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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 19/02/2025

Just posted "A Non-Grand Thesis of Luxury Politics", which is the introduction to my in-progress explanation of the fascism of the current moment through a philosophical-psychological exploration, ~14 minute read: journalofcogency.com/2025/02/19/a...

Right now, I am starting to put together a work of philosophy, a thesis. My goal with this work is to explore this question: How does a smaller group of people manage to rule over a larger one? Why is “there are more of us” not enough to create change? My answer to that question is “the subjugation effect” and this work is my attempt to explain what that is.

To properly explain this phenomenon, I need to proceed in six stages. The first stage, political systems, will set the basic context of the argument. The second stage, money as a medium, will explore the binding force of money as an example of such forces. Third, the way we think, will develop the second stage and show how this “binding” can be generalized to other agents. Fourth, the mystery of cogency, will discuss the construction of social power and indirect action. Fifth, the subjugation effect itself, where specific manifestations of political-cultural subjugation will be examined in light of the first four stages. In the last stage I’ll explore the reason which motivates the continuing of the subjugation effect: the desire for luxury.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 16/02/2025

Read my first-blush review of "Nietzsche and Philosophy" by Gilles Deleuze, in which I refine my position against Nietzsche: journalofcogency.com/2025/02/15/d...

I think that the core appeal of Nietzsche is in asking the question again; I’ve said this before. I didn’t, perhaps, give enough credit to what a monumental moment that may have been. This might be a historical fallacy; that is, because it’s such a common thing now, I assumed it was always the case. Surely there must have always been iconoclasts who went against the philosophical grain.

Also, Nietzsche’s dramatics and poeticizing are aesthetically appealing. It appears to be a much different way of doing philosophy than anyone else, and for that reason it appears to be saying something which is different than anyone else. It seems to demand appraisal on its own terms because it does not easily fit within the run of philosophy as such.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 29/01/2025

Because I'm feeling generous to all the losers: Why I Hate Nietzsche substack.com/home/post/p-...

But more than his existence, I hate the people still cite him approvingly. People listen to ideas about bad conscience and ressentiment, where Nietzsche is saying "you, the reader, are nothing but malice unless you are an elite" and say "yes actually, I feel so much ressentiment and that's why I want justice." They try to convince themselves that actually Nietzsche was being more nuanced than he appears to be.

Am I trying to say that Nietzsche has no complexity? Of course not. But people who defend Nietzsche's work almost demand that you ignore the things he says, things he never contradicts and that no one even suggests he contradicts.

His ideas are bad because he refused to understand the morals of his day, because he rejected their basis and therefore never considered that they might be as much a matter of practicality as they are of empathy. He never thought procedurally about why certain things might take place. The lack of connective tissue in his work is fairly alarming, and this is important because his ideas do not really make sense unless, like most philosophers, you have a little self-doubt inside that you like someone to beat on from time to time.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 25/11/2024

IMPORTANT READ: Read "Protest and the Construction of Power" (14 mins) on Journal of Cogency, about how a process becomes an act of power and how power acts to snuff out anything that challenges it. journalofcogency.com/2024/09/23/p...

When the police assault peaceful protesters, when courts send people to jail for years because they block traffic for mere hours, these things have happened in some part because no challenge to the system of power can be stomached by arch-conservatives. The protest, the resistance to being subsumed, is itself what the state wants to eliminate. If my arm hurts, I’m not likely to tolerate it more because I hurt it while helping my grandmother or practicing jiu jitsu. What might help me tolerate the pain — not try to extinguish it immediately — is if you tell me it is a sign of my arm healing. For those reliant on the power process, what is important is not order or disorder as such but the effective functioning of the power system. Protest is a breakdown, and the state’s violent reaction is the clearest sign that the threat posed to the state power system is real.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 25/11/2024

What Is Capitalism? An exploration of what capitalism means as well as capitalism as an ideology journalofcogency.com/2024/07/01/w...

