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TheOtherDave comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong
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If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you'll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place. Then those things will vanish as well, and other things will take their place. Just keep iterating.
Consider how much of the currently familiar things in our social world originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth. Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition? I wouldn't assume anything of the sort.
In fact if I survive long enough, it wouldn't surprise me to see "regression towards the mean" in human society after a few centuries. The people of the world in the 24th Century might wield amazing technologies by our standards, but their society could have more in common with premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies than the ones we've known as products of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don't see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won't have much tolerance for their assumptions about women's freedoms.
Can you say more about how you get from "things won't always be the way they are now" to "the possibility is worth paying attention to that things will return to something meaningfully similar to the particular kinds of pre-Enlightenment society that Moldbug, et al, endorse"? (As opposed to, well, basically anything else?)
I think the basic argument is that our society has existed for maybe 1 or 2 hundred years, whereas kings and patriarchy have been around for 5000+, which implies that they have some selective advantage.
They had some selective advantage. The world changes.
And tribes/bands of foragers have been around for far longer than that. As Robin Hanson likes to point out, recent technological changes have made a "forager" lifestyle and ethic a lot more viable than it used to be - possibly more so nowadays than the "farmer" prototype that was previously favored.
Right, this is the kind of thing I have in mind.
Yes, a century from now we may have discarded the Enlightenment as we've discarded so many other things. We may replace it with feudal monarchies, or (as you say) foraging tribes, or tyrranical empires, or rule by philosopher-kings, or obedience to futures markets, or entirely unregulated capitalism, or a thousand other things.
There are lots of "non-Enlightenment" styles of life; to pay particular attention to one such way of life may be justified, but if so it seems like it has to be justified on some grounds other than "the Enlightenment isn't uniquely stable."
I think that NRx can be disaggregated into two relatively independent parts -- the critique of the current Western political arrangements and the normative this-should-be-so part. It may make sense to discuss them separately.
The problem with that is doing so implicitly encourages those who espouse the this-should-be-so parts every time they are reinforced by seeing the other bits discussed. I REALLY wish there were a way around this, because criticism of democracy and trying to figure out ways around its bad points is a very interesting subject.
First, I don't see implicit encouragement as a problem. You're thinking in supply-the-enemy-tribe-with-attention terms which aren't particularly useful.
Second, the critical part of NRx doesn't like much more than just democracy. Cathedral is vast and its filaments burrow deep...
This implies that they represent a stable equilibrium. Stable does not imply optimal (though depending on your time-prefernces and degree of risk-aversion, optimal may imply stable).
That's like saying horseshoe crabs and coelacanths have a selective advantage when compared to bipedal apes.
TBD, ask me again in a million years or so :-/
Imagine you're choosing which species to try and be 450 million years ago. You could try and be a mammal, or you could try and be a horseshoe crab. If you become a mammal, maybe one day you'll go to the stars! Or maybe you'll wind up like most kinds of mammals, and go extinct. But if you're a horseshoe crab, you'll still be around, pretty much the same, 450 million years later!
I personally would rather be a bipedal ape. But I don't think it's totally unreasonable to want to be the crab.
As an aside, can someone please explain what the deal with reactionaries and crabs is? I feel like there's some context here that I'm missing.
Gnon likes crabs.
Each species is best suited to its own environment. It makes perfect sense to be the horseshoe crab if you don't expect to ever want to walk, breathe air, or pilot a spaceship.
Also democracy has existed before and democracies tend to have short half-lives.