Cthulhu always swims left isn’t an observation that on every single issue society will settle on the left’s preferences, but that the general trend is leftward movement. If you interpreted it as that, the fall of the Soviet Union and the move away from planned economies should be a far more important counterexample.
Before continue I should define how I’m using left and right. I think them real in the sense they are the coalitions that tend to form in under current socioeconomic conditions, when due to the adversarial nature of politics, you compress very complicated preferences into as few dimensions (one) as possible. Principle component analysis makes for a nice metaphor on this.
Back to Cthulhu. As someone who’s preferences can be described as right wing I would be quite happy with returning to 1950s levels of state intervention, welfare and relative economic equality in exchange for that period’s social capital and cultural norms. Controlling for technological progress obviously. Some on the far right of mainstream conservatives might accept the same trade. This isn’t to say I would find it a perfect fit, not by long shot, but it would be a net improvement. I believe most Western far right people would accept this trade, most Western far left people would not accept this trade. And in America at least, centrists would be uncomfortable both with that level of state intervention and the social norms of the 1950s.
Now that we have this claim about revealed preferences, let’s invoke a very simple heuristic. Imagine you have two players playing a zero sum game of politics, they are offered to move the game to the position it had 50 moves ago. One player accepts, the other refuses. Ceteris paribus which one do you think is winning?
The “who would prefer to return 50 years back?” argument is interesting, but I think the meaning of “winning” has to be defined more precisely. Imagine that 50 years ago I was (by whatever metric) ten times as powerful as you, but today I am only three times as powerful than you. Would you describe this situation as your victory?
In some sense, yes, it is an improvement of your relative power. In other sense, no, I am still more powerful. You may be hopeful about the future, because the first derivative seems to work for you. On the other hand, maybe the second derivative works for me; and generally, predicting the future is a tricky business.
But it is interesting to think about how the time dimension is related to politics. I was thinking that maybe it’s the other way round; that “the right” is the side which self-identifies with the past, so in some sense it is losing by definition—if your goal is to be “more like yesterday than like today”, then tautologically today is worse according to this metric than the yesterday was. And there is a strong element of returning to the past in some right-wing movements.
But then I realized that some left-wing movements have this component too. I remember communists emphasising that millenia ago humans lived in perfectly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies (before the surplus value was taken by the evil slavers / feudal lords / capitalists), so when the true communism comes, this ancient harmony will be restored. Similarly, some feminists (maybe just a small minority of them, I don’t know) have stories about how exactly the ancient matriarchal societies were organized, so overthrowing patriarchy would kinda restore this ancient order.
At this moment my working hypothesis is that “returning to the perfect past” is simply an universal human bias, and the main political difference is where exactly is your Golden Age located. Then it would seem that the right wing puts the Golden Age in the more recent past, while the left wing prefers prehistorical societies.
That makes it pretty likely that in its heart, the left is about returning towards our hunter-gatherer instincts and abandoning as much as possible of our disappointing civilization, while the right is about insisting on some specific adaptations to scarcity. Something like what Yvain said, with the connotational objection that the category of danger does not include only zombies, but also criminals or dysfunctional bureaucracies, which are everyday reality for some people. Generally, as we improve economically, we can afford to remove some of the adaptations to scarcity; the trade-offs that are no longer necessary. But sometimes while doing so we fuck up things horribly and the scarcity returns; often in a way that university professors don’t notice, simply because it does not happen to them.
Imagine that 50 years ago I was (by whatever metric) ten times as powerful as you, but today I am only three times as powerful than you. Would you describe this situation as your victory?
I would describe it as me playing very well for the past 50 years and the game going my way.
Cthulhu always swims left isn’t an observation that on every single issue society will settle on the left’s preferences, but that the general trend is leftward
Dropping the “always” might lead to less confusion on this point.
Why does politics compress issues into a single linear dimension?
I suppose it makes sense in a two party system, but why do parliamentary systems with several small parties mainly have parties on the extremes, rather than mainly having parties with orthogonal preferences that could ally with either major party? In principle, a Green party ought not to care much about the left-right access, but in practice it cares very much.
