George Orwell’s Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer
I have found this most wonderful (if fairly lengthy) article, and thought you would enjoy having it brought to your attention.
It is so good, I think we should include it among the references in the “Politics is the Mind Killer” wiki page. But, before that, I submit it to you, and ask you: is there anything in this article that would warrant its exclusion from this site? I mean, besides the fact that it is about politics, and written by a notorious Social-democrat (And is that in itself grounds for exclusion?).
Interestingly, Orwell—who can hardly be portrayed as a rabid right-wing zealot—characterizes the intellectual elites of the English-speaking world of his day with these words:
Rather than extolling Orwell’s essay for its applause-lights-inducing qualities, we can ask ourselves—what does this imply about the descendants of these same intellectual elites today, and about the results one would get from applying Orwell’s criteria impartially to the predominant, high-status beliefs of our own day?
After all, the consensus among the respectable mainstream nowadays is that people who shared Orwell’s above-quoted opinion back in the day were dangerous, rabid, delusional, and malevolent extremists. There’s even a popular term of opprobrium for these people (“McCarthyism”). So, what conclusion should be derived from the facts that: (1) everyone will applaud the general principles espoused by Orwell’s essay, and yet (2) Orwell’s own application of these principles to the Anglospheric intellectual elites of his own day led him to a conclusion that places him among these frightful extremists, whom any respectable person nowadays can only abhor?
Now, I’m not writing all this to start a discussion about these controversial historical topics. I’m writing to point out that it’s easy to fall for the warm fuzzies awoken by a superficial, applause-lights-style agreement with Orwell’s general remarks—while at the same time remaining blissfully oblivious of their actual implications on various opinions that are high-status in the society in which one lives, including the modern Western societies. (Especially considering that the Western intellectual elites of today have direct institutional continuity with those whose “dominant form of nationalism [was] Communism,” according to Orwell.)
I needed to re-read your comment twice to understand what you meant, because I got it completely wrong the first time. This is how I understand it now, so I write it clearly for readers like me:
What is the dominant form of nationalism (in Orwell’s very loose sense) today in our society?
Would criticizing it make other people percieve you as one of people considered dangerous delusional extremists?
I abstain from the first question, and the answer to the second one is: yes, and it is kinda scary. (Well, disagreeing with majority on a topic that the majority blindly follows is always scary.)
Your reading is correct, but I would also emphasize one particularly bad failure mode for people reading Orwell’s essay nowadays. Namely, people often read it and imagine crude and overt expressions of “nationalism” (in Orwell’s sense) that were common in his own day, and are still common outside of the Western world. So the most subtle and insightful points of the essay are likely to go right over their heads.
More concretely, how many people will stop and think about this part of the essay (bold emphasis mine):
Now, Orwell had in mind here primarily the Communist Russophile intellectuals of his own day, whose allegiance was transferred to a specific and readily identifiable foreign state and ideology. Nowadays, things are rarely so crude and obvious, but it seems to me that essentially the same phenomenon is still rampant—except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)
(Now that I’ve written this, I remember a more recent writer who once wrote an essay that reads practically like an update of Orwell’s above cited paragraph for our time. Yet his very name is associated with such unseemly controversies that I’d have to get into long and bothersome disclaimers about where exactly my agreement with him ends, so I’d rather not get into it. This latter fact, of course, is just another reminder of how rampant the “nationalist” passions are in the respectable public discourse nowadays.)
That’s very easy to imagine as a concept… but are you really making a falsifiable claim that Western intelligentsia typically does all that right now? “Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct.”? I hardly recall seeing this kind of sentiment expressed by modern authors with any frequency*; if they have do have partisan feelings for some group (e.g. articles by straight liberal people in favor of gay marriage), they’re usually more circumspect—and more sane (as in, less doublethink & vulgar use of unspoken assumptions) - about it. Maybe you and me just read the same words differently.
I know you’re likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual “respectable” authors in such context, but… any examples? Please? (I’d like some where such association with a distantly-viewed group is more or less explicit, of course, and I’m also curious to see if you feel that people renowned as cynics and skeptics fall prey to such sentiment.)
-* For “Opponents of evil regime X”, see the ongoing coverage of the “Arab Spring” (yes, the naming does display a little partisan bias); do the overwhelming majority of publications imply that 100% of the rebels commit no atrocities, have exclusively noble motivations and are of good moral character, share a lot of priors with Western liberals, etc? If so, I haven’t noticed it; in fact, the most partisan pro-uprising source so far has arguably been Al-Jazeera, not e.g. Huffington Post or Guardian.
They won’t make that statement explicitly, but they will accuse people who point out specific cases where said group isn’t virtuous or is doing something wrong of racism/sexism/homophobia/Islamophobia/victim bashing.
Yup, but that’s mostly unfalsifiable; people with different values can find different things unacceptably racist/*phobic/whatever. And they aren’t really hiding the fact that such accusations are just part of ideological warfare, or that they are partisan on those issues.
The point is that they’re using these charges to avoid rationally confronting their opponents’ arguments.
Uh-huh. But there’s a debate on truth-seeking vs. avoiding damage to society about this sort of thing even here on LW, as you know. Also, are there that many articles that only counter a listing of [favoured group]’s flaws with “That’s *-ist!”? At the very least and the worst level of argument commonly found, the writers try to make it look like the group’s virtues or just its “normality” to ordinary Western folks outweigh the criticism. I’m drawing on my impressions of The Guardian (which I read sporadically to see what British intelligentsia is up to), specifically of its CIF section.
Well, one historical example is the reaction to the Moynihan Report. It’s by no means the only example, but it’s the one where the people dismissing the report as racist and “victim bashing” probably did the most damage to society.
It seems very unfortunate to me that the concept of “Blaming the victim” has been founded upon such an ill-advised swipe at that report. Certainly such a phenomenon is painfully apparent all the time in daily life and politics, yet Moynihan’s intentions to me seem neither aggressive or very patronizing, nor even fuelled by conservative ideology, even if it could end up as ammunition for an unscurpulous ideologist. (he was in the Kennedy administration, so he might well have been a liberal technocrat)
Now this is pure conjencture and indeed fantasy on my part, but I guess that Ryan might’ve been motivated by the “Hostile media effect”, assuming that the report was a nefarious reactionary ploy and missing even the fact that Moynihan places nearly all the blame for the cultural dysfunctions of the black community squarely upon white oppression! (Hardly thought of as a right-wing thought pattern.)
I’m not suggesting that such an accusation of American culture and whites’ old behavior towards blacks must conversely be left-wing silliness; the logic of Moynihan’s explanation seems sound enough to me—it might be a cliche, but it’s probably true. (But then, I believe that Noam Chomsky is frequently spot-on and somewhat of an authority—what else is to be expected of me.)
Wow. That’s actually a stunningly interesting report. The conflict caused is also very interesting: one could also argue that the report itself, coming out at such a time, could have done more damage to society than its obfuscation did. The opponents of the Civil Rights movement would, I think, have weaponized it and used it to blame the Blacks entirely for their own problems, not to say they didn’t have partial responsibility, of course.
My thoughts exactly! Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists. And most of the radical Right do conspiciously seek to absolve traditional society of whatever stripe they prefer of absolutely any moral guilt. Back to the report in question, it seems well-founded in asserting that the black community had some faulty traditions and regressive ways of raising its new generations (as, from a modern perspective, might some other communities). However, it doesn’t outright deny the economic angle of the problem, nor, especially, does it paint a picture of fundamental hostility between the races, yet it is undoubtedly used to “support” such a picture even now by the real racists!
I wonder if Moynihan himself feared that key the message he apparently tried to send—“White people, in view of their historical fortune, have a duty to help struggling minorities out in an intelligent way, even if it might hurt some feelings in the short run when some structural elements of society need to be altered”—would be co-opted by some unsympathetic fucks to “prove” that n**rs are culturally inferior and should be subjugated by the “superior” races.
Why does right wing extremism scare you so much more than left wing extremism when the former is utterly despised as the definition of evil by most Westerners while the latter is only ever lukewarmly condemned?
Do extreme right wingers have some particular super power that I’m not aware of? The right wing are the guys who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad and if you listen to Moldbug for a century before that too. I need some actual evidence that I should worry about them getting power anywhere in the West without being bombed into the stone age by the US five minutes later (bombing European right wing extremists, especially racist ones is the stuff of victory, moral superiority and war fantasies for them—check out American video games, adventure novels and action movie villains), than say of me personally being struck by lightning when I’m walking my dog on a rainy Saturday evening.
Reading some of your comments I can’t shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?
Sort of yes! I’ve always been a little terrified of the power of naked, unashamed technocracy, of either despotic or Randian aspect. Even the more ruthless bits of Moldbug’s (rather comfortable and watered-down) technocratic fascism are, I fear, hardly a glimpse of what’s to come, if the “rationality” of geeks and engineers, finally free from either today’s humanist quasi-theocracy and the sober bounds of old-time coonservatism, gets free rein. Perhaps many here on LW, especially non-neurotypical people (who I tend to sympathize with a lot, but also be wary of if their condition includes any change in empathy) would be tempted by such a Ubermensch thing. Think of a hybrid of Speer, Eichmann and a weak UFAI and you’ll understand how this nightmare of mine goes.
(I’m actually integrating a sinister-yet-rationalist one world government based on these fears in my science fantasy novel—instead of a generic villainous empire I started out with—except that in my story it was formed by voices of moderation in high places after the Axis victory in WW2 and the ensuing cold war, not as the radical elitist movement that I can phantom it as in the real world.)
“Naked, unashamed technocracy” strikes me as much more similar to the position advocated by the left (ETA: especially the socialist left) then the right.
Oh, it’s advocated by the left, alright (damn you language), but e.g. Stalinism was much less that and much more feudalism than Westerners commonly assume; it was quite the underground struggle, and Stalin himself (even without supposing any conspiracy) fell to it, as everyone around was either genuinely too afraid of disrupting him the morning he had his heart attack/whatever it was, or consciously decided to abandon him.
My point is, if you scratch a Stalinist you’re likely to find a barbarian; those smart, brave and virtuous alt-right-wingers strike me as the only sort of people who could potentially succeed in truly implementing such a regime.
That is a very interesting concept! I’d love to read more about it, if you are writing in English and have any drafts you would like someone to read or will eventually publish, please make a post on LW!
SYNOPSIS:
The novel’s background is that Nazi and Japanese research into the nature of reality in an attempt to access “magic” or create “ontotechnological weapons” (credit for the word “Ontotechnology” goes to EY) pretty much broke the self-sealing “reality bubble” of Earth, placed there by an interdimensional supercivilization fighting its own civil war for the Universe itself. That supercivilization’s factions are perceived as “Angels” and “Demons”; they have made themselves into ontologically basic mental entities and the former are trying to impose absolute objective morality upon the Universe (which IS absolutely good and benign for any species that comes within its influence) while the latter are ruthless anarchists and opppose any rules at all, especially deontological ones.
As humans were predicted to have unusually strong reality-warping potential, Earth was sealed away in a local ceasefire that forbade both recruiting from it. After the “bubble” began to tear, the “demons”, acting without any hierarchy, just spontaneously invaded, making some people into their playthings, dragging others away for use as psychic slave-soldiers and helping start WW3 in the ongoing panic. As Japan and the Reich, blaming each other, were preparing to obliterate the remnants of civilization, powerful technocratic elements on both sides independently launched coups, came to an agreement and instated a new world order that was essentially a megacorporation (I thought of this before reading any Moldbug). It shaped humanity into a great and complex hierarchy, where daily strife and the fullfillment of urges by the population would accumulate the “psychic” reality-warping energies in huge resonators to drain every drop of them, including from people gifted enough to become “mages”.
The pooled energy was used to assist in brainwashing the masses, as a shield to keep rampaging demons away from the major arcologies, and to lash out at the barren and twisted Wastelands, where barbaric, Nietzchean sorcerer-cults now contended with each other and the infernal hordes. At the same time, there was a divine intervention as well. The “angels”, before being driven out of our meta-region of the Universe by the disaster, took volunteers with especially strong psychic potential and moral fibre with them to fight in the endless war, while for all the other humans whom they found worthy—about 5-10% of the population after a century of life under brutal totalitarian regimes—they created a small utopian realm with impenetrable defenses near the North Pole. Founded upon some weird rules, restrictions and gifts, it’s essentially going to be anime-like in my description. You know, heartbreakingly beautiful vistas, surreal technology like dragon AIs, ornithopters and crystal exoskeletons, an elaborate system of universities, guilds and knightly orders for everyone’s talents to flourish, everything is always romantic, etc.
However, it comes at a price, as the trope demands; the ruling council is allowed to use utilitarian logic for hard decisions, and what they’re going to do with it is my main plotline. The utopian culture sends agents Outside to help people and thwart the bad guys’ attempts to penetrate their barrier or otherwise harm them, like Banks’ Contact and Special Circumstances. And they support a network of resistance cells in the utilitarian megacorp’s arcologies. Think like Al-Quaeda, but somewhat sympathetic and with Gnostic mysticism. The protagonist is a young soldier/technician in the Resistance, who starts out depressed, demotivated and Shinji-like (write what you know!); he’s hopelessly in love with a female agent of the Utopia that’s working with his cell on something top-secret. In the beginning, the cell is wiped out by a State Security raid and the agent is taken prisoner, but not before she implants the mortally injured protagonist with her hyper-advanced drone, making him into a superpowered zombie cyborg. Stumbling away from the wreckage, he meets up with a hacker from the arcology—who’s part of a subculture stealing psychic energy and addicted to it—and that hacker’s tsundere sister, a promising social engineer/spin doctor/brainwasher who’s devoted to the megacorp at first but slowly agrees to become a double agent. Together they unveil a conspiracy involving a weird urban legend, said to be a memetic virus called the “Invisible Dawn”—which is the title of the novel.
