Destiny vs everyone

What happens when you remove fallacy and reach the actual disagreement. We may just find out, courtesy of Bonnell and his DGGers.

I have a crazy day job and so my articles are usually written in one take, often from bed.

So my pieces can be long or amateurish, sorry in advance. Someday if I can collect enough “fun coupons” I’ll have the freedom of time to dedicate all my energy to you; to saying things that are real and necessary in ways that are satisfying for you to read.

(“Stella Stillwell” by Stella Stillwell)

I’ll fill that strange blank space you’re looking to quell late night (when Destiny switches to streaming games) and you’re searching around for that one last voice that scratches an itch you’re still having trouble naming.

I’m not holding my breath. In the off chance you’re still reading: the thing that keeps me going is I know we can do better as a society. Someone else recently said this about why he doesn’t quit, and that someone is Destiny.

I’m glad I discovered him. But even more glad I found the related subreddit. I used to spend a lot of time feeling sad about the fact that there are people out there that share my nuanced DNA of values and sensibilities, and that finding them in this life is almost impossible. Such a tragic waste. Because living in a cathedral of your own ideas is lonely in a perverse way. Gobs of useless beauty for a community of one. Made worse by knowing in your bones that your people are out there, somewhere.

Destiny’s ragtag fanbase fills some of that gap for me. Twitter doesn’t get me off. Shaving the edges off of an important topic, routinely; reducing life or death topics to a truism or quip, feels like shaving off literal body parts.

I fucking hate it.

People fucking love it.

And I fucking hate that people fucking love it.

Then I found Destiny subreddit. Maximalism baby. Break on through. Merzbow that thang.

One problem, though, with Reddit, is that after a while you start to feel like your best contributions, the most earnest and nuanced views (often carmelized at the edges with the glorious heat and energy of real human dialectic) is getting wasted. Snowed over, lost in the heaping graveyards of digital oblivion. (Or removed by DGG mods, see my story on that, From The Bowels of the Destiny Subreddit, at the bottom.)

The Redditor life, when approached with guts and sincerity, is a great forge for learning what you actually believe and care about, and putting it into words. You just might surprise yourself with who you turn out to actually be.

I don’t expect the world to care, let alone flock to my blog. And DGGers will hate that I added this to their sub. That’s the ugly bootstrapping part of all this I guess. At least my ideas are now being saved and categorized. Ideas that’ll never be seen if I don’t obnoxiously ask.

Ok, so here’s what’s on my mind today:

I’m fascinated by rhetorical structure. In a landscape littered with fallacy and theatrics on both sides even bad guys show clarity on occasion. Speaking of bad guys, exhibit A.

So my curiosity about Nick Fuentes isn’t about his morality or lack thereof. What he stands for is gross to me, full stop. Very racist, very unAmerican.

It’s more about his coherence, which I’m having trouble seeing as a cheap parlor trick, like the late Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was, with sort of a prefab flow diagram in his head that worked 95% of the time against his carefully curated interlocutors, most of them painfully neophyte.

If looking at rhetoric like a mathematician, for linguistic patterns, which is sort of my day job, (one of them) there’s something aesthetic about Fuentes’ rhetoric to someone who sees Destiny (streamer Steve Bonnell) as the paragon of coherent political debate today, which I do. (Along with some Destiny types who have mastered the polemics every which way.)

Legitimizing Fuentes is a hot take around here and on the stacks and streams I frequent, even though I’ve proven elsewhere that I share Destiny’s values 100%. So fwiw, Destiny is well-adjusted, human, and relatable. Egalitarian, tolerant, believes all Americans are similar enough in the ways that matter, etc. The polar opposite is Fuentes.

Yet I still think they are two sides of a coin because of the internal coherence they both have.

I haven’t consumed all that much Fuentes. Maybe I’m wrong. But usually when I see one of his rants, it’s like, yeah, “if his values are such (sadly), then it follows that he’d want X.” In other words, I don’t see much deflection. That’s so refreshing. I’d rather watch him talk than watch many liberal speakers who cop out too early or fight dumber fallacies with smarter-sounding fallacies. (Most liberals.)

