Everyone's pet theory sucks
We are regressing to voodoo
There is no better feeling in the world than sitting on the toilet and reading someone give a complex eloquent and novel explanation for why something happened, what motivated the people in power to do it, and places the world in a perfect box of understanding that you can’t even argue, but is completely wrong.
Not just wrong. Wronger than wrong. That’s why you can’t argue. You see, Sabrina Carpenter got the job because Bart Simpson is her aunt and Trump planned on using the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon against China and straight white men can’t read write anymore because lesbians formed a coalition with Indians and that’s why your wife won’t fuck you and you’re hiding in the bathroom from your family reading this.
It’s wronger than wrong. You can’t argue it because the person doesn’t know enough to know they don’t know, but know enough to know how to pretend they do. I want to call it the Destiny effect, but you’re not required to blow a dude on camera or fuck Lauren Southern to do this, so a better term would be Critical Thinking. Which really means critical bullshitting, but the egg heads decided to call it Critical Thinking.
You see how things make you feel and use this as a tool to get what you want, basically. Words are tools, not symbols of understanding.
It’s a real thing by the way. Back when we were kids, we had Hooked on Phonics. You learned words by learning how pairs of letters were probably pronounced. Eventually you learned the exceptions and before you know it, bam, you can read. Little Red Ball, motherfucker! But some commies switched it up in the late 90s to something they called Critical Literacy, which is great branding.
Everything is critical. You look at the words and pronounce them how you feel. Remember the 2010s when everyone tried to make words mean different things and no one could discuss anything, and so the woke SJW enacted Operation Fore Jordan Peterson and Operation Video Game Troon Out? Everyone of those people now, in the 2020’s are lamenting the abysmal literacy rates of America, the death of the video game industry, and Jordan Peterson’s decent into madness. Lots of theories and explanations, but:
It couldn’t have been any other way, which is the point of this essay.
The problem with everyone’s theories is the problem with polytheism. The problem is an ever shifting mythology that explains the world in good enough terms, an Orrery. These are those cool things you see in the movies, where someone cranks a machine and planets rotate around the sun with a bunch of creaky gears moving.
People built these machines to predict the cosmos. Every now and again someone would notice Uranus isn’t where it was supposed to be, at home taking care of the kids. It was actually closer to Phallus, the 12th moon of Jupiter, and so the Orrery maker would add some more gears and pretend that Uranus was at the gym.
There’s also stories. In the morning Ra battles Khonsu and takes over the sky, while at night he’s burned out and Khonsu takes it back. An elegant, sophisticated, and compelling reason for the day and night cycle. And it’s wronger than wrong. You can’t argue it because they will bog you down an Overton window, where Ra would never lose to Khonsu because he has +5 in Charisma, or some Atheist Redditor, smugly asserting that solar eclipsis can’t be explained.
They are so stupid. don’t they know Apep eats Ra as he travels across the sky?
Aristarchus then realized that it’s the sun that travels around the earth. Of course the RAGA(Make Ra Great Again) types argued that you can see the sun going up in the sky, across, then down again. That’s not what it would look like if the earth were going around the sun. Archie, wearing his Christopher Hitchens branded robe, asserted,
“And what would it look like if the earth were going around the sun?”
God this whole section is cringe, now that I think about it. Ah well, in for a penny. The point is, the difference between a good explanation and a bad explanation (science v myth) is in the first example, there are many things that could explain the suns movement throughout the sky. You don’t need Ra, you can use Apollo. When an exception happens, like an eclipse, you can add to the story so it fits.
But with a good explanation, it couldn’t be explained any other way. The amount of answers goes from N to 1.
An eclipse happens because the moon blocks the sun during the rotation. the sun moves across the sky because the earth is rotating as it circles the sun. You can’t change any part of the story without everything not working.
The sun is a simple example, but nowadays we have complex ones. And since we taught everyone critical thinking, we are getting really good at inventing Myth, and really bad at explanation. For example
Scott Adams used to talk about people watching two movies on the same screen to explain why people could have diametrically opposed views of the same event with the same information as input. Ra and Khonsu are battling for the hearts and minds of American political spectacle! Your wife decides to pick a fight with you, claiming you haven’t taken her out to dinner in forever, meanwhile you know for a fact you just went out yesterday. Your boss seems incapable of knowing what you did this quarter for his performance review, but seems aptly able to recall everything when it comes time to take credit for it at his.
You see myth after myth after myth. Progressive politics are a religion. She didn’t feel like it was a real dinner and doesn’t count. Your boss is overworked and he’ll pay you back next quarter with an exceed expectations… It’s all bullshit and you can’t argue any of it.
Everyone is Critically thinking, no one has a real explanation for everything. It’s all post hoc justification with mythos sprinkled onto reality the way Canada sprinkles Indians onto it’s crumbling economy. It feels like work is getting done while nothing does. And you can’t argue any of it because, in the words of Carl Sagan, in order to argue that you went out to dinner last night you’d have to create the universe first.
And it sucks because you don’t have the energy to recreate the world every time some dipshit starts spouting nonsense. Add to that, you, like me, aren’t perfect. There’s levels of certainty we have to everything. I know my shit when it comes to my work, and I kind of know other things, and certain things I kind of accept whatever I’ve heard is probably good. So on top of having to recreate 12 years of education every time Sara wants to go out to dinner, I have to bring enough humility to check the foundation my house is built on, otherwise we end up with something worse
And the only acceptable answer is to become a hermit. I’m going to go onto Twitter and grab the first few ‘theories’ and you tell me whether it’s myth or explanation
All these wonderful explanations that explain nothing. It’s all myth. I also find it funny how atheists love to argue that god is in the gaps, then fill in their gaps with Reddit allusion. Oh, if they only knew. Oh, it’s simple, it’s that everyone else is stupid, but not us! I’m tired boss.
I’ve been a teacher in one form or another for my whole life. I taught swimming lessons as a teenager, I taught Naval Communications in the military, and I teach for lack of a better word, Red Pill today. I never had to worry about people arguing over water as a teen. I never had to argue over the color of a ship in the 2000s. But today I’m constantly told about the most convoluted myth of women in the 2020s.
It’s given me two changes to how I approach teaching:
