One of the most depressing pieces I can remember reading in recent years is a study on the literacy of American college students, specifically English majors.
I often need to remind myself when arguing online with anonymous strangers. I take a step back and wonder: "has this person even ever read a single thing about the topic we are disagreeing about?" I wonder how much time I have wasted this way…
On the right, I would argue it not only affects Zoomers but also the TV-slop boomers. Admittedly, left-leaning liberal boomers do read some non-fiction or at least the newspaper.
Excellent article, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot myself recently as I watch friends of mine undergo wild ideological swings (sometimes into outright leftism) and forget the basics
Those people really are no different than those who pack their profile bios with endless labels such as "free [country name]" or their "personality type". The underlying cause of the behavior is the addiction to attention, but whereas the latter seek moral validation through their performative activism (or "slacktivism"), the former seek to "demonstrate intellectual novelty" as Keith puts it in the article.
Speaking of illiteracy, I recently had a safety meeting with a crew of coworkers. In it, each coworker read a passage of the form. Unfortunately, when I say read, I mean they attempted to. It was genuinely mind blowing to me how impossibly hard it was for each man to read a part of that form. Granted, no one here is college educated (and many were dropouts outta high school), but they were stumbling over the most basic words. That being said, even the form was written particularly poorly as well at certain points and, thus, definitely didn’t help the matter. I’ve also personally met multiple people who genuinely couldn’t read at all (not even a little bit). When American reports having a 99% literacy rate, it’s a lie.
It needed to be said. I remember when I was the only person my age who was in on "this thing". Now a lot of young guys are, but they just don't know anything beyond hype edits, cheap 13/50 jokes, etc. and I want to thank you personally Keith for getting me into philosophy all those years ago as a small theorycel YouTube essayist. It's been great to watch you grow.
Very well presented argument and a strong case in itself for the advances bestowed by the steady long term reading practises you describe and advocate. And as a father of a son who at 19 I think has still yet to voluntarily complete a full length book, I know that none of this is panic mongering. Indeed it seems to be a rare issue that enjoyed cross party support (or anxiety), witness James Marriott’s book on the coming post-literate age.
Great piece. With all this in mind I set out to write a fast-moving, easy-to-read yet informative (based) thriller aimed at the young Western male. This is the result. Would be honoured if you'd give it a look, Keith.
I agree with what you’ve said concerning the intellectual decline and the pipeline of the left. I’ve observed how little philosophical coherence seems necessary for this process to succeed. The modern left appears perfectly capable of establishing its ideas as orthodoxy without reconciling the contradictions upon which many of them rest.
They celebrate the preservation of indigenous peoples as distinct nations in their ancestral homelands, while treating Europeans who wish the same for their own nations as racists. They preach women’s bodily autonomy while defending the circumcision of children incapable of consent. They profess socialism while championing unrestricted labour migration to the benefit of capitalists. They point to the Nordic countries as triumphs of socialism, seemingly oblivious to the nationalist Folkhemmet upon which the Nordic Model was built. They condemn Christianity as oppressive and patriarchal while championing Islam.
Rather than reconcile these contradictions, they place opponents beyond legitimate discussion. Once someone has been branded a fascist or Nazi, there is no need to engage with his arguments. He becomes an enemy to be defeated. This intellectual pipeline isn’t cultivating genuine understanding it merely conditions people to accept certain assumptions as unquestionable truths.
I also suspect the age of democracy is largely passing into history, giving way to something resembling a post-national empire. Elections and parliaments remain, but increasingly as instruments of legitimacy for an order in which the nation exercises no control over its future. What matters is where political authority actually resides, and whether the demos remains a nation capable of exercising sovereignty or becomes an ever changing electorate with no common attachment beyond the state.
I agree that a vanguard is desperately needed. As you mentioned, the Bolsheviks did not require Russian workers to read Marx, nor did the French Revolution require peasants to understand Rousseau.
Political power has always rested disproportionately with those capable of directing institutions and coordinating their efforts. The left demonstrates this well. Its success has not depended upon persuading the masses of its philosophical consistency, but upon cultivating institutions and a professional class through which its ideas become authoritative. Whether those ideas withstand scrutiny becomes almost irrelevant once they form the assumptions around which society is organized.
If anything, the 20th century demonstrated that even the most powerful nation-states and democracies could be brought down by a small, organized group from within.
> There is a passage in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace where she describes attention as the “rarest and purest form of generosity”. It is, she argues, a faculty that requires the deliberate suspension of thought; a waiting, an emptying of the self so that truth might enter. What Weil understood, long before the invention of the smartphone, was that attention is not merely a cognitive resource to be allocated. It is a moral one.
Your point about the intermediate layer is critical. On the left you have “disinterested parties” within the lefts ecosystem, these people are essentially the tastemakers within the left. The right has no such thing. Everyone on the right has a bag they are shilling.
I would liken this to film reviewers generally. On the right it’s like living in a world where the ONLY people who review films critically are working directors, screenwriters, and actors.
And so you get a world of Michael Bay reviews recommending Transformers films as the best films.
The right has no one watching the watchmen. The left for all its faults absolutely does.
just wait till keith finds out you dont even need to correct your kanguage at all when you talk to sn ai lije chatgpt youcsn justsmash in whatever you think like this its awersome lol woot nowrries!!! What are you gay dickins??
This illiteracy (maybe a better term for it is rapid information uptake) is a necessary adaptation to the online environment where much of the content is not information dense and is only meant to grab attention or hoodwink you into buying something. If you tried to engage deeply with every post you read online you would quickly exhaust yourself in mountains of slop. Unfortunately as people's attention spans adapt to this environment it creates a vicious feedback loop where they are only capable of producing re-constituted slop, polluting the information environment even more.
What people need to be able to do is consciously switch on and off this mode of reading. When you are sifting the Internet for information you have to be able to briefly assess each post you come across, but when you are reading a source who you trust, a specific Substack author, or a philosophical treatise for instance, you need to turn on a mode of deep engagement.
Richard Spencer's Apolloism is (unconsciously on their part, I'm sure they genuinely believe it) an adaptation to this slop environment where they propose barely plausible readings of a text that no one else will go and closely read, and so they can capture attention banking on the fact that no one will analyze their interpretation critically. Apolloism is the perfect proof that you can sell whatever cooked up bullshit you want to your audience and as long as it's aesthetically pleasing they'll buy it hook line and sinker. Now they might argue that they do close readings on stream, which is true, but most people don't tune into that, and even when they do Mark Brahmin is posing esoteric hebraic connections between words that no one will go and check on their own.
Also as a nitpick for your source on women reading, I wish that you had cited something showing the actual proportion of stuff they read. The Nielsen report only shows that romance is the 3rd most bought book by women aged 13-44.
Funnily enough, Richard Hanania had a piece discussing how leftism adheres to bureaucracy and control big institutions. The idea was something like; leftists control organizations, rightist excel in decentralization.
The right needs the intellectual capital to seize organizations, i.e academia, white collar institutions, government and businesses.
Though the future looks grim. Other than Nick Fuentes, what other prominent Groyper exists?
I often need to remind myself when arguing online with anonymous strangers. I take a step back and wonder: "has this person even ever read a single thing about the topic we are disagreeing about?" I wonder how much time I have wasted this way…
On the right, I would argue it not only affects Zoomers but also the TV-slop boomers. Admittedly, left-leaning liberal boomers do read some non-fiction or at least the newspaper.
Excellent article, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot myself recently as I watch friends of mine undergo wild ideological swings (sometimes into outright leftism) and forget the basics
Conversation with the average zoomer now is very blackpilling
Those people really are no different than those who pack their profile bios with endless labels such as "free [country name]" or their "personality type". The underlying cause of the behavior is the addiction to attention, but whereas the latter seek moral validation through their performative activism (or "slacktivism"), the former seek to "demonstrate intellectual novelty" as Keith puts it in the article.
Speaking of illiteracy, I recently had a safety meeting with a crew of coworkers. In it, each coworker read a passage of the form. Unfortunately, when I say read, I mean they attempted to. It was genuinely mind blowing to me how impossibly hard it was for each man to read a part of that form. Granted, no one here is college educated (and many were dropouts outta high school), but they were stumbling over the most basic words. That being said, even the form was written particularly poorly as well at certain points and, thus, definitely didn’t help the matter. I’ve also personally met multiple people who genuinely couldn’t read at all (not even a little bit). When American reports having a 99% literacy rate, it’s a lie.
Great piece!
It needed to be said. I remember when I was the only person my age who was in on "this thing". Now a lot of young guys are, but they just don't know anything beyond hype edits, cheap 13/50 jokes, etc. and I want to thank you personally Keith for getting me into philosophy all those years ago as a small theorycel YouTube essayist. It's been great to watch you grow.
Nice to hear. Appreciate it
Brilliant essay Keith.
Thank you!
Very well presented argument and a strong case in itself for the advances bestowed by the steady long term reading practises you describe and advocate. And as a father of a son who at 19 I think has still yet to voluntarily complete a full length book, I know that none of this is panic mongering. Indeed it seems to be a rare issue that enjoyed cross party support (or anxiety), witness James Marriott’s book on the coming post-literate age.
Great piece. With all this in mind I set out to write a fast-moving, easy-to-read yet informative (based) thriller aimed at the young Western male. This is the result. Would be honoured if you'd give it a look, Keith.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Causes-Richard-Nichols/dp/B08NZ8JRT5/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lost+causes+richard+nichols&qid=1618186890&sr=8-1
I can recommend two science fiction books to read about a possible future of the white race.
