Philosophical and Ideological Foundations

or Biases and Priors. Also my perspective on the recent political events in the US

Here I lay out my priors, axioms, and biases as defined by the frameworks I use to understand and make sense of the world. I do believe in meta-rationality, that one should be flexible for utility, but by and large I have found the ones below to be the most compelling and real, to me.

Philosophically

Foundations The fundamental beacon of wisdom that grounds epistemology, metaphysics, etc. is Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular his posthumous works, that is primarily Philosophical Investigations, whose themes also permeats Culture and Value and others. He presents the “Ordinary Language” framework for doing philosophy. This method seeks to be precise as to the use of the words in regular speech when considering a philosophical query regarding the topic of that word. This approach lends itself to considering language games as the appropriate model for understanding text, wherein a particular context and utility is defined by mutually understood rules of communication. He demonstrates this through performing semiotic surgery on various central philosophical concepts and questions, which typically leads to the realization that some profundity is actually either trivial, vacuous or meaningless, or “the bewitchment of our intelligence by language.”

As an example “what is consciousness?” Well, one can say after fainting and coming back “I am conscious!” or consider it as awareness of some pattern of process “the experience raised their consciousness”. That is, the word has a multitude of mundane, even if still important, uses in communication. You can protest that you are aiming to point at some thing or fundamental process of existence, but then you have to clarify what you are pointing to. Otherwise, vexation on this can also be understood as a gesture, as awe towards life itself, which is valuable but far from the intention of an attempt at naive philosophizing through seeking profundity in the term “consciousness.”

While this shuts down much Anglo-American philosophy, which broadly consists of sports-team like conflicts using thought experiments involving a brain in a vat and disembodied rabbit parts, it does leave room for Continental philosophy, as being more oriented towards the living of life, rather than distanced abstract analysis. To this end, the grandmasters Nietzsche and Sartre present excellent depictions of the vigor of spirited will in the presence of deconstructed credibility of externally defined metanarratives. The radical uncertainty of a vacuum in the choice to live free presents a deep and striking and entirely unavoidable interplay of fear and thrill that can wound or drive, as depending on the courage of the individual at that moment.

Continuing, Lyotard brought the concept of language games to postmodern French philosophy, presenting its potential for being the arena of power. The legendary and simultaneously infamous Foucault, with his archaeology of language as power, performed insightful analyses on important institutions as far as their history of narratives constructed to serve various social functions.

Yet rather than implying “systemic oppression” and other derived interpretations by activists, to me this suggests a more cautious approach to ideological concepts. It can be easily observed that the narratives of oppression themselves suffer from the same motivated constructivism. To this end we can consider technical analysis of language games, which recall constitutes their utility, as appropriately suggesting the practice of anthropological understanding of what role such games have in the social sphere, and how it came to be that way. When one begins to shine that light of understanding, ideological activism becomes concerning as the language of morality is fierce tribal drive towards hegemony. So claims of certain righteousness should be treated with utmost suspicion.

This extends to Critical Theory broadly, as well as the Frankfurt. To quote from a recent work of mine together with colleagues on the epistemology of causation:

“To the extent that individuals identify with the Frankfurt School and its canon, it can provide meaningful context for their individual choices in social and economic domains. In the face of their dearth of predictive quality, it would be, ironically, overbearing authoritarianism to use them as principles by which to design government policy and political activity. “

Rather, my approach to Continental Philosophy is to chew on its hermeneutics, a concept well developed by Gadamer, consider how an idea tastes, or a coat to try on and see how comfortable and mobile I am with it on. Hermeneutics is the layer of truth between empirical and scientific language and aesthetic language e.g, literature, it is a visceral truth of being compelling to the individual and instrumentally useful to the person’s understanding and living of life.

Mathematics As a mathematician, the question of philosophy of mathematics seems front and center. But while the communication of mathematics is well covered through Wittgenstein’s description of its language game, the philosophy of mathematics is rather the wrong question. Instead, broadly what can be said about the nature of mathematics itself and how does mathematics arise? To this a cognitive scientist Lakoff and linguist Nunez present, in Where Mathematics Comes From a compelling presentation of mathematical objects as embedded cognitive structure, which we then extend and develop as an extensive formalism by forming analogies of them. They present how geometry through analysis can be understood in this framework.

