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MathiasZaman comments on Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013 - Less Wrong
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I feel this is a stupid question, but I'd rather ask it than not knowing: Why would anyone want that? I can understand opposing things like: democracy, secularism and multiculturalism, but replacing them with a traditional monarchy just doesn't seem right. And I don't mean morally, I just don't see how it could create a working society.
I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you're against democracy because it doesn't work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
The obvious question here is, why do you think monarchy has been "shown not to work"? Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies? Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn't have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
That question is kinda obvious. Thanks for pointing it out.
From what I remember from my History classes, monarchies worked pretty okay with an enlightened autocrat who made benefiting the state and the populace as his or her prime goal. But the problem there was that they didn't stay in power and they had no real way of making absolutely sure their children had the same values. All it takes to mess things up is one oldest son (or daughter if you do away with the Salic law) who cares more about their own lives than those of the population.
So I don't think technology level plays a decisive factor. It probably will improve things for the monarchy, since famines are a good way to start a revolution, but giving absolute power to people without a good fail-safe when you've got a bad ruler seems like a good way to rot a system from the inside.
Bullets 5 and 6 of this MoreRight article point out some reactionary ideas to assuage your concerns. Like Mr. Anissimov notes, it is necessary not only to consider the harm such a failure mode might cause, but also to compare it to failure modes that are likely to arise in demotist systems. Reactionary thought also includes the idea that good systems of government align their incentives such that the well-being of their ruler coincides with that of their people, so a perfectly selfish son should not be nearly as much of a concern as an stupid or evil one.
Picture an alternative Earth Prime where monarchies dominated the political landscape and democracies were seen as inconsequential political curiosities. In this Earth Prime, can you not imagine that textbooks and teachers might instead point out equally plausible-sounding problems with democracy, such as the fact that politicians face selection pressures to cut off their time horizons around the time of their next election? Can you not imagine pointing to small democracies in their world with failures analogous to failures of democracies in our world, and declaring "Q.E.D."? How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
I don't think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.
Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy "doesn't work" that he couldn't imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.
I was in a Chinese university around Geoge W. Bush's second election and afterwards, which didn't make it easy to convince Chinese students that Democracy was a particularly good system for picking competent leaders (Chinese leaders are often graduates from prestigious universities like Tsinghua (where I was), which is more like MIT than like Yale, and they are generally very serious and competent, though not particularly telegenic). On the other hand, the Chinese system gets you people like Mao.
I'm not necessarily saying that democracy is the best thing ever. I just have issues jumping from "democracies aren't really as good as you're supposed to believe" to "and therefore a monarchy is better."
I don't think Mao could exactly be said to be a product of the Chinese system, seeing as unless you construe the "Chinese system" to include revolutions, it necessarily postdates him.
I totally agree, and in addition, Mao is the kind of leader that could get elected in a democracy.
However, a democracy may be getting rid of someone like Mao than China was (provided the democracy stats).
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
The argument could be constructed that for different levels of technology, different form of government is optimal. Which sound plausible. For a very low technology level, living in a tribe was the best way of life. For higher level, it was a theocracy or monarchy. For yet higher level, it was a democracy (and this is why the old monarchies are gone). And for even higher level (today in the first world), it is monarchy again.
It's a bit suspicious that the monarchy is the optimal form of government twice, but not impossible. (Although it is better to have opinions because most evidence points towards them, not merely because they are not completely impossible.)
That response is nonsense, an unfair reading. Jaime already offered your hypothesis immediately preceding:
He explicitly says that means something completely different.
I imagine that he means, quite correctly, that many comparisons between democracies and monarchies fail to compare examples at the same technology level.
As to the other point, I doubt Jaime thinks that monarchies turning into democracies is a very good argument in favor of democracies, just that it is a common implicit argument. I doubt that there are many people who think that monarchy is a good form of government at two technological levels, separated by democracy. Generally people who condemn democracy think that it was a mistake, perhaps historically contingent, or perhaps a natural tendency of technology, but one to be fought. Some reactionaries hold that this is a good time to pursue non-democracies, but usually because democracy is finally self-destructing, not because technological pressures have reversed course.
But monarchies turning into democracies is evidence against the stability of monarchies, and some reactionaries do implicitly make the argument that technology favors monarchy in two different periods.
If you accept the criticism it makes of democracy you are already basically Neoreactionary. Only about half of them advocate monarchy as what should replace our current order, remember no one said the journalist did an excellent job reporting about us. While I can't even speak for those who do advocate Monarchy, only for myself, here some of my reasons for finding it well worth investigating and advocating:
Good enough - You need not think it an ideal form of government, but if you look at it and conclude it is better than democracy and nearly anything else tried from time to time so far, why not advocate for it? We know it can be done with humans and can be stable. This is not the case with some of the proposed theoretical forms of government. Social engineering is dangerous, you want fail safes. If you want to be careful and small c-conservative it is hard to do better than monarchy, it is as old as civilization, an institution that can create bronze age empires or transform a feudal society into an industrial one.
