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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)
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:
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?
Wow. This makes a lot of sense.
I had previously thought of the term neoreactionary as just an insult, as similar to any view as "asshole" is to any anatomy. Now I think it is at least in the top half of similar ideologies.
Thank you for the answer and thanks to the original poster for the question.
It's not just society. It's more like he looked at Marx's (flawed, yes) model, thought "that's cool and all, but I want to feed the Tsar his yarbles now", and hit it with a wrench until it gave him some half-assed philosophical justification for starting a revolution (and later for running a totalitarian state, though not as totalitarian as Stalin would make it).
See, orthodox Marxism isn't really a blueprint for revolution. Insofar as it's even a call to revolution, it's saying -- to the industrial workers of the entire world, and that's important -- that revolution is inevitable, it's going to happen anyway, the only thing holding it back from happening is self-delusion. Instead, it's better understood as a future history: it purports to lay out the historical forces that drive large-scale social changes and to predict what the next one's going to look like.
Now, there are a number of ways you could challenge that in light of the real history that's happened in the century and a half since Marx wrote. But Lenin had bigger problems than that. By Marx's lights, Russia in 1917 wasn't ready for a communist revolution: it was at the time the least industrialized major European country (relative to its population), with most of the economy still running on a semi-feudal agrarian system. Its serfs had been emancipated less than a century before. Worse, the rest of the world looked like it wasn't going to be getting on the revolution train anytime soon. This ran completely counter to Marx's future history, but Lenin, in essence, said "fuck it, we'll do it anyway".
Right, but it's that sort of transition from the descriptive and the prescriptive that I'm highlighting. In liberal philosophy the issue is much more subtle, but there has been a constant interchange between the descriptive and the prescriptive. So if you look at society as sovereign individuals engaged in contractual relationships with one another, that's essentially descriptive. It was intended to be descriptive. But then your model for why individuals give up some of their rights to have a state doesn't look right and the answer to that isn't to change the model but to make a prescriptive assertion: the state should be more representative of our interests. So you've gone from descriptive to prescriptive.
Likewise, with feminism: under a model that emphasises individuals in voluntary relationships, women look oppressed, so you derive the prescriptive conclusion that we should alter family law, etc. Under the traditional family-oriented model of society, it's not even clear why anyone but the head of a household should vote, since people aren't 'sovereign' individuals, they're members of an institution - the family - and they play different roles within it, and the head of the household is its representative in society. From this shift to an individualist view you can derive much of the rest of modern liberal/progressive prescriptivism. It problematises the family - the status of women and children, the fairness of inheritance (wealth, status and genetics), familial obligations, etc - and it problematises the institutions of the state.
It's a view of people magically appearing in the world fully formed, with their own interests, and they're shocked to learn that they have parents, that they have roles in society, that society has existed long before they were born and has its own traditions, values, etc. So they're encouraged to stomp their feet and say, "Why wasn't I consulted about any of this?"
Can I leave society If I don't like it? Can I free myself from it's constraints and take advantage of it as an outsider?
If not, why not?
Here is an excellent rant about things that make NRx look attractive.
Quite a rant, but why do you think NRx would be any better?
NRx at the moment is mostly about the critique of the existing political order. That's the part that resonates, while the prescriptive parts are both more contentious and more, I don't know, "abstract".
Second thought-- that rant is from a Left point of view. It's "people are being hurt for no reason, this is intolerable", not civilization is falling apart from lack of virtue."
I am pretty sure the author would disagree.
I think you're misreading it. One of the major points in this rant is:
As to "civilization is falling apart from lack of virtue", that looks strawmannish to me and doesn't resemble NRx positions.
"The system is not fixable because it is not broken."
This is an argument I've seen from leftists. I may have seen some version of it from the right.
Oh my, but the universe is generous!
Consequentialism is not a "Left" point of view. Also, many leftists hold some "virtues" sacred; consider recycling. It doesn't matter that all the tediously "recycled" garbage ends up in the same landfill, the point is to uphold the virtue of caring for the environment.
Cite?
Really? I would expect that most pro-recycling people either don't know that the garbage ends up in the same place, or have an expectation that the separated landfills will come in the near future.
That's true, of course a large part of it is that they don't want to know.
I read about HBD first and then NRx second. I couldn't have a sensible conversation about it with anybody I knew due to the prevailing progressive memeplex - for example, my History teacher once claimed that war was nonexistent in pre-agriculture societies due to it being economically unsustainable (I just about managed to avoid giving myself a concussion from slamming my head on the table). I knew cracks were appearing in the Narrative after I read the Blank Slate, and I knew I had to jettison it entirely once I finished The Bell Curve.
But what to replace it with? Mainstream conservatism was as clueless as progressivism, and while individual libertarians might have had the right mindset to discuss the issue if you framed it the right way, their answers were unsatisfying. Then one day, someone on LW linked to Moldbug - and here suddenly was a whole other narrative that made a lot more sense. It wasn't about HBD as such, but an account of the Progressive idea machine that explained why it was so taboo. I toyed with some of the weirder aspects for a while (Patchwork and Corporate Governance) but eventually gave them up for similar reasons to libertarianism (in a word: too spergy).
I wouldn't call myself a Neoreactionary. My beliefs are somewhere in between paleocon and the Traditionalist branch of NRx. In an entirely separate part of my brain there's also an active transhumanist who is annoyed that this contrarian upstart is getting all the cognitive attention, and Annisimov's early post about transhumanist/NRx synthesis hasn't properly bridged the gap. I don't know what I'll believe in a year or two.
Libertarianism is insufficient as most people will be led easily. They will not take freedom. Freedom is hard work, freedom is frightening. Neoreaction follows from libertarianism with a more secure possible future. Technology provides wealth and being with your group provides security in society.
Freedom is something regularly demanded by those who don't have it.
Division into mutually suspicious groups is anything but a guarantees of security...its the major source of conflict.
That depends a bit on how you define war. Simply ambushing the neighboring tribe and killing all males isn't war in the traditional sense. It doesn't drag on.
Well there are lots of longrunning feuds and conflicts in hunter gatherer societies, where both tribes are about evenly matched for each other.