In Europe, the rise of liberalism happened alongside the rise of another idea: nationalism. It would be incorrect to say that early liberal thinkers did not understand the need for community. Most early nationalists were liberals and vice versa. Still, the individualist goals of liberalism contradict the collectivist goals of nationalism, so I find it more useful to view these as separate ideologies which can be held together. This coincidence is important because nationalism clearly introduced an alternative value-body: the national community. This led to the creation of modern political socialism, and it is in this context that ideological capitalism first emerged. Capitalism, defined in large part by the capital value-body, was a way to avoid socialism. I will explain more about these value-bodies in the next section.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 25/11/2024

Have you ever wondered why the Democrats come right up to the line of doing something good and then back down at the last second? Read "Why the Democrats Will Never Love You", a 7 min read on Journal of Cogency: journalofcogency.com/2024/10/24/w...

And while you can read this situation as the base & the left having some amount of influence, this is a similar level of influence as "voting with your wallet". You can shout as loud as you want for things and refuse to vote for Democrats. If you go too far left, they will just sandbag you and lose. / They would rather sandbag you and lose than be "too socialist" because, fundamentally, they're of the capitalist class. And that's why they have the ultimate power in this situation. Maybe their success relies on you, but if they decide not to play, you get nothing. / I think I'm wrapping up here, so let me say this: most Democratic voters understand this innately, and most leftists do, too. The difference is the response. Committed Democrats are cowards, so they follow wherever the core leads, hoping for protection. Leftists get mad at the game being rigged.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 24/11/2024

Read my commentary on the new episode of Historia Civilis: journalofcogency.com/2024/11/23/c...

On the question of revolution, what interested me is the paramilitary aspect of it. Revolutions in France, in particular, hinged a great deal on Paris and controlling it. Abdicating Paris was almost always seen as a death blow, while holding Paris gave one the right to form governments, run the country, etc. Of course, there were always conflicts like the fighting in the Vendee which went along what happened in Paris, but it’s a very common opinion that the control of Paris is a primary necessity. In the case of the July Revolution, as HC lays out, King Charles X’s withdrawal of the military from Paris was noted by Talleyrand as the precise moment when his reign ended.

Let’s try and port that over to the United States. This line of thinking will hold for many modern countries as well, likely including modern France, but the U.S. is a clearer example. To be blunt: I do not think that a revolutionary force simply taking and holding Washington D.C. would be the end of the government.

But why? That’s what interests me here. What are the differences between Paris in 1830 and modern capitals that would make this strategy untenable?

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 24/11/2024

What Is Religion? (7 min read) A bias (hypothesis) about how we can understand what religion is in a way that clearly indicates what we should include and why: journalofcogency.com/2024/08/13/w...

The four tiers of observance or worldview are general abstract levels of knowing and understanding the world. Through these lenses, a person figures out how they should live and act in the world. These tiers are (1) the cosmos, (2) the world, (3) the society, and (4) the self. These are addressed by the four discourses: (1) cosmology, (2) epistemology, (3) axiology (or teleology), and (4) deontology. In this context, each has a specific definition that I’ll go over now.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 07/11/2024

Read Whipping Ourselves and Weeping, a 10 minute read about Marx & destiny, Nietzsche & self-flagellation, and why the left is always soul-searching journalofcogency.com/2024/07/24/w...

Destiny is fake. The problem with destiny, and with the logic of self-flagellation, is that it ignores the agency of the other side.

For self-flagellation to make sense — for the logic of leftists having an inherent flaw to hold up — the failures of the left would have to be the fault of the left alone. That implies that nothing is fighting against the left. This is the problem with destiny, and with the elevation of Marxite use of the process of dialectical materialism to the status of prophecy simply because the argument is extremely persuasive. We have reduced our situation to something like a mountain climb, where no matter how hard it is, it is a stationary obstacle whose challenges are known and just have to be overcome.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 07/11/2024

Read "Against Ur-Fascism" on Journal of Cogency, a critique of the essay "Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco which I feel is a naive view of what fascism is, one which I try to update journalofcogency.com/2023/10/19/a...