The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail (1976)
Hold Back This Day by Ward Kendall (2016)
Available for free download at http://oceanofpdf.com
I agree with what you’ve said concerning the intellectual decline and the pipeline of the left. I’ve observed how little philosophical coherence seems necessary for this process to succeed. The modern left appears perfectly capable of establishing its ideas as orthodoxy without reconciling the contradictions upon which many of them rest.
They celebrate the preservation of indigenous peoples as distinct nations in their ancestral homelands, while treating Europeans who wish the same for their own nations as racists. They preach women’s bodily autonomy while defending the circumcision of children incapable of consent. They profess socialism while championing unrestricted labour migration to the benefit of capitalists. They point to the Nordic countries as triumphs of socialism, seemingly oblivious to the nationalist Folkhemmet upon which the Nordic Model was built. They condemn Christianity as oppressive and patriarchal while championing Islam.
Rather than reconcile these contradictions, they place opponents beyond legitimate discussion. Once someone has been branded a fascist or Nazi, there is no need to engage with his arguments. He becomes an enemy to be defeated. This intellectual pipeline isn’t cultivating genuine understanding it merely conditions people to accept certain assumptions as unquestionable truths.
I also suspect the age of democracy is largely passing into history, giving way to something resembling a post-national empire. Elections and parliaments remain, but increasingly as instruments of legitimacy for an order in which the nation exercises no control over its future. What matters is where political authority actually resides, and whether the demos remains a nation capable of exercising sovereignty or becomes an ever changing electorate with no common attachment beyond the state.
I agree that a vanguard is desperately needed. As you mentioned, the Bolsheviks did not require Russian workers to read Marx, nor did the French Revolution require peasants to understand Rousseau.
Political power has always rested disproportionately with those capable of directing institutions and coordinating their efforts. The left demonstrates this well. Its success has not depended upon persuading the masses of its philosophical consistency, but upon cultivating institutions and a professional class through which its ideas become authoritative. Whether those ideas withstand scrutiny becomes almost irrelevant once they form the assumptions around which society is organized.
If anything, the 20th century demonstrated that even the most powerful nation-states and democracies could be brought down by a small, organized group from within.
> There is a passage in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace where she describes attention as the “rarest and purest form of generosity”. It is, she argues, a faculty that requires the deliberate suspension of thought; a waiting, an emptying of the self so that truth might enter. What Weil understood, long before the invention of the smartphone, was that attention is not merely a cognitive resource to be allocated. It is a moral one.
From https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/how-much-cognitive-damage-does-a
Your point about the intermediate layer is critical. On the left you have “disinterested parties” within the lefts ecosystem, these people are essentially the tastemakers within the left. The right has no such thing. Everyone on the right has a bag they are shilling.
I would liken this to film reviewers generally. On the right it’s like living in a world where the ONLY people who review films critically are working directors, screenwriters, and actors.
And so you get a world of Michael Bay reviews recommending Transformers films as the best films.
The right has no one watching the watchmen. The left for all its faults absolutely does.
Well said.
just wait till keith finds out you dont even need to correct your kanguage at all when you talk to sn ai lije chatgpt youcsn justsmash in whatever you think like this its awersome lol woot nowrries!!! What are you gay dickins??
This illiteracy (maybe a better term for it is rapid information uptake) is a necessary adaptation to the online environment where much of the content is not information dense and is only meant to grab attention or hoodwink you into buying something. If you tried to engage deeply with every post you read online you would quickly exhaust yourself in mountains of slop. Unfortunately as people's attention spans adapt to this environment it creates a vicious feedback loop where they are only capable of producing re-constituted slop, polluting the information environment even more.
What people need to be able to do is consciously switch on and off this mode of reading. When you are sifting the Internet for information you have to be able to briefly assess each post you come across, but when you are reading a source who you trust, a specific Substack author, or a philosophical treatise for instance, you need to turn on a mode of deep engagement.
Richard Spencer's Apolloism is (unconsciously on their part, I'm sure they genuinely believe it) an adaptation to this slop environment where they propose barely plausible readings of a text that no one else will go and closely read, and so they can capture attention banking on the fact that no one will analyze their interpretation critically. Apolloism is the perfect proof that you can sell whatever cooked up bullshit you want to your audience and as long as it's aesthetically pleasing they'll buy it hook line and sinker. Now they might argue that they do close readings on stream, which is true, but most people don't tune into that, and even when they do Mark Brahmin is posing esoteric hebraic connections between words that no one will go and check on their own.
Also as a nitpick for your source on women reading, I wish that you had cited something showing the actual proportion of stuff they read. The Nielsen report only shows that romance is the 3rd most bought book by women aged 13-44.
Funnily enough, Richard Hanania had a piece discussing how leftism adheres to bureaucracy and control big institutions. The idea was something like; leftists control organizations, rightist excel in decentralization.
The right needs the intellectual capital to seize organizations, i.e academia, white collar institutions, government and businesses.
Though the future looks grim. Other than Nick Fuentes, what other prominent Groyper exists?
But could you grow a carrot to save your life?
I can buy carrots at the supermarket