Indeed. Archaeological study of the grounds surrounding Stonehenge shows evidence of what appears to be a prolonged conflict between two neighbouring settlements, which lasted several hundred years- during which time there were no new religious monuments made in the area (suggesting that most energies were devoted to this conflict). There's evidence of several major battles.
(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hc5v7)
Stonehenge almost certainly wasn't erected by a hunter-gatherer society. Its main monuments date to about 2500 BC, which in a British context is late Neolithic or early Bronze Age (i.e. post-agricultural), and are generally attributed to the Grooved ware culture.
Forager economics may have existed at the edge of agricultural civilization well after the transition, of course, but from associated artifacts, among other things, we can be pretty sure that the European megaliths were put up by sedentary agriculturalists.
An attack at night can allow an evenly matched tribe to kill the other one. That puts some pressure on a tribe that fears getting ambushed to ambush first.
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.
The meta-principles apply to the object-level principles, but I don't think it's possible to figure that out from Moldbug alone. I'll try to provide the details if anyone wants them, but the general idea is that your tribe's values have been shaped by institutional constraints -- your predecessors had the goal of capturing power and the spoils thereof, and made whatever arguments were useful toward that goal, and now you actually believe all of those things.
I don't think this is a complete picture. I haven't had the time to investigate this as much as I would like, but I suspect that there's also some ideological inheritance from the self-justifications of the later stages of the British Empire. (Macaulay. Idea of Progress.) It's possible to come up with an explanation of your tribe's imperialistic tendencies without drawing on this, but I doubt that omission can be genealogically justified.
...and yes, your tribe does have imperialistic tendencies. What homogenized monoculture? There are many reasons I don't and can't call myself a neoreactionary, but I completely agree with them here: your people should not live under the same government as mine. You have never had a homogenized monoculture, and you never will until New England is no longer part of the United States.
I keep encountering mindsets like this among your tribe: my people don't exist as long as you don't have to remember us, and when you do, we're aberrations who need to be wiped from the face of the earth. (I have in fact heard Yankees advocate the genocide of my people. Yes, I do mean genocide. In the most literal possible sense.)
I also agree with neoreactionaries about Woodrow Wilson and FDR -- if German hadn't been wiped out in this country, we'd be behind a language barrier from you. (For certain values of 'we' that include me and exclude most of 'us' -- there's not that much kraut blood in the South. But my grandmother spoke it fluently, and I think natively, and the other side of my family is from what used to be a German-speaking area. Oh well.)
In that specific sentence, I was actually referring to Lesswrong as it was before neoreactionaries became a Big Thing. Pretty much everyone agreed on everything back, and all disagreements were highly productive disagreements in which people changed their mind.
After the NRx came in we've had useless arguments, downvote stalkers, and so on really hurting the signal to noise ratio.
(By the way, that sentence is not an attack on NRx, but a proof of one of its principles - that homogeneity is useful. I'm also harking back to a golden age. My entire attitude right now feels a lot like the Shield of Conservatism, only it's not protecting the conservatives.)
Well, yes, I've been saying this from the beginning -- the word "neoreaction" fucked everything up. If you don't have a word for the whole cluster, each point can be argued; if you do, pro- and anti- become two factions, and you get the usual factional conflicts.
In particular, the strategy I suspect Nick Land was playing by was a mistake. Trying to create a faction and make it as loud as possible works in academia; not so much anywhere else.
It's the SOP for politics. "When bad men combine, the good must associate." (Edmund Burke, 1770)
How many successful political factions have gone out and given themselves names, and how many were only named by their enemies?
What, for example, do the 'cultural Marxists' call themselves?
As it was foretold of old.
Perhaps LW is vulnerable to getting sidetracked into futile discussions of NRx in particular because a lot of the LW memeset is shared with a lot of the NRxrz. Indeed, the NRxrz pride themselves on their clear-sighted rationality. From within, the participants think they're having a rational discussion, while from without it resembles no such thing, it's just politics as usual.
Hey now, I'm not actually condoning that attitude. I'm saying that's the attitude I would have, with the NRx-Lefty hat on. In real life I am still Enlightenment-Leftie, half my friends are religious patriotic folk and I've been quite open to interacting with them and hearing their ideas and even dating them. Enlightenment-Leftie and Enlightenment-Rightie co-exist just fine, because of the tolerance thing... the critique of NRx here is that the Enlightenment framework always favors Leftie, which does seem true but I find it hard to complain about that. But NRx-Rightie is not the solution that finally balances things back in the Right's favor, because.... here comes NRx-Leftie, they can use all Cthulhu's leftward pull tricks and they're not nearly as tolerant of Rightie, in any format, and they're not tolerant of those Red, Purple, or Yellow tribes either. (In theory. In practice I'm not sure NRx wouldn't just collapse in all cases.) Tolerance was an Enlightenment value.
I'm not saying regular lefties never advocate these ideas - ultimately, liberals have amygdalas and love in-groups and hate out-groups just like everyone else. But my idealized Rational Humanist Egalitarian who I'm calling Enlightenment-Lefty for the purpose of this conversation doesn't agree with those lefties. Within this conversational framework, those are just Rx-lefties, lacking the self-aware component of NRx. Even within the NRx-Lefty empire, those sorts of people are kind of the proles of the world, understanding the Cathedral doctrine but not really getting the spirit of it all. The NRx-Lefty empire doesn't go so far as to want genocide (eugenics, maybe)... but yeah, they will go ahead and be paternalistic and superior and intolerant.
Wait, what is your tribe?
1) People who think a lot and generally care about logical consistency, trending towards high IQ
2) who also have sufficiently understanding of parsimony that God, etc, is just totally out of the question
3) and who generally adapt well to technological advance, often being the people whose intellects are drive it forward
4) who don't base moral judgements off of strong emotional response to things that are "weird", like odd sexualities or profanity, or "threatening", like enemy combatants or opposing ideologies.
5) who have a degree of detachment from their particular situations, and wouldn't vastly put the importance of themselves, their family, or their nation above others. It's okay if they do so in small ways in personal life, but they should be cognizant of the whole universal brotherhood of mankind thing and generally see morality and kindness as something that should be applied to people relatively equally.
