The Alt-Right’s Reverence for the Naturalness of Capitalism

And the sociobiological screed in Bard’s and Söderqvist’s “Process and Event”

Capitalism may not even need a defense since it’s just how the world works in our era. Yet as proud liberals, humanists, or consumers, we’d prefer to participate only in merited projects, rather than being forced into a pointless or counterproductive enterprise.

Thus, numerous myths have been spun to rationalize capitalism. Liberal economists promoted this kind of economic system as being more efficient and productive than feudalism despite capitalism’s amorality, so that we could progress without theocracies stifling innovation. These myths, which I’ve considered elsewhere, were eventually cast in mathematical terms to make the case seem as ironclad as physics.

But another line of defense emerges from the alt-right men’s-rights crowd. In Process and Event, for instance, Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (BS) incorporate capitalism in their sprawling Hegelian narrative that ranges from the prehistoric time of nomadic tribes, through Zoroastrianism and the Axial Age, to Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, memetics, and the Information Age. The alt-right themes in their work aren’t obvious, at first, because they’re disguised by an array of unnecessary, obfuscatory neologisms, and they’re merged with cursory readings of numerous other literary philosophies.

It’s worth pondering, though, what capitalism’s role is in big-picture historical terms, and we can use BS’s account to reflect on that question.

The key point in their narrative, as I understand it, is that we can’t likely and shouldn’t try to advance much beyond the social norms of the prehistoric period, norms which BS call “the sociont.” Specifically, the masculine norms and values of hunting and war underlie even civilization because species change biologically much slower than do culture and technology. We fantasize about changing our sociobiological nature at our peril, and at best we must hope we can adapt to how technological revolutions drastically change our environments.

According to BS, the Axial Age’s moral reforms and metaphysical dualisms were appalling deviations from the more naturalistic, polytheistic or authoritarian perspectives of older civilizations and prehistoric nomads. And the harshness of capitalism is more reality-based than the Gnostic’s, Platonist’s, or socialist’s rationalist fantasies. Capitalism is manly and naturalistic, and its champions are entrepreneurs and engineers who adapt to the “phallic” imperatives of hunting and battling for supremacy, these being staples of our evolved nature.

But there are turning points in history, say BS, and one of them is upon us: the internet will bring on an age of “attentionalism” that will radicalize capitalism. And the aim of history, they say, is comparable to the transhumanist one of self-deification: harsh, masculine culture can channel our primitive social instincts, purifying them in a dialectical process that unites us with cosmic evolution.

That, at least, is what I take to be the upshot of Chapter 13 of their book, “Profane Capitalism, Sacral Attentionalism and the Dark Renaissance.” But let’s go through some passages from that chapter, to put their view properly on the table.

An alt-right defense of capitalism

“The point of civilization,” they say,

is not to embed Man in comfort that gives him the possibility to wholly devote himself to his infantilization and not have to grow up. This can hardly be the objective for human creativity. A more reasonable view is that civilization aims to make Man’s transcendental drive more efficient and thereby make him divine. That is: civilization turns adults into even more adult adults, consciously dialectical adults who accept their mortality, and not into deeply childish fairytale princes and princesses, terrified at adultification, unable to handle violence and custom.

You see there the aristocratic, Nietzschean theme of the celebration of some conception of masculinity, and thus of a patriarchal construal of “adulthood.”

Capitalism fits into this historic maturation, then, because this economic system “kills all reveries of perfection, infinity and immortality once and for all. Simultaneously it paves the way for informationalism…” BS look forward to a “tantric religion for the adults among the adults, and not for adults that have been tricked into believing that they can afford to continue being children.”

Moreover, “it is only through this radical return to the archetypology that was generated under the sociont [i.e. under our evolved nature] that humanity in earnest can find its way back to its archetypal identity. The male and the female, the old and the young, the shamanoid and the androgynous, can now orient themselves within the tribal terrain after many centuries of illusions that Man can reshape his nature and become something he is not.”

The quasi-transhumanism in question for BS, then, is a conservative kind since it must work with rather than against nature:

It is not that Man shall be remade — he is who he is — but it is The Machine that shall be developed to attain its full syntheological [religious] potential. And nor is it the masses that shall be hunted by force in the future, threatened by desperate boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints. It is the chosen ones that shall be tempted to step forward to themselves carry out the exodus to the augmented future. It is thus individualism that generates the false premise that “we are all the same”, which in turn generates the modernist obsession with plasticity.

