Are you saying that under-privileged "Progressives" are typically devoid of a mechanism of self-control through guilt,
I was mainly talking about "privileged" Progressives, i.e., the ones who are intellectual descendents, and frequently also familial descendents, of Calvinists.
Here, for example, is the kind of disclaimer that can be often seen attached to "checklists" of white/male/class/cis/etc privilege:
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.
Does this sound like the "party line" of left egalitarianism includes guilt-tripping Average Non-Diverse Guys over their lack of Diversity?
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
I bet that, if you saw a world where all people were truly "held responsible for their actions" (..), you'd recoil in horror and take that back.
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.
I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]