Whatifalthist

By Leo Gura - November 25, 2024

As you know, I have a passion for studying self-deception. In that vein, meet Rudyard Lynch, the right-wing Youtuber who calls himself Whatifalthist. He does these long historical sense-making videos, but his understanding of history is so immature, so cartoonishly perverted by right-wing biases, that it’s remarkable to watch.

He reads many dense and serious history books, but all of it gets filtered through his right-wing starting assumptions and paradigm, his Blueish stage of development, corrupted by confirmation bias. It’s amazing. He uses history to spin elaborate right-wing reactionary grand narratives which make a mockery of real history. He has mastered the art of cherrypicking and confirmation bias. He has no construct-awareness, as he goes about constructing these oversimplified, self-serving historical grand narratives.

I love him as a case study that shows that reading lots of big books is not enough to make sense of reality. In him we see the absolute importance of epistemics and attention to bias. If you want to understand reality you need to make a serious effort to identify and correct for your own biases, otherwise you will just turn into Whatifalthist.

He has cultivated a large right-wing young male audience, overlapping with the Incel, Alt-Right, and MAGA crowd. He serves them up grand narratives that play on their fears, insecurities, bitterness, racism, sexism, and base emotional needs. A perfect ideological trap for frustrated and confused young men. They love it and think it’s brilliant.

This shows us the danger of grand narratives. Of not being aware of the problem of grand narratives. Of thinking that you can distill history down to a simple self-serving narrative.

His narratives are tinged with racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism, with zero self-awareness on his part, said with such confidence. It’s comical to listen to. You have to listen to many of his videos to really appreciate how bad it gets. And yet, at times he make some good points. He even gets things right about spirituality. But all of his good points only deepen the self-deception, as part of a large semantic field of ethnocentric nonsense. It’s a butchering of history.

Watch out, if you are not careful you might turn into him. You can’t just read books and cherrypick them to reinforce all your starting assumptions like a fool.

This stuff may seem insignificant, but these kind of right-wing narratives are deeply destructive to young minds. If a young man stumbles upon Whatifalthist videos and goes down that rabbit-hole, his mind can become poisoned for life. It’s such a powerful, subtle form of self-deception because unless you are deeply educated you will not see nor understand how Whatifalthist videos are wrong. They will just feel right as they play into all your stage Blue conservative biases.

The study of history is extremely important, but it’s even more important that you study it objectively, not through an ideological filter. Of course “objective” is a tricky notion here because the mind will want to consider its own biases as objective — but you get my point.

Whatifalthist dropped out of college and refuses to read books written after the 1960s because he says anything written after the 1960s is too woke.

To any serious student of history, Whatifalthist’s history is a dumpster fire. You won’t know where to begin correcting it. If you did this kind of history in a university you would fail the class. But on YouTube, catering to an embittered alt-right Incel MAGA audience, it works and get lots of clicks. When you’re young, dumb, and full of cum, Whatifalthist seems like real history. This is why university education is important. A university doesn’t just teach you how to be woke, a university teaches you academic rigor and standards. Standards like basic objectivity and how to evaluate the credibility of sources. But if you have a right-wing ideology or agenda, even these basic standards and rigor will appear as wokeness or bias. That’s how corrupting bias and ideology are.

If you want a deep lesson in self-deception, study Whatifalthist videos and worldview.

Click Here to see ALL of Leo's juicy insights.