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Viliam_Bur comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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I needed to re-read your comment twice to understand what you meant, because I got it completely wrong the first time. This is how I understand it now, so I write it clearly for readers like me:
What is the dominant form of nationalism (in Orwell's very loose sense) today in our society?
Would criticizing it make other people percieve you as one of people considered dangerous delusional extremists?
I abstain from the first question, and the answer to the second one is: yes, and it is kinda scary. (Well, disagreeing with majority on a topic that the majority blindly follows is always scary.)
Your reading is correct, but I would also emphasize one particularly bad failure mode for people reading Orwell's essay nowadays. Namely, people often read it and imagine crude and overt expressions of "nationalism" (in Orwell's sense) that were common in his own day, and are still common outside of the Western world. So the most subtle and insightful points of the essay are likely to go right over their heads.
More concretely, how many people will stop and think about this part of the essay (bold emphasis mine):
Now, Orwell had in mind here primarily the Communist Russophile intellectuals of his own day, whose allegiance was transferred to a specific and readily identifiable foreign state and ideology. Nowadays, things are rarely so crude and obvious, but it seems to me that essentially the same phenomenon is still rampant -- except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)
(Now that I've written this, I remember a more recent writer who once wrote an essay that reads practically like an update of Orwell's above cited paragraph for our time. Yet his very name is associated with such unseemly controversies that I'd have to get into long and bothersome disclaimers about where exactly my agreement with him ends, so I'd rather not get into it. This latter fact, of course, is just another reminder of how rampant the "nationalist" passions are in the respectable public discourse nowadays.)
That's very easy to imagine as a concept... but are you really making a falsifiable claim that Western intelligentsia typically does all that right now? "Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct."? I hardly recall seeing this kind of sentiment expressed by modern authors with any frequency*; if they have do have partisan feelings for some group (e.g. articles by straight liberal people in favor of gay marriage), they're usually more circumspect - and more sane (as in, less doublethink & vulgar use of unspoken assumptions) - about it. Maybe you and me just read the same words differently.
I know you're likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual "respectable" authors in such context, but... any examples? Please? (I'd like some where such association with a distantly-viewed group is more or less explicit, of course, and I'm also curious to see if you feel that people renowned as cynics and skeptics fall prey to such sentiment.)
-* For "Opponents of evil regime X", see the ongoing coverage of the "Arab Spring" (yes, the naming does display a little partisan bias); do the overwhelming majority of publications imply that 100% of the rebels commit no atrocities, have exclusively noble motivations and are of good moral character, share a lot of priors with Western liberals, etc? If so, I haven't noticed it; in fact, the most partisan pro-uprising source so far has arguably been Al-Jazeera, not e.g. Huffington Post or Guardian.
They won't make that statement explicitly, but they will accuse people who point out specific cases where said group isn't virtuous or is doing something wrong of racism/sexism/homophobia/Islamophobia/victim bashing.
Yup, but that's mostly unfalsifiable; people with different values can find different things unacceptably racist/*phobic/whatever. And they aren't really hiding the fact that such accusations are just part of ideological warfare, or that they are partisan on those issues.
The point is that they're using these charges to avoid rationally confronting their opponents' arguments.
Uh-huh. But there's a debate on truth-seeking vs. avoiding damage to society about this sort of thing even here on LW, as you know. Also, are there that many articles that only counter a listing of [favoured group]'s flaws with "That's *-ist!"? At the very least and the worst level of argument commonly found, the writers try to make it look like the group's virtues or just its "normality" to ordinary Western folks outweigh the criticism. I'm drawing on my impressions of The Guardian (which I read sporadically to see what British intelligentsia is up to), specifically of its CIF section.
Well, one historical example is the reaction to the Moynihan Report. It's by no means the only example, but it's the one where the people dismissing the report as racist and "victim bashing" probably did the most damage to society.
