Tag: extremism

There Are Two Kinds of Extremists

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

J.D. Vance once made the observation that the real danger of social media isn’t living in an echo chamber, it’s only being exposed to the most extreme versions of the positions of people who disagree with us. I think that this is an important insight, and speaks to how it is important to seek out the reasonable version of extreme views that we see made fun of. That said, there are two kinds of extremists, and the more reasonable version is only important for one of them.

Let’s start with that kind: the extremist who is a monomaniac. This kind of extremist is extreme because he has abandoned most kinds of good in life and cares only about one kind of good. To make up an example so as to not be accidentally controversial, let us suppose that there is a man who loves the color blue. If he merely loves blue, but loves other things as well, he may well have many blue things in his house but he will not seek to paint the whole world blue, because he knows that trees and grass need to be green, and have their own value. If he was a monomaniac in his love for blue, he would not recognize the good of grass and trees and so would not care that they need to be green to achieve it (I’m speaking of photosynthesis, not of their aesthetics), and so he would seek to pain the grass and trees green, and would kill them. This kind of extremist, though highly concentrated online, is rare in real life. Most people love more than one kind of goodness, and so no matter how much free reign they are given to realize their ideal world, they will balance out competing goods and not wreck the world. These kinds of reasonable people are important to seek out. (I should also note that this highly simplified form of extremist is not what one typically meets online; I need to explain the other kind before I can clarify further.)

The other kind of extremist is a man who is dedicated to a philosophy of life and is not afraid of the opinions of his fellow man, but takes his philosophy to its logical conclusion. This is the Catholic saint, the Protestant Puritan, the Buddhist ascetic, and the Soviet dictator. People who are not extremists of this kind are not people who balance out goods, but merely people who lack the courage of their convictions. They do not live out their philosophy of life, not because they think it lacks something, but because they lack something. Most of the time, it’s social sanction that they lack. That’s why, for this kind of extremist, it is precisely the extremists you should pay the most attention to. If society were ever to adopt their beliefs, it would become more like them.

Now that I’ve explained the second kind of extremist, I can describe where you are actually most likely to meet the first kind of extremist: as someone posing as the second kind of extremist. The technical term for this is a heretic, though it’s an unpopular word with baggage, so let’s stick to “monomaniacal extremist.” For that same reason I will avoid religious examples, so let’s take a secular one: environmentalism. There are plenty of people who want to take care of the planet on which we live in a balanced way. They consider measures to ensure that we don’t poison our water supply, but also consider other goods like industrial production, nice housing, having pets, growing food, and a myriad of other goods that need to balance each other out. Then you have the monomaniac who only loves nature where it has not been affected by human beings, and so champions anything that removes human influence, at the fullness of expression being the human self-extinction project.

This example also shows the importance of distinguishing the two types of extremist. On the one hand, it is important to figure out that the monomaniacal environmentalist merely hates people, he doesn’t love the environment as one good among many, and so he does not represent the views or policies or much of anything of the people who merely consider clean air and water and an interesting variety of wildlife to be goods to balance out among other goods. On the other hand, the people who are members of the human self-extinction project are merely the monomaniacal environmentalists with the courage of their convictions. One should not ignore the human self-extinction people and seek out the more moderate “strangle the economy with regulation” environmentalists because those are only distinguished from the human self-extinction people by being unwilling to say what they really mean.

Poe’s Law Isn’t Quite True

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

There isn’t an official version of Poe’s Law, but basically it is:

A parody of an extremist will be indistinguishable from the real thing.

In a sense this is all but definitionally true, since parody is making fun of something by presenting a more extreme version of it. If something is already maximally extreme, there is nowhere to go with a parody, so a parody will consist of saying the same things.

But… this is not quite true. It is possible to distinguish between an extremist and a parody because the extremist has a different goal than the parodist does. The parodist seeks to make people laugh. The extremist is trying to live life, and no matter who you are, life is primarily mundane. If you pay attention to what an extremist says, you will notice that most of what they say is actually fairly boring.

This stems from something Chesterton observed: a madman seems normal to himself. Since he is normal, he doesn’t think about his extreme views differently from his normal views, because to him none of them are weird. It’s not that’s he’s unaware that most people disagree with his extreme views, but that the disagreement is what will be weird to him, not his own views. We think of his extreme views as some oddity tacked on to the rest of his normal views (such as eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, and washing his hands after using the bathroom). He thinks of his extreme views as fitting in with the rest, since there’s on reality an so everything that’s true about it necessarily fits together. The result is that when he speaks, much of what he says will be prosaic, because he has no reason to speak only about his extreme views. People like to talk about the world, not merely the occasional isolated belief about it.

We thus have a way to tell the difference between an extremist and a parody: the density of extremism in the expression. Or, to put it another way, how funny the thing is. The true extremist isn’t in on the joke, so he doesn’t take care to only talk about the funny stuff. The funny stuff may not even interest the extremist all that much. The parodist, by contrast, is in on the joke, so he takes care to avoid the boring things a real extremist would say.

To put it succinctly, brevity is the soul of wit and the parodist can put on the extremist’s clothes, wear a wig, and even use makeup to change the color of his skin, but he can never change his soul.