The Vampire's Castle

Here's a thought-provoking post by somebody I don't know, riffing on  current events I mostly have no idea of, in a country whose politics I essentially have no idea about. As a result, the motivating lead-up is largely incomprehensible to me except in general terms - but then the author gets down to brass tacks, exposing the seamy underside of political correctness as practiced by the upper-class liberal.  (Actually, that description itself isn't very accurate... Read the post. Then read it again. I know I need to.)

I got it linked from Avedon Carol, so you know it's going to be good. But I have to admit I had to read it more than once to start really grokking what's the big idea, and I'm still not to the point of being able to articulate that.

What this kind of thing really keeps boiling down to, in my mind, is the need for a principled way of defining a worldview (a Weltanschauung) and describing the memetic systems that prop it up. Upper-class academic liberalism, with all the points listed in the article, can be described - but ultimately that description has to be dispassionate, documentary. I'm not entirely sure that doing that in natural language is even possible - the mechanisms we've evolved to describe systems carefully are mathematical in nature partly because of the precision mathematical language affords us. We need to have that same precision available when describing concepts and systems.

This description of the Vampire's Castle is a move in the right direction - identification and description of memetic systems when they're not immediately obvious (after all, language is also used to obfuscate, to avoid too-close examination of axioms) - but the lack of this systematic approach makes it impossible to go further.

Korzybski's goal was actually to correct this. I still don't know whether he succeeded, but I rather think he didn't, as his discipline mostly died with him. But I do know I need to take a closer look. Just as soon as I get time. (HAHAHAHAhahahaha, I kill me.)