So a NRx-Lefty of this tribe believes these things, but also thinks an authoritarian, heirarchical society is the best way to achieve these values. So, people who fall into the tribe and are members of the cognitive elite will sort of rule over everyone else, using military force and propaganda and all that other stuff to achieve these values. They still care about outsiders, but they care in a very paternalistic sense and won't hesitate to override people's stated preferences in favor of what the NRx-Lefty extrapolates their preferences to actually be, since savages don't really know what they want or understand anything.
The bulk of the actual NRx movement would be considered enemies, savages, or subversives within this empire, because they tend to fail steps 4 and 5. Within the empire, it's "okay" to be a human-biodiversity-advocate in the same sense that it's okay to think that people with myopia are smarter and consider that a largely irrelevant fact because we have actual IQ tests that we can use to separate people with with much greater accuracy, but it's not okay in a moral sense to be a particularist who thinks your race should be defended. (Ideological particularism, is, of course, encouraged if it's generally in the Cathedral's favor.)
(Once again, describing, not condoning, an idea.)
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.
Naturally, Moldbug has something to say on this, at least for those with libertarian sympathies:
Where the context he was referring to was:
http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/charles1.html
This points to the fundamental conundrum that libertarians are just now starting to grapple with. In a polity where it is a given that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men", you can have some expectation that democratic, representative government is a decent means to secure your freedoms. It is a means, and not an end in itself.
Libertarians largely have the motivations of Thomas Paine with regard to government:
We don't want to vote. We don't want to participate in government. Not really. We don't want to run other people's lives. Run your own damn life, and leave me alone to run mine.
But when the polity changes, increasingly populated by those who do want to participate in the domination of the lives of their neighbors, and to be similarly subjugated themselves, what then?
Whether it's one vote, one time, or a vote every other year, if the result is always increasing subjection, what's a libertarian to do?
Moldbug went down the libertarian -> anarcho capitalist -> reactionary path. I see it as a recognition that despite anarcho capitalist hocus pocus with respect to markets to the contrary, violence is a natural hierarchical location based monopoly - a government. So his answer is to respect the reality of power, and sweep aside ideologies that make the outcome worse than what honest human livestock ranchers would devise. I'm not convinced on that score, but Moldbug would hardly be alone in being able to provide a compelling critique while providing a less than compelling alternative.
The issue is, I don't see NRx providing a clear difference between monarchy and modern demotic dictatorship, and clear ways of preventing the first from sliding into the second.
I've read Hoppe years ago, so far I remember I have not seen a solution to that. The only thing I remember is that a king si really really sure his heirs will inherit so he has a vested interest in not screwing up a country. But such sureness of inheritance means the people really consent to monarchy that is in practice a democracy.
Furthermore I don't understand the whole idea of starting on top, i.e. designing a form of government, instead of starting in the bottom, like the morals and culture of the age.
I mean, for example, if monarchy is so much more desirable then it is obvious why we don't have it: because we as a people became more depraved and not worthy for it e.g. having too much envy.
Another thing I don't understand in these designs is that they are about drawing rules when in reality it is possible to act outside the rules, this is called revolution or coups. Thus a realistic political philosophy cannot simply say if everybody accepts these rules all will be right. The very first political philosopher, Aristotle, wanted to figure out which rules are simply the more likely to obeyed, as in, the least likely to lead to coups and revolutions, the least likely to cause behavior outside the rules. It seems NRx like everybody else is simply trying to find good rules today. This is a really short-sighted. BTW aristotle's solution was a kind of democracy where the rich have more votes. We have this, in practice (the rich buy votes).
For starters a monarch doesn't have to spend most of his effort manufacturing democratic support, thus he can actually focus his effort into governing the country.
A more concrete way to see the difference is that under a monarchy most people aren't expected to participate in politics or hold political opinions, the attitude you captured rather well in your post here. Under a demotic dictatorship, all people are required to participate in politics and form their own political opinions, and those opinions had better mach the dictator's/today's cathedral consensus.
Except they don't. Buying votes is illegal. Thus in order to buy votes you have to ensure that said law won't be enforced against you, witch requires that you have the right connections. Which means to have power you must constantly be playing signaling games to maintain those connections.
That doesn't explain the difference between a monarch and a dictator, as requested. Once a dictator has suspended elections, they don't need democratic support either.
That means that means that they have less time, not that the dictator does. The dictator doesn't need to manufacture assent, they rather need to quash dissent...as would a monarch, as many did. NRxs just assume that Monarchy will work effortlessly, because that's their desired conclusion.
The question was specifically about demotic dictatorships. As for dictators in general, that depends on how the dictator legitimizes his rule.
Monarchs had a lot less dissent to quash. For example, the dress code at Versailles required all men to carry swords. Compare that with a modern president, good luck getting close to him with so much as a pocket knife.
No kind of dictator has to generate democratic support. Demotic dictators are supposed to justify themselves by generating ideological support, but that doesn't actually distinguish them from real world monarchies, because of all the ideology about God Put Me on the Throne,
OTOH, the Star Chamber.
"The People Support Me" is a lot easier to falsify then "God Put Me on the Throne", thus you need correspondingly more oppression to keep anyone from falsifying it.
But all these features were also true for the dictatorships toppled say in the Arab Spring. Or Franco. People were not expected to be engaging in politics, support was not manufactured etc. Still there was unrest and instability.
Putting it differently, from the Aristotelean stability-first angle the question is why and how would people accept it, when there is empirical fact they don't accept it in dictatorships.
As far as I can tell these kinds of demonstrations and unrest have two factors. One, students, intellectuals who care about things like freedom of speech: basically, with some cynicism you could see it they want a piece from the power cake. Perhaps a system that would offer them clear paths to power could defuse it, but being rebellious still feels more virtuous and empowering than repeating official propaganda for a chance of promotion and a sinecure so the only system I can imagine that could secure their support would be itself pretending to be perpetual rebels: welcome to the "Cathedral". Lacking that, you could shower honor and money on young intellectuals and still they would find rebellion more virtuous and empowering. A second factor is the basic simple hunger-revolt urges of the masses when and if the rulers manage to screw up the economy. You could see both factors in the Arab Spring, the mass-hunger-revolt being the muscle doing the pedaling behind it and the rebellious students and young intellectuals the steering brain.
