Entering the ‘Grey Zone’ – Grey Enlightenment

How to Be Grumpy: Aaron Clarey’s The Curse of the High IQ

This passage stood out:

Look, kid. (I was born in the first week of ’75, so there’s no way he’s older than I am.) Are you aware that Voltaire was repeatedly deported and imprisoned in the goddamn Bastille for bringing about the very Enlightenment that allows you to have a free market to analyze? You root for the Stefan Molyneux podcast on your show. How can you not be aware of the fact that Socrates was freaking killed by the mob for his efforts to bring reason and evidence to Western civilization?

We upbraid SJW-types for their ingratitude, bitching about European culture while enjoying the comforts that the dreaded white males have invented for us. Well, maybe you could say a little thanks to Voltaire for going through all that crap so you can have the freedom to make a grand a day consulting.

It was philosophy and literature that built the ideological framework for the liberties we enjoy. Stefan Molyneux doesn’t spread free market ideas by writing code, he does it with philosophy. The Marquis de Sade suffered in the Bastille too, just so you could have Internet porn. The fact that green-haired idiots whose written English is no better than Clarey’s have taken over literature departments doesn’t mean freaking John Locke was an idle playboy. That’s like saying the entire gaming industry is worthless because Anita Sarkeesian thinks she’s part of it.

Here we see Ann Sterzinger entering the ‘grey zone’, supporting some ‘enlightenment’, particularly as it pertains to intellectual output, but rejecting SJW-liberalism and egalitarianism. But then you invoke the slippery slope argument, which is that a little liberalism will eventually lead to full-blown liberalism.

I also agree with this passage:

As if I weren’t already enough of a freak, my elementary school decided to deal with it by making me skip a grade, which guaranteed I would get the crap beat out of me on the regular by the bigger, older farm girls. Not that there was anything else to do with me. “Gifted and talented” programs were limited to a one-year experiment when I was in fifth or sixth grade; all of the extra money in the tiny budget was already eaten up by the special education programs. Because morons are “special.” (And then they were shocked when I took up with Ayn Rand in high school.)

Reforming education, to stop throwing money at the ‘bad’ (the far-left side of the Bell Curve), is a good start, and is an example of a ‘grey zone’ policy.

To codify this as ideology, reactionary realism is about understanding reality as it is and then acting accordingly, eschewing wishful thinking and sensationalism (like Peter Schiff, Zerohedge, and other doom and other ‘doom and gloom’ prophets and gold peddlers). Related, the ‘rationalist right’ combines elements of rationalism and empiricism, with right-wing perspectives on economics, defense and homeland security, HBD, and sociology, as well as a being pro-technology and pro-civilization. Sorta like HBD meets neoconservatism, with some anarcho capitalism and classical liberalism spliced in, and rejecting most if not all democratic institutions, to be replaced by a fundamentally different ‘system’, as Mark Yurray writes:

The alt-right is a racialist populist movement that views mass immigration as a problem to be solved with right-wing populist politics…

….The neoreactionary solution to this problem is not right-wing populism, but a reboot of the government: retire the millions of public workers and put one CEO/King in absolute power with the authority to steer the country along the best path he can see.

Although he leans centrist, Josh Brown of The Reformed Broker could be a recent example of someone who is both pro-capitalism and technology, is empirically minded, and rejects populism, hype, and sensationalism. Further on the right, George Gilder may be another example, who despite being pro-technology (I mention this because some on the ‘right’ mistakenly lump technology with liberalism, when technology and NRx can be compatible.) and supporting free markets, is a vocal critic of feminism and the breakdown of the family structure. Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel are possibly others.

‘Good policy‘ should advance civilization, even if such policy is unpopular with a constituent, deviates from conventional thinking (heterodoxy), an or is temporarily inconvenient and or requires short-term sacrifice (consequentialism, categorical imperative). The 2008 bank bailouts, for example, could be seen as being ‘pro-civilization’ by stemming the bleeding (which policy could have prevented, but assuming that such preventative measured were impossible, necessitating intervention) at the cost of the ‘free market’ being temporarily suspended in the process. Despite the bailouts being hated by everyone, however, in the long run, it was a ‘success’ by enabling free market capitalism to thrive afterward (success like Tesla, Facebook, Uber, etc), by stemming the bleeding from the weakest sectors (housing, banking) so the healthier sectors could thrive (retail, payment processing, internet, etc) instead of being weighed-down. In evolutionary theory, species die because they cannot adapt, due to a lack of variation. Mutations (deviations) allow some to survive changing environments. Likewise, policy should be flexible enough to adapt to changing environments.