Wow. That's actually a stunningly interesting report. The conflict caused is also very interesting: one could also argue that the report itself, coming out at such a time, could have done more damage to society than its obfuscation did. The opponents of the Civil Rights movement would, I think, have weaponized it and used it to blame the Blacks entirely for their own problems, not to say they didn't have partial responsibility, of course.
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.
It seems very unfortunate to me that the concept of "Blaming the victim" has been founded upon such an ill-advised swipe at that report. Certainly such a phenomenon is painfully apparent all the time in daily life and politics, yet Moynihan's intentions to me seem neither aggressive or very patronizing, nor even fuelled by conservative ideology, even if it could end up as ammunition for an unscurpulous ideologist. (he was in the Kennedy administration, so he might well have been a liberal technocrat)
Now this is pure conjencture and indeed fantasy on my part, but I guess that Ryan might've been motivated by the "Hostile media effect", assuming that the report was a nefarious reactionary ploy and missing even the fact that Moynihan places nearly all the blame for the cultural dysfunctions of the black community squarely upon white oppression! (Hardly thought of as a right-wing thought pattern.)
I'm not suggesting that such an accusation of American culture and whites' old behavior towards blacks must conversely be left-wing silliness; the logic of Moynihan's explanation seems sound enough to me - it might be a cliche, but it's probably true. (But then, I believe that Noam Chomsky is frequently spot-on and somewhat of an authority - what else is to be expected of me.)
OK, I'll try to give a current example, with the caveat that I'm giving it purely for illustrative purposes, not to start unwelcome politically charged discussions.
Observe the ongoing controversy over the recent shooting in Florida. Now, I'm not going to speculate on the details of the case itself at all -- for the sake of the argument, you can assume any version of the events you wish, and what I'll say will still apply.
Whatever may have actually occurred in this case, there is no doubt that: (1) conclusive evidence of what really happened is still lacking, and even less evidence was available when the controversy erupted some weeks ago, and yet (2) numerous respectable voices of the mainstream opinion rushed to express passionate condemnation of the shooter that went far beyond anything that could be reasonably inferred from the evidence, often going even beyond mere bias and spin into outright lies and fabrication. Even if, hypothetically, some evidence eventually emerges showing that their general conclusion was right, and the shooter really did something as nasty as they believe, it is simply undeniable that they have gone far beyond anything that might be justified given the presently available knowledge. (And it's easy to find plenty of examples of vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty in their reactions.)
Now, how to explain these reactions? Clearly, some people's reactions are easily explained with just plain "nationalism" in Orwell's sense, since they share their own identity with the person who got killed. But what about those who have no such connection, which certainly includes the majority of the respectable opinion that got inflamed with such passionate intensity? It seems to me like a clear-cut case of "transferred nationalism" in Orwell's sense.
(Again, I really hate to introduce any discussions of controversial daily politics on LW. I'm giving an example like this one only because I was specifically asked to do so, and I don't intend to follow up with any specific discussion of the case. I'm interested in it only as a case study for examining the mechanisms of public opinion demonstrated in it.)
I'd like to mention that depending on the situation and the regime in question people might attach their nationalism to the regime itself (denying its evils) rather than to its opponents.
Heh, of course. I see it all the time in Russian right-of-center publications. But wasn't the blame here being placed upon stereotypical liberal-minded people? I don't see any liberals gushing about how unfairly e.g. Fidel Castro is being treated, or how the Viet Cong were all righteous and noble freedom fighters who only wanted peace and treated enemies with respect (of course, most people - including me - are more sympathetic to them than the American soldiers when talking about the Vietnam war, but that's to be expected given the vast objective differences in the combatants' situations).
Well they certainly exist, expecially in Hollywood.
Well, those people certainly don't make their living by writing or abstract thinking. I meant liberal/moderate leftist journalists, professional writers, political experts, etc. Celebrities known to be conservative also often say misguided ideological things, except that there's less of them in America because conservatives there typically stay away from the entertainment industry (both due to natural predisposition and active self-segregation, I'd guess).*
(In other countries the political divide looks less sharp in general, and proeminent people tend to express their political views more subtly too.)