Simplicity - Of the proposed other proposed alternative forms of governments it is the one most easily accurately explained to nearly anyone. Simplicity and emotional resonance are important features with many consequences. For example when Moldbuggians say society would benefit from formalization they should aim for a bare bones OS for this to be feasible. Formalization is the process where the gap between the actual and claimed functioning of a social institution is closed as much as possible in order to reduce disinformation. This is considered good because uncertainty results in politics/war. There are also costs for keeping people in positions of responsibility sane and not accidentally ending up believing in disinformation if such is common around them. Not bothering to keep them sane at all seems bad.
Agile experimentation - Social experimentation is however useful, especially since the same solutions won't work for all kinds of societies in all situations. It is a system that can be easily adjusted for either robustness or flexibility as needed. A monarch has simple logistics to set up or allow social experiments. Futarchy, Neocameralism... why risk running a society on this OS rather than set up a more robust one and then test it within its confines? East India Companies, Free Cities, religious orders are common in the history of Western monarchy. Indeed you can look at Constitutional Monarchy in modern democratic countries as experiments that where either judged successful or an experiment that breached containment. Even in this case of breach the form of monarchy was still preserved however and might possibly be revived at a future point in time.
Responsible ideology crafting - Many Neoreactionaries think the relative political stability of the Western world of the past 70 years will not last. Historically transition from some kind of republic to military dictatorship is common. Rule by leader of victorious conquering army, has historically show successful transition to monarchy, as all dynasties where basically founded by them. Even if in itself such a change isn't likely in the West, the unlikely situations where neoreactionary criticism of democracy would be taken seriously and guide policy, is one where the most likely victor of the social instability is not an ideal representation of a Neoreactionary CEO philosopher but a military dictator. We should try and plan social reform constrained by logistics of the likeliest outcome of our ideas becoming important, otherwise we are irresponsible. Indeed this might have been the grand crime of Communist theorists.
Low Hanging Fruit - It has been understudied by modern intellectuals who furthermore are biased against it. Compare how much modern theoretical work has been done on Democracy vs. Monarchy. See number wikipedia articles for a quick proxy. This is perhaps practical given the situation we find ourselves in but also somewhat absurd. For example as far as I'm aware no one outside reaction has in depth considered the ridiculously obvious idea of King as Schelling Point! Modern game theory, cognitive science and even sociology unleashed on studying monarchy would reveal treasures, even if we eventually decide we don't want to implement it.
And if we accept the Reactionary criticisms of democracy and the Progressive criticisms of aristocracy and monarchy? What then?
Then you get to happily look down on everyone's naive worldviews until you realize that world is fucked and go cry in a corner.
Been there, done that, realized that crying won't make the world any less fucked, come back from the corner.
Psychosocial development of puberty in a nutshell?
Doesn't reactionary or progressive criticism in itself if taken seriously already do this?
Then you either throw up your hands and go meta with secession/seasteading/etc. or try to find existing systems that neither of those systems would apply to... how about Switzerland?
I am curious why Switzerland isn't more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.
The correct question is whether Switzerland's success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won't help.
We can at least be sure that Switzerland's success hasn't been prevented by its political system. This isn't a proof that the system should be copied, but it's at least a hint that it should be studied.
Switzerland is pretty small, and it's not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it's not obvious to me that it wouldn't, either.
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.
So a question is, if we wanted to "Switzerland-ize" a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.
It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D
Reminds me of some large countries... in North America, I think? :-)
For various levels of superficiality, yeah.
Then again, population-wise it's bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.
I want to emphasize again monarchy only recently gained popularity among neoreactionaries, its possible the majority of them still dream of Moldbug's SovCorps. Anarcho-Papist for example basically believes anarcho-capitalism is best but thinks the Neoreactionary analysis of why society is so leftist is correct.
You make incremental patches and innovations in the existing setup, and keep a very close eye on the results.
Somebody's mind explodes :-D
That sounds like a hell of a package deal fallacy to me.
I was trying to say Neoreactionaries basically only strongly agree on these criticisms, not the particular solutions how to ameliorate such problems. I hope that is apparent from the paragraph?
How are you going to distinguish them from conservo-libertatians, then? I would imagine they would also agree with much of those criticisms and will disagree as to the proposed solutions.
They don't use the particular concepts of Neoreaction, things like the Cathedral or the idea Progressivism is the child of Protestant Christianity or why it drifts leftwards. There will be no clear line as both conservo-libertarians and anarcho capitalists are big inspirations to the neoreactionary world view and form a big part of its bedrock. It is observed many reactionaries tend to be ex-libertarians.
I was under the impression that they also tend to agree about certain social issues such as traditional gender roles (though after posting that comment I found out that Moldbug agrees with progressive views about homophobia); am I wrong?
What is the package?
Isn't "oppose democracy for a specific set of reasons" a natural category?
Added, based on your other comment: "skepticism against Progressive Orthodoxy" is a lot weaker than opposing democracy.