It would be fascinating to do an in-depth study of student and young-intellectual rebelliousness. It looks like something invented in the 1960's, but Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday mentioned it existed in Vienna as far back as his youth1900, but weirdly enough, it was a proto-Nazi type of student movement, basically nationalist students getting drunk and starting fights in the name of some pan-German union. One of the weirdest and most scary facts of early 20th century Europe is that students were above-average likely to participate in proto-fascist movements. From these two data points one could speculate that it may be an ancestral urge, basically young males not wanting to be ruled by the silverbacks, and ape or caveman level status competition. Around the world, youth radicalism was visible in 1908, visible in 1848 and so on. Any monarchy should need a surefire way of dealing with that (i.e. give them power and prestige but also make it as romantic, virtuous and empowering as a revolution) to be seriously considerable.
Come on. Spending money on making a candidate or party attractive and advertised buys votes. Not literally but in the sense of increases the chance of people voting for them.
The claim is that it is more pleasant to live under a monarchy or rightist dictatorship, where you're at least allowed to keep to yourself.
Yes, the neoreactionary claim is that in that kind of intelligentsia environment people win based on their ability to signal piety (or virture) eventually the memes will evolve for maximal apparent piety. This is bad (or very bad) because at some point signaling piety becomes orthogonal to actually being good ideas. You wind up converging on ideas that super-stipulate human inbuilt values. When the pious ideas prove impractical this get's blamed on not everyone being sufficiently pious, thus the least pious must be purged.
Scarier then the large participation of students in proto-communist and actual communist movements?
Jim's proposed solution to this problem is based on restoration England:
1) Require an oath of loyalty to the official religion to serve in government and especial teach at colleges, so you don't get radical professors radicalizing students.
2) If possible make the official religion as boring as possible, so smart people are encouraged to focus their energies on productive tasks, like business or science, rather then attempting to create ever more pious versions of the official religion.
The studies I've seen suggest that once you've spent enough money so that the average voter knows how the candidate is, you hit diminishing returns fairly quickly, at least from regular advertising. Of course, if you are friends with the editor and can have him put a favorable spin on the actual reporting, that's different. And it also relies on connections, not money.
Yes, given that Soviet-type communism and fascism are roughly equivalent, but not all were Soviet-types, the roots of communist ideologies are about small kibbutz type tribes being collectivist, not totalitarianism. Really, one of the biggest unfairness and inaccuracy here is equating all communists with Sovietism, Leninism. The roots of the movement are egalitarian tribalism in the form of workplace collectives, not tyranny. Anarcho-communist always existed, anarcho-fascism needed to be invented by Jack Donovan, it wasn't always a thing, this is the primary difference.
Maybe there is a value mismatch here, I think that stability is the No. 1 requirement, something pleasant yet under constant threat of rebellion is worse than something crappy but crawling on and on without big upheavals.
Yes and it worked because the system is still there, and there were no puritans and levellers, despite the ability to export them to colonies. Oh, wait...
What is even the point of proposing anything that was vulnerable to getting torn down? Maybe if you don't value stability as much as I do... I find democracy stable roughly the same way as hip-hop battles prevent street battles, or recruiting youths into boxing gyms prevent them fighting on the street: a election campaign, election fight channels the tribal or ideological energies that would threaten social violence, revolution etc. into peaceful fighting it out.
This is really a no-brainer... knowing what tribal assholes humankind is, we need simulated tribal warfare in politics to discharge energies. Election campaigning is one, and that requires democracy. What are others?
What I would change is the rhethorics of democracy. It is not about consensus decision making, it is simulated civil war, optimates and populists fighting for the votes.
I don't see what this is supposed to mean. In any case tribalism is just as much, probably even more, a part of human nature then collectivism.
Everything is vulnerable to being torn down. The question is how vulnerable, and how well it works in the mean time.
Look at all the attempts to build democracy in the third world. Also, if you want stability, the Austrian and French monarchies lasted far longer then any democracies have so far.
I am seriously weirded out by this discussion... how is it hard to understand conditions change? One of weirdest aspect of NRx is the complete lack of cultural conservatism - by that I mean the largely politics-independent changing of mores, atittudes, the kind of stuff e.g. Theodore Dalrymple bemoan. That political institutions require a culture that is compatible with them. Engaging in from-the-above system-building as if society was a computer and a political system a program, an algorithm, just find the right one and it gets executed. This social-engineering attitude. Where does this come from? I mean, how is it hard to see there are cultural conditions as prerequisites and indeed the same way democracy does not work well for tribal societies in Africa, the same way monarchies cannot work well in societies where everybody's minds are full of ideas that were received from radical intellectuals? How is it hard to see how different cultural conditions were: those monarchies required that the population be religious and see the monarch as divine ordained. It also required that populations should be fairly uneducated and thus not influenced by radical intellectualism. It required the lack of widespread literay, fairly expensive book printing and distributing technology that does not deliver seditious flyers into the hands of cobblers and so on.
What weirds me out here is the general engineering attitude that systems of politics are primary and culture is at best secondary. Where does this come from? A bunch of programmers and engineers who have little respect for the humanities and incredible power education and the written word has on human minds?
Systems are absolutely secondary to culture, to me - I am mostly humanities oriented and suck at math, and my programming is largely just scripting so I am no hacker - this is more than obvious. For example the reason France is still a more or less rich and functional country is the other France: that everything that was invented there in politics did not have much effect beyond Paris, that e.g. Catholic peasants of Gascogne lived a largely politics-free existence where their lives were mainly determined by cultural norms (work, pray, marry, work, work even more, pray, die) and politics and government was a remote thing one occasionally pays taxes to but is not relevant to daily life. They don't even talk the same way (oc/oil languages). And despite all the bullshit from Paris France works largely because these rural cultural norms were effective. Politics could not make them worse. But they also cannot make them better. If cultural norms are bad, you cannot build a good political system. If they are good, it takes a lot of effort for a bad system to ruin it. I am not saying culture is non-reducible, but certainly as hell non-reducible to politics. To other factors maybe. Politics is 100% culture-reducible, culture determines even what political concepts mean.
