A review of Brett Andersen's evolutionary psychology Youtube series
The crisis of meaning and the possibility of a Heraclitian process of becoming
This is a post about Brett Andersen’s evolutionary psychology Youtube series, which attempts to provide an answer to the nihilism pervading society since Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God”. Andersen possesses an impressive understanding of the science of evolutionary psychology and he attempts to derive objective meaning on that basis. His recent unfortunate personal developments are touched on in addendums at the end. I suspect this post will be a niche one, but it touches on many of the themes discussed on this Substack and is worth a write-up on that basis. The next published post will be more “mainstream”.
Introduction
Nietzsche famously wrote in The Gay Science (1882) that God is dead and that we have killed him:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
What does Nietzsche mean that we have killed God? Essentially, advancements in science and technology during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution increasingly disproved a literal interpretation of the Bible, offering an alternative hypothesis for man’s origins via Darwinian natural selection. For example, biblical cosmology believed the Heavens were fixed past the firmament and belong to the domain of God, yet it turns out they are planets and star systems subject to the same gravitational and other forces that Earth is. How does one square that knowledge with a literal interpretation of the Bible?
If the Bible isn’t literally true, then, what is true? If the Bible is only metaphorically true, which metaphorical interpretations are correct and on what basis should they be concluded? Would not the basis for such interpretive choices be open for endless debate? One can see the shakiness of faith arise…
A belief in God had sustained man for thousands of years and calmed his most basic fears of his own mortality. Every aspect of society had reinforced man’s place in the world amidst a religious construct that gave meaning to man’s suffering, and man can bear most any suffering so long as he believes there is meaning to it. The death of God equates to the death of a world with intrinsic meaning, where our actions had spiritual consequences and mattered; we became unmoored from belief as the cult of reason advanced without understanding the consequences of what we were doing. This unmooring process inevitably led to nihilism:
Nietzsche discusses Christianity, one of the major topics in his work, at length in the context of the problem of nihilism in his notebooks, in a chapter entitled "European Nihilism." Here he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God (which justifies the evil in the world) and a basis for objective knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism, against the despair of meaninglessness. However, it is exactly the element of truthfulness in Christian doctrine that is its undoing: in its drive towards truth, Christianity eventually finds itself to be a construct, which leads to its own dissolution. It is therefore that Nietzsche states that we have outgrown Christianity "not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close."As such, the self-dissolution of Christianity constitutes yet another form of nihilism. Because Christianity was an interpretation that posited itself as the interpretation, Nietzsche states that this dissolution leads beyond skepticism to a distrust of all meaning.
Nietzsche keenly felt the onrush of nihilism in the mid-to-late 1800s; so did others like Tolstoy. These trends have only spread, deepened, and metastasized since then. Anyone reading this has been born and raised in an era steeped in a ubiquitous, pervasive nihilism touching every facet of society. But for those with a sense of history it is this era that is abnormal, untethered from the underlying anchoring religious beliefs that sustained man for thousands of years. We don’t know what such normalcy feels like, to feel like we belong in an ordered universe infused with cosmic meaning.
Nietzsche believed that nihilism was a period that western man must pass through in order to hopefully emerge on the other side, after much pain and suffering, with a revaluation of its own core values. But it was by no means certain; just as possible was a descent into permanent nihilism followed by mankind’s destruction. Nietzsche went insane before he was able to construct what such a revaluation of its core values could really look like.1
The core point of this Substack (rooted in the philosophy expressed in the companion Neoliberal Feudalism Substack) is that, after the death of God and the descent into nihilism, western civilization has retained the morals and ethics of Christianity but without the underlying belief structure. Due to the egalitarian ratchet effect, combined with this underlying nihilism and will to nothingness2, western civilization is rapidly sliding into a suicidal abyss. This makes for a very destabilizing situation. There needs to be a change; is it time to emerge from the nihilistic phase that Nietzsche predicted? If so, what should such revalued or transvalued values look like?