A proper mathematician also should proselytize Badiou, who contends in Being and Event and other works that mathematics is ontology. Indeed in speaking mathematics one presents the very structural mechanistic and dynamic essence of some object or phenomenon, independent of the context and culture contingent narrative language games. In declaring a Theorem in category theory, one presents a cardinality of the continuum statements of lived reality, and a narrative statement is measure zero. Narrative, rather than presenting ontology, presents the Hermeneutics of lived experience and exposure to communication. This constitutes aiding people to make sense of it for their own lives and ways of considering things that can suggest new mindsets with which to show up in the world. But a Partial Differential Equation describing the flow of a fluid is an eternal and universal Truth. As far as ontology, mathematics is it.

Ethics, As mentioned above, as far as Meta-Ethics, that is, what is the nature of ethical statements, they are language games for which current evidence suggests, as outlined in The Moral Animal, Sapiens, and Language vs. Reality, ethical language evolved to serve as a means for a tribe to assert hegemony over its members and in opposition to external tribes. Still, one can consider a valid language game to play: welfare economics. Welfare Economics is the study of well-defined formalisms to quantify overall human well being, to serve as an objective function for analysis of economic policy. To this end, I appreciate the work of Amartya Sen. He defined a set of capability vectors as including the various life activities an individual can do, including economic activity of various kinds, social engagement, leisure and physical activity, etc. which would all be hampered by economic deprivation, ill-health, etc. Finally, one can consider Virtue Ethics, that is, personal ethics and standards I would respect myself most to the extent the I adhere to, including: uninhibited honesty, discipline, prioritizing good health, respectful of knowledge and wisdom, open-mindedness to life experiences and cultural engagement, and a steadfast dedication towards self-mastery in priorities.

As far as Aesthetics I appreciate intricate complexity as well as vitality, and juxtaposition of the raw and the refined, for instance surrealist art and poetry and lyrical more undergound hip-hop together with progressive metal music.

Spirituality. As a teen I was a staunch Dawkins style atheist until I found Wittgenstein. I found his framework accurate: religion is a language game unlike physical science, one doesn’t read and consider and weigh the evidence, rather one finds a scripture or sermon compelling and declares, in a more visceral sense, “I believe!” (or otherwise). With this approach debates on the existence of God are meaningless, and one can appreciate that each religious tradition has its own set of wisdom for a fulfilling and virtuous life, and, when it’s functioning well, providing stability of common purpose to the population. I was still an atheist, just in a very passive sense as far as religion just not being part of my world.

Eventually after deciding to drop certain lifestyle habits at the start of my mid life crisis, I started to study spirituality. I studied various ancient and contemporary wisdom, especially from the East, as far as enlightenment and cultivated various practices of discipline and asceticism.

Jordan Peterson makes a good point about the intellect becoming prone to believe any thought they have and that this can give in to whims and self delusion. And indeed, much of Existentalism was to find one’s true personal Will to Power, your definition of Truth in the age of dead deities and everpresent Nausea. And finally let us not forget Rene Girard’s astute observation that our goals and desires are commonly memetic, suggested from social narratives, rather than spontaneously arisen from within. Rather it takes great self-knowledge and courage to truly be fully raw in deliberate intent, and even then it becomes exhausting if every choice and utterance must be taken with radical diligence of consciously maximal good faith.

Ultimately I converted to Tengrism, a form of animism. It has been practiced throughout mostly Turkic peoples from the Central Asian steppe to northern Siberia at various times, from which I have some ancestry, probably including the Genghis. Without a singular canon, I make Tengrism my own and am slowly reading about it, developing an attitude of soul being present in all things, trying to consider how I may best be in harmony with the universe, etc. I intend for this development to ultimately provide a pillar, a life beacon to which I can always turn to for solid principles that can keep me focused towards a life in harmony and assertive praxis by my values.

Politically

I would identify as a Free Market Left Libertarian Federalist

Left Libertarian What is currently identified as Libertarianism in the US comes from an intellectual tradition made prominent by Robert Nozick in the second half of the 20^th century together with the canon of Austrian Economics, characterized by a minarchist state, and is more broadly defined as Right Libertarianism. Left Libertarianism as an intellectual tradition arose from 19^th century anarchists such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc. In Revolutionary Russia it was fairly popular: the largest party in the first free election in 1917 was the Social Revolutionaries, which were a Left Libertarian grouping. Of course the Bolsheviks had the union at the munitions factory and the rest is history. Still I have a bit of a mancrush on Ernst Makhno. In the Russian Civil War, he created a third force, a Green Army and took over vast swatches of Ukraine enacting Makhnochisvmo. Ukraine was mostly agrarian, and so just constituted neither landlord nor government presence in the peasants’ lives. The peasants had their own land, worked their land, and no one bothered them. His army fought off both the White and Red Armies until, in a moment of desperation, the Bolsheviks promised to give him autonomy if they teamed up to crush the Whites. Together they defeated the White Army and then the Red Army immediately turned on Makhno and killed him and the other leaders and Left Libertarianism was soon wiped out from the new USSR. In the present day Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis are two prominent Left Libertarian economists. I may discuss them in future articles.

Free Market Left Libertarian However, rather than syndicalism or communist/socialist variants of Left Libertarianism, I believe in the great prosperity potential that can be unleashed by a free market. Individualist Left Libertarianism is considered to have begun with Max Stirner, a young Hegelian often used by Marx as a foil in his writing, and developed in the US by Benjamin Tucker and his long stewardship of Liberty magazine. The torch has been a light one through history but remains glowing, with a modern example of Kevin Carson, and his work on autonomous organization as well as DIY manufacturing as an expression of revolutionary will, before he unfortunately turned to anarcho-communism in more recent years.

Fundamental distinctions of Right Libertarianism and Free Market Left Libertarianism include: 1) the active maintenance of free competition as a necessary bedrock. However, I think after minimizing regulatory bloat and corporate welfare, economies of scale won’t be as prominent, as modern technology can provide opportunities for innovative product differentiation, so there shouldn’t have to be much enforcement in the first place 2) the noted presence of noncooperative dynamics between actors with asymmetric power and capital, which can be muted with prioritizing the structure of a significantly leaner firm, ridding sticky contracts from historical inertia like the 40 hour work week, and means of socially harnessing idle resources such as Georgist land tax policy. In addition, whereas Austrian Economics via Rothbard, Hayek, von Mises defines Right Libertarian Economic Theory, I prefer their less preachy Joseph Schumpeter (I think the best book ever written on Economics is the unfortunately underappreciated Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, And Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process) together with New Keynesian understanding of market failures and Post Keynesian affirmation of disequilibrium and dynamic systems models as more faithful of macroeconomics. Some classic leftish policies I think are sensible include the Tobin tax to add friction to financial speculation, and the graduated negative tax as a means of providing unemployment insurance while minimizing disincentives to work.

Finally, federalism means significant power devolution. I believe this is the only solution to the culture wars. Rather than behaving like monkeys throwing their turds at each other on X, and a struggle for hegemony of cultural narrative in the symbolic space, let people choose with their feet. Cities would be administered with maximal personal freedom, but suburban and rural towns and communities should have the means to administer a local set of values. This can be thought of from acknowledging the bias that comes form Libertarianism: I saw (cannot remember source, sorry) one idea on why Libertarians are so few is because is appeals to a rare personality combination – high conscientiousness and high disagreeableness. And while hedonic binges of casual sex and recreational drug use may not perturb some, it can be ruinous for others. And so some consider the legalization of drugs and encouragement of polyamory etc. as luxury beliefs, and I can understand that a community may not want to have children exposed to certain cultural messaging publicly. But by letting each town enforce its own values, cultures will essentially compete for adherents, as people will naturally move to communities that are most prosperous, safe, and broadly flourishing.

