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[anonymous]90

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).

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CronoDAS70

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.

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?

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8gjm
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?
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by [anonymous]
1 min read
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13

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?).

 

Personal Blog

13

George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer
28Vladimir_M
10Viliam_Bur
2[anonymous]
9[anonymous]
8gjm
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[-]Vladimir_M280

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... (read more)

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[-]Viliam_Bur100

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.)

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[-]Vladimir_M180

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

... (read more)
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1Multiheaded
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.
[-]Eugine_Nier210

"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.

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0Multiheaded
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.
9Eugine_Nier
The point is that they're using these charges to avoid rationally confronting their opponents' arguments.
-3Multiheaded
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.
[-]Eugine_Nier190

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.

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6Multiheaded
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.)
5[anonymous]
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.
1Multiheaded
My thoughts exactly! Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists. And most of the radical Right do conspiciously seek to absolve traditional society of whatever stripe they prefer of absolutely any moral guilt. Back to the report in question, it seems well-founded in asserting that the black community had some faulty traditions and regressive ways of raising its new generations (as, from a modern perspective, might some other communities). However, it doesn't outright deny the economic angle of the problem, nor, especially, does it paint a picture of fundamental hostility between the races, yet it is undoubtedly used to "support" such a picture even now by the real racists! I wonder if Moynihan himself feared that key the message he apparently tried to send - "White people, in view of their historical fortune, have a duty to help struggling minorities out in an intelligent way, even if it might hurt some feelings in the short run when some structural elements of society need to be altered" - would be co-opted by some unsympathetic fucks to "prove" that n**rs are culturally inferior and should be subjugated by the "superior" races.
[-]CaveJohnson150

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?

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5Multiheaded
Sort of yes! I've always been a little terrified of the power of naked, unashamed technocracy, of either despotic or Randian aspect. Even the more ruthless bits of Moldbug's (rather comfortable and watered-down) technocratic fascism are, I fear, hardly a glimpse of what's to come, if the "rationality" of geeks and engineers, finally free from either today's humanist quasi-theocracy and the sober bounds of old-time coonservatism, gets free rein. Perhaps many here on LW, especially non-neurotypical people (who I tend to sympathize with a lot, but also be wary of if their condition includes any change in empathy) would be tempted by such a Ubermensch thing. Think of a hybrid of Speer, Eichmann and a weak UFAI and you'll understand how this nightmare of mine goes. (I'm actually integrating a sinister-yet-rationalist one world government based on these fears in my science fantasy novel - instead of a generic villainous empire I started out with - except that in my story it was formed by voices of moderation in high places after the Axis victory in WW2 and the ensuing cold war, not as the radical elitist movement that I can phantom it as in the real world.)
6Eugine_Nier
"Naked, unashamed technocracy" strikes me as much more similar to the position advocated by the left (ETA: especially the socialist left) then the right.
7Multiheaded
Oh, it's advocated by the left, alright (damn you language), but e.g. Stalinism was much less that and much more feudalism than Westerners commonly assume; it was quite the underground struggle, and Stalin himself (even without supposing any conspiracy) fell to it, as everyone around was either genuinely too afraid of disrupting him the morning he had his heart attack/whatever it was, or consciously decided to abandon him. My point is, if you scratch a Stalinist you're likely to find a barbarian; those smart, brave and virtuous alt-right-wingers strike me as the only sort of people who could potentially succeed in truly implementing such a regime.
1CaveJohnson
That is a very interesting concept! I'd love to read more about it, if you are writing in English and have any drafts you would like someone to read or will eventually publish, please make a post on LW!
7Multiheaded
SYNOPSIS: The novel's background is that Nazi and Japanese research into the nature of reality in an attempt to access "magic" or create "ontotechnological weapons" (credit for the word "Ontotechnology" goes to EY) pretty much broke the self-sealing "reality bubble" of Earth, placed there by an interdimensional supercivilization fighting its own civil war for the Universe itself. That supercivilization's factions are perceived as "Angels" and "Demons"; they have made themselves into ontologically basic mental entities and the former are trying to impose absolute objective morality upon the Universe (which IS absolutely good and benign for any species that comes within its influence) while the latter are ruthless anarchists and opppose any rules at all, especially deontological ones. As humans were predicted to have unusually strong reality-warping potential, Earth was sealed away in a local ceasefire that forbade both recruiting from it. After the "bubble" began to tear, the "demons", acting without any hierarchy, just spontaneously invaded, making some people into their playthings, dragging others away for use as psychic slave-soldiers and helping start WW3 in the ongoing panic. As Japan and the Reich, blaming each other, were preparing to obliterate the remnants of civilization, powerful technocratic elements on both sides independently launched coups, came to an agreement and instated a new world order that was essentially a megacorporation (I thought of this before reading any Moldbug). It shaped humanity into a great and complex hierarchy, where daily strife and the fullfillment of urges by the population would accumulate the "psychic" reality-warping energies in huge resonators to drain every drop of them, including from people gifted enough to become "mages". The pooled energy was used to assist in brainwashing the masses, as a shield to keep rampaging demons away from the major arcologies, and to lash out at the barren and twisted Wastelands, where barbaric
3Multiheaded
Unfortunately for you, I'm writing in Russian, as attempting something novel-length in English would've at this point only become a drain of my mental energy; I'll need another decade of practice before I can use it as easily as Russian.
2Eugine_Nier
Having beliefs that correspond to reality?
3Multiheaded
You would also describe yourself as having beliefs that correspond to reality, but neither you nor me nor the general public would claim that you're some kind of extremist on account, say, of your posts here; you look like a typical secularist conservative/libertarian type to me. While we would clearly disagree about many of each other's values or instrumental decisions, we definitely wouldn't believe that the other is a horrible enemy of civilization.
[-]Vladimir_M110