In short, I find it a huge blind spot in NRx to engage in systems-building and consider culture only an afterthought.
Why, with a good enough culture you could basically afford to be anarchist and not worry about political systems at all!! That was roughly Tolkien's idea. The Shire hardly needed any government at all, because their cultural norms were productive and peaceful and honest. THIS is a huge lesson you guys totally don't understand, apparently.
Um, those changes are not politics independent. These changes are being caused by various political forces.
And where does culture come from?
Have you looked for culturally conservative NRxers?
Is it supposed to 'be a fact that you are more likely to be allowed to keep yourself, under a monarchy or rightist dictatorship?
Years before I read any Moldbug, I became fascinated with the way that sacredness affects social life and cognition even in ostensibly non-religious groups. Since my work challenged the sacredness of life, I was able to notice how that particular sacredness was (non-rationally) socially supported against challenges, and this helped me to see the same patterns in other areas of thought. Human cognition and behavior only make sense when analyzed religiously, and the neoreactionary idea of "The Cathedral" is one of several fruitful analyses along those lines, along with, say, the ideas of Emile Durkheim, Jonathan Haidt, and Roy Baumeister. Human institutions and behavior must be analyzed religiously and folklorically. I'm more interested in human flourishing, ritual, and cultural evolution than regular politics, but the neoreactosphere has been extremely friendly to these kinds of discussions.
My family and most of my friends are extremely liberal and I was a good liberal for most of my life.
If you don't mind my asking, when you ask "what led you to accept the basic premises of the movement," what do you see as its basic premises, and what causes you to describe it as a "movement"?
I went from straight Libertarianism to Georgism to my current position of advocacy of competitive government. I believe in the right to exit and hope to work towards a world where exit gets easier and easier for larger numbers. My current anti-democratic position is informed by the amateur study of public choice theory and incentives. My formalist position is probably due to an engineering background and liking things to be clear.
When the fundamental question arises - what keeps a genuine decision maker, a judge or a bureaucrat in government (of a polity way beyond the dunbar number) honest, then the 3 strands of neo-reaction appear as three possible answers - Either the person believes in a higher power (religious traditionalism) or they feel that the people they are making a decision for are an extended family (ethnic nationalism) or they personally profit from it (Techno-commercialism). Or a mix of the three, which is more probable.
There are discussions in NRx about whether religious traditionalism should even be given a place here, since it is mostly traditional reaction, but that is deviating from the main point. Each of these strands holds something sacred - a theocracy holds the diety supreme, an ethno state holds the race supreme, a catallarchy holds profit supreme. And I think you really can't have a long term governing structure which doesn't hold something really sacred. There has to be a cultural hegemony within which diversities which do not threaten the cultural hegemony can flourish. Even Switzerland, the land of 3 nations democratically bound together has a national military draft which ties its men in brotherhood.
A part of me is still populist, I think, holding out for algorithmic governance to be perfected and not having to rely on human judgement which could be biased. But time and time again, human judgement based organizations have defeated, soundly, procedure based organizations. Apple is way more valuable than Toyota. The latter is considered the pinnacle of process based firms. The former was famously run till recently, by a mercurial dictator. So, human judgement has to be respected, which means clear sovereignty of the humans in question, which means something like the neo-cameralism of Moldbug, until the day of FAI.
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.
The paradigmatic cases of the evils of communism are Russia and China. Neither country was ever a democracy. The third paradigmatic monster of the 20th Century, Naziism, did arise from a democracy, but was not communism.
What is the X you are referring to, that democracy produces, and that produces evil, and what are the examples?
That's historically funny given that Marx argued that democracy can never produce communism.
Is that extrapolation justified?
I wouldn't say it's obvious, but here a graph of US government spending over time. It seems basically monotonic.
Monotonic as a percentage of GDP? Meaning the government will be 100% of GDP in finite time?
I wouldn't even go that far. I think it's reasonable to set aside the oscillations in the 1950-1980 period and call that bit basically monotonic, but WWI & WWII still wreck any underlying monotonicity (and arguably the Great Depression and Great Recession do too). Moreover, since 1975, the overall trend looks basically flat to me except for the Great Recession bump at the end.
Moving to my own country, I find an even stronger negative result: over the last 60 years the overall trend in public spending's share of GDP has been flat. (That, I must admit, surprised me a bit; I would've expected the government's share of spending to swell a bit over time because of aging populations and state provision of education & healthcare, which suffer from Baumol's cost disease. But apparently not.)
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.
Unless you want an edge over other LWers, would you mind elaborating which beliefs have benefited you and in what way?
C. S. Lewis describes the protagonist in The Man Who Was Thursday's relationship with the antag roughly like this. "He was coward enough to be frightened of force, but not coward enough to worship it." That's basically my relationship with the left.
I grew up in Massachusetts, so I became conservative initially through disgust at the excesses of the dems. I'm not proud of this, I'm sure if I grew up in RepublicTown USA I'd have started out a dem, basic smartypants contrianism. Like so many who fancied ourselves prodigies (I got a 1600 on my SAT, I read Calvin and Hobbes, Encyclopedia Brown, etc.)I regarded myself basically as a defender of a bastion of truth from a sea of fools.
Moving to college, however, I started seeing over the walls a different class of liberal, the Uruk Hai, if you will. I could never join them, but I deeply wanted to understand them. Why are the worst filled with passionate intensity? What was this movement that could only speak in irony? Why were the John Stewarts the real leaders, not the politicians? What's up with the left?
The reverse question was also demanding my attention. Why were my Right buddies so dreadful? Shouldn't these racists, these homophobes, these uneducated plebes be on the other side? Hard to defend truth alongside someone who wouldn't know it if it throttled him.
