What would really be useful would be example of conspiracy theories that were accepted by a fringe group, rejected by the mainstream (for at least a decade, say), and ultimately found to be true. Maybe the COINTELPRO would qualify for this—were some of the targeted groups complaining about FBI targeting them?
Interesting edge case is the whole McCarthy stuff—he was right that there was a quite a bit of communist spying, but he appeared to have no evidence whatsoever for this (and his specific accusations were mostly random). Does accidentally being correct count? Or is this more another case of “reverse stupidity isn’t intelligence”?
Basically, a fringe left-wing group had (mostly) done the job of American institutions when those failed, and revealed a conspiracy to the public. The “commies” were not (just) plotting against the U.S., but protecting it against its own government! That’s wilder than most conspiracy theories.
I’m pretty sure that McCarthy is an example of reverse stupidity. The Soviet Union had plenty of spies in America, just like we had spies in the Soviet Union, but my reading has mostly pointed me towards the hypothesis that McCarthy didn’t have any special knowledge of who the Soviet spies were.
McCarthy was not after spies as in “trained intelligence workers”, he was trying to ferret out a certain subset of his political opponents, whose goals he imagined to be aligned with those of the USSR. Nowdays, of course, most people consider his activities to be anti-American.
McCarthy was being fed info from J. Edgar Hoover, who did have access to the Venona transcripts. I don’t know if he was given the identities of known spies, but he was sent after Hoover’s bureaucratic rivals.
Interesting edge case is the whole McCarthy stuff—he was right that there was a quite a bit of communist spying, but he appeared to have no evidence whatsoever for this (and his specific accusations were mostly random).
He was after communist agents of influence not spies specifically and his method was going after people visibly spreading communist memes.
That link is a glaring example of the intellectual decline of the American right wing. ESR has said so many dumb things! Radical/trend-setting Western intellectuals do not insist that the Western civilization is evil, held up by slave labour and must atone for its sins, etc. simply because they have some particular anti-Western agenda! This is an essential element of Western culture, I’d say—its self-abnegation, self-doubt, applying higher standards to itself, all that ostensibly “bleak”/”nihilistic”/”ultra-puritan” stuff. We have that relentless drive to fight a war with ourselves. What other culture can mourn and lament its flaws like ours? We even learned to, um, get off on it—in a way.
This is what has been present in it since Christianity’s inception: the radicalism, the urge to “immanentize the eschaton”, the denial of local boundaries and ties in favor of a global Logos which all would live under and by. A certain left-wing tendency is in our figurative (and maybe literal) blood.
McCarthy looks rather comical in this regard; he saw the tip of the iceberg, guessed that there must be more under the water, but overlooked the fact that R’lyeh itself is beneath and his grandparents were fish-people. (All of it for the better, in my honest opinion!)
Radical/trend-setting Western intellectuals do not insist that the Western civilization is evil, held up by slave labour and must atone for its sins, etc. simply because they have some particular anti-Western agenda! This is an essential element of Western culture, I’d say—its self-abnegation, self-doubt, applying higher standards to itself, all that ostensibly “bleak”/”nihilistic”/”ultra-puritan” stuff.
True, however, Eric’s point was about why this particular element of Western civilization was elevated above all others over that past century.
That explanation is literally impossible. The memes I refer to are Clergy (or Brahmin as Moldbug calls them) memes first and foremost, and the Clergy is a decentralized, informal, horizontal network that operates totally in the open and has deep roots in the West but almost none in Russia. See: The Open Conspiracy by H.G. Wells. See: Andrew Carnegie, the Carnegie Foundation and the Dodd Report. On the phenomena mentioned above, see: the Frankfurt School. (will add links later, too lazy)
Philosophy? Universalist. “Serious” literature? Universalist. Social sciences departments? Universalist. NGOs and advocacy organizations? Universalist. The Soviet intelligence agencies/KGB looked like rural thugs next to them. Those thugs were rightly seen as rabid and hostile by the Western intelligentsia from WW2 onwards, and it had no way of controlling them, but at no point did they exercise any serious intellectual influence of their own. The dog could hardly control the mutated tail, but the tail did not wag the dog.