Whew.
Unfortunately for you, I’m writing in Russian, as attempting something novel-length in English would’ve at this point only become a drain of my mental energy; I’ll need another decade of practice before I can use it as easily as Russian.
Having beliefs that correspond to reality?
You would also describe yourself as having beliefs that correspond to reality, but neither you nor me nor the general public would claim that you’re some kind of extremist on account, say, of your posts here; you look like a typical secularist conservative/libertarian type to me. While we would clearly disagree about many of each other’s values or instrumental decisions, we definitely wouldn’t believe that the other is a horrible enemy of civilization.
OK, I’ll try to give a current example, with the caveat that I’m giving it purely for illustrative purposes, not to start unwelcome politically charged discussions.
Observe the ongoing controversy over the recent shooting in Florida. Now, I’m not going to speculate on the details of the case itself at all—for the sake of the argument, you can assume any version of the events you wish, and what I’ll say will still apply.
Whatever may have actually occurred in this case, there is no doubt that: (1) conclusive evidence of what really happened is still lacking, and even less evidence was available when the controversy erupted some weeks ago, and yet (2) numerous respectable voices of the mainstream opinion rushed to express passionate condemnation of the shooter that went far beyond anything that could be reasonably inferred from the evidence, often going even beyond mere bias and spin into outright lies and fabrication. Even if, hypothetically, some evidence eventually emerges showing that their general conclusion was right, and the shooter really did something as nasty as they believe, it is simply undeniable that they have gone far beyond anything that might be justified given the presently available knowledge. (And it’s easy to find plenty of examples of vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty in their reactions.)
Now, how to explain these reactions? Clearly, some people’s reactions are easily explained with just plain “nationalism” in Orwell’s sense, since they share their own identity with the person who got killed. But what about those who have no such connection, which certainly includes the majority of the respectable opinion that got inflamed with such passionate intensity? It seems to me like a clear-cut case of “transferred nationalism” in Orwell’s sense.
(Again, I really hate to introduce any discussions of controversial daily politics on LW. I’m giving an example like this one only because I was specifically asked to do so, and I don’t intend to follow up with any specific discussion of the case. I’m interested in it only as a case study for examining the mechanisms of public opinion demonstrated in it.)
Okay, thanks. However, based on what I know of the US, nearly any murder or other serious incident caught in the news where the races of the victim and the accused were different would practically always provoke a hysterical reaction wracked with all the usual American neuroses. There’s nothing exceptionally bad about this case’s handling that hasn’t been true for a very long while IMO.
(Well, except for pre-Civil War times, when things might have been a little less convoulted but positively flaunted the heuristics we now find disgusting; the mainstream wouldn’t stop for a moment before assigning guilt based on how non-Anglo-Saxon* a participant was, and the radical anti-racists would jump to the opposite conclusion, often in a patronizing “Uncle Tom” way. Can’t point to a specific case from which I got this picture, and you might be justified in calling it oversimplified, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not just a modern political caricature of the bad old times.)
-* Were the Southern whites also considered Anglo-Saxon in the broad sense? If no, what word did they use to separate themselves and e.g. the Irish/Eastern European immigrants or other “inferior” whites?
There is plenty of counter evidence to this.
Even some stuff that would seem to have all the building blocks for media exposure and revenue generation, like say the recent case of a home invasion where a young man sexually assaults and kills a 85 year old woman and beats her husband to the point of him being hospitalized.
Huh? So… what do you think makes the difference between this case and the ones that failed to detonate? If your answer looks too mind-killing to you, please PM me.
Man bites dog partially explains it.
Well, I am giving it as an example of standard and long-standing attitudes of the sort that Orwell described as “transferred nationalism,” not some novel phenomenon.
Well, how about, say, Germany or Canada? The racial issues are obviously less charged here, and not due to their especial monoethnicity - and it appears to me from outside view that while people there might be unimaginably biased on other issues, they are at least more polite, less prone to contagnious hysteria and just have a higher sanity waterline as communities.
I think Steve Sailer does a good job of analysing this.
Sorry, but I think this is too partisan and arational (has Sailer even tried to imagine what his “enemies” think and believe before professing that they are basically Stalin and O’Brien?) to quote on LW. You could’ve just linked to the post.
Good point, fixed the post.
The fact that Zimmerman stinks so badly at his self-appointed job of “neighborhood watch captain,” it led him to kill an innocent man. (If you think Martin was actually committing a crime, I can probably give you 2-to-1 odds.) In the absence of social condemnation, Zimmerman might continue carrying a gun in pursuit of his hobby. The media has put itself in charge of condemnation. Since some of their leaders seem very stupid, we would expect them to make mistakes. (In fact, you could argue they stink at this job and shouldn’t be in charge of condemnation at all.)
The fact that Florida law might allow two men to “stand their ground” and escalate the use of force until someone dies also seems relevant. If it actually happened then Florida voters should know. But I don’t think this played more than a small role in the media’s actions, because they seem too stupid on the whole to make decisions based on policy concerns.
You are aware that according to the best theory based on public available evidence Zimmerman didn’t shoot Martin until the latter was beating his head on the pavement? Also in that kind of situation “stand your ground” laws aren’t all that relevant since there is no way to retreat.
Edit: Also, your “media incompetence” theory doesn’t explain why all the mistakes went in the same direction.
By saying “incompetence” you make it sound like I think the media wants to create accurate beliefs about reality, but fails due to other factors. This seems as silly as thinking the human brain evolved to get the right answer, in general, but has all these extraneous biases mucking it up. I thought I explained how I see the media’s motives.
I don’t understand what you mean. Are you assuming that beating someone’s head on the pavement would count as a crime? Because like I said, Trayvon Martin had a perfect right under Florida law to stand his ground if the strange man with the gun genuinely seemed threatening.
Why not? All their mistakes seemed to go in one direction back when Chris T.N.O. Matthews was saying Al Gore “would lick the bathroom floor” to be President. But I explain that as the result of personal dislike combined with a tribal sense of offense at Bill Clinton’s actions, not a bias against Democrats. Why on Earth would you not expect idiots like that to fly off the handle at the death of an innocent child?
I’d like to mention that depending on the situation and the regime in question people might attach their nationalism to the regime itself (denying its evils) rather than to its opponents.
Heh, of course. I see it all the time in Russian right-of-center publications. But wasn’t the blame here being placed upon stereotypical liberal-minded people? I don’t see any liberals gushing about how unfairly e.g. Fidel Castro is being treated, or how the Viet Cong were all righteous and noble freedom fighters who only wanted peace and treated enemies with respect (of course, most people—including me—are more sympathetic to them than the American soldiers when talking about the Vietnam war, but that’s to be expected given the vast objective differences in the combatants’ situations).
Well they certainly exist, expecially in Hollywood.
Well, those people certainly don’t make their living by writing or abstract thinking. I meant liberal/moderate leftist journalists, professional writers, political experts, etc. Celebrities known to be conservative also often say misguided ideological things, except that there’s less of them in America because conservatives there typically stay away from the entertainment industry (both due to natural predisposition and active self-segregation, I’d guess).*
(In other countries the political divide looks less sharp in general, and proeminent people tend to express their political views more subtly too.)
- I think it was pretty silly of Moldbug to spin a theory of how everybody-who’s-anybody is carrying the “progressivism” meme in America because it’s supposedly better adapted; it’s clear that there’s simple Hanson-style signaling at work in Hollywood and elsewhere; Moldbug’s assertion that academia sets the intellectual fashion might bear closer scrutiny, but clearly most people (non-intellectuals) don’t give a rat’s ass about the contents* of any fashion they’re following! They believe-in-belief that they do, of course, but e.g. the people of the US entertainment industry, AFAIK, went from cautiously admiring the Soviet Union to considering it a miserable dump sometime around the early 80s, so they clearly aren’t faithful adepts of “progressivism”. Also, consider all the psychodrama after 9/11.
Forgive my ignorance, but what’s that?
The belief that people behave certain ways because it signals something about their thought process, without actually thinking that way. I.e. politicians expressing outrage to signal, not because they are actually outraged. Hanson thinks this type of insincere signaling explains a lot of social behavior, much more than conventional wisdom would suggest.
Oh! We have this thing in TV Tropes! We call it a Straw Hypocrite! Indeed, it’s a hypothesis always worth assuming, but I don’t see how much use it can have except in hindsight, I mean how would one go about predicting someone else’s genuine emotional state? It’s much easier to predict the emotional state they will allow themselves to show, than it is to try to divine what’s going in in that brain of theirs! Not to mention, they probably aren’t even actually very clear on what they feel or what they think, at all. In extreme cases, they may have less predictive ability on the topic of their inner workings than an external observer! Not to mention the remarkably ironic occasions where people believe they are “faking” feelings that they actually have and are in denial of!
Pinkie Pie mode, eh?
Pinkie Pie mode is my default mode, I just try to subdue it when I’m on the Internet, but sometimes I get lazy...
By the way, here in Russia it is mostly reactionary/nationalist/authoritarian types that express disapproval at any suggestion of regime change, either external or internal, in places like Cuba. It seemingly doesn’t matter much to them what kind of dictatorship it is, as long as it continues to exist and spite the 1st world nations. (Yes, I’m biased as hell against them.)
That doesn’t surprise me in the least.
You mean to say Russia isn’t 1st world? When was there a 1st and 2nd world in the first place? I thought “third world” was a reference to a “third party”, not an attempt to actually order parts of the world in the shape of some list. For one thing, that would be rather insulting for whoever is the 2nd world, wouldn’t you agree?
1st World—Capitalists
2d World—Communists
3rd World—The places where puppet games were played (particularly former colonies).
I’d say… antifascism?
In Europe anti-fascists basically are fascists, at least when it comes to their tactics and their relationship to the authorities who often look the other way while they do their thing (which is the use of violence and extortion to attack right wing organizations and individuals known to support them).
Note: Possibly Mindkilling
In Ireland, antifa is pretty small, but seems to be closely associated with radical republicanism—which has a specific meaning in Irish politics: Sinn Féin and other more millitant nationalist groups, generally left-leaning (or appearing to be to gain popular working-class approval) and often anti-British.
This leads to the odd situation where antifa is closely correlated with nationalism.
From a communications clarity point of view, I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-right ideology, in the same way that I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-left ideology. Using the far-right failure mode label for those on the far left confuses this distinction.
To me, the defining feature of fascism (or communism) is not use of private, politically motivated violence with the tolerance of the authorities. That’s bad, but it’s not the reasons that I think fascism is bad.
It’s similar to the problem of saying that Nazism is bad because it is socialist (“National Socialism” in the name). Nazism is bad, and socialism (as those speakers intend the term) is bad, but Nazism != socialism.
And what are those reasons? Since I really don’t see the distinction you’re trying to make.
To speak more carefully—violence for the purpose of influencing the “center of mass” of political opinion in a country, when the government is not uniformly in favor of the political position of those executing the violence—is not the same thing as fascism. More colloquially, tactics similar to voter intimidation have been used by fascists, but not only fascists.
My main point was that an ideological label that applies to both FARC and AUC is not a particularly informative label. If fascism is restricted to the usage I suggested, then it is more informative than that.
You didn’t answer my question. Let me state it more explicitly. What do you mean by “fascism”?
Fascists seem to believe that there once was a society that lived perfectly. Some of us can become these “Ideal Men” if we are spiritually pure enough (or maybe we can only set things up so that our descendents can be this way). Further, the importance of this spiritual purity justifies any violence in service of reaching this goal.
Fascists are wrong because the imagined past never occurred (like the country song that complains that Coke is a slang shortening for Cocaine—as if there was ever a time when Coke was not a reference to Cocaine).
Communists have the same belief in an “Ideal Man,” but they think that no one has ever lived that way. With sufficient mental purity, we might be able to become “Ideal” (again, we might only be able to cause this for our descendents). Once we are all ideal, we will be able distribute resources “fairly” and avoid the social problems we face today. Again, achieving that ideal justifies any violence.
Communists are wrong because the existence of scarcity guarantees that schemes of wealth distribution cannot solve every social problem.
Transhumanist look forward, not backwards. But they don’t say that all social problems will go away. Only that technology will make us so rich that all our current problems will be gone. There’s the joke of the person revived from suspended animation in the distant future who asks if there was still poverty, disease, hunger, wars or crime and is told that no, those problems were solved long ago. Then he asks, then why doess everybody seem so nervous? “Well, you see—we have REAL problems.”
Who do you have in mind? ETA?
There’s no such thing as being “basically” fascists: either you are a fascist or you aren’t. Totalitarian, violent extremists, maybe. But that’s a strange “general truth” you’re stating here. The anti-fascists I know (basically, everyone) are radically averse to violence. In fact, being anti-fascist is the one single thing everyone agrees on, even the parties branded as “fascist” by everyone else! Is this violence the case in your country, or are you generalizing from fringe groups?
That’s because in today’s Europe anti-facism is an applause light not an ideology.
Unless you mean it’s become such a widespread ideology that it’s isometric to a tautology in the minds of the public, I don’t see what you mean.
I mean someone calling themselves “anti-facist” doesn’t have any semantic content.