-* I think it was pretty silly of Moldbug to spin a theory of how everybody-who's-anybody is carrying the "progressivism" meme in America because it's supposedly better adapted; it's clear that there's simple Hanson-style signaling at work in Hollywood and elsewhere; Moldbug's assertion that academia sets the intellectual fashion might bear closer scrutiny, but clearly most people (non-intellectuals) don't give a rat's ass about the contents of any fashion they're following! They believe-in-belief that they do, of course, but e.g. the people of the US entertainment industry, AFAIK, went from cautiously admiring the Soviet Union to considering it a miserable dump sometime around the early 80s, so they clearly aren't faithful adepts of "progressivism". Also, consider all the psychodrama after 9/11.
Forgive my ignorance, but what's that?
The belief that people behave certain ways because it signals something about their thought process, without actually thinking that way. I.e. politicians expressing outrage to signal, not because they are actually outraged. Hanson thinks this type of insincere signaling explains a lot of social behavior, much more than conventional wisdom would suggest.
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!
By the way, here in Russia it is mostly reactionary/nationalist/authoritarian types that express disapproval at any suggestion of regime change, either external or internal, in places like Cuba. It seemingly doesn't matter much to them what kind of dictatorship it is, as long as it continues to exist and spite the 1st world nations. (Yes, I'm biased as hell against them.)
That doesn't surprise me in the least.
You mean to say Russia isn't 1st world? When was there a 1st and 2nd world in the first place? I thought "third world" was a reference to a "third party", not an attempt to actually order parts of the world in the shape of some list. For one thing, that would be rather insulting for whoever is the 2nd world, wouldn't you agree?
1st World - Capitalists
2d World - Communists
3rd World - The places where puppet games were played (particularly former colonies).
I'd say... antifascism?
I though about democracy "nationalism" (which also includes antifascism). A belief that whatever is decided by majority, must be the true, good, and beautiful thing. If something decided by a majority vote happens to be bad, there is always an excuse, some technical detail which explains that this wasn't a truly democratic choice. If you are more mindkilled, you can just use "democratic" as a synonym for "good" and label everything you like as democratic, and everything you don't like as undemocratic, whatever the actual majority position is; because even if the majority does not agree with X, well they should agree with it, and in your favorite parallel universe they agree with it, therefore X indeed is democratic.
Are they more possible algorithms of vote counting? What a lucky coindidence that exactly the one used in my country right now is the best, I mean the most democratic one! I only blame the non-voters for its failures; they are always my last resort for explaining why my preferred choice didn't win.
(There seems to be some similarity with the CEV concept, so I would like to emphasise the difference: in democracy, there is no need for "coherent extrapolation", because the majority is already perfect as it is. We only need to find its "volition" by a majority vote. If anything goes wrong, it can be explained away as a technical failure in the vote-counting process.)
Well, demographically speaking, that seems to only work with the left, at least within countries I'm familiar with. The Right is usually a third of the population, and they are very disciplined in always voting for their party, no matter what that party does. The Left, on the other hand, is easily disappointed, and tend to abstain from voting entirely.
I don't know about the rest of your post. The fairly consistent pattern of Islamic countries achieving democracy by overthrowing secular and oppressive regimes, and then voting for Islamist parties is universally seen as a bad thing, in the West at least. This tends to elicit some fair amounts of mockery in the Arabosphere: "So it's only democracy when you like it, huh? Surely we have much to learn from the Beacons of Civilization and their unquestionably good institutions and supreme, universal values..."
Antifascism seems to be a much steadier pattern, to the point of labelling totalitarian Islamist regimes and ideologies "Islamofascism", calling anyone with strict, pro-police or pro-military ideas a fascist (in France you'd say of a very stern teacher that "she's a little fascist")... A politician of whom you say "he is a fascist" is a politician that is beneath contempt.