Why does politics compress issues into a single linear dimension?
I don’t know, it might be an artifact of representative systems in the West where the all important thing is getting the majority vote. “Left” vs. “Right” being a strong signal of who your allies tend to be seems to work pretty well descriptively for most people’s political identities and preferences.
A slight nitpick: I wouldn’t describe politics as anything remotely near zero-sum. The actions of the players of a country’s game of politics have very far-reaching effects on the citizens and residents of that country, and in some cases of the residents of the entire world.
The actions of the players definitely do affect the world at large in ways outside the scope of the game, which makes it about as far from zero-sum as it could possibly be. I’m pretty sure that this changes the outcome of your thought experiment dramatically.
That depends on the definition of “left.” What is your definition?
(I am skeptical that “left” is a useful concept.)
Moldbug sometimes seems to define it as Puritan or Protestant more generally. But at other times he seems to say that the two are the same, but not by definition.
In the early 19th century, the Temperance movement was the same people seeking the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Surely this counts as left? A century later it won by having a broader base, but it was still Protestant. Indeed, much of the appeal was as a way to attack Catholic immigrants.
Marijuana and cocaine were banned at about the same time as alcohol. One interpretation was that this was a side effect of the temperance movement. (This is more clear in the case of cocaine, which was a dry run of prohibition; less clear with marijuana, which was banned later.) Another interpretation is that they were race war (just like alcohol). That sounds right-wing, but what is your definition? The prohibition of LSD was much later and seems much more clearly right-wing.
I am talking only of America. I believe that prohibitions elsewhere were imported. If you think America is right-wing, that makes them seem right-wing.
Added: I forgot opium. It was nationally banned with cocaine, but it was banned in SF much earlier, when the Temperance movement was a lot weaker. I think most local Prohibitions were left-wing, but opium in SF might not fit that.
Marijuana and cocaine were banned at about the same time as alcohol. One interpretation was that this was a side effect of the temperance movement. (This is more clear in the case of cocaine, which was a dry run of prohibition; less clear with marijuana, which was banned later.)
I think the ban of Marijuana in 1937 was a win for DuPond business interests. From a right/left perspective of the 19th century that’s difficult to parse as either left or right.
Yes, the commercial aspects probably pushed it over the line despite it not being banned earlier, but the fact that lots of things were banned suggest that there is probably a common cause and that the commercial aspects were only secondary. Whether the common cause is that one group opposed everything or that one group opposed alcohol and moved the Overton window is harder to decide.
If I had to guess, I’d say that as Konkvistador is against democracy and voting in general, he wants voting rights to be denied to everyone, and as such, starting with 51% of the population is a good step in that direction.
starting with 51% of the population is a good step in that direction
Sure, but the process would likely have hysteresis depending on which group you remove first, and “women” doesn’t seem like the best possible choice to me—even “people without a university degree” would likely be better IMO.
Maybe it is because of our instincts that scream at us that every woman is precious (for long-term survival of the tribe), but the males are expendable. Taking the votes away from the expendable males could perhaps get popular support even today, if done properly. The difficult part in dismantling democracy are the votes of women.
(Disclaimer: I am not advocating dismantling democracy by this comment; just describing the technical problems.)
If you stop thinking of democracy as sacred and start seeing letting various groups vote as a utility calculation, one starts looking at questions like how various groups vote, how politicians attempt to appeal to them, and what effect this has on the way the country winds up being governed.
It’s not just a question of whether they vary, it’s whether they vary in a way that systematically correlates with better (or worse) decisions. Also there are Campbell’s law considerations.
I chose those examples in particular because in the United States the movement behind prohibition, making prostitution illegal and expanding the franchise to women was basically one and the same.
I disapprove of voting obviously. I chose it as the example because in the US the same movements argued for making these three things, among others, as they are in the first place.
Drug prohibition laws introduced in the 20th century are a nice counterexample to reactionaries’ claim that Cthulhu only swims left, BTW.
(Edited to replace “always” with “only”—I misremembered that quote.)