I have previously argued that what is needed is a partial transvaluation of values so that the warrior Roman values and the transvalued priestly Christian values would result in a balance. Whether that would come from a new religion as Spandrell argues for, or a reinvigoration of Christianity perhaps via Orthodoxy as Roosh wants, or a
Christian ghost dance as also calls for, or something else, remains up in the air. Others have tried solving this riddle as well, such as Curtis Yarvin with his vision of a techno-corporatist-dictatorship, but I think it’s a mess, divorced from reality.3 My lack of a specific positive forward vision is a weakness to my argument, because it’s far more persuasive to offer someone both a carrot and a stick (i.e. promotion of new vision simultaneously with the criticism of the old) than just the stick. But I didn’t really have a fully formed, fleshed out vision of what such a partial transvaluation of values would look like, other than it must involve a movement away from pure materialism back toward an element of idealism; it’s a process of education and learning, and the research involved in the posts for Substack, as well as feedback from readers, helps further my own process and understanding as well.Andersen’s Substack
An off-hand comment a couple of months ago by Substack user
on ’s Substack led me first to the Substack of, and then the Youtube channel of , a PhD candidate in evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico, which then led to a deep-dive of his work and listening to his 22+ hour Youtube series. This speaks to the quality of his ideas generally, especially because I prefer to intake information via writing and not via audio or visual sources, but I oddly preferred his Youtube videos to his written work. Synthesizing his series into its core arguments and the various takeaways that resonated with me, as well as offering some points of constructive criticism, has been fun and challenging to write.
Andersen wrestles with the same issues I highlight, i.e. the attempt to derive objective meaning in an era of ubiquitous nihilism.4 But Andersen approaches the problems from an evolutionary psychology perspective and not an autistic A-to-Z, step-by-step rendering of the gradual introduction of a globohomo worldwide slave control grid and why the world has allowed this system to be put into place as I have done. His approach addresses the problem from a very different angle, but an important one that is helpful to flesh out a fuller perspective and argument.5
Andersen starts his series by discussing his personal background. He suffered a series of psychotic breaks earlier in his life, resulting in part from drug use, which had destroyed his life in multiple ways. He eventually had epiphanies while reading Jordan Peterson’s book “Maps of Meaning” (or listening to his lecture series) at 24 years old which led to his recovery, having a profound impact which set him on a journey of self-discovery.6 He has been singularly obsessed with trying to understand the meaning of life for the past seven years since then. From the moment he wakes up to when he goes to bed, he says, this is basically all he thinks about.
This dovetails nicely with my explanation of how cognitive dissonance arises among individuals in society:
These routes to generalized dissent [examples including problems with dating, problems with health/nutrition, and problems with political understandings] involve an individual experiencing cognitive dissonance in their lives resulting in a prolonged period of emotional or psychological pain, followed by the desire to find an explanation to alleviate their pain, which mainstream society cannot provide given their narrative falsehoods are the primary cause of it. The lower status an individual is in the eyes of society, the more likely that person is likely to experience such psychological pain leading to cognitive dissonance. Currently white males, the most disfavored group in the United States, have much higher levels of disillusionment toward the establishment than women and minorities, because the latter are much greater beneficiaries of the system.
While Andersen would like to become an academic after finishing his PhD and would make an excellent one, he has been precluded from doing so because of the extreme anti-white wokeness pervading academia, which he has been very justifiably frustrated by and which he says he will not pay lip-service to. I suspect he will become a psychiatrist or psychologist instead, perhaps working with psilocybin therapies where legal or via clinical trials (MDMA therapy would also be worth exploring), but that is just a guess.
Andersen’s perspective
Andersen’s arguments delve into the changing environmental and cultural selection pressures that have shaped religion, morality, culture and evolutionary psychology throughout human history. His Youtube series discusses this history, offering a wide range of scientific studies and theories in support of his points which will be touched on briefly here. Other than Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson as primary influences, Andersen quotes extensively from John Vervaeke’s work.
According to Andersen, religion originally arose among hunter gatherers as a form of ancestor worship. Gods were a part of everyday life and they were just like humans, only more powerful, with their own personalities and whims. These religions were shamanistic in character in that they involved intense ceremonies led by charismatic, right-brain-dominant7, chaotic practitioners who attempted to unite small groups of people in focused, high-energy, altered consciousness rites.
