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Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?
Through LessWrong, I've discovered the no-reactionary movement. Servery says that there are some of you here.
I'm curious, what lead you to accept the basic premises of the movement? What is the story of your personal "conversion"? Was there some particular insight or information that was important in convincing you? Was it something that just "clicked" for you or that you had always felt in a vague way? Were any of you "raised in it"?
Feel free to forward my questions to others or direct me towards a better forum for asking this.
I hope that this is in no way demeaning or insulting. I'm genuinely curious and my questioning is value free. If you point me towards compelling evidence of the neo-reactionary premise, I'll update on it.
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Comments (616)
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.
Just like it's wrong to reject old ideas merely because they're old, it's wrong to reject recent ideas merely because they're recent.
just happen to work better than everything humans have tried before. Recency has nothing to do with their success.
"Work better" in what sense? Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the longevity and "anti-fragile" nature of practices like religion and patriarchy indicate that they work quite well indeed, despite recent efforts to make them go away.
We have more people living better than ever before in history, and this is because of the Enlightenment.
The traditional neoreactionary counter is that increased quality of life is due to technological advancement, and that social "progress" has been neutral at best and detrimental at worst.
Yes, but if it's not visible in quality of life, and it's not visible in technological advancement ... what quantity is it detrimental to?
Quality of life. The idea is that without the ravages of modernity, technological advancement would have created an even higher quality of life.
By way of example, consider the 1950s. Their technology was obviously inferior to ours. And yet they had intact families (marriage rates were higher, divorce and bastardy rates lower) and well-paying jobs (a husband's salary alone sufficed to support his entire family, his wife was free to cook and clean and raise the children). Is our quality of life higher than theirs? It's not obvious to me. Even if it is, why is this trade-off necessary? Why can't we have the superior scientific technology of the 2010s and the superior social technology of the 1950s?
Those marriage rates masked quite a lot of marital misery, and... well, frankly, neoreactionaries just have no right to use the economic structure of the '50s Western long boom as evidence for their ideas. Those jobs were based on the strong-labor, employment-state, and financial repression policies of the post-war governments -- everything reactionaries hate.
That's only desirable if there's strong social pressure in favor of some family models over others. Tolerance of diverse family structures has made marriage less relevant for economic well-being.
Your idea of freedom is... curious.
Their persistence only indicates that those systems are tough and capable of self-maintenance, not that they're what human society needs.
Star Slate Codex has a great perspective on this. The institutions that are beneficial depend on the context. Are we playing for survival and can't afford risk or are we playing for flourishing and the risk is worth it because the gains outweigh the losses and we can afford to be nice?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
Good point. But how does this "is" statement become an "ought"?
The point is that it deflates the implicit argument that current norms are "ought"s.
You know, there are actual investigations into these things.
Seeking the specific case, not the general case.
Well, as I said in this same thread, things like egalitarianism, female rights, minority rights, etc. have been found to be normatively binding due to the falsification of the normativity of certain social structures, usually patriarchy, royalty, and religious rule. Upon finding that those things are unjustified, we revert to the default that everyone is equal simply because there needs to be a reason to ascribe difference!
This is one of the funnier things I've read this year.
You mean like the fact that people have different strength, intelligence, personality, ability, etc.
Those are not ethical traits. Honestly, there are arguments you could be using that you're failing to use here. Instead, you and your comrades seem to enjoy using the downvote button as a form of evidence.
On what grey planet are you living on that "everyone is simply equal" is the "default"?
Ethically equal does not mean materially the same. For God's sakes, this is so simple and obvious there are children's books that know it.
God probably being the central word in that sentence.
Pop quiz: explain to me why I should program my FAI to consider materially-different humans to have different ethical weight, to have their values and cognitive-algorithms compose differently-weighted portions of the AI's utility function.
Not doing so might leave your AI to be vulnerable to a slower/milder version of this. Basically, if you enter a strictly egalitarian weighting, you are providing vindication to those who thoughtlessly brought out children into the world and disincentivizing, in a timeless , acausal sense, those who're acting sensibly today and restricting reproduction to children they can bring up properly.
I'm not very certain of this answer, but it is my best attempt at the qn.
They should, yes. They're correct, or at least, they're better approximations than we can otherwise create right now.
I haven't really seen much discussion on the intersection of neoreaction and transhumanism. Neoreactionary theories of long-range probable societal trends, like dysgenics or a return to generally pre-Enlightenment social order also tend to assume that humans stay mostly as they are and only get selected by natural evolution. Meanwhile, getting to the point of being able to revive cryonically stored people successfully would probably include a bunch of human condition gamechanger technologies, like an ability to make the whole notion of fixed gender optional on any level (genetics, cognitive architecture, body plan) you'd care to name.
Is there much other than Michael Anissimov's essay?
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.
Also democracy has existed before and democracies tend to have short half-lives.
That's like saying horseshoe crabs and coelacanths have a selective advantage when compared to bipedal apes.
I've heard several conservatives teasing liberals for “still living in 1968” or similar.
... Actually all of those ideas are considerably older than the Enlightenment, and can be traced to Antiquity and beyond.
Egalitarianism in particular jumps out as an odd entry in that list, since anatomically modern humans probably spent most of their evolutionary history in hunter-gatherer bands appreciably more egalitarian than sedentary civilizations.
What is a "neo-reactionary"?
I am no expert. I hope there are others here who can explain better than me, since I'm just going to link you to wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
I defer to FiftyTwo, but this article give a good intro in a few sentences.
Here is an excellent rant about things that make NRx look attractive.
Here is a simple argument for NRx: 1) democracy automatically produces communism and 2) communism is very evil. Proposition 2 is not very controversial. Proposition 1 just comes from extrapolating the trend line of government control over the economy out another couple of decades.
Neoreaction confuses me so much.
On one hand, interesting, and seemingly true and useful ideas about the nature of memetic drift and the role of the university, the pitfalls of attempting subversion of the dominance heirarchy, the virtues of handing certain things over to an elite, the flaws of democracy, the virtues of homogeneous communities, the virtues of particularism, and so on.
On the other hand, I'm unable to understand the logical steps from that to "and therefore white is the best race, patriarchy is a better system, the Enlightenment was misguided, we need a single dictator, let's bring back the Victorians and King Leopold"
I think I could call myself a neoreactionary if the meta-principles were applied without the object-level principles. I'd say the "elites" I support are the maligned "liberal elites" of the university, the "particularism" I support is my particular mostly egalitarian Enlightenment values.
If I let myself give in to the psychogical feelings that NRx, particularist, anti-egaltarian arguments stir within my heart, I get "Ra ra let's patriotically beat the tribal drums of the Nerdy Liberal Elite's superiority over the superstitious, non-egalitarian, cognitively inferior out-group as we are clearly the natural rulers". (I don't actually think this, I'm describing the mechanisms of the tribal sentiment. When NRx's make sensible arguments about natural rulers taking over and establishing heirchy, I nod along, but I'm naturally imagining lefty sex positive pseudo-egalitarian academic people like myself at the top of that heirarchy implementing horrifyingly progressive ideas and producing equality in opportunity and comfort, if not raw decision making power, for those who cooperate. I certainly don't imagine the White Male Christian King Leopold types ruling anything, and if they did rule I'd see it as rightful inevitable natural law that they be displaced by my own tribe, which will tend to succeed anyway because it is smarter and better.)
...as far as I can tell that's pretty much NRx, except that I'm applying the principles to my own in group (which is what you're actually supposed to do AFAIK, except for that my own in-group isn't the NRx in-group), which makes it not NRx at all?
If anything, if I put on my Neoreactionary-Lefty hat I see the NRx-conservatives as the pesky revolutionaries who are not following their own advice, going against what is clearly the natural order of things, let's ban them from our forums and socially shame them for Triggering and Being Offensive so as to not pollute our homogenized monoculture. It's only with my Enlightenment-Lefty hat's "free speech/principle of charity/tolerance/diversity's advantages outweigh drawbacks" memeplex (which ultimately wins out) that I see any reason to entertain to them or give them space to do the whole metacontrarian skit with in the first place - at least concerning the race/sex stuff. I'm perfectly happy taking the meta stuff, it's great.
This is sort of paradoxical, because if I assumed the NRx-Lefty's attitude from the start I would never have heard of NRx, whereas Enlightenment-Lefty's attitude risks conversion to NRx-Lefty after exposure. I'm not sure which hat-viewpoint this fact is an argument for.
I am not white. If you do not believe race realism then you are equivalent to creationist. There is no magic in evolution.
There is a legitimate fear that Enlightenment-progressive-libertarian-feminist-liberal-universalism is self-undermining in the face of people who would build tribalist-reactionary-patriarchal-tyranny in its midst.
That conflict is not being worked out in the forums of the Internet, though. It is being worked out in actual real-world polities faced with that specific problem. Distant academic comment on it offers fog and ideological confusion, not clarity. Theorists are better off learning about the actual facts on the ground, in places where the conflict between Enlightenment and Reaction is waged with ballots and with bullets, than in spinning castles-in-the-air of theory attempting to link this struggle to everything from DNA to video games.
"Mercy, mercy! We can talk about it, can't we?" — Last words of Theo van Gogh
"I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer." — the words of Mohammed Bouyeri, van Gogh's murderer, spoken to van Gogh's mother
Nationalist Reactionary Rightie has that fear because they just don't like immigrants coming in and messing things up. Enlightenment Rightie has that fear and sees themselves as the dogs that protect Enlightenment Leftie sheep from the evil wolves. NRx-rightie disagrees with both of them, and thinks there is no way anyone is gonna ever topple the Lovecraftian horror that is Enlightenment Leftie, and we're all doomed to experience constant violent revolutions and ever more ridiculous post-modernist nonsense if we don't do something. (I'm still not clear on what exactly Doom looks like, but I'm pretty sure civilization collapses at some point and we start over)
Primitive Rx Leftie definitely thinks that there's absolutely no way the Muslims can realistically take over the government by force, and the only biggest threat they pose to Enlightenment society is petty violence and the risk of inflaming the nationalist sentiment, who can take over the government, without force. Crush the shitlords before they get out of hand so we can get back to the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment Leftie says that when people are happy and healthy in life, they don't do bad stuff or turn to extremism in large numbers. We just need to stick to our values of openness and honesty. Trust the Cathedral and technological advance to help people along the path of moral progress, and don't crush anyone. Free speech and tolerance for all, Left, Right, and even those extremest terrorist types.
NRx Leftie agrees mostly with Rx lefty, partly with Enlightenment Righty, and thinks Enlightenment Leftie is naive, but it's not going to be a problem because if things go as planned NRx Leftie has become dictator so now the schools are extremely well funded machines teaching the fundamentals of critical thinking, and they've also had a team of social scientists actively research the most effective religious deconversion techniques and implement them. Hopefully this involves an open and honest dialogue involving asking priests and imams certain pointed questions in front of small children, but they're open to underhand methods like social pressure rhetoric or ridicule if that turns out to work better. Alternatively, it might be more effective to let them keep the religion in an abstract sense (that will unfortunately keep them in the underclass, but whatever,the smarties will figure it out) but research ways to make them shed most of the objectionable values it carries.
The research itself is ideally designed to be an "open secret" - the work is publicly available in the literature and the people who matter get explicit explanations, but otherwise phrased obtusely such that populations who would object to it would find it inoffensive or incomprehensible if they saw it, similar to the treaties given to Native Americans... or phrased such that those who successfully understand end up agreeing, or just a plainly published technique effective regardless of whether one is savvy to it. Or it can be a secret - secrets are allowed, but Enlightenment Leftie things they are dangerous so NRx Leftie tries to avoid them where possible.
Yesterdays Muslims quickly become today's progressive libertarian feminist universalists. A few of them go on rampages and blow up buildings, and the damage is sad but otherwise no one gets angry or cares any more than we'd care if a tribally-neutral sociopath did it. There's no "Muslims are bad" vs. "Let's tolerate them" argument - everyone within the society agrees that religion is just ridiculous fairly quickly and it's kind of laughable if you follow one but it's a cognitive bias most normal humans are prey too, and people divert their attention to outside threats rather than to immigrants. Not that their are that many outside threats, because NRx-Lefties government had no qualms about imperialism and goes ahead and conquers the savages and converts them as described above whenever it's militarily viable and economically expedient, and because NRx-leftie isn't as mean as Leopold it won't take long before the conquered people consider themselves better off and don't even want independence..as far as they're concerned, they've kept their language and cultural knowledge intact, gained technology, are materially better off, and have shed the superstitious beliefs of their grandparents despite still remembering and preserving the beliefs - NRx leftie still "multicultural" in a superficial sense, but is unabashedly particularist when it comes to beliefs about morality and reality. So "outside threats" are people with actual military power...3rd world nations with the potential to become primitive terrorists were either left totally unmolested so that no enmity could develop, or conquered in the least socially disruptive possible way with the help of anthropologists and stuff, educated, and made materially better off than they were before ASAP and then traded with or exploited for resources in the nicest possible way the anthropologists can think of. None of that half-half economic-pressure / puppet ruler / CIA manipulation routine that we do now when our economic interests call for imperialism but our society won't let us.
Enlightenment Leftie is still pretty sure NRx Leftie's government is going to end up evil, corrupt from its original values, ineffective, or collapsing on itself, just like every other attempt to do this sort of thing. But it's a lot like the disagreement between left-socialists and left-libertarian economists - a productive intra-tribal disagreement where "winning" means achieving the common goal, not ending the argument with points for your side. The final consensus isn't necessarily world domination, but it might justify a little bit more elitism and political bias, less tolerance in the University, the Internet, and other places currently left-dominated. It might mean the left lets up on all the self-flagellation and guilty naval gazing whenever power is exerted... or not. I mean, I consider myself pretty tolerant of the Right by "average Leftie" standards and I don't think I'd actually support the Left to move away from my viewpoint in that respect more than it already is.
(Or at least, that's what it would look like if there was a sizable contingent on the left who looked at NRx and thought, "hmm, okay, there are some truths here, I can work with this")
I don't mean this as critisism, but 'NRx Left' sounds like an excellent opportunity for meta-meta-meta-contrarianism.
what have i done
I don't see the current (=last one-two decades) geopolitics as fitting this narrative. I think they fit much better the narrative of a late-stage empire falling into decadence and so unable to enforce Pax Americana well any more.
The idea of bringing civilization, that is "Enlightenment-progressive-libertarian-feminist-liberal-universalism", into the midst of savages, that is "tribalist-reactionary-patriarchal-tyranny", on M-1A Abrams main battle tanks is called neoconservatism, funnily enough, and it didn't fare too well in reality.
Despite being American myself, I don't see the frontier between the Enlightenment and reaction as being an American military front.
The situation in Europe — including the resurgence of fascism in Greece, the emergence of Putin-Stalinism, and the various national conflicts over Muslim immigration and the status of immigrant communities with violent anti-woman, anti-dissident, or anti-free-speech practices — looks much more like a "clash of civilizations" to me than the current generation of American overseas adventurism does.
What is delivered by tank is not civilization; it is resource extraction.
You linked that to "legitimate fear that Enlightenment-... is self-undermining" (emphasis mine).
The Greek fascism is a reaction to the excesses and failure of a semi-socialist crony-capitalist corrupt state. Putin is partly a reaction to the same and partly just business-as-usual for Russia. The conflicts in e.g. France, etc. over Muslim immigrants are pretty clearly tribal conflicts on the basis of "these weird people don't even look like us, have strange customs, and, most galling of all, are unwilling to recognize their cultural inferiority".
So I am not sure where this Enlightenment meme complex (which you clearly think is a positive thing, not leading to failures of corrupt states) is undermining itself.
That's because you're mistaking the other hand as logically following from the first one.
A political platform is about a preferred set of rules and institutions - you can logically get there in more than one way, and illogically get there too.
Founder effect, same reason MWI/Bayes-Bayes-Bayes! is a thing here.
Does being aligned much closer to neoRx count? If so, I confess that my long journey (decades) has gone from its most recent position of being a mindless drone of the "establishment" right wing, steeped early in RC and finshed off in episcopal trimmings. Then after some hayek, regernery(?) And such I followed up with moldbug and the like I had the same epiphany Charlie Brown did on the Christmas special at Dr. Lucy's kiosk:
THAT'S IT !!!!!
It seemed to all make a lot of sense. Unfortunately it all seems so unattainable. Meh.
IANANR,IFIDSIWAPLATMDTTTOMC (I am not a neoreactionary, in fact I don't strongly identify with any political labels at the moment due to the threat of motivated cognition)
But,
I think I have grasped the link between LW and NRx. Its a mixture of having something to protect and extrapolating trends. Whereas singulatarians looks at exponential trends in computing, extrapolate and see a future where some form of superintelligence will surely come to dominate, worrying that human values could be destroyed, the NRx look at the trends of memes and genes, extrapolate the exponential growth, and see a future where their ingroup and values are massively outnumbered, which can be a death sentence in democracy.
If your terminal values are running against the tide of change, then progressivism is an existential risk. Imagine you believe in God if you do not, and then imagine Christianity going the same way as Norse paganism. Imagine everything you believe gives meaning to life being discarded to the dustbin of history. Or imagine that the positive correlation between religion and fertility reverses the secularisation of society in the long run, and we end up in a totalitarian theocracy. If somehow neither of these futures scares you, keep going until you imagine a future that does.
To put it another way, most people think "this group I disagree with is only 2% of the population. They're not a threat." NRx thinks "This group is only 2% and doubling every x years. Assuming the trend stays constant, how long do I have until they have a democratic majority?".
That sounded more positive of NRx than I intended. Conversely, while exit is not threatening, NRx taking over society is of course a big threat to anyone with progressive values.
Among the ways NRx differs, I think strategic prioritisation is one of the big points. Even if you believe that homosexuality is a big threat to civilisation (which I emphatically don't) well, there are a lot of homophobes. What is going to be the marginal benefit of one more homophobe? By comparison, one more cryonisist or one more FAI researcher has very large marginal benefit due to the small size of these groups. I find it really strange that Anissimov used to talk about the threat of nanotech/AI/bioterrorism and now talks about the threat of gays and transsexuals. [Edit: I retract this last snetence - apparently I have been misinformed about Anissimov]
Where have I talked about the threat of gays and transsexuals? I merely asserted that one especially insane transsexual (Justine Tunney) not be associated with a reactionary movement. That makes sense, right?
This comment is a work of art.
I'm guessing the mentality behind this comment is, "oh my god, this guy dares to question transsexualism? that's eviiiilll".
The mentality behind it appears to me to be "that statement is such a blatant misdirection it is amazing".
The mentality is, "wait, why aren't you openly admitting you're evil?"
The more I think about it, the less sense this thread makes. You have openly admitted that you and your own private Idaho are not Cathedral2014!Good, loudly and clearly, for years. Why would I bother pretending like you're hiding it?
Exactly.
You single out Tunney for being transsexual, not insane.
Yes, not appropriate for being a reactionary leader in a far right group. Neoreaction is a social conservative movement. This is similar to how you wouldn't put an NRA member in charge of the local Democratic Party headquarters.
NRA membership is a changeable choice based on ideologic affiliations. Gender identity is firmware. You can't compare the two.
"Firmware"?
Gender reassignment surgery is not a blanket solution for every case of gender dysphoria. Variable rates of satisfaction with the surgery don't make gender identity any less of a psychoneurological fact as opposed to an ideological affiliation.
It seems like the number of people doing it is strongly correlated to the increased popularity of Tumblr.
<eyeroll>
Is that the Tumblr which is chock-full of straight porn?
You completely lost me there. What does Tumblr have to do with anything?
It promotes gender dysphoria by introducing it where it didn't previously exist.
From what I heard I thought you were calling for people not to associate with any gays/transsexuals, or with people who themselves associate with gays/transexuals. I thought you thought that the threat posed was one of demographic decline.
I apologise if I have misrepresented your position, but that was how I interpreted the situation from what second-hand sources said. Incidentally, in what respect is Justine Tunney insane?
Apology accepted. Your second-hand sources were wrong, tell them that. It's so difficult to have legitimate discussions about NRx when 90% of the opinion the Less Wrong community has about us is based on stuff that is completely made up.
So, just to be clear... are you claiming that this quote isn't encouraging readers to reject and condemn transsexuals?
Or that the quote isn't yours?
Or that encouraging readers to reject and condemn transsexuals is meaningfully distinct in this context from calling for them not to associate with transsexuals?
Or something else?
It is my quote. It is meaningfully distinct, in the sense that we can participate in a progressive society where it's normalized, but recognize how it emphatically does not fit into a conservative framework.
In general, this position is similar to that of many conservative Republicans. It may be shocking to many of the people on this site to be exposed to view held by a majority of Americans, but that's just too bad. In any progressive "struggle session", I will fail. This is because I reject the entire progressive worldview.
OK. Thanks for clarifying. (I'm not really interested in discussing what about it may or may not be shocking and why it might be if it is, I just wanted to get your perspective on what seemed from mine to simply be two contradictory statements.)
To clarify further, I'm not a universalist, so I don't think everyone "should" condemn or approve of any particular individual or group. I said that for groups that care about strong families, they will need to denormalize alternative lifestyles. If groups don't care about strong families, they can do whatever they like. The "strong families" bit is essential to the meaning of the paragraph.
Reading that quote, what you said is stronger than that. You said "if communities are going to reap the benefits of strong families". Regardless of how this can be literally parsed, what it connotes is that you think that strong families are beneficial and that transsexuals, by preventing such benefits, are harmful and worthy of condemnation. Furthermore, your quote is full of loaded language which implies that you personally view transsexuals negatively.
I personally think that many of them are confused. Given that it's a liberal society, I respect people's decisions to do what they want. Yes, strong families are beneficial. Various alternative lifestyles get in the way of that. Eventually societies need to choose between maximizing personal freedom and having strong families. This is a tradeoff that most liberals have yet to really consider seriously.
Further clarification accepted. FWIW, this is consistent with my previous understanding of your position, with standard error bars around "strong" and "family."
And I quote:
Yes. In communities where the strength of the family is irrelevant and the only focus is on the self, such behaviors are common. These communities are slowly being replaced by others due to their failure to reproduce.
Do you have evidence for that? The family is not the main unit for transmission of information. Professional educators took over that function long ago.
Alternate suggestions for making families stronger-- oppose whatever tends to weaken family ties.
Make divorce more difficult and/or more discouraged. Teach people how to be good companions.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lasting-relationships-rely-on-2-traits-2014-11
Discourage people from throwing their children out. This means discouraging homophobia and transphobia.
Support telecommuting. Being geographically scattered is hard on families.
Yes, NRx's are trying to do that too.
Is there an actual logical connection between those two sentences that isn't a fully general argument against parents insisting on any ethical standards from children?
You could distinguish between behavior which is clearly dangerous to other members of the family, and behavior which isn't.
That doesn't make families stronger -- that makes people who hate each other live together (usually with pretty bad results).
It does, but less divorce might still make for more stability in extended families. I don't know whether the effects of divorce on extended families has been studied.
I think that in this context stability is the wrong thing to optimize for.
If I understand you correctly, transsexuals are not the problem, lack of family values and low testosterone are the problem, and transexuals are one symptom.
Assuming, for sake of argument, that this is true:
1) A lot of people are pro traditional family values. What do you think the marginal utility of one more advocate is? Or is advocating it amoung certain groups (e.g. LW) more important because we need intelligent people to keep breeding?