First, it’s necessary to dispense with the notion of fascism-as-syndrome, and my approach is straight-forward: no collection of “fascist” symptoms can be said to be representative of fascism alone. Eco does address this issue, it must be noted, but mentioning a problem does not solve it. For the proposed facets in “Ur-Fascism” to be useful they must provide a way for us to see fascism as distinct from other political ideologies. “Ur-Fascism” does not achieve this. I’ll demonstrate with a few examples.

• The cult of tradition exists in most liberal(izing) societies, including the United States, India, Brazil, et. al., in heritage holidays, national dress, and so on; if viewing “rural exile” policies as fitting into this category (i.e. sending city-dwellers, especially intellectuals, to rural places so they could learn from simplicity and poverty), socialist-communist countries also engaged heavily in promoting traditional values and ways of being.
• The appeal to the frustrated middle class was the explicit draw in the American and French Revolutions, and can be said of the Russian Revolutions as well (considering that urban workers were seen as more socioeconomically developed than rural peasants).

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 07/11/2024

Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "Against Ressentiment" on Journal of Cogency, about how people (especially liberals & leftists) have internalized the idea of ressentiment and bad conscience, and why that fuckin sucks journalofcogency.com/2024/03/08/a...

Few concepts which Nietzsche developed have been less controversial than ressentiment. I view this as a problem. It’s not unusual to find that ressentiment (and its cousin bad conscience) are at the core of Nietzsche’s thought. It’s also not unusual to observe that Nietzsche was stridently elitist and aristocratic. It’s interesting, then, that people never associate those two observations and ask to what extent ressentiment was constructed to justify that aristocratic worldview. Asked another way, what explanatory force does ressentiment have outside of that view? In my estimation, it is little or none. What I will show is that ressentiment is only a way to ascribe inherent malice to weakness, a line of thought whose only end point is excusing the use of power by the powerful against the weak.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 07/11/2024

Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "Technology of Authority" on Journal of Cogency, about how the purpose of capitalism is to establish domination over people as a successor to divine kingship #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/06/05/t...

Technology of Authority

Yes, I wish this was a metal song, too.

This is the theory of a theory, a pre-theory. Capitalism is not simply an economic system or mode of production, it is a method of establishing domination: a technology of authority. It is the more or less direct successor of divine kingship. When the European revolutions of the 19th century had destroyed divine kingship, at a point when Europe had more or less dominated the world, this discredited divine kingship forever. Without divine kingship, a government must serve its society, and this logic always means that the wealth of a state will eventually be distributed among the common people. Capitalism as an ideology functions to justify the authority of those who wanted to stop that from happening over the common people by granting social privilege to the holders of capital over non-holders of capital.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 07/11/2024

Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "What Is Divine Kingship?", explaining why the idea of divine kingship is an important precursor to fascist ideas journalofcogency.com/2024/06/08/w...

Almost every kind of justification that is successful is a variant of the invocation of social benefit. This idea will return again later. For now, we should understand divine justification (which is the type used by sacral rule) as being an image of the invocation of social benefit. Especially in the West, it’s common to link any alliance of divinity and government with oppression, so it should be understood that this justification is based not on divine force & punishment but on divine providence. Providence is a kind of benefit which originates outside of society and is potentially limitless. Ensuring that this potential is not lost is the responsibility of the sacral ruler, such as by organizing rituals and ensuring divine wishes are followed, and this gives the ruler the justification to take acts which might otherwise be seen as against society. A dramatic example is the system of human sacrifice in the Aztec civilization. It is unlikely that this system was enjoyed by much of the population, but the system was justified as being demanded by the divine as a condition of providence. Remember that what justification accomplishes is a reduction in opposition from the society for an action taken without the society’s consent and/or against the society’s immediate well-being. Without this justification, how could we explain the fact that Aztec people allowed this to continue?

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 07/11/2024

Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "Protest and the Construction of Power" (14 mins) on Journal of Cogency, about how a process becomes an act of power and how power acts to snuff out anything that challenges it. journalofcogency.com/2024/09/23/p...

