I actually like debating with people who are wrong on the internet. It's generally thought of as an exercise in futility, but that's only if you're trying to change someone's mind. I do it because what they say, and how respond, makes me have thoughts I might not otherwise have had.

The other day, this habit helped me solve a puzzle I've been working on for ten years.

Every psychologist knows that when you argue against someone's strongly held belief, you increase their conviction in that belief. In fact, the more compelling your argument, or evidence, is, the more you strengthen this belief.

But what psychologists cannot tell you is why.

The only explanation they usually venture is that accommodation (the act of changing one's world-model to deal with new information) takes more effort than assimilation (fitting new information into an existing worldview).

But that doesn't hold water. Because people whose beliefs are being contradicted aren't just coming off as lazy and apathetic. No. They get mad. They get so mad that they sometimes resort to insults, or violence, or start to hate the person doing it. And when we talk about debates, a argument against someone's position is often referred to as an "attack".

Now, psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, meaning the stress people experience when their beliefs are contradicted by others or by experience. They're right... sort of. It feels like pain, in an abstract way. We've all felt it to some degree, and we've all seen others react to it.

But this doesn't explain anything. It's just a label. Yes, this thing occurs... but why?

Why does a disconfirming experience feel painful? Why does it tend to actually strengthen a belief rather than weaken it? Why does this only happen with strongly-held beliefs, and not weakly-held ones?

Ever since I helped found an internet discussion group called "the red pill", which dealt with present disconfirming arguments to certain deeply held beliefs, I watched this happen and it puzzled me.

It couldn't be dismissed with "people are stupid", or otherwise explained in terms of individual dysfunction, because everyone does it to some degree. It's a human instinct.

Then, finally, one day, when arguing with someone online, I had an idea.

The words "right and wrong" mean both "correct and incorrect", and "good and evil". What if that's not a coincidence?

The majority of the brain isn't self-aware, but it heavily influences decision-making. What if those parts of the brain store moral opinions and factual beliefs in the same way? What if only the small, self-aware, prefrontal cortex is capable of making a distinction between the two?

That would mean that the midbrain doesn't really have an "ought" and an "is". Instead, it would have a category that encompasses both. I think that category might be "tribal alignment".

For example, "you ought not to disrespect tribal elders", and "don't step on the yellow and black snakes, they are poisonous", are a moral belief, and a factual one, but at their core, they both tell you what to do or not do. Why wouldn't the ever-practical and lazy programmer that is evolution store them in the same way.

Hence, alignment. Do your beliefs align with the tribe or not? And, as the world becomes larger and more integrated, which tribe do your beliefs align with? Or do they align with none at all?

(And if you're thinking here that it's no coincidence that a popular role-playing game uses this term to describe morality, then you might be correct.)

So perhaps people get mad when you challenge their beliefs, because, to their unconscious mind, you are basically telling them to unalign with their tribe. And under the conditions of brain evolution (stick and rock technology), isolation meant death.

(This might be why people living in the worst of communist dictatorships have never been as unfree as hunter-gatherers living in tribes. Tyrants have a very long list of things you may not do, but primitives have a very short list of things you may.)

Let's try an example:

Suppose I, an atheist, am speaking to a christian about whether or not there is a god. The more factual arguments I muster, and the more compelling they are, the more I am, in effect, demanding that someone abandon their community. And that doesn't even mean, necessarily, walking away. It can also mean losing the sense of belonging. And the latter can happen to someone involuntarily, merely by listening to me, without any conscious act of defection.

If we think about it like that, no wonder it makes people mad! They are being asked to sacrifice a concrete source of comfort and (perceived) benefit, in exchange for... well, at worst nothing, but even at best the benefits of being "correct", which might exist, but even if they do, are hypothetical and they can't see them.

Of course trying to cut someone off from the tribe is experienced as an attack.

But every tribe, but its very nature, has to be wrong about something. Because new evidence comes to light all the time, and if your beliefs aren't able to turn on a dime, then pretty soon some of them are going to be outdated. And if your beliefs are able to turn on a dime, constantly pivoting to whatever the current evidence suggests, then you have no tribe, you can't have a tribe, because you have nothing to hold that tribe together.

(This is why libertarians don't win elections.)

So the universal human experience is a choice: suffer the pain of delusion, or suffer the pain of isolation.

And these tradeoffs play out in a number of different ways... some false beliefs cost you very little, and some of them ruin your life. Some beliefs align you with close-knit and beneficial communities, and some align you with random nutjobs, or no one at all.

And how costly beliefs are can change.

