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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:
Does being aligned much closer to neoRx count? If so, I confess that my long journey (decades) has gone from its most recent position of being a mindless drone of the "establishment" right wing, steeped early in RC and finshed off in episcopal trimmings. Then after some hayek, regernery(?) And such I followed up with moldbug and the like I had the same epiphany Charlie Brown did on the Christmas special at Dr. Lucy's kiosk:
THAT'S IT !!!!!
It seemed to all make a lot of sense. Unfortunately it all seems so unattainable. Meh.
I was always intrigued in the racial policy of NRx, how do NRxaries define race for their purposes, and how that factors in to their overall ideology? Also appreciated if any NRxaries can recommend me some good reading on the above topic to update my priors?
If you care about culture, (traditional) values and intact families, then democracy is empirically very bad (far from being "the worst form of government, except for all the others" it would place among the very worst). The question is then how you come to care about these things. For me it proceeded negatively: from a critical reading of political philosophy, I came to believe that the foundations of liberalism are incoherent; that what liberalism sees as constraints on individual freedom are nothing of the sort. That many of the norms, values and practices that make up a traditional society are non-voluntary - in the sense that it doesn't make sense to speak of people assenting or not assenting to them - and therefore cannot be seen as constraints on human freedom at all; we're born into them, they form part of our identity and they provide the context (even possibility) of our choices.
So I came to believe that the Enlightenment was the result of this kind of philosophical error and that it is no different from the kinds of philosophical error that bring people to, say, question whether an objective reality exists. The heady feeling one gets from an argument that leads to an absurd conclusion, in this case, led to the false belief that traditional society consisted of arbitrary constraints on human freedom and, eventually, to pointless reforms and revolutions. Consider this: If somebody proposes a model of the physical world and it's incorrect, they have to change the model. But if somebody proposes a model of society and it's incorrect, they can insist on reorganising society to fit the model. This is essentially what has been happening for the last several hundred years. If I said this is what happened with communism - that Marx developed a flawed model and Lenin tried to fit society to that flawed model - most people would probably accept that. Is it so hard to believe the same kind of process led to our own political order and continues to inform it?
On reflection, the contemporary Western view of politics, which I once accepted without question, appears to be utterly absurd. It has no choice but to see the history of humanity as one of oppression and this oppression is becoming increasingly bizarre. It was, perhaps, easy to believe that religion was inherently oppressive, at least given an overly literal interpretation of religion, or to believe that monarchy was oppressive, but now one must believe that the family was oppressive, that gender roles were oppressive, that sexual morality was oppressive, that even having a gender was oppressive, that monogamy was oppressive, etc. The list is ever expanding, the revisionist history gets more absurd by the day. Moreover, most people miss the fact that we're talking about traditional society being inherently oppressive. There were, of course, bad monarchs, bad religious leaders, bad family circumstances, etc, but the liberal claim is that it was all bad, all the time (although it is apparently unnecessary that anyone noticed, since everyone was also ignorant). This is quite an extraordinary claim.
In my view, none of these things were oppressive. You're born into a society, it has its pre-existing norms, values, roles and practices. You're born into a set of pre-existing relationships and roles. These are not constraints, they're part of your identity, they're part of the enabling context in which you have and make choices. This includes things like how leaders are nominated, the roles of men and women, children and parents, etc. That you can imagine different ways of doing things does not imply that you are being deprived of a choice. Moreover, they are in many respects immutable. They continue to exist whether we understand them or misunderstand them and try to rebel against them. Thus, there is just no such thing as a liberal society. What we have instead is a traditional society where there are, for example, arbitrary constraints on leaders (constitutional "checks and balances", elections, etc) that do little more than to ensure that we have incompetent leaders. We have family law and a welfare system that is bad for families. We encourage men to be bad fathers and husbands and women to be bad mothers and wives. We encourage children to rebel against their parents. So what we're doing, in fact, is not 'reform' but just being bad in our roles as parents, spouses, leaders, lawmakers, etc, because we have a bad model of how society works that lead us to mistake incompetence, negligence and immorality for freedom.
This is all fine, but let's move one level higher. What is the reason that almost everybody who reasoned like this was religious? Why does it seem like this kind of thinking is fairly impossible to defend without some reference to religion e.g. https://bonald.wordpress.com/the-conservative-vision-of-authority/ ?