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 27/10/2024

A short piece about what morality is and what it is worth for us #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/01/18/a...

To oppose Chomsky’s view of moral systems, though, I do not believe moral systems (or any mental construct) are like biological organs, I believe they are like bone tools. Do we need them (or something better) to navigate the world, to get ourselves sustenance, to protect ourselves? Absolutely. But these are things that we have made out of nature, not things that nature has made for us.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 26/10/2024

What Is Capitalism? An exploration of what capitalism means as well as #capitalism as an ideology #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/07/01/w...

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 25/10/2024

Read "Protest and the Construction of Power" (14 mins) on Journal of Cogency, about how a process becomes an act of power and how power acts to snuff out anything that challenges it. #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/09/23/p...

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 24/10/2024

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 13/10/2024

Read "Whipping Ourselves and Weeping" (10 mins), about self-flagellation, leftist fascination with Nietzsche, and a 10,000 year war #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/07/24/w...

I’ve always hated the embrace of Nietzsche on the left. I don’t think that Nietzsche had good ideas in the sense of intending anything good for most people. I’ve recently become acquainted with the nihilistic philosophy of Nick Land which strikes me as intensely similar. I usually say that the reason these philosophers get picked up by otherwise sensible leftists is that they “ask the question again”. Essentially, they revisit what seem like obvious assumptions — in progress, in the value of humanity, in the concept and/or usefulness of morality, etc. — and point out absurdities in them. The major flaw in both of them, and I won’t guess at the source, is that they don’t have anything productive to say. All they have to offer is rejection of those assumptions and animosity. People will argue that both are simply being provocative but you are not simply reading between lines at that point, you are reading between atoms.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 14/06/2024

New on Journal of Cogency: What Happens When a Country Defaults? Following a question from reading David Graeber's Debt, I sketched out what national debt is and the potential dangers #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/06/14/w...

The overuse of pledges will eventually cause lenders to stop accepting them, no longer lending cash/goods to the government to use for purchases. When a government cannot make pledges or purchases, it can only rule by decree. This will increase discontent and it can do so indefinitely; the obvious outcome of this is government overthrow. This is the tension which countries attempt to defuse through their fiscal and monetary policies.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 11/06/2024

New one on Journal of Cogency: What Is Divine Kingship? Where I explain... divine kingship, as well as beginning my challenge of Marx's modes-of-production model of history by using a concept inspired by Deleuze & Guattari #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/06/08/w...

First, I should probably make clear what I mean by sacral rule. It’s obvious that this includes two historical concepts — the divine right of kings in Europe and the mandate of heaven in China (and nearby regions) — but what else does it include and what does it not include? I live in the United States of America, a country whose population is officially about 70% Christian, has only elected Christians to be its monarch, has gone through protracted periods of Christian political mania dominating law and justice, and whose majority population regularly abuses religious minorities. Many Americans believe this country to be the favorite of the Christian God, the ruler begins their rule by swearing in upon a Christian Bible, and they are often associated with priests who recognize the ruler as being chosen by God. Does all this mean that America is under sacral rule?

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 09/06/2024

A new piece of esoteric (not like that) philosophy on Journal of Cogency: Traffic, Flow, Code, and Boundary, about extending the concept of flow & code as presented by Deleuze & Guattari #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/05/27/t...

Here's a dumb example from my own life. Years ago, my friend and I were traveling by car at night. We came to a fork in the road. I was driving and I took the fork one way, then my friend told me that we should have taken the other way. My reaction was to swing the car around, drive briefly over the grassy median, and get on the right road. I think we can adequately analyze this with certitude and enforcement. In the case of certitude, this is simple. After first taking the fork, the flowcule has low or no certitude that the system would take it to its preferred destination, so it decided to travel over an invalid area. However, this choice or outcome may have been impossible if more enforcement had been present. If a wall had surrounded that invalid area, the flowcule couldn't have entered. If a police officer had been present, the threat of immediate punishment may have better enforced system rules. The fact that many cars... (Continued in link)

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 09/06/2024

A short piece about what morality is and what it is worth for us #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/01/18/a...