Hunter gatherer mythological origin narratives involved stories where everything has meaning, which served as an inspiration for action for how people should act in their own lives. Humans were generally well integrated between their thoughts and their instincts because they had naturally selected for this nomadic lifestyle for millions of years. Tribal morality had evolved to be black-and-white, in-group vs. out-group, as a way for hunter gatherer societies to unite against their enemies, and anyone who went against the group’s morality would be cast out, which was akin to death. Counter-intuitively, according to research we feel our moral beliefs and then rationalize them, even though we all falsely believe that we arrive at our morality based on logic and reasoning.
Culture evolved as a cultural ratchet effect where humans copied each other’s behaviors, but then evolved those behaviors during times of crisis to adapt to changing environments. Tensions arose from society’s demands to conform to the group (the herd instinct) against an occasional individual’s belief in the necessity of change, which inevitably resulted in society seeing that individual as “crazy” and evoking significant pushback and hostility if or until the change was ultimately accepted. Dreams served as a way for individuals to avoid over-fitting their limited models of the world for current circumstances, giving them a creative way to see problems in a new, flexible, fluid light.
During the Axial Age between the 8th and 3rd century BC, humans transitioned from hunter gatherer societies to agrarian societies brought on by the neolithic agricultural revolution. New selection pressures resulted in a movement away from these shamanistic, high-intensity religious ceremonies and polytheistic Gods and toward left-brain, low-intensity, formalized religions based on written texts and featuring distant, inaccessible God(s). Andersen gives Jews in Israel followed by Christianity as examples. These pressures occurred because shamanistic religions were not scalable in the way that written doctrinal religions were, and doctrinal priests were focused on uniting their people to strengthen themselves against their neighbors and enemies. While shamanistic practices were decentralized and based on a leader’s charisma, priests who could read and write their religious doctrines formed hierarchical organizations that functioned like guilds. As such, wherever doctrinal religions arose their priests brutally crushed their shamanic competition, much as guilds always attempt to crush their independent competition.
Humans had great difficulty adapting to an agricultural lifestyle, where their long-honed instincts as hunter gatherers clashed with the reality of living in closer quarters in urban environments and with a much more sedentary lifestyle, and this caused a lot of problems. Doctrinal religions tried to address these conflicts with commandments by God on how one should act, although this didn’t fully solve the issue; the underlying tension with humanity’s out-of-kilter instincts regarding sex, food, war, and other basic drives remained, and remains to this day.
As part of this transition to urban environments, the meaning of God(s) evolved. God changed from serving as a forum for action based on mythological ancestor worship to a Plato-inspired material/spiritual dualism, where the material world was severed from the spiritual world. The material world served as a place of imperfect objects, merely shadows of the world of forms, and the spiritual world was the “real” world which was perfect and static.
What Nietzsche defined as the ascetic ideal came to dominate. This ideal involved values that advocated withdrawing, abstaining, or rejecting bodily, emotional, and material aspects of everyday life. In other words, they were a “will to nothingness.” Nietzsche saw the Christian motto of “poverty, chastity, humility” as an ascetic ideal because it suggests that people need to abstain from material wealth, sensual urges, and emotional or egotistical feelings. Nietzsche also thinks that many nonreligious people practice the ascetic ideal such as Schopenhauer, who he came to see as decadent.
Contrast the ascetic ideal with that of Heraclitus, who was Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher. Heraclitus believed that everything was change, nothing was static, and that the only thing that could be taken as static was the nature of change itself. He expressed this in sayings like panta rhei ("Everything flows") and "No man ever steps in the same river twice." Nietzsche, per Twilight of the Idols, "Reason in Philosophy”, §2: “But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that Being [as opposed to Becoming] is an empty fiction.” And in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, “Heraclitus”, p.62-63: “Well, this is the intuitive perception of Heraclitus; there is no thing of which we may say, “it is.” He rejects Being. He knows only Becoming, the flowing. He considers belief in something persistent as error and foolishness. To this he adds this thought: that which becomes is one thing in eternal transformation, and the law of this eternal transformation, the Logos in all things, is precisely this One, fire. Thus, the one overall Becoming is itself law; that it becomes and how it becomes is its work.”
If life is indeed change, and it is only the nature of change itself that is static, then the process of change, of syncretization and of growth and unity should be embraced instead of resisted. Andersen believes that the existing concepts of God cannot be resurrected by existing dualist, doctrinal religions, which have bled their meaning over the centuries in an environment that no longer favors that particular mode of thinking. Instead, there is an opportunity for the return of right-brain, shamanistic chaos energies and thinking styles which have been on the losing side for millennia. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power provides such potential basis for objective meaning which can bridge the gap between our reason and our instinct, based on a scientific understanding of human nature without reliance on two-worlds mythology.
