An essay by John C Wright
http://www.scifiwright.com/2017/06/objectivism-and-alt-right/"A reader asked me my opinion as to why the Alt-Right treated allies and friends (I assume the reader had yours truly in mind) with such slander and contempt.
Interesting question. I think there is a reason and rather clear one. I hope I can be candid without giving cause for offense. I call it as I see it, and am ever open to correction.
A caveat: the question and the answer deal with generalities. In no way do all comments refer to all members of the Alt-Right, or even most. We are dealing with a common thread that runs through their most vocal advocates, that is, their loudest, not necessarily their clearest.
My answer is that I do not expect Alt-Right to talk differently than SJWs. Their avowed method is to adopt enemy tactics, strategy, and methods. So a lot of them (by no means all) have turned, like the pigs at the end of ANIMAL FARM, into the very thing they claim to be revolting against.
They hence fall into the same trap of turning what should be a political movement into a cult.
When a political party becomes a cult, it is substituting groupthink for thinking, substituting hysteria for logic, insult for debate.
Cult thinking is binary and totalitarian. I agree with nine tenths of their policy positions of the average Alt-Righter, but if I say I fear and oppose Mohammedans but not Jews, to a binary thinker, that is insufficient.
A politician makes compromises to gather allies. A cultist pens anathemas to drive heretics away.
Cult thinking is totalitarian because it demands the whole person.
If Alt-Rightery were a political movement and not a cult, one could find mutual cooperation with anyone sharing like goals. There would be no absurd demands for conformity on abstract or trivial issues. Half a loaf would be better than no bread.
I submit that the Alt-Right has fallen into the same trap as Ayn Rand. The Alt-Right has accepted enemy premises and definitions.
Alt-Right philosophy has the same allure as Objectivism: it is simple, it is fresh, it is direct, and it promises to conquer all opposition, and that right soon.
Both Objectivism and Alt-Right claim to be rational and scientific, and both flatter their followers by praising them as supermen, as those who eat the Red Pill of Morpheus and wake to see the unvarnished reality.
Both have the same fatal flaw which will not allow either to grow larger than a mere cult movement.
Ayn Rand’s response to collectivists perverting altruism into a weapon was not to define altruism correctly, but to denounce altruism itself.
She merely had to abandon the entire Western canon of thought to do so, and uphold the vice of selfishness as if it were a virtue.
Likewise, the Alt-Right response to collectivists perverting race equality as a weapon was not to define race equality correctly, but to denounce it.
Alt-Right thinking merely had to abandon the entire Western canon of thought to do so, and uphold the vice of race hatred as if it were a virtue.
This is the method of ridding yourself of wolves in sheep clothing by killing your sheep and inviting the wolf in the door.
Ridding oneself of a major pillar of what Western thought recognizes as universal moral principle can only appeal to person scalded or neurotic or otherwise crippled or undeveloped in that one area.
For Ayn Rand, only antisocial and selfish people, usually young bachelors eager for heroic individualism, are lured like moths to her lamp.
For the Alt-Right, it is those who despise the idea of equality before the law, and the brotherhood of man, and who believe man is material, shaped by genes, not spiritual, shaped by decisions. To them, genes are all; religion, philosophy, national creeds and ideals, all count for nothing.
This also abandons a major pillar of Western thought reaching all the way back to the Greeks, namely, personal responsibility.
Let us not lack sympathy for the Alt-Right.
Having decades of glassy-eyed, shrieking Leftwing sadists shoving perverted and poisonous mockeries of the ideas of equality, brotherhood, justice and liberty down one’s throat would turn even a devout man who favors these ideas into a cynic, if not into an avowed foe.
Having decades of conservatives utter windy promises and then betray every ideal and every principle they allegedly upheld, and cleaving to the enemy the first time in living memory a sharp blow had ever been struck against the enemy, likewise must have a stern price.
I still call myself a conservative, but only in full knowledge that there is a blot on the escutcheon, and many a writer who claims that title is an open traitor to all I in truth uphold and he in word only.
Because, honestly, a conservative who opposes Trump on the grounds of ideals, despite what this administration has already done in deregulating and defanging the bureaucracy, reversing foreign policy mistakes, and appointing originalist judges, falls into the same error of being a cultist and not a political thinker.
The enmity of the Alt-Right against such weasels is merited.
If someone tells you your whole life that “equality” means Black Lives Matter shoot cops, while you, as a white guy, get routinely accused of imaginary crimes, and you are forced always to the back of the line, while the Blacks gather in numbers to burn and riot — well, then, equality is madness, and Jim Crow is a welcome alternative.
But you have to believe the someone to buy the lie. You have to believe the Left to conclude that equality means special privileges for Negros and endless curses for Caucasians. Equality means the opposite.
That is what happened in Russia to Ayn Rand when it came to altruism. She was told that altruism meant communism. Altruism means the opposite.
She believed the someone.
Now, I do not think the Alt-Right is as far gone as Ayn Rand, because most still profession loyalty to the West, and many remain nominally a Christian.
I do notice that, in the same way a Leftist Christian is ever called upon to chose between Leftism and Christ, he never picks Christ, so too whenever an Alt-Right is confronted by contradictions between Christianity and Alt-Right, he rarely puts Christ first.
Instead I hear many an Alt-Right man speaking hellish nonsense about inventing a new form of pagan Christianity compatible with Alt-Right posturing.
May heaven preserve us all from such folly!
Ayn Rand was smart yet bitter enough enough to wedge herself into an airtight corner of circular arguments and rewritten history.
Her philosophical system was able to filter out any evidence or argument that might challenge or correct the system. It reached a halt-state.
There was no way to get her out or reach in to her from the outside: her system is too ironclad.
The Alt-Right does not show this same propensity, at least not that I have seen. Alt-Right philosophy is still mostly political, based on a one-sided reading of history, but the system might still be open to philosophical doubt on tangential questions.
These are not evil people. There is a great darkness troubling them."
"About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title. His work can be supported on Patreon"
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