Instead, “the possibilities to reshape people is as small as the risks are large. Man’s plasticity is highly limited, which makes for a renaissance of classical archetypology. It is simply futile to mobilize resistance against a sociobiology that of course will not allow itself to vanish through wishful thinking.”

Likewise, Marx’s

Often mentioned alienation — that is: how capitalism is alleged to separate Man from his own fundamental nature — actually is an expression of hatred directed at unavoidable realities and the blatant truth of cause and effect in a society. As though it were a human right to be allowed to refuse to grow and take responsibility for one’s own provision. In this way the Marxist class struggle appears a struggle between generations: the adult children’s struggle to always be allowed to remain precisely children and shirk the demands and responsibilities of adultification.

The masculine orientation of this apparent social Darwinism comes across especially in BS’s tirade against pacifism and vegetarianism, the penchant for which in “postmodern society” amounts to “an ill-concealed attack on capitalism as a libidinal force.” Those anti-capitalist

conceptions are fundamentally hostile toward sexuality. They are fundamentally mendacious and infantilized. It is once again a case of the tenacious, Rousseauian myth that capitalism in all its forms is to be regarded as evil exploitation. It certainly is not. Capitalism is merely the exposure of the libidinal brutality that propels the entire civilization forward, and as the key to the truth of this libido it is a powerful producer of value for everything and everyone.

According to BS, “What makes capitalism a brutal truth-teller is that capital establishes an objectively true value for all products and services that are available in a market. The relation between supply and demand determines a price that is true until the basic prerequisites are altered.”

As for the revolutionary potential of the digital age,

The attentionalism [i.e. internet culture] that follows from capitalism will, after a few decades of confused teething problems only reinforce this libidinal brutality further. The digital and its algorithms is rather, as philosopher Mark Stahlman expresses the matter, one big wall of brutal truth that now confronts humanity against which all attempts to lie or engage in wishful thinking inexorably are crushed. There is no alternative to radical authenticity unless one decides to definitively say goodbye to reality and stay with the fairytales. Capitalism made Man’s relations to in part nature, in part culture truer and more forthright, and this was its great contribution to the civilization process. Attentionalism will only dialectically reinforce this development and make Man’s relations to nature and culture even more brutally honest.

Indeed, “What triumphs in the end is the bazaar’s simple motto that speaks of the best product at the best price, which [in the coming attentionalist age] will not hinge on advertising or marketing finding their way back to this reasonable message.” Instead, “it is solely authentic communication proper that the phallic algorithm will sift out and hold aloft.”

The fallaciousness of sociobiological “dialectics”

The first thing to say about this account, I think, is that it’s overstated. I agree with the alt-right critics that the cult of so-called wokeness that’s emerged in reaction to Trumpism and the global authoritarian backlash against neoliberalism is objectionable. Men aren’t doing so well in late modernity because their bodies are largely replaced by machines, and we’re taught to pride ourselves on domesticity that seems to conflict with men’s wanderlust.

But however sympathetic you might be to some of BS’s narrative, I don’t see the Nietzschean or dialectical framing of the issues as compelling. On the contrary, BS’s presentation of their case is just sophistical, obfuscatory, and fallacious. They don’t argue for their conclusions or explain their premises with much attention to real science or history; instead, besides ranting in flagrant ad hominem fashion, they argue by assertion, stipulation, and creative definition. Often, they treat their neologisms as stand-ins for reasons to think that their distinctions are exhaustive or logically or empirically compelling.

I’ve talked about their method elsewhere, however. Here, I’ll just reiterate that what’s natural isn’t necessarily what’s good. Even if we revere nature’s creativity on pantheistic grounds, as BS do in their other book Syntheism, that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to submit to certain cherry-picked natural norms. On the contrary, we might exercise our natural creativity by overcoming our environment and some of our instincts, just as the cosmos has transformed itself over the eons.