Galileo was threatened by the church for challenging an aligning belief that was, at the time, consequence-free for most people. It didn't really matter in someone's daily life if they thought the sun orbited the earth, or vice versa.

And so Galileo was treated as if he were advocating genocide, or something, because Popes' brains don't make a distinction between factual positions and moral ones.

But, in the twenty-second century, when we start trying to mine asteroids, the same belief would have a huge cost, and would have to be stamped out. Fortunately, it's already happened, partially because of Galileo.

But.... what is different about Galileo? And the people who read his work, nodded, and said "that sounds right, I'm going to change my beliefs".

Well, there's a lot of people who run around priding themselves on being smarter than others, or more objective. And that makes them feel good. But is that the whole story?

What if the people who embrace unaligning beliefs are doing so, at least partially, because they are already unaligned and have nothing to lose? What if Galileo was already suffering the pain of isolation, due his vast personal differences from the people of his day? If so, it would cost him very little to pivot his beliefs, and thereby avoid the pain of delusion as well.

And what if this equation is also impacted by how costly a particular delusion is?

Which brings us back to the red pill. The red pill was a push for unalignment; an attempt to help ourselves and others reject the "matrix" of an unaligned belief system that was costing us a great deal. But it gradually became about other types of unalignment as well, and, more importantly, about the ability to unalign.

This what "taking the red pill" really means in a larger context... making the conscious choice to suffer the pain of isolation instead, when the pain of a particular delusion becomes large enough to make matrix participation a bad investment.

This is why we got so much hate mail at first. We weren't proselytizing, but our mere existence created a risk of unalignment for others who became aware of our views. This was a threat both to those people themselves, because they found unalignment painful, and to others who found their unalignment painful (because they were less easy to exploit).

Thus, we were, in a very real sense, an infohazard. A self-perpetuating meme which caused painful cognitive dissonance.

My current hypothesis is that most resistance to well-supported ideas rests upon this dynamic. It might even be the case that being objective isn't always a good idea... that it might not always be beneficial to be correct. Some factually correct beliefs might have a very high psychological or external cost, in exchange for a lot less personal benefit.

It may have come to your attention that a great many people who wield influence in politics, academia, and social media appear to hate straight white men. If you ask them why, you won’t get a straight answer, and if you watch their behaviour, it doesn’t appear to make a whole lot of sense, either, given that most of them ARE straight white men, and that the taxes and revenue they depend on come from straight white men, and that straight white men are pretty much what keeps western civilization going at all.

You have to think about what’s in it for them. What do they want?

The distinguishing feature of these people is not that they want power (everyone wants power), but that they want power for its own sake. They don’t want it to make their lives better. They don’t want it in order to make the changes they wish to see in the world. They don’t want it to help anyone else, or even themselves.

They just like having it. It’s the source of their next dopamine fix. And they are all serotonin-deficient, so dopamine’s all they have to look forward to.

When you understand this, it’s obvious that if they are targeting straight white men, that must be because straight white men are an obstacle between them and power. Because they don’t do anything for any other reason.

So why are straight white men an obstacle between neomarxists and power? Well, this is pretty simple… straight white men are hard to rule. They are the most libertarian demographic out there. And if you do a web search coupling the words “white”, and “libertarian”, you’ll find that the neomarxists are keenly aware of this fact, and expend a great deal of ink lamenting it.

It’s not about your race at all. It’s about the simple fact that you don’t want them telling you what to do, and you don’t want them taking your wealth to use for their purposes rather than your own. Neomarxists don’t hate you because you are straight, white, male, and young… they hate you because you don’t have to do what they say, and they cannot stand being around anyone who doesn’t do what they say.

So what do you do when someone hates you because you are ungovernable? You have only two options. You can either become easier to rule so that they stop attacking you, or become still harder to rule so that their hatred has no power to hurt you.

The first option is, obviously, a non-starter, because if you become easier to rule, you may stop being hated, and even attacked, but you’re not going to prosper. Look at black people in America… they are super easy to rule. They’ve been voting Democrat and trusting the system for sixty years, in exchange for nothing but empty promises and grinding poverty. The places where black people are being shot, arrested, and neglected aren’t run by Republicans, and haven’t been for many, many years.

If you stop resisting, neomarxists might kick you less, but they aren’t going to magically start giving a fuck about you or one problem that you have.

You must become more ungovernable.

How to do that? First, you have to realize that you actually aren’t in a position of weakness. They may have more money, and more cameras and microphones, and run social media websites, and television news stations, and hold elected office, but ultimately they are trying to make you do things, and you are trying to stop them. That means that in order to win, all you have to do is not do the things.