(I am assuming we all agree here that ideas that cannot be defended on a secular ground are not worth defending)
Basically it sounds a lot like the conflict between human volition vs. actual happiness or good lives. A lot of modern liberalism reduces to "if you get what you personally want, you will be happy / OK". So it is all about moving people from inborn roles to roles they want and choose. And a lot of religious thought is all about trying to convince people to reduce or give up their self-centered volition, desires, viewpoints, whatevers, basically to convince them to find happiness through other means than following their own wills.
I am aware of this because I practiced a lot of Buddhism which uniquely focuses on it, on how the ego, the will, volition, vanity, is the source of suffering itself. Much of Christianity sounds like a half-assed version of a Buddhist ego reduction therapy - when people get down on their knees and pray "your will be done" it essentially means "NOT my will be done, I will train by brain to accept that the world does not revolve around me". The core idea in Buddhism, Christianity etc. is that there is true happiness to be found in surrendering your will.
THIS is the psychological basis from which we can understand the difference between traditional and modern societies. This is why reactionaries are religious, mostly.
The question is, just why cannot we justify this non-egocentric psychology on a scientific basis? Why do we need religion for this? Why cannot we figure it out naturalistically?
And if we cannot figure it out naturalistically, scientifically, isn't it likely this is at some level wrong?
......even by the individuals affected? If they tell y8u that they hate being forced into a particular role, you're going to tell them that their feelings don't matter, because you can prove logically that it is non voluntary, and that you can't rebel against your identity?
It's worth noting both that the oppressed were often denied a voice, in the sense of leaving a written record, as part of their oppression....and that there is plenty of evidence of dissent , in the form of popular revolt.
It's also worth noting the difference between far left and classically liberal versions of this argument. (A perennial problem with Moldbug is the way he conflates progressivism qua the leftmost 10% of the spectrum with progressivism qua the leftmost 90%). The classical liberal does not regard traditional societies as morally wrong so much as instrumentally wrong, unsuited to economic and technological progress. Where you have a traditional, hierarchical society, the rulers of that society are under a set of incentives to defend their relative position, which is to say they are not incentivised to promote innovation. On the contrary, even technological developments can sunset them, as the English aristocracy was disrupted by the Industrial revolution.
Liberal democracies, by contrast, are so good at reaping the benefits of progress that, they are able attract queues of would be immigrants from more traditional societies.
Suppose someone hates being short. Being short is mostly involuntary; the primary thing that is voluntary is how they react to being short. Historically, philosophical advice has been of the variety "deal with it; it's better to be short and untroubled than short and troubled." Being short and identifying as being tall, insisting on being tall, or resenting not being tall, are all opposed to reality.
The best liberal response, I think, is to note that "being short" has both a physical reality (how long your body is) and a social reality (how others react to the length of your body), and that the social reality is mutable. In a modern, industralized society, the economic use of height is very narrow, and we could adjust the social reality to match the current physical reality.
The worst liberal response, I think, is to claim that "being short" is just a social reality, that the social reality is completely mutable, and that short people have been oppressed by tall people, and we need to work against that oppression.
I am under the impression that, proportional to the relevant populations, there are more American expats in Singapore than Singaporean expats in America. (There might actually be more in absolute numbers, but I'm having difficulty getting that number.)
The compromise approach, the best liberal morality, is a nice theoretical solution, but that him does it work in practice? In practice, people have a right, or they don't.
The important point would be whether they are there for so many years, or whether they have torn up their passports.
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".
You are not being entirely fair to Lenin, he wrote a fair amount. They call it "Marxism/Leninism" for a reason. Lenin was a lot of things, but he was not a stupid man.
You forget the Marxist idea of morality where there's a moral imperative to do things that make history progress. Starting an inevitable revolution is such a thing.
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?"
IMHO the issue is that this kind of individualism in Western society, for wealthy white males, was created really long ago. Roughly late 18th century. So anyone without an explicit interest in history, esp. from the angle of questioning the whole modern epoch, will see this individualism already as an old, established, traditional stuff, i.e. pretty much conservative stuff. In the West, pretty much every step of progressivism, leftism or liberalism since that was largely about expanding it to other people, poor white males, non whites, women etc.
