Grounding the Dialectic | Transfaction Mechanics on the Hegelian Spring
Disclosing the Wizard's Circle, Grounding the Dialectic, and Protecting Yourself from Dialectical Machinations.
Transfaction is the intentional or unintentional swapping of Features for Properties, Experience for Knowledge, or Experience for Meaning. These transfactions create fallacies that are often used as dialectical leverage to move minds and change thoughts. They are like the Deathly Hallows of the Dialectic Arts.
Some of you may know Hegel’s Dialectical Spring™. It’s a model that discloses how the dialectic can be used to radically alter the intellectual landscape. This model depicts an instrumental application of the dialectic, the kind of application intersectional marxists, reactionaries, and other collectivists employ that is not quite above board and of dubious ethical standards.
Philosopher’s Stone: Knowledge refocuses and holds Attention & ushers Awareness.
Transmutation: Meaning teleports anywhere on the coils & shifts the Ground.
The Crucible: Lived Experience Compresses the Spring.
The dialectic as depicted here has the well reasoned arguments happening in the center of the spring. Normal people think we’re having an argument across this spring, after all that is the thesis and antithesis. But what normal, charitable Westerners don’t know is that the real goal of the dialectician is to get to the top of the spring.
If you apply pressure to the top of the spring during the dialectic, the coils settle down atop one another and it’s easy to jump up a level or 3. remove the pressure and we’ve got a brand New Normal.
As mentioned, across the spring is bait in an oppositional argument. The dialectic does have ethical, practical applications, but in PoMo Clown World where words are violence & power and meaning is but a social construction, the dialectic is a weapon.
How does that social construction work when it’s not imposed by the crushing weight of systemic oppression?
Seven Intersectional Strategies for Intellectual Vandalism
There are 7 moves that intersectional marxists have, and 3 of them are transfactions. We’ll be sticking to the Transfactions, but here’s their whole bag of tricks:
Marrying a Truth to a Lie
DARVO - Deny/Attack/Reverse/Victim & Offender
Motte & Bailey
Transfaction of Knowledge
Transfaction of Meaning
Redefinition of Terms
Properties: Properties are essential characteristics that are immutable and inherent of the object or idea. Properties define and constrain the object or agent.
Features: Features are inessential aspects or additions to an object that are mutable and may or may not be inherently relevant to the object or idea. Features are how properties adapt and present themselves in the environment.
This is something of a mindbender, and if you get angry hearing about it, please leave a comment. Several people I’ve shared this idea with got pretty angry about the Properties and Features bit. Kind of funny, but Features are what we use for direct perception of reality. Features are the aspects and attributes of our environment that disclose the affordances for action.
Affordance Theory - a Feature Ladened Landscape & Lifestyle
Affordance Theory, initially proposed by JJ Gibson. Similar to Gestalt Theory, but not quite, Affordance Theory has perception & action as a coupled relationship between an agent, the environment, and an object. This is Direct Perception of reality, and the perception happens precognitively.
Affordances are objects that invite us to action, and it is the Features of the object that we’re attracted to:
We’re wired for Affordances, literally. There’s a thing called the Affordance Landscape that fills our perceptual field and our brain when we get invitations to action. And these invitations are uniquely fit to the agent who perceives them. It is a fascinating and highly instrumental theory and field of research (aka: ecological psychology, ecological approach).
Nobody wants to touch the Confusion Machine, and the Reality Eraser is aptly named, as you don’t know what’s happening when you use it. That big shiny red button doesn’t need instructions.
So features are directly prehended and grasped directly from the environment as Affordances for action. They are mutable, changeable, and are nothing more than the adaptation of the essential properties of the object as it presents and is perceived in the environment. And they are in the environment, not our heads.
We recognize the Features of Affordances implicitly and intuitively, but not the Properties. They require a thoughtful perspective.
Properties - the Essentials of Knowledge
You can get by with Affordances. Pushing a button or turning a dial is nice, it’s better than dealing with the Confusion Machine, but if the button doesn’t work, what do you do?
To understand something explicitly you have to know the properties. Explicit knowledge is required for intentionality, recall, strategy and tactics, and troubleshooting.
Explicit knowledge requires thinking. It’s slower than direct perception of reality. Experienced Affordance use will, more often than not, outpace thinking. And if you’re thinking that they’re actually thinking… it’s not gonna go well for you - you’re gonna get a read and throw a punch and they’re not gonna be there. They’re not thinking, they’re reading the environment and playing by feel.
The Dialecticians Deathly Hallows
The three transfactions operate, mechanically on the spring. The Philosopher’s Stone, swapping experience for knowledge, controls Attention and ushers Awareness.
Transmutation, experience for meaning, affords an escape plan, camoflague, and movement & maneuvering anywhere on the spring.
