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Journal of Cogency
@journalofcogency.com
210 followers 90 following 170 posts
Philosophy, religion, metaphysics, politics.

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Just posted "A Non-Grand Thesis of Luxury Politics", which is the introduction to my in-progress explanation of the fascism of the current moment through a philosophical-psychological exploration, ~14 minute read: journalofcogency.com/2025/02/19/a...
Right now, I am starting to put together a work of philosophy, a thesis. My goal with this work is to explore this question: How does a smaller group of people manage to rule over a larger one? Why is “there are more of us” not enough to create change? My answer to that question is “the subjugation effect” and this work is my attempt to explain what that is. To properly explain this phenomenon, I need to proceed in six stages. The first stage, political systems, will set the basic context of the argument. The second stage, money as a medium, will explore the binding force of money as an example of such forces. Third, the way we think, will develop the second stage and show how this “binding” can be generalized to other agents. Fourth, the mystery of cogency, will discuss the construction of social power and indirect action. Fifth, the subjugation effect itself, where specific manifestations of political-cultural subjugation will be examined in light of the first four stages. In the last stage I’ll explore the reason which motivates the continuing of the subjugation effect: the desire for luxury.
February 19, 2025 at 3:47 PM
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Why do I want to do this? I have said this before, too. It’s because these ideas are conservative ideas. They are the conservative justifications for their political agenda. As such, they have no value for those who want real justice. They have less than no value because they make you second-guess the things you would do to achieve justice. They make you wonder whether even if you got a lot of support if it’s “the right thing”, if you are organizing “without ressentiment“, if you are not determining right and wrong through “slave morality”. It serves only to convince people that they should not seek to redress wrongs and it does this through leaps in logic and disguised interest. Holding onto Nietzscheanism is one of the biggest flaws that leftists have currently and its one they absolutely must let go of. I am the man of ressentiment. I am the man of bad conscience. I am the slave who triumphs. Nietzsche put the poison pill down and I am swallowing it, and I will shit it out, too. I refuse to be afraid of being accused of the ideas he made up. I am also the philosopher with the hammer. Nietzsche is the anvil. And I will never stop beating him to produce something better.
February 16, 2025 at 12:11 AM
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But engineers don’t always know what the best design is and don’t always know why a building fails. Sometimes they’re too close to the nuts and bolts, admiring a new technique, and not seeing that it’s caused flaws elsewhere. Philosophers are not always going to simply intuit a problem with philosophy. To Nietzsche’s benefit, philosophy has a quality that engineering doesn’t: philosophy is not actual. It doesn’t exist in the actual world, and effects outside of the mind do not affect it. Where the fascinated engineer will eventually have to face the flaws in their design when it collapses, nothing can force the ideas Nietzsche puts forward to collapse, so we’re free to keep believing in them even if they prove to be inadequate. With things that are actual, we don’t need to worry about the chain of reception. Things happen and that makes the new reality. It doesn’t matter that the most educated engineers say that floating apartments can work; if they don’t float, it didn’t work. Philosophy is not actual so it’s not like that. It does worry about the chain of reception. So the fact that the experts of philosophy still give credence to Nietzsche means that his ideas will keep being studied.
February 16, 2025 at 12:11 AM
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The people who like Nietzsche primarily, in my opinion, like that he made attacks upon philosophy which exposed anxieties that people had about the supposed certainty of philosophical “truth”. There are elements of procedural thought which are compelling, especially as brought out by Deleuze. As one follows those compelling elements, one then sees how they are built up into Nietzsche’s edifices and one assumes that those edifices are well-built. But they are not. I’ve been saying “Just look at the fucking thing” and, to be honest, this suffices for most people. I’ve said it before but Nietzsche isn’t like a popular guy. There’s a reason he has always been “controversial”, why people always have to rescue his work. “Just look at the fucking thing!”
February 16, 2025 at 12:08 AM
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But why should we see the noble’s statement as one that isn’t coming out of reason or contingency? Why should we accept that a noble person would say “I am good” in a vacuum? Why would they say anything about their quality if they have nothing to compare to? Obviously, going by the logic of the argument, the person who says “I am good” is also making a comparison, so if the slave says “so”, the noble must also say “so”. It is this value judgment which is the difference between noble and slave for Deleuze/Nietzsche, not the specific appellations of good or evil, and it immediately falls apart upon inspection. Yes, Deleuze/Nietzsche do assert that “good” does not need comparison, but again: they are just saying things. This is what I mean. Nobody else would say that you can understand “good” without “bad”. They only say this for the purpose of making this specious argument. And it’s upon this argument that the rest of Nietzsche’s philosophy is built, because this is the same distinction as that between active/reactive, critique/ressentiment, re-action/reaction, and so on. The distinctions are false and are introduced purely to support the value judgment.