Even the conservative razor-sharp Ben Shapiro deflects or indulges in fallacies. Part of that might be the religious foundations. But he generalizes massively. (His recent book is saying the left/poor are weak and envious, bad for the world, and the rich are lions and brave, good for the world. Repurposed Randian tripe + religious grounding.)

I don’t believe in a white Christian nation Fuentes argues for, obviously. And not just because I’m not a white Christian. But he’s crystal clear about what he wants and why, which is, again, refreshing.

So for me, I guess I’d like to see Destiny and Fuentes talk about how their values differ and what to do about it.

In the end, the conflicts we have are at root about competing values, not faulty logic. Sure maybe you can find a mistake here and there, but it’s not foundational. It’s usually a petty objection or a red herring.

Because many people at their core are just social Darwinists or religious dogmatists. Not due to logic, per se, but due to self-evident emotional valence from first principles. It’s what they ARE.

Some people are secular and scientific, and looking to build systems that appeal to our evolved sense of fairness. I’m in that group with DGGers.

But I find myself mostly biding my time while 99% of the debaters (including Destiny) play tit for tat, as if we all have the same values but just think unclearly, like a knot to be untangled through yelling the truth quickly and accurately.

Destiny does that well, and it needs to be done, mainly so that we can rule out whether distortion, fallacies and ignorance are the problem.

But that’s NOT what’s exciting. That stuff’s a problem, sure, but it’s not the final boss level.

What’s exciting is when all the knots are untangled and we are left standing face to face with human beings who have different VALUES.

Meaning we simply care about different things, believe in whatever God of the gaps, and assign unresolvable emotional valence to matters of how we want power and resources to work, and how we want tribalism to work. How we want epistemology to work.

It’s that simple. You can’t really argue someone out of that. It’s not an argument. It’s a feeling. A self-evident preference as true as any qualia about what matters and how to live as a society.

There is a point where philosophies are like flavors, we are wired to like this and not that. It often comes down to aesthetics.

That’s why Destiny is so satisfying. He’s like a knife, a free fall into a chasm going at the speed of purely-coherent rhetoric all the way to the white hot center of the disagreement. Once that happens, all that’s left is the stark difference in values.

I don’t like seeing his talent made into a road show or parlor trick.

Yes he’s fun to debate because his brain is masterfully on autopilot.

He talks over people from a place of being right and clear, not just theatrical. People love that, and also hate it.

I love it because it makes for good entertainment and catharsis and because it works for clarifying what’s actually true and how people hide the ball. If Destiny was analyzed by AI for informal fallacy he’d show up rationally clean and rhetorically sincere compared to almost anyone he debates.

What we need is for both sides to go all the way to the end, past the thicket of subterfuge, and to lay bare the differences in VALUES.

It’s not a “debate” at that point. It’s a contest. Or a negotiation. Hopefully the latter. Between two or more types of human.

The first: A cooperative realistic science-loving kind that can survive not knowing everything (me, Destiny, most of you, most progressives, artists, scientists.)

The second: A competitive kind, a tribalistic God-fearing kind that needs myth for meaning and permission to use luck without guilt. (Fuentes, Shapiro, Hasan, et al, business moguls, just-world-fallacy types.)

Maybe it’s a spectrum not a binary. But fMRI studies reveal neurological differences corresponding with these ideologies, polymorphic differences at least, opposed to purely genetic. But real structural differences, nonetheless.

I’m interested in how to resolve this tension around core values, not arguments.

We are not there yet. We can’t get to the soft underbelly because the endless knots of debate go in circles for entertainment value.

Let’s not lose site of the real goal though: admitting we fundamentally, almost biologically disagree about what matters, and what to do about disagreeing about what matters.

I actually have some thoughts about that. And that’s where the real hot takes truly begin.