2) You say "These communities are slowly being replaced by others" - has your estimate for when the singularity occurs moved far back in time? Concerns about family values seem of little importance if non-biological intelligence is likly to turn up soon.
In reference to your first comment, basically yes.
1) The only reason I joined this thread in the first place is because someone attacked me, I don't particularly advocate neoreaction among LW groups, because I understand the community is hyper-liberalized to the point of absurdity.
2) Yes, my estimates of when the Singularity will occur moved from 2030-2040 to 2070-2080 over the last five years. This change is partially what has caused the neoreaction thing. I think there is a real risk that Western civilization will fall apart before we get there.
The LW tone has improved this year and this post is refreshing.
1) I would agree that its probably best to keep NRx and LW separate. Still, this leaves the question of what is the marginal utility of advocating traditional family values?
2) I see, this does make your NRx position more understandable. I too have moved my estimates somewhat backwards.
1) Way too many to list here.
2) I still consider a near-future Singularity possible but not likely.
I don't know which communities you're talking about, but anecdotally I have to say I've found trans bars and support groups to have a much broader range in race, class, and origin than any other places I typically go.
Also, low testosterone you describe in that paragraph is not implicated as a cause of transgender behavior, with people generally being in the typical range for their birth sex before transition, which includes outliers with very high testosterone levels. Giving people additional testosterone has been tried and not been found to "cure" transgender behavior.
Relying on made-up facts for an entire paragraph of your purpose statement is not very encouraging.
What about low testosterone in utero (or high testosterone for f->m)?
What do you think the most probable cause of transgender behavior is?
I'm not sure about KaceyNow, I suspect transgender behavior is basically a culture bound syndrome.
Wikipedia lists a large amount of evidence for differences in genetics and brain volume. I know its possible that culture could cause changes in brain structure to some extent, but it can't influence genetics.
Given Wikipedia's editorial biases (and academia's publication biases) on these kinds of topics, it's almost certainly filtered evidence.
According to wikipedia:
So maybe the amount of testosterone would be normal but it would have less effect?
Citation on the testosterone business?
IANANR, but from what I heard they tend to start by reading Moldbug, who does make a few interesting points not usually found elsewhere, then proceed to listen to Michael Anissimov, who apparently makes similar points, but more accessibly. And once you are infected with the memes like The Cathedral and Demotism, moreright.com starts making a lot of sense. Nyan_Sandwich does not post here anymore, but he used to particiapte a fair bit, including a few highly upvoted articles in Main... until NRxia got the best of him.
That IANANR is an acronym and that I figured out what it means immediately, makes me laugh.
In these discussions, I often find myself writing a long text describing my beliefs and why I am not interested in defending or spreading them. At that point, I usually stop writing and start over, like I did now.
I'm willing to label myself as neoreactionary because neoreaction better describes our current society than leftism. In a future world I might look at neoreaction as the most accurate description of a certain time period. Neoreactionary beliefs could be easily rendered irrelevant with transhumanist advances.
The reason I value neoreaction is because it gives me – in my personal life – an edge. This is also the reason why I am not interested in defending or spreading many neoreactionary beliefs.
Beliefs I've developed that are common in neoreaction are by far the ones that have contributed the most to my personal happiness.
I am an Aristocratic Egalitarian/'neoreactionary' because of Curt Doolittle. He has by far the most well developed piece of work in the Dark Enlightenment. I had developed a good amount of the Burkean sentinments myself and from Taleb, but I wasn't quite sure. Moldbug tipped me over, and then I found Aristocratic Egalitarianism. I'm probably somewhere between Thiel, John Gray,Taleb, Curt. + Influences from Machiavelli and Isaiah Berlin. With Elizier and Robin as well of course.
If you want a coherent framing point that is articulate, well stated, and non-obscurant Aristocratic Egalitarianism is it. You don't have to have hate in your heart to be NRx. It can be forward and positive, and it is mostly. However, before that it is.... 'sober'. There is no eliteness without appreciation and paternalism. It's not people's fault for how nature rolled the dice for them and it wasn't say high intelligence or executive functioning; no matter what the kids say. Being blessed with a lot of ability comes with the responsibility and that also means that people who are very intelligent but do not have responsibility are strictly looked down on in my point of view.
If it helps, I used to be an ultra-leftist & I'm not white and I can accept what every one is saying. Nyan/Nick Land is a good example of forward looking persons. Check out nickbsteves, and the people over at Social Matter.
By the way, the futarchy is way less cogent as a viewpoint than any of the plural viewpoints in 'NRx'. I chose to reframe around Curt because he can just say it and get it over with. He has convinced me of how class, race, and environmental value loading deeply influences the way you state things. I must insist every one check out his work.
http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/11/11/newest-most-precise-definition/ http://www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/
Any chance of translating those from the original Moldbuggese?
I'm not sure what you're asking for. At first glance, seems like a poseur insult.
Moldbug is notorious for a jargon-heavy and hard-to-read writing style, which your comment is being compared to in a request for a clarified version.
Those aren't the same person.
It's curious to see the frequency of posts that start with "I am not a neoreactionary, but...". (This includes my own). If I'm not mistaken, they seem to outnumber the actual neoreactionary posts by a fair margin.
I think a call for patriarchal racially-stratified monarchy is catnip around here. Independently of its native virtues, I mean. It's a debate that couldn't even happen in most communities, so it's reinforcing our sense of LW's peculiar set of community mores. It's a radical but also unexpected vision of a technological future, so it has new ideas to wrestle with, and enough in the way of historical roots to reward study and give all participants the chance to learn. And it is political without being ossified in to tired and nationally televised debates, with new insights available to a clever thinker and plenty of room to pull sideways.
For that reason, I'm a little worried that it will receive disproportionate attention. I know my System 1 loves to read the stuff. But System 2... Enthusiastic engagement with political monarchy- pro or con- is not something I would like to see become a major feature of Less Wrong, so I think I'm going to publicly commit to posting no more than one NRx comment per month, pending major changes in community dynamics.
Personal opinion follows. Contest it if you like, but your chance of swaying me by arguments without giving very hard evidence is low.
The fact that this is "catnip" for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it's founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
Well I've been looking around NRx for a while and have seen a lot fewer false facts then in the "mainstream" sources. Do you have any examples of NRx false facts.
As for "bad ethics", If you define "bad ethics" as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has "bad ethics". Of course by that definition any one who had 1994!"good ethics" has 2014!"bad ethics" and conversely, similarly someone who has 2014!"good ethics" like will turn out to have 2034!"bad ethics" and conversely, [Edit: and someone pointing out certain true facts has "doubleplusungood ethics"].
Right and wrong are not defined by factional allegiance.
Dear God, I hope so! 2014 is barbaric! Have you even seen how many people are hungry, thirsty, sick, ignorant, enslaved, or debt-peons? Have you even bothered checking how much raw misery there is?
Um, that's not what 2034!"bad ethics" means. That is in fact precisely the attitude that makes you 2014!"good". Obviously I don't know which of your attitudes will make your current self 2034!evil but some possibilities. (Note these are all from different event branches.)
1) Do you believe people's job should have a relation to their skills? That makes you a 2034(branch A)!evil abelist.
2) Do you believe your job should have any relation to your preferences? That makes you 2034(branch B)!selfish.
3) Do you believe people should be free to say "Allah doesn't exist"? That makes you a 2034(branch C)!evil Islamaphobe.
4) Do you believe parents have any responsibility towards the upbringing of their children? That makes you a 2034(branch D)!patriarchal oppressor.
I could invent more scenarios, but you get the idea.
That there are many things that are considered good in 2014 but will no longer be considered good in 2034 is a standard progressive position.
Except that, once again, I am not defining right and wrong by political faction. You are.
In that case how are you defining "right" and "wrong" are you using when you make the claim the neoreaction is based on "bad ethics"? If the answer is "whatever feels wrong to eli_sennesh", you might want to look into how you came to have those feelings.
