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Multiheaded comments on Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.] - Less Wrong
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Are you saying that under-privileged "Progressives" are typically devoid of a mechanism of self-control through guilt, since they spend their time attacking teh evil white cis straight man, and feel themselves to be naturally blameless by comparison, part of a saintly group that can do no wrong?
Here, for example, is the kind of disclaimer that can be often seen attached to "checklists" of white/male/class/cis/etc privilege:
(Note that in the context of the linked post, which is about neurotypical privilege in particular, both you and me could probably use a little more of said neurotypical privilege in our daily lives! There's far more ways to be excluded from it than just being on the autism spectrum, of course.)
Does this sound like the "party line" of left egalitarianism includes guilt-tripping Average Non-Diverse Guys over their lack of Diversity? Or is it like what Orwell said back in the 30s - the worst advertisement for Socialism and Christianity is their [stereotypical] adherents?
I was mainly talking about "privileged" Progressives, i.e., the ones who are intellectual descendents, and frequently also familial descendents, of Calvinists.
In the context of these discussions of privilege, the "we're not guilt tripping you" disclaimers read like suspiciously specific denials, since they then proceed to engage in something that looks very much like guilt tripping.
In this case I was referring to how both Calvinists and Progressives guilt-trip themselves.
In any case, if I'm misunderstanding what you meant here by
could you correct me. Specifically, what do/did you think would consist of "holding you responsible for your actions" and why?
There is an interesting diversion to be made along these lines. Nick Land, who has written up a series (The Dark Enlightenment) about Moldbug and the neo-reaction in general, has just written this, in which he posits the politically-assisted decoupling from reality as a progressive eschatology:
"The unforgivable crime is to accept that there are consequences, or results, other than those we have agreed to allow."
This meme, a seriously morbid distortion of epistemology, is common to many adaptive belief systems, but I would propose that it is more crucial to progressivism than any other.
Land is a little horrifying in his Nietzchean/Stirnerian lack of barriers, to be honest.
About accepting/not shrinking from shocking facts about reality: I see two basic types of failure modes here - firstly, denying the presense of any given horror (like e.g. innate group neurological differences - race, gender, etc - creating inherent power and knowledge differences in a society and making brutal unyielding inter-group hierarchy such a society's "natural", least costly to maintain and most economically productive state) is indeed more common to people with liberal/Universalist leanings... -
...- but there's a second failure mode in normalizing and rationalizing such facts despite them registering as "evil" on one's moral intuition meter, and I think that one is much more common to reactionaries/anti-Universalists, including Land himself. Where a liberal could be happily deluded about the difficulty of fixing "natural" evils with artificial policies, a reactionary could calm his (let's be honest, they're almost exclusively male) conscience with redefining "evil" and accepting life as it is. I see no more reason to accept that complacency than I see to accept deathism.
What say you?
EDIT: I've read the article - well, yeah, Land is guilty of siding with reality. I wonder what he thinks about transhumanism.
When you refuse to treat humans as rational agents, it's easy to forget the most important aspect of human behavior: that it responds to incentives (even perverse ones). How hard-working or intelligent a human is depends on whether society rewards hard work and intelligence. If the products of someone's hard work are redistributed to those who are lazy on that grounds that being lazy is not the person's fault, there will suddenly be a lot fewer hard workers and a lot more lazy people.
Except that there is no such sudden change, and the numbers of unemployed people increase and decrease with the health of the economy, indicating that people are willing to take jobs when they are available, and that status is important as well as income, and that people can acquire money through luck and inheritance as well as hard work...
I could go on.
That's because most measures of the "health of the economy" give a very strong weight to the number of unemployed people.
And status is affected by a lot of things beside how hard one works.
No. The point remains true if you use a measure that doesn't.
Indeed. The non-worker Paris Hilton is much higher status than the average unemployed person,, which would motivate the average unemployed person to take up jobs where they are available.
Why? If your point is that they'll be motivated to work so that they can earn enough money to be as rich as Paris Hilton, then my point is precisely that redistributing wealth from those who work to those who don't makes this motivation less effective. If your point is something else, could you spell it out in more detail.
In a society with no welfare system, someone with no job or inherited wealth will have an income of zero and be a the bottom of the status ranking. In a society with a typical welfare system, someone with no job or inherited wealth will have a minimal income, and still be a the bottom of the status ranking. The people at the top will also have a little less in absolute terms, and still be top rank. So: no. Your point might apply to some extreme form of redistribution, that aims to give everyone the same income, but that has never been put into practice.