Hey, really enjoyed your triple review on power lies trembling, but imo this topic has been… done to death in the humanities, and reinventing terminology ad hoc is somewhat missing the point. The idea that the dominant class in a society comes from a set of social institutions that share core ideas and modus operandi (in other words “behaving as a single organisation”) is not a shocking new phenomenon of twentieth century mass culture, and is certainly not a “mystery”. This is basically how every country has developed a ruling class/ideology since the term started to have a meaning, through academic institutions that produce similar people. Yale and Harvard are as Oxford and Cambridge, or Peking University and Renmin University. (European universities, in particular, started out as literal divinity schools, and hence are outgrowths of the literal Catholic church, receiving literal Papal bulls to establish themselves as one of the studia generalia.) [Retracted, while the point about teaching religious law and receiving literal papal bulls is true the origins of the universities are much more diverse. But my point about the history of cultural hegemony in such institutions still stands.]
What Yarvin seems to be annoyed by is that the “Cathedral consensus” featured ideas that he dislikes, instead of the quasi-feudal ideology of might makes right that he finds more appealing. That is also not surprising. People largely don’t notice when they are part of a dominant class and their ideas are treated as default: that’s just them being normal, not weird. However, when they find themselves at the edge of the overton window, suddenly what was right and normal becomes crushing and oppressive. The natural dominance of sensible ideas and sensible people becomes a twisted hegemony of obvious lies propped up by delusional power-brokers. This perspective shift is also extremely well documented in human culture and literature.
In general, the concept that a homogenous ruling class culture can then be pushed into delusional consensuses which ultimately harms everyone is an idea as old as the Trojan War. The tension between maintaining a grip on power and maintaining a grip on reality is well explored in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus (which also has an imo pretty decent second half on AI). In particular I direct you to his account of the Bavarian witch hunts. Indeed, the unprecedented feature of modern society is the rapid divergence in ideas that is possible thanks to information technology and the cultivation of local echo chambers. Unfortuantely, I have few simple answers to offer to this age old question, but I hope that recognising the lineage of the question helps with disambiguation somewhat. I look forward to your ideas about new liberalisms.
Thanks for the well-written and good-faith reply. I feel a bit confused by how to relate to it on a meta level, so let me think out loud for a while.
I’m not surprised that I’m reinventing a bunch of ideas from the humanities, given that I don’t have much of a humanities background and didn’t dig very far through the literature.
But I have some sense that even if I had dug for these humanities concepts, they wouldn’t give me what I want.
What do I want?
Concepts that are applied to explaining current cultural and political phenomena around me (because those are the ones I’m most aware of and interested in). It seems like the humanities are currently incapable of analyzing their own behavior using (their versions of) these ideas, because of their level of ideological conformity. But maybe it’s there and I just don’t know about it?
Concepts that are informed by game theory and other formal models (as the work I covered in my three-book review was). I get the sense that the most natural thinkers from the humanities to read on these topics (Foucault? Habermas?) don’t do this.
Concepts that slot naturally into my understanding of how intelligence works, letting me link my thinking about sociology to my thinking about AI. This is more subjective, but e.g. the distinction between centralized and distributed agents has been very useful for me. This part is more about me writing for myself rather than other people.
So I’d be interested in pointers to sources that can give me #1 and #2 in particular.
EDIT: actually I think there’s another meta-level gap between us. Something like: you characterize Yarvin as just being annoyed that the consensus disagrees with him. But in the 15 years since he was originally writing, the consensus did kinda go insane. So it’s a bit odd to not give him at least some credit for getting something important right in advance.
My meta- practical suggestion is to ask AIs with prompts like notice where the ideas or arguments matches existing ideas from humanities, using different language. Ideally point to references to such sources. Often you will find people who came up with somewhat similar models or observations. Also while people may be hard to reach or dead, and engaging with long books is costly, in my experience even their simulacra can provide useful feedback, come up with ideas, point to what you miss.
Another meta- idea is it seems good to notice the skulls. My suspicion is it is not coincidence that humanities are particularly incapable of using the knowledge which actually exists in their field—possibly the egregores feel the danger or the value.
Concepts that are informed by game theory and other formal models
Strongly in favour of this.
There are people in academia doing this type of work, a lot of them are economists by training studying sociology and political science. See for example Freaknomics by Stephen Levitt or Daron Acemoglu who recently won a nobel prize. Search keywords: neo-instutionalism, rational choice theory. There are a lot of political science papers on rational choice theory, I haven’t read many of them so I can’t give immediate recommendations.