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... (read more)

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-2Multiheaded
Okay, thanks. However, based on what I know of the US, nearly any murder or other serious incident caught in the news where the races of the victim and the accused were different would practically always provoke a hysterical reaction wracked with all the usual American neuroses. There's nothing exceptionally bad about this case's handling that hasn't been true for a very long while IMO. (Well, except for pre-Civil War times, when things might have been a little less convoulted but positively flaunted the heuristics we now find disgusting; the mainstream wouldn't stop for a moment before assigning guilt based on how non-Anglo-Saxon* a participant was, and the radical anti-racists would jump to the opposite conclusion, often in a patronizing "Uncle Tom" way. Can't point to a specific case from which I got this picture, and you might be justified in calling it oversimplified, but I'm pretty sure that it's not just a modern political caricature of the bad old times.) -* Were the Southern whites also considered Anglo-Saxon in the broad sense? If no, what word did they use to separate themselves and e.g. the Irish/Eastern European immigrants or other "inferior" whites?
9[anonymous]
There is plenty of counter evidence to this. Even some stuff that would seem to have all the building blocks for media exposure and revenue generation, like say the recent case of a home invasion where a young man sexually assaults and kills a 85 year old woman and beats her husband to the point of him being hospitalized.
2Multiheaded
Huh? So... what do you think makes the difference between this case and the ones that failed to detonate? If your answer looks too mind-killing to you, please PM me.
5[anonymous]
Man bites dog partially explains it.
7Vladimir_M
Well, I am giving it as an example of standard and long-standing attitudes of the sort that Orwell described as "transferred nationalism," not some novel phenomenon.
2Multiheaded
Well, how about, say, Germany or Canada? The racial issues are obviously less charged here, and not due to their especial monoethnicity - and it appears to me from outside view that while people there might be unimaginably biased on other issues, they are at least more polite, less prone to contagnious hysteria and just have a higher sanity waterline as communities.
-1CharlieSheen
I think Steve Sailer does a good job of analysing this.
4Multiheaded
Sorry, but I think this is too partisan and arational (has Sailer even tried to imagine what his "enemies" think and believe before professing that they are basically Stalin and O'Brien?) to quote on LW. You could've just linked to the post.
1CharlieSheen
Good point, fixed the post.
-6hairyfigment
3Eugine_Nier
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.
3Multiheaded
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).
[-]Eugine_Nier100

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.

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3Multiheaded
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.
1[anonymous]
Forgive my ignorance, but what's that?
9TimS
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.
0[anonymous]
Oh! We have this thing in TV Tropes! We call it a Straw Hypocrite! Indeed, it's a hypothesis always worth assuming, but I don't see how much use it can have except in hindsight, I mean how would one go about predicting someone else's genuine emotional state? It's much easier to predict the emotional state they will allow themselves to show, than it is to try to divine what's going in in that brain of theirs! Not to mention, they probably aren't even actually very clear on what they feel or what they think, at all. In extreme cases, they may have less predictive ability on the topic of their inner workings than an external observer! Not to mention the remarkably ironic occasions where people believe they are "faking" feelings that they actually have and are in denial of!
0Multiheaded
Pinkie Pie mode, eh?
0[anonymous]
Pinkie Pie mode is my default mode, I just try to subdue it when I'm on the Internet, but sometimes I get lazy...
0Multiheaded
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.)
4Eugine_Nier
That doesn't surprise me in the least.
-2[anonymous]
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?
[-]TimS130

1st World - Capitalists
2d World - Communists
3rd World - The places where puppet games were played (particularly former colonies).

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2[anonymous]
I'd say... antifascism?
8[anonymous]
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).
3Bill_McGrath
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.
3TimS
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.
4Eugine_Nier
And what are those reasons? Since I really don't see the distinction you're trying to make.
2TimS
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.
3Eugine_Nier
You didn't answer my question. Let me state it more explicitly. What do you mean by "fascism"?
4TimS
* Fascists seem to believe that there once was a society that lived perfectly. Some of us can become these "Ideal Men" if we are spiritually pure enough (or maybe we can only set things up so that our descendents can be this way). Further, the importance of this spiritual purity justifies any violence in service of reaching this goal. Fascists are wrong because the imagined past never occurred (like the country song that complains that Coke is a slang shortening for Cocaine - as if there was ever a time when Coke was not a reference to Cocaine). * Communists have the same belief in an "Ideal Man," but they think that no one has ever lived that way. With sufficient mental purity, we might be able to become "Ideal" (again, we might only be able to cause this for our descendents). Once we are all ideal, we will be able distribute resources "fairly" and avoid the social problems we face today. Again, achieving that ideal justifies any violence. Communists are wrong because the existence of scarcity guarantees that schemes of wealth distribution cannot solve every social problem. * Transhumanist look forward, not backwards. But they don't say that all social problems will go away. Only that technology will make us so rich that all our current problems will be gone. There's the joke of the person revived from suspended animation in the distant future who asks if there was still poverty, disease, hunger, wars or crime and is told that no, those problems were solved long ago. Then he asks, then why doess everybody seem so nervous? "Well, you see - we have REAL problems."
-2[anonymous]
Who do you have in mind? ETA?
-7[anonymous]
7Viliam_Bur
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.)
0[anonymous]
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.
7Viliam_Bur
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 fa
5Eugine_Nier
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.
2[anonymous]
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!
3Viliam_Bur
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.
2[anonymous]
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.
3Viliam_Bur
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.
2TheOtherDave
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.
2[anonymous]
So it's kind of like the American Consitution?
3TheOtherDave
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.
2[anonymous]
I find the US constitution remarkable in its sheer longevity, and how well-designed it was that it can still be used at this point in time. Compare and contrast with the French and Spanish consitutions throughout the XIXth and XXth centuries, which have been changing with every new regime. Sometimes with every new party. The Constitutions tended to be fairly detailed and restrictive, and not written with eternity in mind. I still used to prefer the latest versions of those because they tended to be explicitly Human Rights Compliant (TM), and found the Bill of Rights and the Amendments to be fairly incomplete and outdated in that regard. But it's been growing on me as of late. Anyway, yes, the similarity I draw is that both are protocols and guidelines that are intended to outlast their creators far, far into the future, and still be useful to people much more intelligent and knowledgeable than the creators, to be applied to much more complex problems than the creators ever faced.
1CronoDAS
The U.S. constitution still has its problems (the Electoral College turned out to be a stupid idea, and the requirement that each state have equal representation in the Senate is also problematic), but it seems to have worked well enough...
1[anonymous]
You'd expect the CEV's performance to be within those parameters. But I have one question: when can one decide to abolish either of those, and replace it with a new system entirely? Sometimes it is better to restart from scratch.
0Eugine_Nier
This certainly isn't the time. The two problems CronoDAS mentioned are at most mildly annoying, it isn't worth destroying a powerful and useful Schelling point merely to fix them.
9[anonymous]
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).
8gjm
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?
[-][anonymous]110

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... (read more)

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6gjm
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?".
3[anonymous]
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.
2[anonymous]
Yes, but it never was a nuclear war.
1[anonymous]
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.
-1gjm
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.)
3Multiheaded
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.
4Eugine_Nier
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.
2Multiheaded
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.
0[anonymous]
More importantly, communist "nationalism" isn't quite the same as communist collaboration, or any other form of "treason".
9Vladimir_M
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 Curtai
9gjm
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.
[-]Vladimir_M130

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... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]100

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?

