Mischaracterized

 

I am more of an essentialist than an existentialist, but I am both.

The issues, of being and existence preceding whatness and the nature of each person, though of secondary level consideration, still are be included in how we think about people.

 

Ideologues, true-believers of any stripe, including Leftists, hate essentialism, so they mischaracterize it, in part out of a deceiving, deliberate malice, and to some degree from ignorance. Following is a paragraph from Wikipedia, copied and pasted by me to this article tonight (11/14/23). The quote is not authoritative, but indicative of how ideologues mischaracterize essentialism, and I will paste the quote and then comment on it:

 

“ . . .Historically, beliefs which posit that social identities such as ethnicity, nationality or gender determine a person's essential characteristics have in many cases been shown to have destructive or harmful results. It has been argued by some that essentialist thinking lies at the core of many simplistic, discriminatory or extremist ideologies.^[30] Psychological essentialism is also correlated with racial prejudice.^[31][32] In medical sciences, essentialism can lead to an over-emphasis on the role of identities—for example assuming that differences in hypertension in African-American populations are due to racial differences rather than social causes—leading to fallacious conclusions and potentially unequal treatment.^[33] Older social theories were often conceptually essentialist . . .”

 

My response: “These anti-essentialists accuse those of us that are essentialist of being racist, biased, and discriminatory against people of color, other-gendered, non-middle class, etc. They wrongly proclaim that our generalizations are too sweeping, too rigid, about the nature of certain groups of people, that our take is simplistic, discriminatory, and extremist, that we are white, conservative, supremacist ideologues or fascists. None of this is true or accurate.

 

There are a few alt-right, fascist, racialists and racists that define non-whites by their racial identity, typecasting them with racial characteristics, but they are not conservatives.

In fact, Leftists lie all the time, and whatever they accuse conservatives of (Their first and most damaging lie to conflate being conservative with being fascist and racist, and that is most nasty, effective, mendacious, ad hominem smearing weapon that they use against us: the Big Lie campaign.) doing, they are doing far more and far worse:  their values are locked in cement: they have views of any opponents as fascists and thugs. Their statements are simplistic, discriminatory, violent, hate-filled.

Their raging and extreme mischaracterizations  of us, their enemies, is based on group identity stereotypes against whites and capitalists as racists, colonizers, exploiters and oppressors. These accusations against way over-exaggerations of minor faults. These accusations are overgeneralized, reductionistic, simplistic character assassinations hurled at us, that we as a group--all members of these groups—are defamed as possessing. They lie by denying our decency, fairness, sense of justice making America the least racist, multi-ethnic nation that ever existed.

 

They downgrade whites as all inherently, unchangeably racist, who cannot act any differently from these insulting, degrading, rigid, stale roles assigned by the ideologues They mischaracterize us, and their slanderous descriptions of us are controlled by their mischaracterizing, attributing to us fictitious, supposedly binding group identity traits. We have no individuality, no redeeming personal traits, nor personal free will or efforts can alter that group role as oppressor class. The attributed faults against whites are there, they claim, innately, unalterably, and determined by nature. This spurious assortment of role assigned is all we are and ever can be.

 

Ironically ideologues self-refer as anti-essentialist, but they are rigidly, hyper-essentialist as only anti-Caucasian, reverse racists, and racialists that them can exhibit. Their lies about us is not connected to apriority reasoning, fairness, truth, science, nature, biology, or commons sense. Their generalizations about us are imagined and paranoic, not factual.

 

Leftists and anti-essentialists claim to be for free will and individuality but how they act is hypocritically the opposite of what they announce: hey don’t believe in or espouse individualism, freedom of thought and action or individuality.  Those they love (who can do no wrong, and should be so well treated) and support are all alike versus those that they hate and tirelessly attack (who do nothing right, and deserve vicious assault) are all alike as identified members of unjust, victimizing, cruel groups, without individuality or dissenting behavior.

 

 Leftists and anti-essentialists are typical fanatics and true-believers: for all humans, there can be accurate generalizations about people as individuals; They have no free will, no individuality, no personal exceptions or truth about them as individuals.

 

They are but avatars of the group they belong to. The hyper-favorable stereotypes Leftists apply to members of the groups they favor are locked in forever and unchangeable no matter what anyone in those groups try to change.

 

The hyper-negative, inaccurate, and unfair stereotypes Leftists hold against groups that they disown are hugely mistaken, over-generalizations which they assert as necessarily true, severely restricting and binding upon those oppressor groups and all its members forever. There will be no change, no movement. No individual in that group can help but oppress, exploit, abuse and tyrannize the less privileged.

The epistemology of the anti-essentialists leads them into relativistic denial of essential metanarratives about people, their nature, and the world.

 

Then the anti-essentialists adopt a fervent ideology whose false, inapplicable, absolutist metanarrative boasts an epistemology of utter confidence in their own rightness.

 They assert that base reality is at bottom power struggling between rival factions. Their core agenda is to grow their cause, talking peace, moderation, and compromise when weak, and aggressive, militant revolution and domination when likely to prevail. All their political strategies and tactics are cloaked efforts to grow the cause everywhere.

