CA Bond wrote a good book elaborating and sharpening Bertrand de Jouvenel’s central concept of the high-low middle mechanism called Nemesis (2019). However, unfortunately, like many intellectual types, Bond seems to suffer from significant bouts of spergery. In my years of dealing with these sorts of people, of which there are many, they share three common traits, which make it somewhat difficult to engage with them on any serious level. Let us take these three traits as our working definition of The Sperg. These are:

1. An acute lack of theory of mind. Someone with a decent theory of mind understands that A) not everyone knows what they do, and B) the relevant and C) default contexts in which any argument is made. For example, in this case, A) we live in a world in which most people don’t know anything at all about political philosophy, and B) the relevant context is the one in which I, as someone known for elite theory with a YouTube channel watched by tens of thousands of people every day, respond to recent attacks on it by the online populist right, and C) the default context is one in which the basic hypothesis of most people is that history is driven by Martin Luther King Jr-style civil rights marches and mass protests. The actual aim of The Sperg in these sorts of scenarios is not to engage in any real argument, but rather to show off that he knows the material better than whoever else. In other words, to use pro-wrestling parlance, he’s trying to “put himself over”. What The Sperg never seems to understand is that, in most times and places, except in the very narrow confines of academic journals (which is a context in which it is assumed everyone knows everything to the level of The Sperg, and is read by tens of people as opposed to tens of thousands), an argument must be translated for an audience who knows next to nothing.

2. A bizarre and overwhelming sense of being threatened when no such threat exists. Here, The Sperg for some reason takes an argument as being an assertion of superiority that directly undermines them. For example, in this case, our sperg thought my article was an act of gatekeeping with a set of commands. Here, the difficulty arises because the aim of The Sperg is again nothing to do with any argument but rather to rebel against perceived authority by attempting to tear it down. This is a fight or flight response coming from a place of ego, and as such there’s nothing that can be done about it. Here I choose to fight only as an illustration of why I almost never do.

3. A failure to understand that my thing is not their thing, which results in anger that my thing is not their thing. Finally, The Sperg is unhappy if something is not exactly their thing. They feel the need to defend their thing, and owing to 1 and 2, lash out in anger and attack, because they think that some other thing is trying to destroy their thing. For example, a while back a sperg was raging at one of the lectures I gave on YouTube. He did not understand that this lecture would be watched by tens of thousands of people, many of whom do not have philosophy degrees. My lecture had the specific job of trying to get a few central points across in thirty minutes or so. He did not understand, also, that I was always going to give the lecture I was going to give, not his lecture. So I told him, “make the lecture you want”. Then when he sperged more, I banned him. This is the only thing to do with The Sperg, in most times and places. The Sperg is likely banned or excluded from lots of places, owing to his tendency to sperg out.

It seems that CA Bond is currently in the grip of some sort of manic episode rocking back and forth because of 1 + 2 + 3. Thus, when I wrote an article clearing up confusion about elite theory, because it triggered him into becoming The Sperg, he:

1. Failed to understand the relevant and default contexts of the article.

2. Took it as a personal attack and affront himself.

3. Raged against the sky because it is not exactly his thing.

He wrote an angry piece entitled On “Elite Theory” Commands in which he seemed to take my general definition of elite theory and the explanation of my own work as a command that he must do the same thing. This sort of thinking is triggered only in spergs. It is unfortunate, but it’s a common affliction.

What is Bond upset about? First, he’s upset because I am more interested in the similarities between thinkers than their differences. My interest is, first and foremost, in what’s true. My interest is never in slavish adherence to any particular thinker or their system or making an orthodoxy out of it. One might argue that this is what went wrong with Marxism. It is seldom, if ever, going to be the case that any one person got everything right. Many thinkers are monomaniacal. Indeed, both Mosca and Pareto were, and have frequently been, accused of this. Yet what is interesting about them is in what they agree on and both observe about reality. Let us examine some impotent flailing about by Bond:

Does Parvini provide evidence for the claim that, if two thinkers appear to describe the same phenomenon, their deeper conceptual differences can be bracketed without affecting the truth of the proposition he extracts from them? Does he offer an argument to which the reader could rationally assent? Or does he simply tell us that these differences are “Not important” because he is “not interested” in them?

There are several methodological premises here that he asserts, and he unilaterally declares them off the table. Yet whether Mosca and Pareto are describing the same thing in compatible terms is precisely what needs to be established before their ideas can be combined. If the question can be dismissed by his lack of interest, there is no discussion to be had.

I did not say that you cannot discuss it, I just said I’m not interested in it, and my work is not interested in it. Bond is correct to say there is a hidden methodological premise in this. I stated it most openly in The Prophets of Doom (2023) in which I look at eleven different thinkers, many of whom had not even read each other, all making somewhat similar observations about the shape of history. My interest is in what is common to these thinkers, rather than their idiosyncratic differences or peculiarities. Why? Because my epistemological assumption is that if something is true different people will see it, from a variety of perspectives, no matter their other differences. I then try to draw out general inferences from what is agreed upon. The difficulty for the philosophy sperg here is that I am gesturing to something that just is, to what is, which has no conceptual horizon or a priori edifice required. In theory, even Caveman Grug might come along and point to what is and say “there”. My work proceeds from this assumption. Bond may think you cannot “rationally assent” to this, whatever that means. Well, take your pick.

Second, Bond, in classic sperg manner, not understanding the difference between a Substack article in the context of a dispute in contemporary popular online politics and an academic journal of anthropology demands evidence that Amazonian tribes had structures of decision-making and governance.

To say that his central “fact” (minority organisation set against a disorganised mass) is a constant even in Amazonian societies is a serious anthropological claim. I would like to see the ethnographic account he is relying on, and an explanation of who, in that account, constitutes the organised minority and who constitutes the disorganised mass.

What does someone say to something like this? Did Amazonian tribes have chiefs? Yes. “Come on then Parvini, get out your … anthropology journal”. I mean fucking hell, okay. Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, “The Rise and Fall of Amazonian Chiefdoms”, L’ Homme (1993), pp. 255-83. “Yes, but you didn’t say WHICH Amazonian tribes!” What the fuck is wrong with you? The Mẽbêngôkre, the Tukano, Asháninka, the Munduruku, whatever, again context. No one is going to care about this. “But what about the Yanomami! Ha ha, got you, got you”. Honestly, at this point, you need to piss off. Besides, the Yanomami had headmen (almost always male) who settled disputes, and organised local leadership, they just didn’t have a central authority. The “democracy” and “egalitarianism” of these things are probably overstated for the usual reasons. But who am I kidding? It should be obvious to all readers that this is a WASTE OF TIME. The lesson here is about appropriate level of argument for the relevant context. See also: don’t be The Sperg.

Next, Bond is upset because people might disagree with each other when observing an event. He says:

Two people can observe the same political event and disagree about what happened.

For example, I might look at a Tommy Robinson rally and see a paid agent of special interests leading a counter-gang to soak up dissident energy, while someone else might see “the people waking up and taking it to the elites, a revolution is coming!” The implication by Bond here seems to be that because there’s no reason to prefer my “elite theory observation” to, let’s say, the populist Tommytard one, the claim to “value-free analysis” is arbitrary. Bond appears to be looking for an explicit statement of another hidden epistemological assumption on my part. We could go back to the second and third laws of logic:

The Law of Non-Contradiction: A statement cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same sense.

The Law of Excluded Middle: A statement is either true or false, with no middle ground.

Well, *Walter White hands* “you got me” . Hopefully, you can see that acquiescing to the tedious demands of The Sperg is a fruitless and unfulfilling exercise because you are forced to state things that are totally fucking obvious. In this case, CA Bond is making the yawn-inducing point that because “value-free analysis” adheres at least to these two fundamental laws of logic, it is, in fact, making a value call, thereby setting up an epistemological hierarchy, privileging one observation (the one pointing to the true thing) to another (the one pointing to the false thing). Well, no shit Sherlock! Incidentally, I argued at length in defence of value-free analysis in an actual academic journal here, read that if interested.

Next, Bond points to what he thinks are “straw men”. Let’s have a look. First, he claims that I am straw manning people who have a problem with my method – i.e. the one where I am more interested by the similarities of common observation than I am by the differences between thinkers, and that I’m not interested in the same sorts of things that animate philosophy graduates. Per Bond: “He is dismissing a problem for his method by recasting it as a matter of academic taste.” This is where The Sperg needs to learn how to read words as they are actually written rather than the ones they imagine are written. When I say “I consider this irrelevant”, “I am not interested in that”, he imagines “you said I’m not allowed to talk about this! Your COMMANDING ME not to be interested in that!” How does one respond to this? As I said, you must take your pick. My assumption is if something is true, then many different people will see it, from a variety of perspectives, no matter their other differences. If you have a different assumption, you must figure out how you disagree with that one. Knock yourself out!

