Tell me about your beliefs
a Walt Right community survey
I want to learn more about my audience. My last surveys measuring temperament and intelligence were quite enlightening, and this time I’d like to ask about your beliefs.
Please answer these questions in the comments, and be as detailed as you’d like.
How would you describe your current religious worldview? If nonreligious, describe the metaphysical / epistemic principles to which you subscribe.
From where do you derive your sense of right and wrong? Do you subscribe to any particular ethical or meta-ethical system?
How would you describe your current political beliefs?
How do you determine who is an ally you can collaborate with politically?
Which political propositions are outside your personal Overton Window, such that you couldn’t collaborate with someone who held such beliefs?
Do you support Biden or Trump and why? How much do you care about the election?
1. How would you describe your current religious worldview? If nonreligious, describe the metaphysical / epistemic principles to which you subscribe
A: Hindu. I was raised with some weird mixture of Smarta rituals, carvaka lifestyle, Shakta morality and a distinctly western scientific philosophy of life. Growing up there was never a right or wrong way of thinking, if only you could articulate and justify your beliefs(we love heated debates over abstract ideas in our family). Recently I am leaning toward Kashmiri Shaivism more and more, just because it is a highly virile and yet sophisticated conception of the world.
I know more mythological and folk stories from the most diverse possible backgrounds than almost anyone I have ever met, because I believe in the power of archetypes (I believe that Jung’s archetype theory should be considered part of the Hindu philosophical tradition, because that’s where it fits in the most organic way) as if they were lesser deities, and because they are usually a compressed character-study of different peoples and situations. A story or myth is a philosophical shorthand for shared understanding that we really should appreciate and use more often. But for any story to have religious significance, it has to be morally dipolar in that it has to capture a whole being and not just a one-sided aspect of it.
2. From where do you derive your sense of right and wrong? Do you subscribe to any particular ethical or meta-ethical system?
A: It is mostly intuition-based at this point, but I think that you need to have seen and actually digested enough of life(independent of your age) to have a good and robust intuition about these things. I still change my mind on the rights and wrongs of plenty of things based on newer experiences but the fundamentals have solidified into a mosaic of different, sometimes contradictory, ethical frameworks that is hard to properly articulate outside of test-cases.
In a broadly Hindu(or just pagan?) context, every locality has its own character and a particular deus that has dominion over it, while there is a whole hierarchy of deities all the way up to the unviverse. This is how I like to see ethical or moral systems- certain highly abstracted universals that can incarnate in highly local and even personal ways based on the phenomenological environment. The incarnations are known to contradict and “war” with each other in the Hindu Mythos and so I believe that ethical systems must do too. But I think I have learned to move across different ethical systems without losing integrity.
This can sometimes look like I have no sense of right and wrong to people that are trying to follow only one ethical system, but it’s not true- I agonize over the right and wrong of things a lot more than the average person. I do sympathize with people that can stay within one internally consistent ethical system all their lives, but it tends to set you up to be blindsided if and when contradictory reality hits you so only very few “lucky” people can get away with it.
I think that any ethical system that doesn’t leave room for evolution has an expiration date and should be actively gotten rid of when it starts throwing contradictions against the natural, observable order of the world. People tend to try to manipulate reality to fit their ethical vision of it instead of changing their vision to fit reality. I think that that is the perfect recipe for disaster.
3. How would you describe your current political beliefs?
A: Politics has always been more of an intellectual exercise for me than anything real but as I see more and more people’s vision of the world slipping away from reality I am forced to take a more concrete stance on things. I’ve learned to say “libertarian right” based on most of the policy stuff I agree with but, honestly not sure. I strongly believe in individual causes like both the FRM and MRM, certain environmental movements(when I can actually see them doing real useful things) etc. Walt Right is sorta my first real political project though.
4. How do you determine who is an ally you can collaborate with politically?
A: I think I can negotiate some kind of temporary shared understanding with almost anyone who is willing to engage with me openly, even when I don’t particularly like them. But a long term and stable collaboration should be based on at least some degree of real friendship because purely transactional relationships are too fragile. Of course, I don’t have any political experience but I think that who you can ally or collaborate with can vary quite a lot based on the task at hand.
I’ve observed that everyone has deeply personal reasons for engaging in politics so I categorically do not trust people that project an entirely altruistic persona. “I am doing all this only because I care and want to help the world” is a mask that usually hides some pretty ugly things(Regan comes to mind, along with some of the EA crowd).
5. Which political propositions are outside your personal Overton Window, such that you couldn’t collaborate with someone who held such beliefs?
A: Any kind of totalitarianism and political fetishism, even the covert kinds. If you think *everyone* should be a certain way or should do certain things, that goes against my foundational worldview. And the fetishists are usually just overgrown children that never learned to channel their natural impulses in a healthy way, they should be kept out of politics for their own sake.
6. Do you support Biden or Trump and why? How much do you care about the election?
A: Neither, and I think the US elections have stopped mattering to anyone, it’s just a circus.
1. Lapsed Eastern Orthodox. I think philosophic matters are intractable, and you can dedicate your entire career to disputing one premise of one argument for the existence or non-existence of God. Therefore, I think people should just choose whether or not to believe and run with it
2. Human nature entails a level of dignity that confers a basic right not to be treated as a means involuntarily. This is my basic starting point, and virtues and vices should shape us within the bounds of what human nature confers
3. Conservative in the sense of opposing radicalism and accepting the limitations of reality. Classical liberal in the sense of viewing knowledge as individually dispersed and consequently favoring decentralized decision-making mechanisms, such as free markets and federalism, over centralized bodies such as the UN or presidency
4. Whether the person prioritizes the same issues in the current political moment. Coalitions form and fracture since politics is dynamic, so alliances should be based on what's the paramount issue now. if the person is so optically poisonous that it stops my coalition from expanding or becomes a PR liability, I believe in disassociating from them
5. Anything whose optics are so repulsive to every vehicle for mass political action that anyone associated with it would be reputationally stained. If every organization with the ability to affect public policy and elections finds a certain idea (or someone associated with it) to be cancelable, it's a waste of political capital to try shoving it into the Overton window and will only lead to ghetto-ization. I also think any political cause that isn't tempered by humaneness must be actively opposed. As noted above, human dignity is the basis of my ethics
6. Getting Trump back in is hugely important because he'll end the Russo-Ukrainian War and appoint better people to the judge-ocracy. The world's currently on fire (Russo-Ukrainian War, Iran-Israel, record number of DPRK provocations), and the Philippines and China seem to have become a tinder box that's dangerously close to being lit. Furthermore, most of the institutionalized wokeness can be undone via executive action, and Trump is highly likely to do so if he's back in since he began to do so at the end of his first administration. That'll enable us to move on from this phase of the culture war