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[-]Eugine_Nier120

Churchill did it,

It didn't even let Churchill win reelection right after the war ended.

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5[anonymous]
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?
5Eugine_Nier
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.
1asr
The word regime usually means "the overall structure of the government" or "a period of legal and administrative continuity" -- not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It's misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
5TimS
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
-1asr
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
1Eugine_Nier
These are not mutually exclusive.
4Multiheaded
Um... Orwell? :)
[-]Vladimir_M110

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... (read more)

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0[anonymous]
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?
[-]Vladimir_M140

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... (read more)

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2Multiheaded
The trouble with such a setup is that it's the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who'd find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they "only" have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with "respectable" minority members - not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
1Vladimir_M
You're losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
0Multiheaded
(Yes, I should admit that I've more or less projected the example above from today's realities; it's more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
0Multiheaded
Nowdays, nearly anyone - either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like - can aspire to be an "intellectual" just by starting a blog; most people who are in a "position" like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
8gjm
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 reliabilit
5Multiheaded
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)
7[anonymous]
You know, I've got to use this one sometime, with a straight face, just to see the reaction.
4gjm
The thing is, it's not completely wrong :-). (Except for the fact that that belief itself certainly isn't irrational in any useful sense.)
0[anonymous]
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.
3gjm
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.
1[anonymous]
That's a pretty huge more-or-less.
5gjm
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn't completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn't endorsing them!
0[anonymous]
And it was very cleverly put, if I dare say so.
5[anonymous]
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.
9Vladimir_M
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.
2[anonymous]
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that: * The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc. * You don't get punished retroactively. * Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision. * Children having rights and being granted special protection. * The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them. * The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism * The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers. * And so on and so forth. Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It's also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don't aim for a position they weren't capable of keeping).
[-]Vladimir_M120

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.

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[-][anonymous]100

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 ... (read more)

Reply
-5[anonymous]
8[anonymous]
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!"
0[anonymous]
You're not making sense to me. What is "This"? What are you talking about?
6[anonymous]
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?
5David Althaus
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!
0Eugine_Nier
Have you seen this post by Eliezer?
3David Althaus
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I'm still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn't mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer's, I'm just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador's arguments.
2Eugine_Nier
I'm not really convinced by it either.
2[anonymous]
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly "observed" moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree. Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as "adding back up to normality". I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like "moral progress" real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen't seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
1[anonymous]
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.
4[anonymous]
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).
0[anonymous]
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It's not like we've had many of those throughout history...
3[anonymous]
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I'm a square after all. To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
2[anonymous]
Like these guys?
-1TimS
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.
2[anonymous]
Eee-nope. Adaptation executers not fitness maximizers.
-1TimS
Sorry, don't understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn't mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
5[anonymous]
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren't significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD. It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of "ethics".
2[anonymous]
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn't changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we're the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
-1TimS
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful. For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn't a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure. I'm saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
8[anonymous]
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us. Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can't cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don't much change. Let us in this light review Fischer's fundamental theorem of natural selection: In other words crocodiles also didn't have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations. And this precisely what we observe.
5[anonymous]
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn't this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn't as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn't we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn't present there. Isn't that evolution? The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes. Incidentally this is the perfect voter too.
0[anonymous]
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn't shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage. I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven't we Tim?
2Multiheaded
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?)
0gjm
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?
6CharlieSheen
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.
6Multiheaded
This was essentially imprisonment and incapacitation without trial for dissenters. You got locked up and basically tortured.
4CharlieSheen
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).
-3Multiheaded
In other news, Barack Obama is literally Stalin and his Socialist Healthcare will dismantle dissenters for spare organs. (C'mon, bro.)
2CharlieSheen
Dammit it all makes sense now! I just knew I was missing something.
1Multiheaded
Seriously, though, the comparison is preposterous. Look at how Anders Breivik (curse his name) is treated.
1CharlieSheen
I didn't mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some "muscular liberalism" on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn't at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
0gjm
The time we are talking about was not "after Stalin's death".
4Vladimir_M
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.)
4Multiheaded
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.
3AlexM
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.
0buybuydandavis
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.
2TimS
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.
2buybuydandavis
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.
2TimS
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.
0Eugine_Nier
I linked to a relevant article elsewhere in this thread.
7Vladimir_M
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.
1Eugine_Nier
Could you go into more details on what you think is wrong with his overall picture.
[-]Vladimir_M120

