Two Materially Untrue Beliefs I Hold About The World

19 Nov, 2025

Intro

As I write this, I'm 21 and so, of course, I would love to think that I know it all, I've made it through my just world and shattered world phases, I've even (shocker of shockers) read a little theory. I know a thing or two, and may have even seen a thing or two. However, I don't know or, at least, don't understand everything. Yet.

One - People Can be Convinced to Adopt Correct Beliefs With Sufficient Argumentative Skill

This one is just false on its face, right? When's the last time in your scrolling-- (Do you scroll? You're reading an actual blog right now so maybe you don't. Okay, so, like, scrolling is when...) Anyways, when's the last time in your scrolling you came across someone with just atrocious politics. And here, I'm not meaning a Nazi or one of their hangers-on, I'm meaning somebody who clearly hasn't sat down and considered anything. They've never tried to be coherent. And it's infuriating, right? Because they're sat there, just tapping away and you feel like you're halfway to an icepick lobotomy trying to work out what the hell their worldview even is. And then it hits you, they don't actually believe in anything, they don't actually have any framework, they don't (dear God I'm really saying it) read theory. And so, you get to thinking that you will be the one to enlighten them. To give them models and a working understanding, or barring all that, to at least help them reach ideological consistency.

And in this paternalistic moment, and I do really mean paternalistic, because it feels like you're talking to a child; where you're finished with the responsum and you're about to hit post, you realize that you've got no social leverage here and, hell, even if you did, they wouldn't see it. And if they did see it, they wouldn't change their mind because you can't beat the algorithm.

I have about ten of these moments a week. Unfortunately for my mental health and general mood, I continue to use Tumblr in 2025, and it remains filled with the most insufferable people around. Truly. The number of times I have to deal with people engaging with legal questions as though they were moral questions (and vice versa) making basic mistakes of is vs. ought is, frankly, absurd and I often wonder why I continue to use the accursed site. (It's pornography, in case you're wondering. There's a lot of people with very similar kinks to mine on there.)

Sometimes I do post the responsum, sometimes I finish it and then delete it, most times it just goes to my drafts, but every time I feel like shit afterwards. Obviously. Because I never end up convincing them. See my point about social leverage. Most people, and again, you're reading a blog right now so this may be a strange concept to you, but most people do not believe things on the basis that convincing arguments can be made for the truth or falsity of them. Most people just believe whatever everyone around them believes. Most are willing to forsake truth for consensus, because it's easier and provides a level of social smoothing. Going with the herd is easier than going against, after all.

And so, I feel like shit because I'm out here trying to convince someone to accept beliefs that don't fit into their presupposed framework, which always causes cognitive dissonance if done correctly, meaning I'm intentionally inflicting some degree of emotional distress, and it's liable to be unproductive. While I may not work in a role where I take the Physician's Oath, I do still think first do no harm is a good guiding principle, excepting productive harm (like discourse,¹ or open surgery) Or of course, unless a cute girl asks me to hurt her within the Magic Circle.

Two - A Command of Latin Will Make me Seem Like a Proper Academic

So, somewhere in the back of my head there's a chuuni² middle-schooler who's just discovered the words polyglot and academian. This is one of the reasons I use we sometimes. This chuuni still lives in 1500s Hamburg apparently because she genuinely seems to think that academic discourse is still happening in the Roman tongue. In her mind Latinate titles and the ability to pepper in aphorisms will earn me respect. To be sure, if this was 1500s Hamburg and I was in the hallowed halls of some University, it would but this is the Upper Midwest in 2025, and if I quote something from Seneca nobody's going to notice.

I realized this in approximately 11th Grade, as evidenced by my C performance in Latin 3 and Latin 4, but I still remain aesthetically attracted to Latin and to Republican Rome. They made it look so damn good during the Renaissance. Something interesting in a time of sumptuary law and grand speeches I suppose. Of course, I'm not unfamiliar with the slow decline and rapid fall of the Republic, how when a republic betrays its populace that populace grows uninterested in "keeping it" in the Franklin sense. Nor am I unaware of the proscription lists, and the tongue on the rostrum (The tongue, specifically is an image that torments me sometimes, in a time where we have military policing our streets.) that ended it all.

In my mind, I'm prone to seeing it as some faraway golden era (And again, I must say that I'm familiar with the Roman economy's dependence on slavery, I'm familiar with the colonization, but the popular images remain, and I think I am remembering, here, Rome qua popular imagination instead of Rome qua Rome.) because it was a golden era for a specific group of Roman citizens. The literati (and here this just means those wealthy enough to be literate) wrote such great propaganda. The Republic was bangin' for the urbanum gentibus. In my mind there's Rome, marbled, statued, clean; and then there's Rome, conqueror, temple-burner, salter of fields, destroyer of cultures, wasteland-bringer. They're like two seperate people. I think that divide would be apparent too, to a citizen, having done his twenty years in a Legion in Asia, having lived the second and now settling into the first. I think you'd have to pretend just to function.

Maybe that says something about being an American today, as we are in our own slow decline. I think that I'm not the one who can tell you what it is, just one who can make the parallel. I suppose you sort of have to, in a nation that apes the Antique republics. The parallels run deep, and I've got a post coming down the pipe about them.

#false_beliefs #politics #things_ive_written #thought_contagion