Michael Shellenberger’s Concern with Nihilism

Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Michael Shellenberger. The first third of the interview has been released. I highly recommend watching/listening/reading it. Shellenberger once identified as a liberal, but now he declares himself an independent, taking good ideas wherever he finds them and rejecting bad ideas. I agree with much of what he has to say in this part of the interview. Here is an excerpt from the interview where Shellenberger argues that a big part of our problem is nihilism:

Michael: I'm really interested in defending the pillars of civilization and the pillars of civilization are, as I see it, cheap, abundant energy, law and order, and meritocracy. My first book, Apocalypse Never, addresses the attack on abundant and cheap energy. San Fransicko describes the attack on law and order and meritocracy. You start attacking those pillars of civilization and you just don't have a civilization left anymore

Tucker: Can you repeat those?

Michael: Cheap energy, law and order, and meritocracy. All three are under attack in a really systematic way. This is why I find myself as somebody that's traditionally been on the left and is now independent. I see what conservatives are doing and the role of conservatives as important. They have the role of defending civilization. The role of the left has always been to demand change and push for change. And in some cases, I support that. But, right now, you see that the left has gone so far that even more moderate liberals have been radicalized and are undermining the bases of our civilization.

Tucker: But the alternative to civilization — and I've seen glimpses of it a couple of times — is so horrifying. It’s the total domination of the week by the strong. A 15-year-old with an automatic rifle can rape, can do whatever he wants, and you have no power. We spent millennia trying to build an alternative to that and we now have it. Why would you ever want to revert to the 15-year-old with the automatic weapon being in charge?

Michael: That's maybe the most important question of our time. And it's not an academic question.

Tucker: It’s a very practical question! And there are parts of the world where there's no civilization. I have personally seen them so I know. You can just buy a plane ticket and go there if you're interested. Why would anybody want that?

Michael: That is a huge question. I think one question is, “Do the people who are undermining civilization really want that? Do they know what they want?” To some extent, I think they do. But where all of my work has led me, and this is where my third book is going, is that what we're dealing with — and it's a bit of jargon, but I can't figure out how else to say it — a crisis of nihilism, meaning that as people stop believing in traditional religion, as people stop believing in God, they start to adopt new religions.

Nihilism has two meanings that are related. The first is that life has no purpose or value. We're just like animals. We're born, we reproduce, and we die. There's no point to any of it. And so it doesn't really matter what you do. You're not going to be judged at the end of your life to determine whether you go to heaven or hell. So that's the first nihilism. But then this turns people toward a kind of will-to-power. It turns into a desire to feel powerful, which itself is just a kind of hedonism when you get right down to it.... And it’s not just from the radical activists. We see it among elite media basically saying, “Unless we go back to pre-industrial energy sources, we're going to end up in a climate apocalypse.” They've constructed a new apocalyptic religion out of nihilism. I think that is what's driving this crisis of civilization. It’s a crisis of nihilism that arguably began a couple of hundred years ago....

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The LSAT has Become an Inconvenient Truth

Wilfred Reilly is a political scientist whose research focuses on empirical testing of political claims. I've followed him for a long time. He follows the facts where they lead. This time, the topic is the extremely sudden demise of the LSAT. This time, Reilly's topic is the extremely sudden demise of the LSAT, which happened just as it became likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will clamp down on affirmative action.

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Tulsi Gabbard Blasts Gender Ideology

Tulsi Gabbard now has a show. In this episode, Gabbard makes a powerful case that many teachers and medical professionals are betraying and permanently harming our children. The first 12 minutes of this video including video of many of these professionals spouting dangerous gender ideology. This includes several doctors who work at Boston Children's Hospital.

At minute 12, Tulsi talks with Chloe Cole, a young women who got caught up in gender ideology, At the encouragement of others, she came to believe that she was a boy named Leo at the age of 13. Two years later, she underwent a double mastectomy. After the surgery, Chloe felt a deep sense of regret. On November 10, Chloe announced that she had secured attorneys to bring a lawsuit against those who misled her.

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Colin Wright Offers a Front Row Seat to a Seminar Featuring Gender Ideology

Colin Wright is a biologist who has followed transgender issues for years and who is not afraid to ask obvious questions. He recently attended an online workshop directed to parents, facilitated by two purported experts in transgender issues. The name of May 26, 2022 workshop was “Supporting Your Trans/Non-Binary Youth: A Starter Guide for Parents and Caregivers." Wright's article sets forth the content of the the seminar along with his criticisms and concerns. You can read Wright's entire article here: "EXPOSED: Gender Workshop for Parents Supporting Trans/Non-Binary Youth Gender “experts” say that children are the real experts." These were experts who could not even tell Colin the difference between a man and a woman or a boy and a girl.

Here is Wright's summary:

This workshop represents the standard introduction into transgender issues. It is not an outlier in terms of content and ideology. The only thing that makes this workshop somewhat unique is the fact that I was there asking the questions that your standard believer never does in order to force the presenters to grapple with fundamental issues with gender ideology.

Are gender identities based on stereotypes? How are “man” and “woman” defined? How can we expect children to understand concepts that people with masters degrees claim is beyond their capacity to understand? These questions should not be viewed as aggressive or out of bounds. These are fundamental questions that any gender “expert” should be able to easily answer, but they can’t. Yet they somehow remain so sure of the truth of what they believe that they’re willing to shuttle children down the path to irreversible hormone and surgical treatments to conform to identities they readily admit are “arbitrary words to describe experiences.”

Children are not the paragons of wisdom and self-knowing that gender “experts” claim they are. Children lack the life experience and perspective to make radical permanent decisions about extreme body modification. It is the duty of parents to apply their real life experience and perspective in order to ensure their children make it through childhood with healthy bodies and minds.

Gender ideology indoctrination does the exact opposite.

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UNC Adopts Chicago Principles and the Kalven Committee Report Principles

Hopefully we will see a lot more universities adopting the Chicago Principles. UNC recently took this big step . . . and more:

On July 27, the University of North Carolina (UNC)–Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees made a strong, new commitment to safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus. Colleges and universities face immense pressure to comport with majority beliefs, but UNC’s trustees proactively resolved to maintain institutional neutrality on controversial political and social issues.

The trustees’ unanimous resolution built on the previous work of the faculty. To the credit of the UNC Faculty Assembly, it adopted in 2018 the Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression, an action affirmed by the trustees in March 2021. The faculty resolution read, in part, “By reaffirming a commitment to full and open inquiry, robust debate, and civil discourse we also affirm the intellectual rigor and open-mindedness that our community may bring to any forum where difficult, challenging, and even disturbing ideas are presented.”

The trustees took a remarkable further step. In addition to confirming once more the decision of the Faculty Assembly, they put the university in the vanguard of institutions committed to a robust heterodoxy of views and opinions by also adopting what is known as the Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action. The UNC resolution notes that the Kalven Report “recognizes that the neutrality of the University on social and political issues ‘arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints’ and further acknowledges ‘a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.’

For more on the need for universities to maintain institutional neutrality, see Mark McNeilly's article at the HxA Blog: "Universities Should Adopt Institutional Neutrality." An excerpt:

Institutional neutrality is the idea that the university, as the Kalven Report states, “cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.” It comes to this conclusion on the basis of the view that “the mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” The university follows this mission to advance society and humankind. What higher mission could there be?

The instrument of the mission, per the Report, “is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Thus, “to perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.”

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