Under this conception, will to power does not mean “will to dominate” or Schopenhauer’s “will to life”. Rather, Nietzsche’s notes indicate it is a broader term reflecting a sort of meta-drive of all of our various instinctual drives (for sex, eating, health, safety, control), the manifestation of which arises out of the position one finds oneself in society:
The will to power appears:
a. among the oppressed, among slaves of all kinds, as will to “freedom”: merely getting free seems to be the goal…
b. among a stronger kind of man, getting ready for power, as will to overpower; if it is at first unsuccessful, then it limits itself to the will to “justice,” i.e., to the same measure of rights as the ruling type possesses;
c. among the strongest, richest, most independent, most courageous, as “love of mankind,” of “the people”, of the gospel of truth, God; as sympathy, “self-sacrifice,” etc…as instinctive self-involvement with a great quantum of power to which one is able to give direction: the hero, the prophet, the Caesar, the savior , the shepherd…”
Andersen believes that the will to power manifests psychologically as relevance realization, which is the process by which we process extreme amounts of data inputs to determine what we believe to be relevant to achieve our will to power, and therefore what we focus on instead of discard, and/or self-actualization. It is a metaphysical thesis which posits a universal process of complexification.
Under this approach, the process of complexification is defined as something increasing its differentiation into constituent parts while simultaneously increasing its integration as a whole. Complexification occurs where there are competing drives or interactions, which leads to a breaking of frame called self-organized criticality, followed by a descent into chaos, leading eventually to, if the entity doesn’t collapse or die, a higher baseline level of complexity:
For example, Andersen had a normal-ish upbringing, then he descended into chaos caused by his psychotic breaks, then he was able to work his way out of them to achieve a more complex and thereby more powerful understanding of himself and the world.
Andersen sees this process mirrored throughout nature (where both the world and the universe is constantly complexifying), throughout mythology as discussed in Maps of Meaning, and even in the rise of consciousness itself.8 He believes that life being rooted in the will to power solves the meaning crisis, because by understanding and acting in accordance with nature we can bridge the gap between our instincts and our thoughts and become self-actualizing. We can integrate the opinions of all those around us to help us become more complex individuals, we can integrate master and slave morality and our own competing drives to try to become the Overman, and we can help the world complexify in this non-zero sum process as well.
Under this perspective it is not a static end result that can be reached using a “good vs. bad” or “good vs. evil” moral judgments, or the will to nothingness hoping for a better world after death, but rather an understanding and embracing of the process of complexification itself that is the end goal; an acceptance of Heraclitus’s perspective of the only static thing is the nature of change itself. His is not a moral judgment per se but an objective argument for optimality - “This is the process that you participate in and the perspective you should have if you want to be psychologically healthy.” As Andersen argues:
We must come to view morality not as a static set of principles, facts, or objective truths, but rather as an ongoing process. The particular moral values adhered to by a group of people are highly dependent on the history and context of that people. Moral values evolve. This process is akin to the cultural ratcheting process that Michael Tomasello described in his (1999) book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Tomasello argued that cultural evolution requires both the conservative impulse to imitate and the progressive impulse to tinker. As I suggested in my Intimations essay, this cultural ratcheting process is only one example of a process of complexification that plays out at all levels of analysis (see also Azarian, 2022; Wolf et al., 2018). It is our participation in this process, rather than any of its particular outcomes, that ought to be understood as sacred and objectively valuable….
Morality as process means that there are no timeless rules or principles that constitute “moral facts”. Morality evolves and must continue to evolve. This isn’t to say that every change in morality is good (the conservative impulse is just as important as the progressive impulse), but it is to say that the norms governing human behavior must continually overcome themselves as the problems facing humanity and civilization change.
Andersen isn’t arguing that all values are subjective, because a replacement for nihilism must have a basis in objectivity. But he is arguing that the process of change, descent, and rising into a more complex entity (if the entity survives the descent) is the universal, objective process that ties everything and everyone in life together, and therefore what is “good” (not from a moral perspective) is what optimizes that process and what is “bad” is what downgrades the optimization of that process.