You find a glaring case of the naturalistic fallacy in BS’s discussion of what they call the “dark side” of the sexual act: “The really dark side of sexuality we tend not to speak of, that which plays out after a bloody showdown on the battlefield, that is: outside of one’s own sociont, within the conquered territory after several men and elderly people among the adversaries have been killed, including the matricide of the matriarch. What then remains is the sexual siege of the enemy’s women, as if this was a given.”

But there’s no reason for that “as if” in BS’s account. Rape is an evolutionary given, according to BS’s crypto-sociobiological perspective, and they don’t repudiate this patriarchal norm in that quoted passage. They just emphasize that we shy away from acknowledging the amorality of much human (and animal) sexual behaviour.

Yet to repudiate that norm would be to acknowledge the fallaciousness of crude sociobiological generalizations, and to grant something like the liberal’s humanism. And indeed, BS insinuate as much by distinguishing between the “light” and “dark” sides of sexuality. What would make rape “dark” if not the moral framework that goes back at least to the Axial Age, to an age of moral reform that BS deem “childish”?

Another example is BS’s notion of an “archetypal identity.” Suppose we have certain genetically determined ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour, as evolutionary psychologists contend. Does that mean the attempt to think or to behave differently is illusory and based only on “fairytales”? No, because if anything’s hardwired into us, it’s the ability to be people rather than animals, and personhood consists of the power of self-creativity, based on self-consciousness, intelligence, curiosity, imagination, and relative autonomy.

Paradoxically, if you like, what’s most “natural” about us is our virtual supernaturalness. As behaviourally modern, symbol-obsessed hominids, we’re an anomalous species that uses language to organize our thoughts into worldviews and cultures, which in turn motivate us to reshape the natural environment. We adapt not just to nature but to culture, which is why BS’s point about biology’s inflexibility is facile.

Perhaps we’re still far from being thoroughgoing cyborgs, with machines and genetic engineering replacing our evolved body types. But the brain adapts to its environment by detecting patterns and learning from them. This is why you can improve and perhaps master any task if you just practice for long enough.

Biologically and psychologically, perhaps all behaviourally modern humans are comparable, from the humans of the late Paleolithic period to the consumers of America. But culturally we differ because our brains have adapted to different environments that we’ve shaped with technology.

So even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that we’re hardwired to excel at a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, that doesn’t mean we ought to keep behaving that way. The trillions of neural connections our brains can form are liable to master whatever environment is thrown our way, including the artificial environments we create.

What BS don’t show is that an archaic, prehistoric lifestyle is superior to a feminized, late modern one. They assume, for instance, that being an adult is better than being a child, but not even that is obvious in the intended sense. We mature as a matter of natural growth, but the naturalistic fallacy stands in the way of inferring that because that growth is normal, therefore it’s good, such that childlike adults automatically deserve to be ridiculed.

For example, the talk of the childish fear of sexuality or of the “phallic” practices of adult hunting and warfare is odd because sex is animalistic and thus itself primitive and perhaps premature in an evolutionary (dialectical or genealogical, or Hegelian or Nietzschean) narrative of how our species got where it’s at. Unless BS abandon humanism or individualism entirely and equate humans with animals, so that we have no special right to exist (in which case laws against murder would be groundless), they’d need to accept that personhood is a creative leap ahead of animality.

Why, then, should we credit a norm among animals, such as sexuality, as a mark of maturity or of hyper-adulthood for a species of people? If we belittle animals by enslaving, hunting, or otherwise extinguishing them, why should we glorify part of their life cycle? That’s incoherent.

Evading the genetic fallacy?

I should add that in one passage, BS seem to acknowledge the problem of the naturalistic or genetic fallacy, although they don’t show how their reductive conservatism escapes the problem. Here’s the passage, which comes at the end of the chapter:

It is true that the sociont as an idea entails a correct formalization of Man’s origin as tribopoiesis [defined below]. But a formalization does not allow an idealization, unless one cheats by arbitrarily adding Platonist forms as an ideal. Forms are only archetypes that have been chiseled out over millions of years of evolution. And archetypes are in themselves no ideal, they are only forms that one would be wise to understand and adapt to, but they are no more than that. And they are definitely not eternal or perfect.

The question is why it’s “wise” to “adapt” yourself to archaic behavioural norms, such as to those that flourished in the Upper Paleolithic and that we might still carry with us as genetically determined reflexes, prejudices, preoccupations, and the like.

