By Saxon Nomad of the Sons of Wisconsin.
The heart of right-wing politics is the ability to think at scale. Nothing is just about me, you, or this particular moment in time. Individual quirks wash away at scale because of destructive interference, and shared traits alone stand out. You might not know which of two employees or students is smarter after meeting with them both, but you would certainly notice if you had two companies or classrooms with different average levels of intelligence, empathy, or neuroticism.
This is not just about scaling up space and multiplying people. Time is a dimension, too. What you eat for breakfast over the course of your life is more important than whether you had it this morning, and what your nation will eat for the next hundred years trumps both. How about what you will eat in eternity?
There is a sort of paradox hidden here. Groups are made up of individuals; lives are made up of choices. So individuality is nothing, but it is also everything. Everyone understands the dissonance at some level.
Sometimes the micro and the macro diverge. You might care for your foreign neighbor yet go to war with his nation. Or you might love his nation yet deport him from yours. You might be a Leviticus-20 theonomist yet have a pleasant relationship with your gay colleague.
Other times the dissonance proves too great, and there must be convergence. Hypocrites do not inherit the kingdom of God. Which way, Western Man?
Living dissonance is bad enough; negotiating dissonance and resonance is a meta-schizo affair. But that is why most people are not born to lead. It is also why geniuses are prone to madness — which in turn is why the smartest men must interpret and lead. Only they can do so without going insane (and some do). Thus the midwit’s dilemma: he has enough RAM to look at the picture either zoomed in or zoomed out, but not enough to scale up or down in real time. He almost realizes it when he asks, “Source?”
Thinking at scale is necessary because the enemies can do it. They think in terms of centuries, and they too operate at scale. They recognize slopes that look flat or unslippery to the human eye. So they cannot be mere flesh and blood, though they possess it. This recognition is yet another occasion for madness, and it demands grit on top of everything else.
A smart man is not just intelligent; he has the instincts and virtues to say the right thing at the right time. Men are guided by words, and words are profound. It isn’t good enough to publish law or doctrine approximately and tuck the meaning away in explanatory documents; the resonances, connotations, and effects of your words on human groups at scale must all be perfect. Your words will be followed, considered, dissected, memed, ignored, or rejected by men of all types and all levels of competence. They will dock you for incoherence — real or perceived — and will sniff out hypocrisy intuitively.
Only God, and maybe Satan, will know whether you messed up until we see the fruits of your speech in two hundred years, or the effects of one man on his nation. Satan himself was created as an angel of light, and even he was unequal to the task.
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