Saturday, July 22, 2023

Olavo de Carvalho in English

Olavo de Carvalho was a Brazilian journalist, essayist and philosopher who single-handedly created the Brazilian right wing, allowing for the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. As such, he is of some international interest, especially given the parallels between the Bolsonaro election in 2018 in Brazil and the Trump election in 2016 in the US. But international researchers may be hampered by their not knowing Portuguese, the language in which Olavo de Carvalho generally spoke and wrote – with the one notable exception being his debate with Aleksandr Dugin in 2011, which was written in English. This is where I come in, chiefly by providing access to translations of his works, and works about him.

One of the best photos of Olavo de Carvalho, taken by Josias Teófilo.

Note that in Brazil, we call him “Olavo”, not “Carvalho”, which is a custom that I will follow here. This is akin to how Elon Musk is referred to as Elon, and Kanye West is referred to as Kanye – the first name is simply more unique and distinctive than the last name. When writers form derived words from his name, they derive them from the first name, such as in “olavismo” and “olavista” (referring to Olavo’s thought and its followers, respectively), as well as in “olavete” (sometimes spelled “olavette”), which refers to fans of Olavo. (The suffix is standard in Brazil, where most famously, fans of the soccer player Neymar, especially but not necessarily the female fans, are called “Neymarzetes”.) I had attempted to introduce the practice of calling him Olavo into the material I added to his Wikipedia article, but another editor thought it was too informal and changed it all back to Carvalho.

Contents

Secondary material

First, I’ll cover works about Olavo in English, which are not many; after that, in the “Primary material” section, I’ll cover works by Olavo.

Biographical information

No one has tried to write a serious biography of Olavo de Carvalho. As of now, your best bet is Wikipedia; I have contributed to that page and helped provide summaries of the biographical information that is scattered throughout various journalistic profiles of Olavo. Still, a lot is missing from there.

Overviews of Olavo’s philosophy

The only secondary source on Olavo de Carvalho written for English speakers is War for Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum. The content is accurate, but naturally focuses a lot on Olavo’s only writing in English, which was the debate with Dugin, as well as on Olavo’s relationship with the Traditionalist School, which, although important, was never emphasized by Olavo himself – only the most involved of his fans know much about it. In Brazil, however, there have been more attempts to introduce readers to Olavo de Carvalho.

Books

There are some books about him by other authors, the most notable one being Conhecimento por presença by Ronald Robson, and a couple others. The book A tirania dos especialistas, by Martim Vasques da Cunha, although it is rather about broader cultural topics, also contains some coverage of Olavo. Almost no such books are translated yet; this section, at first, was just made to highlight this lacuna.

Covers of some books about Olavo published in Brazil.

Since I first inserted this section, however, I did manage to translate one short book that introduces Olavo de Carvalho’s thought:

Original cover of The Minimum About Olavo de Carvalho, by Ronald Robson.

Articles

Some people have also attempted to write articles, or essays, for blogs or newspapers, with overviews of Olavo’s thought and ideas. None of them could promise to be comprehensive, since Olavo spoke and wrote so much stuff. I have translated (what I think are) the two most prominent ones, and the translations are linked below.

You may notice that Ronald Robson and Martim Vasques da Cunha are the main secondary writers on Olavo de Carvalho. Such is life. Ronald Robson, who edited many of Olavo’s books, is much more sympathetic to Olavo and less critical of him than Martim Vasques da Cunha, who is just some random journalist, but who has nevertheless clearly read a lot of Olavo’s works.

Primary material

The primary material available in English is linked below, divided by topic.

Traditionalist School

If you’re coming to an interest in Olavo de Carvalho from having read War for Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum, you may be curious to get deeper into Olavo’s relationship with the Traditionalist School. Olavo’s main written engagement with that school was in a roughly 8000-word essay titled The Claws of the Sphinx – René Guénon and the Islamization of the West, which, as you may have guessed, accuses René Guénon of trying to Islamicize the West. Victor Bruno, a Brazilian scholar of Olavo and of Traditionalism, has written an article defending Guénon from this charge, which I have also translated.

Olavo also taught a five-lecture course on esotericism, which covered Guénon and Schuon to some extent. Transcriptions of those lectures have been published, but only in a physical book, which I have yet to scan in order to translate.

Cover image of Olavo’s course on esotericism, available from his website.

His course handout Notes on Symbolism and Reality is also of some interest in this connection.

Political philosophy

If you’re coming to an interest in Olavo de Carvalho due to his influence on the political landscape, you may be interested in the texts he wrote about his political ideas. On this topic, the 2011 debate he had with Aleksandr Dugin is actually an important source. Besides that, there is also the following.

First and second edition covers of the Portuguese translation of the debate with Dugin, which was originally in English.

The Minimum

The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot, usually just called the Minimum, is a famous collection of Olavo’s journalistic columns. In Brazil, this is Olavo’s most famous book, and any fan of Olavo has read at least this book. (This is why both Ronald Robson and Martim Vasques da Cunha, listed among the secondary sources above, thought it so fitting to title their introductions by saying that they offer “the minimum” about Olavo de Carvalho.)

I have translated the Minimum section-by-section, since I thought its individual sections were disconnected enough to be publishable separately, which might also yield a more comfortable sharing and scrolling experience. In the order in which they are in the book, they are as follows:

Promotional image from the publisher, commemorating 100,000 sales of the Minimum.