It sure does. It’s vague and nebulous, because “fascism” itself is vague and nebulous by design, but usually it boils down to:
Against wars of conquest and even against gunboat diplomacy.
Against intellectual censorship and police states, for freedom of expression.
In favour of liberal democracy.
In favour of the right of all to a fair trial, against death penalty.
In favour of the right to unionise, to make strikes, to pacific and non-violent demonstrations.
If anyone disagrees with any of these points, they had better not say it out loud, regardless of what they actually end up doing.
Unless, of course, the people you’re censoring are themselves fascist or can be accused of facism or “hate speech” then it’s ok.
Well, it could look like hypocrisy if you fail to understand that the points I oulined aren’t principles or goals in and of themsleves. They are simply measures taken to avoid the rebirth of fascism or anything like it, mere means to an end. The top priority remains anti-fascism in and of itself, and the repression of anything that could promote it, looks like it could promote it, or could be made to look like it could promote it. Hence why Mein Kampf is banned, and people in Belgium have gone to prison for reading The Protocols of the Sages of Zion in the subway. Really, it all boils down to Hitler: bad in mainland Europe, and Civil War: bad in Spain (which is probably why they abhor violent methods so much).
Obviously the dilemma anti-fascism faces is the danger of becoming so repressive in its efforts to stop fascism from raising again that it creates a new totalitarianism of its own, but so far they seem to be pulling along fine.
...
So for you and your friends, freedom of expression doesn’t extend to letting people say things you don’t like, and it isn’t censorship if you stop them doing it.
Certainly not: they are allowed to say them, the same way they’re allowed to say, for example, that they’re sexually attracted to small children: sharing this information about their state of mind will brand them as dangerous, repulsive, and immoral, they will be subject to suspicion and strong scrutiny, people will be wary of letting power in their hands, of associating with them in public… but no-one would tell them to shut up. In fact, people would want them to speak up, so that they can be identified and tagged.
So, we’re fully in favour of letting them say things we don’t like, we’re actually enthusiastically in favour of them saying them. When I say “they had better not say it out loud”, I mean that it would not be in their best interests to signal that state of mind, and that they would, as a matter of pure self-interest, censor themselves, without any input from us, and to our great regret.
For a moment I was going to say that I had misinterpreted you, but on reflection, I don’t think I did at all.
You just compared being against your favoured constellation of political ideas to child molesting, and called those who are against them dangerous, repulsive, and immoral. You want them subject to suspicion and strong scrutiny; they must be identified and tagged. Of course, you’re not going to personally suppress them, but—nudge nudge, wink wink—they’d better take care if they know what’s good for them, eh?
Now, imagine someone had read only that comment, but not its ancestors. What might they conjecture that this constellation of political ideas might be?
The manifest destiny of the Aryan race? Missionary Christianity? The white man’s burden of ruling the lesser peoples? Pan-Islamism? No, “liberal democracy”. (That was just the third of your five bullet points, but “liberal democracy” includes the other four already.)
BTW, have you come across Mencius Moldbug?
I’m not nudging, I’m not winking, and I’m not jocular or joyous: I’m dead serious, and state this as a matter of fact. Not as a threat or a warning, but as a statement of common sense. In fact, I like it better when they do not show this much common sense, so we can discuss their ideas in the open, and expose them for what they are.
I chose paedophilia (not child molesting, I never said anything about actually having ever laid a hand on an actual child) because it’s something people get panicky about on a gut level, but is contingent to the local region of space and time one occupies. You may replace it with “racism”, “military expansionism/imperialism”, “support for the Death Penalty”, “support for banning guns”, “support for Cryonics and/or Transhumanism”, or “support for gay marriage”, depending on the social environment you’re moving in.
I have. I am fairly unimpressed. Some interesting, daring, and refreshing new ideas, but I don’t know if it’s “rehearsing arguments”, “one argument against a thousand”, and so on and so forth, but I find his arguments un-satisfactory, ultimately.
I find it telling that you conflate all of these and put them on the same level. In particular, you seem to be confused as to what missionary Christianity and Pan-islamism entail, respectively, by themselves.
A statement of “common sense” that they will be seen as dangerous, repulsive, and immoral, and all the rest. If not by you, and not by them, then by whom?
I wish people who use this expression would go on to say what it tells them.
Those were just some examples of ideologies that have taken this attitude to their opponents. (Ok, maybe not all manifestations of missionary Christianity deserve to be in that list; consider it replaced by Stalinism or the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)
For “liberal democracy” to take that attitude doesn’t sound very liberal.
Please see here.
I don’t have access to the link. Is it an unpublished draft?
Er, yes, I have turned it into a draft at the behest of some readers who told me to reformat it in a way that would make it a proper top-level post, rather than a mere recapitulation/contextualization of the discussion so far. I’ll warn you as soon as it’s done.
If your regret over the consequences of punishing them for expressing their actual state is great enough, you might consider not punishing them. Conversely, if after considering it you decide to continue to punish them, you might want to calibrate your estimate of your regret more precisely.
No, no, I regret that they won’t speak up so we can’t identify them, I don’t regret the treatment they are given once they are identified. This is especially annoying when they start to act out on the opposites of these ideas as policies without announcing themselves, and in fact vehemently denying any type of association with the typical opponents of those ideas. It makes working to stop them harder.
You seem to have a fundamental confusion between “person is going to be punished for expressing beliefs outisde the Overton Window”, and “person is going to suffer negative consequences once it is publically known that they have beliefs outside the Overton Window”. The first would be institutionally enforced censorship, and wrong. The second would be simple social dynamics at work, and inevitable. If you can’t tell the difference, I suggest you live in a country like the one where I was born, where the very circulation of certain ideas can be paid with your own life.
Tapping out.
Please see here. This is not a fight, and I’m not trying to knock you out.
That link doesn’t work for me.
Do you have a preferred expression for people indicating that they are no longer interested in discussing a particular subject with you?
How about “I have lost interest in closing this discussion”, or even not answering at all? Anyway, that’s not what you indicated, you indicated that I had “won”, somehow. I’m not interested in winning arguments, I’m interested in finding out the truth. “(You have satisfactorily proven that) my (implcit) accusations were precipitated/groundless/undeserved. I now see where you are coming from (even though I disagree with your conclusions).” would have been my preferred outcome, “You are clearly insane and not worth talking to” would have been my least preferred.
Now, me, Richard and Nier have gone into a tangent where I have shown some very poor grasp of both social and rational skills, and allowed myself to snap at my comrades in an entirely unseemly manner, under externally-induced stress and time pressures, that I should have known better than to let get the better of me. The posts I have fathered have shamed me, but I shall keep them up as an example of what not to do.
I’ll try here to adress their points more intelligently, pertinently, and courteously.
This statement got me very very angry. The conclusion you jumped to, Richard, is an understandable extrapolation, but I would have liked it if you had been more cautious about embracing it, because I have said nothing of the sort. My guess is that you are committing the “Politics is the Mind-Killer” mistake of trying to fit me into preexisting categories, groups, and roles, in your narrative. You should know, by now, that trying to do that with a Less Wronger is like trying to catch water, except water doesn’t get pissed off. Abstain from doing that in the future.
Now, I don’t know about my “friends” (I’ll ask them… both of them… when I get the chance, though I think they’ll agree with what I’m going to argue), but I for one think that people should be allowed to say what they want, regardless of whether I like or I don’t like it. If there is any merit to their ideas, sharing them with the public will represent an improvement to the pool of collective knowledge. If there isn’t, having them submitted to be de-constructed and exposed as worthless is also an improvement.
At least, that’s my kind, idealistic, forgiving, past self. After having spent some time with /b/tards and goons, I have found that there is such a thing as a harmful, dangerous, or cruel abuse of freedom of speech.:
There is the promotion of the discriminating of minorities.
There is the promotion of violence.
There is the promotion of sexual and psychological abuse, and of the oppression of one gender by another, of one age group by another.
There is the promotion of one group using lethal force on another to, well, force them to undertake certain actions, or cede certain advantages, for the sake of the group that is most effective in its use of violence.
There is the promotion of totalitarian regimes.
There is the systematic aggression by certain self-appointed standard enforcers, against any opinions that go enough outside the mainstream that they attract any attention at all. (Hypocrisy? Wait up!)
There is the promotion of not giving a fair trial to people (lynching, purging, and so on), mostly by presenting their guilt as being beyond doubt (regardless of evidence), and that what they did was so heinous they must be punished as soon as possible, as harshly as possible, without getting a chance to defend themselves.
With some correlation to the last one, there is the promotion of the idea that said extremely heinous criminals should not even have the right to live on.
There is the promotion of the idea that strikes are an illegitimate form of protest, heck, that any form of protest at all in the workplace is illegitimate, save for job-quitting, if that.
Analogically, that protests against the actions of the government are illegitimate, no matter how non-violent.
I’ll leave the question of how these (ab?)uses of freedom of expression should be dealt with, and whether there should be consequences for those who make use of their freedom in such a way, and what those consequences should be, as an exercise to the reader.
When I said
I had this sort of guy in mind. A fascist in a liberal democracy, he keeps his mouth shut (well, at least he tries, but his burning, endless love for the kind Fuhrer cannot be contained), and bides his time. Because he fears… what? In what I conceive of liberal democracy, he’d have the right to hold on to his ideas, even to speak them out. As long as he doesn’t actively advocate finishing the Holocaust or oppressing black people or that kind of thing, the Law would leave him alone. He would be allowed to discuss his anti-democratic, fascist opinions in public places and media… and have them be ridiculed and soundly refuted. His immediate environment may or may not care: they may very well file him off as an inoffensive cuckoo (he’s anything but: he almost gunned the protagonists down, and then blew up a theatre at their behest… long story). He’s poor, unambitious. incompetent, and keeps to himself. No-one will bother to obstruct him or get in his way.
Now suppose that someone who was in favour of wars of conquest, in favour of strict government censorship, in favour of ideological totalitarianism and one-party rule, in favour of lynchings, trial by ordeal, “adminsitrative detainment”, summary execution, extermination camps, prohibition of any form of protest in the workplace or against the government… suppose that this someone was smart, rich, capable, pragmatic, competent, and ambitious. Suppose that, and I know this is hard, given the previous attributes, suppose that they publicly announced holding this set of beliefs.
Would you not expect them to meet with a spontaneously generated slew of obstacles and hindrances of every kind?. And I haven’t said anything about their opinions on race or gender or social inequality. Just the institutions of liberal democracy.
Would it not be right, and good, and proper that they are subjected to this kind of obstruction, if not outright legal action?
But, see, that’s why that hypothesis was hard to swallow. Someone like that, smart and capable and pragmatic, would keep their mouth shut. They would bide their time. And then, when you expect it the least, they might pull this kind of shit. Or this other kind of shit.
Are you still going to pretend that this is just a matter of what “me and my friends” “like” or don’t “like”, Richard?
Now, see, I regret that, out of self preservation, and/or for the sake of bringing their plans to fruition, that kind of people will keep quiet, and only share and discuss these opinions with like-minded people. I regret that they do not feel that they can share their opinions in public, and expect them to win out by their own merit. I regret that they might, in fact, not want to submit their opinions to public scrutiny, because somewhere, deep inside, they know them to be evil or false. There is an idealistic part of me that wants to believe that, were these people given a chance to express themselves, to communicate freely and civilly with others, they would either change their beliefs as a result of the bayesian update, change everyone else’s beliefs, and/or, if it’s a matter of “personal” or “irrational” sensibility, make peace with the fact that they live in a world where the majority does not share their point of view, and that they cannot force their opinions, least of all their policies, unto them.
There is another, more cynical and ruthless side of me, that believes that the sort of people who are dangerously violent because of their ideology are not the sort of people who would benefit in any way from publicly debating their ideas, nor would anyone benefit from arguing with them. This aspect of me posits that sometimes, defending the freedoms of the most means stopping others from promoting the idea that said freedoms should be partly or fully, but permanently, waived, as well as infringing on the freedoms of these others should they show that they are willing and able to destroy these freedoms, and that this is perfectly okay.
To give you an example, you can’t accuse of hypocrisy someone who claims to want to preserve life, because they kill a few select individuals, that have proven that killing them was the only way of incapacitating them (or that you can’t try to incapacitate them without at least risking, and sometimes accidentally achieving, killing them).
You can’t accuse liberal democracy of “not being very liberal” if its institutions, official and unofficial, actively work to hinder, by any means necessary (and ideally by the least harsh means necessary), any and all efforts to make it less liberal. This democracy is, in fact, in a constant equilibrium of being as liberal as it can sustainably be.
The problem with censorship is that it inevitably expands to far. For example, your list of “abuses of free speech” includes both promotion of ideas that really are heinous and promotion of ideas that are perfectly reasonable. For example:
Depending on what you mean by strike. But I think it’s a perfectly reasonable idea that you shouldn’t be able to refuse to do your job whenever you feel like expressing a “grievance” with no consequences except possibly loss of pay for the period of time when you don’t work.
Why in the world would that be a reasonable idea?
Because society depends on people doing their jobs in order to function.
Wrong emphasis. Society depends on people*, doing their jobs.