The task was impossible, I feared. The rank and file didn't understand themselves, and I wasn't confident that their existed a second tier. (As a conservative, I was super familiar with the "You are under the control of evil masters" meme, and it was rubbish when applied to us, so I figured it wouldn't be any better aimed at the left. Just Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin repurposed).
When President Bush took over I was ready for a golden age. Watching how the successfully elected conservative politicians fared against the Left was an eye opener. When Congressional Democrats, and then President Obama took over I thought that the Darkest Timeline had come, and once again the results were a revelation. I had been surprised twice, I took stock.
I watched Yes Minister around this time, and had my first realization. This was comedy, sure, but not really. This explained the Obama/Bush paradox. They, and their whole stable of fellow politicians, hadn't had the power to change anything, who did? Sir Humphrey. Not incarnate and hilarious, of course, but my experience in the corporate world had given me plenty of examples of the power of the rank and file to influence the bosses. I didn't quite articulate it, but I understood that the unelected G10+'s must be running the show.
I encountered Less Wrong at some point, and became familiar with the notion of dissolving a question. From there it was a brief hop to Moldbug's site (forget which post took me exactly, hang around long enough and you'll see mention of it on here). His open letter and introduction series took many of my own realizations and slotted them together into a cohesive framework, which made sense of the world.
Calvin and Hobbes is part of the official smarty pants syllabus? I associate it more with introverted ADHD. And love it.
There are lot of legitimate criticisms to single the left out for. But this is not one of them.
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]
And meta-contrarianism too.
Previously: the comments to "Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.]".
This is important, connotationally. For example, I have upvoted WalterL's explanation, because I value the clarity of thought and answering the question. But that doesn't mean I agree with him politically. In a different thread, if someone would give a similarly clear answer to question "why are you a social justice warrior?", I would upvote that, too. On the meta level, I appreciate this quality of political debate. On the object level, I may disagree. I guess this way of debating is unusual on most parts of internet, so it make create a wrong impression that many people support an idea, while they can merely appreciate the way the idea was explained.
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.
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.
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
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.
If this were as obvious to the rest of LW as it is to you, I think neoreaction would already have been dismissed by us.
Something like 95% of LWers self-classify as social liberals. Why would such a phenomenally non-socially-conservative group fixate on neoreaction unless it had some surface plausibility? (Prismattic observes that neoreaction is relatively new, and uses our jargon. I think the former fact doesn't actually explain much, because new a-priori-unappealing-to-LW ideas are surely being born all the time, yet we don't hear about them. That neoreaction uses bits of LW argot is probably more relevant, but it's hard for me to imagine it being the whole explanation. Would a serious creationist last long here just because they larded their comments with our jargon?)
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"].
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.
I believe the fact that neoreactionaries make frequent use of LW jargon is down to more than a founder effect.
There are multiple aspects to the LW memeplex that perform significant legwork in laying an epistemological foundation to mug intelligent social liberals with reality, which is close to the defining trait of neoreaction. To wit,
I keep hearing people say this. This is a rationalist site; why hasn't anyone gone out and generated some statistics?
I don't understand which half of that sentence you are objecting to, or what statistic in particular you would be looking for.
"crowding out"
Ok, but I didn't say this had already happened. I said it is something I would not want to see happen in future. Possibly you were just using my comment as a convenient anchor for a point you were already prepping for someone else, but it doesn't really make sense to address it to me.
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.
That horse has already left. Neoreaction is a thing now.
People have posted about creationism on LessWrong?
That's only an observation that could be made by someone who knows what neoreaction sounds like. On the other hand by having LW posts about neoreactionary ideas anybody reading LW comes into contact with them.
Would you prefer that I had not posted for that reason?
In general, t seems...backwards to restrain the things the community talks about out of concern for how others will view the community as a result. Sort of like declaring a police state to protect the nominal freedoms of a Constitution. Shouldn't we talk about whatever interests us?
That said, in this particular instance, the OP is very contentious, with a significant of votes and just barely over 50% positive. It is something that at least many members of this community don't want to hear about.
Yes, but not very strongly. Given that your post is overall it positive karma it's however alright. Karma votes show you whether a majority thinks your post has a place or hasn't. Votes decide what threads have a place in discussion and which haven't.
Online communities are not states with guaranteed freedom of speech.
It's not only about the perception of outsiders. It's also about what the people in this community think.
Yes. I was making a poor analogy. Isn't the value of lesswrong that we are able to explore ideas things that are not admissible elsewhere for lack of interest, lack of training, or direct aversion? (This is obviously contestable. I invite you to contest it.) If the fundamental value of the community is compromised out of concern for its reputation, then the reputation is of increasingly less value.
If you read the about page, that's not how LW statement of purpose is phrased.
To quote the About page
In this case "automatically" rejection would be a poor description even in the case where NRx is more discouraged.
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.
"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.
I don't understand, surely "Everyone has a Right to Exit" is the opposite to world government? And why is "We Want Exit" unsustainable?
Who guarantees the right?
A bunch of mostly male geeks in a boat doesn't look very sustainable to me.
Well, seasteading is certainly not particularly scalable. But while its mostly male geeks now, who knows what the demographics would look like when it gets going?
As for who guarantees the right, well, most countries allow their citizens to emigrate if they want.
Exactly. Which is why exit is actually about entry.
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.
Isn't Israel an ethnonationalist state with a strong implicit hierarchy?
Ethnonationalist democratic state with a weak implicit hierarchy, actually. Did I ever claim present-day Israel is morally optimal?
No, but I find the juxtaposition of Marxist universalist ideas being fervently communicated by those who enjoy the economic and social benefits of an ethnostate to be amusing.
Fair enough! And I would say we've got several social transformations to go through (ie: a general increase in the level of education and an improvement in methods of government) before we can actually abolish ethnostates.
(It should be stated: I'm a consequentialist, and an objective consequentialist. This means that when things accomplish net good (up to my understanding of "good"), I endorse them, even if they "smell bad".)
So yeah. For here and now with actually-existing people in actually-existing societies, ethnostates seem to be our best heuristic for making democratic, egalitarian societies actually work, instead of degrading into a civil war between tribal clusters (which, I think, is precisely what you're so afraid of). That doesn't make them terminally valuable, but it does leave them instrumentally useful.