The popularity of aristocratic and monarchist stories in popular culture - Star Wars, LOTR, The Tudors, Game of Thrones, possibly Reign if its rating improve, etc. - says something about the human mind's "comfort" with this kind of social organization. David Brin and similar nervous apologists for democracy have that working against them.
To quote myself on what I consider is plausibly better than democracy:
Neocameralism in paritcular is something that is possibly still more popular among Neoreactionaries than democracy. Here I briefly explain it:
Because you are so incredibly smart that today you will get everything right, and those old mistakes done by lesser minds are completely irrelevant...?
Maybe it's not about people really wanting to live under some majesty's rule, but about an irresistable opportunity to say that you are smarter than everyone else, and you have already found a solution for all humanity's problems.
(This was originally my observation of Communists of the smarter type, but it seems to apply to Neoreactionaries as well.)
Read ten pages of "Democracy: the God That Failed" and see if you still feel that there's so little substance to what we believe.
Even before reading it, I already agree that democracy does not work the way people originally thought it would, and some pretend it works even today. (People voting to get money from their neighbors' pockets. Idiots who know nothing and want to learn nothing, but their vote is just as important as Einstein's. Media ownership being the critical factor in elections.)
That just doesn't give me enough confidence that my solution would be better. Let's say it would avoid some specific problems of democracy successfully. How about new problems? (Or merely repetition of the old ones, enhanced by the modern technology.)
Einstein was a physicist. He probably had more sense about politics than random inattentive person who votes on the basis of emotion, but I'm going to hope that people who actually know something about politics get influence by writing and/or politicking. Their influence isn't limited to their vote.
In fact, Einstein was pretty politically active and influential, largely as a socialist, pacifist, and mild Zionist.
Well, the neoreactionaries claim that strong monarchies will be more stable, and less subject to needing to satisfy the fickle whims of the population. There is some validity to at least part of the argument: long-term projects may do better in dictatorships. Look for example at the US space program: there's an argument that part of why it has stalled is that each President, desiring to have a long-lasting legacy, makes major changes to the program's long-term goals, so every few years a lot of work in progress is scrapped. Certainly that's happened with the last three Presidents. And the only President whose project really stayed beyond his office was JFK, who had the convenience of being a martyr and having a VP who then cared a lot about the space program's goals.
However, the more general notion that monarchies are more stable as a whole is empirically false, as discussed in the anti-reaction FAQ.
What I suspect may be happening here is a general love for what is seen as old, from when things were better. Neoreaction may have as its core motivation a combination of cynicism for the modern with romanticism about the past.
If you do read any of the pro-reaction stuff linked to by K (or the steelman of reaction by Yvain) I suggest you then read Yvain's anti-reaction FAQ which provides a large amount of actual data.
Thank you. I'll read the FAQ, it seems exhaustive and informative.
And as I hope I made clear, I can certainly understand the notion that "democracy isn't awesome". But I don't get the jump from there to "a monarchy will be better."
Read "Democracy: The God That Failed" and "Liberty or Equality" for some basic arguments.
I object to that piece being called a "Steelman of reaction" despite Yvain's claims in his later piece.
Do you mean that the piece does not do the best case possible, or do you mean that was it is steelmanning is not neoreaction?
Until some certified reactionary can do better....
Yvain's anti-reaction FAQ shows nothing of the sort. It cherry-picks a few examples. To compare the stability of democracies and monarchies, a much broader historical comparison is needed. I'm working on one now, but people should really read their history. Few of those who confidently claim monarchies are unstable have more than a smidgen of serious reading on Renaissance Europe under their belts.
I look forward to you response when it is published. As of right now, that's an assertion without data.
Here: Response to Yvain on “Anti-Reactionary FAQ”: Lightning Round, Part 2 — Austrian Edition.
Considering that your response relies heavily on deciding who is or isn't "demotist", it might help to address Yvain's criticism that the idea isn't a well-defined one. The issue of monarchs who claim to speak for the people is a serious one. Simply labeling dictators one doesn't like a demotist doesn't really do much. Similarly, your response also apparently ignores Yvain's discussion of the British monarchy.
It's just a small slice of a response, I can't respond to everything at once...
Napoleon was a populist Revolutionary leader. That should be well-understood.
For something more substantial, try "Democracy: the God That Failed" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
I'm not convinced that this is a meaningful category. It is similarly connected to how you blame assassins and other issues on the populist revolutions: if historically monarchies lead to these repeatedly, then there's a definite problem in saying that that's the fault of the demotist tendencies, when the same things have not by and large happens in democracies once they've been around for a few years.
Also, while Napoleon styled himself as a populist revolutionary leader, he came to power from the coup of 18 Brumaire, through military strength, not reliance on the common people. In fact, many historians see that event as the end of the French Revolution.
While I understand that responding to everything Yvain has to say is difficult, I'd rather read a complete and persuasive response three months from now than an unpersuasive one right now. By all means, feel free to take your time if you need it.