Analysis of his argument (pros and cons)
Andersen’s ability to absorb, process, and synthesize a huge amount of information speaks to both his intelligence, drive, and how obsessed he has been with this topic for the past seven years. His Youtube series has been an impressive attempt to synthesize the latest scientific research and theories along with philosophy and history, and it has impacted my views on a variety of topics, the extent of which will be felt and absorbed over time. I can only assume he wrote the series as a way of helping others on their own complexification journeys, as well as his own.
I would call his approach one of philosophical naturalism, which is similar to and overlaps Nietzsche’s almost pantheistic process philosophy:
To believe [as pantheism does] that everything is perfect, divine, eternal, also forces one to believe in eternal recurrence. Question: now that we have made ethics impossible, is such a pantheistic affirmation of all things also made impossible? No: in principle only an ethical god is overthrown. Is there any sense in imagining a god beyond good and evil? Would a pantheism of this kind be possible? Can we remove the idea of purpose from the process, and yet still affirm the process? That would be the case, if something were achieved within that process and at every moment of it - and always the same …
Every basic trait underlying each and every event, expressing itself in every event - if it were experienced by an individual as his own basic trait - would force that person triumphally to endorse every instant of everyday existence.
With that said, the positives of Andersen’s approach appear to me to be as follows. An adaption of his perspective would lead to
living life much more in the moment, to appreciate life for what it is, and not just wait for justice or a better life after we die;
a Buddhist or Stoic-like appreciation for pain and suffering through valuing and respecting the complexificaton fall-and-rise process itself, in the hope that it would lead to greater complexification and more power once one arises out of it;
a greater willingness to consider other sides and perspectives in the hopes of absorbing them to become a more complex and powerful person;
a greater intention of pursuing non-zero sum games to try to make the world a better place for all; and
an appreciation of the will to power underlying all things that removes a dualist perspective and ties humanity back firmly into our role within the world and not separate and apart of it.9 This in turn gives us a greater appreciation for the inter-connectedness of all things and elevates the importance of sustainability of nature, animals, and universal brotherhood.
These are all admirable traits that focus on what we can do as individuals that provide a clear route toward offering a solution toward the meaning crisis/nihilism that our society is in. It is indeed a viable and very different worldview than the nihilist perspective we are all deeply immersed in, whether we are religious or secular.
There are a couple of significant criticisms of this approach, though:
The material world seems fundamentally imbued with metaphysical evil, in the sense that every living creature can only survive by consuming other living things. Even plants have a will to power and seek to grow and expand and have defense mechanisms against predation. Andersen tries to hand-wave this away by arguing that our cognition is too limited to make moral judgments about reality, that we can either accept it as it is or not, therefore Shopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism is wrong because it presumes to know more about the universe than our limited cognition allows, but I find that to be a weak argument. We can assign moral judgment on things while at the same time recognize our limitations as finite beings and that we can be wrong, so long as we retain the willingness to grow beyond our limited judgments when confronted with evidence to the contrary;
As a corollary to #1, Andersen argues that the increasing scope of non-zero sum games provides us an opportunity to work together in this process of complexification for the benefit of all, but a naturalist or pantheist perspective in relation to the Darwinian struggle for survival just as likely leads to increased conflict as increased cooperation, because there is no reason to accept losing other than fear of punishment from the winning side.10 In other words, a dualist perspective may provide incentives for losers to accept their current arrangements in the hope of justice in the afterlife; such a slave morality may increase societal stability;
The dualist perspective offers hope of justice and fulfillment in the afterlife. Philosophical naturalism or pantheism is good so long as your complexification process is working, but plenty of times the complexification process fails or you suffer life circumstances that seem too terrible to bear. If your mind or body give out, or you are thrown in prison for life, or cherished family members die, or you suffer any of innumerable tragedies, philosophical naturalism or pantheism offers no solace or hope from this - in other words, slave morality is an objectively more functional belief system if one finds oneself in a position of permanent weakness, which could happen to anyone. It’s a cold, cruel world and universe out there, subject to blind laws and an underlying current of unifying will to power; it offers no solace to those trampled under its feet. Keep in mind that Nietzsche went insane after seeing the suffering of a horse and spent his last decade of life bedridden, whether from his beliefs or otherwise. And another proponent of pantheism, Baruch Spinoza, inhaled microscopic particles of glass through his mouth and died young and in agony. What use were his beliefs to him then? Andersen self-describes as a complete agnostic, believing that all behavior and motivations have origins that can be described from an evolutionary psychology perspective, and that he has absolutely zero knowledge or intuition about a next world and that he is fully comfortable in this perspective — I would say this makes him unusual, and that such a perspective will not be so easy to convince others of. But pantheism or philosophical naturalism only works with an assumption that material reality is metaphysically neutral; if material reality is infused with metaphysical evil (point 1), though, then the tension between base reality and this perspective will inevitably result in mental or physical breakdown.
