That’s Their Culture

December 31, 2019

By NZB3

That’s their culture. You have no right to judge them.

“What’s the best counter argument?”

Lucy’s premise [click image to enlarge] is that one cannot evaluate culture. If something has the status of culture then it is beyond judgement. Who are you, with your tiny individual brain, to contend with institutions and values laid down by social forces? Ayn Rand’s philosophy refers to this Social Constructivist premise as ‘Social Metaphysics’.

“Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality.”-  The Ominous Parallels (1982), Leonard Peikoff

This collectivist cognition is an r-selected trait and frequently the way women think¹. The focus is anti-individual. Instead, one is focused on conformity with what The Group permits one to think. What is safe. What is fashionable. To be in the presence of someone who asserts their own ego by thinking outside the Reservation provokes stress in the Lucy People. They ‘Trigger’.

I could provide a counter-argument along the lines of- ‘You/we have a mind capable of comprehending reality…’ or ‘You are a sovereign individual’ or ‘I am not a number, I am a free man!’ Some people yearn for that sort of pathway, especially so if they grow up like the proverbial Ugly Duckling around r-selected people. To find a road that isn’t anti-individual, doesn’t chop one’s head off for being an independent thinker (a ‘Tall Poppie’) is like coming up for air after being born and raised held under water. These sorts of people don’t go to Kant, they embrace Nietzsche and Rand (sometimes too much.) However, Lucy is not one of these people.

You can’t use arguments within an egoistic framework to convince someone who repairs to a collectivist one. You can’t reason someone into subscribing to reason. The exchange is not a rational one. Charlie Brown’s friend has walked into a zombie-person’s Identity Protective Cognition. His role is not to enlighten but to survive.

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1 The Protected classes are advantaged to thinking like this because their existence depends of the sufferance of society. They need to perform social functions to please and otherwise be useful to Protectors. In our evolutionary history, women tend to be the ones who stay back at camp and tend to the social environment where reality is set by the moods of the community. Men tend to be reality-facing; Concerned with hunting the practical facts of what works or doesn’t work

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