Joe Dixon > Quotes

“The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“Our work is rejected because we are actually interested in the truth. Not a good look! People are “ashamed and embarrassed” by our work because, like Nietzsche’s work, it’s full of “difficult” material. Nietzsche was totally ignored during his sane life. Even today, the common herd don’t have a clue who he is. Leibniz, humanity’s greatest genius, is more or less unknown. That’s the way it goes. Our work is suffering the same fate. Well, it’s no surprise. We refused to play the Mandarin game. We refused to comply with the herd. Like true philosophers, we prefer to be Sages and Gadflies. The masses killed Socrates. Everyone that refuses to share our work is passing us the hemlock. So be it! We have total contempt for people that claim to like our work, but wouldn’t be seen dead sharing it on social media. You must be able to stand with those making difficult arguments that the herd don’t like. We disagree with Nietzsche on all manner of things, but we would certainly stand shoulder to shoulder with him against the herd. It’s essential for Gadflies to exist to shake the masses out of their complacency. Yet the Gadflies are always hated and, in the end, they are always handed the hemlock. They are the true heroes of our world, the ones that never get any credit.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Daedalus said you shouldn’t fly too low. If you do, the water will fatally weigh down your wings and you will surely perish. Don’t fly too high either. The sun will melt the wax holding your wings together, and you will plunge to your death. So, moderation in all things. Always follow the middle course. How dull. Set your sights higher. Go as high as you can, all the way to the top. We are the people of the peaks, not the middle of the road.”
― Joe Dixon, Why God Should Go to Hell: How God Is Outside the Moral Order

“Reason and logic are a force for unity. People can rally around the objective, absolute Truth. All of these are undermined by the Dunning-Kruger effect, by the rise of irrationalism. Today, the world is full of subjectivists and relativists who actively sneer at the Truth and proclaim that everyone has their own truth. When you start believing your own truth, your own propaganda, your own bullshit, you become a narcissist. You think you are a god, and that no one is allowed to contradict you. After all, who are they to challenge your truth?”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“The Stupid Stupid people are highly motivated to dismiss any unfamiliar ideas as rapidly as possible so that they can go on clinging to their existing silly, retarded belief systems. These morons specialize in “zingers” – cretinous one-liners that they imagine are definitive refutations, but which are always comically and extravagantly ignorant and ill-informed – accompanied by inevitable ad hominem insults. That’s the way these clowns roll. They are natural-born trolls. Trolling is simply acidic stupidity. Smart people, by complete contrast, are interested in unfamiliar ideas and research and study them.”
― Joe Dixon, Take Them to the Morgue

“In the Middle Ages, anyone who tried to escape their duties to society - negative libertarians, in other words, with which today's world is full - were not deemed worthy of consideration. They were pathetic. They were Last Men. Today's world produces them by the legions. They are the primary output of modernity.”
― Joe Dixon, The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence

“Never follow the herd. The great always go in the opposite direction. The herd follows the well-trodden path. The great establish paths never trodden before. They create new paths, new ways, new routes.”
― Joe Dixon, The Prophet of War: The Downfall of the West

“Every nation can be summed up by a single book or play, or by a particular author. America is perhaps perfectly encapsulated by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby is a book about luxury, enchantment, glamour, magic spells, aspiration, a vulgar Wonderland, insecurity, pretentiousness, bluffing, soullessness, fakes, phonies, emptiness, desperation, regrets, and impossible dreams. “Her voice is full of money,” says the narrator about the beguiling muse Daisy Buchanan. Could this not serve as the epitaph for the American Dream itself as it is finally laid to rest?”
― Joe Dixon, Character Wars: America's Failing Character

“What does the negative libertarian escape to? Normally, it’s pure self-indulgence, hedonism, the pursuit of instant gratification. His life outside work is about dumbed-down entertainment, video games, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, alcohol, fantasy, escapism, relaxation, laziness, food and drink, chillaxing and “downtime”. But none of these things are enduringly satisfying. They are not sacred causes. They are not the meaning of life. That’s why all negative libertarians are sad, depressed, anxious, tormented individuals, crushingly alone and fearful. They are desperate to distract themselves from their lives because their lives are so miserable. Self-indulgence – the cult of yourself and your own pleasure and self-obsession – is never satisfying. You always need something higher than yourself, bigger than yourself, something for which you will sacrifice yourself, something that will curb your insatiable Id.”
― Joe Dixon, The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb

“The average person looks to be taught by the mediocre, not the excellent.”
― Joe Dixon, The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence

“People are crazy. The values of the world are crazy. What does predatory free-market capitalism care about sanity and values? Capitalism will do anything for a profit. If madness sells – which it does – capitalism will not hesitate to pander to it. Reason, logic and mathematics don’t sell, so capitalism and mainstream culture avoid them like the plague. Reason and logic are the antidote to insanity, but they are the things most rejected by an insane culture. Catch-22. That’s why the Insanity Wars can end in only one way: Cataclysm. The Dumbocalypse is almost upon us. The Dumbageddon conspiracy is going into overdrive. But from the ashes of old humanity, new humanity shall arise like the phoenix. The dawn of the HyperHuman lies on the far side of the eclipse of the dunce.”
― Joe Dixon, The Insanity Wars: Why People Are Crazier Than Ever

“Capitalism needs an enemy. If a real one doesn’t exist, it simply creates one … “Marxism.” Since there is no political and economic Marxism in America, the American right have invented cultural Marxism to perform the role of ultimate “other”, the thing to be hated, feared and resisted. What they call cultural Marxism is in fact what sane people call liberal cultural capitalism, i.e. the culture associated with liberal capitalists rather than conservative capitalists. Of course, in the demented minds of the far right, liberalism is Marxism, which is why Barack Obama was routinely branded a Marxist by the far right, despite never espousing a Marxist sentiment in his entire life. Liberal views, multiculturalism, and political correctness are not Marxist. They are liberal. Why would anyone call them Marxist except to demonize them? No honest person would ever refer to them as anything other than liberal, but since when have the American far right ever been honest? Their game is always the same: to generate maximum hatred of anything that is not conservative, libertarian, Confederate, racist, white Supremacist, and Nazi. Marxism is quintessentially about class struggle, about the workers versus the owners, and the aim of producing a classless society where the people are fully in charge of their own lives, and are never the slaves of the masters. Liberalism, by contrast, does not focus on class struggle but on values, identities and “rights”, especially of minorities. Right wingers have confused liberal capitalism with Marxism. Of course, they have done this deliberately to demonize liberal capitalism in order to convert all capitalists to conservative capitalism. They only want to see conservative (right wing) capitalism, or libertarian (far right) capitalism. Everything else is to be routinely denounced as “Marxist.” It’s just the good old McCarthyite tactic – tried and tested over the decades – that right wingers love so much.”
― Joe Dixon, The Ownership Wars: Who Owns You?

“Twitter Is Twitter the ultimate Mythos medium? Writing too hard for you? Analysis too hard for you? No need to worry. Now you can say it all in 140 characters, roughly reflecting the size of your vocabulary, knowledge and brain. Twitter is successful because 140 characters corresponds to the typical size of a meme: a single idea that can shoot off into the Darwinian meme pool and be naturally selected by all the jostling Mythos meme machines (Twitterati, or Twits, to you and me). Don’t you just love it? This is dumbing down with go-faster stripes and turbo engines. Maybe we can reach the ultimate Tweet: zero characters and a complete flatline of human mental activity.”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“Much as we advocate a Logos world, we don’t want to kill off Mythos – because we would kill off our own humanity if we did so. It’s all about getting the balance right. We must have a rational society, but with plenty of scope for Mythos exploration, fantasy and fun. Society must be run according to rationality, but our vital recreational time must be all about feeling, narrative, communication and fun.”
― Joe Dixon, The Intelligence Wars: Logos Versus Mythos

“Jordan Peterson says, “Clean up your room.” Don’t do that. Overcome the system that is oppressing you. If not, you will have the tidiest room in the world and also the emptiest life in the world, the life of a functionary, flunkey, yes-man, robopath and slave. You know your place. You are a coward who does nothing to change the game that decreed you were a loser from the day you were born. Reject Peterson. Save yourself. Save the world.”
― Joe Dixon, Clean Up Your Room!: The Eternal Spotless Mind of Jordan Peterson

“Donald Trump and his ilk are eating the poor for breakfast, yet the poor keep voting for the billionaire elite ... turkeys voting for Christmas.”
― Joe Dixon, The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence

“The acceptance of the truth now appears to be increasingly based on the acceptability of the appearance and Mandarin reputation of the person proclaiming it. We’re increasingly in the grip of the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority. When people appeal to authority, they are claiming that something must be true because it is said or believed by someone who is said to be an “authority” on the subject. Anyone with an “out there” image is deemed automatically not to be an authority because the Mandarins have brainwashed everyone to believe that authorities must look as bland as possible, just like them.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Only people who have a world-historical perspective can change history. The average person has only a domestic, ahistorical perspective. Look at social media. It’s full of people without a clue what’s going on. Immense historical forces have been unleashed all around them, and all they care about is posting their brain-dead, vacuous observations and their self-pitying, whining woe-is-me statements about how shitty their lives are and how no one understands them. As well as countless memes and selfies, of course. You just have to love those lolcats on skateboards, right, hoomans? They are forever trapped in their parochial little world of trivia. Why are our books so unsuccessful? It’s because they announce, with the volume of Stentor at Troy, a world-historic agenda, but we are surrounded by pygmies who stare at us like cows in line at the abattoir.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“The Jacobins were the standard bearers of the left. Liberals are not on the left. They are in the center, and often trending right with their hatred of the State and any possibility of State social engineering on the grand scale. It has been rightly observed that the hallmark of liberalism is wanting the “thing without the thing”, as Slavoj Zizek famously put it. The liberals want war without war, revolution without revolution, drugs without any of the downside of drugs, coffee without caffeine. They want a situation that inevitably leads to violence, without the violence. They immediately condemn the violence even though violence was implicit in the entire project from the get-go.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Democracy, let’s face it, was never more than a disguised version of moronarchy … rule by morons.”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“Peterson is the new Winthrop. The Puritans are on the march again, furiously cleaning their rooms because cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
― Joe Dixon, Clean Up Your Room!: The Eternal Spotless Mind of Jordan Peterson