Cthulhu always swims left isn’t an observation that on every single issue society will settle on the left’s preferences, but that the general trend is leftward movement. If you interpreted it as that, the fall of the Soviet Union and the move away from planned economies should be a far more important counterexample.
Before continue I should define how I’m using left and right. I think them real in the sense they are the coalitions that tend to form in under current socioeconomic conditions, when due to the adversarial nature of politics, you compress very complicated preferences into as few dimensions (one) as possible. Principle component analysis makes for a nice metaphor on this.
Back to Cthulhu. As someone who’s preferences can be described as right wing I would be quite happy with returning to 1950s levels of state intervention, welfare and relative economic equality in exchange for that period’s social capital and cultural norms. Controlling for technological progress obviously. Some on the far right of mainstream conservatives might accept the same trade. This isn’t to say I would find it a perfect fit, not by long shot, but it would be a net improvement. I believe most Western far right people would accept this trade, most Western far left people would not accept this trade. And in America at least, centrists would be uncomfortable both with that level of state intervention and the social norms of the 1950s.
Now that we have this claim about revealed preferences, let’s invoke a very simple heuristic. Imagine you have two players playing a zero sum game of politics, they are offered to move the game to the position it had 50 moves ago. One player accepts, the other refuses. Ceteris paribus which one do you think is winning?
The “who would prefer to return 50 years back?” argument is interesting, but I think the meaning of “winning” has to be defined more precisely. Imagine that 50 years ago I was (by whatever metric) ten times as powerful as you, but today I am only three times as powerful than you. Would you describe this situation as your victory?
In some sense, yes, it is an improvement of your relative power. In other sense, no, I am still more powerful. You may be hopeful about the future, because the first derivative seems to work for you. On the other hand, maybe the second derivative works for me; and generally, predicting the future is a tricky business.
But it is interesting to think about how the time dimension is related to politics. I was thinking that maybe it’s the other way round; that “the right” is the side which self-identifies with the past, so in some sense it is losing by definition—if your goal is to be “more like yesterday than like today”, then tautologically today is worse according to this metric than the yesterday was. And there is a strong element of returning to the past in some right-wing movements.
But then I realized that some left-wing movements have this component too. I remember communists emphasising that millenia ago humans lived in perfectly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies (before the surplus value was taken by the evil slavers / feudal lords / capitalists), so when the true communism comes, this ancient harmony will be restored. Similarly, some feminists (maybe just a small minority of them, I don’t know) have stories about how exactly the ancient matriarchal societies were organized, so overthrowing patriarchy would kinda restore this ancient order.
At this moment my working hypothesis is that “returning to the perfect past” is simply an universal human bias, and the main political difference is where exactly is your Golden Age located. Then it would seem that the right wing puts the Golden Age in the more recent past, while the left wing prefers prehistorical societies.
That makes it pretty likely that in its heart, the left is about returning towards our hunter-gatherer instincts and abandoning as much as possible of our disappointing civilization, while the right is about insisting on some specific adaptations to scarcity. Something like what Yvain said, with the connotational objection that the category of danger does not include only zombies, but also criminals or dysfunctional bureaucracies, which are everyday reality for some people. Generally, as we improve economically, we can afford to remove some of the adaptations to scarcity; the trade-offs that are no longer necessary. But sometimes while doing so we fuck up things horribly and the scarcity returns; often in a way that university professors don’t notice, simply because it does not happen to them.
I would describe it as me playing very well for the past 50 years and the game going my way.
Dropping the “always” might lead to less confusion on this point.
I only used “Cthulhu always swims left” because that is how army1987 termed it. Moldbug says “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.”
That formulation has the same problem. Like “always swims left”, “only swims left” suggests that every observed movement is leftwards.
Unless there is an implicit distinction between purposeful movement, analogous to swiming, and some drift due to chance.
I doubt most people who read the phrase “Cthulhu only swims left” would pick up on that unspoken distinction, though I could be wrong.
(I’ve corrected it now.)
Why does politics compress issues into a single linear dimension?
I suppose it makes sense in a two party system, but why do parliamentary systems with several small parties mainly have parties on the extremes, rather than mainly having parties with orthogonal preferences that could ally with either major party? In principle, a Green party ought not to care much about the left-right access, but in practice it cares very much.
I don’t know, it might be an artifact of representative systems in the West where the all important thing is getting the majority vote. “Left” vs. “Right” being a strong signal of who your allies tend to be seems to work pretty well descriptively for most people’s political identities and preferences.
A slight nitpick: I wouldn’t describe politics as anything remotely near zero-sum. The actions of the players of a country’s game of politics have very far-reaching effects on the citizens and residents of that country, and in some cases of the residents of the entire world.
The actions of the players definitely do affect the world at large in ways outside the scope of the game, which makes it about as far from zero-sum as it could possibly be. I’m pretty sure that this changes the outcome of your thought experiment dramatically.
That depends on the definition of “left.” What is your definition?
(I am skeptical that “left” is a useful concept.)
Moldbug sometimes seems to define it as Puritan or Protestant more generally. But at other times he seems to say that the two are the same, but not by definition.
In the early 19th century, the Temperance movement was the same people seeking the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Surely this counts as left? A century later it won by having a broader base, but it was still Protestant. Indeed, much of the appeal was as a way to attack Catholic immigrants.
Marijuana and cocaine were banned at about the same time as alcohol. One interpretation was that this was a side effect of the temperance movement. (This is more clear in the case of cocaine, which was a dry run of prohibition; less clear with marijuana, which was banned later.) Another interpretation is that they were race war (just like alcohol). That sounds right-wing, but what is your definition? The prohibition of LSD was much later and seems much more clearly right-wing.
I am talking only of America. I believe that prohibitions elsewhere were imported. If you think America is right-wing, that makes them seem right-wing.
Added: I forgot opium. It was nationally banned with cocaine, but it was banned in SF much earlier, when the Temperance movement was a lot weaker. I think most local Prohibitions were left-wing, but opium in SF might not fit that.
I think the ban of Marijuana in 1937 was a win for DuPond business interests. From a right/left perspective of the 19th century that’s difficult to parse as either left or right.
Yes, the commercial aspects probably pushed it over the line despite it not being banned earlier, but the fact that lots of things were banned suggest that there is probably a common cause and that the commercial aspects were only secondary. Whether the common cause is that one group opposed everything or that one group opposed alcohol and moved the Overton window is harder to decide.
I would consider legalizing drugs, prostitution and taking away women’s votes to be well worth voting for. If I believed in voting that is.
What’s your issue with women’s voting rights?
If I had to guess, I’d say that as Konkvistador is against democracy and voting in general, he wants voting rights to be denied to everyone, and as such, starting with 51% of the population is a good step in that direction.
Am I correct, or is there something more?
Sure, but the process would likely have hysteresis depending on which group you remove first, and “women” doesn’t seem like the best possible choice to me—even “people without a university degree” would likely be better IMO.
Maybe it is because of our instincts that scream at us that every woman is precious (for long-term survival of the tribe), but the males are expendable. Taking the votes away from the expendable males could perhaps get popular support even today, if done properly. The difficult part in dismantling democracy are the votes of women.
(Disclaimer: I am not advocating dismantling democracy by this comment; just describing the technical problems.)
If you stop thinking of democracy as sacred and start seeing letting various groups vote as a utility calculation, one starts looking at questions like how various groups vote, how politicians attempt to appeal to them, and what effect this has on the way the country winds up being governed.
Don’t forget to consider what sorts of political expression are available to those who are not allowed the vote.
Sure, but I’d guess voting patterns vary much more with age, education, and income than with gender.
It’s not just a question of whether they vary, it’s whether they vary in a way that systematically correlates with better (or worse) decisions. Also there are Campbell’s law considerations.
I think my point still stands.
Well, education is subject to Campbell’s law, but I suspect Konkvistador wouldn’t object to raising the voting age, or imposing income requirements.
Another strike against utilitarianism! One person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens.
I chose those examples in particular because in the United States the movement behind prohibition, making prostitution illegal and expanding the franchise to women was basically one and the same.
I disapprove of voting obviously. I chose it as the example because in the US the same movements argued for making these three things, among others, as they are in the first place.