I know this seems too basic to even mention, but when it comes to culture and systems of governance you need a clearly defined morality much more than you need supreme intellectual mastery

The online rationalists present a neat example of why this is: they use very sound logic to get to the conclusion that a white ethnostate ultimately serves people best, and while that's a morally reprehensible position, it's not really an inaccurate one

Think about it: in a totally utilitarian sense, there are two extremely macro ways of ending, for example, disproportionate murder of Black folks by police. One is to get rid of the police. The other one is where supposedly neutral logic, without a moral backstop, gets you

You can logic your way into other, less genocidal positions, of course. The problem is that intellectualism is seen as inherently unbiased, while morality is seen as a mark of inherent corruption. Contextually, that just doesn't make any sense

The whole idea of governance is a cultural, social, and, yes, moral one, not an intellectual one. You figure out what moral positions you as a society care about most, then use intellect to build the systems that hopefully fulfill that vision

Our technological history makes this very apparent: non- and pre-colonial governance produced history-changing solutions to such moral questions as "should anyone go hungry?" or "should we protect vulnerable members of our group who may not be able to protect themselves?"

Moral questions and answers like these have propelled humanity, despite the insistence of the assholes who were always around saying things like, "well, if we only feed half of us, that half would get more food, which is a win purely in terms of utility." The fuck?

In the attention economy, though, these bullshit artists can thrive because of the fetishization not necessarily of logic or against "bias," but the fetishization of ideals that do not require morality to function effectively

This allows them to look and feel like they are "above" things like morality, which they think can only cloud one's judgment. It's better, they say, to formulate arguments that don't require an arbitrary "outside force" like morality

The catch, though, is that the white ethnostate utopia they want is, itself, a statement of morality, because assigning a potentially zero value to every non-white person's worth as a living being is, at base, very very very very much a statement of morality

The whole thing crumbles after that: earlier in this thread I said they think a white ethnostate ultimately "serves people best," and they do think that; they just manage to avoid being very specific about who they mean by "people," and who they don't.