Let’s taboo some words:
Society: a sufficiently large group of individuals. Are we assuming a shared final goals? A power structure? A distribution of labour?
depends on: requires for its continued… What? Existence? Prosperity? What aspect of society depends on “people doing their jobs”? What does society depend on “people doing their jobs” for? For now, I’ll assume you’re using “depends on X” in the sense of “expects X to happen”… but that’s kind of weak.
people: individual sentient beings, not machines or tools, with needs other than being kept in optimal condition for the performance in the functions they perform, and existences that do not necessarily revolve around performing said functions.
doing their jobs: performing the functions that they have promised to perform reliably and within certain sufficient quality and quantity parameters
Again, given that it’s people we are talking about, they will only want to do their jobs in exchange for a reliable retribution in advantages in the shape of wealth and status in sufficient quality and quantity that have a utility to the people that is equivalent or superior to costs that “doing their job” entails for them. They will only be able to do their jobs if the compensation is sufficient to keep them alive so they can come back the next day.
Now, let’s use some basic economic theory: let’s assume work is a commodity, that is, let us do away with the “people” part and suppose the job-performers are emotionless, non-sentient machines, tools that will simply go irreversibly out of order if they are given insufficient resources for a long enough period of time, beings that exist only and purely to do their jobs, whose downtime is either spent in maintenance (and can be shortened or lengthened depending on where the optimal total productivity point between maximum duration and maximum instant output lies). Let’s also assume that their work capacity is distributed in an ideal free market, and that the machines are programmed to ask for as many resources as you are willing to give them. There’s a very close real-life equivalent to said machines: cattle.
Finally, let us assume that there is a steady influx of new machines, but that the work that the society needs to get done fluctuates.
This situation automatically results, thanks the to wonderful “Invisible Hand” that guides the self-regulating ideal market, into the jobholders being given *exactly as many resources as they need to work and keep functioning the next day, maintaining exactly the population that can provide the necessary amount of labour needed for getting the amount of job that society demands done.
Now, in the XIXth century, that is often what actually happened, except with people, specifically unqualified labour (heck, look at the very term: “unqualified labour”, as if labour was everything they are). And that was just unplanned market fuckery. The Nazis would actually planify killings by giving workers rations that were exactly calculated so that they would die soon upon completion of the project they were assigned to.
Why did this happen? Because those workers were powerless to make the people who had the right to set the conditions of the job agreement give them anything more than what ensured what was strictly needed for them to perform their task, which was basically them being alive for as long as they were needed and useful, and not an instant more. Which was what they ended up actually getting, because a free market ensures that’s where the Nash Equlibrium lies: they are locked in a prisoner’s dilemma in which if any single one of them refused to agree to work under those conditions, they would simply be replaced by another, willing person, and then die.
This is why as long as we assume that job-performers are people, more than tools to be used and thrown away, that their existence has value beyond the utility derived from them performing their jobs, and that it should not be entirely miserable, it is absolutely vital that job-performers have a form of power over those who set the conditions of the work agreement, that will allow them to protect themselves from being reduced, by the sheer strategic necessity, to the status of tools.
Now, strikes are a horrible way of achieving this: they are self-regulating too, in that, performing them is at the immediate cost of the job-performers (of course, since they are paid less than what their job-performing is actually worth, this costs whoever profits from their job even more) and risks the cessation of the demand for the job itself being performed. So, game-theory wise, it works, ideally resulting in the job-performers being assigned just under the amount of resources that would make the net utility of the job being performed inferior to that of it not being performed.
If you have suggestions for alternate ways in which job-performers can protect themselves from becoming cattle or machinery, I would love to hear them. I say this in all sinceirty: strikes are ugly. If you can additionally justify why people should not have the right to strikes, given those alternatives existing, I would love to hear that too
Because the Nazis put industry under state control so that people had no choice but to work for companies guided by the state’s economic policy.
Sure, don’t centralize the hiring process under the guise of “economic planning” or maintaining an “economic policy” so much that hiring effectively becomes a monopsony.
The first point would be more of an issue in terms of that particular state’s particular economic policies: in a democratic state, economic policies that would not result in such an outcome would win out.
The second point… do you mean to say that, were there to be many job-assigning institutions competing to get the same job performed at the least possible cost, the equilibrium would fall into job-performers being given more resources than what they would receive were they to be considered disposable cattle? That only works if the work-performers are scarce, in which case it doesn’t matter whether there is one or many institutions competing. And if the work-performers are abundant, the equilibrium will fall into them being given exactly as many resources as they physically need to perform their job.
In a perfect market, centralizing or decentralizing doesn’t achieve anything: what matters is simply offer and demand.
Also, why do you put scare quotes around “economic planning” and “economic policy”?
No, my point is that by and large states don’t need and shouldn’t have “economic policies”.
Are you trying to argue that monopsony power doesn’t exist? Without monopsony power an employer who pays low wages will have a hard time attracting employees. Whereas a monopsony employer can set wages arbitrarily low, his only limit is his own conscience and that at some point potential employees will prefer not to work. It’s possible to state the above more mathematically, for example here (Note: that article talks about monopoly rather than monopsony but the principal is the same).
Except that centralizing destroys the perfect market.
You haven’t established that point to my satisfaction. Don’t try to: it’s not that I don’t expect you to succeed, it’s that, at this point in time, I am compelled away by urgent priorities.
I now know that we are falling for red herrings, both of us. I also acknowledge that I am out of my depth, and that I will have to leave this sort of conversation for when my understanding of economics and game theory are sufficient to tackle it with ease. I advise you to do the same: I have the feeling that there is much cached wisdom and pre-rehearsed arguments in what you say, as I will acknowledge there is in mine.
Lifeguards.
Then you will abstain from going swimming: if you don’t, it will be at your own risk and peril. Though bad working conditions in this case is more likely to cause people to quit, and a scarcity of appliants (which means you’ll have to take unqualified people or close the swimming area for longer periods of time): it certainly won’t be a manner of being overexploited by abusive leadership. Overexploiting a lifeguard by assigning to them a larger area than they can effectively cover simply means they will fail at their jobs and people will die, so that’s not an option either.
The exception puts the rule to the test, and, as I have shown, lifeguards are an exception in more ways than one.
But, as a general rule, and given the way power dynamics function in the modern workplace, I would argue that the right to strike is an absolutely vital part of the checks and balances of a healthy economy.
Not to say unions can’t act petty or spoiled at some points, but that attitude is self-defeating, and the existing counterpowers will stop them soon enough. That’s what checks and balances are for: selfishness keeping itself in check.
Assuming the rest of society is functional, i.e., capitalist. Unions in industries that are enforced monopolies, e.g., government workers, are a problem. For example, here in the United States, teachers’ unions are probably the biggest obstacle to fixing the education system.
The idea that education is an enforced government monopoly in the United States Of America of all places makes me question whether you are aware of the importance of private education in that country relative to public education. The idea that a society being functional equals it being capitalist simply makes me question what you mean by capitalism and functionality: try to taboo those words? Finally, the idea that teachers’ unions would get in the way of the improvement of public education strikes me as odd and unexpected, and I would like you to develop that point: what do you mean by “fixing” and why are they “obstacles” to it?
It’s not quite an enforced government monopoly, although people choosing private school have to pay twice (pay for the public schools through their taxes and tuition for the private school). There are various attempts, e.g., school vouchers, charter schools, to fix this but the teachers’ unions have been fighting them tooth and nail.
By capitalist I mean free market. By functional I mean provides effective services. Note: my claim is not that societies can’t have both functional and non-capitalist elements, rather that for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist.
This doesn’t surprise me given the filters you likely get your news through.
By “fixing” I mean making it so that students come out of the schools having actually learned basic math and English skills. A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.
What do you mean by free market, exactly?
When is effectiveness, and when can a service be qualified as effective?
Depending on your definitions of effective and free-market, the existence of Sweden, at the very least, might make you want to question that reasoning.
I don’t select the media from which I get my news. While the press in general does operate a selection on what information they release to the public, I do not think favouring teachers’ unions is one of their priorities.
Well, in the end the institutions are made of people, and applying game theory oversimplifies many factors. Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause (supposing that reform is exactly what it says on the tin, rather than making it possible to fire teachers for other, less avowable reasons. Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.
EDIT: You know, someone keeps down-voting both of us, and I don’t know why.
Well, adjust you’re priors appropriately.
Or rather they have such a high social image that the people who aren’t paying much attention react the same way you just did.
By all accounts, teachers in the USA are the dregs of society: very badly paid, subjected to unreasonable demands of moral upstanding, and powerless in front of the students, the administration, and the parents.
How do you manage that? Does someone else select it for you?
Wait, you’re on the internet, that can’t be right.
I just read whatever information falls in my lap while browsing my favourite sites: Less Wrong and Tv Tropes. I don’t get out much, Internet-wise. I don’t go out of my way for sources that agree with me, nor do I actively refuse sources that don’t. A selection bias still happens, because I only read news provided to me by tropers and rationalists.
I was talking more about various street level anti-fascist organizations like say this one and other more recent “antifa” groups across Europe, not the average person who would describe themselves as against fascism or “anti-fascist”. Also I meant fascist in the sense of using fascist tactics and mode of operation. Fascism before takeover was basically street level political violence and intimidation with good ol boys sympathetic to their causes in the law enforcement and the court system helping them get off with minimal penalties.
Well, that’s what happens when you try to fight fascist gangs on their own terms: you become a mirror image! Ethical injunction, he who fights monsters, and so on and so forth.
It seems to follow from this statement that everyone you know is radically averse to violence.
Is that actually what you meant?
Why yes, absolutely. I do not know if this is lucky or unlucky, but I don’t know (personally and outside of the internet) anyone who isn’t a pacifist in some capacity when it comes to foreign policy, and in full capacity when it comes to domestic struggles. It just isn’t done. Symbolic violence such as flag-burning or, if it comes to that, car burning, is perfectly okay. So is strong language… as long as said language doesn’t appeal to violence. We don’t joke about being violent to our opposition, unlike, say, American pundits and talk show hosts. Again, it just isn’t done.
Just to clarify: do you mean to restrict the scope of discussion to voicing support for large-scale/political violence? Or do you also mean to say that you are all radically averse to violence in your personal lives?
Well, both, clearly. Violence is bad. Unless it’s in a ring and strictly for sport, then it’s seen as slightly less disgusting and may even gain a “bad ass” edge. But otherwise, violence, personal or political, is just… bad. It’s dangerous to all parties involved, it hurts, and it doesn’t achieve anything. Of course, under extreme circumstances, and I do say extreme, someone snaps. But even then, it’s never justified unless it’s in self-defence, and it’s always a shameful display: the common understanding is that you should have been smart enough, civil enough, to defuse the situation without getting physical.
This just isn’t true. Violence achieves all sorts of things. (I would also dispute “dangerous to all parties involved”.)
This isn’t true either (but at least is somewhat subjective).
Also false. I disprove of narrow-minded overgeneralizations almost as much as I disapprove of violence.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, of course, but I am simply sharing with you the general attitude towards violence in my social environment, not arguing in their name. Nevertheless, if you’re going to go so far as to pick those memes apart, instead of simply saying “thank you for the clarification, now I understand how you people think”, I’d suggest you actually go through with it and lay down your argument in full. Saying “I’d say you are wrong” and then leaving it at that tends to leave a bad taste in your interlocutor’s mouth.
OK:
Yes it does. For example if you beat someone up you can take their stuff. Or thwart their political designs. If you beat up enough people well enough you can execute social change. In fact the vast majority of positive social change (and even more negative social change) that has occurred in the history of mankind has relied on violence.
Violence is the crudest form of power we have. Power does stuff. Pretending violence doesn’t achieve anything is gross self delusion.
Don’t let your pacifist politics corrupt your very model of reality. Instead, understand what violence does and does not achieve and then act on your preference for non-violence.
Ah, well, yes, violence will get you what you want in the short term, but unless you exterminate your enemies, they’ll still be a liability: violence doesn’t convince anyone, it just makes them more tractable. Heck, even verbal combat, that is, argument, doesn’t usually serve any purpose but convince both parties that they are right.
So, yes, “violence (and rudeness, for that matter) achieves nothing” is a gross simplification. “Violence brings very flawed achievements and has lots of terrible drawbacks” would be much more accurate.
Let’s frame it as comparing two options against each other (not one option against some unspecified ideal outcome). Based on a quantum event, in one branch of the multiverse you use violence, in another you refrain from violence. Is your long-term utility in the first branch necessarily lower than in the second branch?
Your enemies are not a homogenous group. Some of them are very convinced and eager to act, but others just like to join the existing group and be an anonymous part of the mob. Destroy the former, and you don’t have to worry so much about the latter.
A short-term advantage can sometimes be used as a leverage for long-term advantage. If you happen to rule a country, you can change education and media to include your propaganda. This increases the number of your followers in long term. (Back to typical LW topics: If you are an AI capable of recursive self-improvement, paralysing your opponents for a week may be all you need to conquer the universe.)
Depending on specific circumstances… for example, your enemies may be popular because they have an aura of invincibility. Beat them once and you have ruined the aura, which may remove many of their followers.
(Disclaimer: I don’t suggest using violence, I just say that sometimes is may be the better choice, so the “violence doesn’t achieve anything” is untrue.)
Hm. Very true, I’m afraid. Anyway, “violence achieves nothing” is a useful heuristic, and in times of extreme need the use for violence will still impose itself: the meme simply puts up a mental “barrier of potential” that makes sure you really think hard of alternatives before resorting to it.
I tend to distrust ideas whose usefulness depend on not being too compellingly expressed.
If what I actually believe is that there are usually more valuable alternatives than violence, I endorse saying that as compellingly as possible, rather than saying that violence is never valuable no more compellingly than appropriate.
I strongly agree with your general point, but could you explain what you mean by this comment, because it looks problematic for any reasonable understanding of self-defense (which I would expand to include defense of others).
OK. Thanks for clarifying.
I though about democracy “nationalism” (which also includes antifascism). A belief that whatever is decided by majority, must be the true, good, and beautiful thing. If something decided by a majority vote happens to be bad, there is always an excuse, some technical detail which explains that this wasn’t a truly democratic choice. If you are more mindkilled, you can just use “democratic” as a synonym for “good” and label everything you like as democratic, and everything you don’t like as undemocratic, whatever the actual majority position is; because even if the majority does not agree with X, well they should agree with it, and in your favorite parallel universe they agree with it, therefore X indeed is democratic.
Are they more possible algorithms of vote counting? What a lucky coindidence that exactly the one used in my country right now is the best, I mean the most democratic one! I only blame the non-voters for its failures; they are always my last resort for explaining why my preferred choice didn’t win.
(There seems to be some similarity with the CEV concept, so I would like to emphasise the difference: in democracy, there is no need for “coherent extrapolation”, because the majority is already perfect as it is. We only need to find its “volition” by a majority vote. If anything goes wrong, it can be explained away as a technical failure in the vote-counting process.)
Well, demographically speaking, that seems to only work with the left, at least within countries I’m familiar with. The Right is usually a third of the population, and they are very disciplined in always voting for their party, no matter what that party does. The Left, on the other hand, is easily disappointed, and tend to abstain from voting entirely.
I don’t know about the rest of your post. The fairly consistent pattern of Islamic countries achieving democracy by overthrowing secular and oppressive regimes, and then voting for Islamist parties is universally seen as a bad thing, in the West at least. This tends to elicit some fair amounts of mockery in the Arabosphere: “So it’s only democracy when you like it, huh? Surely we have much to learn from the Beacons of Civilization and their unquestionably good institutions and supreme, universal values...”
Antifascism seems to be a much steadier pattern, to the point of labelling totalitarian Islamist regimes and ideologies “Islamofascism”, calling anyone with strict, pro-police or pro-military ideas a fascist (in France you’d say of a very stern teacher that “she’s a little fascist”)… A politician of whom you say “he is a fascist” is a politician that is beneath contempt.
Heck, now that I think of it, you could extend it to “human rights” “nationalism”. Apparently the Human Rights Declaration of 1948 is the be-all and end-all of governmental morality. Except in the USA, “because they are weird like that” (and that’s the charitable memetic explanation).
Also, for what it’s worth, I think the best algorithm for vote counting in Presidential elections is the Australian one (strangely enough, they don’t brag about it, but instead mostly complain… perhaps it is a good sign). In Parlimentary Elections, I present to you Fluid Democracy. I think it’s awesome and we should do it right now.
The part about non-voters was not supposed to be about facts, but about rationalizations. Whenever someone loses election, they can imagine that they would have won, if all the people would have voted. This is how one keeps their faith in democracy despite seeing that their ideas have lost in democratic elections.
I guess the typical mind fallacy strongly contributes to the democracy worship. If I believe that most people have the same opinions as me, then a majority vote should bring victory to my opinions. When it does not happen, then unless I want to give up the fallacy, I have to come with an explanation why the experimental data don’t match my theory—for example most people had the same opinion like me, but some of them were too lazy to vote, so this is why we lost. Or they were manipulated, but next time they will see the truth just as clearly as I do. And then, sometimes, like when looking at the voting for Islamist parties, it’s like: WFT, I can’t even find a plausible rationalization for this!
Human minds are prone to separate all humans into two basic categories: us and them. If someone is in the “us” category, we assume they are exactly like us. If someone is in the “them” category, then they are evil, they hate us, and that’s why we (despite being good and peaceful people) should destroy them before they destroy us. Whatever education we get, these two extremes still attract our thinking. In recent decades we have learned that other humans are humans too, but it causes us to underestimate the differences, and always brings a big surprise when those other humans, despite being humans like us, decide for something different than we would.
In USA they already have the Bill of Rights. Despite differences, it seems to me that both documents inhabit the same memetic niche (that is: officially recognized and worshiped document which you can quote against your government and against the majority vote).
Here. Shortly: “our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together” extrapolated by a super-human intelligent machine. It is proposed as a solution to problem what should we ask such machine to do, assuming that the machine is smarter than us, and we don’t want to get burned by our own stupidity. Something like: my true wish is what I would have wished if I had my values and your superior intelligence; plus assumption that sufficiently intelligent humans could together agree on a mutually satisfying solution, and the super-human intelligence should be able to find this solution.
Another popular rationalization, is that my side would have won if it wasn’t for the biased media misinforming the public. I suppose that’s also similar to CEV.
Another wonderful line I’ve got to use someday.
But the values would change with a higher intelligence, wouldn’t they? The perspective on the world changes dramatically!
Well, yes and no. Perhaps it would be better if you look into relevant Sequences, so I don’t have to rediscover the wheel here, but essentially: some things we value as means to get something else—and this is the part which may change dramatically when we get more knowledge—but it cannot be an infinite chain, it has to end somewhere.
For example a good food is a tool to be healthy, and the health is a tool to live longer, feel better, and be more attractive. With more knowledge, my opinion about good and bad food might change dramatically, but I would probably still value health, and I would certainly value feeling good.
So I would like the AI to recommend me the best food according to the best scientific knowledge (and in a Singularity scenario I assume the AI has thousand times better knowledge than me), not based on what food I like now—because this is what I would do if I had the AI’s intelligence and knowledge. However, I would appreciate if the AI also cared about my other values, for example wanting to eat tasty food, so it would find a best way to make me enjoy the diet. What exactly would be the best way? There are many possibilities: for example artificial food flavors or hypnotizing me to like the new taste. Again, I would like AI to pick the solution that I would prefer, if I were intelligent enough to understand the consequences of each choice.
There can be many steps of iteration, but they must be grounded in what I value now. Otherwise the AI could simply make me happy by stimulating the pleasure and desire centers of my brains, and it would make me happy with that treatment—the only argument against such solution is that it is in a strong conflict with my current values and probably cannot be derived from them by merely giving me more knowledge.
Of course this whole concept has some unclear parts and criticism, and they are discussed in separate articles on this site.
Oh, I’d love it if you were so kind as to link me there. Although the issues you pointed out weren’t at all what I had in mind. What I wanted to convey is that I understand that the more intelligent one is, the more one values using one’s intelligence and the pleasures and achievements and sense of personal importance that one can derive from it. One can also grow uninterested if not outright contemptuous of pursuits that are not as intellectual in nature. Also, one grows more tolerant to difference, and also more individualistic, as one needs less and less to trust ad-hoc rules, and can actually rely on one’s own judgement. Relatively unintelligent people reciprocate the feeling, show mistrust towards the intelligent, and place more value in what they can achieve. It’s a very self-serving form of bias, but not one that can be resolved with more intelligence, I think.
Oops, now I realized that CEV is not a sequence.
So, here is the definition… and the following discussions are probably scattered in comments of many posts on this site. I remember reading more about it, but unfortunately I don’t remember where.
Generally, I think it is difficult to predict what we would value if we were more intelligent. Sure, there seems to be a trend towards more intellectual pursuits. But many highly educated people also enjoy sex or chocolate. So maybe we are not moving away from bodily pleasures, just expanding the range.
Yes, which is precisely why CEV proponents think a constrained structure of this form is necessary… they are trying to solve the problem of getting the benefits of superintelligence while keeping current values fixed, rather than trusting their future to whatever values a superintelligence (e.g., an AI or an intelligence-augmented human being or whatever) might end up with on its own.
So it’s kind of like the American Consitution?
Well, it shares with the U.S. Constitution (and many other constitutions) the property of being intended to keep certain values fixed over time, I suppose. Is that what you meant? I don’t consider that a terribly strong similarity, but, sure.
I find the US constitution remarkable in its sheer longevity, and how well-designed it was that it can still be used at this point in time. Compare and contrast with the French and Spanish consitutions throughout the XIXth and XXth centuries, which have been changing with every new regime. Sometimes with every new party. The Constitutions tended to be fairly detailed and restrictive, and not written with eternity in mind. I still used to prefer the latest versions of those because they tended to be explicitly Human Rights Compliant (TM), and found the Bill of Rights and the Amendments to be fairly incomplete and outdated in that regard. But it’s been growing on me as of late.
Anyway, yes, the similarity I draw is that both are protocols and guidelines that are intended to outlast their creators far, far into the future, and still be useful to people much more intelligent and knowledgeable than the creators, to be applied to much more complex problems than the creators ever faced.
The U.S. constitution still has its problems (the Electoral College turned out to be a stupid idea, and the requirement that each state have equal representation in the Senate is also problematic), but it seems to have worked well enough...
You’d expect the CEV’s performance to be within those parameters. But I have one question: when can one decide to abolish either of those, and replace it with a new system entirely? Sometimes it is better to restart from scratch.
This certainly isn’t the time. The two problems CronoDAS mentioned are at most mildly annoying, it isn’t worth destroying a powerful and useful Schelling point merely to fix them.
A rationalist has a hard time not reviewing history from that period and concluding that for all intents and purposes McCarthy was right about the extent of communist infiltration and may have indeed grossly underestimated and misunderstood the nature of intellectual sympathies for communism and how deeply rooted those sources of sympathy where in American elite intellectual tradition.
He basically thought he needed to eliminate some foreign sources of corruption and that he would be helped rather than sabotaged by well meaning Americans in positions of great power at least after they where made aware of the extent of the problem. He was wrong. For his quest to have been less quixotic he would have needed to basically remake the entire country (and at that point in time, the peak of American power that basically meant by extension the remaking of the entire West).
Let’s suppose—for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise—that you’re right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers. And that McCarthy was not successful in changing this situation.
It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.
Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration—even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy’s time—was not such a bad thing?
I don’t think there is much dispute on the large scale of communist infiltration at the time, though obviously it isn’t often mentioned or emphasised. One can however make a good case that what is by some interpreted as communist sympathy wasn’t really such. One say easily use the same standards that are often used when declaring some historical figure had Fascist connections or sympathies, to go on and prove that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists. :) I think such a standard is pretty silly one though, both for fascism and communism.
Sure why not. The US of the 1950s is a shining gem of what well meaning technocrats can do for the middle class. One can either credit them for it, or say it would have been even better without them, that is open to debate. But hindsight bias is at play here I think. The Cold War period could easily have ended in a horrible way, including the end of the modern civilization. We where very lucky.
If you looked at Stalin’s USSR in the 1950s, knew about the Gulags, the famines of the 1930s, the atrocities of the Russian Civil war, the mass graves of Eastern Europe and the aggressive foreign policy (remember Finland and how they basically divided up Poland with Hitler?) now freshly armed with nuclear weapons (developed with the significant aid of spies in the US leaking the tech!)...
Isn’t fearing the potentially catastrophic outcome of Communist sympathy and infiltration a really understandable position to hold?
Me too. I’m not sure why you even bring it up.
It certainly could, but what does that have to do with the question at issue here? Are you suggesting that a US filled with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers was more likely to turn the Cold War into a civilization-ending catastrophe? I’d have thought (perhaps naively) that if there was so much communist sympathy at such high levels that it’s not flat-out insane to say “that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists” then that would have made large-scale war with the USSR less likely, rather than more.
It certainly is. I think you may be mistaking the point I’m making, which isn’t actually “so being filled with Communist infiltrators isn’t so bad after all” but “so, are you really sure the world looks the way it would if the 1950s USA were full of Communist infiltrators?”.
Because it often is used when talking about fascism.
Well we know they had enough infiltrators to steal detailed info about a superweapon for starters, so I’d tend to say: Yes, it does.
It didn’t seem to do much for making war between the USSR and China less likley.
Yes, but it never was a nuclear war.
I think it could have escalated to one however. China was for quite a while in the unfortunate situation of having a few nuclear weapons but not enough for MAD. The Soviet Union did have enough to wipe China off the map.
That would be … one infiltrator?
(Of course I’m not suggesting that there was only ever one Communist infiltrator in the US. Of course there were more. Plenty of capitalist infiltrators in the USSR too, no doubt.)
I’m Russian, and I can say that the “capitalist infiltrators” were, in a mirror reflection of the situation in the US, just a subset—a really large subset—of Soviet intelligentsia; their memes were “human rights” and “peaceful coexistence” and such on a far-mode level, and the feeling that a society that’s so much wealthier and more comfortable to live in must be the “right” one on a near-mode level. And they did help dismantle the USSR when the hour struck. What followed is complicated.
(Dear Reader: doesn’t this sort of thing make you feel that Vlad and others should more seriously inspect the real culture, politics and ideology of the USSR when talking about such “Soviet influences” or “Soviet subversion”, so that it doesn’t appear in their writings as simply the Other, an unexamined nefarious force?)
EDIT: Vlad has already made a disclaimer that’s kind of useful. That’s very nice of him, although I’d really like to see some actual examination of the USSR from him. Think of which, I don’t think he ever publicly examined the Socialist ideology in detail, despite the numerous times he denounced some of its particular results.
Keep in mind that the memes the USSR was using for memetic warfare were not always the same ones it was using for internal propaganda.
Yup, but the people making both external and internal propaganda must have been influenced by some memes, whether USSR-mainstream, radical, doublethink-heavy or even disapproved ones. I want someone who’s denouncing Soviet/communist influence to look at what the people at the source of that influence thought, in detail.
More importantly, communist “nationalism” isn’t quite the same as communist collaboration, or any other form of “treason”.