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... (read more)

Reply
0TimS
Well said. At that point, I'm not sure that there's anything left of the article that isn't better stated by you in this comment here. In short, the whole purpose of the article was to rant (which is problematic for exactly the reasons you described).
0Multiheaded
Thanks. Leaving out your ideological statements and some other contrarian things, much of that was my impression of the article as well.
3TimS
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.
1[anonymous]
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.
1TimS
Let me just say that I don't think that post-modernism can be thought of as Socratic iconoclasm. I think it has valuable insights, many of which have been co-opted by more "rationalist" philosophy. For example, I don't think Michel Foucault can profitably be described as a nihilist. And whatever his sympathies to the Soviet Union (it appears that it was different at different stages of his life), I think the idea that he was generating poison-memes on behalf of the Soviet Union is ludicrous.
2[anonymous]
I would downvote your post because of the way its statements seem to be disjointed to each other, but I'd rather not have your post go below threshold, so I'll directly ask you: * Why do you not think that post-modernism can be thought of as a form of methodological and cultural iconoclasm, and in hwat measure do you think it is not comparaabe to the efforts of Socrates and his contemporaries... and the backlash they suffered because of it. * What are those valuable insights you talk of, and what is that quote "ratonalist" unquote philosophy that has coopted many of them? * Why would Foulcault be described as a nihilist? * You are aware that Appeal to Ridicule advances the discussion excatly nowhere. Why do you think the fact that he was "spreading poision memes on behalf of the Soviet Union" to be remarkably unlikely and incongruous?
1[anonymous]
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?
0Eugine_Nier
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.
0[anonymous]
Strangely enough, this fragment of the declaration, out of context, appears to enable a Marxist revolution as easily as any other, and without much of a stretch: if one assumes that the current Governments are acting as merely enablers and administrators of a corporate power that would stand between them and their rights to Life (nationalized healthcare, the right to the minimum amount of resources to survive whether you want to work or not), Liberty (job protection, safety nets, elimination of censorship and surveillance, not being discriminated from jobs because of race, creed, sexual life, or having children), and the pursuit of Happiness (depending on whose definition, it might involve minimizing time spent working, assuming your job doesn't provide you with happiness, and maximizing the time spent with one's family, or doing other stuff one actually likes to do, including non-remunerated but actual, tiring, productive work). I guess we should praise the Founding Fathers for the foersight they put in their work, and having made it as flexible as it is. That said, it is indeed sad how doctrinal Marxism has shown an absolutely deplorable disregard for the rights and interests of anyone who wasn't a proletarian. Luckily, democratist, egalitarian movements have predated and outlived Marxism, being born of a sensibility that is beyond mere memetic and mimetic propagation. By the way. what is volk-Marxism, for that matter? A search in google mostly turns out the blog you linked to, Youtube comments, and some right-wing blogs. It does not seem to be a very widespread word... could you allay my suspicions that it isn't a buzzword? (I don't say this in a spirit of mockery, I am genuinely curious). I'd like you to source the priors that allow you to assess such a probability. As a Muslim, and someone who was in close contact with those movements throughout, I do not recall a single source phrasing the conflict in religious terms. What does that entail, exactly, and wh
0Eugine_Nier
Only in the sense that any text can be interpreted to mean anything with enough "interpretation", as you proceed to do in the next paragraph. Also I shown mention that Jefferson broke with what one might call "orthodox Lockeanism" by substituting "pursuit of happiness" for "property". Marxists tend to be all for censorship and surveillance as long as they're the ones doing the censoring and surveilling. A term for the Marxist-dervied/inspired memes that Eric Raymond discusses in the blog post I linked to above.
0[anonymous]
Yes, I know, I have read that article in full, but I still didn't understand the delimitations of that definition. You seem to imply that my interpretation wasn't legitimate. However, I suppose all power units, be they political, economical, or otherwise, will try to get their hands on as much information as they can get away with, while denying it to others. They will also be hypocritically outraged that other power units censor and suveil them. Hardly something endemic to Marxism, regretfully enough. One would argue that the ultimate elimination of censorship and surveilance is simply the complete empowerment of the general public to censor and surveil everyone else: all your words and actions are known to everyone, and no-one dares step out of line. Truly a Tyranny of the Public, if the Public isn't memetically equipped to resist the temptation. In case you thought otherwise, I am not suggesting the American Consitution or the Declaration of Independence are tweakable to accomodate leftism. More the opposite: that a leftism that respects individual rights can be Consitution-compliant.
0Eugine_Nier
Well, yes. I particularly object to your redefinition of the word "liberty". Also notice that it says "pursuit of Happiness" and simply "Happiness", i.e., the government shouldn't get in your way of pursuing happiness but isn't obliged actively assist you.
0[anonymous]