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.
Yup.
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.
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.
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 )
Eliezer doesn't really push libertarianism.
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.)
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.
Their platform says, "Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders." They have some elaboration here.
Thank you, and now I know.
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.
Weird, I thought that link would lead to Straw Nihilist.
Good point. Straw Vulcan is rationality-signaling for STEM majors, and Straw Nihilist is the same for humanities majors.
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.
While I can't assign a reliable probability to the hypothesis "you're living in a simulation", I attach roughly zero decision-theoretic significance to the possibility. Meaning: since there's nothing I can do to affect this, I can safely go on with my life without giving it much thought beyond the usual philosophical ponderings I do whenever I'm in a contemplative mood.
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.
How would we recognize "simplified" calculations? If the "next level up" laws of physics differ from ours, their idea of what is cheap or expensive to compute might also differ.
Even if the upper physics was sufficiently similar to ours to share some characteristics (e.g. the need for large computations to be parallelized and the expense of parallel communication), and our laws of physics were simplified in a way to accommodate those characteristics (e.g. with a limit to the speed of information propagation), would we recognize that simplification as such, or would we just call it another law of physics and insist that we've never seen it simplified?
Um, how would you tell? Wouldn't glitches or simplified calculations appear as just additional laws of nature.
I think of glitches as being small breaks in the laws of nature.
I'm inclined to think that people (especially modern skeptical people) would find ways to paper over small glitches.
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.
My impression is that Land decided a long time ago to side with 'intelligence' in the abstract, in a sense that inevitably led him to antihumanism, and that he supports neoreaction insofar as he sees potential in its proposals to unchain institutional intelligences that he thinks are more worthy of support than anything human.
(I think he should look into the Italian Futurists, try to grok the aesthetic of them and the things around them and see what sorts of things they'd come up with. It's not that far from capitalism to war, for one. But I don't think it's too likely that he will; even if Moldbug hadn't reinforced the belief that nothing interesting ever came out of anything that had anything to do with the losing side of that particular war, the taboo there is still strong.)
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/
Those aren't the same person.
I'm well aware they aren't. Just missed the s there.
Is that Black Swan/Fooled by Randomness Taleb?
Yes. Also see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2392310
People have a lot of distorted opinions about him, so make sure to check the appendix recommended readings etc just to get an accurate idea of him.
Any chance of translating those from the original Moldbuggese?
None of the books in http://www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/ was written by Moldbug.
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.
What is a "neo-reactionary"?
Scott Alexander has a charitable summary on his blog and a rebuttal.
Moreright is probably the most comprehensive neoreactionary website,
This post descries itelf as a neoreactionary canon
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.
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?
Why couldn't post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
They could, and there's the are scenarios in the premise where they likely will, but neoreaction isn't just a program of political philosophy for post-democracy. There seems to be much rhetoric and general memetic clustering in NRX around the idea that progressivism will fail because it has outstretched itself trying to re-engineer human nature with cultural conditioning, and that social orders which comply more with fundamentally unchanging elements of human nature are a good political attack against progressivism. The reactionary commenters at SSC seem to like narratives about long-term human decline which tend to rely on nothing interesting happening with human reproduction in many generations from now on.
With technology that can re-engineer human nature, you could have brand new chances to go at the progressive wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-people-were-more-like-this stuff. Then you'd have to start thinking which bits of traditional values are actually good for a general population of agents, and which are just time-evolved kludges around previously unfixable human systematic suckiness. I see a divide opening up here between people who value the idea of a reactionary society of baseline humans in itself, and people who just go for whatever gets things done effectively. Though I guess NRX already has formed subcultural divides.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There's no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. "Whatever gets things done effectively" is presently defined as "whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans".
The first priority is the here and now, but people also like to talk about what they expect to see in the next 30 or 100 years. A part of what makes an ideological movement run is a vision of the future, and people seem quite capable of getting into arguments and schisms about the principles of those.
Why would they resemble the pre-democratic outcomes that advancedatheist says "wouldn't surprise me"? What should even draw "premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies" to anyone's attention, out of the vast and unknown possibilities of a transhuman estate that removes the reasons that those societies evolved in those ways?
Because some of those, like hierarchy, are game theoretic equilibria that are likely to emerge across a wide range of possible configurations, especially where there are great asymmetries between agents.
Are you saying that you think that a vast majority of the possible transhuman futures rest entirely on Enlightenment principles?
No. Are you saying that pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment principles are the only possibilities? Why should either of these be part of a transhuman future?
Exhaustively speaking, societal organizational principles in the abstract tend to be Enlightenment-oriented or not. So, yes, any given transhuman future will have principles of some kind, which will be inspired by the Enlightenment or not. Non-Enlightenment principles (used here to describe every possible set of societal principles besides those based around the Enlightenment) are a rather huge space of possibilities, which cover not only many societies which have already existed, but many millions which may have yet to come to pass. Many "pre-Enlightenment" situations were organic hierarchies, similar to the way nature itself has operated for literally billions of years. "Pre-Enlightenment" does not refer to a specific thing, but a huge space of configurations which do not closely adhere to Enlightenment principles.
Beware of non-apples
As long as it's clear that the term isn't doing any semantic heavy-lifting here, it's safe in this context. No flattering claims are being made about non-Enlightenment principles in general, just that they correspond to a vast space.
That makes sense, but now that I think about it I don’t find this claim particularly neoreactionary: Enlightenment memes induce a sort of agnosia that prevents the rational design of non-enlightenment social structures. Treating this agnosia will increase the amount of possible social structures we are able to consider and the chances that we will be able to design something better.
What I see proposed are specific forms of monarchy or corporate-like governmental structures. More exotic proposals like futarchy and liquid democracy are dismissed, at least by Moldbug. So pre-enlightenment (or maybe anti-enlightenment) does feel like a better label to my non-expert ears.