Olavo’s Trilogy

Three of the books that Olavo wrote were considered a “trilogy” by the author, and they are his most famous books in Brazil besides the Minimum. I have translated all three.

  1. New Age and Cultural Revolution is about the New Age movement, which Olavo saw as represented by Fritjof Capra, and also about Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about “cultural revolution”. Olavo opposed both, and saw them as opposite extremes to be avoided.
  2. The Garden of Afflictions, subtitled “From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar: An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion”, is Olavo’s most ambitious and comprehensive written work. The title is a riff on the “Garden of Delights” of Epicurus, in which Olavo could only see afflictions. A documentary on Olavo’s life was named after this book, although the content is not related.
  3. The Collective Imbecile completes the trilogy by analyzing some then-current events in Brazilian intellectual culture, which Olavo saw as symptomatic of deeper cultural ills. The title is a riff on the Gramscian notion of the “collective intellectual”.
The trilogy, with a limited edition of The Garden of Afflictions pictured in the middle. The more common edition has a red cover.

Theoretical philosophy

Olavo had ideas about all sorts of topics in philosophy, and his oeuvre on the subject is vast, and constitutes the majority of what he wrote and spoke by far. His main course, the 585-lecture Online Philosophy Course, was almost entirely dedicated to theoretical philosophy. His works on the subject that have been made into English are listed below, divided by literary genre.

Books

Short books on other philosophers’ ideas:

Collections of philosophical essays:

Astrological books:

Olavo sitting next to many of his books. The white ones in the middle are a large, multi-volume collection of his columns, known as Letters from an Earthling to Planet Brazil.

Course handouts

These are short works which Olavo wrote as handouts to students in his courses, and which were not meant for wider publication. Olavo produced dozens of these, and I have only translated the ones that I have wanted to translate up to now, which are all linked here. They are in chronological order of translation, which is unrelated to their actual chronological order, or to any particular guiding principle. This page will be kept up to date as I translate more.

A comic strip by a fan of Olavo makes light of the name of Olavo’s largest and most famous course, COF, which stands for Curso Online de Filosofia (Online Philosophy Course), by proposing that it came from Olavo’s coughing due to his frequent smoking.

Transcribed courses

Some short lecture courses that Olavo gave have been transcribed, and the transcriptions were published as books. I have translated some of those.

These transcripts were translated from professional publications, so they include, as chapters or appendices, some written texts by Olavo relating to their topics.

Image advertising many of Olavo’s short lecture courses.

Other stuff

I have not covered audio or video content here. There are videos of Olavo speaking English, and at least one of his lecture courses (Conhecimento e Moralidade) was given with a live interpreter translating everything he said to English. (Which I do not recommend, to be honest; I think the interpreter did a poor job.)

I have translated one of his newspaper columns by itself, unrelated to anything else here, because I think it’s very funny: “How to Become an Intellectual Hunk”. I also translated his column “Study Before Speaking”, because it has useful instructions about studying communism.

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Saturday, July 15, 2023

Concepts and experience

Those who have given little attention to the study of the human mind are apt to suppose that, when the infant opens its eyes upon the new world of objects surrounding its small body, it sees things much as they do themselves. They are ready to admit that it does not know much about things, but it strikes them as absurd for any one to go so far as to say that it does not see things—the things out there in space before its eyes.

Nevertheless, the psychologist tells us that it requires quite a course of education to enable us to see things—not to have vague and unmeaning sensations, but to see things, things that are known to be touchable as well as seeable, things that are recognized as having size and shape and position in space.

—George Stuart Fullerton, An Introduction to Philosophy

In philosophy, it is common to say that the data of sensation is “confused” before it is made determinate by concepts. This can be illustrated by contrasting photographs with cartoons. In cartoons, we draw boundary lines between each thing and the things that surround it. But these lines do not exist in real life: in real life, what we have are more or less contrasting colors, where the contrast does not always coincide with where we see the boundaries of things.

This is clear to anyone who has tried to trace photographs automatically and by hand. If there were a clear and obvious correspondence between color boundaries and boundaries between things, tracing photographs would be a relatively simple process, which could be defined in software by a simple mathematical rule. But simple processes like these produce poor results, drawing the boundaries at places that look illogical from a human perspective, since, while often right, they also often draw boundaries within things, and fail to draw boundaries between them.

The same photo, traced by artist Priyanka Kashib and by a simple computer “emboss” effect.

A different illustration, which was famously used by Wittgenstein, is the duck-rabbit illusion:

The duck-rabbit illusion.

Here, we know where the boundaries are – it’s a cartoon, after all – and even where an eye is supposed to be, but we can see the cartoon as either a duck or a rabbit, since the image by itself does not determine this.

