hairyfigment comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: malcolmocean 01 March 2014 03:34PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (326)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 06 March 2014 05:06:09PM 23 points [-]

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous— that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Comment author: hairyfigment 07 March 2014 06:38:53PM 5 points [-]

This is better than the other Screwtape quote, but - given the example of Ayn Rand - I think Lewis still gets causality backwards where smart Marxists were concerned. I think they started by being right about God and "materialism" when most people were insistently wrong (or didn't care about object-level truth.) This gave them an inflated view of their own intelligence and the explanatory power of Marxism.