So you have the problem here that once one group of individuals got it, it is hard to defend why others should not. The issue is with having the first group have it, but that is a really old story, and so old that it looks downright conservative.
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?
C'mon, next time you spot a "recycling" truck, just follow it for a while and see where it's going. Sorry to disappoint you, but you might as well be asking for a "cite" that Santa's not real.
(And of course, I'm not talking about special cases. Everyone "recycles" their china and cutlery after use - but that's because the stuff is actually valuable!)
What country are you talking about? All of the major ones that recycle? If so, here is your chance to backtrack to a more reasonable position.
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.
I am not white. If you do not believe race realism then you are equivalent to creationist. There is no magic in evolution.
There is a legitimate fear that Enlightenment-progressive-libertarian-feminist-liberal-universalism is self-undermining in the face of people who would build tribalist-reactionary-patriarchal-tyranny in its midst.
That conflict is not being worked out in the forums of the Internet, though. It is being worked out in actual real-world polities faced with that specific problem. Distant academic comment on it offers fog and ideological confusion, not clarity. Theorists are better off learning about the actual facts on the ground, in places where the conflict between Enlightenment and Reaction is waged with ballots and with bullets, than in spinning castles-in-the-air of theory attempting to link this struggle to everything from DNA to video games.
"Mercy, mercy! We can talk about it, can't we?" — Last words of Theo van Gogh
"I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer." — the words of Mohammed Bouyeri, van Gogh's murderer, spoken to van Gogh's mother
Nationalist Reactionary Rightie has that fear because they just don't like immigrants coming in and messing things up. Enlightenment Rightie has that fear and sees themselves as the dogs that protect Enlightenment Leftie sheep from the evil wolves. NRx-rightie disagrees with both of them, and thinks there is no way anyone is gonna ever topple the Lovecraftian horror that is Enlightenment Leftie, and we're all doomed to experience constant violent revolutions and ever more ridiculous post-modernist nonsense if we don't do something. (I'm still not clear on what exactly Doom looks like, but I'm pretty sure civilization collapses at some point and we start over)
Primitive Rx Leftie definitely thinks that there's absolutely no way the Muslims can realistically take over the government by force, and the only biggest threat they pose to Enlightenment society is petty violence and the risk of inflaming the nationalist sentiment, who can take over the government, without force. Crush the shitlords before they get out of hand so we can get back to the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment Leftie says that when people are happy and healthy in life, they don't do bad stuff or turn to extremism in large numbers. We just need to stick to our values of openness and honesty. Trust the Cathedral and technological advance to help people along the path of moral progress, and don't crush anyone. Free speech and tolerance for all, Left, Right, and even those extremest terrorist types.
NRx Leftie agrees mostly with Rx lefty, partly with Enlightenment Righty, and thinks Enlightenment Leftie is naive, but it's not going to be a problem because if things go as planned NRx Leftie has become dictator so now the schools are extremely well funded machines teaching the fundamentals of critical thinking, and they've also had a team of social scientists actively research the most effective religious deconversion techniques and implement them. Hopefully this involves an open and honest dialogue involving asking priests and imams certain pointed questions in front of small children, but they're open to underhand methods like social pressure rhetoric or ridicule if that turns out to work better. Alternatively, it might be more effective to let them keep the religion in an abstract sense (that will unfortunately keep them in the underclass, but whatever,the smarties will figure it out) but research ways to make them shed most of the objectionable values it carries.
The research itself is ideally designed to be an "open secret" - the work is publicly available in the literature and the people who matter get explicit explanations, but otherwise phrased obtusely such that populations who would object to it would find it inoffensive or incomprehensible if they saw it, similar to the treaties given to Native Americans... or phrased such that those who successfully understand end up agreeing, or just a plainly published technique effective regardless of whether one is savvy to it. Or it can be a secret - secrets are allowed, but Enlightenment Leftie things they are dangerous so NRx Leftie tries to avoid them where possible.