Practically: New Cityville is an urban area where everything goes and lifestyle experimentation is commonplace while religion is in low priority, then Townfolkston lives in Americana Christendom and its tradwives in cowboy boots, and Roots Hamlet County supports a few extended family kin networks performing hunter-gatherer like communal child rearing and lots of drum circles. Each non-urban locale can enforce their own laws regarding vices, public display and behavior, family law, etc. Then men and women can simply decide what is best for them by moving and/or selecting a partner associated with that respective community and their associated value structure and family arrangement. More on this in a future article.

Now to make my more theoretical politics more applied and practical, let me share an interpretation of the 2024 US Presidential Election from a perspective of a member of the intelligentsia as allied to the working class with a Libertarian ethos.

Donald Trump is a corrupt and reckless idiot. Obviously.

Elon Musk, and his milieu of Thiel and Yarvin, echo what I describe, and will write in more detail on in another article, to be a redneck’s interpretation of Julius Evola. What’s important and disturbing is that this is the framework for the Southern European Fascist dictators in the 1930s.

Yet somehow, the vote for Trump was the optimal one for the working class.

“I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another” – Mao Zedong

There are two names that perfectly illustrate the state of the Democrats now. Dean Phillips and Lina Khan. Are these names familiar? Probably not, and the reasons are telling.

Lina Khan was the FTC chair, one that was especially active in both protecting workers’ rights and bargaining laws as well as aggressively pursuing anti-trust policy. With her championing working class interest, and the Democrats hemorrhaging the working class, why didn’t Kamala talk about Lina Khan during her campaign? Because the corporate donors to Kamala told her that Lina Khan is a problem and would be fired after Kamala takers office.

Many are upset that there was no primary and Kamala was automatically ushered in to replace somnolent Biden. But actually, officially there was a primary, during the normal primary season. It’s just there was a complete media blackout about it and Biden refused to debate. The opposing candidate was Dean Phillips. What he did he talk about? How congresspeople spend most of their time talking to lobbyists and how legislation is bought and sold. Apparently you can’t talk about that or challenge the DNC choice. I’m sure if you could, Dean would be sitting in the White House right now.

That the Democrats stand for (just a different) elite and the Professional Managerial Upper Middle Class rather than the average American is telling in the gaslighting: the economy is great to them because average income per head is up and stocks are way up, but what they don’t report is that real wages have been stagnant since 2019 for the median worker, and even worse when considering the prices of the particular typical basket of goods for lower income individuals.

The USAID story is rather farcical. The Democrats’ media howling that the current administration is cutting food for starving children. Yet none report on what DOGE actually found. I don’t think such projects are ones most Americans are saving lives.: $3 million for a Malaysian gay meetup app, $3 million to recruit convicts for “climate justice”, $6 to support tourism in Egypt, $6 million to “Transform Digital Spaces to Reflect Feminist Democratic Principles”, and $25 million to Deloitte to promote green transportation in Georgia. Then countless millions for the purposes of propagandizing Marxist-Leninism (DEI). I’m sure there are certainly valuable programs there, but the narrative is like Hamas with their human shields. Yes, a more sane administration would be more surgical in the battle sparing unnecessary casualties, but it’s clear the entire system is riddled with patronage and ideology and leaning towards a Milei chainsaw is rather appropriate. At least as far as the battleground of ideas, it’s clear that there is much work to be done to make left of center intellectual class political ideas credible.

In all, at least the black boots Big Tech crew have the guts to be up front about having contempt for common folk.

But nevertheless, I have serious skepticism that this is all there will be to it, but instead the current administration, rather than draining the swamp, will simply replace it with an even thicker one with loyalists, just like last time.

So to return, why was the vote for Fascism over Marxist-Leninism optimal for the working class in 2024? Well, recall that Trump is a reckless idiot. His pronouncements resemble college students getting really stoned and considering policies that would be dope, case in point taking Greenland. No one could possibly predict what Trump comes up with, and so one can consider this akin to Exploration in Reinforcement Learning. It’s obvious that a vote for a Democrat or a mainstream Republican would most certainly continue the gradual decline in working class living standards and increase in deaths of despair, so one might as well close your eyes and toss the ball in a Hail Mary because there’s some chance that, in the grand scheme of global nonlinear complexity, some hare-brained Trump initiative magically pushes things in motion within a new domain of attraction towards some positive direction.

