The Truth is Priceless. For Everything Else There's Blustercard

Yesterday at Instapundit I was uncharacteristically drawn into a moronic debate, this one about music. I almost never get into online arguments, because they are utterly pointless.  At least a decade ago I realized I had never once lost such an argument; but that never once had my opponent realized he had been vanquished. So why waste one's time and energy?   

Instead, I try to hone my neurons and keep the synapses in shape by coming up with a pointed gag or zinger or quasi-infallible aphorism a la Dávila.  These are not for the edification of their recipient. Rather, just a regimen to keep my mind, you know, uh, limber.  

This mirrors a much larger cultural phenomenon having to do with... with everything, right?  I don't want to take this post in that direction.  Too big a subject.  Suffice it to say that

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time (Dávila).

This being the case, the only truly fruitful argument would be one regarding first principles.  I literally cannot conceive of any argument that could alter mine. I'll still hear them out, of course, but these are nearly always just ancient sophistries dressed in modern garb.  I suppose I'm pleased that there are conservatives who enjoy doing intellectual combat with our modern and postmodern sophists. I'm just not one of them. For  

Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men because intelligence is a conviction they share.

BUT

Intelligence is a train from which few do not deboard, one after the other, in successive stations.

That is such an important wisecrack.  Take two people, each with an IQ of 145 or so, which is to say, three standard deviations above the mean.  Math is hard, but if I remember correctly, only around one in a thousand people fall into this range.  But ask these two about the nature of reality, and you are liable to be given answers that utterly contradict one another.

Conclusion: no amount of intelligence discloses the nature of reality.  But because I know this and they don't, I'm smarter than people who are smarter than I am!  Woo hoo!

What's really going on here?  What is really going on is that intelligence isn't just anything, at least in my cosmos.  Here we believe that intelligence is not intelligent unless it is an adequation.    If it is not an adequation, then it really is just about power, or status, or chicks.  Getting them, that is.  The rest is just for show -- to deceive the public and to fool each other.  

By the way, one reason President Trump drives journalists crazy is that he is a bull in their china shop of unearned status.  He is revealing these mediocrities to be what they are merely by his existence:  mediacretins.

Here is our first principle, more or less: that the object of intelligence is being; and that the subject of being is intelligence.  Conformity of the two is what we call "truth." And truth is certain, or it is not worthy of the name.  (Of course, there are relative truths, but they are nonetheless true because they are relative to Truth as such.)

Now, in the words of the Aphorist, 

Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment.

What does he mean by this?  Let's say I'm a naive metaphysical Darwinian.  I have written a check to the First Bank of Natural Selection that claims "humanness" is entirely reducible to selfish genes.   The check bounces.  It comes back to me with a note, "insufficient funds."

What happened?  I'm sure I had sufficient funds to cover the check: my portfolio is quite diversified and includes status, tenure, conventional wisdom, conformity to my peers, the climate of opinion, even some junk metaphysics in a hedge fund.

You forgot one thing: the nature of what is, and how we may know it.  How is this possible if Darwinism is true?   Not only have you been living on credit, you are actually as bankrupt as California would be if it were honest about its literally unpayable debts. 

But here is what I don't understand: this post was supposed to be about music.