They are struggling to control your body. But since your body is directly connected to your brain, not theirs, you have a bit of an advantage. All you have to do is first not comply, and second, be resistant to the things they will try to do to make you comply.

There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty (not freedom, liberty – they are not the same thing), in this order: Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo.

You’ve all heard that saying, and people like to repeat it, but very few know what it actually means. It is not a recipe for how and when to overthrow the government. You don’t need or want to seize control of government, because governments are tools for ruling others, and this isn’t about how to rule others, but about how not to be ruled.

Instead, these boxes are the remedies, in order, to a government’s attempts to control you.

First, they make laws and policies without considering your interests and priorities. The remedy to this is the Soap Box. Most people think you are supposed to stand on your soapbox and persuade others to believe as you do, but that’s not what the Soap Box is for. Instead, you are supposed to harangue policymakers so that they know what you want.

Second, the policymakers and elected officials will try to resist your Soap Box by ignoring your concerns and doing what they were going to do anyway. The remedy to this is the Ballot Box. Most people think you are supposed to go to the ballot box and elect people who support the policies you do, but that’s not what the Ballot Box is for. Instead, you are supposed to vote out officials who ignore you when you get on your Soap Box.

Third, the policymakers and elected officials will try to resist your Ballot Box by rigging the system, creating political parties, gerrymandered districts, absentee ballots, ID-less voting systems, and just plain stuffing ballot boxes with fake votes. Anyone think that the Democrats really won the 2020 election? The remedy to this is the Jury Box.

Which is the stage we are now at. If you think the Ballot Box still matters, consider that congress has an approval rating of under 25%, and a reelection rate of over 90%. If you think that the Soap Box still matters, just try writing a letter to your congresscritter that disagrees with the platform of the political machine they are beholden to. See what the response looks like.

So what does it mean to use the Jury Box?

It means that the law is just words on paper unless it is enforced. To use the Jury Box means to nullify the law by not non-compliance, both on a personal and a collective level.

Juries can vote to acquit for any reason, or no reason at all. Laws can be disobeyed without consequence if the people doing so are too numerous to target, or too expensive to prosecute, or too hard to find. State and local jurisdictions can simply nullify federal law. When was the last time anyone cared that federal law still forbids marijuana use? Unless your home state still goes along with it, voluntarily, it makes no difference at all.

Remember, you are not trying to control the authoritarians. You are just trying to prevent them from controlling you. If the Soap Box and the Ballot Box fail to prevent them from passing crazy laws, then it’s time to make those laws not matter.

Then, if you ignore the law, there is only one thing left for authoritarians to do.

(Oh, they could withhold things you need from them, I suppose, but if you still allow yourself to depend on the federal government for anything you need, you’re clearly a retard, and I can’t fix stupid.)

No, they have to send thugs after you. That’s what the Ammo Box is for. Your AR15…

(You do own one, don’t you? If not, see the previous comment about retards.)

… isn’t for marching on D.C. and guillotining socialists in front of the capitol building. It’s for when they send thugs to drag you out of your home. You might think it can’t work, because they have a lot more men, and guns, than you do. But you’re wrong. They don’t.

There’s a lot of straight white men in America with guns, who don’t want to be told what to do. You outnumber government thugs by many orders of magnitude. They might be able to step on you, but only if you are alone.

This means that the strategy of the Ammo Box is about not being singled out. Do you live in state that’s going to ignore federal law if it tries to violate your rights or disarm you? Do you live near a bunch of people who will disobey with you when the shit hits the fan? Do you know your neighbors? Are they the sort of people who think for themselves, or do they do what their television tells them to? Do they burn down the local business distract if they see something on TV they don’t like?

Might be time to pack that moving van, not to leave the country in pursuit of pussy, but to get where you’re not in hostile territory when the shit hits the fan. Pussy is everywhere. The same cannot be said about “a fighting chance to control your own destiny”.

Make sure you own some land. And a rifle with plenty of ammunition. Make sure you’re not living or working around lots of people who are governable, and can be weaponized against you. Make sure you’re not dependent on the good graces of people who want to control you.

Make sure you’re not vocally right too early. You don’t want to be the only visible person making a stand. Pick your moment. It’s going to have to get a lot worse before most people are tired of getting kicked and ready to stop trusting “the system”.

Remember, society hasn’t “failed you”, because it wasn’t ever on your side in the first place. Start thinking about how to limit its power to harm you.

Because pussy isn't the only problem you have.