By "pre-Enlightenment" I understand the social arrangements in Europe of the centuries immediately preceding the Enlightenment, which neo-reactionaries see the Enlightenment as a catastrophic falling away from, and which they desire to return to. This is unambiguously what advancedatheist is talking about upthread, and what, for example, Moldbug unfavourably contrasts our present arrangements with. This is a very specific thing, not the huge space that you interchangeably referred to as "non-Enlightenment".
"Pre-Enlightenment" bears the same relationship to "non-Enlightenment" as kangaroos do to non-elephants.
Viewing reactionaries as wishing to return to a time in the linear past, which evolved organically based on local conditions, and which may not be appropriate to present technological conditions, is mistaken. The goal is not to simply revive a past arrangement but to apply certain traditional principles and spirit to a newer expression of organic principles that is suited to its context. So, when you say "go back to", it's not that simple. Which is why "pre-Enlightenment" seems like an oversimplifying label, to me.
In fact, you could call it post-Enlightenment, since it would be the emergence of structure from an Enlightenment society that may retain some Enlightenment principles while discarding others. Calling any system based on principles aside from Enlightenment ones "pre-Enlightenment" seems like assuming a kind of a priori obsolescence, in effect dismissing it before it's even considered.
In any case, "pre-Enlightenment" does not refer to any specific structure (like kangaroos), but a wide variety of arrangements. Therefore, I see it as more similar to "non-elephant" than "kangaroo".
...
The first quote makes it clear that you do mean something specific by "pre-Enlightenment". Not as specific as, say, "ancien régime France", but nevertheless defined as the positive possession of "certain traditional principles".
I am doing the opposite of that, as indeed your first paragraph interpreted me as doing. It appeared to me that you were using "pre-Enlightenment" and "non-Enlightenment" interchangeably, both referring to whatever is not the Enlightenment. And at the end you do claim that "pre-Enlightenment" is a non-elephant, not a kangaroo. If you like, I can analogize it to the class of marsupials, but it still isn't a non-elephant.
You, and Moldbug, and advancedatheist, and every other neoreactionary are putting forward specific views of how society should be structured, specific views which is not merely "something other than the present arrangements". There may be a range of views in the nrsphere, but their doctrines are characterised by what they want, not by what they hate. They do a lot of the hating, to be sure, but they have a positive base of reasons for that.
For example, monarchy and libertarian anarchy are incompatible with each other, and neither of them are Enlightenment structures (as "Enlightenment" is used by neoreactionaries). Are either or both of them compatible with or implied by neoreactionary principles? My reading of neoreactionaries suggests to me that monarchy is, and libertarian anarchy is not.
... 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.
Older readers of LessWrong will know that it doesn't take that long.
In my 40's I was damn near grabbing people and shaking them and saying "Things change!"
After a while, I got bored with saying that, and also came to the conclusion that if you haven't lived through things that you thought were basic going away, you don't know what it's like.
Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
It's possible that feminists and MRAs will wake up to find a matriarchal future.
Or gender (if any) will come to mean something very different from what we're used to. Once humanity starts bioengineering itself, the range of possibility opens up tremendously.
My bet is that if cryonics works, the future will divide into home era cohorts, and the vast majority of people from earlier times may be living in reasonable comfort but will have very little power. A few highly adaptable people may be able to get up to speed to join the current culture.
You mean there are people who don't just shape-shift their apparent sex depending on the precise situational combination of their current mood and what they want to signal? Goddamn you lot are weirdos ;-).
Although the conservation-of-mass issue gets awkward: you can either be a scrawny male but a healthy-looking female or a healthy-looking male and a rather overweight female, or be kinda awkwardly lithe in either form. Or you can go to the bathroom and store the extra unwanted mass when female, but really, there's only so much biological nanotechnology can do against basic physics.
(EDIT: Yes, I did make this up on the bus one day when thinking of things future people might consider good ideas that we'd consider unutterably bizarre, and was indeed waiting for an opportunity to post it ;-).)
Um, if you have the ability to arbitrary rearrange your cells, they're likely more loosely attached to each other than those in animals. In any case you should be able to process raw environmental material to grow.
I have thought about possible future societies that aren't based on biological reproduction. Most of the examples in scifi fall apart after a little MoR-style pocking (their main flaw is keeping certain aspects of the setting the same as ours even if those aspects no longer make sense). The two that seem stable are the following:
1) Sentients become pure infomorphs (or ems as Hanson calls them). This abolishes the distinction between memetic and genetic inheritance. Thus "sex" in the sense of recombining "genetic" material is separate from reproduction and resembles having conversations. Reproduction consists of creating a copy of your mind/source code. This resembles the life cycle of bacteria, who exchange information via conjugation but reproduce via binary fission.
2) Sentients are produced in centralized factories, e.g., most children are grown in artificial wombs, or robots produced in more conventional factories. This effectively makes them eusocial with all that implies about their sense of individuality, or rather lack thereof.
The other possibility is old-fashioned sexual reproduction. I have no idea which of those possibilities will come to dominate.
One possibility is that body composition becomes less important because it's so easily changed. At that tech level, it probably doesn't have any health implications.
Height might be less significant.
Instead of more mass to be a larger male, how about less density?
Height and density. I'm a moron. brb, retuning bodily nanomachines.
What do I have to do to be highly adaptable enough to join the culture that is still experiencing growth? What could I be doing now in order to prepare for that?
Tentatively-- try living in a bunch of different cultures.
Seconded.
That sounds like premature optimization to me.
Unquestionably, but it's still fun to ask.
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.
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.
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).
Also democracy has existed before and democracies tend to have short half-lives.
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.
And this is worse than death?
They should, yes. They're correct, or at least, they're better approximations than we can otherwise create right now.
Hmm. You have a point. People often think that an overturning the current order is basically inconceivable. History suggests otherwise. However, we live in a technological society unlike any that has ever existed on earth before, and remains to be seen how predicative historical trends are on a post-industrial revolution post-computer revolution world. All we can safely say is that all bets are off.
However, I think we can assume that at least some of the technology will stick around (people still use computers, even if we run out of oil). The question is, How much of our social change is the direct result of the technological change.
Does feminism exist because of birth control? How likely is birth control to disappear? Is patriarchy predicated on physical strength? Does that matter in an economy that's not dominated by agriculture?