I’d be happy to join you in your search for existing literature, if that’s a priority for you. Or just generally discuss the stuff. I’m particularly interested in applying rational choice models to how the internet will affect society.
Hey, thank you for taking the time to reply honestly and in detail as well. With regards to what you want, I think that this is in many senses also what I am looking for, especially the last item about tying in collective behaviour to reasoning about intelligence. I think one of the frames you might find the most useful is one you’ve already covered—power as a coordination game. As you alluded to in your original post, people aren’t in a massive hive mind/conspiracy—they mostly want to do what other successful people seem to be doing, which translates well to a coordination game and also explains the rapid “board flips” once a critical mass of support/rejection against some proposition is reached. For example, witness the rapid switch to majority support of gay marriage in the 2010s amongst the population in general.
Would also love to discuss this with you in more detail (I trained as an English student and also studied Digital Humanities). I will leave off with a few book suggestions that, while maybe not directly answering your needs, you might find interesting.
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (as close to a self-portrait by the modern humanities as it gets)
Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton (high level perspective on how cultural, material, and social currents impact our views on reality)
How minds change by David McRaney (not humanities, but pop sci about the science of belief and persuasion)
P.S. Re: the point about Yarvin being right, betting on the dominant group in society embracing a dangerous delusion is a remarkably safe bet. (E.g. McCarthyism, the aforementioned Bavarian Witch Hunts, fascism, lysenkoism etc.)
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (as close to a self-portrait by the modern humanities as it gets)
At least reading the wikipedia, this… does not seem so self-conscious to me. Eg.
Fisher regards capitalist realism as emerging from a purposeful push by the neoliberal right to transform the attitudes of both the general population and the left towards capitalism and specifically the post-Fordist form of capitalism that prevailed throughout the 1980s. The relative inability of the political left to come up with an alternative economic model in response to the rise of neoliberal capitalism and the concurrent Reaganomics era created a vacuum that facilitated the birth of a capitalist realist perspective. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which Fisher believes represented the only real example of a working non-capitalist system, further cemented the place of capitalist realism both politically and in the general population, and was hailed as the decisive final victory of capitalism. According to Fisher, in a post-Soviet era, unchecked capitalism was able to reframe history into a capitalist narrative in which neoliberalism was the result of a natural progression of history and even embodied the culmination of human development.
and
Fisher argues that the bank bailouts following the 2008 economic crisis were a quintessential example of capitalist realism in action, reasoning that the bailouts occurred largely because the idea of allowing the banking system to fail was unimaginable to both politicians and the general population. Due to the intrinsic value of banks to the capitalist system, Fisher proposes that the influence of capitalist realism meant that such a failure was never considered an option. As a consequence, Fisher observes, the neoliberal system survived and capitalist realism was further validated. Fisher classifies the current state of capitalist realism in the neoliberal system in the following terms:
The only powerful agents influencing politicians and managers in education are business interests. It’s become far too easy to ignore workers and, partly because of this, workers feel increasingly helpless and impotent. The concerted attack on unions by neoliberal interest groups, together with the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist organisation of the economy – the move towards casualisation, just-in-time production, globalization – has eroded the power base of unions [and thus the labor force].
These are not exactly hard-hitting or at all novel or even interesting criticisms. And they’re not even criticisms of humanities! So how can it be self-conscious?
I think you’re saying something here but I’m going to factor it a bit to be sure.
“not exactly hard-hitting”
“not… at all novel”
“not… even interesting”
“not even criticisms of the humanities”
One and three I’m just going to call ‘subjective’ (and I think I would just agree with you if the Wikipedia article were actually representative of the contents of the book, which it is not).
Re 4: The book itself is actually largely about his experiences as a professor, being subjected to the forces of elite coordination and bureaucracy, and reads a lot like Yarvin’s critiques of the Cathedral (although Fisher identifies these as representative of a pseudo-left).
Re 2: The novelty comes from the contemporaneity of the writing. Fisher is doing a very early-20th century Marxist thing of actually talking about one’s experience of the world, and relating that back to broader trends, in plain language. The world has changed enough that the work has become tragically dated, and I personally wouldn’t recommend it to people who aren’t already somewhat sympathetic to his views, since its strength around the time of its publication (that contemporaneity) has, predictably, becomes its weakness.