February 16, 2025 at 12:06 AM
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Possibly the most unconvincing part of Nietzsche’s philosophy is how he constructs the noble and the slave. The noble says “I am good, you are evil”, while the slave says “You are evil, I am good”. I have not stated this exactly, of course. The way that Deleuze/Nietzsche put it, the slave says “You are evil, so I am good”. Why is this? It’s because only if you add that element in can you act as though the second part is contingent on the first part, and by only adding it for the slave, the noble is not making a contingent statement. The noble doesn’t reason, they say, but the slave does.
February 16, 2025 at 12:04 AM
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Because Nietzsche is allergic to checking his work, he never considers how absurd what he says is. He never thinks again about it. If we take his distinction between active and reactive forces, reading through this book, there is never a concrete stated difference between the two. Again, this is said fairly explicitly, but I have to say: lampshading does not eliminate the problem. It is clear that the only difference between active and reactive is perspective. Many times it is stated that the difference is something innate in forces, that this fact about forces is determining, but there are enough hedges that you can see that there is no difference. The point of differentiating them is to make a value judgment about them: namely, calling the active forces “good” and the reactive forces “bad”.
February 16, 2025 at 12:02 AM
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But this leads us towards the fatal flaw of Nietzsche, one which Deleuze gleefully copies and continues. This flaw is what I will call anti-experimentalism. At first, I want to say his issue is anti-empiricism, as empiricism is a trait that Deleuze/Nietzsche specifically decry. The problem with Nietzsche is that he resists being told no. This is an element of his theology of affirmation, obviously, but his affirmations burst past consideration into childishness. There’s a part which I remember, though I won’t bother quoting (I’ll talk about this later), where Deleuze/Nietzsche is saying that the problem with science is that it’s based on testing hypotheses rather than making affirmative claims. I’m likely mangling the message, but the point is, they are taking issue with the scientific method. And the thing is… that’s just how it works. That’s how you do science and confirm that your answers are useful for other people. To be affronted that science doesn’t work the way you think it should, even though the way you think it should work simply wouldn’t work, is puerile.
February 16, 2025 at 12:01 AM
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Read my first-blush review of "Nietzsche and Philosophy" by Gilles Deleuze, in which I refine my position against Nietzsche: journalofcogency.com/2025/02/15/d...
I think that the core appeal of Nietzsche is in asking the question again; I’ve said this before. I didn’t, perhaps, give enough credit to what a monumental moment that may have been. This might be a historical fallacy; that is, because it’s such a common thing now, I assumed it was always the case. Surely there must have always been iconoclasts who went against the philosophical grain. Also, Nietzsche’s dramatics and poeticizing are aesthetically appealing. It appears to be a much different way of doing philosophy than anyone else, and for that reason it appears to be saying something which is different than anyone else. It seems to demand appraisal on its own terms because it does not easily fit within the run of philosophy as such.
February 16, 2025 at 12:00 AM
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Because I'm feeling generous to all the losers: Why I Hate Nietzsche substack.com/home/post/p-...
But more than his existence, I hate the people still cite him approvingly. People listen to ideas about bad conscience and ressentiment, where Nietzsche is saying "you, the reader, are nothing but malice unless you are an elite" and say "yes actually, I feel so much ressentiment and that's why I want justice." They try to convince themselves that actually Nietzsche was being more nuanced than he appears to be. Am I trying to say that Nietzsche has no complexity? Of course not. But people who defend Nietzsche's work almost demand that you ignore the things he says, things he never contradicts and that no one even suggests he contradicts. His ideas are bad because he refused to understand the morals of his day, because he rejected their basis and therefore never considered that they might be as much a matter of practicality as they are of empathy. He never thought procedurally about why certain things might take place. The lack of connective tissue in his work is fairly alarming, and this is important because his ideas do not really make sense unless, like most philosophers, you have a little self-doubt inside that you like someone to beat on from time to time.