If the dark side of sexuality is one of those protohuman norms, does that mean we should adapt by giving rapists a pass? Or is it more prudent to cherry pick from those norms, depending on your audience or personal interests? So, if you’re trying to appeal to an alt-right, mostly male crowd, like BS are, you’d write as though patriarchy were heroic, even if the demotion of the feminine aspects of the prehistoric gathering of resources and of the raising of children were arbitrary rather than “wise.”

Again, BS seem dimly aware of the danger here to their thesis, which is why their definition of “tribopoiesis” in their glossary is vague about our relation to the “sociont.” Tribopoiesis is supposed to be

A basic metaphysical principle stating that everything is born from a collective of relations and that everything returns to a collective of relations within all emergence vectors. Nothing is born by itself, there is no autopoiesis. This means for Man that everything of value is born out of and relates to the sociont, which is there both before a man is born and remains after a man dies.

The vagueness is in that phrase “and relates to the sociont.” The logical point about the genetic fallacy grants a historic or causal relation between something of value and its source but denies the relevance of that relation to the value. Thus, the standard example is that bad people can produce good art, which is to say that the aesthetic value emerges from a historical or psychological context to become something apart from that context.

Indeed, it’s ironic that the evolutionary psychologist’s emphasis on prehistoric context mirrors the “woke” or postmodern liberal’s relativizing of truth to personal or political conditions. The wokester, for instance, denies that we should ignore an artwork’s point of origin when assessing the art’s value. According to young, woke progressives, if the artist has misbehaved such that he or she has been “canceled,” the art ought to be rejected, regardless of its apparent merit.

All of which you’d expect BS to repudiate for being toxically feminine, yet their “Hegelian dialectics” operate in the same way, reducing culture to (cherry picked) sociobiological (and alleged psychoanalytic) norms.

In any case, sure, emergent properties “relate to” their point of origin (since everything relates somehow to everything else). Those properties are still emergent, so their origin is irrelevant to what biologists might call their exaptive function, that is, to the new role they take on in a different environment. The traits that work in one environment might be maladaptive in another, so they either fade away, remain as vestiges, or become useful in some updated terms.

Either way, just presuming that certain behaviours (like “phallic” masculinity, sex, hunting, or war) are good because they’re old, normal, or “natural” is the classic conservative fallacy, regardless of how it’s dressed up with BS’s neologisms.

The arbitrary preference for masculinity

Another inconsistency in BS’s account is in their boasting about how masculine culture derives from prehistoric hunting and war, without fully reckoning with how feminine values likewise would derive from the gathering side of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

BS distinguish between “outer” and “inner circuits,” between the male-dominated and female-dominated social zones, which could imply that even late-modern men and women should stay in the same, prehistoric lanes. Thus, if capitalism channels the masculine realities, only men should be in business, while women should keep to their inner circuit, that is, to managing children and the household.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that some masculine and feminine cultural norms may derive from at least common impressions that certain behaviours were likely natural in prehistoric tribes.

But again, even if this were so as a way of explaining causally how we ended up with certain predilections, that wouldn’t entail the social Darwinian prescription. That is, the causal story wouldn’t justify BS’s palpable diatribes against, say, critics of capitalism or of hunting, war, or phallic culture. There are, for instance, feminine males and masculine females — because, as I said, the brain is flexible and able to adapt to conditions on an individual basis.

The question, then, is whether masculine or feminine character traits might be apt in different social or technological environments. Should we defer to masculinity in promoting capitalism, or should we restrain those tendencies and reform capitalism on “feminine” or feminist grounds? Sociobiology itself won’t answer that question.

The answer would depend on what the goals are supposed to be of all our civilized productivity. Why do we bother to work? What’s the purpose of living as civilized people?

Intriguingly, right at the chapter’s end, BS blow up their macho narrative by pointing out that “the sociont [the condition of prehistoric hunter-gatherers] was a communist society.” How, then, is capitalism more natural than communism? Well, BS say, “It is however not at all true that the sociont was a matrix [a feminine paradise] where all were kind and merry and sat and sang perky camp songs the whole day without having to contribute to the provision of the collective.”

