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Konkvistador comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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Interestingly, Orwell -- who can hardly be portrayed as a rabid right-wing zealot -- characterizes the intellectual elites of the English-speaking world of his day with these words:
Rather than extolling Orwell's essay for its applause-lights-inducing qualities, we can ask ourselves -- what does this imply about the descendants of these same intellectual elites today, and about the results one would get from applying Orwell's criteria impartially to the predominant, high-status beliefs of our own day?
After all, the consensus among the respectable mainstream nowadays is that people who shared Orwell's above-quoted opinion back in the day were dangerous, rabid, delusional, and malevolent extremists. There's even a popular term of opprobrium for these people ("McCarthyism"). So, what conclusion should be derived from the facts that: (1) everyone will applaud the general principles espoused by Orwell's essay, and yet (2) Orwell's own application of these principles to the Anglospheric intellectual elites of his own day led him to a conclusion that places him among these frightful extremists, whom any respectable person nowadays can only abhor?
Now, I'm not writing all this to start a discussion about these controversial historical topics. I'm writing to point out that it's easy to fall for the warm fuzzies awoken by a superficial, applause-lights-style agreement with Orwell's general remarks -- while at the same time remaining blissfully oblivious of their actual implications on various opinions that are high-status in the society in which one lives, including the modern Western societies. (Especially considering that the Western intellectual elites of today have direct institutional continuity with those whose "dominant form of nationalism [was] Communism," according to Orwell.)
A rationalist has a hard time not reviewing history from that period and concluding that for all intents and purposes McCarthy was right about the extent of communist infiltration and may have indeed grossly underestimated and misunderstood the nature of intellectual sympathies for communism and how deeply rooted those sources of sympathy where in American elite intellectual tradition.
He basically thought he needed to eliminate some foreign sources of corruption and that he would be helped rather than sabotaged by well meaning Americans in positions of great power at least after they where made aware of the extent of the problem. He was wrong. For his quest to have been less quixotic he would have needed to basically remake the entire country (and at that point in time, the peak of American power that basically meant by extension the remaking of the entire West).
My impression of the situation (which has not been extensively researched) is that, although there really were plenty of spies and such, McCarthy's methods were largely ineffective at identifying them. Is my impression accurate?
I would agree with your impression.
Let's suppose -- for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise -- that you're right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers. And that McCarthy was not successful in changing this situation.
It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.
Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration -- even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy's time -- was not such a bad thing?
I don't think there is much dispute on the large scale of communist infiltration at the time, though obviously it isn't often mentioned or emphasised. One can however make a good case that what is by some interpreted as communist sympathy wasn't really such. One say easily use the same standards that are often used when declaring some historical figure had Fascist connections or sympathies, to go on and prove that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists. :) I think such a standard is pretty silly one though, both for fascism and communism.
Sure why not. The US of the 1950s is a shining gem of what well meaning technocrats can do for the middle class. One can either credit them for it, or say it would have been even better without them, that is open to debate. But hindsight bias is at play here I think. The Cold War period could easily have ended in a horrible way, including the end of the modern civilization. We where very lucky.
If you looked at Stalin's USSR in the 1950s, knew about the Gulags, the famines of the 1930s, the atrocities of the Russian Civil war, the mass graves of Eastern Europe and the aggressive foreign policy (remember Finland and how they basically divided up Poland with Hitler?) now freshly armed with nuclear weapons (developed with the significant aid of spies in the US leaking the tech!)...
Isn't fearing the potentially catastrophic outcome of Communist sympathy and infiltration a really understandable position to hold?
Me too. I'm not sure why you even bring it up.
It certainly could, but what does that have to do with the question at issue here? Are you suggesting that a US filled with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers was more likely to turn the Cold War into a civilization-ending catastrophe? I'd have thought (perhaps naively) that if there was so much communist sympathy at such high levels that it's not flat-out insane to say "that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists" then that would have made large-scale war with the USSR less likely, rather than more.
It certainly is. I think you may be mistaking the point I'm making, which isn't actually "so being filled with Communist infiltrators isn't so bad after all" but "so, are you really sure the world looks the way it would if the 1950s USA were full of Communist infiltrators?".
Because it often is used when talking about fascism.
Well we know they had enough infiltrators to steal detailed info about a superweapon for starters, so I'd tend to say: Yes, it does.
It didn't seem to do much for making war between the USSR and China less likley.
Yes, but it never was a nuclear war.
I think it could have escalated to one however. China was for quite a while in the unfortunate situation of having a few nuclear weapons but not enough for MAD. The Soviet Union did have enough to wipe China off the map.
