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25 [deleted] 07 June 2012 07:48AM

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Tags: razib nerds gnxp religion politics compartmentalization

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Comment author: Multiheaded 08 June 2012 09:16:51AM *  2 points [-]

See? Looks like I haven't been talking gibberish after all! Or, at least, someone wise shares some of my paranoid delusions. He even points to the two most infamous technocratic states specifically.

A pity that he hasn't mentioned another important thing: that being convinced of one's total freedom from dogma (and founding your philisophy on this "difference" between you and the brainwashed masses) is the most dangerous dogma of all, and nerds are very likely to be convinced of just that.

(It's easy to glimpse some scary moments of that dogma on the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer... although, as I said, he's far from the worst of it.)

Comment author: [deleted] 09 June 2012 03:49:10AM *  0 points [-]

Do you have any more mainstream examples than your software engineer? I really don't know what you mean by "dogma." In the 19th century the word was not used so pejoratively but lately I can't think of anyone who would describe their package of beliefs as a dogma.

Comment author: Multiheaded 09 June 2012 04:18:25AM *  -1 points [-]

Again, the RAND Corporation. There's plenty written about its mindset and practices, including in connection with the whole Vietnam deal - Agent Orange and all that. "Forced-draft urbanization", ain't that a brilliant fucking idea? Hell, thinking of that, the CIA analysts probably also qualify as slaves not only to bureaucracy, but to the Cult of Reason as well.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 June 2012 04:47:16AM -1 points [-]

Samuel Huntington certainly had a bloodless way of writing. I wonder if he would have characterized himself as dogma-free.

Again, the RAND Corporation

Where else have you written about the rand corporation?

Comment author: Multiheaded 09 June 2012 05:02:59AM *  -2 points [-]

Where else have you written about the rand corporation?

Nowhere, just mentioned it in this thread twice. You can start with Soldiers of Reason by Alex Abella, though - it's really rather biased against RAND, but has plenty of info.

There's also an interesting-sounding title in the Wikipedia links, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, but I haven't read that one yet. Looks like it'll be more helpful for my argument, judging by the name and the summary.

In Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, S. M. Amadae tells the remarkable story of how rational choice theory rose from obscurity to become the intellectual bulwark of capitalist democracy. Amadae roots Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy in the turbulent post-World War II era, showing how rational choice theory grew out of the RAND Corporation's efforts to develop a "science" of military and policy decisionmaking. But while the first generation of rational choice theorists—William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan—were committed to constructing a "scientific" approach to social science research, they were also deeply committed to defending American democracy from its Marxist critics. Amadae reveals not only how the ideological battles of the Cold War shaped their ideas but also how those ideas may today be undermining the very notion of individual liberty they were created to defend.

Oh, looks like its first 180 pages are on Google Books.

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