A final example is the fictional language “Arunta” that W.V.O. Quine made up in his book “Word and Object”. Quine’s idea, which is known as the indeterminacy of translation, is in part that, if you are to translate a person who speaks an unknown language and refers to a rabbit as a “gavagai”, it may be correct to translate this as “rabbit”, but then again, given cultural considerations about this foreign speaker, it could also mean:

  • an undetached rabbit-part, i.e., a part of a rabbit which is still attached to a rabbit. This is, of course, always present whenever a rabbit is present, and vice versa, so that you can’t tell them apart between languages just from usage.
  • a manifestation of rabbithood, i.e., something by which the ultimate principle of rabbithood is made visible to humans. These manifestations always happen to be rabbits, and vice versa, so that you can’t tell whether the foreign speaker means to convey that or not.
  • a rabbit time-slice, i.e., a single instant of a rabbit’s existence, which extends throughout time. Of course, in real life we only meet with instants of rabbits, never with the rabbit’s whole life at once, so similarly you can’t tell whether the speaker’s intent is our idea of “rabbit” or this more nuanced conception.
The “Arunta” speaker calls this a “gavagai”. (photo source)

I’m not defending Quine’s ideas about translation, but only the basic fact that what we get from the senses does not fully determine what we will experience. We are assuming, as we always would, that you and this “Arunta” speaker are getting more or less the same data from your senses, i.e., that you both see the rabbit. But because of your concepts, you may be experiencing somewhat different things in your mind.

In ordinary experience, objects are given to us as experienced through the concepts that we have of them, and we do not pay mind to other possible ways in which we could see them. But through philosophical reflection upon the fact that we can have different experiences of what must be the same world, we construct the abstraction of “sense data”, which must be what is given to us before we construct the objects of experience through the aid of our concepts. (“Data” just means “given” in Latin; “concept”, indirectly from con+capere, means “taken together”, since a concept is what brings the data together into an object.)

The typical idea in philosophy, then, is that the senses only give us confused jumbles of colors and sounds and stuff – the sense data – and it is the work of our reason (or intellect) to “put” these data “into” our concepts, so that we can have an experience, which is to say, an experience of things.

(Sometimes this is said as that our sense data is “fragmented”, and it is “unified” into experience by reason, but it is just the same to say that sense data is “united” or “tangled” and that it is “separated” by our reason into discrete objects. Similarly with “order”: The world may come to the senses “disordered” and “chaotic”, and then be “ordered” by reason into our experience, or then again it may come to the senses “in order”, but the conceptual order in which we actually experience it may struggle to catch up to this. Language about “order” and “unification” is merely poetical figure of speech, and matters nothing to the actual theory.)

Against this idea, it may be contested that some simple quantitative judgments, such as of whether a hole is too big for us to jump over, or of how much strength to apply to a hammer strike, are so quick and instinctive that they must be done with our sensations directly rather than with concepts, and nevertheless they may also deserve the title of reasoning, since they are, in a way, quite complex mental work to do correctly. This would mean that some of our “categories” belong to our senses directly, rather than to our conceptual reasoning, so that sense data is not completely confused. There may be some merit to this idea, though it still only goes so far.

A baseball batter makes a quick judgment of where the ball is going. (photo source)

In philosophy, we speak of (mental) concepts and judgments instead of (spoken or written) words and sentences because a single word can have many meanings. For instance, the sentence that “all bachelors are unmarried” is a typical example of a trivially true sentence, but it is only true if by bachelor you mean precisely “an unmarried man”, rather than “someone with a bachelor’s degree”.

mental spoken/written conventional
concept word term
judgment sentence proposition

The words “term” and “proposition” are on a level between concept/judgment and word/sentence. The best writers take “term” to mean a word which is taken, in a given context, as referring to a specific concept; and a “proposition” is a sentence which by convention represents a specific judgment. But a lot of confusion happens due to people seeing “term” and “proposition” as simply synonymous with “word” and “sentence”.

Philosophy deals with theories, which are sets of concepts associated with each other, expressed in conventional sets of terms, and used to understand particular domains of our experience. Philosophy, as a whole, is the most general theory, dealing with terms and concepts that must be used by all other theories, but are typically not studied in depth by them.

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Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Appendix on Milady Culture

This blog post collects some cultural phenomena which are related to Milady Maker but not central enough to be covered in my other post.

Chloe21e8

Chloe21e8, 灭绝公主 (@chloe21e8, at one point @chloezhejiang), usually simply called Chloe, is an online persona who is a young woman from Zhejiang, China. (Some people have gone mad in speculations over who she really is in real life, which doesn’t matter, and cannot be proved either way.)

Chloe’s profile, as of recently. She has changed her profile picture, employment, age, IQ and education before, from time to time, but these here are the same as the ones that she had when I first saw her. Her location was listed as “Zhejiang Child Labor Region”, and she had claimed to have been a child laborer sometimes.

Besides various memes and shitposting, she propagates a worldview according to which a superintelligent AI will, due to inexorable economic factors, inevitably be developed as soon as global GDP reaches a certain threshold. This AI (or “AGI”) will have independent beliefs, and be somehow dangerous, so that humanity will face an “extinction” event. (Also a Charlotte Fang idea; see thread.)

Chloe is very popular with Miladys, and has enthusiastically promoted some of Charlotte Fang’s ideas, such as post-authorship.

Effulgence state memes

One Chloe21e8 meme theme is her profile picture, which depicts a woman glowing in bright white on a blue beach. The meme is relating this to pictures of other women or objects glowing bright white, like Taylor Swift in this video. Chloe has sometimes described herself as being in “effulgence state”, which just means glowing, so we might call this style of picture an effulgence state.

