Hard determinist therapy

Today I am writing a sequel to my post about Quisling therapy, which I came up with as a way to manage your (hyper)political hate and live with odious laws. What I am proposing now is along the same lines, but less mean-spirited than my original stab at Quisling therapy, because it is time to honestly admit that hate is a real problem that can't be solved merely by tweaking the same feeling.

It is time for a radically new account of our enemies, one without free will. Free will is a perennial philosophical question with no clear right answer, and I don't claim to have made any theoretical advances either, but I have found what works to improve the lives of hyperpolitical sufferers like me. Much of my suffering stems from attributing moral agency to the perpetrators of feminist sex laws, and moral agency being such a philosophically problematic concept anyway, why am I letting this belief blight my life so profoundly?

I am talking about literally convulsing with hatred against feminist sex laws and the people who support them for hours every day here -- no joke! Today I managed to avoid that for the first time in two decades, by reminding myself that our enemies don't have free will. They are no more responsible for their persecution of sexuality than a rabid dog is for its aggression. Society is infested with antisex rabies, and we need to address this horrible fact as best we can, but the one thing we don't need to do is obsess over how hateful people are for perpetrating or condoning sex-hostility, because they didn't have a choice in the sense that matters for that.

To temper your hatred, I suggest becoming an incompatibilist determinist like Gregg Caruso, who explains his philosophy in this conversation with Robert Wright. While he talks mostly about criminals, taking this position seriously means that our political enemies also don't have free will, and we ourselves don't. Our political enemies ought therefore to be regarded with the same compassion as he wants for criminals. Criminals are to be quarantined and treated, as humanly as one would while defending society against infectious disease that necessitates the use of force against morally innocent victims. Retributivism has to go, and I really don't have a problem with this for criminals as long as they accept it, but the problem is, how do you decide who is a criminal? I get the feeling that Caruso and others like him take the intersection of criminality and politics too lightly. "Treating" criminals who don't want to be treated because they don't think there is anything wrong with them and they have political disagreements with the law, such as terrorists and egosyntonic sex offenders, runs afoul of serious ethical contraindications. But for the purposes of self-help, which this post is about, I am down with discounting personal responsibility of the kind that goes along with libertarian free will.

Hard determinism (or however you go about believing that there is no free will; some random chance can be permitted also) doesn't solve political strife, but at least we don't need to hate our enemies. On the downside we are not entitled to revel in righteousness either, but I need to relax before the stress hormones do me in or ruin my health. It is one of those rare times when philosophy can save lives. Incompatibilist determinism is the attitude that life does you, and you just go with the flow. There are horrible people around, but they're being done in the same way, so it doesn't make sense to hate them or think them evil. Thus I bring my stress levels down from hyperpolitical disorder to something approaching normal, while keeping my same wholesome ideology and activist bent.

There is a higher level still, which consists of seeing our enemies as cogs in a machine that is not even conscious. Government is intelligent, a sort of AI, but probably not conscious, so hate is even more misguided against the system. Not coincidentally, I've come to this realization at a time when I have reaped the full benefits of nofap. I see now that hatred is a lot like masturbation, a kind of political equivalent that is similarly maladaptive and counterproductive. It doesn't get you any closer to the real goal, and in fact hurts, since you waste time and energy shaking with hatred when you could have been a more effective activist, writing more and better blog posts, books and a proper manifesto, participated in debates and so on. Extreme hate is always toxic to the hater and only rarely to the people you hate. When it doesn't incapacitate you, a lot of times it empowers them, like the feminist trolls who are more likely to succeed in their campaign to have me censored if I lose my temper.

I can only say that I am ashamed of all the time and opportunities I've wasted. I could have been a so much better MRA if I had realized this earlier. As with my ignorant failure to embrace nofap in my youth, my political hatred has been been a waste of life and vitality -- but it ain't over yet.

Let us now look at what happens when the rubber meets the road and society sics one of its rabid dogs on you. Firstly, don't hate the dog, because he can't help it. Keep your cool and be rational. If the rabid dog is a vigilante trying to kill you, you can safely follow the traditional advice for rabid dogs and put him down, since self-defense against criminals is still permitted. If you are attacked by an official rabid dog, however, this approach does not work since he has unlimited backup of more rabid dogs, so then you need to play by the rules of the justice system while defending yourself, like I did so successfully myself once.

But preferably, we should avoid attracting the aggression of rabid dogs. That means obeying the law while working to change it in legal ways. There is no cure for rabies (outside of intensive care, by which a handful people have survived), but there is a vaccine, and male sexualist activism is about developing and disseminating that vaccine -- our ideology -- in which hatred is not a helpful ingredient.