I posted an explicit statement of a moral system I'm willing to call my current view waaaaay up in the thread. Go use that algorithm, and then explain to me how neoreaction isn't bad ethics.
It appears to me that neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general, as it founds itself on a strong ethical antirealism that doesn't allow for ordinary-realist nor constructivist ethics, instead considering all available concepts of right and wrong to be mere cultural and material contingencies, thus yielding a fundamental imperative to preserve one's existing cultural "values" at all costs. Add the (frankly bizarre, given the circumstances: if nothing is true and everything is permitted, what's so bad about Cthulhu?) view of "progressivism" as corrupting, and then add the normal human impulse to consider Purity-Poison as a moral axis, and you've got the basics of neoreaction.
The problem being, it all only hangs together if you assume both the normative relevance of the Purity-Poison axis to attack "progressivism" (scare-quotes because today's conservatives get tarred as "progressives"), and the view of all morals and values as culturally relative.
Of course, I think I might be mixing Caroline Glick with neoreaction here, but she's practically a neoreactionary who evolved outside the San Francisco futurist community anyway.
So before you can really make this point you want to make, you have to conclusively prove not merely that some political party or another fails to represent "real" ethics (for the record, I'm a pragmatist-socialist politically, and thus consider myself at home in none of the mainstream parties in any country where I can vote), but that realist ethics are in the general case impossible.
This is a bizarre and uncharitable misreading, and it ought to be clear that this is so from not only the contradiction you point out, but also the number of Christians in neoreaction.
First of all, ought-statements can't be grounded completely in is-statements, but they also can't be grounded completely in other ought-statements. Many disagreements that will appear to the progressive as normative in character are actually descriptive. (I wonder if this is related to progressivism's retreat into deontological rights-talk, which does make it a moral argument -- but deontology, while useful for some things, is hopelessly absurd as an actual grounding for ethics.) Is Roissy a deontologist, a utilitarian, or what? Who knows? -- his disagreements are generally descriptive ones, and, since the ethical systems that humans in similar cultures and circumstances(1) actually use generally give similar outputs to the same inputs(2) (except for unrealistic edge cases like the trolley problem), it doesn't really matter.
Second, go look at the Hestia Society's motto. The groundwork for one of the neoreactionary positions (though there isn't only one, and this particular one isn't limited to neoreaction) follows easily from a rejection of both Whig history and anarcho-primitivism: if civilization is vastly preferable to savagery, but the continued existence and advance of civilization is not guaranteed by the World-Spirit, present-morality maximizers pose a serious threat of unwittingly making tradeoffs that will be disastrous later, by weakening the foundations of civilization and contributing to collapse. Even if progressivism is a present-morality maximizer, it has not established -- and (because Whig history) is incapable of establishing -- that it is not making these tradeoffs. To even ask that question is to leave progressivism.
(Yes, this is one of those permanent states of emergency that leftists sometimes rail against -- but it's not as if they don't have their own.)
Roissy is an educated Western urbanite, and IIRC Jewish.
Similar enough for moral discourse to be possible without immediately collapsing into philosophy.
Yes, but progressives always imagine that their views that will be vindicated in 2034. and their opponents' cast out. They never seem to consider the possibility that their current views will be regarded as wrong/outdated/evil, and those of their opponents (or possibly some as yet unknown view) triumphant. This pathology is not unique to progressives, but seems to be worse among them, because of their self-image as being "on the right side of history."
Creationism was discussed to death long before Lesswrong existed, which is why people downvote attempts to rehash it as a waste of everyone's time. To the extent that Neoreaction is something different than plain old Reaction, a) it's a relatively new memeplex, so if it's bad, someone has to do the work of swatting it down, and b) when the Neoreactionaries aren't busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they're using Lesswrong-style jargon. You run the risk of outsiders pattern-matching LW and Neoreaction together either way. I'd prefer the association be "Lesswrong is a place where neoreactionary ideas are discussed and sometimes criticized" than "Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics".
That being said, there's ample discussion already on Slate Star Codex, and I wouldn't want to see it crowding out other topics here.
Really? Because most ideas are bad, and that by default includes most new ideas, so I don't see why a new "memeplex" shouldn't justify itself rather than having a right to be taken seriously.
Out in the world, LessWrong is more closely associated with Peter Thiel's brand of libertarianism, and gets all the flak and critiquing usually given to techno-libertarianism.
Straightforwardly equating NRx with monarchy is a very surface-level (mis)understanding.
Worried? This is the only place I've even heard of it. This place gives the very false impression that it's something that matters to people out in the real world.
Edit: the only exposure elsewhere ive had is when a friend who is a conisseur of bizarre stories about silicon valley shenanigans he can laugh at linked me to some article called 'geeks for monarchy'. He was 100% sure the writer had been trolled and found it hilarious.
No, this was the troll post: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/02/a-reader-writes-of-his-experience-among-the-dark-enlightenment-types.html
Hadn't seen that one (as previously stated). That is indeed a funny troll. However, my friend found the reporting in the geeks for monarchy article so outlandish that he was sure someone was putting a credulous writer on.
I agree with Toggle that this might not have been the best place for this question.
The Circle of Life goes like this. Somebody associates Less Wrong with neoreactionaries, even though there are like ten of them here total. They start discussing neoreaction here, or asking their questions for neoreactionaries here. The discussion is high profile and leads more people to associate Less Wrong with neoreactionaries. That causes more people to discuss it and ask questions here, which causes more people to associate us, and it ends with everybody certain that we're full of neoreactionaries, and that ends with bad people who want to hurt us putting "LESS WRONG IS A RACIST NEOREACTIONARY WEBSITE" in big bold letters over everything.
If you really want to discuss neoreaction, I'd suggest you do it in an Slate Star Codex open thread, since apparently I'm way too tarnished by association with them to ever escape. Or you can go to a Xenosystems open thread and get it straight from the horse's mouth.
I believe that the parent and grandparent should be the first two comments someone reads when visiting this article on the "Best" setting.
Here is the current open thread on Slate Star Codex if you want to vote with your feet to move NRx comments over there. I link so that Yvain doesn't have to :-)
Please do not upvote my comment here or comment in response if you agree. Instead, please vote on other comments to express agreement, so as to bring about the suggested outcome.
If you care about culture, (traditional) values and intact families, then democracy is empirically very bad (far from being "the worst form of government, except for all the others" it would place among the very worst). The question is then how you come to care about these things. For me it proceeded negatively: from a critical reading of political philosophy, I came to believe that the foundations of liberalism are incoherent; that what liberalism sees as constraints on individual freedom are nothing of the sort. That many of the norms, values and practices that make up a traditional society are non-voluntary - in the sense that it doesn't make sense to speak of people assenting or not assenting to them - and therefore cannot be seen as constraints on human freedom at all; we're born into them, they form part of our identity and they provide the context (even possibility) of our choices.
So I came to believe that the Enlightenment was the result of this kind of philosophical error and that it is no different from the kinds of philosophical error that bring people to, say, question whether an objective reality exists. The heady feeling one gets from an argument that leads to an absurd conclusion, in this case, led to the false belief that traditional society consisted of arbitrary constraints on human freedom and, eventually, to pointless reforms and revolutions. Consider this: If somebody proposes a model of the physical world and it's incorrect, they have to change the model. But if somebody proposes a model of society and it's incorrect, they can insist on reorganising society to fit the model. This is essentially what has been happening for the last several hundred years. If I said this is what happened with communism - that Marx developed a flawed model and Lenin tried to fit society to that flawed model - most people would probably accept that. Is it so hard to believe the same kind of process led to our own political order and continues to inform it?