It’s a much more complex question. For start, while Joe McCarthy himself is the greatest individual symbol of this whole period, there were many other crucial people and events in which he played no role. (For example, the Hiss affair, arguably the very central event of the whole era, had happened before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
Now, the whole “McCarthyist” reaction (a.k.a. the “Second Red Scare”) did have some significant influence on things. After all, the U.S. back then still had some strong and functional institutions of democracy and federalism, and the Washington elites were in genuine fear of politicians who were riding on people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime. This clash was resolved with the complete defeat of these politicians, who were either destroyed and consigned to infamy, like McCarthy, or eventually lost their edge and got assimilated into the establishment, like Nixon. But the blow they delivered did have a significant influence in altering the course of events in a number of different ways.
(By the way, Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis of McCarthyism as the last dying gasp of meaningful representative democracy in the U.S.)
As for the U.S. prospering in the 1950s and 1960s despite all this, it’s always futile to discuss historical counterfactuals. There are way too many confounding factors involved, not the least of which is that in the 20th century, the benefits of technological progress for living standards tended to exceed the damage by bad government in all but the most extreme cases, making it hard to speculate on what might have happened without the latter. (Also, due to a confluence of lucky technological and social factors, the period in question happened to place low- and medium-skilled labor in industrialized countries in an exceptionally favorable situation.)
(Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier. Also, just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical of the alleged great progress achieved, nowadays in the Western world it is can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.)
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
I can’t say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
which seems to me rather like saying “Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it’s educating”, or “Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth”. That is, yes that’s part of it, but it’s far from all of it, and it’s not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I’m very willing to be informed better—but I’d like, y’know, some actual evidence.
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it’s possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists’ seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR’s regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn’t require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists—again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers—did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success—some people’s careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people’s careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of “racism” and “hate.”)
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR’s regime certainly didn’t use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don’t think it’s justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it’s accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
It didn’t even let Churchill win reelection right after the war ended.
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don’t remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
This, however, didn’t translate into having his policies implemented.
Britain has regime changes they’re just peaceful.
As for violent regime changes, Britain has had those, just not recently.
The word regime usually means “the overall structure of the government” or “a period of legal and administrative continuity”—not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It’s misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Um… Orwell? :)
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR’s case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what’s commonly understood as “right-wing” in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR—except for FDR’s role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one’s liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you’ll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues—even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don’t have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you’re on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that’s somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they “only” have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with “respectable” minority members—not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
You’re losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
(Yes, I should admit that I’ve more or less projected the example above from today’s realities; it’s more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
Nowdays, nearly anyone—either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like—can aspire to be an “intellectual” just by starting a blog; most people who are in a “position” like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
Perhaps I’m confused, but it doesn’t look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the “New Deal regime”. You mention “the Katyn massacre coverup”, which I’ll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn’t seem to me to qualify as an “outrage” (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and “the handling of the civil war in China”, on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me … unconvinced … that the standard view is wrong.
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn’t that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn’t claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It’s claiming that various entitles are “hate groups”, and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don’t see that there’s a good analogy between McCarthy saying “X is a Communist” when X isn’t a Communist, and the SPLC saying “Y is a hate group” when Y isn’t neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
The link you give doesn’t make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn’t seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think “But he started it!” a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA’s attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy’s attack on the CIA.)
No, I don’t think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity’s belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn’t mention that belief would be insane.)
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions—which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy—was in fact invented by the architects of “the New Deal”? Or that FDR’s administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you’re merely saying that McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers—just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt’s administration ever did—for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
You know, I’ve got to use this one sometime, with a straight face, just to see the reaction.
The thing is, it’s not completely wrong :-). (Except for the fact that that belief itself certainly isn’t irrational in any useful sense.)
Well, if I’m going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I’m familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I’m not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That’s a pretty huge more-or-less.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
And it was very cleverly put, if I dare say so.
Without questioning them yourself, could you give examples of such grand narratives? I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I don’t know in whose name you’re speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it’s that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum—namely, technological progress—in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you’re looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
You don’t get punished retroactively.
Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
Children having rights and being granted special protection.
The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
And so on and so forth.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It’s also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don’t aim for a position they weren’t capable of keeping).
See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that—even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question—the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children’s lives and don’t like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization “more formidable”. Don’t get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can’t really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
You mean the Nurnberg trials?
I don’t come from “your civilization”. I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don’t care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.
Now, sure, “material prosperity” can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, “conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture” (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply “high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure”, or even more simply “(material) wealth” but then we’d be playing with semantics, and I’m not sure that’d be productive.
What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it’d probably involve the term “marginal utility” or “marginal cost”, or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?
However, these benefits are not exclusive to “your prosperous civilization”. They’ve showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some “primitive” societies.
They aren’t exclusive to “prosperity” or “civilization” either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth…
Privelege,
discrimination,
arbitrary punishment,
authoritarianism,
oppression of the weak (including children and women),
sharp division between conflicting groups,
irrationality and anti-empiricism,
and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
I like ice cream, and I don’t admonish people who buy ice cream because they like the taste, I do admonish people who think buying ice cream will help their health or improve their chances of winning a marathon (I would have used smoking since ice cream may not be that unhealthy but I don’t like smoking).
In other words, nothing really. What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
The long run… has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there’s no such thing as “in the end”. Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However,
if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then
a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise ** (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin’s Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services),
would, I think, require all the things I said and more.
Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as “happiness” and “formidability”… and how much weight you give to each aspect of it
Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. “Fair?” Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one’s sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start.
Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won’t be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference.
No-retroactivity is another aspect of “keeping things fair”, as are
clear and accessible rules,
transparent rules-making, and
not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: “democracy”
helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.
Maybe what you meant by
was “Happiness-as-contentment”, a numb, pleasant stupor… The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley’s Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why “social welfare”, “full public health insurance”, and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the “newbie/tutorial stage” and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.
Then there’s Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of “fun”, the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn’t create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It’s the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as “formidability-consolidating”). But it appears that it’s a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...
And there’s also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.… Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people’s happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I’d rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).
In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there’s probably more, but I haven’t thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, “looking out for our own and screw everyone else”, must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone’s labour’s marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.
This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn’t just about overcoming others, it’s about overcoming oneself and nature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that “the best outcome for everyone on the whole” is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.
Hm. I’d think there’s material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be “socialist”.
I don’t try to be socialist, it comes to me as naturally as breathing: it’s not just an identity, or “my favourite pick of political beliefs”: I don’t notice when I’m “being socialist” any more than a fish notices when it’s swimming, it just comes out that way by default. Anyway, which are the precise points that you see as incorrect?
One blatant example, yes.
I wasn’t talking about material prosperity necessarily, I was talking about prosperity, formidableness in the sense you defined:
And even said so:
You also included an economic aspect, but it seemed to me the bolded part was the key. Perhaps the word prosperity threw you off? I didn’t mean to use it in a primarily material sense, so I went and checked if I didn’t perhaps misuse it (I am not a native speaker).
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit. It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
and more
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
You’re not making sense to me. What is “This”?
What are you talking about?
You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn’t really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman’s liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
So when I below said “This” I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one’s opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
I would like to use this opportunity to remind you that you owe us a post about this :-)
ETA: Sorry, I should have read the grandgrandparent first. Anyway, I’m eagerly awaiting your post!
Have you seen this post by Eliezer?
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I’m still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn’t mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer’s, I’m just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador’s arguments.
I’m not really convinced by it either.
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly “observed” moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as “adding back up to normality”. I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like “moral progress” real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen’t seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don’t mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I’m a square after all.
To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
Like these guys?
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Eee-nope. Adaptation executers not fitness maximizers.
Sorry, don’t understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn’t mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren’t significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD.
It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of “ethics”.
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn’t changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we’re the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn’t a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure.
I’m saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us.
Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can’t cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don’t much change.
Let us in this light review Fischer’s fundamental theorem of natural selection:
In other words crocodiles also didn’t have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations.
And this precisely what we observe.
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn’t this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn’t as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn’t we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn’t present there. Isn’t that evolution?
The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes.
Incidentally this is the perfect voter too.
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn’t shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage.
I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven’t we Tim?
Sloppy. Most such “empirical examples” of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism’s low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including “sociocultural” ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so.
(And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance—yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That’d be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would’ve been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao’s regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore—a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
(I hope I’m making myself clear enough, am I?)
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government’s policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of “the contemporary grand narratives of progress” can get some people to think your opinions are weird. “Just like”? Really?
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin’s death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
This was essentially imprisonment and incapacitation without trial for dissenters. You got locked up and basically tortured.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren’t your experience is different… how?
What I’m hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren’t exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their “sexism” or “racism” in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
In other news, Barack Obama is literally Stalin and his Socialist Healthcare will dismantle dissenters for spare organs.
(C’mon, bro.)
Dammit it all makes sense now! I just knew I was missing something.
Seriously, though, the comparison is preposterous. Look at how Anders Breivik (curse his name) is treated.
I didn’t mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some “muscular liberalism” on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn’t at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
The time we are talking about was not “after Stalin’s death”.
I didn’t mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems’ ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one’s reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it’s laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.
And if you look to policies preferred by the McCarthy and other hardcore cold warriors (WW3 or ceaseless Vietnam and Afgan-like wars all over the world) and value life and well-being of non-Americans, every one of the 205 or 78 or 57 communists on Tailgunner Joe’s list deserved to be awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, together with equivalent awards of all nations of Eurasia.
It’s hard to weigh these kinds of alternative histories. Given their strategy of supporting protest movements, and indeed, getting in front of every parade they could, I’m sure they lended impetus to a number of good movements. On the other hand, when they got out in front of the movements, they would alter the course of the movements. Whether the net perturbation was good depends on your values, and the empirical facts of how large and in what direction those perturbations were.
Me, I’m not very fond of communism, so I find the lingering effects of their ideology harmful.
Alter to what? You are implying some sort of underhanded maneuvering that I not sure ever actually occurred.
After Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr was moving to topics of that are still controversial today—like ending the Vietnam War and ending pervasive poverty. As you say, one’s the net effect of that change depends on one’s prior values. More importantly, I think these types of change were organic to the movement that King was leading, not imposed from above.
Instead of imply, I’ll just state that they supported movements to further their own interests, which were not identical with the interest of the followers of those movements.
I don’t disagree that leaders like Ralph Nader or Martin Luther King advocated for what they thought was a good idea, which might not have a close relationship with what the followers would necessarily articulate as goals.
What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I’m particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn’t.
I linked to a relevant article elsewhere in this thread.
I don’t think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn’t help.
A better example to answer Tim’s question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.
Could you go into more details on what you think is wrong with his overall picture.
Don’t get me wrong, the basic story about the Soviet-directed subversion is true and well-attested by testimonies of Soviet defectors. However, there are two major problems with Raymond’s narrative.
First, his ideological concept of “suicidalism” is highly contrived and detached from reality on a number of points. Raymond starts from his own libertarian ideology—with which I in fact have some sympathy, but which is in his case very nerdy and simplistic—and then he takes a caricatured version of every opinion he disagrees with, and amalgamates all this. Now, I do think a correct analysis along these lines could be done (i.e. reducing the dominant ideology in the modern West to a list of principles, some of which need to be only stated plainly to see how pernicious they are). However, I think Raymond fails in this task, being driven by the desire to see something as close as possible to a simple evil inversion of his own principles.
(He also displays a trait common among modern libertarians and conservatives that I find indescribably irritating. Namely, they often scour the rhetoric of liberals and then exclaim in triumph when they find something that seems like a good target for propagandistic attack because it superficially looks bad from the liberal point of view. Of course, they never managed to fool anyone of any consequence this way, it and just makes them look like clowns to anyone but their own choir to whom they are preaching.)
Second, I think that a correct historical analysis would show that Soviet subversion—in the sense of subversion planned and directed from Moscow—was by no means unimportant, but not of such central and exclusive importance as Raymond believes. Furthermore, it’s very simplistic to believe that whenever some ideological interaction and intermixing occurred, it was just diabolically clever Russians duping their Western useful idiots. Plenty of that happened, of course, but the overall picture is much more complex than that. The story of the cooperation and mutual ideological influence between the Soviet and American elites was definitely not simple and unidirectional.
That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond’s article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way. But as it is, it has serious flaws.
Well said.
At that point, I’m not sure that there’s anything left of the article that isn’t better stated by you in this comment here. In short, the whole purpose of the article was to rant (which is problematic for exactly the reasons you described).
Thanks. Leaving out your ideological statements and some other contrarian things, much of that was my impression of the article as well.
Thanks for the link. Whatever the merits of post-modern thought, I don’t think King was a post-modernist. Assuming that the FBI was right to monitor him, what did he do to further the Communist agenda?
And I don’t really agree that your link was a fair minded view of post-modernism, or that it was a poison-meme from the Soviet Union.
According to this article, postmodernism seems to be, in its barest essence, a form of impious iconoclasm as applied to the analysis of traditional concepts. It’s a very honoured tradition in Western Philosophy: in one century of democracy, the Athenians managed to practically destroy their entire body of traditions by discovering the base, petty group interests behind the so-called “sacred” and “natural” laws of their City.
Let me just say that I don’t think that post-modernism can be thought of as Socratic iconoclasm. I think it has valuable insights, many of which have been co-opted by more “rationalist” philosophy.
For example, I don’t think Michel Foucault can profitably be described as a nihilist. And whatever his sympathies to the Soviet Union (it appears that it was different at different stages of his life), I think the idea that he was generating poison-memes on behalf of the Soviet Union is ludicrous.
