The Mandarin Effect Quotes

“Our work is rejected because we are actually interested in the truth. Not a good look! People are “ashamed and embarrassed” by our work because, like Nietzsche’s work, it’s full of “difficult” material. Nietzsche was totally ignored during his sane life. Even today, the common herd don’t have a clue who he is. Leibniz, humanity’s greatest genius, is more or less unknown. That’s the way it goes. Our work is suffering the same fate. Well, it’s no surprise. We refused to play the Mandarin game. We refused to comply with the herd. Like true philosophers, we prefer to be Sages and Gadflies. The masses killed Socrates. Everyone that refuses to share our work is passing us the hemlock. So be it! We have total contempt for people that claim to like our work, but wouldn’t be seen dead sharing it on social media. You must be able to stand with those making difficult arguments that the herd don’t like. We disagree with Nietzsche on all manner of things, but we would certainly stand shoulder to shoulder with him against the herd. It’s essential for Gadflies to exist to shake the masses out of their complacency. Yet the Gadflies are always hated and, in the end, they are always handed the hemlock. They are the true heroes of our world, the ones that never get any credit.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Social media is the supreme triumph of the commonplace, the undiluted voice of the commonplace, the perfect means of viral transmission of the commonplace. All excellence is tracked down and exterminated. The commonplace infects everything. It grows like weeds everywhere and strangles all beautiful, exceptional flowers. All tall poppies are all cut down.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Only people who have a world-historical perspective can change history. The average person has only a domestic, ahistorical perspective. Look at social media. It’s full of people without a clue what’s going on. Immense historical forces have been unleashed all around them, and all they care about is posting their brain-dead, vacuous observations and their self-pitying, whining woe-is-me statements about how shitty their lives are and how no one understands them. As well as countless memes and selfies, of course. You just have to love those lolcats on skateboards, right, hoomans? They are forever trapped in their parochial little world of trivia. Why are our books so unsuccessful? It’s because they announce, with the volume of Stentor at Troy, a world-historic agenda, but we are surrounded by pygmies who stare at us like cows in line at the abattoir.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“We see liberals on social media making serious errors in trying to get movements off the ground. They try one message, and then another, then another, and the thing becomes a bigger and bigger mess. It’s no longer clear what the message is, what the group stands for, what the point is. It’s especially disastrous if a group trying to create a niche position then gets relocated on the bandwagon of much bigger, established campaigns such as veganism, LGBTQIAX, global warming, etc. The group then no longer has its own identity but is just an adjunct of these other campaigns.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“The Jacobins were the standard bearers of the left. Liberals are not on the left. They are in the center, and often trending right with their hatred of the State and any possibility of State social engineering on the grand scale. It has been rightly observed that the hallmark of liberalism is wanting the “thing without the thing”, as Slavoj Zizek famously put it. The liberals want war without war, revolution without revolution, drugs without any of the downside of drugs, coffee without caffeine. They want a situation that inevitably leads to violence, without the violence. They immediately condemn the violence even though violence was implicit in the entire project from the get-go.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Can you imagine … it’s now up to the common herd to decide what outsiderism is, and how it should be presented. Real outsiders don’t give a fuck what a bunch of liberal cunts think. That’s exactly what radicals are opposed to. Can you imagine – the outsider without an outside … the outsider acceptable to the flock, the sheeple. Isn’t that the definition of an insider? You can’t be a Gadfly if you don’t piss anyone off.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“The acceptance of the truth now appears to be increasingly based on the acceptability of the appearance and Mandarin reputation of the person proclaiming it. We’re increasingly in the grip of the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority. When people appeal to authority, they are claiming that something must be true because it is said or believed by someone who is said to be an “authority” on the subject. Anyone with an “out there” image is deemed automatically not to be an authority because the Mandarins have brainwashed everyone to believe that authorities must look as bland as possible, just like them.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“The Sage worldview has been suppressed and repressed, creating a crisis of meaning in the world. Only Sages can resolve this crisis since they alone can think big enough to replace God. When God has been killed, it is essential to bring him back, but now in a proper, rational and logical form, one that retains the best aspects of science, but without science’s grotesque materialism and nihilism. Only Sages can raise God from his grave. Only Sages can bring back meaning, purpose and a point to existence”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Multiculturalism is like having legs that want to walk in opposite directions, or having one hand that wants to slap your face and another that wants to stroke your face, or having two warring hemispheres of the brain, with completely different aims. It cannot work. A single monoculturalism is just as disastrous. It prevents change. What is required is a diverse monoculture ... a single system that can express itself in myriad different ways. Multiculturalism means trying to sustain different, competing systems and pretending they belong to the same system and are all working for the common good. They don’t and they aren’t. This is the central lie of multiculturalism, and liberalism in general.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Why do scientists never debate philosophers? It’s because they know they would be destroyed in argument, when they have to actually clarify their ridiculous and embarrassing belief system. Mandarins, in their little priesthoods, hide behind jargon so that they know that no outsiders can laugh at their lack of clarity. They create an in-language so that only the insiders can know how absurd the belief system is, and they all have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction. That’s how the Mandarin system works. They don’t dare to be clear because then it would be clear that they are the emperor in his new clothes and know nothing at all.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“No one else can be blamed for the failure of the education system than the education system itself, and in particular the education establishment, the Mandarin Elite. These people have made education painful and monstrous, not joyous and transformative. They have killed joy. They have turned education into the most boring undertaking possible rather than the most exciting. They should be fired en masse. Not a single one of them should be left to go on poisoning minds. There should be a total clearing out of the Mandarin class, and their total replacement by people who actually care about educating the people, rather than spouting tedious nonsense”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning