Most wizardry so far has been focused on black magic:

The key of black magic is the art of naming the nameless, of showing that that which appears natural—that is,ideology in the true sense—is not. A secure ideology (in the man-on-the-street sense of “political memeplex”) is one that has no name. What is the name for that on which American liberalism and American conservatism agree? What is the name for that on which Americans agree? Liberalism is an -ism; conservatism is an -ism; but talk of justice, of human rights and freedoms, is not.

The American caste system, the Anglo-Soviet split, and even this article itself—these are all works of black magic.

But practical politics relies much more on white magic: building an ideography, a set of words, or ideographs, with connotational/emotional and exosemantic/thede-signaling loads pointing in the direction desired by the ideography’s builders. This is the essence of Moldbug’s concept of ‘idealism’.

There are two operations in black magic: definition and undefinition. Moldbug defines America’s castes; graaaaaagh undefines ‘racism’. Definition consists of redrawing the semantic map of the territory of the world—in rationalist terms, cleaving reality at its joints; undefinition consists of showing that an existing piece of the semantic map does not accurately represent the territory of the world, that it folds together things that ought to be separated, and that it obscures thought by doing so, such that, for example, an attack on one thing that falls under the term can be taken to refute another thing that falls under it, to which the attack at hand does not apply.



There are four operations in white magic: invention, reinforcement, reversal, and erasure.

Invention consists of drawing up a new ideograph, a new word with connotational and/or exosemantic load. This may occasionally appear as black definition, and in fact invention is likely to require definition as a prerequisite, as with the invention of the term ‘white privilege’. Without any semblance of denotation, the word is less likely to have either meaning or direction. And when an ideograph exists without a definitive denotation, it often appeals to a pre-existing tradition, and its invention is likely to contain an attempt at definition—Plato’s and Rawls’ attempts at inventing ‘justice’ both fall under this category. It’s also possible for already existing non-ideographic words to be imbued with ideographic load, as Theden has been doing with words like ‘Brahmin’.

Reinforcement is exactly what it sounds like: restating an ideograph and its connotational and/or exosemantic load. This may seem controversial, but I will claim that, for many Universalists, ‘white’ is a negative ideograph. Observe:

The thing about the Republicans is that when they have a tantrum, they really have a tantrum. Right now, somewhere in Washington, DC, there are a bunch of rich men with white hair, white skin, and black hearts screaming and stomping around in their suits because they don’t want poor people to have affordable healthcare.

‘Black hearts’ carries an obvious negative connotational load; juxtaposing it with ‘rich men’ and ‘white hair, white skin’ reinforces the negative load of both, in both the connotational—the negative load of the ‘black-hearted’ referents of the adjective is to spread onto the adjective itself—and exosemantic—these people are to be taken as the enemy—senses.



Reversal consists of reversing the load of an ideograph, whether connotationally or exosemantically. This occurs in two forms: reclamation, switching the load from negative to positive, and declamation, switching the load from positive to negative. I use the word reclamation because it already exists: “reclamation of slurs”: “You’re going to call me a queer/nigger/redneck/faggot? Fine, I’m a queer/nigger/redneck/faggot; I’ll take that as part of my identity and use it to positively signal my thede affiliation!” This is an example of exosemantic reclamation. Connotational reclamation proceeds along the lines of, say, (and I know I’ve seen this argument somewhere) “You’re going to call me a racist? Fine, I’m a racist! Were I not a racist, I’d hate my own people! Do you hate your own people, you race-traitor bastard?” As always, the connotational and exosemantic aspects are often linked: the attempts at reclamation of ‘liberal’ seem to be both. As for declamation, see Theden on progressives.

Erasure is an extreme case of declamation: the ideograph acquires such negative load that those who previously took it as positive are forced to disassociate themselves from it. I read an interview a few days ago with a DC campaign operative who said that denotationally liberal candidates can’t associate themselves with the word ‘liberal’ anymore. (This is not a new phenomenon; it comes up in Bloom County, so it’s been around since the Reagan era.)