On reflection, the contemporary Western view of politics, which I once accepted without question, appears to be utterly absurd. It has no choice but to see the history of humanity as one of oppression and this oppression is becoming increasingly bizarre. It was, perhaps, easy to believe that religion was inherently oppressive, at least given an overly literal interpretation of religion, or to believe that monarchy was oppressive, but now one must believe that the family was oppressive, that gender roles were oppressive, that sexual morality was oppressive, that even having a gender was oppressive, that monogamy was oppressive, etc. The list is ever expanding, the revisionist history gets more absurd by the day. Moreover, most people miss the fact that we're talking about traditional society being inherently oppressive. There were, of course, bad monarchs, bad religious leaders, bad family circumstances, etc, but the liberal claim is that it was all bad, all the time (although it is apparently unnecessary that anyone noticed, since everyone was also ignorant). This is quite an extraordinary claim.
In my view, none of these things were oppressive. You're born into a society, it has its pre-existing norms, values, roles and practices. You're born into a set of pre-existing relationships and roles. These are not constraints, they're part of your identity, they're part of the enabling context in which you have and make choices. This includes things like how leaders are nominated, the roles of men and women, children and parents, etc. That you can imagine different ways of doing things does not imply that you are being deprived of a choice. Moreover, they are in many respects immutable. They continue to exist whether we understand them or misunderstand them and try to rebel against them. Thus, there is just no such thing as a liberal society. What we have instead is a traditional society where there are, for example, arbitrary constraints on leaders (constitutional "checks and balances", elections, etc) that do little more than to ensure that we have incompetent leaders. We have family law and a welfare system that is bad for families. We encourage men to be bad fathers and husbands and women to be bad mothers and wives. We encourage children to rebel against their parents. So what we're doing, in fact, is not 'reform' but just being bad in our roles as parents, spouses, leaders, lawmakers, etc, because we have a bad model of how society works that lead us to mistake incompetence, negligence and immorality for freedom.
This is all fine, but let's move one level higher. What is the reason that almost everybody who reasoned like this was religious? Why does it seem like this kind of thinking is fairly impossible to defend without some reference to religion e.g. https://bonald.wordpress.com/the-conservative-vision-of-authority/ ?
(I am assuming we all agree here that ideas that cannot be defended on a secular ground are not worth defending)
Basically it sounds a lot like the conflict between human volition vs. actual happiness or good lives. A lot of modern liberalism reduces to "if you get what you personally want, you will be happy / OK". So it is all about moving people from inborn roles to roles they want and choose. And a lot of religious thought is all about trying to convince people to reduce or give up their self-centered volition, desires, viewpoints, whatevers, basically to convince them to find happiness through other means than following their own wills.
I am aware of this because I practiced a lot of Buddhism which uniquely focuses on it, on how the ego, the will, volition, vanity, is the source of suffering itself. Much of Christianity sounds like a half-assed version of a Buddhist ego reduction therapy - when people get down on their knees and pray "your will be done" it essentially means "NOT my will be done, I will train by brain to accept that the world does not revolve around me". The core idea in Buddhism, Christianity etc. is that there is true happiness to be found in surrendering your will.
THIS is the psychological basis from which we can understand the difference between traditional and modern societies. This is why reactionaries are religious, mostly.
The question is, just why cannot we justify this non-egocentric psychology on a scientific basis? Why do we need religion for this? Why cannot we figure it out naturalistically?
And if we cannot figure it out naturalistically, scientifically, isn't it likely this is at some level wrong?
......even by the individuals affected? If they tell y8u that they hate being forced into a particular role, you're going to tell them that their feelings don't matter, because you can prove logically that it is non voluntary, and that you can't rebel against your identity?
It's worth noting both that the oppressed were often denied a voice, in the sense of leaving a written record, as part of their oppression....and that there is plenty of evidence of dissent , in the form of popular revolt.
It's also worth noting the difference between far left and classically liberal versions of this argument. (A perennial problem with Moldbug is the way he conflates progressivism qua the leftmost 10% of the spectrum with progressivism qua the leftmost 90%). The classical liberal does not regard traditional societies as morally wrong so much as instrumentally wrong, unsuited to economic and technological progress. Where you have a traditional, hierarchical society, the rulers of that society are under a set of incentives to defend their relative position, which is to say they are not incentivised to promote innovation. On the contrary, even technological developments can sunset them, as the English aristocracy was disrupted by the Industrial revolution.
Liberal democracies, by contrast, are so good at reaping the benefits of progress that, they are able attract queues of would be immigrants from more traditional societies.
I'm not a neoreactionary as such (eg I'm pretty skeptical of monarchy), more of an anti-leftist. I see NRx as the best relatively coherent movement against the left due to it critiquing the flaws of the left in what I see as a more intelligent and perceptive way than typical conservatives do.
I think I found it via Moldbug at first.
Have you read Steve Sailer or Nick Land? Anissimov isn't the whole of NRx, and most of the others have there own ideas about their preferred form of government.
Steve Sailer is one of my favourite bloggers but I dunno if he'd consider himself a reactionary exactly. Nick Land I've mostly heard rumours about him having crazy ideas.
I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed this topic because it introduced me to new concepts. When I clicked on this discussion I hadn't a clue what Neo-Reactionaries were. I knew what a political reactionary is but I hadn't a clue about this particular movement.
The thing that I have found fascinating is the fundamental concept of the movement (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that they want a way out. That the current system is horribly flawed, eventually doomed and that they want to strike a new deal that would fix things once and for all. The recognition is that even if abolished governments will again form. As such they hope to devise a government that is no longer a sham, and structurally will have finally the best interest of the people at its heart instead of selfishness.
What fascinates me about this is some of the discussions about AGI here. Plenty of people apparently feel that eventually agi will rule over us. They essentially are interested in building "a better tyrant." I don't know, give me a thumbs down on this comment if you want but I found the parallel interesting. Of course many ideologies are more alike then people care to admit. For example communism is supposed to be economic and social power sharing and to ensure at the very least everyone's material needs are met. Capitalism and the corporate structure actually aim for the same thing.
Except that they somehow believe no democracy can ever accomplish this goal.
Yes, because there are fundamentally high time preference incentives in democracy.
Since you LinkedIn stalked me and we do look to be associated with common organizations now and in the future, I'm going to restrain my emotions and try to discuss this issue. Instead of, you know, just strangling you through my monitor.
"For the next election!" is obviously a problem with current forms of democratic government. But I do think that if you were honestly trying to address that issue for the good of all, you would at least mention such proposals as commons trusts, if only to argue against them -- but they would be in your hypothesis space in the first place. Instead, "we have a problem in current-day democracy, especially American democracy" is taken as justification for, "It's time for a radical leap back to 1788 France" and other such neoreactionary positions.
To me, this stinks of motivated cognition. What you want is the absolute monarchy, or the seasteading, or the corporatized city-states, or Lord of the Rings, or something; the flaws in democracy are but a justification, not a reason. If you want to have honest discussions about these sorts of things, you can ask that the usual "Holy crap that guy is evil!" reactions be turned-off temporarily (I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from you, so I know exactly what it's like to get that reaction upon mentioning my politics in polite conversation, especially in the damn-dirty-liberal-capitalist USA), and then come out and explain your real motivations. Until you admit what your real goal is, nobody can do anything but try to clear away the rhetorical smoke your faction is somewhat rudely throwing into the air.
Maybe you have fundamentally decent and honest intentions. Maybe you have fundamentally malevolent intentions but simply aren't configured to perceive right and wrong like the rest of us. But if you keep stinking everything up with obscurantist ranting about how everyone else besides you is both malevolent and insane, others will continue treating your ideological faction as logically rude.
Following your link, the description is high on left-wing buzzwords and light on actual details. I fail to see why either Michael or my self should waste our time with every crackpot proposal.
Ok, attempting the steelman their proposal it seems to amount to setting up a trust to be managed by a group omni-benevolet trustees. Problems like where these trustees are supposed to come from, how their omni-benevolence is to be maintained, or even the practical details of how the trust will operate are glossed over or given vague hand-wavy answers. Depending on how those questions are answered this trust might even resemble a neo-reactionary state with the aristocrats called "trustees" although there are hints that's not the direction they're going.
