deviates from that will seem disgusting and perverted to them. Whereas someone more traditional will be disgusted by homosexuals and transexuals, the elf finds the fecund, patriarchal family to be an abomination that sends them into fits of rage and nausea to even think of it being legal. If anything, the rage towards the old family pattern far exceeds anything said by the ‘homophobic’ or ‘transphobic.’

This inversion is just about never remarked on, because it is a little embarrassing, but it is human nature just the same. This is also not to say that ‘both sides are equally intolerant and therefore equally bad’ — the striver-marriage is what is odd and unsustainable, and the older form is what has been successfully adopted & maintained by every great culture in human history.

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