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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?).
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Comments (285)
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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 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 are wrong because the existence of scarcity guarantees that schemes of wealth distribution cannot solve every social problem.
Who do you have in mind? ETA?
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).
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.
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.)
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:
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.
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?
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).
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.
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?
Um... Orwell? :)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
The time we are talking about was not "after Stalin's death".
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?)
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
English does have a perfectly good word for the "nationalism" Orwell describes: tribalism.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I think it's good and should go onto the wiki page.
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.
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
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.
Thanks for the clarification.