Andersen has a view of the history of humanity, the planet and the universe as ever-increasing complexity that isn’t really proven. He mentions at one point that increasing complexification happens until there is a descent or collapse of the entity, but if his argument rests on increasing complexification as an objectively good thing in an of itself, he should explore the process of collapse better — why it happens and what the implications of collapse are to his theory, and why he thinks the overall trend is toward this progressive complexity even in light of local or regional collapses. Why does he assume that universal complexity will expand forever? With respect to humanity, there may be a total collapse due to nuclear weapons use or consuming the world’s natural resources or for other reasons, and Andersen responds by saying well we then need to take care of each other in a non-zero sum competition, but what solace does that give us if collapse happens anyway?
The world is subject to ever-increasing levels of centralization and control, and for individuals, declining freedom of movement, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression, which I would like to see emphasized in his argument. One can look at history and politics to get a better sense of this, which I try to provide in my Neoliberal Feudalism Substack, but this centralization process is forever ongoing based on the frenetic chase for increasing levels of technological innovation. Central bank digital currencies are just the latest, but very major, step for ever-increasing centralization/control worldwide which will be used to micro-manage individual behavior on a scale never seen before in human history; Russia is the first to roll it out and formally legalize it. If ever increasing levels of centralization and control occurs in the complexification process he references, does that necessarily mean it will increase human happiness or fulfillment? If not, why should we embrace it?
Tied to point 5, Andersen’s approach is very individualist focused, but if one believes that the egalitarian ratchet effect rooted in Pauline Christianity is destroying western civilization, it is questionable whether his non-dualist approach has the motivational “juice” behind it to incentivize group action to stop this destruction. The prior attempt to transvalue egalitarian values was a failed German race-based attempt at a full transvaluation back into full warrior values, promising Germans unlimitedly high status if they won; on what basis would his approach incentivize group action, if at all? [To be clear, my approach is seeking a partial transvaluation of values so that warrior and priestly energies are in balance, not to seek a return to full warrior values]. Other than the German example, though, power politics seems to revolve around doubling down on the ressentiment of egalitarianism as a weapon for a new elite to take power. Is Andersen’s objective merely to give people a scientific basis for individual stoicism against life’s troubles, or is there room in this perspective for group action and if so, under what basis? Because as much as Andersen bitterly complains in his own life about the extreme levels of anti-white wokeness in the university system, it is hard to imagine this specific phenomenon if the United States was 90% instead of 60% white like it was merely a generation or two ago. Andersen would love to expand non-zero sum games to cover all of humanity so we can all work together to address humanity’s problems, but waving away the intense drive for tribal based identity is not so easily accomplished — and it may not be possible to accomplish at all.
This is a minor comment, but Andersen focuses a lot on right-brain chaos shamanic impulses, which he sees as associated with schizotypy personalities, versus left-brain order doctrinal impulses, which he sees as associated with autism-spectrum personalities. However, from personal experience I wonder to what extent people with lopsided energies one way or the other consciously or unconsciously understand the lopsidedness of their energies and seek out ways to balance them out. An autistic personality may find itself attracted to shamanic rites as a compensatory measure. Or Andersen, who self-identifies as a chaotic shamanistic type, has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy synthesizing his beliefs into an autistic, organized, systematized argument. In a political context there is a lot of overlap in the ideas and impulses of the far-left and the far-right, to the extent that Francis Parker Yockey thought that a far-left/far-right alliance was necessary to oppose globohomo. I think it would be helpful for Andersen to address compensatory measures for those with lopsided energies, one way or the other.
