THE RULES (MUST READ):

How to join a discussion:
In a comment under the excerpt you'd like to discuss, first provide your own original analysis of the text. To do so, state what you take to be the author's main thesis. Furthermore, explain how the author attempts to build said thesis, using specific details from the text to support your explanation, with at least one direct quote, and elaboration upon said quote, used to support your analysis. This rule comes from the belief that before you criticize an author's argument, you must first be able to articulate said argument; in order to criticize, you must first understand. Additionally, in order to develop that understanding, if there is a portion of the text that you find difficult or confusing, you must point it out via direct quotation and express what you find confusing about it, offering at least an educated guess about what it might be attempting to convey; this will allow us to collaboratively address and interpret the tricky parts of the passage. After you've submitted a summary, but not before then, you can engage with others who have contributed and discuss the text more generally. To maintain the quality of discussion, comments from participants who have not yet posted their own summaries will be deleted (implicit in this is that you, the participant who has written a summary, are not to respond to posts from people who have not contributed their own original analyses, except perhaps to gently remind them about the requirement).

Discussion guidelines:
All further discussion should relate directly back to the prose being analyzed. Avoid veering into broad, unrelated debates; if a comment doesn't use the text as a primary piece of evidence, it's off-topic. This ensures the chat remains focused and doesn't devolve into a generic debate forum. Additionally, while the channel has a clear reactionary point of view, the goal is rigorous and scholarly analysis, not a simple dunk session. Clever, insightful, and even ruthless criticism is encouraged; low-effort, purely ideological insults are not. The best "own" is a well-reasoned deconstruction of the author's own words.

Keep things civil and articulate:
All comments of sharp, critical tone should be directed at the text under review and, perhaps occasionally, at the author. They should not be directed at fellow discussion participants. Disagreements in analysis are welcome and expected, but they must remain civil and focused on the ideas, never on personal attacks. Furthermore, you are expected to attempt to be articulate and display a reasonable, adult vocabulary; either put effort into your posts or hold back on commenting.

The purpose of the chat:
Finally, the chat group exists merely so that these comments sections can exist. Consequently, any post made in the "Poor Reading Discussion" chat that is not under one of this channel's comment threads will be deleted. Feel free to join it, however, if you'd like to be notified when someone posts a summary or comment.

Moldbug wrote, regarding a section of this text, that "[i]f the Modern Structure had a manifesto, this might be it." Adams' argument that "it is the student, the man of affairs and the scientist who to-day, in last resort, closes debate and shapes public policy" is a statement that experts had already held the real power. His proposal was simply to formalize and weaponize that influence, using the American Historical Association as the "helve to the axe." This text is, in essence, a blueprint for creating an intellectual Brahminate to act as a check on a degraded democratic process. But what was supposed to be a long-lost strategy for national restoration ended up being merely the petulant fantasy of a scholar class who failed to understand the consequences of their recommendations. A fascinating historical read, especially given hindsight.

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Gentlemen, for your consideration, I submit a prime specimen: an excerpt from Thomas Carlyle's "The Present Time." Carlyle does not merely critique the democratic fervor of his day; he excoriates it as the deluded celebration that follows a foundational collapse, comparing its celebration to a household cheering for "light and ventilation" after their front wall has fallen into the street.

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A note: this channel has grown too fast. We are at 23 subscribers, which is dangerous. As such, I have decided to start formatting the excerpts as if to be printed, using serif font, size 12, etc. You will find it very difficult to read these documents on your phone. Best either print it out, transfer it to a fairly large e-reading device, or else convert the file into a more readable one. All three of these are sufficient barriers for entry.

Feel free to comment below noting your approval of this decision.

Size 12 is too big. Save the digital trees and use size 5!

Today will be an off day. Tomorrow starts a novel, grueling period of your life. From now on, we will be taking a page from friend of the channel Robin Sharma's book and posting at 5 AM so that you may rise, print your copy, and carry and analyze it throughout the day. This will be your new habit; you will live by the 7 R's:

Rise: DROP YOUR WORTHLESS HIDE FROM THAT FILTHY BUNK AND DOUBLE-TIME IT TO THE NEAREST PRINTING SERVICE—LIBRARY, FEDEX, WALGREENS, OR WHATEVER GOTTFORSAKEN PLACE IS IN YOUR PATHETIC VICINITY, YOU SNIVELING WORM! MOVE IT!