Why, yes, what I meant to say there was that the government should enable you to pursue happiness in any way you choose, by guaranteeing your liberty to choose who to work for, what to work at, and how much you work. To be precise, the freedom to do whatever you want with your very limited time on this earth (I think people will still end up working just as much, when offered this freedom, unless they deliberately want to starve en masse, among other losses of comfort). The government isn't actually helping you be happy in any particular way, they just make sure you are able to pursue whatever would make you happy. Of course, that's not Marxism: Marx would have said that "from each in accordance with their capacity, to each according tot their necessity", which I think is utterly dumb: who's going to decide how much ouput one is capable of, or where one's needs stop? Of course, if your notion of happiness is, say, to be someone's slave, the government shouldn't get in the way of you pursuing that. I'd be curious to see how many people do choose slavery over freedom. Anyway, the Constitution forbids the Government to get in the way of your happiness, it doesn't forbid it to make that pursuit easier for you, unless that gets in the way of your happiness. But then you could just reject their help, right?
0Eugine_Nier
Yes it is. It's forcing the employer to hire you. Or gets in the way of someone else's freedom.
0[anonymous]
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 see
4Eugine_Nier
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.
0[anonymous]
But then wouldn't their work automatically be a part of said literature? I do find it amazing how many people who are clearly parroting memes without much personal input claim to have come up with them themselves. I for one like to give credit where credit is due. What evidence would falsify your theory that those memes are automatically descended from deliberate Soviet efforts? Because at this rate you're starting to sound like my "Protocols of the Sages of Zion" reading uncle, who thinks everything the West does is the result of Zionist lobbying, Zionist subversion, and the Zionist conspiracy to sap and destroy our precious bodily fluids. Sorry, not bodily fluids, I mean our precious way of life, our intellectual integrity, the patriotic/religious fervour of our youth, the unity and freedom of the Islamic peoples, etc. etc. etc. . By sapping and neutering it and precipitating its decadence with their filthy propaganda spread through media manipulation and the aid of servile, self-hating intellectuals, them and other sorts of useful idiots. Only to replace it with their own, self serving work, that will render us impotent to resist their tyranny. Sounds familiar? Hey, actually, the more I think about it, the more this pattern reemerges. I can think of examples from Ancient Greece! Ever heard of a guy named Pausanias? Maybe we could write an interesting article out of this! I genuinely feel we're onto something.
3Eugine_Nier
Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that "were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed" on his own or my theory that those memes ultimately descend from communist propaganda. Another good example of a memetic weapon doing damage long after the war it was created to fight is over.
2[anonymous]
No, that's my testimony. I'm asking about your theory that anyone coming up with those memes is a result of the previous existence of those memes, and that said existence is exclusively owed to soviet agents manufacturing them under a specific agenda, as opposed to them being autonomous thinkers drawing similar conclusions in front of the same facts because they have a similar sensitivity and share some preconceptions that are in no way exclusive to a societ influenced or for that matter even leftist culture. Yes, well, doesn't it trouble you that maybe Eric Raymond and others like him are being victims of a similar process, given the many remarkable parallels between their discourses, modulo Hated-Enemy-Of-The-Day?
2Eugine_Nier
Then why didn't anyone come up with these memes in previous empires? Or for that matter in Europe before the mid 20th century?
5[anonymous]
From what little I know, I blame, at the latest, Widrow Wilson and the notion of self-determination, i.e. the USA making a power-grab after WWI was over and declaring that Imperialism is, in fact, evil. Followed by WWII and the total, ideological war against an enemy whose entire ideology revolved around the most extreme nationalism possible, leading to everyone embracing diverse forms of Reversing that Stupidity, one of them being Anti-Patriotism. But we can go further back, like, say, Kant's insane pacifism (what agenda might he have been possibly pushing?), or even much further back, to the Bible. Egypt deserved to be destroyed by the Plague, and its army wiped by the sea, because they refused to set the oppressed Hebrews free, and it was right for God to do so. I do find it amusing that so few Jewish and Christian hegemonies would see themselves in the role of Egypt, nor wonder whether that's a good place to stand, until so late in the XXth century. You'd think the comparison would be obvious.
7CronoDAS
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?
3[anonymous]
I would agree with your impression.
0[anonymous]
Yes McCarthy was pretty ineffective.
2[anonymous]
I will need you to be more explicit with where you're gong with this.
7[anonymous]
I think it is pretty obvious. I suggest you especially closely read the paragraphs where Orwell talks about say transferred nationalism and then pause for 5 minutes by the clock to consider what the intellectual descendants of these are in the modern Anglosphere. TRANSFERRED NATIONALISM * (i) COMMUNISM. * (ii) POLITICAL [C]ATHOLICISM. * (iii) COLOUR FEELING. * (iv) CLASS FEELING * (v) PACIFISM. Indeed that whole section basically reads like something out of the altright blogosphere's description of the modern intellectual world. But this is very political of me to directly point out. I'm going to give you a more direct answer that compliments this one in a PM. Vladimir may agree or disagree with my points, but I can understand why he may (I'm not sure he did) want to keep some inferential distances as a protection measure there.
0Eugine_Nier
Here is a post by Eric Raymond that goes into more details.
[-]fubarobfusco140