 

They hyper-essentialize group-identified attributes, for all groups, as ineluctable and forever applicable. This is why it is the anti-essentialists and the ideologues that are profoundly racist—they cannot solve racism by being more racist, and that is their solution: they attribute  debilitating group identity  traits as enveloping everyone, to both the alleged victims of racism, and the alleged racist groups doing the hating.. None ever can change and grow Eternal is power struggling our group versus other groups—there is no hope.

 

It is the conservatives, the rational individualists and the essentialists that alone can transcend universal, built-in, natural human racism and bigotry towards people of rival races, tribes and groups. As conservatives begin to live as self-actualized supercitizens, they see themselves and others as equals and all much talent and private ability; with the right of values and God in their lives, all or any can do great and wonderous things personally. If each person believes and acts to make real her promising personal destiny through ambition, imagination, and hard work, she will do great things. All she has to do is believe in herself, that she is worth self-saving, and that such personal victory is real and doable. The sky is the limit. She can do all this by raising the bar for herself, improving the content of her character and her merited success will be forthcoming. She will impress all as the color of her skin and her group affiliations tend not to matter.

 

 

I condemn reverse-racist and putrid racialist Leftists and militant anti-essentialists for their lying false stereotypes about whites (a group disfavored as oppressors) and their giving a pass as perfect people—members of the groups (the so-called oppressed) they favor. All of these accusations are groundless rantings from sick, demented hysterics.

 

Ideologues have wildly unrealistic optimistic assessment about their allies and equally bleak fallacious, charges to lodge against their foes. The crippling prison and destiny of every human being is to live their role as a mere part of the collective; none can never veer from those group-anointed roles to be assumed without question or exception by all living persons.

 

I will recharacterize and offer a definition of essentialism that is fairer to conservatives and what we actually stand for. I need to be careful and try and separate what other essentialists claim versus what I claim as an essentialist, and I may fail to make that difference abundantly clear, so I apologize to the reader in advance.

 

Conservatives posit that there is a basic human nature enjoyed by all people, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, whether they lived 10,000 years ago or are born 20 years from now. We are real, existent creatures that have a nature, that all share attributes and properties in common. Still, each person is born also with all have some core goodness, reasoning ability, free  will and a modest innate drive to develop what is unique in themselves about as far as they care to take it. Their necessary, basic characteristics remain unchangeable, but their free, educated, awakened self can consciously plan and alter or add this basic nature, and direct its wild, chaotic energies to personal advantage. The natural foundation, human nature, is the ground floor, and  the creative self is the carpenter building her house, her accumulated but advanced accidental traits are blended with her core, necessary traits and personality to build a free, strong, integrated individual, by maverizing the self towards unique perhaps extraordinary singularity as a maverized individual.

 

Each person has a given human nature as humans. Each has properties that can be and intelligibly discerned and linguistically described. How each person individuates is how they elect to signify that their identity is that of an individual and individuators, or as a joiner and groupist.

 

This nature as basic is fixed, but also fixed are our person potentialities that we can actualize. How we do that or not or how we proceed is for us consciously to ponder and decide.  As smart, sane, healthy adults, we can show the world our good wills and free wills that we have nurtured and made strong. By reasoning, feeling, acting, and choosing, we can build a satisfactory personal self, individuated and appealing to us and yet socialized to mesh with others in the community. This effort can be very self-liberating, self-constructed, self-controlled, and amazingly creative and innovative. We can use science and role playing and story of individuating as hero in the myth (channeling Jordan Peterson) to grow the self.

 

This nature has immutable, necessary properties that affect gender roles especially, and all humans have a capacity  for good and evil. We have free will but internal and environmental forces and drives also determine our behavior.

 

Some see human nature as basically good, and others see it as neutral. Conservatives view human nature as corrupt but partially, innately good, that the individual youngster is redeemable if of her own free will she recieves an internalizes her people’s moral code to live by. She can personalize this ethos as she develops self-restraint and adopts maverizing values, perhaps a belief and relationship to a good deity.

Many Christian conservatives regard humans as psychological egoists. This evil, personal, youthful selfishness must be socialized by teaching the young altruist ethics. These conservatives regard selfishness and self-interest as evil, and selflessness, self-sacrifice to others, and the promotion of other-interest over self-interest, as moral goodness.

 

I approximately define self-interest as good, and beyond a  modest, moderate effort, on the part of  every individual, to be  kind and courteous to all, other-centeredness as evil, I think we are born evil, and born a bit good so with good moral training that good minority part of the soul or consciousness can be strengthened into a good will, and good character, if the youngster of her own free wills to take on these positive values.

 

We are evil born because we are psychological altruists, doing evil naturally and socially reinforced all our lives by group-living, prominent group values, with the popular suggesting that urging group-rights, group-identifying, nonindividuating and group-living upon the young is the way for them to live.

 

Now I see this essentialist view on human nature of mind as fixed and unchanging, but also baked into human consciousness and DNA is a soul and free will and a modest desire to individuate, individual-live, favor egoist values, individual rights identify, individual identifying.