The work that more does the thing testingthewaters is gesturing toward, imo, is Exiting the Vampire Castle. The views expressed in this work are directly upstream of his death: his firm (and early) rebuke of cancel culture and identity politics precipitated rejection and bullying from other leftists on twitter, deepening his depression. He later killed himself.
Important note if you actually read the essay: he’s setting his aim at similar phenomena to Yarvin, but is identifying the cause differently // he is a leftist talking to other leftists, so is using terms like ‘capital’ in a valenced way. I think the utility of this work, for someone who is not part of the audience he is critiquing, is that it shows that the left has any answer at all to the phenomena Yarvin and Ngo are calling out; that they’re not, wholesale, oblivious to these problems and, in fact, the principal divide in the contemporary left is between those who reject the Cathedral and those who seek to join it.
(obligatory “Nick Land was Mark Fisher’s dissertation advisor.”)
Hey, really enjoyed your triple review on power lies trembling, but imo this topic has been… done to death in the humanities, and reinventing terminology ad hoc is somewhat missing the point. The idea that the dominant class in a society comes from a set of social institutions that share core ideas and modus operandi (in other words “behaving as a single organisation”) is not a shocking new phenomenon of twentieth century mass culture, and is certainly not a “mystery”. This is basically how every country has developed a ruling class/ideology since the term started to have a meaning, through academic institutions that produce similar people. Yale and Harvard are as Oxford and Cambridge, or Peking University and Renmin University.
(European universities, in particular, started out as literal divinity schools, and hence are outgrowths of the literal Catholic church, receiving literal Papal bulls to establish themselves as one of the studia generalia.)[Retracted, while the point about teaching religious law and receiving literal papal bulls is true the origins of the universities are much more diverse. But my point about the history of cultural hegemony in such institutions still stands.]What Yarvin seems to be annoyed by is that the “Cathedral consensus” featured ideas that he dislikes, instead of the quasi-feudal ideology of might makes right that he finds more appealing. That is also not surprising. People largely don’t notice when they are part of a dominant class and their ideas are treated as default: that’s just them being normal, not weird. However, when they find themselves at the edge of the overton window, suddenly what was right and normal becomes crushing and oppressive. The natural dominance of sensible ideas and sensible people becomes a twisted hegemony of obvious lies propped up by delusional power-brokers. This perspective shift is also extremely well documented in human culture and literature.
In general, the concept that a homogenous ruling class culture can then be pushed into delusional consensuses which ultimately harms everyone is an idea as old as the Trojan War. The tension between maintaining a grip on power and maintaining a grip on reality is well explored in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus (which also has an imo pretty decent second half on AI). In particular I direct you to his account of the Bavarian witch hunts. Indeed, the unprecedented feature of modern society is the rapid divergence in ideas that is possible thanks to information technology and the cultivation of local echo chambers. Unfortuantely, I have few simple answers to offer to this age old question, but I hope that recognising the lineage of the question helps with disambiguation somewhat. I look forward to your ideas about new liberalisms.
Thanks for the well-written and good-faith reply. I feel a bit confused by how to relate to it on a meta level, so let me think out loud for a while.
I’m not surprised that I’m reinventing a bunch of ideas from the humanities, given that I don’t have much of a humanities background and didn’t dig very far through the literature.
But I have some sense that even if I had dug for these humanities concepts, they wouldn’t give me what I want.
What do I want?
Concepts that are applied to explaining current cultural and political phenomena around me (because those are the ones I’m most aware of and interested in). It seems like the humanities are currently incapable of analyzing their own behavior using (their versions of) these ideas, because of their level of ideological conformity. But maybe it’s there and I just don’t know about it?
Concepts that are informed by game theory and other formal models (as the work I covered in my three-book review was). I get the sense that the most natural thinkers from the humanities to read on these topics (Foucault? Habermas?) don’t do this.
Concepts that slot naturally into my understanding of how intelligence works, letting me link my thinking about sociology to my thinking about AI. This is more subjective, but e.g. the distinction between centralized and distributed agents has been very useful for me. This part is more about me writing for myself rather than other people.
So I’d be interested in pointers to sources that can give me #1 and #2 in particular.
EDIT: actually I think there’s another meta-level gap between us. Something like: you characterize Yarvin as just being annoyed that the consensus disagrees with him. But in the 15 years since he was originally writing, the consensus did kinda go insane. So it’s a bit odd to not give him at least some credit for getting something important right in advance.