That would be ... one infiltrator?
(Of course I'm not suggesting that there was only ever one Communist infiltrator in the US. Of course there were more. Plenty of capitalist infiltrators in the USSR too, no doubt.)
I'm Russian, and I can say that the "capitalist infiltrators" were, in a mirror reflection of the situation in the US, just a subset - a really large subset - of Soviet intelligentsia; their memes were "human rights" and "peaceful coexistence" and such on a far-mode level, and the feeling that a society that's so much wealthier and more comfortable to live in must be the "right" one on a near-mode level. And they did help dismantle the USSR when the hour struck. What followed is complicated.
(Dear Reader: doesn't this sort of thing make you feel that Vlad and others should more seriously inspect the real culture, politics and ideology of the USSR when talking about such "Soviet influences" or "Soviet subversion", so that it doesn't appear in their writings as simply the Other, an unexamined nefarious force?)
EDIT: Vlad has already made a disclaimer that's kind of useful. That's very nice of him, although I'd really like to see some actual examination of the USSR from him. Think of which, I don't think he ever publicly examined the Socialist ideology in detail, despite the numerous times he denounced some of its particular results.
Keep in mind that the memes the USSR was using for memetic warfare were not always the same ones it was using for internal propaganda.
Yup, but the people making both external and internal propaganda must have been influenced by some memes, whether USSR-mainstream, radical, doublethink-heavy or even disapproved ones. I want someone who's denouncing Soviet/communist influence to look at what the people at the source of that influence thought, in detail.
More importantly, communist "nationalism" isn't quite the same as communist collaboration, or any other form of "treason".
It's a much more complex question. For start, while Joe McCarthy himself is the greatest individual symbol of this whole period, there were many other crucial people and events in which he played no role. (For example, the Hiss affair, arguably the very central event of the whole era, had happened before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
Now, the whole "McCarthyist" reaction (a.k.a. the "Second Red Scare") did have some significant influence on things. After all, the U.S. back then still had some strong and functional institutions of democracy and federalism, and the Washington elites were in genuine fear of politicians who were riding on people's (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime. This clash was resolved with the complete defeat of these politicians, who were either destroyed and consigned to infamy, like McCarthy, or eventually lost their edge and got assimilated into the establishment, like Nixon. But the blow they delivered did have a significant influence in altering the course of events in a number of different ways.
(By the way, Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis of McCarthyism as the last dying gasp of meaningful representative democracy in the U.S.)
As for the U.S. prospering in the 1950s and 1960s despite all this, it's always futile to discuss historical counterfactuals. There are way too many confounding factors involved, not the least of which is that in the 20th century, the benefits of technological progress for living standards tended to exceed the damage by bad government in all but the most extreme cases, making it hard to speculate on what might have happened without the latter. (Also, due to a confluence of lucky technological and social factors, the period in question happened to place low- and medium-skilled labor in industrialized countries in an exceptionally favorable situation.)
(Note that if it hadn't been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier. Also, just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical of the alleged great progress achieved, nowadays in the Western world it is can also be quite dangerous for one's reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.)
Without questioning them yourself, could you give examples of such grand narratives? I'm worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I don't know in whose name you're speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it's that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum -- namely, technological progress -- in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you're looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It's also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don't aim for a position they weren't capable of keeping).
See, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that -- even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question -- the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children's lives and don't like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization "more formidable". Don't get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can't really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
Considering I've run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
This isn't a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit. It becomes less
"We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with."
and more
"Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!"
You're not making sense to me. What is "This"?
What are you talking about?
You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn't really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman's liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
So when I below said "This" I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one's opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
Most humans who really understand it don't feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
I would like to use this opportunity to remind you that you owe us a post about this :-)
ETA: Sorry, I should have read the grandgrandparent first. Anyway, I'm eagerly awaiting your post!
Have you seen this post by Eliezer?
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That's what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
Don't see why you use a disjunction here: can't both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don't mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
I can't say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
which seems to me rather like saying "Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it's educating", or "Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth". That is, yes that's part of it, but it's far from all of it, and it's not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that "having Communist connections" should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I'm very willing to be informed better -- but I'd like, y'know, some actual evidence.
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it's possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists' seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR's regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn't require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can't despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the "outrage" territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists -- again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers -- did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success -- some people's careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people's careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it's by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of "racism" and "hate.")
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR's regime certainly didn't use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people's careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don't think it's justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it's accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
Actually that's far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
You mean to say it wasn't even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
It didn't even let Churchill win reelection right after the war ended.