Of course, we can only conjecture how people lived so long ago. In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow argue that prehistoric people likely experimented with different social norms, including sedentary ones, fluctuating between lifestyles to suit the seasons.

But if we assume that hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have built up complex social hierarchies or amassed material possessions and wealth inequalities and that they required everyone in the small tribes to pull their weight, they’d still have been free from the stress of having to compete for status. They’d have pooled their resources in something like the communist manner, which would have fostered nurturing, motherly values rather than the zero-sum ones of hunters or warriors.

In short, prehistoric societies would have mixed what we might call “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics, and BS’s celebration of capitalism is based only on an arbitrary preference for masculinity. Those two authors don’t show philosophically, historically, or sociologically that masculine values or social systems are better than feminine ones.

The laws of capitalism

Let’s turn, though, to capitalism’s chief strength, in BS’s view, namely to its tendency to reveal the truth of our natural condition.

To start with, BS err in saying that “capital establishes an objectively true value for all products and services.” Classical and neoclassical economists diverged largely in their explanations of economic value. The classical economists, such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, said a product’s value is determined by its cost of production, which is indeed a relatively objective matter. Yet the neoclassicals rejected that analysis and emphasized the role of demand, which is subjective.

For instance, you could say an apple’s price is determined by the cost of picking it and of bringing the fruit to market, or you could say the price depends mainly on whatever customers are willing to pay for it. You see the subjectivity of prices in the value of fine art, for example, when the price can skyrocket because of seemingly unhinged demands.

Yet the subjectivity of economic value decouples capitalism from its supposed role as a brutal truth-teller. Hence, we find that snake oil salespeople thrive in capitalism. If you can create the demand by lying sufficiently well about a product’s bogus advantages, associating the product with some myths or ideals, as in associative advertising, and then perhaps shutting down the business and resurfacing, as necessary, when the fraud collapses, you can profit based on lies rather than honesty.

Certainly, there are harsh realities in the competitive business of supplying products to fulfill a demand, but it’s just a Victorian myth that capitalism is a natural economic system, that capitalist competition is our form of the wild animal’s struggle in the evolutionary setting. If capitalism were natural, it would be wild and therefore lawless. Anything would go by way of trial and error, as in the natural selection of species’ mutations.

So, there would be no reason for laws against fraud in capitalist societies, for example. What we find, though, is that few outsiders want to do business in authoritarian countries that have weak, corrupt judicial systems since investors would have no guarantee that they’d own the rights to the fruits of their labour. Indeed, lawless capitalism would be short-lived in that this kind of raw competition would burn itself out in a self-destructive kleptocracy.

Notice that deception is hardly forbidden in the wild; on the contrary, nature is a prolific evolver of camouflages. The stick insect, for instance, looks just like a stick, and thus cheats predators out of an easy meal by lying to them about its nature. The reason fraud is illegal in successful, developed economies is that we wisely sacrifice our right to cheat others to reduce the chance of our being cheated in turn. That unnatural, quasi-moral assurance drives the investment of capital.

It’s true, though, that capitalism isn’t entirely artificial or moralistic. Capitalism is supposed to exploit some natural traits, which is why this modern economic system ends up perpetuating ancient civilized social structures, namely the pyramidal wealth inequalities, with roughly the richest twenty percent of the population raking in 80% of the profits, as per the Pareto principle. In that respect, there are likely some sociobiological factors that feudalism and capitalism share. Indeed, Yanis Varoufakis shows how capitalism has evolved into technofeudalism.

But if progressing beyond our species’ wild upbringing in the Paleolithic period is difficult, making what secular humanists call “progress” not a foregone conclusion, we’re still left with that question, raised earlier, about the purpose of productivity. Why bother to work hard? Because it’s manly or “adult” to do so? On the face of it, those are norms or predominant behavioural patterns, not goods.

BS hold out some hope of utopian revolution or transhuman godhood as history’s proper, ideal end point. Yet their one-sided characterizations aren’t so inspiring. Sure, laziness isn’t a virtue, but neither is drudgery, the latter being an aspect of enslavement. Most of the world’s workers would likely prefer work that they enjoy or that they consider play. Yet many jobs are of the bullshit variety, this being another kind of capitalist deception.

If machines replace our bodies and computers replace our minds, what kind of work would be left for us to do? Will technological progress make us obsolete? And would we fear that outcome because we fear being alone with our existential condition?

BS reject individualism as an outdated liberal ideology since they think we evolved to be tribal and thus to submit to the collective will or to fade into a network. But individualism has always been promoted as an aspiration, and you don’t discredit an aspiration by showing that it’s not always or often achieved.

Personhood, too, was once unheard of. Then some primates evolved into us. We can indeed think tribally, as when we succumb to mob mentalities. But the brain can also individuate itself, as when the person learns how to think critically, and how to create a character and a personal system of beliefs and values. Indeed, our individuality is written in the distinguishing features of our very faces, which is to say that if nature wanted us to be tribal, why did we evolve such unique features of our bodies? Our thinking can be tribal, but our bodies are autonomous, and the sets of neural connections in our brains are never the same.

The digital age

What are the prospects of the Internet Age’s so-called “attentionalism”?

Elsewhere, I’ve shown how internet culture perpetuates the same inequalities we find in feudal and capitalist networks. BS’s faith in algorithms seems naïve in the face of the internet’s many familiar distortions, from the production of echo chambers to the promotion of infotainment or disinformation (“fake news”), to the spread of antisocial toxicity due to anonymity. So far, capitalism’s self-destructive logic applies to the internet, hampering the Wired Magazine-style of fantasy about the internet’s radical potential: con artists and charlatans can excel with sophistry as they appeal to our worst instincts and exploit our cognitive weaknesses, creating a race to the bottom.

In fact, this disenchantment with civilized norms inspired the countercultures of the Axial Age and of all subsequent revolutionary moments to posit far-fetched ideals to force us to shift our perspective and to confront our existential condition. Just because societies have always worked a certain way doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t be changed. And if they can be changed, what should they become? Again, what’s the point of civilization?

Macho patriarchy isn’t a good enough answer, nor is there much vision evident in deferring to the propaganda of big tech companies, as BS seem to do. At best, the empowerment of algorithms will make us more creative. But will the best creations win most of the attention on the internet? Why believe late-modern capitalism would be so meritocratic? Superstars excel in certain respects, but often they do so by employing shady public relations consultants to conceal certain failures or by externalizing the costs and exploiting some underpaid underlings.

In that connection, we should point to the facileness of BS’s take on the Marxist concept of capitalist alienation. Marx’s point wasn’t exactly that the proletariat are alienated from themselves; rather, it was that they’re alienated from their work because profits are always at least partly exploitative, meaning that the workers are necessarily shortchanged for their services. The work itself is often robotic and dehumanizing, especially since capitalism is reinforced by secular ideologies that threaten liberals with a crisis of a godless life’s apparent meaninglessness in the cosmic scale.

BS address the latter point by forwarding their bid for a utopian, pantheistic religion, but that religion is comparable to Marxism. Both are supposed to be realistic paths to virtual utopias, the difference being that one is capitalist whereas the other features communism as a necessary stage.

In any case, BS do nothing to discredit Marx’s point about alienation. If late-modern capitalism weren’t alienating, there would be no need for BS’s “Syntheist” religion.

Capitalism and the meaning crisis

I’ll close by returning to the question of capitalism’s status in the Enlightenment. If liberalism or individualism is the parent of science, capitalism, and democracy, we needn’t expect that these offspring would necessarily get along. Instead, capitalism might work like the cuckoo bird, hogging society’s resources and crowding out the other institutions in the nest.

The replication crisis in the soft sciences is due largely to the rush to publish, which is a business concern. And democracy is infamous for being vulnerable to business opportunities in the “revolving door” that capitalism makes possible. Capitalism itself, though, isn’t the driver of innovation. What drives that progress is the liberal ideology, the protection of personal liberties, which capitalism harnesses. Legal protections for private property fuel the incentive to innovate and to profit by fulfilling a social demand.

BS are right, I think, to marry economic with religious assessments since the main challenge for liberalism is the meaning crisis. Again, why seek to succeed financially when godless life is absurd and ultimately futile? What good are personal freedoms if there’s no aim to which we ought to commit ourselves?

But whatever the merits of BS’s philosophical and religious conclusions, their approach to reaching them seems to me impeded by the literary, sophistical style of their discourse.

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