January 29, 2025 at 6:27 PM
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IMPORTANT READ: Read "Protest and the Construction of Power" (14 mins) on Journal of Cogency, about how a process becomes an act of power and how power acts to snuff out anything that challenges it. journalofcogency.com/2024/09/23/p...
When the police assault peaceful protesters, when courts send people to jail for years because they block traffic for mere hours, these things have happened in some part because no challenge to the system of power can be stomached by arch-conservatives. The protest, the resistance to being subsumed, is itself what the state wants to eliminate. If my arm hurts, I’m not likely to tolerate it more because I hurt it while helping my grandmother or practicing jiu jitsu. What might help me tolerate the pain — not try to extinguish it immediately — is if you tell me it is a sign of my arm healing. For those reliant on the power process, what is important is not order or disorder as such but the effective functioning of the power system. Protest is a breakdown, and the state’s violent reaction is the clearest sign that the threat posed to the state power system is real.
November 25, 2024 at 11:20 PM
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What Is Capitalism? An exploration of what capitalism means as well as capitalism as an ideology journalofcogency.com/2024/07/01/w...
In Europe, the rise of liberalism happened alongside the rise of another idea: nationalism. It would be incorrect to say that early liberal thinkers did not understand the need for community. Most early nationalists were liberals and vice versa. Still, the individualist goals of liberalism contradict the collectivist goals of nationalism, so I find it more useful to view these as separate ideologies which can be held together. This coincidence is important because nationalism clearly introduced an alternative value-body: the national community. This led to the creation of modern political socialism, and it is in this context that ideological capitalism first emerged. Capitalism, defined in large part by the capital value-body, was a way to avoid socialism. I will explain more about these value-bodies in the next section.
November 25, 2024 at 3:47 AM
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Have you ever wondered why the Democrats come right up to the line of doing something good and then back down at the last second? Read "Why the Democrats Will Never Love You", a 7 min read on Journal of Cogency: journalofcogency.com/2024/10/24/w...
And while you can read this situation as the base & the left having some amount of influence, this is a similar level of influence as "voting with your wallet". You can shout as loud as you want for things and refuse to vote for Democrats. If you go too far left, they will just sandbag you and lose. / They would rather sandbag you and lose than be "too socialist" because, fundamentally, they're of the capitalist class. And that's why they have the ultimate power in this situation. Maybe their success relies on you, but if they decide not to play, you get nothing. / I think I'm wrapping up here, so let me say this: most Democratic voters understand this innately, and most leftists do, too. The difference is the response. Committed Democrats are cowards, so they follow wherever the core leads, hoping for protection. Leftists get mad at the game being rigged.
November 25, 2024 at 1:08 AM
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Read my commentary on the new episode of Historia Civilis: journalofcogency.com/2024/11/23/c...
On the question of revolution, what interested me is the paramilitary aspect of it. Revolutions in France, in particular, hinged a great deal on Paris and controlling it. Abdicating Paris was almost always seen as a death blow, while holding Paris gave one the right to form governments, run the country, etc. Of course, there were always conflicts like the fighting in the Vendee which went along what happened in Paris, but it’s a very common opinion that the control of Paris is a primary necessity. In the case of the July Revolution, as HC lays out, King Charles X’s withdrawal of the military from Paris was noted by Talleyrand as the precise moment when his reign ended. Let’s try and port that over to the United States. This line of thinking will hold for many modern countries as well, likely including modern France, but the U.S. is a clearer example. To be blunt: I do not think that a revolutionary force simply taking and holding Washington D.C. would be the end of the government. But why? That’s what interests me here. What are the differences between Paris in 1830 and modern capitals that would make this strategy untenable?
November 24, 2024 at 7:17 PM
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What Is Religion? (7 min read) A bias (hypothesis) about how we can understand what religion is in a way that clearly indicates what we should include and why: journalofcogency.com/2024/08/13/w...
The four tiers of observance or worldview are general abstract levels of knowing and understanding the world. Through these lenses, a person figures out how they should live and act in the world. These tiers are (1) the cosmos, (2) the world, (3) the society, and (4) the self. These are addressed by the four discourses: (1) cosmology, (2) epistemology, (3) axiology (or teleology), and (4) deontology. In this context, each has a specific definition that I’ll go over now.
November 24, 2024 at 3:01 AM
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Read Whipping Ourselves and Weeping, a 10 minute read about Marx & destiny, Nietzsche & self-flagellation, and why the left is always soul-searching journalofcogency.com/2024/07/24/w...
Destiny is fake. The problem with destiny, and with the logic of self-flagellation, is that it ignores the agency of the other side. For self-flagellation to make sense — for the logic of leftists having an inherent flaw to hold up — the failures of the left would have to be the fault of the left alone. That implies that nothing is fighting against the left. This is the problem with destiny, and with the elevation of Marxite use of the process of dialectical materialism to the status of prophecy simply because the argument is extremely persuasive. We have reduced our situation to something like a mountain climb, where no matter how hard it is, it is a stationary obstacle whose challenges are known and just have to be overcome.
November 7, 2024 at 1:57 PM
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Read "Against Ur-Fascism" on Journal of Cogency, a critique of the essay "Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco which I feel is a naive view of what fascism is, one which I try to update journalofcogency.com/2023/10/19/a...
First, it’s necessary to dispense with the notion of fascism-as-syndrome, and my approach is straight-forward: no collection of “fascist” symptoms can be said to be representative of fascism alone. Eco does address this issue, it must be noted, but mentioning a problem does not solve it. For the proposed facets in “Ur-Fascism” to be useful they must provide a way for us to see fascism as distinct from other political ideologies. “Ur-Fascism” does not achieve this. I’ll demonstrate with a few examples. • The cult of tradition exists in most liberal(izing) societies, including the United States, India, Brazil, et. al., in heritage holidays, national dress, and so on; if viewing “rural exile” policies as fitting into this category (i.e. sending city-dwellers, especially intellectuals, to rural places so they could learn from simplicity and poverty), socialist-communist countries also engaged heavily in promoting traditional values and ways of being. • The appeal to the frustrated middle class was the explicit draw in the American and French Revolutions, and can be said of the Russian Revolutions as well (considering that urban workers were seen as more socioeconomically developed than rural peasants).
November 7, 2024 at 1:55 PM
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Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "Against Ressentiment" on Journal of Cogency, about how people (especially liberals & leftists) have internalized the idea of ressentiment and bad conscience, and why that fuckin sucks journalofcogency.com/2024/03/08/a...
Few concepts which Nietzsche developed have been less controversial than ressentiment. I view this as a problem. It’s not unusual to find that ressentiment (and its cousin bad conscience) are at the core of Nietzsche’s thought. It’s also not unusual to observe that Nietzsche was stridently elitist and aristocratic. It’s interesting, then, that people never associate those two observations and ask to what extent ressentiment was constructed to justify that aristocratic worldview. Asked another way, what explanatory force does ressentiment have outside of that view? In my estimation, it is little or none. What I will show is that ressentiment is only a way to ascribe inherent malice to weakness, a line of thought whose only end point is excusing the use of power by the powerful against the weak.
November 7, 2024 at 1:50 PM
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Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "Technology of Authority" on Journal of Cogency, about how the purpose of capitalism is to establish domination over people as a successor to divine kingship #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/06/05/t...
Technology of Authority Yes, I wish this was a metal song, too. This is the theory of a theory, a pre-theory. Capitalism is not simply an economic system or mode of production, it is a method of establishing domination: a technology of authority. It is the more or less direct successor of divine kingship. When the European revolutions of the 19th century had destroyed divine kingship, at a point when Europe had more or less dominated the world, this discredited divine kingship forever. Without divine kingship, a government must serve its society, and this logic always means that the wealth of a state will eventually be distributed among the common people. Capitalism as an ideology functions to justify the authority of those who wanted to stop that from happening over the common people by granting social privilege to the holders of capital over non-holders of capital.
November 7, 2024 at 1:48 PM
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Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "What Is Divine Kingship?", explaining why the idea of divine kingship is an important precursor to fascist ideas journalofcogency.com/2024/06/08/w...
Almost every kind of justification that is successful is a variant of the invocation of social benefit. This idea will return again later. For now, we should understand divine justification (which is the type used by sacral rule) as being an image of the invocation of social benefit. Especially in the West, it’s common to link any alliance of divinity and government with oppression, so it should be understood that this justification is based not on divine force & punishment but on divine providence. Providence is a kind of benefit which originates outside of society and is potentially limitless. Ensuring that this potential is not lost is the responsibility of the sacral ruler, such as by organizing rituals and ensuring divine wishes are followed, and this gives the ruler the justification to take acts which might otherwise be seen as against society. A dramatic example is the system of human sacrifice in the Aztec civilization. It is unlikely that this system was enjoyed by much of the population, but the system was justified as being demanded by the divine as a condition of providence. Remember that what justification accomplishes is a reduction in opposition from the society for an action taken without the society’s consent and/or against the society’s immediate well-being. Without this justification, how could we explain the fact that Aztec people allowed this to continue?