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don't remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
Um... Orwell? :)
This, however, didn't translate into having his policies implemented.
Britain has regime changes they're just peaceful.
As for violent regime changes, Britain has had those, just not recently.
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR's case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what's commonly understood as "right-wing" in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR -- except for FDR's role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one's liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
I don't see what's "dreadful" about it: I'm fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
Just to be clear, I didn't mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you'll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you'd be free to discuss them in respectable venues -- even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don't have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you're on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that's somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers - just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt's administration ever did - for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
Perhaps I'm confused, but it doesn't look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the "New Deal regime". You mention "the Katyn massacre coverup", which I'll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn't seem to me to qualify as an "outrage" (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and "the handling of the civil war in China", on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me ... unconvinced ... that the standard view is wrong.
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn't that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn't claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It's claiming that various entitles are "hate groups", and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don't see that there's a good analogy between McCarthy saying "X is a Communist" when X isn't a Communist, and the SPLC saying "Y is a hate group" when Y isn't neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
The link you give doesn't make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn't seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think "But he started it!" a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA's attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy's attack on the CIA.)
No, I don't think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity's belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn't mention that belief would be insane.)
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions -- which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy -- was in fact invented by the architects of "the New Deal"? Or that FDR's administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you're merely saying that McCarthy's anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
You know, I've got to use this one sometime, with a straight face, just to see the reaction.
The thing is, it's not completely wrong :-). (Except for the fact that that belief itself certainly isn't irrational in any useful sense.)
Well, if I'm going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I'm familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I'm not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there's a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That's a pretty huge more-or-less.
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government's policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of "the contemporary grand narratives of progress" can get some people to think your opinions are weird. "Just like"? Really?
I didn't mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems' ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one's reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it's laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin's death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
This was essentially imprisonment and incapacitation without trial for dissenters. You got locked up and basically tortured.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren't your experience is different... how?
What I'm hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren't exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their "sexism" or "racism" in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
The time we are talking about was not "after Stalin's death".
Sloppy. Most such "empirical examples" of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism's low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including "sociocultural" ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so.
(And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance - yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That'd be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would've been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao's regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore - a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
(I hope I'm making myself clear enough, am I?)
And if you look to policies preferred by the McCarthy and other hardcore cold warriors (WW3 or ceaseless Vietnam and Afgan-like wars all over the world) and value life and well-being of non-Americans, every one of the 205 or 78 or 57 communists on Tailgunner Joe's list deserved to be awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, together with equivalent awards of all nations of Eurasia.
It's hard to weigh these kinds of alternative histories. Given their strategy of supporting protest movements, and indeed, getting in front of every parade they could, I'm sure they lended impetus to a number of good movements. On the other hand, when they got out in front of the movements, they would alter the course of the movements. Whether the net perturbation was good depends on your values, and the empirical facts of how large and in what direction those perturbations were.
Me, I'm not very fond of communism, so I find the lingering effects of their ideology harmful.
Alter to what? You are implying some sort of underhanded maneuvering that I not sure ever actually occurred.
After Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr was moving to topics of that are still controversial today - like ending the Vietnam War and ending pervasive poverty. As you say, one's the net effect of that change depends on one's prior values. More importantly, I think these types of change were organic to the movement that King was leading, not imposed from above.
Instead of imply, I'll just state that they supported movements to further their own interests, which were not identical with the interest of the followers of those movements.
I don't disagree that leaders like Ralph Nader or Martin Luther King advocated for what they thought was a good idea, which might not have a close relationship with what the followers would necessarily articulate as goals.
What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I'm particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn't.
I linked to a relevant article elsewhere in this thread.
I don't think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn't help.
A better example to answer Tim's question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.
Could you go into more details on what you think is wrong with his overall picture.
Thanks for the link. Whatever the merits of post-modern thought, I don't think King was a post-modernist. Assuming that the FBI was right to monitor him, what did he do to further the Communist agenda?
And I don't really agree that your link was a fair minded view of post-modernism, or that it was a poison-meme from the Soviet Union.
According to this article, postmodernism seems to be, in its barest essence, a form of impious iconoclasm as applied to the analysis of traditional concepts. It's a very honoured tradition in Western Philosophy: in one century of democracy, the Athenians managed to practically destroy their entire body of traditions by discovering the base, petty group interests behind the so-called "sacred" and "natural" laws of their City.
Speaking of the topic of "generating poision memes", I think that, since part of our endeavour would involve the deconstruction and destruction of propaganda and its pernicious enabling of "nationalism", "groupism", "collectivism" or however else we may call it, it might be interesting to study contemporary Think Tanks and their strategies with as much diligence and interest as those institutions of the past that this deeply interesting (if sometimes objectionable) article mentions.
For a rationalist to be able to function properly as a citizen, and defy the expectation that they would enclose themselves in ivory towers, unconcerned with the affairs of foolish mortals, one must develop tools to identify and deconstruct "poison memes" as soon as they come in contact with them, without having to rely on analysts who are ideologically indentured to the group opposing the creators of those memes, since they would in turn spread "poison memes" of their own.
A seeker of truth that would bounce between these sources would not find said truth, but only confusion piling upon confusion, save if they perform a truly exhausting effort of mental analysis and cross-referencing. As Descartes might have put it, partisan works do contain many excellent and true precepts, but these are mixed in with so much other harmful or superfluous stuff that it is almost as difficult to separate out the truth from the rest as it is to pull a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble by separating out the wanted goddess-shaped marble from the unwanted remainder.
Hence I think developing a toolset to see through politically-motivated memes, if not outright cataloguing and properly sourcing them, would be a worthy task to undertake. If not by us, then by some other, specialized organ, that would be equally commited to the advancement of correct epistemology and mental hygiene.
Note: I want to make it clear that I do not think said article is entirely without merit. Far from that. I have seen some of the very stupid memes therein described existing in left-winger people I know, such as one of my dearest friends saying that, were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed. I was so shocked I could have slapped him then and there. (As a representative of said Third World (and of freaking reason for that matter) I explained to him that that was a preposterous notion,)
Nevertheless, knowing this person well, I can say with some certainty that he did not "catch" this meme from any marxist or progressivist literature or propaganda, but came to it on his own entirely. You see, not all pernicious ideas need to be taught (what a wonderful world would it be if they were): sometimes they arouse in parallel, in different people, because they make the same fundamental thinking mistakes, starting from similar but widespread faulty priors. Such as the ideas that:
If the brutal, violent exploitation of the Third World by the colonial powers is seen as a crime, a mind equipped with the aforementioned memes would, with a high probablity, come up with this idiotic idea, without any Soviet prompting at all! Heck, not even those memes could be seen as Soviet-generated, they predate the USSR by far, heck, they probably predate dirt.
As for the horrors of colonialism are undeniable historical fact, and their criminalization seems to have been hardly a matter of left-versus-right, and more of a matter of much more diverse "nationalisms", including literal Nationalisms, and one country calling out another for a crime the likes of which their own forces proceed to commit immediately, and which they vigorously deny or ignore, when called out in turn. At some point, internationally-minded people, such as, say, humanists, seem to have come up with the conclusion that those are all crimes.
Well, he might of caught it from someone who caught it from said literature.
I find this extremely unlikely. At best he came to it by following trains of thought inspired by reading progressive literature. Note that the most effective propaganda stops lays own all the premises but stops just short of stating the intended conclusion, so that the target believes he came up with the idea on his own.
I find myself very very confused by this article. There are too many priors we don't seem to share, too much inferential distance I need to jump. What is the American Way of Life, and what is this "Lockean individualism" he keeps talking about? How is anywhing Bin Laden said comparable to the contents of "Z Magazine", which appears to be an amusingly old-fashioned doctrinal Marxist publication? He talks a lot about past events I'm unfamiliar with, and sources I haven't read (yet).
Okay, that practically discredits the entire work, and puts the predictive ability of the author's priors to the test, since he clearly didn't bother to do the research here, and dared to speak of subjects he is ignorant of. As it turns out, it fails. I will only say this much: the Paris Riots were about as much of an Islamic crusade as The Los Angeles riots were Christian ones.
EDIT: Wooooow comment thread. That is long. Would you recommend reading it?
Here is a good place to start.
Also these lines from the Deceleration of Independence are decent summary.
Two large differences with Marxism and volk-Marxism is that rights are attributed to individuals rather than groups, and that emphasis on freedom from government interference rather than the "right" to goodies from the government.
I'm not sure you understand what he means, he's not claiming that the all the Paris rioters were motivated by jihad (although that's probably a larger component than you'd care to admit) any more than all the Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters were motivated by jihad. Nevertheless, the effect of the revolution in Egypt has been to make the government much more Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, the way Europeans (at least everyone to the left of Geert Wilders) responds to riots by Muslim youth is to officially give Islamic organizations more influence and those organizations do promote the Islamization of society.