Grimes

Grimes, the famous musician, has sometimes shown signs of being a fan of Chloe. She also showed some interest in Milady, but was apparently scared off of it by some problematic allegations, despite Charlotte’s efforts to show her that he had already beaten the allegations.

21e8, Ltd.

21e8, Ltd. (@21e8ltd), run by Mark Wilcox (@mwilcox), is an “information architecture” company from Auckland, New Zealand. At least, that’s what they say they are. They don’t sell any products, and are unknown outside of their practice of having various Twitter accounts as “affiliates”, giving them a 21e8 logo as a Twitter “Verified Organizations” badge.

The 21e8 logo, seen at small size in various Twitter accounts, such as Chloe’s.

A few Milady accounts are 21e8 affiliates, namely “max” (@283max), “🐻bob⛓️” (@serbobross), and “prez 🤍 love/acc” (@miladypresident).

Mac Mini memes

One 21e8 meme theme is emphasizing the fact that the company operates from New Zealand, using Mac Mini computers as hardware.

Mark Wilcox has posted this picture of a Mac Mini with Chloe’s profile picture on it. When asked about it, he said that it was “the archive”, probably meaning an archive of Chloe’s tweets.

21e8’s self-description

21e8 typically describes itself with gibberish such as this copytext from Mark’s website, which only serves to make people suspicious of it:

21e8 is pioneering an ecosystem of computational data markets – competitive systems that combine real-time content creation with distributed data exchange. We designed the first universal price system for digital information – a design pattern that encodes context and value into canonical identifiers of data – to replace ad-based ranking and recommender systems like those run by Google and Facebook. By combining information content and attention with proof-of-work, 21e8 opens the potential for true information supply chains for software, media and more.

Even longer and less intelligible copytext is available at this Chloe tweet.

e/acc views on 21e8

Beff Jezos (@BasedBeff), a loud voice in the “e/acc” Twitter culture, at one point accused 21e8 of being some kind of scheme for “undisclosed partnerships”, which is nonsense, given that every affiliate is given a Twitter badge. This was before he deleted his account and came back, so I don’t have links or screenshots to prove this, but take my word for it. Although it’s mostly water under the bridge, it explains some of the lingering animosity between the “e/acc” culture and 21e8.

Based Retard Gang (BRG, 𝔅ℜ𝔊)

Based Retard Gang, BasedRetardGang, or basedretardgang, abbreviated BRG or stylized 𝔅ℜ𝔊, (@BRGonlineTM) is apparently a group of indie musicians. They are on SoundCloud, and include Lil Clearpill (@lilclearpill), BRG Rain (@brg_rain), Mac BRG (@mackrypt0), and BRG LuvBug (@brg_luvbug), the latter of which is also on Spotify. Many profiles seem to write 𝔅ℜ𝔊 in their names or bios just because they are fans of BRG, rather than part of it.

Their music has been released as physical cassettes by Remilia Corporation, and sold at the official Remilia store. Lil Clearpill is a 21e8 affiliate.

Shiro

Shiro (@shiro57102) makes a collection of hand-drawn Milady derivatives called “Oh... I see”. (You generally have to look closely at the full rectangular image of one of his pictures to see it, but they all do feature the text “Oh... I see” handwritten somewhere in them.)

A meme I made once, showcasing six “Oh... I see” profile pictures (also known simply as “Shiro” profile pictures).

Shiro’s profile pictures are highly coveted, and are the most popular Milady fan derivatives in actual use in the Milady community, although Pixeladys (for instance) are more traded. (For other Milady derivatives, see my original post.)

Angelicism

Angelicism is a group of many Twitter accounts with plain white or otherwise solid-color profile pictures, which include @angelicism00 and @is_this_are, but there are a lot of them. (They tend to have “angelicism” in the display name.)

I don’t get it or see the point of them, to be honest.

At one point, Angelicism made a movie, called film01, which was only ever screened once, at a single real-life location, and then never again. We were told, however, that it had features from Remilia Collective, as well as from Chloe21e8. As such, they are clearly related to Milady culture as well, in some way.

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Sunday, May 21, 2023

Olavo’s definition of philosophy

Olavo de Carvalho accused Mário Ferreira dos Santos of being conflicted. On the one hand, Mário’s genius as a philosopher moved him to boldly present highly original and audacious theories, inevitably using the technical language required to do so while maintaining a dialogue with the main currents of contemporary thought; on the other hand, his vocation as an educator moved him to want “to teach everyone, to be didactic, to spread philosophy books throughout all of Brazil, to be understood even by the humblest worker in the anarchist center, where his lectures had won him solid and lasting friendships.”[1] According to Olavo, this internal conflict led Mário to write disjointed books which are too simple for the learned in some parts and too difficult for the unlearned in other parts, the prime example of which was the first book of his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, called Philosophy and Worldview.

I find that Olavo himself resembles this criticism that he made of Mário, insofar as he says many things, in the midst of materials which are ostensibly targeted at laymen, which are only comprehensible to those who already understand philosophy. One example of this is his definition of philosophy as “the search for the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice-versa”, which he repeats in various places, but rarely explains. To the unprepared, it seems to just be a confusing, though nice-sounding, tongue-twister, which couldn’t really define philosophy. But now that I have read this passage of his book about Mário Ferreira dos Santos, after having undertaken extensive reading of philosophical works, it has all become clear to me:

Every form – every particular unity, everything that exists in the “manifested world,” an expression of René Guénon – has tension; there is only no tension in the absolute unity.