November 7, 2024 at 1:46 PM
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Anti-Fascist Thought: Read "Protest and the Construction of Power" (14 mins) on Journal of Cogency, about how a process becomes an act of power and how power acts to snuff out anything that challenges it. journalofcogency.com/2024/09/23/p...
When the police assault peaceful protesters, when courts send people to jail for years because they block traffic for mere hours, these things have happened in some part because no challenge to the system of power can be stomached by arch-conservatives. The protest, the resistance to being subsumed, is itself what the state wants to eliminate. If my arm hurts, I’m not likely to tolerate it more because I hurt it while helping my grandmother or practicing jiu jitsu. What might help me tolerate the pain — not try to extinguish it immediately — is if you tell me it is a sign of my arm healing. For those reliant on the power process, what is important is not order or disorder as such but the effective functioning of the power system. Protest is a breakdown, and the state’s violent reaction is the clearest sign that the threat posed to the state power system is real.
November 7, 2024 at 1:42 PM
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A short piece about what morality is and what it is worth for us #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/01/18/a...
To oppose Chomsky’s view of moral systems, though, I do not believe moral systems (or any mental construct) are like biological organs, I believe they are like bone tools. Do we need them (or something better) to navigate the world, to get ourselves sustenance, to protect ourselves? Absolutely. But these are things that we have made out of nature, not things that nature has made for us.
October 27, 2024 at 5:33 PM
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What Is Capitalism? An exploration of what capitalism means as well as #capitalism as an ideology #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/07/01/w...
In Europe, the rise of liberalism happened alongside the rise of another idea: nationalism. It would be incorrect to say that early liberal thinkers did not understand the need for community. Most early nationalists were liberals and vice versa. Still, the individualist goals of liberalism contradict the collectivist goals of nationalism, so I find it more useful to view these as separate ideologies which can be held together. This coincidence is important because nationalism clearly introduced an alternative value-body: the national community. This led to the creation of modern political socialism, and it is in this context that ideological capitalism first emerged. Capitalism, defined in large part by the capital value-body, was a way to avoid socialism. I will explain more about these value-bodies in the next section.
October 26, 2024 at 5:11 PM
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Read "Protest and the Construction of Power" (14 mins) on Journal of Cogency, about how a process becomes an act of power and how power acts to snuff out anything that challenges it. #philosophy journalofcogency.com/2024/09/23/p...
When the police assault peaceful protesters, when courts send people to jail for years because they block traffic for mere hours, these things have happened in some part because no challenge to the system of power can be stomached by arch-conservatives. The protest, the resistance to being subsumed, is itself what the state wants to eliminate. If my arm hurts, I’m not likely to tolerate it more because I hurt it while helping my grandmother or practicing jiu jitsu. What might help me tolerate the pain — not try to extinguish it immediately — is if you tell me it is a sign of my arm healing. For those reliant on the power process, what is important is not order or disorder as such but the effective functioning of the power system. Protest is a breakdown, and the state’s violent reaction is the clearest sign that the threat posed to the state power system is real.
October 25, 2024 at 2:11 PM
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Have you ever wondered why the Democrats come right up to the line of doing something good and then back down at the last second? Read "Why the Democrats Will Never Love You", a 7 min read on Journal of Cogency: journalofcogency.com/2024/10/24/w...
And while you can read this situation as the base & the left having some amount of influence, this is a similar level of influence as "voting with your wallet". You can shout as loud as you want for things and refuse to vote for Democrats. If you go too far left, they will just sandbag you and lose. / They would rather sandbag you and lose than be "too socialist" because, fundamentally, they're of the capitalist class. And that's why they have the ultimate power in this situation. Maybe their success relies on you, but if they decide not to play, you get nothing. / I think I'm wrapping up here, so let me say this: most Democratic voters understand this innately, and most leftists do, too. The difference is the response. Committed Democrats are cowards, so they follow wherever the core leads, hoping for protection. Leftists get mad at the game being rigged.
October 24, 2024 at 8:16 PM