Run off: ONCE YOU'VE STORMED THAT POSITION, DOWNLOAD AND PRINT THE DAY'S READING ON THE DOUBLE, YOU DISGRACEFUL EXCUSE FOR A RECRUIT—NO HESITATION, NO WHINING!

Read: ALL DAY LONG, ASSAULT THAT EXCERPT LIKE IT'S AN ENEMY BUNKER, SCRIBBLING DOWN EVERY LAST BIT OF INTEL IN GRUELING DETAIL—NO SLACKING, NO BREAKS!

Reread: THAT'S RIGHT, YOU PATHETIC MAGGOT—REREAD IT ALL OVER AGAIN, WITH MAXIMUM AGGRESSION AND ZERO MERCY, OR YOU WILL FACE THE FIRING SQUAD OF FAILURE!

Reflect: LOCK AND LOAD AGAINST THAT PASSAGE IN BRUTAL HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT ALL DAMN DAY, TEARING OUT EVERY SHRED OF VALUE UNTIL IT'S BLEEDING SECRETS AND BEGGING FOR SURRENDER!

Report: SOUND OFF WITH A FULL-BLOWN REPORT ON WHAT YOU RIPPED FROM THAT TEXT, DELIVERING A SUMMARY PACKED WITH DIRECT QUOTES—ANYTHING LESS IS INSUBORDINATION!

Represent: MARCH WITH UNYIELDING UNBREAKABLE VIRTUE IN EVERY THEATER OF OPERATIONS, INSIDE THE WIRE OR OUT IN THE OPEN—ANY SLIP-UP, ANY SIGN OF WEAKNESS, AND I'LL PERSONALLY BOOT YOU OUT OF THE RANKS FOREVER, YOU DISHONORABLE DOG!

Herein, for your consideration, we submit an excerpt from Thomas Aquinas' De Regno. In our age of facile solutions and men of action who prefer engaging in stupidity to the excruciating torture of prolonged thought, we find rest as Aquinas addresses the gravest of political questions—how a people might deal with a tyrant—with a sobriety that is, to the modern and democratic mind, incomprehensible.

He does not offer the catharsis of righteous rebellion. Instead, he painstakingly weighs the perils of action against the grievances of the present. An assault on tyranny often begets a worse one, and this is a truism that one ought to consider whenever he thinks of rebellion.

Aquinas articulates a political calculus rooted in prudence, not passion, exemplified by a timeless anecdote of Sicilian wisdom:

Whence in Syracuse, at a time when everyone desired the death of Dionysius, a certain old woman kept constantly praying that he might be unharmed and that he might survive her. When the tyrant learned this he asked why she did it. Then she said: “When I was a girl we had a harsh tyrant and I wished for his death; when he was killed, there succeeded him one who was a little harsher. I was very eager to see the end of his dominion also, and we began to have a third ruler still more harsh—that was you. So if you should be taken away, a worse would succeed in your place.”

Presented is one man's solution to a labyrinthine problem of the day, one that calls for your attention and analysis.

Aquinas even provides you, personally, with a sort of Prophecy...

Every half-hearted summary, every lazy analysis, every pathetic excuse for an argument you post, every day you fail to provide your thoughts in response to the daily excerpt is another vote for A MORE GRIEVOUS SLAVERY. YOU THINK MR. POOR IS A TYRANT NOW? YOU THINK THE RULES ARE TOO STRICT AND THE READINGS TOO DIFFICULT?

PRODUCE ONE MORE LAZY DAY'S SLOTHFUL RESULTS AND YOU WILL PRAY FOR THE MILD TYRANNY YOU ENJOY TODAY. Your failure is a SIN, and for the sins of the people, a tyrant is made to reign. Your intellectual cowardice, your laziness will bring down a harsher rule upon your own heads.

GET TO WORK, MAGGOTS.

MOVE IT. NOW.

GET READING!

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Before the Church learned to beg for a seat at the table of “Science,” there were men who sought to overturn the table itself. We present a dispatch from that forgotten war: an excerpt from Robert Lewis Dabney's 1871 sermon, “A Caution Against Anti-Christian Science.”

Dabney wastes no time on conciliation. He views the ascendant physical sciences of his era as a corrupting “philosophy,” a fashionable poison being hawked by popular lecturers and magazines. He argues that this new thinking poses a direct and immediate threat not just to abstract theology, but to the moral fabric of the family and the salvation of the next generation.

For Dabney, the stakes are the souls of the young, who are being equipped with just enough fashionable skepticism to despise their heritage. He laments how this new science is being used

...so that college lads can cultivate, under their father's own roof, by this aid, a nascent contempt for their fathers' Bibles, along with their sprouting mustaches; and misses can be taught to pass judgment at once on the blunders of Moses and the triumphs of Parisian millinery.

... NOW LISTEN UP, YOU PATHETIC WORMS!

I WANT ANALYSIS SO SHARP IT DRAWS BLOOD. THE FIRST MAGGOT TO POST A WEAK, COWARDLY SUMMARY IS GOING TO WISH HE'D NEVER LEARNED TO READ. THE FIRST DEGENERATE TO PUT THE TEXT DOWN, TO GIVE UP, TO NOT EVEN POST A SUMMARY WON'T BE ABLE TO READ TOMORROW!

NOW SOUND OFF! MOVE!

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Gentlemen,

Power is not merely winning a conflict. It is the ability to erase the arguments of the vanquished, to make the logic of your defeated enemy seem not just wrong, but insane. Today, we examine a piece of that erased logic. We look at the side that lost. We examine what seems insane: a call for the total destruction of English Dissent.

For your consideration, I submit Daniel Defoe's "The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters." This text is a rare, unfiltered demand for the complete removal of a faction that was, at the time, a troublesome minority. That minority won. Their descendants now rule the Western world. This pamphlet is a voice from the losing side, a warning that was ignored, issued by a man who saw the existential threat they posed to his nation:

'Tis Cruelty to kill a Snake or a Toad in cold Blood, but the Poyson of their Nature makes it a Charity to our Neighbours, to destroy those Creatures...not for the Evil they have done, but the Evil they may do.

...If you will leave your Posterity free from Faction and Rebellion, this is the time. This is the time to pull up this heretical Weed of Sedition, that has so long disturb'd the Peace of our Church, and poisoned the good Corn.

If one severe Law were made, and punctually executed, that who ever was found at a Conventicle, shou'd be Banished the Nation, and the Preacher be Hang'd, we shou'd soon see an end of the Tale.

The narrator of this text makes a simple, brutal case: the Dissenters, with their corrosive, factional spirit, are a mortal threat to the nation. He argues that failing to remove them—to “pull up this heretical Weed of Sedition”—is not mercy, but a cruel betrayal of future generations.

NOW GET TO WORK, MAGGOT!

DOWNLOAD THAT FILE!

READ! DO IT NOW, YOU WORM!

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Humble peasants, for your consideration, I submit a rather unusual specimen for analysis: Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism.

While one might reflexively dismiss Wilde as a mere gay little dandy with utopian delusions, certainly not worthy of our time or effort, to do so would be to miss a rare and invaluable opportunity. In this text, a progressive, in a moment of unguarded honesty, lays bare the entire project that underpins his worldview. He argues that progress is not the work of the masses, but of a specialized vanguard who must drag a pitiable, inert, and dullard populace toward progress it neither understands nor desires and often regrets after the fact.

The mask slips entirely when he discusses the abolition of slavery in America. He does not offer the typical pabulum about a noble uprising against injustice. Instead, with clinical detachment, he reveals the quiet part aloud:

Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things.

Your mission is to dissect this passage. You will not simply read it; you will put it on the rack and torture its secrets out of it as it begs you for forgiveness.

GET TO WORK.

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Immanuel Kant. A murderer at your door. He asks if his quarry is inside your home. The modern mind offers a benevolent lie. Kant rejects that offer, pointing to a sacred, unconditional, and absolute duty: you will tell the truth, regardless of the consequences.

Now follow your duty to read. No exceptions; this imperative is categorical.

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I've got an odd little reading from you today from the abyss of leftist* thought.✞

John Zerzan argues that the spiritual desolation of the modern world is not a recent ailment born of capitalism, but a foundational sickness rooted in the very genesis of civilization itself. He identifies the poison as “reification”—the process by which living, immediate experience is abstracted, symbolized, and ultimately converted into a dead thing. The analysis traces this decay back to the primordial objectifications of time, language, and ritual, presenting them not as the original acts of separation that bled the world of its meaning.

* This might be considered a rude label by some because Zerzan rejects the "leftist" label and instead classifies himself as "post-left." However, Ted Kaczynski split with him over his attraction to leftist causes, so I'll defer to his judgment on that while accepting that it's possible that, since that time, he has abandoned some of his leftist leanings.

✞ This post is brought to you by Didact, who catalyzed my recent reading of some of Zerzan's work.

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