Integration

As it should be the case, there is a clear yin-yang tension with respect to the spirituality of retreat from social engagement and the rather boldly contrarian revolutionary discourse. Their congruent integration requires delicateness. The definitive pillars of my principles are in active process of iteration, in both experience and deep reflection. As ironic as it is for me to recommend (in)famous pronatalists, as someone resolutely childfree, I strongly recommend Malcolm and Simone Collins’ Pragmatist Guide to Life as far as cohesively constructing a superstructure of self-supportive philosophical adherence, life objective functions, internal values, principles of conduct in the social world, and aesthetics. Here, I will present a few perspectives on choreography for the yin-yang cognitive-hermeneutic dance, without leaving the reader with any satisfactory resolute conclusion, because who doesn’t like a good tease.

Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius was written towards the end of the Roman Empire. It reflected resignation at the surrounding reality: Boethius was imprisoned by a victorious Goth while institutions he held dear were completely hollowing out of their former glory. In it, he presents the opportunity for radical acceptance providing a moment for deep introspection, reflection on ancient and contemporary knowledge and wisdom. He writes how one can seek to understand the experience of a purposeful existence through communion with ideas and spirituality, together with the moment to moment experience of living, no matter how small in the grand scheme of things..

Still, these matters are not all decided by my preference. With regards to politics, I read plenty on the topic, and adjacent fields (philosophy, economics, history) in my youth, then through most of my adulthood didn’t have much of an interest in politics until the events of last year. It was as described in Slavoj Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, you may want to stay out of it but you may have no choice. To make a colorful analogy, it felt like last year suddenly ideology showed up to my apartment uninvited and took a giant smelly shit in the middle of my living room. I disconnected from the relevant projects and PI, that is I kicked ideology out of my apartment and cleaned up the turd. But now the topic of the institution of science and academia is front and center: as mentioned Trump is reckless and stupid, and now he’s arbitrarily and significantly cut the NSF indirect costs cap, creating a potential budget shortfall problem for many institutions, and so it seems a civic duty is to figure out what ultimately caused this, i.e., how the working class came to detest the institutions of science and academia. This is like after the living room clean up it still smells, then I look out the window and see an entire block in the distance looks like, literally, a massive pile of shit hit a giant fan.

In a way, my Libertarian position reflects a deeper character and personality element: if somehow I was given power over a country and was mandated to perform some social and economic interventions, even if they were my choice I’d find the experience horrifying as far as the responsibility for the well being of so many people. The world is so unpredictable but there are institutions that get to play God. To consider that someone would want to do this suggests a rather troubling individual. So this maximization of human choice with respect to dominion by state or corporate or other institutions is what would bring the most to Sen’s capability vectors of a population. The greater the ability to choose by will, especially in a competitive environment so that good options are incentivized, the better the human condition.

Needless to say I’m aware that my position as a free market left Libertarian federalist is a minority within a minority within a minority, and so I do not harbor any illusions of significantly influencing political consciousness in this direction. Still I hope to provide a perspective and voice that is otherwise more nuanced and accommodating of the varied tapestry of humanity that it could yield insight and enrich the conversations regarding contemporary political topics. My views are so rather niche, political parties all tend to be rather distasteful and so I don’t take sides in electoral politics, just seek to understand it. But the thing about Libertarianism is its emphasis on self-reliance, independent innovation and mutual aid. Indeed even Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States involves more stories of ordinary people assisting each other and taking direct action against oppressive power, more than government officials changing American history towards less poverty and hardship. And so as Wittgenstein says “a true revolutionary is one who revolutionizes himself” And if I pursue a life rich in will to power, of independence in thought and behavior, innovate technology that can enrich lives without economies of scale, and develop ideas and tools for others to live a life of more autonomy, I live a life fertile in revolutionary consciousness.