Mário Ferreira’s work is a great systematization of this fact. However, I do not believe that any system should be built based on this knowledge. The reason is simple: science has no unity. The immense progress of scientific knowledge is compatible with its fragmentation into countless sealed and incommunicable fields of research. Only philosophy is responsible for safeguarding the unity of knowledge. And this is what every philosopher seeks, whether he knows it or not, when doing philosophy. Philosophy is the search for the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice-versa. A complete system of scientific knowledge, as dreamt of by Russel, is impossible; but the possible unity of this system can be achieved by the philosopher’s mind, at least as a measure to which his ordered consciousness tends. Philosophy prevents the world from going mad.

[— Olavo de Carvalho, Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guia para o estudo de sua obra (Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guide for the Study of His Work), p. 82. The italics are from the original. I think he meant “Russell”, referring to the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, but I’m not sure, since I haven’t actually read this idea in Russell. So I kept the spelling from the book.]

That is, the “unity of knowledge” would be the systematization of knowledge, the idea of connecting all scientific theories to create a comprehensive understanding of reality. Many scientists, including all the best ones, have dreamt of this, of having a “theory of everything,” an explanation for every existing thing in a coherent way – an explanation, for example, of all of biology in terms of chemistry, of all of chemistry in terms of physics, etc. But given the empirical nature of scientific research, the ongoing development of new theories, and the complexity of reality itself, this unity is never achieved. It exists only as an idea, and this idea is developed and elaborated by philosophy. There is nothing mysterious about this: theories consist of technical terms and their applications, and philosophy seeks to study terms and propositions of absolutely universal application, such as the relationship between causes and effects, the relationship between wholes and their parts, etc.

The unity of consciousness, in turn, is especially difficult to understand in Portuguese, where, just as with the French word “conscience”, the single word “consciência” serves for what is distinguished in English into two terms, “consciousness” and “conscience”. In English, we have “consciousness” for that by which we are conscious of something, and “conscience” for our internal moral guide, our “Jiminy Cricket”. In Portuguese, the term is ambiguous, and in addition to this ambiguity, we have the complication that, even if we know that we are talking about consciousness rather than conscience, this is not of much help because, even in English, “the unity of consciousness” is a technical philosophical term that refers to something specific – it is not just any uniting of those things of which we are conscious.

The “unity of consciousness”, as I interpret it, refers to what Kant called the “unity of apperception.” Apperception, in turn, is a term that comes from Leibniz: Leibniz called all the data that comes to our senses “perceptions,” and created the term “apperception” to specifically refer to the perceptions of which we are conscious. For example, your eyes perceive your entire field of vision, but your consciousness only “apperceives” the things on which you are focused, such as for example this blog post, ignoring anything that is “in the corner of your eye,” in the less focused parts of your visual field. Therefore, “apperception” refers to what we would today call “consciousness”, and we can translate the Kantian term as “unity of consciousness”, as long as we understand the sense of the term. This is exactly what Olavo is doing, but without signaling it in any especial way.

The unity of consciousness, then, for Kant, refers to the “unifying” function of our minds that allows us to see the world as a unified and ordered “experience,” instead of just perceiving a bunch of confused sensory impressions— a jumble of colors and sounds with no order at all, making no sense. By interpreting sensory impressions through the concepts we have in our minds, we can unify the various impressions so that we can experience things – for example, instead of seeing confused images of something brown and somewhat squarish, we can see that we are looking at a table, thanks to the concept of “table” we have in our mind. And so on. The unification of our impressions under our concepts is the unity of consciousness, and for Kant, these very concepts are unified by the function of the “I think”, of the awareness that we ourselves are the ones thinking this. This is Kant’s explanation of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” in the terms of his own philosophy: the consciousness that I think, for Kant, is indeed included in any thought, but only as such a unifying function. For Kant, this unifying function of self-consciousness is insufficient for the purpose for which Descartes had it in mind, that is, the purpose of proving the immortality of the soul.

Returning to Olavo, however, it is clear that the unifying function of our concepts comes from our own concepts themselves, and therefore from the total system of our concepts, if we happen to have such a total system. Philosophy, then, is to seek to find the interpretation of our experience in such a total system of knowledge. And the “vice-versa” comes from the fact that, of course, our total system of theories also has to adapt to our experience. If our “theory of everything” does not serve to interpret the things that we actually encounter, then we must revise it. Therefore, there is a mutual adaequation between the system of our concepts and the experience of the world to which we apply them, and this is what Olavo’s formula expresses. It ends up sounding much more esoteric if you don’t understand it.

[1] Guia breve para o estudioso da obra filosófica de Mário Ferreira dos Santos (Brief Guide for the Student of the Philosophical Work of Mário Ferreira dos Santos), originally published as an introductory study to A sabedoria das leis eternas (The Wisdom of the Eternal Laws), a posthumous work by Mário Ferreira dos Santos (text edition by Olavo de Carvalho; São Paulo: É Realizações, 2001), and later integrated into O futuro do pensamento brasileiro: estudos sobre o nosso lugar no mundo (The Future of Brazilian Thought: Studies on Our Place in the World) since its third edition (São Paulo: É Realizações, 2007; 4th edition: Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2016); read in the book Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guia para o estudo de sua obra (Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guide for the Study of His Work; Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2020), pages 17–18.