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.

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[-]IlyaShpitser120

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.

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3[anonymous]
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.
1Eugine_Nier
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.
7TimS
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).
2NancyLebovitz
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?
5NancyLebovitz
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.
2[anonymous]
The very next sentence is, in fact,
3Eugine_Nier
I'm not convinced that question is even well defined. What does "contributed most" mean when mapped onto causality graphs?
[-]CronoDAS100

English does have a perfectly good word for the "nationalism" Orwell describes: tribalism.

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[-][anonymous]50

I think it's good and should go onto the wiki page.

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[-]bramflakes20

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.

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9GLaDOS
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.
3Vaniver
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."
7[anonymous]
Looks like I was right about expressing wariness at the idea that some discussions would degenerate into politics: that's exactly what happened, and I had a major part in it too, without even noticing. It cost me a surprisingly large amount of points. I'm still very bad at anticipating the reactions of my fellow lesswrongers, so I need to ask: Was it * because I was evidently biased? * because I demonstrated egregious ignorance of fundamental knowledge related to the topics I attempted to discuss? * because the opinions I expressed were themselves impopular? I can't help but notice that those expressing right-wing and/or reactionary viewpoints, even when they weren't even trying to rationalize them, but presented them as fact, have been treated in a much more forgiving way, and I'm having trouble understanding why.
0Multiheaded
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.
1[anonymous]
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.
6Viliam_Bur
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.
1faul_sname
Well, you could probably find people here opposing the "freedom and the Democratic way" on here.
-3[anonymous]
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.
[-]Multiheaded150

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... (read more)

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2[anonymous]
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.
[-]Multiheaded110

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... (read more)

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9[anonymous]
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?
5CaveJohnson
We are living in dreamtime.
5Multiheaded
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.
3CaveJohnson
This is a most excellent point, that I need to consider more. Honestly I have no desire to force people to "Truth", but I do want the liberty to seek it and act on it. If this means my segregation or secession from the vast majority of humanity and posthumanity, since they can't be protected in any other way, so be it.
2radical_negative_one
It just occurred to me that this is basically the state of humanity in Brave New World.
-6[anonymous]
0bramflakes
Thanks for the clarification.
[-]buybuydandavis-10

I think the term Orwell was looking for was collectivism.

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2buybuydandavis
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.
8Vladimir_M
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.
6buybuydandavis
So they were engaging in exactly the kind of nationalism Orwell describes. How fitting.
1Emile
...so would you say "collectivism" is a good term for describing them?
3Normal_Anomaly
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.
0[anonymous]
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.
[+]Dmytry-160
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