 

Essentialists all likely have the same assumption that without recognizing that we are governed by necessary fixed basic nature, regarded as self-evident reality to be factored into how humans are to live, we would not have a chance to survive, evolve or be happy. We have a spiritual soul too, but the fixed part gives us all a genetic and psychological nature upon which to build a sane, coherent, wholesome decent adult personality.

 

 To form and retain a psychologically healthy self, Jordan Peterson describes the sane adult as doing living daily life, 90% of which repetitious stable, routine, habits, and rituals that keep people calm and composed, and this is done in line with the needs of that basic nature being met in socially acceptable ways.

 

What happens when ideologues, existentialists, anti-essentialists and postmodernists value existence over essence, subjectivity over objectivity, and irrational viewing and unwillingness to characterize and categorize anything, though their assertions are untrue, dismissing essentialist ontology as racist, white supremacist and Western bias.

 

Existentialists say essentialists bracket, stifle and deny individuality, free will and personal freedom, when in fact but essentialism just establishes a meaningful, stable base or framework of values for people to use to write their personal stories and their roles in those stories. All kids need culture norms of support family love, groupism, God, stability and then as adults start to individualize.

Without traditional culture and values, without communal structures and rituals, there is no metanarrative for kids to try themselves against, and the current amount of lawless, depressed, shattered children is the product of no essentialist underpinning structure upon which to customize their personal cosmos. How will we perpetuate the species if we do not prepare each successive generation to know their culture, their history to savor and enjoy while updating and tweaking it?

 

In his book, Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucalt, Professor Stephen R. C. Hicks, on page i lays out his thesis for this seminal book: “The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.”

 

What does this mean? The failure of thinkers and scientists during the 250 reign of Modernism or Age of Enlightenment reasoning, because they failed to defend essentialist ontology and foundationalist epistemology adequately against the skeptics, Kantians, nihilists, postmodernists, subjectivist and anti-essentialists (anti-foundationalists), has led to the Leftist/culturally Marxist/PostModernist cultural metanarrative (They deny any metanarrative but that is just another lie on their part: they have an evil, fake, negative, empty, secular/holy cause—Collectivism as Marxism, Islamism, Fascism, Rabid Nationalism—North Korea, Russia, China—to give to the people. Their alleged anti-essentialism is a linguistic and semantic weapon to overthrow Western and American culture to replace it with secular, cultural Marxism.

 

People must have a story meaning or narrative to live by, or go mad, sick, or evil (Jordan Peterson) so they need values and spiritual love in their lives and a faith to worship a good deity (Dennis Prager). If people combine Judeo-Christian values with Greek reason and add a touch of Mavellonialism, then you have built an updated metanarrative to sell to the masses. You have a Chris Rufo cultural counter-revolution, a new universal cultural story: Western and Modern with some Marxist postmodernism as a minor cultural aspect.

 

People today have been taught there are no meanings not absolutes. This essentialist does not think he can prove his metanarrative is straight truth for sure, but we can come close so, and that must suffice.

The Leftists, anti-essentialist and nihilistic, are without values, culture, or a national metanarrative, so the people are left to fend for themselves in loneliness, alienation, anomie, and despair. Americans are now sick and seek replacement meaning in inferior, secular solutions, group living, mass movements holy causes, totalitarianism.  The collapse of Western democracy, capitalism and Judeo-Christian faith leads to nihilism, so people seek wicked murderous ideologies with demagogues leading the. The demagogue is their new deity, and his holy cause is the new religion. Big Government is the cathedral at which they worship.  

 

When socialism failed by 1960s the cultural Marxists used the long march through the institutions (Fabian, nonviolent, cultural Marxism) to overthrow Western values so postmodernism comes in, so we move towards totalitarianism.  This replacement cultural story and the new political setup will usher in a nightmare hell on earth, not a story to enjoy.

 

Revolutionaries gleefully smash our lovely metanarrative and fine set of Western values.  The American way of life gave its people peace, tolerance, stability, freedom, and prosperity on mass levels never known before in human history. Why should that system be overthrown?

People are born evil, but without a gentling a veneer of civilization, good values, and a humane culture story, we will lose the amazing mass civilization called America. If that near heaven on earth is destroyed by revolutionaries, hell on earth will quickly descend upon us all. Leftists seeks to rid us of this lovely America with its rare level of liberty and prosperity and law and order. These malicious anti-essentialists conspire to smash all that is good and decent: soon their followers, wild mob beast will roam our streets and resort to jungle lawlessness and anarchy.

 

All this occurs because the nihilist crushed what should never have been destroyed. That mass civilization can be quietly, peacefully, gradually but constantly reformed,  incrementally improved, tweaked and adjusted and masses.

 

Who should do this? We  need society run and preserved by  millions of anarchist supercitizens, that never panic, never stampede, never give up their guns, rights, lives, property or liberty to some dictator promising that he will save them and provide them security if they will just submit to his rule over them.

 

Only supercitizens are organized, strong, fearless, non-panickers that weather all storms, invasions, pandemics, wars, civil wars, economic panics, revolutions. They will survive endure pick up the pieces, get stronger, smarter, more versatile, and freer with a culture that is free, prosperous, and individual with no totalitarian control from above tolerated or accepted.