My meta- practical suggestion is to ask AIs with prompts like notice where the ideas or arguments matches existing ideas from humanities, using different language. Ideally point to references to such sources. Often you will find people who came up with somewhat similar models or observations. Also while people may be hard to reach or dead, and engaging with long books is costly, in my experience even their simulacra can provide useful feedback, come up with ideas, point to what you miss.
Another meta- idea is it seems good to notice the skulls. My suspicion is it is not coincidence that humanities are particularly incapable of using the knowledge which actually exists in their field—possibly the egregores feel the danger or the value.
One specific reading suggestion is The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel. Other, parts about institutional change in Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy by Avner Greif
Strongly in favour of this.
There are people in academia doing this type of work, a lot of them are economists by training studying sociology and political science. See for example Freaknomics by Stephen Levitt or Daron Acemoglu who recently won a nobel prize. Search keywords: neo-instutionalism, rational choice theory. There are a lot of political science papers on rational choice theory, I haven’t read many of them so I can’t give immediate recommendations.
I’d be happy to join you in your search for existing literature, if that’s a priority for you. Or just generally discuss the stuff. I’m particularly interested in applying rational choice models to how the internet will affect society.
Hey, thank you for taking the time to reply honestly and in detail as well. With regards to what you want, I think that this is in many senses also what I am looking for, especially the last item about tying in collective behaviour to reasoning about intelligence. I think one of the frames you might find the most useful is one you’ve already covered—power as a coordination game. As you alluded to in your original post, people aren’t in a massive hive mind/conspiracy—they mostly want to do what other successful people seem to be doing, which translates well to a coordination game and also explains the rapid “board flips” once a critical mass of support/rejection against some proposition is reached. For example, witness the rapid switch to majority support of gay marriage in the 2010s amongst the population in general.
Would also love to discuss this with you in more detail (I trained as an English student and also studied Digital Humanities). I will leave off with a few book suggestions that, while maybe not directly answering your needs, you might find interesting.
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (as close to a self-portrait by the modern humanities as it gets)
Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton (high level perspective on how cultural, material, and social currents impact our views on reality)
How minds change by David McRaney (not humanities, but pop sci about the science of belief and persuasion)
P.S. Re: the point about Yarvin being right, betting on the dominant group in society embracing a dangerous delusion is a remarkably safe bet. (E.g. McCarthyism, the aforementioned Bavarian Witch Hunts, fascism, lysenkoism etc.)
At least reading the wikipedia, this… does not seem so self-conscious to me. Eg.
and
These are not exactly hard-hitting or at all novel or even interesting criticisms. And they’re not even criticisms of humanities! So how can it be self-conscious?
I think you’re saying something here but I’m going to factor it a bit to be sure.
“not exactly hard-hitting”
“not… at all novel”
“not… even interesting”
“not even criticisms of the humanities”
One and three I’m just going to call ‘subjective’ (and I think I would just agree with you if the Wikipedia article were actually representative of the contents of the book, which it is not).
Re 4: The book itself is actually largely about his experiences as a professor, being subjected to the forces of elite coordination and bureaucracy, and reads a lot like Yarvin’s critiques of the Cathedral (although Fisher identifies these as representative of a pseudo-left).
Re 2: The novelty comes from the contemporaneity of the writing. Fisher is doing a very early-20th century Marxist thing of actually talking about one’s experience of the world, and relating that back to broader trends, in plain language. The world has changed enough that the work has become tragically dated, and I personally wouldn’t recommend it to people who aren’t already somewhat sympathetic to his views, since its strength around the time of its publication (that contemporaneity) has, predictably, becomes its weakness.
The work that more does the thing testingthewaters is gesturing toward, imo, is Exiting the Vampire Castle. The views expressed in this work are directly upstream of his death: his firm (and early) rebuke of cancel culture and identity politics precipitated rejection and bullying from other leftists on twitter, deepening his depression. He later killed himself.
Important note if you actually read the essay: he’s setting his aim at similar phenomena to Yarvin, but is identifying the cause differently // he is a leftist talking to other leftists, so is using terms like ‘capital’ in a valenced way. I think the utility of this work, for someone who is not part of the audience he is critiquing, is that it shows that the left has any answer at all to the phenomena Yarvin and Ngo are calling out; that they’re not, wholesale, oblivious to these problems and, in fact, the principal divide in the contemporary left is between those who reject the Cathedral and those who seek to join it.
(obligatory “Nick Land was Mark Fisher’s dissertation advisor.”)
Happy to take your word on these things if the wikipedia article is unrepresentative!