The Rationalist: A Primer On How To Think, Pt. 2

In the last edition of the Rationalist, I explained what I thought were good principles upon which you should base your entire intellectual life. To be clear, it’s not that I wish I could control you into thinking a certain way. I know I can’t, and to be quite honest, I don’t particularly want to.


But what I do want, what would make me happy, is if you took the advice I gave you seriously. In this world, nuance is in short supply. Being willing to admit you are wrong when the evidence points you in that direction is a skill both vital and in shamefully short supply.

More to the point, there can be no greater danger to the American civil religion than the sentence I am about to write. If Americans no longer believe there is anything that unites us, the endless striving towards right and good that we attempt as Americans are meaningless and pointless.

Now if you believed that before, and will consider anything I say as serving “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, there is nothing I can do to change your mind.
There is a chance, even, that you will be one of those people who look at this and proclaim it no longer necessary for America.

You might even not say America how I say it, instead preferring to say Amerikkka as though this is some original thought.

But that is not the point. The point is that I promised to tell you who you should avoid. In my last article, I showed you how by not following certain patterns of thought you could fall into being snowed by those feigning intelligence. This time, though, we’re going to be a little bit more blatant. This time, I’m naming names.