Lol, have you read the site you linked to? That's a good example of motivated cognition. All the statements are of the form "in the trust [buzzword heavy good thing will happen]" with no explanation of what the causal mechanism leading to the thing happening will be. One gets the feeling that their thought process is "[good think] is good therefore in must happen".
Which is exactly the same thing I normally say to your crackpot proposals, but this time I decided to be nice and actually try talking to you. I won't be so bothered again, since your entire post is basically "lol lefties" instead of actually answering the question as to why you lot seem to jump from "current-day American government is flawed" to "hurrah 18th-century monarchy!" with no distribution over possible solutions, or evidence, or search process in between.
Which rather confirms my hypothesis that it's a case of motivated cognition, and you're not worth engaging.
Not omnibenevolent: stop strawmanning. Accountable through the court system. When beneficiaries believe trustees are acting against their trust, they file suit, and an expert judge makes the actual decision based on the trust's charter. Just like in all established trusts under current law, some of which are actually-existing commons trusts. Duh.
I had actually wanted to link a Wikipedia page for the subject, but Google yielded none. Alas.
Eli, I found Scott Alexander's steelmanning of the NRx critique to be an interesting, even persuassive critique of modern progressivism, having not been exposed to this movement prior to today. However I am also equally confused at the jump from "modern liberal democracies are flawed" to "restore the devine-right-of-kings!" I've always hated the quip "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" (we've yet tried), but I think it applies here.
Do you have a link you can provide which explains your own political philosophy, or something close to it? Since your comments here address exactly the concerns I had in reading NRx material, I'm curious to see where you are coming from.
Unfortunately, no, as my own views are by now a cocktail mixed from so many different original drinks that no one bottle or written recipe will yield the complete product.
What I would say in reply to this is:
A) Dissolve "democracy", and not just in the philosophical sense, but in the sense that there have been many different kinds of actually existing democracies. Even within the deontological, arbitrary restriction, "ONLY DEMOCRACY EVER", one can easily debate whether a mixed-member proportional Parliament performs better than a district-based bicameral Congress, or whether a pure Westminster system beats them both, or whether a Presidential system works better, or whatever. Particular institutional designs yield particular institutional behaviors, and generalizing across large categories of institutional designs requires large amounts of evidence.
B) Dissolve "democracy" in the philosophical sense, and ask: what are the terminal goals democracy serves? How much do we support those goals, and how much do current democratic systems suffer approximation error by forcing our terminal goals to fit inside the hypothesis space our actual institutions instantiate? For however much we do support those goals, why do we shape these particular institutions to serve those goals, and not other institutions? (Asking that last question in the form of "If states are democratic, why not workplaces?" is the core issue of democratic socialism, and I would indeed count myself a democratic socialist. But you get different answers and inferences if you ask about schools or churches, don't you?)
C) Learn first to explicitly identify yourself with a political "tribe", and next to consider political ideas individually, as questions of fact and value subject to investigation via epistemology and moral epistemology, rather than treating politics as "tribal". Tribalism is the mind-killer: keeping your own explicit tribal identification in mind helps you notice when you're being tribalist, and helps you distinguish your own tribe's customs from universal truths -- both aids to your political rationality. Lastly, yes, while politics has always been at least a little tribal, the particular form the tribes take varies through time and space: the division of society into a "blue tribe" and a "red tribe" (as described by Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex), for example, is peculiar to late-20th-century and early-21st-century USA. Other countries, and other times, have significantly different arrangements of tribes, so if you don't learn to distinguish between ideas and tribes, you'll not only fail at political rationality, you'll give yourself severe culture shock.
D) Learn to check political ideas by looking at the actually-existing implementations. This works, since most political ideas are not actually perfectly new. Commons trusts exist, for example, the "movement" supporting them just wants to scale them up to cover all society's important common assets rather than just tracts of land donated by philanthropists. Universal health care exists in many countries. Monarchy and dictatorship exist in many countries. Religious rule exists in many countries. Free tertiary education exists in some countries, and has previously existed in more. Non-free but subsidized tertiary education exists in many countries. Running the state off oil revenue has been tried in many countries. Centrally-planned economies have been tried in many countries. And it's damn well easier to compare "Canadian health-care" to "American health-care" to "Chinese health-care", all sampled in 2014, using fact-based policy studies, than to argue about the Visions of Human Life represented by each (the welfare state, the Company Man, and the Lone Fox, let's say) -- which of course assumes consequentialism.
D1) This means that while the Soviet Union is not evidence for the total failure of "socialism" as I use the word, that's because I define socialism as a larger category of possible economies that strictly contains centralized state planning -- centralized state planning really was a total fucking failure. But there's a rationality lesson here: in politics, all opponents of an idea will have their own definition for it, but the supporters will only have one. Learn to identify political terminology with the definitions advanced by supporters: these definitions might contain applause lights, but at least they pick out one single spot in policy-space or society-space (or, hopefully, a reasonably small subset of that space), while opponents don't generally agree on which precise point in policy-space or society-space they're actually attacking (because they're all opposed for their own reasons and thus not coordinating with each-other).
D2) This also means that if neoreactionaries want to talk about monarchies that rule by religious right, or even about absolute monarchies in general, they do have to account for the behavior of the Arab monarchies today, for example. Or if they want to talk about religious rule in general (which very few do, to my knowledge, but hey, let's go with it), they actually do have to account for the behavior of Da3esh/ISIS. Of course, they might do so by endorsing such regimes, just as some members of Western Communist Parties endorsed the Soviet Union -- and this can happen by lack of knowledge, by failure of rationality, or by difference of goals.
E) Learn to notice when otherwise uninformed people are adopting political ideas as attire to gain status by joining a fashionable cause. Keep in mind that what constitutes "fashionable" depends on the joiner's own place in society, not on your opinions about them. For some people, things you and I find low-status (certain clothes or haircuts) are, in fact, high-status. See Scott's "Republicans are Douchebags" post for an example in a Western context: names that the American Red Tribe considers solid and respectable are viewed by the American Blue Tribe as "douchebag names".
F) And finally, a heuristic that tends to immunize against certain failures of political rationality: if an argument does not base itself at all in facts external to itself or to the listener, but instead concentrates entirely on reinterpreting evidence, then it is probably either an argument about definitions, or sheer nonsense.
G) A further heuristic, usable on actual electioneering campaigns the world over: whenever someone says "values", he is lying, and you should reach for your gun. The word "values" is the single most overused, drained, meaningless word in politics. It is a normative pronoun: it directs the listener to fill in warm fuzzy things here without concentrating the speaker and the listener on the same point in policy-space at all. All over the world, politicians routinely seek power on phrases like "I have values", or "My opponent has no values", or "our values" or "our $TRIBE values", or "$APPLAUSE_LIGHT values". Just cross those phrases and their entire containing sentences out with a big black marker, and then see what the speaker is actually saying. Sometimes, if you're lucky (ie: voting for a Democrat), they're saying absolutely nothing. Often, however, the word "values" means, "Good thing I'm here to tell you that you want this brand new oppressive/exploitative power elite, since you didn't even know!"
H) As mentioned above, be very, very sure about what ethical framework you're working within before having a political discussion. A consequentialist and a virtue-ethicist will often take completely different policy positions on, say, healthcare, and have absolutely nothing to talk about with each-other. The consequentialist can point out the utilitarian gains of universal single-payer care, and the virtue-ethicist can point out the incentive structure of corporate-sponsored group plans for promoting hard work and loyalty to employers, but they are fundamentally talking past each-other.
H1) Often, the core matter of politics is how to trade off between ethical ideals that are otherwise left talking past each-other, because society has finite material resources, human morals are very complex, and real policies have unintended consequences. For example, if we enact Victorian-style "poor laws" that penalize poverty for virtue-ethical reasons, the proponents of those laws need to be held accountable for accepting the unintended consequences of those laws, including higher crime rates, a less educated workforce, etc. (This is a broad point in favor of consequentialism: a rational consequentialist always actually considers consequences, intended and unintended, or he fails at consequentialism. A deontologist or virtue-ethicist, on the other hand, has license from his own ethics algorithm to not care about unintended consequences at all, provided the rules get followed or the rules or rulers are virtuous.)