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 09/06/2024

Remember to check out (and share (and comment on)) my article The Theory of the General Crisis, basically laying out why citizenship is fake, we are subjects of the state, and what a just state would actually look like #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2023/10/19/t...

Introduction
In a relatively short space here, I am going to describe the basic formation, function, and structure of the state. My goal is to help clarify the actual nature of the state so that we, regardless of our individual statuses, can respond to the state based upon our true position. One of the pitfalls of liberalism-nationalism (i.e. the ideology of liberal democracy) is the concept of citizenship, expressed through elections and evocations of the "will of the people" and so on. It suggests that the majority of people have a real share in government. As should not require much illustration, this is not the experience of most people in most countries. *Citizenship is a kind of fake idea, meant to suggest constituency – truly having a voice in government – without actually conferring it.* My hope is that by laying out what things pressure states to form and to continue, the truth of constituency will become clear. Despite the liberal revolutions... (see link)

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 08/06/2024

New post on Journal of Cogency: What Is Divine Kingship? Where I explain... divine kingship, as well as beginning my challenge of Marx's modes-of-production model of history by using a concept inspired by Deleuze & Guattari #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/06/08/w...

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 10/03/2024

Israel has the power to frame the conflict, they get the benefit of the doubt, and they exploit that. #philsky

Yet by claiming self-defense for its part rather than Islamophobia, Israel portrays itself as not being hateful, not being like their opponents who are full of hatred and ressentiment. The fact that Israelis are at least as racist as Palestinians (and likely much more so) never becomes a factor in judging Israeli actions because Israelis are not seen as the kinds of people for whom racism is supposed to matter. Like a Caucasian uncle, being who they are ensures that they never get kicked out no matter who they offend or who they injure.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 08/03/2024

Capitalism is not about money, it's about power.

So what is the truth? Money, profits, capital — these are means. These aren’t the end. So what is the end? If the end was capital, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and the DeVos family and so on would simply retire with their money. There would be an “enough”. The reason that they don’t, and the reason that there isn’t, is because the object of obtaining capital is not simply to have capital, it’s to exercise power. Capitalism is portrayed as a race where everybody simply wants to make more money, but it isn’t.

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 08/03/2024

One of the major points of this essay: the Nietzsche that most people (today) are talking about is not the actual Nietzsche, it's a revisionist version that makes him sound nice. It's not what he really said.

The problem with Nietzsche revisionism can be summarized in the misreading of the übermensch. The revisionist idea is that the übermensch is a goal for all to seek; modern man who has slave morality is a stage that all people can surpass; the animal man had to become modern man and therefore modern man must evolve. This is not what Nietzsche says. His actual argument is that the noble animal man was overtaken by the slaves that the nobles had oppressed. The slaves then instituted slave morality for all. This stifles those who are noble. The truly great person for Nietzsche is the noble who can surpass the treacherous obstacle that is modern man and become the übermensch. Remember that there are two moralities—the master morality of “good and bad” and the slave morality of “good and evil”—and that the name of one of his books is Beyond Good and Evil specifically; as he himself says [Continued in linked essay]

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Journal of Cogency @journalofcogency.com · 20/02/2024

Why race hatred isn't enough to make a group into a power-building target for fascists:

Though the nazis and many German racists of the time thoroughly denigrated Polish people and all Slavs, they never considered putting Slavic people under a system like they placed the Jews in because they knew that their opinion was not widely held. Should they start persecuting Slavs openly, non-Slavic people might care. The Jews, however? They were so hated that other countries knew about their plight and still refused to take Jewish people in. The Jews were targeted because, in a way, the rest of Europe (and their descendants like the USA) was willing to collude in eliminating them. And by doing so, the nazis built up their power and went on their rampage. The Holocaust was not where the crime began. It was delivering on a promise which the nazis made to Germany as part of their rise.

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