Conclusions
Andersen offers a thought provoking theory into what a transvaluation of values in an age of nihilism could look like. I think his argument should incorporate and try to respond to the criticisms listed above (which are meant as constructive criticism to help steel man his arguments), to the extent I am not misunderstanding or misrepresenting his arguments (which is possible). But he does an admirable job of synthesizing a great deal of information, gleaned through painstaking effort over many years, in a way aimed at trying to offer a specific path forward for humanity. What a revaluation of values should look like, overturning the nihilism brought about by 2,000 years of priestly egalitarianism, is an enormous, complicated, extremely difficult question, one that potentially drove Nietzsche to insanity before he could synthesize an answer, but it is the most important question one can ask if western civilization is to have any hope of a successful future at all, which looks increasingly unlikely. Hopefully we can all work toward trying to find a solution out of this mess together.11
Addendum: Andersen released four posts at once on August 24 after a long publishing pause, three of which seem significantly off-tone from the rest of his sober, reasoned, scientifically minded content over the past months and years - those three posts are here, here and here, followed by 5-10 posts a day (!) in the days since. It seems like he suddenly adopted and is trying to mimic the strident, hyperbolic tone of Nietzsche, posting a bunch of Youtube links to various songs to get the reader into his frame of mind. In a footnote to one of the posts he admitted to recently starting smoking marijuana heavily after being cold-turkey for years; given his three prior mental breakdowns, this seems quite ill-advised. Marijuana induced psychosis is a very real thing, and I know otherwise high functioning, successful men who have experienced it. Brett, if you are reading this I highly recommend you cut out all marijuana use immediately. There has been a major change in tone, style, and content in these latest posts, and not to your benefit. I understand you currently think you are a misunderstood genius straddling the line between chaos and order, meant to be fought and rejected until your genius is accepted by the masses, and that you don’t care if others are concerned for you, but I hope you give these words serious consideration.
Addendum #2: And now Andersen is out with a wildly vituperative anti-Trump rant. Poor guy, he bitterly complains about not being able to find a job in academia because he's a straight, white, non-woke male, but he can't do a simple A + B = C in that Blormf was elected as a protest vote against this white erasure process, in spite of his personal failings and not because of them. The middle-America masses chose him because he was seen as the only option that hadn’t been co-opted by a system that hated them, not because he fooled them as a paragon of virtue (generally speaking; there is a contingent of braindead Trump worshippers who worship him as a cult of personality, and they deserve scorn like blind followers of any cult of personality. But these are a fairly small minority in my opinion). Andersen focuses his complaints on Blormf being a “cad” and not a “dad” in terms of his three wives and endless cheating, arguing he himself is so ethical and would never behave in such a deplorable way, bringing to mind Elliot Rogers (who Andersen discusses elsewhere) and how he was a “supreme gentleman”. I get a strong feeling that Andersen is currently experiencing difficulties with women.
It’s also ironic that Andersen stresses the blending of different ideas in order to achieve a higher-plane synthesis, yet rejects out of hand the feelings of half of the American population, and seems to fetishicize what he considers to be his greatly superior IQ. This is a major blind spot of his. It also brings to mind the Maurice Samuel quote about the nature of experts in his book “You Gentiles”, where he states:
There is no test or guarantee of a man's wisdom or his reliability beyond what he says about life itself. Life is the touchstone: books must be read and understood in order that we may compare our experience in life with the sincere report of the experience of others. But such a one, who has read all the books extant on history and art, is of no consequence unless they are an indirect commentary on what he feels around him.
Hence, if I have drawn chiefly on experience and contemplation and little on books - which others will discover without my admission - this does not affect my competency, which must be judged by standards infinitely more difficult of application. Life is not so simple that you can test a man's nearness to truth by giving him a college examination. Such examinations are mere games - they have no relation to reality. You may desire some such easy standard by which you can judge whether or not a man is reliable: Does he know much history? Much biology? Much psychology? If not, he is not worth listening to. But it is part of the frivolity of our outlook to reduce life to a set of rules, and thus save ourselves the agony of constant references to first principles. No: standardized knowledge is no guarantee of truth. Put down a simple question - a living question, like this: "Should A. have killed B.?" Ask it of ten fools: five will say "Yes", five will say "No." Ask it of ten intelligent men: five will say "Yes," five will say "No." Ask it of ten scholars: five will say "Yes," five will say "No." The fools will have no reasons for their decisions: the intelligent men will have a few reasons for and as many against; the scholars will have more reasons for and against. But where does the truth lie?