I) Almost all policies can be enacted more effectively with state power, and almost no policies can "take over the world" by sheer superiority of the idea all by themselves. Demanding that a successful policy should "take over the world" by itself, as everyone naturally turns to the One True Path, is intellectually dishonest, and so is demanding that a policy should be maximally effective in miniature (when tried without the state, or in a small state, or in a weak state) before it is justified for the state to experiment with it. Remember: the overwhelming majority of journals and conferences in professional science still employ frequentist statistics rather than Bayesianism.
EDIT: Holy crap, this should probably be its own discussion post.
Isn't Israel an ethnonationalist state with a strong implicit hierarchy?
There are real word examples, including such delights as the BBC and NHS.
A common, but shallow point. Thefallacy is equating democratic government with elected officials. Most democracies have second chambers , civil services and other added to lengthen time preference. Yes Minister is all about an elected pol being unable to budge the long term plans of his ministry.
"God" is a more appropriate name.
I tend to consider Exit and We Want a King as different theories.
Exit starts to get close to libertarian/anarchic schools of thought (e.g. seasteading is generally thought of as ancap), which is almost diametrically opposed to We Want a King.
Hmm. Well, the monarchists think they are going to get some Vetinari style ruler who lets business faire, although that hasn't been common historically.
It looks like I further need to distinguish between We Want Exit, and Everyone has a Right to Exit. The latter fads up to World Government, the former falls apart over biological sustainability.
Previously: the comments to "Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.]".
I don't consider myself a reactionary, but I found Moldbug's "Open Letter to Progressives" to be a very convincing teardown of modern western society. For me, it made a lot of things 'click', and really drove home just how arbitrary and historically motivated present day beliefs are. I wouldn't say it shattered my world view, but it certainly gave me an outside view and I highly recommend reading it all.
He then follows up this teardown with a buildup of a reactionary perspective. I think he does an awful job of showing this perspective as any less arbitrary than the one he just broke down, and has very little real justification. But to someone who was just left with a despairing sense of uncertainty about how the world should work, I suppose that it would be very tempting to latch onto the first thing that could fill that hole.
That's standard preacher approach. Incendiary accusations to destroy everything you take for granted, then, when you're in tears and directionless, a promise of salvation if you follow their way.
Come to think of it, that's a pattern EY has used extensively as well... "Here's proof that religion is insane and most people are predictably and systematically stupid, including yourself. Now believe in the Singularity, general self-improving artificial intelligence, cryogeny, space expansionism, and libertarianism!"
This doesn't seem too implausible. I have no trouble believing that religion is false ("insane" is an incendiary term that I do not believe should be invoked in a non-clinical context due to triggering most people's "mind-killed" modes), as well as believing that people are predictably and systematically irrational (same deal with "stupid"). Are you arguing against this?
I have not seen Eliezer ever advocate for his personal views on these topics outside of posts dedicated specifically to said topics. Most posts in the Sequences just talk about basic techniques for rationality, without ever mentioning any of the stuff you've listed. Indeed, the two major prongs of his worldview--rationality and transhumanism--seem to be largely (almost entirely) detached from each other. I'm having a hard time seeing this "preacher approach" you're talking about in Eliezer's writings.
Most emphatically not. I'm very glad to have discovered that, and I'm grateful for EY's impassioned preaching, that made it seem immediately, crucially, urgently relevant. By comparison, when I read books like Think Fast and Slow, or watch shows like Crash Course Psychology or Earthlings 101. I feel like I'm just collecting a bunch of interesting, quaint. and curious trivia that aren't much of a factor in how I think of myself, the world, and my place in it. (And don't get me started on new Cosmos. NDG doesn't preach, he lectures. Carl Sagan at least used to wonder )
You should care about people in alternate universes. (Am I getting this right?)
Also, it's at least somewhat plausible that you're living in a simulation.
Well, we've never caught Nature glitching or bugging or even simplifying its calculations, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That we're living in a simulation is about as plausible as the Abrahamic narrative, about as falsifiable, and about as proven.
I'm inclined to think that people (especially modern skeptical people) would find ways to paper over small glitches.
The hilarious thing about this is that Eliezer isn't even very hardcore about libertarianism, and most LWers on the surveys assign very low probability to cryonics actually working, including those who've actually signed up. The Preacher's Way works, whether or not you actually intend it to do so!
(Which is why it's epistemically polite simply not to speak that way at all.)
(And besides which, the human condition is an entirely valid concern that we ought to be moving from the realms of myth and religion to the realm of rationality. It is to my great and lifelong dismay that one signals intelligence, education, enlightenment, and general rationality by loudly dismissing all questions of value, feeling, or the human condition.)
Weird, I thought that link would lead to Straw Nihilist.
Are you joking, or do you really think that total open borders doesn't count as hardcore libertarianism?
Not joking at all. Total open borders, by the usual tribal-allegiance measure of political positioning, is a hardcore liberal (in the Democrats-and-blue-tribe sense) position. Most actually-existing libertarians are xenophobes.
Of course, if the Libertarian Party has actually put open borders in its election platforms, then tell me and I'll update.
But no, he's not hardcore libertarian, in the sense of anarcho-capitalist or deontological proprietarian. All utilitarian libertarians are non-hardcore.
Also, I do recall him once self-labeling as "small-l libertarian", which very much implies non-hardcoreism.
I do not think this is true. I think it just implies non-affiliation with the Libertarian Party. Many hardcore libertarians reject the Libertarian Party.
Eliezer doesn't really push libertarianism.
Moldbug as political philosopher is far too libertarian to be useful. Moldbug as historian is capable of at least presenting a broad outline.
I'm disappointed that neoreaction hasn't done very much to fill in the details beyond the 20th century (and it was Moldbug and Foseti who did most of that), but philosophy is always more attractive than history.
Moldbug's political philosophy is useful to Nick Land, who avoids the defects of it by supporting them entirely: he seems to see capitalism as the only institutional intelligence capable of doing anything. I'm not sure how he squares that with HBD (especially given the role of the Catholic Church in their historical narrative) and cyclical history -- it seems to me that the economic consequences of the decline of the West should propagate outward. (There might be room for historical studies here -- what happened to trade after the fall of Rome? -- but there are obvious differences there. Transportation distance, interlinking of systems, and so on.)
That the throne-and-altar types have accepted Moldbug seems strange, since the Jacobite stuff is mostly trolling.
I thought up a second way to explain this.
I discovered outright lying, not just incompetence, in several areas of the social sciences. This lead me to try and figure out the drivers of corruption of the social sciences. Eventually I hit upon "scientism" being used to manufacture consent in democratic societies. I also discovered how scientific governance as exists in the form of modern technocracy was a sham used by the powerful to eliminate possible rivals, under the pretense of empowering the weak. The key thinker explaining this dynamic is Bertrand de Jouvenel.
I eventually came to the opinion that this same drive for deception, one could call it the "ingsoc" drive, isn't a strange feature just of Communism and Nazism but was present in FDR's regime as well. It metastized universally in the 20th century. Epistemically liberal democracies were no healthier than the other two major forms of mass opinion derived legitimacy.
This lead me to the conclusion that my priors on political theory, economics, culture and ethics had been spiked in a nasty and systematic way. Then I went through a long process of taking the priors of peoples living before the age of mass consent being considered the golden standard for political legitimacy and started updating them one step at a time going through history up until the present era. A key step in this process was the writing of Thomas Carlyle.
Mencius Moldbug was a useful companion in this process, but the source material he draws on is even more powerful. It takes longer to read tho.
I agree that the political beliefs of citizens living in democratic societies come about via a process that we have no reason to believe is truth-tracking, but why should past thinkers such as Carlyle be much better? By what measure has he been shown to be a reliable guide on political/sociological questions?
The intro to the rationalist neoreactionary blog the Future Primaeval sort of captures this: