Thread by @Meaningness

In order to do the things everyone does, you have to say the things everyone says. Unless you are willing to be a weirdo—which may exclude you from doing things anyway.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1383713889146204164

This explains the otherwise puzzling fact that the only part of the otherwise dead trad MSM anyone is willing to pay for is culture war opinions. Saying the correct thing about this morning’s outrageous noodle incident is genuinely worth paying $thousands/year for social cred.

Someone pointed out recently that what you get from most of the top-by-revenue substacks is access to correct culture war opinions a few hours ahead of the mob. Pay for them so you can sound superior. (The others are all financial advice, which also has obvious dollar value.)

I can’t believe most culture warriors hear the things coming out of their mouths (keyboards I guess), which generally boil down to “yes when we say exterminate the Bad Tribe, we do mean genocide.”

https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1383814957641330691

This observation by @bryan_caplan was first (?) made by Søren Kierkegaard ~1850. Nearly everyone in Europe still “was a Christian” and said all the right things for Christians to say. They weren’t lying; they just somehow didn’t notice that they didn’t mean any of it.

@bryan_caplan Kierkegaard was an anguished weirdo who thought that, when it came to things like ethics and religion, you should mean what you say. He called that “authenticity,” which has since been one of the most influential ideas in Western culture.

In its subsequent iterations, existential authenticity turned out to be a terrible idea. However, since fake-Christianity imploded due to its fakeness becoming just a bit too obvious, and has been replaced with fake “political opinions,” some revised version may be valuable.

I’m somewhat practicing what I’m preaching here. Authenticity has been a terrible idea; for example it led Heidegger into Nazism and Sartre into Communism and nihilism. So I want to diss Kierkegaard as a Bad Guy. But his analysis seems correct and valuable reapplied here.