And the Crucible, swapping Properties for Features, compresses the spring, bringing the ultimate goal down into the rhetorical arena where the dialectic is crackling.
Between the 3 of these transfactions one can move, control an opponents perception, Attention, and Awareness, and teleport or relocate the topic to a venue of your choosing. Transfactions are the unethical dialecticians super power. There is a reason the Woke don’t debate. This is their whole schtick.
The Philosopher’s Stone Controls Focus & Awareness
Epistemology is our theory of knowledge, it’s what we know, what we can know, and how we can know it. This theory of knowledge is an agent’s framework for understanding, and it’s not always easy to put a finger on it.
When your theory of knowledge runs into trouble in the actual world, in your lived experience, cognitive dissonance arises. This is uncomfortable. Humans like reality to match what we know and we’ll go through all kinds of mental and emotional gyrations to ensure that this is the case.
Experience for Epistemology - Look, I’ve Done This, Trust Me…
Lived Experience as a theory of knowledge is dialectical wizardry. It strips the field of intellect down to what happened. It is completely subjective, and while it might be “your truth” that does not mean it is objectively true.
As an epistemology, a theory of knowledge, or as the extent of what we know, this is completely insufficient. It’s naval gazing. Lived Experience is context dependent, and because it happened in the actual world (complex domain), we can’t predict it will hold true in other contexts until after the fact. To assert that it will is to attempt to control reality. I wonder why activists are so mad all the time. Reality just won’t bend to their will.
They mistake what they did for what they know. Let’s take an example:
“Hey Chuck, throw that away for me, would you?”
Chuck looks at me, sees the garbage, catches the net and throws it away. If I ask him what he knows about what just happened, he’s gonna give me the feature based response, that which happened,”I know you want me to put this in there.”
But the reality is Chuck knows much, much more:
If Chuck can go get it and throw it away, he knows: Attention, Target, approach, arrive, touch, grab, hold, reorient, target, approach, arrive, full/empty, drop.
Those are the inherent properties of throwing something away. You will never perform the skill without those properties being performed - the END.
The FEATURE is that "Chuck knows how to listen to me and throw it away". When people mistake this they become Affordance Users and incapable of dealing with the confusion machine on that topic - it literally hurts them.
My real job is to make the confusion machine tunable between you and another critter for your particular purposes, goals, and dreams. I, and everyone else in the field, does it through metaphor, example, and ad hoc systems, forms, and drills. It's an epistemic mindfield. Everyone wants an answer. A technique that affords success. Life doesn’t work like that. You must know Properties to be competent and capable.
Epistemology for Experience - What Do You Mean “What Happened”, We Already Know This
This is often put forth as lensing. Nothing wrong with lensing as long as you know you’re looking at actual reality through a colored lens
Rather than grappling with dynamics "on the ground", the dialectician just asserts and regugitates top-down deductions from entrenched knowledge frameworks.
The metaphor "As Above, So Below" captures how this sustains an unbridgeable divide between the "above" theorizing and the grounded "below" of experience.
Caging & Occlusion of the Dialectic
In both cases, the poles required for the dialectic to function as a process getting purchase from opposition are severed:
Either the entire intellectual/conceptual realm gets trashed, leaving only the subjective memory or imagination of actual experience.
Or the embodied/experiential grounding is obscured by rigid superimposed epistemic structures.
Regardless the Transfactions of Knowledge serve to cage the dialectic and occlude objective reality and a proper dialectical synthesis. Anything that comes out of this dialectic will be critically hamstrung. Transfactions of Knowledge are not slippery slopes, they are Trap Doors.
Transmutation - Becoming Is Meaningful
When the meaning of events is exchanged for their actual occurrence, interpretations become detached from reality.
Ontic for Ontology (The Kingdom of Heaven is Within): The inner significance of events corresponds to their external manifestation.
Manipulating inner significance shapes perception of external reality, influencing belief in internal truths.By manipulating the inner significance or beliefs of individuals, the wizard can influence how they perceive and interpret external events. This manipulation serves to shape their perception of reality according to the wizard's agenda, essentially controlling their understanding of the world based on fabricated or distorted internal truths.
Ontology for Ontic (The World Soul): The external manifestation corresponds to inner significance.
Shaping external events aligns with inner significance, reinforcing belief in perceived truths.By shaping external events or phenomena to align with desired internal beliefs or narratives, the wizard can reinforce these beliefs in individuals' minds. This manipulation of external events serves to validate and strengthen the perceived truths or narratives that the wizard wishes to instill, further cementing their control over individuals' perceptions and understanding of the world.
The Activist Ontology of Cultural Affordances
By being able to swap out the essential meanings or significance of events/phenomena or ascribe meaning to occurrences, the wizard is essentially hijacking and reshaping the fundamental ontological ground.