What, then, should be the criterion of a man's reliability?
There is none. You cannot evade your responsibility thus by entrusting your salvation into the hands of a priest-specialist. A simpleton may bring you salvation and a great philosopher may confound you.
And so to life, as I have seen it working in others and felt it within myself, I refer the truth of what I say. And to books I refer only in so far as they are manifestations of life.”
Per Wiki, Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals) a new work with the title, The Will to Power: An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, the project under this title was set aside and some of its draft materials used to compose The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888); the latter was for a time represented as the first part of a new four-part magnum opus, which inherited the subtitle Revaluation of All Values from the earlier project as its new title.
On the The Genealogy of Morals III. 28: “Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far – and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all … man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was no longer like a leaf in the wind…he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself – all this means – let us dare to grasp it – a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.”
Curtis, if you ever read this, simplify your argument and make it clearer for non-tech nerds, but even then, color me extremely skeptical of a dictatorship with biometric-access guns that the dictator turns on and off with the push of a button answering to a governmental corporate board of directors and pursuing NOI at all costs somehow resulting in utopia.
Andersen quotes Tsarina Doyle’s work “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of the Will to Power” at around 42 minutes: “…If we are to be motivated to act according to values […] then they must be deemed to be objective in some other way that connects and subjects them to constraint by the empirical world. This alternative account of the objectivity of our values must, therefore, be a metaphysically laden one and must reflect the fundamental relationship between mind and the empirical world….Nietzsche allows for the objectivity of value by holding that values are metaphysically continuous with the dispositional fabric of reality….without this metaphysical claim, ‘Nietzsche is guilty of perpetuating the will to nothingness that informs nihilism rather than adequately responding to it.’”
I had recently started exploring the angle of Darwinism in a post on rapid natural selection pressures brought upon by the neolithic agricultural revolution.
Andersen comments at one point early in the series on Peterson’s descent into political obsession, his seeking of the media spotlight and other embarrassing decisions, which he has been very disappointed by. I have also been extremely turned off by Peterson, especially that he got the COVID vaccine which he stated was solely due to societal pressure (!), his regular public crying breakdowns, and his other moral failures. I have not read Maps of Meaning and it’s entirely possible that Peterson’s early work was much stronger than his current public persona, but I neither have much interest in mythology nor do I like Peterson’s excessively flowery writing style, so I do not plan to read his work.
Andersen posits that highly right-brain dominance is associated with schizophrenia, chaos, and shaman/prophet types, while highly left-brain dominance is associated with autism, order, and priest types.
According to Andersen consciousness arises from the complexification process and is defined as the difference in power between the output of the brain as a whole (where all the constituent parts work together as part of a non-zero sum game) versus the output of the brain broken down into its constituent parts.
The Will to Power, Book IV, §1067:
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself […] This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!
On that note, check out
’s weekly compendium of Substack posts across the spectrum of the dissident right, which offers a lot of thought provoking content and provides a point of unity across a fractured space.
I really appreciate this summary/introduction to Brett Andersen's thinking, and the insights into Nietzsche's thinking as well.
I, too, wondered what was going on with Brett in his recent anti-Trump tantrum and seemingly endless citation of pop music. Nice to learn he's allowed himself to come under the influence of plant toxins.
This is admittedly due to ignorance on my part, but I’ve never quite understood the meaning of warrior value and their importance.
With Rome I can understand how such militant values came about due to Rome spending its youth constantly pushing its borders. Useful in that context, and others, like in a fragmented feudal world where warlords maintained order.
But I don’t really see it happening in the kind of civilization we have today given the nature of our economy and technology.
I don’t 100% agree with Yarvin’s ideas, but his ideas have an appeal to me in the sense that his idea of monarchy does bear resonance with stable models of rule outside the West in other contexts, such as the Confucian ideal of a good Emperor and Egyptian Pharaohs.
Some were warriors, but their respective cultures put more of an emphasis on them wise philosopher kings and enlightened administrators. Mainly on the account they had to manage extensive networks of complicated infrastructure and projects.
Not to say that they didn’t also rely on military might or had their own issues.