Grounded in what?
epistemology for the damned
[day 15/30 - epistemic status: I strongly suspect some other philosopher has laid out this point better and more formalized than I will. But I canât find it, and these thoughts are mine.]
I read the essay Dark Side Epistemology some time ago. You will have to read it first to understand this piece, but be assured it is fascinating homework.
Today I want to make an argument that there is one statement that humans canât help but believe about themselves, that clashes with the quest for truth: They want to live
But letâs start with a much weirder questionâŠ
Why are trans women socialist?
Why are trans women disproportionally Socialist? If you really give it some thought, this is very weird isnât it? Socialism is an economic theory on how to best allocate the means of production! Why should âwanting to take hormones and undergo surgeries to align my body closer to the opposite sexâ be a predictor for what economic theory you believe?1
If you ask a socialist trans woman why sheâs a socialist, odds are sheâll say something along the lines of âbecause leftists donât want me dead!â. Which is reductive, but obviously understandable!
Being trans is scary. Your very identity can sometimes feel threatened in ways you never had to worry about when you were cis. Leftists celebrate transness. Liberals tolerate it.2 Right wingers are somewhere between tolerating and hating you.
Trans women can then hardly be blamed for falling into socialist beliefs as some sort of defense mechanism. But what a shame really, because now they ideologically captured by an economic ideology that might be wrong!3
This is then, my psychological thesis on why so many trans women are communists. They start with a basic axiom: âI should not be socially judged for wanting the things I want (gender transition)â and then they look for a belief systems that are compatible with that axiom, and they adopted it.
But then I started noticing this pattern, and I found it fucking everywhere.
Other examples
Why am I vegan? I want to tell you that I read 5 Peter singer books and arrived at the conclusion that being vegan is correct and then went vegan. The truth is more ugly. I broke down in an ALDI buying meat and called my boyfriend sobbing saying: âI canât do this anymore, what did the poor cow ever do to meâ. The next day I went vegetarian, the day after that I went vegan. And then I read 5 Peter singer books.
When I asked an EA I was getting to know why theyâre EA they just responded âi wanted to be appreciated and loved and i thought that was because i wasnât a good enough person so i looked up how to beâ.
Why did I transition in the first place? I didnât really have gender dypshoria before the age of 17. It seemed to all spawn in right when I realized, how convenient is that? But notice the word I use: convenient. This would be very inconvenient for most people, but it was convenient for me because I was looking for some evidence that itâs okay for me to be a woman. so clearly thereâs some even deeper desire there. I donât know what it is. Did I transition just to feel loved? To be seen? I donât know anymore.
What Iâm trying to get at is that, like the communist trans woman, my initial motivation was usually purely emotional. And everything after is then unavoidably a form of post-hoc rationalization.
I also think this is why so many trans women shy away from the idea that they might experience some form of autogynephilia. (if i transitioned because of agp â im a pervert â unacceptable conclusion therefore I must not be agp!)4
Acceptable exceptions?
For me, I noticed I have epistemological lines I wonât cross, even if thatâs not entirely ârationalâ or âtruth seekingâ. I donât think I will ever accept anything that ends in the conclusion âand thatâs why you should kill yourselfâ and by extension âand thatâs why trans people (or any group I belong to for that matter) should kill themselvesâ.
Luckily this hasnât mattered much so far, I havenât found very many good arguments that tell me I should kill yourself. But Iâm torn on whether to accept this exception! What if I do end up finding a convincing argument someday?!
I strongly suspect others hold similar beliefs. I think the majority of people donât care how good your argument is, if the conclusion is that they should commit suicide, theyâre not going to listen. Itâs so completely orthogonal to our evolutionary instincts that it is a completely unreasonable expectation to have of people.
Thereâs exceptions to this self-preservation rule as always: but you have to go very fringe before you find an ideology that honestly adopts this belief. Even the anti-natalists wonât generally accept the conclusion that they should kill themselves.
At last thereâs EFILism. EFIL is life spelled backwards. Itâs a barely comprehensible ideology ran by one guy, and he just kind of thinks life is suffering and life on earth should end. But even this guy hasnât killed himself! Cowards!5
Concluding
My argument can be expanded to every other concept that pleases the limbic system, but it gets weaker the less important it is.6
There is a hole at the bottom of your belief systems and itâs your soul.
Call it type 1 thinking, or pleasing the limbic system, or your inner child or even THE ANCIENT REPTILLIAN BRAIN.
Weâre all just a scared, little child inside longing for some primordial warmth. Your axioms are grounded, yes. Not in truth, but in emotional scars.
I fear friends⊠That itâs emotivism all the way downâŠ
I donât think this is a take-down of communism or anything, Iâm not doing an ad-hominem
In belgium at least, I donât think the same can be said for the UK.
This is also why I think thereâs relatively few rationalist trans girls, theyâre all lefties!
no I donât think blanchards typology is correct, but when I ask fellow trans women if theyâve experienced feelings that can be summarized as agp, they usually give me a very apprehensive yes and I think this is why
It was the ideology of the person who bombed that abortion clinic a while back
similar arguments can be made for basically all innate human wants