Rather than events/entities having some innate, immutable Being or essence, the wizard's transfactive abilities reduce them to functional affordances - opportunities to project or fabricate meanings, instrumentally, in service of ulterior motives.
The ontological dimension flattens out, stripped of depth and substance. Events and occurrences are transfigured into plastic utility surfaces for wizard circles and confusion spells.
Given this prioritizing of affordances over any intrinsic properties or essences, the world is turned into a machine only bearing the facade that dialectical agents like the wizard have grafted upon it.
So in essence, the transfaction of Meaning creates a world where Being and meaning itself are just a fungible resources, perpetually liquefied and recycled through predatory dialectics.
Hijacking and Teleportation
Transfaction of Meaning serves as a form of alchemical teleportation, moving the discourse to a different conceptual space or ideological realm within Hegel's dialectic. By altering the meaning attributed to certain events or ideas, the dialectician can guide the conversation away from its natural trajectory, teleporting it to a predetermined destination aligned with their agenda.
Swapping Experience for Ontology gives the wizard power to redefine the core significance of events/theses, hijacking the discussion and forcing interpretations that send it down diversionary philosophical paths.
Conversely, the Ontology for Experience swap enables the smuggling and sowing of predetermined meanings that the dialectic must then contort itself to incorporate, diverting its energies to rationalizing the transfaction.
These Meaning Transfactions can be used as tools for stealthily jumping and switching semantic and hermeneutic tracks, derailing the dialectic and turning it from transcendent truths onto preconfigured ideological sidings and branch lines.
Meaning Transfactions give the wizard techniques for literally redirecting the entire train of dialectical thought elsewhere via meaning-substitutions.
Rather than just following the spring these transfactions represent ways to coopt and deform its trajectory to serve the dialectician's aims, all while cloaking this Sleight of hand as profound revelation.
The Crucible - Don’t Believe Your Lying Mind
Compressing the Spring - Artificial Transcendence
The top of the vertical axis of the spring is where we’re going, but we’ve got to go round and round the dialectic spring to get there. It’s a long process of discovery. But the skilled dialectician knows where they want to go, and it’s possible to transcend the argument; to get a glimpse or a vision of that transcendence.
Transfactions of Experience provide the illusion of profundity and are often terribly difficult to suss out. This illusion of profundity, artificially transcends the argument by compressing the spring the distance between the spiraling levels decreases. Compress it hard enough and the coils touch. This is artificial transcendence.
So when we squish the spring with transfactions of Experience we artificially transcend and get a glimpse of new possibilities and ideal potential where the coils touched each other. This is what the ideologically possessed see as the future; false transcendence through skillful use of the dialectic by a alchemical dialectical wizard. Alchemy is operational and instrumental it is about transformation.
Seen & Unseen - Swapping Features for Properties
Essentially, by substituting inessential, mutable Features for essential, immutable Properties through transfaction, the wizard:
Precludes any authentically transcendent realizations that could unsettle the agenda
Manufactures a simulation of increasingly complex yet coherent meaning
Cloaks this simulacra of a dialectic behind dense phenomenological sophistries
Infinitely protracts the process without risking liberation from the instrumental paradigm
By endlessly amplifying and recirculating inessential phenomenal features as if they were foundational properties, the wizard avoids any transcendence that could expose their ulterior motives or destabilize their position.
The dazzling display of mental gymnastics is often hard to follow, it’s just outside of your grasp, but it seems coherent - maybe you’re missing something. You’re not. You’re being manipulated.
Signature of Affordances - Swapping Properties for Features
Swapping essential Properties for inessential Features destroys the ground of meaning and provides endless inessential arguments as the object under discussion mutates into any and all of it’s potential and historical expressions.
The wizard deliberately reduces essential, fundamental properties to contingent, circumstantial features. This serves two key purposes:
It prevents any universal truths or core premises from taking root within the dialectic. When everything is portrayed as transient and context-dependent, the dialectic cannot build upon foundational principles that could threaten the wizard's control.
It forces the dialectic into a constant state of horizontal action. Rather than vertically synthesizing higher unified understanding, or organically coming to a synthesis, the discourse remains scattered across a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting situational features defined by the wizard.
This is not allowed to happen, but is consciously engineered it through strategic ‘propertization’ of features. By liquefying any solidifying essences into relativistic happenstance, they prevent the dialectic from achieving any transcendent integration.
This serves to obfuscate universal patterns or "signatures" that could expose a broader reality contradicting the wizard's dialectical confabulations. It keeps the discourse revolving around the phenomenal features and affordances that the wizard can seamlessly redefine and reconfigure as needed.
In this maximally materialized, de-naturized state, the wizard maintains supreme rhetorical sovereignty. No permanent symbolic foothold to challenge their will can form without being dissolved back into arbitrary phenomenal flux under their direction.