Next, Bond, ignoring context as ever, is unhappy that I said communists deny the basic fact of elite theory. Here, the relevant context is that a week or so ago, I did an entire week of lectures on the Bolsheviks as a combat organisation and Lenin as a Vanguardist. As an aside here, notice the asymmetry of expectation from The Sperg, lacking theory of mind. Bond’s expectation of me is to provide footnotes to anthropological studies of Amazonian tribes and to name specific tribes showing a detailed knowledge of the fucking Yanomami, but on himself, he places no such demand to do basic homework. This is particularly galling as another relevant context is that it is likely that people who read my article would also include some of the 49,000+ people who watched that particular video on Lenin. Again, CONTEXT IS ALWAYS BEYOND SPERGS.

Anyway, Bond is unhappy that I included communists in a list with liberal democrats and free market capitalists as people who deny the basic fact of elite theory, given that Lenin himself, as I’ve argued at length including in the first few pages of The Populist Delusion which Bond plainly did not read (again, homework for thee but not for me), was a de facto elite theorist. Bond now, once more pedantic, nitpicky, tiresome, yawn-inducing, says:

Quite how communists could be charged with denying organised minority leadership is beyond me. Leninists, in particular, have an explicit theory of it.

Right, but I included communists because all of them, including Lenin and even Stalin, saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a way-station to utopia. Marxist-Leninists saw socialism as a transition to communism proper. Socialism was supposed to be the “lower phase” (i.e. the party decides), and communism “the higher phase” in which, to quote any reddit-tier commie:

Envisioned as a classless, stateless, and moneyless society where the division of labour disappears and distribution shifts to the principle of “to each according to their need”. The state apparatus gradually “withers away” as public administration becomes entirely decentralized and voluntary.

Now, if Bond had done his homework and not been itching to score points, nitpick, fight and so on, he might have realised this and thereby not fallen into school-boy error. He preferred to fight, so let’s fight some more.

Next, in the third example, he is unhappy that I have presented my opponents, such as Captive Dreamer or James Lindsay as stupid or dishonest. Then admits, once again, to not doing his homework: “I do not know the specifics of this debate”. Again, context. The thousands of people who watch me and read me, know this context. If you don’t, given this context, it’s your job to find out about it if you’re going to write about it (you might easily have just not), especially if you’re going to be demanding anthropological studies from me in tenth-rate likely AI-generated substack articles. As far as ad hominem goes, I go by a single rule: do not engage in it until someone has earned it, then let them have it. Ask and ye shall receive.

To take a case in point, CA Bond does not seem to understand what an FAQ is. The letters stand for “frequently asked questions”. To break this down for The Sperg, who needs everything defined and explained like he’s just hatched from an egg: an FAQ “refers to a curated list of common questions and answers about a specific topic”. In the case of question 7, Bond has an issue that I was answering that question and not a different question and THEN CALLS IT A STRAW MAN. Oh, well, sorry Chris that your question wasn’t asked. He says:

He replaces a question about what people can do with a claim about what his critics supposedly want to believe. I would like to see his justification for psychologising them in this way.

No I didn’t, I answered the question we are asked over and over again. The psychologising comes from the fact that this is what they tell us. Again, spending even a day, even an hour, trying to get to know this context, rather than wading in half-cocked and drawing penises on your own face, might have saved a lot of time. It would certainly have saved me from feeling the need to answer these frankly pointless objections.

He then has a problem with several of my analogies. A chair is not the same thing as an elite. Applying theories to reality cannot work like applying DLCs to a base game. The mass is not exactly the same as weather. Okay, Data, let us try to figure out why these strange illogical human beings might use analogies to get an illustrative idea clear in the mind of a general reader. Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know! A chair is not exactly like an elite and the mass is not exactly like the weather, I didn’t get that before: well then, back to the drawing board eh! I’ve never had much patience with this sort of pointless, tedious and masturbatory “academic discourse”. None of this stuff from Bond is helpful, at all. It is of precisely zero value. None of it gets us any closer to our overall aim of seeing reality as it really is.

My project has never had time for any of this. What I aim to do is build up a tool kit to help us see things as clearly as possible. My irritation with “philosophy wank” of this kind is because it might as well be an argument with someone like Vaush demanding you pull up citations in real time or demanding that you state a priori epistemological assumptions when in 99% of cases “just common sense” will do. It is mind-numbingly tedious and I hope this one-time rebuttal to CA Bond will demonstrate forever and always why. If you want to debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s fine – do it in your own time, in your own space – it’s not what I do and you won’t make me do it either.