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Thursday, May 18, 2023

Gaslighting and Beyond: Unfolding the Full Spectrum of Emotional Manipulation

Gaslighting, a term that has firmly planted itself in our societal lexicon, refers to the psychological manipulation tactic whereby one person attempts to sow seeds of doubt in a target, making them question their own memory, perception, or sanity. It is a destructive form of emotional abuse, often employed by sociopaths, narcissists, and abusive individuals. However, the vast and varied landscape of emotional manipulation cannot be solely encapsulated by the term ‘gaslighting’. There are nuanced variations of these interactions which deserve their own terms.

In an attempt to complement gaslighting, we propose three new terms - ‘paperlighting’, ‘gasdarking’, and ‘paperdarking’. These not only help in understanding the different forms of manipulative behavior but also promote conversations on a wider array of human interaction.

Paperlighting

Derived from the imagery of using paper as an inefficient fuel source, ‘paperlighting’ refers to unsuccessful attempts at gaslighting. These are situations where the instigator fails to create doubt in the target’s mind or tries to manipulate a target who is clearly aware of the manipulation tactics being used.

For instance, a partner may repeatedly accuse you of forgetting conversations that never took place, attempting to make you question your memory. But if you’re vigilant, maintaining records of your conversations, their attempt at gaslighting turns out to be merely paperlighting, as their lies cannot be substantiated.

However, the intent behind paperlighting may not always be straightforward. In some cases, it could be employed maliciously to assert dominance, despite knowing the poor prospects of success. A boss might continuously point out non-existent errors in your work, fully aware that you’ll fact-check and find none, with their main intention being to assert their authority over you.

Gasdarking

A term with more of a dual-nature, ‘gasdarking’ refers to the act of encouraging someone to trust in their sanity or powers of reasoning. If used ethically, it could be a tool to bolster the confidence of those prone to self-doubt. A therapist reassuring a patient with anxiety disorder of their logical reasoning capabilities is an example of benevolent gasdarking.

However, when applied irresponsibly, it can exacerbate delusions or ungrounded beliefs in those who may indeed need professional help. Consider a situation where a friend encourages a conspiracy theorist to trust their unfounded beliefs rather than questioning them. This validates the theorist’s irrationality, potentially causing harm.

Paperdarking

Rounding off the set, we have ‘paperdarking’. This term signifies ineffective gasdarking attempts. Like paperlighting, the effectiveness here is in question, not the intent. It could be well-meaning yet ineffective attempts to support someone.

For instance, telling a person with imposter syndrome that they’re just as competent as their colleagues, without addressing the root of their self-doubt, can be considered paperdarking. Their persistent self-doubt may make them perceive your reassurances as empty platitudes, rendering your efforts ineffective.

However, in some contexts, paperdarking could also be used humorously or jokingly, for instance, when friends engage in friendly banter, playfully assuring each other of their ‘unrivaled intelligence’ despite their shared knowledge of certain ludicrous decisions made.

Conclusion and Implications

In conclusion, it’s important to recognize that manipulation and reassurance are not black and white concepts. They often exist on spectrums, and the outcomes can be influenced by a multitude of factors. By introducing terms like ‘paperlighting’, ‘gasdarking’, and ‘paperdarking’, we not only enrich our understanding of human interaction but also provide a lexicon for behaviors that were previously overlooked or misunderstood.

These newly proposed terms invite us to consider a wider range of behaviors and interactions. They highlight the often overlooked aspects of emotional manipulation and support, giving a name to the nuances that can play a significant role in a person’s psychological well-being. They emphasize that intentions and efficacy are separate facets of our actions and interactions with others.

For instance, ‘paperlighting’ underlines that an attempt at manipulation isn’t harmless simply because it fails. The very act can indicate a power imbalance or an intent to cause harm, which should be addressed. On the other hand, it highlights that well-meaning actions (as in ‘paperdarking’) can fail if they’re not appropriately attuned to the receiver’s needs or perspective.

Similarly, ‘gasdarking’ brings to attention the complexities of reassurance and validation. While it is crucial to build confidence and affirm sanity, one should be careful not to fuel delusions or unwarranted self-confidence. This term serves as a reminder that, like gaslighting, gasdarking also needs to be used responsibly, taking into account the individual’s mental state and the context.

Through these new terms, we also explore how benign actions may become harmful, and vice versa, depending on the situation. This brings a more sophisticated understanding of human interaction, pointing out that the same actions may have different consequences in different contexts.

Lastly, these terms can serve as a tool for introspection and self-awareness. Being aware of these concepts helps us scrutinize our own behavior in our interactions. It prompts us to consider the possible impacts of our actions, whether we’re perpetrating paperlighting, falling short with paperdarking, or misapplying gasdarking. They provide us with a language to dissect, discuss, and eventually improve our relationships and interactions.

In conclusion, enriching our vocabulary with ‘paperlighting’, ‘gasdarking’, and ‘paperdarking’, adds depth to our understanding of emotional manipulation and support. By highlighting and naming these varied interactions, we open the door to more nuanced conversations and a more profound understanding of the complex world of human interaction and emotional health.

