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:
Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism--using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but 'fellow travellers' and russophiles generally.
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 appl...
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):
...But for an intellectual, transference [of "nationalist" allegiance] has an important function... It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. [...] In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. [...] [Yet] [h]e still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to lo
"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."
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.
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!"?
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.
Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists.
Why does right wing extremism scare you so much more than left wing extremism when the former is utterly despised as the definition of evil by most Westerners while the latter is only ever lukewarmly condemned?
Do extreme right wingers have some particular super power that I'm not aware of? The right wing are the guys who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad and if you listen to Moldbug for a century before that too. I need some actual evidence that I should worry about them getting power anywhere in the West without being bombed into the stone age by the US five minutes later (bombing European right wing extremists, especially racist ones is the stuff of victory, moral superiority and war fantasies for them --- check out American video games, adventure novels and action movie villains), than say of me personally being struck by lightning when I'm walking my dog on a rainy Saturday evening.
Reading some of your comments I can't shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?
I know you're likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual "respectable" authors in such context, but... any examples? Please?
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 shoot...
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
Well they certainly exist, expecially in Hollywood.
1st World - Capitalists
2d World - Communists
3rd World - The places where puppet games were played (particularly former colonies).
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.
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.
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?
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 eve...
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
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-winger...
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.
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.
That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal,
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?
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.
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...
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.
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 s...
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.
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.
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 ...
Don't get me wrong, the basic story about the Soviet-directed subversion is true and well-attested by testimonies of Soviet defectors. However, there are two major problems with Raymond's narrative.
First, his ideological concept of "suicidalism" is highly contrived and detached from reality on a number of points. Raymond starts from his own libertarian ideology -- with which I in fact have some sympathy, but which is in his case very nerdy and simplistic -- and then he takes a caricatured version of every opinion he disagrees with, and amalgamates all this. Now, I do think a correct analysis along these lines could be done (i.e. reducing the dominant ideology in the modern West to a list of principles, some of which need to be only stated plainly to see how pernicious they are). However, I think Raymond fails in this task, being driven by the desire to see something as close as possible to a simple evil inversion of his own principles.
(He also displays a trait common among modern libertarians and conservatives that I find indescribably irritating. Namely, they often scour the rhetoric of liberals and then exclaim in triumph when they find something that seems like a goo...
This is relevant not only to "Politics is the Mind-killer" but also to "The Bottom Line" and the notion of motivated cognition:
Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore START by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only AFTER this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case.
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.
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 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-idea...
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...
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?).