Heck, now that I think of it, you could extend it to "human rights" "nationalism". Apparently the Human Rights Declaration of 1948 is the be-all and end-all of governmental morality. Except in the USA, "because they are weird like that" (and that's the charitable memetic explanation).
Also, for what it's worth, I think the best algorithm for vote counting in Presidential elections is the Australian one (strangely enough, they don't brag about it, but instead mostly complain... perhaps it is a good sign). In Parlimentary Elections, I present to you Fluid Democracy. I think it's awesome and we should do it right now.
The part about non-voters was not supposed to be about facts, but about rationalizations. Whenever someone loses election, they can imagine that they would have won, if all the people would have voted. This is how one keeps their faith in democracy despite seeing that their ideas have lost in democratic elections.
I guess the typical mind fallacy strongly contributes to the democracy worship. If I believe that most people have the same opinions as me, then a majority vote should bring victory to my opinions. When it does not happen, then unless I want to give up the fallacy, I have to come with an explanation why the experimental data don't match my theory -- for example most people had the same opinion like me, but some of them were too lazy to vote, so this is why we lost. Or they were manipulated, but next time they will see the truth just as clearly as I do. And then, sometimes, like when looking at the voting for Islamist parties, it's like: WFT, I can't even find a plausible rationalization for this!
Human minds are prone to separate all humans into two basic categories: us and them. If someone is in the "us" category, we assume they are exactly like us. If someone is in the "them" category, then they are evil, they hate us, and that's why we (despite being good and peaceful people) should destroy them before they destroy us. Whatever education we get, these two extremes still attract our thinking. In recent decades we have learned that other humans are humans too, but it causes us to underestimate the differences, and always brings a big surprise when those other humans, despite being humans like us, decide for something different than we would.
In USA they already have the Bill of Rights. Despite differences, it seems to me that both documents inhabit the same memetic niche (that is: officially recognized and worshiped document which you can quote against your government and against the majority vote).
Here. Shortly: "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together" extrapolated by a super-human intelligent machine. It is proposed as a solution to problem what should we ask such machine to do, assuming that the machine is smarter than us, and we don't want to get burned by our own stupidity. Something like: my true wish is what I would have wished if I had my values and your superior intelligence; plus assumption that sufficiently intelligent humans could together agree on a mutually satisfying solution, and the super-human intelligence should be able to find this solution.
Another popular rationalization, is that my side would have won if it wasn't for the biased media misinforming the public. I suppose that's also similar to CEV.
Another wonderful line I've got to use someday.
But the values would change with a higher intelligence, wouldn't they? The perspective on the world changes dramatically!
Well, yes and no. Perhaps it would be better if you look into relevant Sequences, so I don't have to rediscover the wheel here, but essentially: some things we value as means to get something else -- and this is the part which may change dramatically when we get more knowledge -- but it cannot be an infinite chain, it has to end somewhere.
For example a good food is a tool to be healthy, and the health is a tool to live longer, feel better, and be more attractive. With more knowledge, my opinion about good and bad food might change dramatically, but I would probably still value health, and I would certainly value feeling good.
So I would like the AI to recommend me the best food according to the best scientific knowledge (and in a Singularity scenario I assume the AI has thousand times better knowledge than me), not based on what food I like now -- because this is what I would do if I had the AI's intelligence and knowledge. However, I would appreciate if the AI also cared about my other values, for example wanting to eat tasty food, so it would find a best way to make me enjoy the diet. What exactly would be the best way? There are many possibilities: for example artificial food flavors or hypnotizing me to like the new taste. Again, I would like AI to pick the solution that I would prefer, if I were intelligent enough to understand the consequences of each choice.