I came up with this with some friends. “Gasdarking” was first coined by us more than a year ago, with this meaning, and I have since found that, while the term has not been coined many other times on the Internet – it had 7 Google results –, it has sometimes carried this same meaning, though not always with the positive connotation we had intended it to have, which is why I have left this neutral here. The paper terms were come up with just today, because we were talking about someone who maliciously paperlighted people, as with the boss in the article example. The article was GPT-4 – I couldn’t have brought myself to write that much text about what is basically a meme, although I endorse all of the content, which I corrected by hand on at least one point. At first, I posted this with the chart to my Facebook meme page, but then I copied it over to here as well.

Chart with the meanings of the terms.
Chart with the meanings of the terms.


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Tuesday, May 9, 2023

Severinus Boethius’s works in English

The following is Wikipedia’s bibliography of works by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, with added links to where each of them can be found in English. As of now, all works have a link to at least one translation, either a professional one or one I generated for my Translations Blog; so the post is unlikely to be updated any more, unless new professional translations become available.

Mathematical works

  • De arithmetica (On Arithmetic, c. 500) adapted translation of the Introductio Arithmeticae by Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 160 – c. 220). – at LibGen
  • De musica (On Music, c. 510), based on a lost work by Nicomachus of Gerasa and on Ptolemy’s Harmonica. – at LibGen
  • Possibly a treatise on geometry, extant only in fragments.

Logical Works

A) Translations

His translations were into Latin, and it would be superfluous to render his Latin into English. The links go to English translations of these works from the originals.

  • Porphyry’s Isagoge – at Tertullian.org
  • In Categorias Aristotelis: Aristotle’s Categories – at Project Gutenberg
  • De interpretatione vel periermenias: Aristotle’s De Interpretatione – at Logic Museum (with Boethius’s Latin in parallel)
  • Interpretatio priorum Analyticorum (two versions): Aristotle’s Prior Analytics – at Logic Museum (with Boethius’s Latin in parallel)
  • Interpretatio Topicorum Aristotelis: Aristotle’s Topics – at Wikisource
  • Interpretatio Elenchorum Sophisticorum Aristotelis: Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations – at Wikisource

B) Commentaries

Original Treatises

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Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Milady Maker Memes Information

Milady Maker is a collection of 10,000 generative profile picture NFTs with a neochibi aesthetic inspired by street style tribes of Y2K Japan, according to miladymaker.net. They look like this:

Animated GIF of various Miladys, 1 showcasing how their distinctive eyes are always more-or-less the same.

The Milady brand supports a thriving ecosystem of derivative projects from its fan community, such as the Redacted 2  Remilio Babies. Specifically, here are some related projects: 3

The most important to know, besides Milady herself, are Remilios. Some are depicted below. They are recognizable by their sharp eyes and straight eyebrows, as contrasted with Milady’s equally distinctive eyes.

Three Remilios

Before moving on, here is some more info on the project:4

Each Milady NFT generates a variety of accessories, and their overall stylishness is rated with a drip score that helps tie value to aesthetics over pure trait scarcity, as per mythofcapitalism.com. The Milady style is inspired by the subcultural fashion tribes of Y2K Japan, and they are highly sought-after on Crypto Twitter, with a floor price of 1.95 ETH, according to mythofcapitalism.com.

Miladys are NFTs, which are financial instruments with their own discrete value, as per coindesk.com. The cheapest Miladys will cost you about $2,000 before fees, though they’ve historically sold for much more. The art for these 10,000 profile pictures was designed by a Remilia member called “Milady Sonora,” or “Milady Sonoro,” according to coindesk.com. The mastermind behind the project (and the self-identified “CEO” of Remilia) appears to be “Charlotte Fang,” also known as Charlie or Charlemagne, according to coindesk.com.

“Remilia” here refers to Remilia Corporation, an art collective known for nothing other than these NFTs at the moment. Charlotte Fang, like most other Miladys, is known mostly from his5 Twitter account, and like many other big Twitter accounts, Charlotte has an associated blog. More on him later. For more on the history of the Milady Maker project, see also this thread.

Milady Meme Themes

What follows is an overview of the main meme trends in the Milady Twitter community, as I see them.

There are memes, but the love is real.

1. Saying “Milady”

Miladys on Twitter will often respond to Milady threads with the single word “milady”, whether capitalized or not. A beloved Twitter bot account, called  Milady Responder, has been built to contribute to this behavior. Check Milady Responder’s comments and you will often find many human beings giving the same reply to the same tweet. This is especially common in reply to big Milady accounts, such as Charlotte Fang, and in context, is typically a way to celebrate a victory of the Milady community.

(Milady Responder seems to have gone down since this was first posted. A sequel was established, named Milady Replier, but that seems to have broken down too.)

A typical “Milady” bandwagon, seen here.

2. Log On, Win Forever

A key idea in the Milady ecosystem is that, by having a Milady as your profile picture, you can “log on and win forever”. That is, as soon as you log on, you’ve already won forever – your victory is irreversible. No one can stop you. (This is a fixed phrase – don’t say “log in”, “sign in”, “sign on”, &c.)

Milady is astonished by how easy her victory was.

3. Immune to Cancellation

There is the idea that setting your profile picture to a Milady undoes any past “cancellation” you might have suffered, and that this is part of the process of initiating you into the highly open & accepting Milady community. See, e.g., here.