“This is not a drill. This is your life. Stop being what you have been. Become what you were meant to be. See the Light. Join the Hyperboreans. Become a HyperHuman. Only the highest, only the noblest, only the most courageous are called. A new dawn is coming... the birth of Hyperreason. It’s time to enter Hyperreality.”
― Joe Dixon, Why God Should Go to Hell: How God Is Outside the Moral Order

“In today’s world, the cult of the individual is the new religion. No one is allowed to contradict the individual, to tell him he’s wrong, a waste of space, a liability, a degenerate. We have to pretend that all individuals – no matter how vile – are sacred. We are not allowed to take any action against them, to reform them, correct them, educate them. After all, everyone has their own truth, so everyone is automatically right.”
― Joe Dixon, The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb

“There is nothing surprising about the European Union. It’s the medieval Catholic Church resurrected as a secular institution. The British are Protestants who couldn’t stand being in a Catholic Union. That’s really why Brexit happened. In the America presidential election, why was Hillary Clinton so hated? It was because she was perceived as a kind of Pope (President) in charge of the Washington D.C. Establishment (the Church). She was an expert, and experts are hated by ordinary Americans. Why did Donald Trump prove so successful? It was because he was an extreme individualistic narcissist, exactly like so many Protestant Americans. Naturally, he himself is a Protestant.”
― Joe Dixon, The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb

“If you inhabit a role too well and too long you start to become that role. You have lost yourself. The man who always wears a mask becomes the mask. There is no longer a real face under the mask, just a ghastly blank where a human soul once was. We live in a Persona World, a world of masks where everyone is faking it. What is more fake than social media?”
― Joe Dixon, The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence

“We see liberals on social media making serious errors in trying to get movements off the ground. They try one message, and then another, then another, and the thing becomes a bigger and bigger mess. It’s no longer clear what the message is, what the group stands for, what the point is. It’s especially disastrous if a group trying to create a niche position then gets relocated on the bandwagon of much bigger, established campaigns such as veganism, LGBTQIAX, global warming, etc. The group then no longer has its own identity but is just an adjunct of these other campaigns.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“People are trained – brainwashed – to believe that material well-being stands for psychological well-being. If you have a house, a job, a car, lots of commodities, a partner and family then you ought to be happy. But where is the real you in all of that? Of course, psychological well-being, not material well-being, should be the benchmark. But we live in a materialist world thanks to economic materialism (predatory capitalism) and philosophical materialism (scientism). Science more or less denies that we have minds and free will, hence are just machines, while predatory capitalism treats us as material objects. Mind – the psyche, psychology – is exactly what is absent from the materialist hegemony, and that’s why the world is so anxious, depressed and alienated. It comes with the territory. It’s an inevitable aspect of materialism. Materialism shapes us as matter. Consumerism shapes us as consumers. The class system locks us into artificial class identities. In a world of commodities, we ourselves are commodified. All of our values start to revolve around objects, things, commodities, consumption, matter. The human has disappeared. We need to revalue all values in terms of idealism rather than materialism, and rationalism instead of empiricism.”
― Joe Dixon, The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence

“The Moronarchy is upon us. Welcome to the Dumbocalypse. The Dumbageddon Conspiracy has finally paid off. Freedumb and Dumbocracy have reached their logical conclusion. How did we get here? We can thank the Dunning-Kruger effect, the most powerful and disturbing force in the world today ... the force of human stupidity, the greatest destroyer and wrecker there has ever been. Come and explore the bizarre world of idiots, of the Confederacy of Dunces, of the Dunciad.”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“Social media is the supreme triumph of the commonplace, the undiluted voice of the commonplace, the perfect means of viral transmission of the commonplace. All excellence is tracked down and exterminated. The commonplace infects everything. It grows like weeds everywhere and strangles all beautiful, exceptional flowers. All tall poppies are all cut down.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Cults are not full of the strong, they are full of the weak. Hyperianism is all about strength. Hyperians are willing to be members of the “Cult of Reason” – because that is of course the supreme irony. Reason is the cult-buster. Every actual cult seeks to deprive you of your reason, and never apply clear and critical thinking to the cult. The Cult of Reason, by contrast, gives you the exact tools to see through everything, hence is the sole defense against cults. Is mathematics a cult? How could it be? It is nothing but the unfolding of reason and logic. The hilarious thing is that a group devoted to promoting reason and logic is regarded as a “cult” by cretins promoting innumerable versions of unreason and illogic. It is opposition to reason and logic – to rationalism – that constitutes cultic behavior.”
― Joe Dixon, Take Them to the Morgue