I would downvote your post because of the way its statements seem to be disjointed to each other, but I’d rather not have your post go below threshold, so I’ll directly ask you:
Why do you not think that post-modernism can be thought of as a form of methodological and cultural iconoclasm, and in hwat measure do you think it is not comparaabe to the efforts of Socrates and his contemporaries… and the backlash they suffered because of it.
What are those valuable insights you talk of, and what is that quote “ratonalist” unquote philosophy that has coopted many of them?
Why would Foulcault be described as a nihilist?
You are aware that Appeal to Ridicule advances the discussion excatly nowhere. Why do you think the fact that he was “spreading poision memes on behalf of the Soviet Union” to be remarkably unlikely and incongruous?
I find myself very very confused by this article. There are too many priors we don’t seem to share, too much inferential distance I need to jump. What is the American Way of Life, and what is this “Lockean individualism” he keeps talking about? How is anywhing Bin Laden said comparable to the contents of “Z Magazine”, which appears to be an amusingly old-fashioned doctrinal Marxist publication? He talks a lot about past events I’m unfamiliar with, and sources I haven’t read (yet).
Okay, that practically discredits the entire work, and puts the predictive ability of the author’s priors to the test, since he clearly didn’t bother to do the research here, and dared to speak of subjects he is ignorant of. As it turns out, it fails. I will only say this much: the Paris Riots were about as much of an Islamic crusade as The Los Angeles riots were Christian ones.
EDIT: Wooooow comment thread. That is long. Would you recommend reading it?
Here is a good place to start.
Also these lines from the Deceleration of Independence are decent summary.
Two large differences with Marxism and volk-Marxism is that rights are attributed to individuals rather than groups, and that emphasis on freedom from government interference rather than the “right” to goodies from the government.
I’m not sure you understand what he means, he’s not claiming that the all the Paris rioters were motivated by jihad (although that’s probably a larger component than you’d care to admit) any more than all the Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters were motivated by jihad. Nevertheless, the effect of the revolution in Egypt has been to make the government much more Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, the way Europeans (at least everyone to the left of Geert Wilders) responds to riots by Muslim youth is to officially give Islamic organizations more influence and those organizations do promote the Islamization of society.
Strangely enough, this fragment of the declaration, out of context, appears to enable a Marxist revolution as easily as any other, and without much of a stretch: if one assumes that the current Governments are acting as merely enablers and administrators of a corporate power that would stand between them and their rights to Life (nationalized healthcare, the right to the minimum amount of resources to survive whether you want to work or not), Liberty (job protection, safety nets, elimination of censorship and surveillance, not being discriminated from jobs because of race, creed, sexual life, or having children), and the pursuit of Happiness (depending on whose definition, it might involve minimizing time spent working, assuming your job doesn’t provide you with happiness, and maximizing the time spent with one’s family, or doing other stuff one actually likes to do, including non-remunerated but actual, tiring, productive work). I guess we should praise the Founding Fathers for the foersight they put in their work, and having made it as flexible as it is.
That said, it is indeed sad how doctrinal Marxism has shown an absolutely deplorable disregard for the rights and interests of anyone who wasn’t a proletarian. Luckily, democratist, egalitarian movements have predated and outlived Marxism, being born of a sensibility that is beyond mere memetic and mimetic propagation.
By the way. what is volk-Marxism, for that matter? A search in google mostly turns out the blog you linked to, Youtube comments, and some right-wing blogs. It does not seem to be a very widespread word… could you allay my suspicions that it isn’t a buzzword? (I don’t say this in a spirit of mockery, I am genuinely curious).
I’d like you to source the priors that allow you to assess such a probability. As a Muslim, and someone who was in close contact with those movements throughout, I do not recall a single source phrasing the conflict in religious terms.
What does that entail, exactly, and why is this a bad thing? I’m not assuming it is a good or bad thing, I just want to know why you think it would be.
Typical case of reversed stupidity. As I think I have already mentioned somewhere on this thread, you will observe that once people believe themselves free of the yokes of their oppressors, and their oppressors’ agents, the same people will tend to feel attracted to said oppressors’ designated enemies (regardless of the details of the nature of said enmity, or its truth beyond rhetorics). In the Wars of Religion, it was Protestantism, in the Cold War, it was the USSR, and in The War on Terror, well, it’s the guys with the beards advocating the return to an idealized, pure past, and the rights of the common man against the foreign oppressor, again: they’re just wearing a different hat.
Maybe applying the right-left label here is a mistake: maybe it’s a “left wing” thing in Britain, but in France it’s more of a “right wing” thing: the French left has a bit of a vendetta against religion in any way shape or form, and thinks the “goodies” of the Goverment (and its funds) shouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Only in the sense that any text can be interpreted to mean anything with enough “interpretation”, as you proceed to do in the next paragraph. Also I shown mention that Jefferson broke with what one might call “orthodox Lockeanism” by substituting “pursuit of happiness” for “property”.
Marxists tend to be all for censorship and surveillance as long as they’re the ones doing the censoring and surveilling.
A term for the Marxist-dervied/inspired memes that Eric Raymond discusses in the blog post I linked to above.
Yes, I know, I have read that article in full, but I still didn’t understand the delimitations of that definition.
You seem to imply that my interpretation wasn’t legitimate.
However, I suppose all power units, be they political, economical, or otherwise, will try to get their hands on as much information as they can get away with, while denying it to others. They will also be hypocritically outraged that other power units censor and suveil them. Hardly something endemic to Marxism, regretfully enough. One would argue that the ultimate elimination of censorship and surveilance is simply the complete empowerment of the general public to censor and surveil everyone else: all your words and actions are known to everyone, and no-one dares step out of line. Truly a Tyranny of the Public, if the Public isn’t memetically equipped to resist the temptation.
In case you thought otherwise, I am not suggesting the American Consitution or the Declaration of Independence are tweakable to accomodate leftism. More the opposite: that a leftism that respects individual rights can be Consitution-compliant.
Well, yes. I particularly object to your redefinition of the word “liberty”.
Also notice that it says “pursuit of Happiness” and simply “Happiness”, i.e., the government shouldn’t get in your way of pursuing happiness but isn’t obliged actively assist you.
Why, yes, what I meant to say there was that the government should enable you to pursue happiness in any way you choose, by guaranteeing your liberty to choose who to work for, what to work at, and how much you work. To be precise, the freedom to do whatever you want with your very limited time on this earth (I think people will still end up working just as much, when offered this freedom, unless they deliberately want to starve en masse, among other losses of comfort). The government isn’t actually helping you be happy in any particular way, they just make sure you are able to pursue whatever would make you happy.
Of course, that’s not Marxism: Marx would have said that “from each in accordance with their capacity, to each according tot their necessity”, which I think is utterly dumb: who’s going to decide how much ouput one is capable of, or where one’s needs stop?
Of course, if your notion of happiness is, say, to be someone’s slave, the government shouldn’t get in the way of you pursuing that. I’d be curious to see how many people do choose slavery over freedom.
Anyway, the Constitution forbids the Government to get in the way of your happiness, it doesn’t forbid it to make that pursuit easier for you, unless that gets in the way of your happiness. But then you could just reject their help, right?
Yes it is. It’s forcing the employer to hire you.
Or gets in the way of someone else’s freedom.
Speaking of the topic of “generating poision memes”, I think that, since part of our endeavour would involve the deconstruction and destruction of propaganda and its pernicious enabling of “nationalism”, “groupism”, “collectivism” or however else we may call it, it might be interesting to study contemporary Think Tanks and their strategies with as much diligence and interest as those institutions of the past that this deeply interesting (if sometimes objectionable) article mentions.
For a rationalist to be able to function properly as a citizen, and defy the expectation that they would enclose themselves in ivory towers, unconcerned with the affairs of foolish mortals, one must develop tools to identify and deconstruct “poison memes” as soon as they come in contact with them, without having to rely on analysts who are ideologically indentured to the group opposing the creators of those memes, since they would in turn spread “poison memes” of their own.
A seeker of truth that would bounce between these sources would not find said truth, but only confusion piling upon confusion, save if they perform a truly exhausting effort of mental analysis and cross-referencing. As Descartes might have put it, partisan works do contain many excellent and true precepts, but these are mixed in with so much other harmful or superfluous stuff that it is almost as difficult to separate out the truth from the rest as it is to pull a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble by separating out the wanted goddess-shaped marble from the unwanted remainder.
Hence I think developing a toolset to see through politically-motivated memes, if not outright cataloguing and properly sourcing them, would be a worthy task to undertake. If not by us, then by some other, specialized organ, that would be equally commited to the advancement of correct epistemology and mental hygiene.
Note: I want to make it clear that I do not think said article is entirely without merit. Far from that. I have seen some of the very stupid memes therein described existing in left-winger people I know, such as one of my dearest friends saying that, were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed. I was so shocked I could have slapped him then and there. (As a representative of said Third World (and of freaking reason for that matter) I explained to him that that was a preposterous notion,)
Nevertheless, knowing this person well, I can say with some certainty that he did not “catch” this meme from any marxist or progressivist literature or propaganda, but came to it on his own entirely. You see, not all pernicious ideas need to be taught (what a wonderful world would it be if they were): sometimes they arouse in parallel, in different people, because they make the same fundamental thinking mistakes, starting from similar but widespread faulty priors. Such as the ideas that:
a criminal should own up to their crimes and allow themselves to be punished, that victims have a right to violent vengeance
that by allowing injustice without speaking out against it one is automatically an accomplice,
that this notion could possibly be valid on the level of an entire country (I blame the Nurnberg trials for that meme),
that punishment can be dealt by proxy.
If the brutal, violent exploitation of the Third World by the colonial powers is seen as a crime, a mind equipped with the aforementioned memes would, with a high probablity, come up with this idiotic idea, without any Soviet prompting at all! Heck, not even those memes could be seen as Soviet-generated, they predate the USSR by far, heck, they probably predate dirt.
As for the horrors of colonialism are undeniable historical fact, and their criminalization seems to have been hardly a matter of left-versus-right, and more of a matter of much more diverse “nationalisms”, including literal Nationalisms, and one country calling out another for a crime the likes of which their own forces proceed to commit immediately, and which they vigorously deny or ignore, when called out in turn. At some point, internationally-minded people, such as, say, humanists, seem to have come up with the conclusion that those are all crimes.
Well, he might of caught it from someone who caught it from said literature.
I find this extremely unlikely. At best he came to it by following trains of thought inspired by reading progressive literature. Note that the most effective propaganda stops lays own all the premises but stops just short of stating the intended conclusion, so that the target believes he came up with the idea on his own.
But then wouldn’t their work automatically be a part of said literature?
I do find it amazing how many people who are clearly parroting memes without much personal input claim to have come up with them themselves. I for one like to give credit where credit is due.
What evidence would falsify your theory that those memes are automatically descended from deliberate Soviet efforts? Because at this rate you’re starting to sound like my “Protocols of the Sages of Zion” reading uncle, who thinks everything the West does is the result of Zionist lobbying, Zionist subversion, and the Zionist conspiracy to sap and destroy our precious bodily fluids. Sorry, not bodily fluids, I mean our precious way of life, our intellectual integrity, the patriotic/religious fervour of our youth, the unity and freedom of the Islamic peoples, etc. etc. etc. . By sapping and neutering it and precipitating its decadence with their filthy propaganda spread through media manipulation and the aid of servile, self-hating intellectuals, them and other sorts of useful idiots. Only to replace it with their own, self serving work, that will render us impotent to resist their tyranny. Sounds familiar?
Hey, actually, the more I think about it, the more this pattern reemerges. I can think of examples from Ancient Greece! Ever heard of a guy named Pausanias? Maybe we could write an interesting article out of this! I genuinely feel we’re onto something.
Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that “were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed” on his own or my theory that those memes ultimately descend from communist propaganda.
Another good example of a memetic weapon doing damage long after the war it was created to fight is over.
No, that’s my testimony. I’m asking about your theory that anyone coming up with those memes is a result of the previous existence of those memes, and that said existence is exclusively owed to soviet agents manufacturing them under a specific agenda, as opposed to them being autonomous thinkers drawing similar conclusions in front of the same facts because they have a similar sensitivity and share some preconceptions that are in no way exclusive to a societ influenced or for that matter even leftist culture.
Yes, well, doesn’t it trouble you that maybe Eric Raymond and others like him are being victims of a similar process, given the many remarkable parallels between their discourses, modulo Hated-Enemy-Of-The-Day?
Then why didn’t anyone come up with these memes in previous empires? Or for that matter in Europe before the mid 20th century?
From what little I know, I blame, at the latest, Widrow Wilson and the notion of self-determination, i.e. the USA making a power-grab after WWI was over and declaring that Imperialism is, in fact, evil. Followed by WWII and the total, ideological war against an enemy whose entire ideology revolved around the most extreme nationalism possible, leading to everyone embracing diverse forms of Reversing that Stupidity, one of them being Anti-Patriotism. But we can go further back, like, say, Kant’s insane pacifism (what agenda might he have been possibly pushing?), or even much further back, to the Bible. Egypt deserved to be destroyed by the Plague, and its army wiped by the sea, because they refused to set the oppressed Hebrews free, and it was right for God to do so. I do find it amusing that so few Jewish and Christian hegemonies would see themselves in the role of Egypt, nor wonder whether that’s a good place to stand, until so late in the XXth century. You’d think the comparison would be obvious.
My impression of the situation (which has not been extensively researched) is that, although there really were plenty of spies and such, McCarthy’s methods were largely ineffective at identifying them. Is my impression accurate?
