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Notes -
…….Hlynka, the reason why people like me get so frustrated with you is that a lot of the time it just seems like you don’t actually take any time to really read what people actually wrote or even make an effort to evaluate our actual arguments; you have a handful of stock arguments prepared and you deploy them, regardless of their precise appropriateness to the specific argument or interlocutor you’re responding to, as a way to sort of rhetorically pump your shotgun and let us know we’re not welcome on your property.
And it’s not fair for me to get frustrated at you for doing this, because that’s the correct and appropriate strategy for Reds! I don’t mean that as an insult or to infantilize you, although I’m acutely aware that this is how it will be received on your end. What I mean would be more clear to you, I think, if you made an honest effort to understand the arguments in the “Babble & Prune” essay that I myself linked. Surely you’ve been kicking around these spaces long enough to have stumbled upon that essay before.
The entire thrust of that essay is that Blues represent the “Babble” half of the dialectic, meaning that their whole purpose is to come up with a ton of ideas, the majority of which will be wrong. So, not only can people be both “smart” and “wrong”, it’s probably on average more likely that a given idea formulated by a smart person is wrong than that it’s right.
Furthermore, I have talked extensively about my own major change in worldview within my own lifetime. That means that not only can smart people be wrong, I was one of the smart people who was wrong. Like, really wrong. Like, potentially irretrievable damage to my life outcomes type of wrong. If I had listened to Reds, and adhered to one of their prescribed life templates, my life would be unspeakably better right now. But, if I’m honest with myself, I was never going to - not when I was young and shit-hot enough for it to matter - because I’m a Blue. Much like Blues gravitate toward lottery professions, the Blue phenotype is a sort of “lottery ticket personality”: maybe you figure out how to split an atom or write The 1812 Overture, or maybe you end up penniless with syphilis in a snow-filled gutter at 30. There’s obviously variation - almost nobody is a “pure Blue” or “Pure Red” - and I am gravely weighing out the feasibility of giving the Red template my most sincere try, but certainly the bimodal distribution is real.
I understand why you loathe Blues so much. At the historical moment in which we live, they’ve been able - through what I consider egregious subterfuge and bad faith - to artificially inflate their own power over Red, throwing the Babble & Prune machine wildly out of balance, and now they’re presenting a very real threat of trying to turn your kids Blue and trying to destroy what you hold dear. Trying to take the outside view, though, I think it remains true that neither Blue nor Red can destroy each other without destroying themselves in the process.
Uh, you can totally have a society without blue types. It would have much worse art and much less innovation, but it would work. Because the things that make civilization work are by definition things that we already know how to do, which the red types are good at.
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