What would really be useful would be example of conspiracy theories that were accepted by a fringe group, rejected by the mainstream (for at least a decade, say), and ultimately found to be true. Maybe the COINTELPRO would qualify for this—were some of the targeted groups complaining about FBI targeting them?
Interesting edge case is the whole McCarthy stuff—he was right that there was a quite a bit of communist spying, but he appeared to have no evidence whatsoever for this (and his specific accusations were mostly random). Does accidentally being correct count? Or is this more another case of “reverse stupidity isn’t intelligence”?
Speaking of COINTELPRO...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI
Basically, a fringe left-wing group had (mostly) done the job of American institutions when those failed, and revealed a conspiracy to the public. The “commies” were not (just) plotting against the U.S., but protecting it against its own government! That’s wilder than most conspiracy theories.
I’m pretty sure that McCarthy is an example of reverse stupidity. The Soviet Union had plenty of spies in America, just like we had spies in the Soviet Union, but my reading has mostly pointed me towards the hypothesis that McCarthy didn’t have any special knowledge of who the Soviet spies were.
McCarthy was not after spies as in “trained intelligence workers”, he was trying to ferret out a certain subset of his political opponents, whose goals he imagined to be aligned with those of the USSR. Nowdays, of course, most people consider his activities to be anti-American.
McCarthy was being fed info from J. Edgar Hoover, who did have access to the Venona transcripts. I don’t know if he was given the identities of known spies, but he was sent after Hoover’s bureaucratic rivals.
He was after communist agents of influence not spies specifically and his method was going after people visibly spreading communist memes.
That link is a glaring example of the intellectual decline of the American right wing. ESR has said so many dumb things! Radical/trend-setting Western intellectuals do not insist that the Western civilization is evil, held up by slave labour and must atone for its sins, etc. simply because they have some particular anti-Western agenda! This is an essential element of Western culture, I’d say—its self-abnegation, self-doubt, applying higher standards to itself, all that ostensibly “bleak”/”nihilistic”/”ultra-puritan” stuff. We have that relentless drive to fight a war with ourselves. What other culture can mourn and lament its flaws like ours? We even learned to, um, get off on it—in a way.
This is what has been present in it since Christianity’s inception: the radicalism, the urge to “immanentize the eschaton”, the denial of local boundaries and ties in favor of a global Logos which all would live under and by. A certain left-wing tendency is in our figurative (and maybe literal) blood.
McCarthy looks rather comical in this regard; he saw the tip of the iceberg, guessed that there must be more under the water, but overlooked the fact that R’lyeh itself is beneath and his grandparents were fish-people. (All of it for the better, in my honest opinion!)
True, however, Eric’s point was about why this particular element of Western civilization was elevated above all others over that past century.
That explanation is literally impossible. The memes I refer to are Clergy (or Brahmin as Moldbug calls them) memes first and foremost, and the Clergy is a decentralized, informal, horizontal network that operates totally in the open and has deep roots in the West but almost none in Russia.
See: The Open Conspiracy by H.G. Wells. See: Andrew Carnegie, the Carnegie Foundation and the Dodd Report. On the phenomena mentioned above, see: the Frankfurt School. (will add links later, too lazy)
Philosophy? Universalist. “Serious” literature? Universalist. Social sciences departments? Universalist. NGOs and advocacy organizations? Universalist. The Soviet intelligence agencies/KGB looked like rural thugs next to them. Those thugs were rightly seen as rabid and hostile by the Western intelligentsia from WW2 onwards, and it had no way of controlling them, but at no point did they exercise any serious intellectual influence of their own. The dog could hardly control the mutated tail, but the tail did not wag the dog.