There can be many steps of iteration, but they must be grounded in what I value now. Otherwise the AI could simply make me happy by stimulating the pleasure and desire centers of my brains, and it would make me happy with that treatment -- the only argument against such solution is that it is in a strong conflict with my current values and probably cannot be derived from them by merely giving me more knowledge.
Of course this whole concept has some unclear parts and criticism, and they are discussed in separate articles on this site.
Oh, I'd love it if you were so kind as to link me there. Although the issues you pointed out weren't at all what I had in mind. What I wanted to convey is that I understand that the more intelligent one is, the more one values using one's intelligence and the pleasures and achievements and sense of personal importance that one can derive from it. One can also grow uninterested if not outright contemptuous of pursuits that are not as intellectual in nature. Also, one grows more tolerant to difference, and also more individualistic, as one needs less and less to trust ad-hoc rules, and can actually rely on one's own judgement. Relatively unintelligent people reciprocate the feeling, show mistrust towards the intelligent, and place more value in what they can achieve. It's a very self-serving form of bias, but not one that can be resolved with more intelligence, I think.
Oops, now I realized that CEV is not a sequence.
So, here is the definition... and the following discussions are probably scattered in comments of many posts on this site. I remember reading more about it, but unfortunately I don't remember where.
Generally, I think it is difficult to predict what we would value if we were more intelligent. Sure, there seems to be a trend towards more intellectual pursuits. But many highly educated people also enjoy sex or chocolate. So maybe we are not moving away from bodily pleasures, just expanding the range.
Yes, which is precisely why CEV proponents think a constrained structure of this form is necessary... they are trying to solve the problem of getting the benefits of superintelligence while keeping current values fixed, rather than trusting their future to whatever values a superintelligence (e.g., an AI or an intelligence-augmented human being or whatever) might end up with on its own.
So it's kind of like the American Consitution?
Well, it shares with the U.S. Constitution (and many other constitutions) the property of being intended to keep certain values fixed over time, I suppose. Is that what you meant? I don't consider that a terribly strong similarity, but, sure.
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.
In Europe anti-fascists basically are fascists, at least when it comes to their tactics and their relationship to the authorities who often look the other way while they do their thing (which is the use of violence and extortion to attack right wing organizations and individuals known to support them).
Note: Possibly Mindkilling
In Ireland, antifa is pretty small, but seems to be closely associated with radical republicanism - which has a specific meaning in Irish politics: Sinn Féin and other more millitant nationalist groups, generally left-leaning (or appearing to be to gain popular working-class approval) and often anti-British.
This leads to the odd situation where antifa is closely correlated with nationalism.
From a communications clarity point of view, I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-right ideology, in the same way that I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-left ideology. Using the far-right failure mode label for those on the far left confuses this distinction.
To me, the defining feature of fascism (or communism) is not use of private, politically motivated violence with the tolerance of the authorities. That's bad, but it's not the reasons that I think fascism is bad.
It's similar to the problem of saying that Nazism is bad because it is socialist ("National Socialism" in the name). Nazism is bad, and socialism (as those speakers intend the term) is bad, but Nazism != socialism.
And what are those reasons? Since I really don't see the distinction you're trying to make.
To speak more carefully - violence for the purpose of influencing the "center of mass" of political opinion in a country, when the government is not uniformly in favor of the political position of those executing the violence - is not the same thing as fascism. More colloquially, tactics similar to voter intimidation have been used by fascists, but not only fascists.
My main point was that an ideological label that applies to both FARC and AUC is not a particularly informative label. If fascism is restricted to the usage I suggested, then it is more informative than that.
You didn't answer my question. Let me state it more explicitly. What do you mean by "fascism"?
Fascists are wrong because the imagined past never occurred (like the country song that complains that Coke is a slang shortening for Cocaine - as if there was ever a time when Coke was not a reference to Cocaine).
Communists are wrong because the existence of scarcity guarantees that schemes of wealth distribution cannot solve every social problem.
Who do you have in mind? ETA?