I would agree with your impression.
Yes McCarthy was pretty ineffective.
I will need you to be more explicit with where you’re gong with this.
I think it is pretty obvious. I suggest you especially closely read the paragraphs where Orwell talks about say transferred nationalism and then pause for 5 minutes by the clock to consider what the intellectual descendants of these are in the modern Anglosphere.
TRANSFERRED NATIONALISM
(i) COMMUNISM.
(ii) POLITICAL [C]ATHOLICISM.
(iii) COLOUR FEELING.
(iv) CLASS FEELING
(v) PACIFISM.
Indeed that whole section basically reads like something out of the altright blogosphere’s description of the modern intellectual world. But this is very political of me to directly point out. I’m going to give you a more direct answer that compliments this one in a PM. Vladimir may agree or disagree with my points, but I can understand why he may (I’m not sure he did) want to keep some inferential distances as a protection measure there.
Here is a post by Eric Raymond that goes into more details.
This is relevant not only to “Politics is the Mind-killer” but also to “The Bottom Line” and the notion of motivated cognition:
It’s U.S.S.R., easily. Why is this even a question? The US (correctly, imo) let the great dictatorships bleed each other. The US was a financier but did not do most of the fighting. The UK is a tiny nation.
By and large I think you are right. But I am also keenly aware that my opinion formed when I discussed the subject with Russian friends and family (and probably the same can be said for you). I’ve taken a college class on World War II, but I came into it with very specific beliefs, and so it doesn’t seem terribly surprising that I left with the same beliefs.
It’s not that I just have a bare, unsupported opinion in my head: if I wanted to, I could go on for quite a bit about the reasons that the USSR was crucial to the defeat of Germany while the US and UK played less significant roles. But I imagine the American readers of LW have equally good reasons why the intervention of the US made all the difference.
Really, the idea that this question is important to me troubles me more than the question itself, and I would rather work at disentangling it from my own identity than work at establishing the truth.
Depends on what you mean by “contributed most”. One reason for the high casualty rate from the USSR is their leaders’ we have reserves attitude.
The Battle for Stalingrad, which is the beginning of the defeat of the Nazis, starts in Nov. 1942. What are the Western Allies doing then? Invading North Africa, which I think was fairly irrelevant to the outcome of the war.
Wikipedia says that 80% of German military casualties were on the Eastern Front.
My impression from reading When Titans Clash is that the USSR could have won WWII without D-Day. Obviously, it would have taken much longer (and ended up with Soviet puppets all the way to the Atlantic Ocean).
Considering how long and how much it took to defeat the Nazis, it’s at least plausible that all three were necessary, or it would have taken much longer.
“Contributed” seems ambiguous. Are we talking about who took the most damage or who did the most damage?
Alternate preconceived conclusion: All three contributed a lot and there’s no way to settle the question. That’s because I think arguing about which of the three did the most is tiresome.
The very next sentence is, in fact,
I’m not convinced that question is even well defined. What does “contributed most” mean when mapped onto causality graphs?
English does have a perfectly good word for the “nationalism” Orwell describes: tribalism.
I think it’s good and should go onto the wiki page.
I’m disturbed that you’re considering rejecting something just because it was written by a Social Democrat, and at the same time talking about politics being the mindkiller.
Orwell might have been right about doublethink.
I don’t think you need to be much concerned. When it comes to the politics of individual LessWrong posters I genuinely prefer not to know, but overall as a demographic LessWrong is pretty “social democratic” in its political beliefs.
To quote Konkvistador’s summary:
I think you can agree your fear is quote unfounded. Considering most of the Libertarians are probably left Libertarian and our very wide spread dislike for the religious right in the US, LessWrong if anything is likley to have a strong left wing bias.
The charitable interpretation is that Orwell is known first and foremost as a political thinker, and there’s evidence that his ‘nationalist’ biases were present on the things he cared about. So if “politics is the mind-killer” can cash out as “we shouldn’t quote Hitler because that will lead to problems” it can also cash out as “we shouldn’t quote Orwell because that will lead to problems.”
But I don’t think that’s how “politics is the mind-killer” does or should cash out. It’s reasonable to be concerned about that possibility, but the answer to the concern is “nope, it’s not an issue.”
Looks like I was right about expressing wariness at the idea that some discussions would degenerate into politics: that’s exactly what happened, and I had a major part in it too, without even noticing. It cost me a surprisingly large amount of points. I’m still very bad at anticipating the reactions of my fellow lesswrongers, so I need to ask: Was it
because I was evidently biased?
because I demonstrated egregious ignorance of fundamental knowledge related to the topics I attempted to discuss?
because the opinions I expressed were themselves impopular? I can’t help but notice that those expressing right-wing and/or reactionary viewpoints, even when they weren’t even trying to rationalize them, but presented them as fact, have been treated in a much more forgiving way, and I’m having trouble understanding why.
I’ve been explaining some radical right-wing views here, true, but I’ve also more or less expounded my own leftist views (in an ideological way, not a political one—there’s a difference) and have been upvoted for it :) Don’t worry, there’s no dark conspiracy on LW, the right-wing/libertarian/generally contrarian people you see around these parts are just the cream of the crop for several reasons of selection. If you try and achieve their level of eloquence and writing quality, even for the duration of one post, you’ll get plenty of karma and attention.
I was mostly referring to the Less Wrong community’s tendency to err in the side of caution when mentioning anything politically-loaded, for fear that it might be mind-killing to our own, inflame passions better left dormant, and cause unnecessary, inextricable conflict. That, and, well, many Lesswrongers being libertarians or fiscally conservative, I thought they might be unwelcoming to the works of a man such as Orwell. But, upon further reading, it turns out that this essay is politically neutral almost to a fault, and that the only side it takes is the side of truth, freedom, and the Democratic way. Which is a political stance in itself, but not one that would be subject to controversy here, I hope.
I admire Orwell for his ability to recognize and show the problems associated with his side of the political spectrum. In Animal Farm and 1984 he is improving the argument against him, even without disproving it immediately… and this is probably as far as is humanly possible to discuss politics rationally.
I only wish that famous people in all political groups were able to do the same thing. Are there any other famous examples? Perhaps Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is something similar for libertarians (except that it is less famous, less dark, happens on a different planet, and has a deus-ex-machina happy end).
EDIT: Oops, “The Dispossessed” is not libertarian, but left anarchist society. They don’t have private property, if I remember correctly.
Well, you could probably find people here opposing the “freedom and the Democratic way” on here.
Yes, but they tend to lose their arguments fairly quickly, and it’s usually mere Devil’s Advocacy, for the principle of the thing. Which is of course a necessary and fun exercise, but not one that is actually problematic in community cohesion terms.
I would not be so optimistic. I’m not a huge proponent of the “Democratic way”, but I don’t mind it and think there are decent arguments for it, including instrumental ethical ones. (I believe that in a better universe people should only have the right to demand things from their administration without dictating who in particular would hold office, but I understand that it helps diminish abuse of power; on the other hand, opponents of democracy bemoan other kinds of such abuse, which they say democracy facilitates… all that, and I haven’t even talked about how “the rule of people” primarily depends upon the structure of an entity’s economy and the culture & traditions of that entity, with formal political systems often being red herrings)
The densely packed “Freedom” is subtly attacked by LW and blogosphere Right all the time, however, and what’s damn scary is that some of the stuff that they claim to be superior to it looks, at least, more self-consistent than Our Way. I’m not talking about (the direct question of) individualism vs collectivism here, either, as I’m trying to combine the two; it’s mostly things like anti-egalitarianism, anti-idealism, etc that bother me. And I mean really bother me, as in “lost a few nights’ sleep”. A few times I was leaning towards the thought that such views should be officially and swiftly censored as opposed to the current culture of disapproval. Which, ironically, sounds like anathema to “Freedom” on its own.
One key question I can’t figure out is whether such reactionary approaches can be largely dismissed as operating on a diverging value system—or whether some of such unsolicited “advice” (example: making any slavery-type contract legal) is indeed “more based in reality” that our ethics and way of thought, and we’re the crazy ones for feeling sickened. Of course, we shouldn’t abandon “Freedom” just because a smart guy on the internet argues at length against it, but my point is about how what feels like a comfortable solid foundation can be shaken, and how it might well be a dilemma between giving up part of your identity and reacting less than sanely.
Would you be so kind as to link me to the relevant contents? Perhaps there is much to learn there, in a Nietzschean, thought-provoking way. Getting pissed off is a wonderful incentive to question things.
Well, you can already see it all around you, even in this thread, no? Here’s a list of the usual suspects on LW. Of those, Konkvistador is the one whose writings I enjoy most; he’s a moderate conservative/centrist/mild technocrat whom I stand by in some value-challenging problems (e.g. Dust Specks vs Torture—you are acquainted with this darling little controversy by our beloved leader, aren’t you?) and oppose in others (infanticide).
I’d also recommend Unqualified Reservations, the domain of the infamous and illuminated Mencius. There you’ll find a rather repetitive and at times faulty yet fascinating procession of arguments against nearly everything that has been done on Earth since 1789.* But it’s not M.M. whose ideas make me tremble so; it is our very own Vladimir_M, who’s very, very polite and cautious and has an impeccable reputation around here. His obscure hints and cryptic clues might be wise to pursure… or not.
(Forgive me for this purple-tinted nonsense, o fellow LWers, for I’ve been playing the delightful, absorbing and astoundingly well written browser game Fallen London, and my style has been trying to take on a Dickensian aspect, in spite of my ignorance as to how a modestly educated foreigner might write that way and still not make a derping fool of oneself. PM me with Facebook names, even false ones, if interested; there’s a nice boon for invitees and inviters, as well as bonuses for interacting within a clique.)
-*(I do not support the general direction of his narrative—“Western nations only lose in wisdom and gain in suicidal insanity as ages go by, because of their horrible, evil memetics since the Reformation”—and its tone gets old fast. This has to do with his personality type and quirks, I’d wager; see e.g. his oft repeated metaphor of LSD for our supposed insanity. And—I know how underhanded and ad hominem this sounds, but hell, he mentioned it many times—the fact that his parents were Communists.)
Suppose a society was consistently getting richer for a long time because of better technology. Would positional signalling of your status via your opinions and beliefs instead of say with material goods (purple cloak, rare feathers, enough food to grow fat) be more or less valuable? What would memetic evolution look like in such an environment? How would this effect the fitness of memes that are basically true beliefs that pay rent (in material gain or happiness), but happen to make you look bad?
We are living in dreamtime.
And I’d honestly rather see heretics burned at a stake or whatever than allow some well-meaning subversives to crash that dreamtime. I’m not waking up, my friends & family are not waking up, anyone whom I sympathize with is not waking up—the most I’d be okay with is an AI or augmented human dedicated to observing the “waking” reality!
You want to know why, don’t you? You consider that a hysterical overreaction? Well, know this (but you already do, of course): there are essentially two types of brains—some rather unusual and aberrant ones are nourished by absorbing truth, but to most it’s pure, unspeakable torture that shouldn’t be acknowledged, yet alone rationally contemptated. Even if the stakes are enormous. Sure, we have hypocrisy as our saving grace, and we might get an AI to do the contemptating for us eventually. but generally there’s a vast divide between people like you who want the Truth, and most folks. And I’m very, very unsure that I shouldn’t just support the majority here.
This is a most excellent point, that I need to consider more. Honestly I have no desire to force people to “Truth”, but I do want the liberty to seek it and act on it. If this means my segregation or secession from the vast majority of humanity and posthumanity, since they can’t be protected in any other way, so be it.
It just occurred to me that this is basically the state of humanity in Brave New World.
I choose dust specs, obviously. I know a negligible value when I see it.
Thanks for the clarification.
I think the term Orwell was looking for was collectivism.
Every so often I get downvoted for something I consider completely noncontroversial, but with no comments to say what the objections are.
The general term for the kind of ideology Orwell is talking about is collectivism, and the epistemological error is methodological collectivism. Clearly nationalism is just not the right word, because he is not just talking about nations. Collectivism more accurately captures what he is talking about. If anyone has a more precise and accurate term, feel free to share.
I didn’t downvote you, but my guess is that your comment came off as an attempt to push Randianism, or perhaps some other closely related ideology. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t your intention, but the problem is that many such people are highly active on the internet, and “collectivism” happens to be a word that they use incessantly and which is not very common otherwise.
So they were engaging in exactly the kind of nationalism Orwell describes. How fitting.
...so would you say “collectivism” is a good term for describing them?
I’ve more often seen collectivism as an opposite to individualism: that is, a desire or tendency to work together in groups or to focus on the welfare of a group more than that of individuals in it, or in some cases a focus on preventing harm over maximizing freedom. Tribalism is better because it doesn’t have any other meaning. Also, the tendency Orwell is talking about probably evolved during conflicts among hunter-gatherer tribes, but I have no citation for that.
Actually Orwell has used the term “Collectivism” in other contexts. It’s about as vague a term as “liberalism”, “elitism” or “republicanism”, and takes specific meanings in specific contexts.
Here is an article that discusses it from many different viewpoints and tries to see the big picure
Having read that, I’m not sure Orwell’s “Nationalism” is isometric to the general concept of “Collectivism”, since “Patriotism”, which, according to him, is “Nationalism”’s opposite, fits there too. Somehow it seems more specific: it’s about dividing the world in power units and rooting for one and/or booing another. You could say it’s about dividing the world in sports teams.
Which is why I always despised spectacle sports with all my soul.
Mind killer meme is the mind killer.