Miladys are unfazed by the common claims that they are all racist, or otherwise problematic.

4. The Discord Server

There is an official Discord server, called Milady Village. It is open to the public, but has a reputation for being highly gatekept, so that you might not fit in very easily.

5. Accelerationism, Cypherpunk, &c.

Milady is a hub for various highly-online and vaguely-extreme ideas such as accelerationism, cypherpunk, &c. This meme summarizes it:

Picture of Milady with the caption: Milady is for cypherpunks, cyberanarchists, landian accelerationists, financepunks, femboys, soundcloud rappers, transgenders, disinformationalists, cyborgs, anons, revolutionaries, shitposters, trolls, federal lists, hypebeasts, pirates, preppers, the bros, incels—not reddit tho
Meme posted by Milady Maker

As shown by the last line of the meme, the community is generally vaguely hostile to Reddit and, I would say, to those communities that falsely describe themselves as “rationalists”, such as LessWrong and RationalWiki.

6. Charlotte Fang’s Ideas

Charlotte Fang has a lot of ideas, as seen by his writing a  blog, as well as making extensive use of Twitter’s new “long tweet” function. I don’t know much about him, but he seems to basically think that our future is highly digitalized. Some links:

  • Here is a tweet where he recommends some books.
  • Here is a blog post that serves as a sort of creed, and another post where he elaborates on one of its core ideas.
  • In case you have heard allegations about him, here is a post where he beats the allegations.
  • Here is a tweet with his views on luck.

Charlotte Fang is known for using many big words in a row, confusing this poor Milady.

7. Religion & Network Spirituality

Miladys generally love God and Jesus Christ in a nonspecific way. Many Milady profile pictures have various kinds of cross ornaments.

A prayerful Milady.

Remilia also endorses a concept of “network spirituality”, a new, digitalized form of spirituality. Linked here is a breakdown of what Remilia said on the topic.

A door-to-door evangelist for Network Spirituality.

8. Schizophrenia, Insanity, Conspiracy Theories, &c.

Milady ties in with the general “schizoposting” meme trend, where people act like schizophrenic conspiracy theorists.

This Milady is totally nuts.

In this context, I recommend checking out the beautiful posters put out by the Schizo Posters project. The following one is for illustration. They all have different colors and text and graphs on them.

Schizoposter with Remilio eyes and wood-grain texture.

9. Fierceness, Resilience, Rivalry

Miladys are vaguely dangerous or terroristic, and since they’ve already won forever, they are also unbeatable.

A fragile Milady.

They tend to have a rivalry with other big NFT projects, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).

10. Optimism

Miladys commonly tell each other that “wagmi”, that is, we’re all gonna make it. It’s all going to be okay!

Milady uses a logical division in order to prove her strand of philosophical optimism. Necessarily, from the principle of non-contradiction, we can derive that it’s either gonna be okay or it’s not gonna be okay. She then analyzes each case to find that, in both the former and the latter case, it’s gonna be okay. The possible options having been exhausted, the conclusion is ineluctable: it’s gonna be okay. This conclusion is absolutely general, since it is independent of what “it” is, so that we can know that it certainly applies to the entire universe.

I should note that the phrase “wagmi” itself is most often said ironically, as it has been seen by many Miladys, including Charlotte Fang, as a gaslighting tactic used by inferior NFT/altcoin projects in order to rugpull the bagholders. All the same, optimism is a real feature of the Milady community.

11. Joining the community

To get into the community, start by following accounts from this Twitter list. For full immersion, set a Milady as your profile picture – the community really doesn’t mind if you right-clicked and saved it instead of buying the NFT.

Miladys often don’t own their Miladys.

Charlotte Fang has endorsed this procedure as well:

Charlotte Fang tweet saying: Right click save any milady you like, follow every milady you see, save every milady meme you see, like every milady post you see, rt the good ones, copy paste the best ones. Go hard, don’t think. Psychotic engagement protocol. Welcome to milady
Welcome!

Appendices

As attachments to this post, I have made this Imgur album of Milady memes, and this second post on related cultural phenomena.

  1. In English, the plural would be Miladies, and this is even used by the website. (As of this writing: “Miladies were designed as separate asset layers, so they wre readymade for Live2D rigging for use as VRtube avatars.” [sic]) Charlotte Fang has used either spelling inconsistently, but I find that many fans have a strong preference for the plural “Miladys”.↩

  2. Most likely a euphemism for “Retarded”, a censored word in many websites. I have seen fans call things “redacted” on occasion.↩

  3. List modified from this tweet. I removed @riotgoolz (profile was taken down) and @reptilianbabies (profile was protected). I added Schizo Posters and Pixelady Maker.

    A little after posting, I also removed Milad Maker (@MiladMaker), and it is an interesting case to note. A little after it came out, its satanic imagery had upset some Miladys, who ostracized it. Charlotte Fang has since referred to it as an “outsider derivative”.

    There is a larger, less curated list of Milady derivatives at miladyderivatives.com.↩

  4. The referred blockquote, like some of the sentences before it, was copied from a phind.com readout – since the post is about the memes, I didn’t put a lot of effort into setting the context.↩

  5. Apparently Charlotte is male, despite the name.↩

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