Your initiation and first exercise in the martial art of ideology is to think something, and really truly believe it, that would get you arrested if you said it in public. If you can't do this, you are intellectually boxed in. You are cut off from reality by someone else's neuroses. Paul Graham writes in "what you can't say" that all societies have absurd lies that they vigorously enforce. Ours is no different.

It's worse than just silly things polite people pretend to believe at cocktail parties. Taboos are often existential, even and especially for you. There are taboos that could kill you, which amount to slavery, and which threaten to wipe out the physical existence of your extended family and memory. Worse, they could be targeted directly at the particular goodness that you represent. If you want your life to serve life and not decay, your first job is to be able to see this, and separate your own conscience from the self-imposed boundaries of thought that make up your received ideology. You need to find and commit worthwhile thought-crimes.

I cannot not tell you which taboos to break with. The exercise is to figure it out yourself. Paul Graham say you should privately break all of them. But one of the most important, stated somewhat abstractly, is the idea that you should not care about this, that you should not think existentially about the fact that you have accepted political limits on your thought. Ask yourself if that's actually indifference, or fear.

To a first approximation, all taboos are lies. They exist to protect the interests of some powerful cartel against others' ability to notice their abuse and coordinate against them. That doesn't mean any given taboo claim or ideology is true for you, but you must be able to consider it for real. If you find that there are no existential taboos that you would break in your heart, you probably aren't really considering them. Do your interests and conscience really just happen to magically align with all the powers of the society and time you live in? Really?

It's easy enough to find the silly taboos that people self-censor and get "cancelled" for. But here's a sharper heuristic: what political ideas and practices do people actually get hunted, exiled, arrested, and killed over? What are they right about that causes such hysteria? There are many such cases if you go looking.

Sometimes they are actually just being stupid and evil and no sane society could accept that kind of behavior or thought even if there is truth to it. But sometimes it's the people who are saying what I just said who are actually your enemy and the people being persecuted are just right. There is no simple principle to discriminate by. Feel the vertigo. The art consists largely in distinguishing these cases.

But if you can't get out there beyond the pale and believe something taboo, you're not going to be able to think clearly about what is true and good when it matters. Your friends won't be able to trust you not to sell them out for saying the wrong thing. On the other hand, if you're out there in the zone of forbidden truth, you have taken the first step to ideological sovereignty and the ability to hold your own in the info war using the martial art of ideology. The point isn't to be edgy or rebellious, or to believe anything in particular. The point is to believe independently.

Given a forbidden truth, something you can't say, Paul Graham is right that you shouldn't just go around saying it. Your engagement with real philosophy should be quiet and private. Hide your power level.

But philosophy is not an individual game. You must find a small group of friends among whom you can speak frankly. And don't just proclaim truth with them. Study it. Draw out its implications. Do a book club. Dedicate your lives to it. This is where you will sharpen your skills, find your truth, and develop asabiya with trusted comrades. This is the seed of something powerful.

Paul Graham says it all better than we can, and 20 years ago. He's one of the smartest and best writers out there. What I find odd is the delta between his apparently mastery of the idea of useful heresy here, and the stuff he says in public.

In public, Paul Graham is a basic GenX liberal. And not just hiding his power level, but one who goes out of his way to say things he would not if he had secretly liberated himself from even the rather obvious taboos that he all but mentions. I wonder if it's all an elaborate ruse, but I think what's actually going on is this:

While he may have been privately willing to think independent thoughts 20 years ago, in the absence of the right private no-ideas-barred sparring environment, and in the absence of really taking the martial art of ideology desperately seriously, willingness is not enough. If your social and information environment is otherwise respectable, you actually can't on your own think your way out of that, no matter how open minded you are. All you can do is notice some of the contradictions. But you won't be able to generate really solid alternatives, and really develop that into a worldview. So I think this demonstrates the importance of the final paragraph there in the OP: you need to really actually do organized thoughtcrime with a mafia of trusted friends.

Of course PG said that too, but I don't think he actually did it. I don't think his inner circle is sufficiently ideologically independent. It has taken me a whole life of total disregard for established opinion and a career of organized forays into ideological independence to build my worldview, and I'm still finding received ideological bullshit in my intuitions on a weekly basis.

While I think a capacity for thoughtcrime is important, I think that centering it as the first discipline in the art of ideology will bias you towards contrarianism, which is to be trapped in the frame of the current dialectic, just polarized to the other side.

I think more broadly it is important to identify what is the received ideology (much of which is hidden by not being the subject of active discourse), and to deeply explore the whole space of ideology beyond the modern dialectic. It's an iterative process. History, cross cultural research, and philosophy are all important and feed into each other.

First read widely and see how other peoples beliefs seem completely crazy or alien. Those will highlight what the unquestioned parts of your ideology is. Then try to understand them in their own terms rather than just translating and mangling their ideology by reinterpreting it through your own. This is important and it takes time. Reinterpreting it is next to useless because it doesn't get you out of your ideological space. Question the existence and necessity of your own beliefs. Trace them back through history.

This can also lead to creating room for truly original philosophy, which can uncover more low level granular received beliefs, which can facilitate further perspective flips and ideological flexibility and strength. You really can't learn philosophy from discussion on the internet and a lot of third hand reinterpreting and categorizing.

As an example, I was brought up an atheistic jew and after a whole lot of conversation with a good friend that had went catholic, I started to understand that viewpoint and how it was completely alien to what it seemed like "everyone" believed. A huge flip, a completely different way of thinking of human nature, morality (especially "free speech" and authority, as well as natural law), and of course God. I started to see that translating reinterpretation, like how a lot of far right new edgy converts were still really quite liberal in how they would do things like viciously criticize the pope in public, or see how rationalists trying to tap the social technology of the church interpret God in a materialist way was completely heretical and incompatible with the faith. They have not escaped their original ideology. It seems to me at least like most of my contemporaries don't even begin to understand the faith, though I do realize that that says a lot about me and who I associate with. But that's just catholicism! Historically speaking that's not very far from where we are today. I think I would be a whole lot more of a STEMlord today if I hadn't done this.

Could you imagine completely submitting yourself to a king? Most people who I find in these strange internet spaces are the contrary sort who absolutely could not do something like that. Could you imagine sincerely doing ritual human sacrifice? Dying for your brothers in battle? Devoting your life to studying ancient scrolls? Seeing no problem with torturing cats for fun? Trying to end your own cycle of reincarnation? Seeing enormous ancient redwoods and your first thought is their utility as lumber, or upon discovering a small isolated population of a species thought to be extinct you kill most of them so that you can display their taxidermied corpses in your museum?

Perhaps not all of those are worth exploring, but I think that flinching away from the relevant ones in disgust is just a useful emergency measure, and it is better if you can say "I understand it. That's wrong, but I understand it." That takes time though, so it won't always be worth it.

>Your initiation and first exercise in the martial art of ideology is to think something, and really truly believe it, that would get you arrested if you said it in public.

It's interesting that some people seem to be getting beat up in public for saying the "wrong" things, as described in this recent article of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-13/china-secret-police-operations-revealed-by-spy-four-corners/103826622

That this is happening in a number of places over which the Union Jack flies shows that the Anglo thing is indeed deader than America. Many of us might be in a jurisdiction where certain ministries for state security would not actually dare to touch us physically, but it is important to educate ourselves on how such actors can engage in other methods of control and misdirection, as outlined in >>1536, and why. As Paul Graham points out:

>To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it.

>it is important to educate ourselves on how such actors can engage in other methods of control and misdirection

>>1296 seems somewhat relevant with regard to this discussion. The timer is ticking.