Yesterdays Muslims quickly become today's progressive libertarian feminist universalists. A few of them go on rampages and blow up buildings, and the damage is sad but otherwise no one gets angry or cares any more than we'd care if a tribally-neutral sociopath did it. There's no "Muslims are bad" vs. "Let's tolerate them" argument - everyone within the society agrees that religion is just ridiculous fairly quickly and it's kind of laughable if you follow one but it's a cognitive bias most normal humans are prey too, and people divert their attention to outside threats rather than to immigrants. Not that their are that many outside threats, because NRx-Lefties government had no qualms about imperialism and goes ahead and conquers the savages and converts them as described above whenever it's militarily viable and economically expedient, and because NRx-leftie isn't as mean as Leopold it won't take long before the conquered people consider themselves better off and don't even want independence..as far as they're concerned, they've kept their language and cultural knowledge intact, gained technology, are materially better off, and have shed the superstitious beliefs of their grandparents despite still remembering and preserving the beliefs - NRx leftie still "multicultural" in a superficial sense, but is unabashedly particularist when it comes to beliefs about morality and reality. So "outside threats" are people with actual military power...3rd world nations with the potential to become primitive terrorists were either left totally unmolested so that no enmity could develop, or conquered in the least socially disruptive possible way with the help of anthropologists and stuff, educated, and made materially better off than they were before ASAP and then traded with or exploited for resources in the nicest possible way the anthropologists can think of. None of that half-half economic-pressure / puppet ruler / CIA manipulation routine that we do now when our economic interests call for imperialism but our society won't let us.
Enlightenment Leftie is still pretty sure NRx Leftie's government is going to end up evil, corrupt from its original values, ineffective, or collapsing on itself, just like every other attempt to do this sort of thing. But it's a lot like the disagreement between left-socialists and left-libertarian economists - a productive intra-tribal disagreement where "winning" means achieving the common goal, not ending the argument with points for your side. The final consensus isn't necessarily world domination, but it might justify a little bit more elitism and political bias, less tolerance in the University, the Internet, and other places currently left-dominated. It might mean the left lets up on all the self-flagellation and guilty naval gazing whenever power is exerted... or not. I mean, I consider myself pretty tolerant of the Right by "average Leftie" standards and I don't think I'd actually support the Left to move away from my viewpoint in that respect more than it already is.
(Or at least, that's what it would look like if there was a sizable contingent on the left who looked at NRx and thought, "hmm, okay, there are some truths here, I can work with this")
I don't mean this as critisism, but 'NRx Left' sounds like an excellent opportunity for meta-meta-meta-contrarianism.
what have i done
What, like the British Empire? How did that work out?
Pretty well until the British lost faith in their own culture.
Assuming for a moment that's what actually happened, when in history do you locate that event?
That's actually precisely Enlightenment Leftie's qualm.
NRx Leftie says it's different this time, because the British Empire were fairly savage themselves, because they actually didn't value the people who they considered savages as human beings. NRx Leftie said that the British Empire actually worked out fairly well, by some standards. and the bad bits were because the Brits themselves had a savage culture.
Enlightenment Leftie calls bullshit why should it be different this time, and that's pretty much why I don't really buy NRx.
(My inner Conservative-Churchill thinks the British empire was actually a net good and my inner NRx-Right adds that the independence movements triggered by liberalism are what really fucked us over.)
The British Empire may have been materially a net good, but (as Benedict Anderson points out) it was doomed the day it embraced Macaulay's plan of cultural exterminationism through education.
"Independence movements triggered by liberalism" is a better way to put it than "independence movements", but it's not as accurate as "independence movements triggered by the combination of something involving the creation of an elite class educated in European things, often actually in Europe (or America), and later the Cold War scramble for puppet states between the two superpowers, hence their agreement on the issue of decolonization and probably Washington's shafting of Britain in Suez." Where do you think Pol Pot got his Marxism from? Certainly not Cambodia, and not even the USSR (the Khmer Rouge was a Western ally for a while) -- he got it in Paris, the center of the relevant empire.
(To take the Benedict Anderson hypothesis further, onto very speculative and shaky ground: could it be that decolonization arose out of the same impulse as Italy's misadventures in colonialism? In Italy's time, any serious nation had an empire; after WW2, any serious nation had its own state, except 'nation-states' couldn't exist because of pre-existing attachment to administrative boundaries among the elite, those boundaries having shaped their life far more in practical terms than native culture or ethnic identification. Also legibility reasons that Anderson doesn't mention AFAIK: precisely named and delineated boundaries that aren't accurate will be preferred over accurate boundaries that have yet to be drawn, because 1) the former is much more practically knowable and able to be acted upon by an organization than the latter, 2) the former are available and the latter aren't. Compare the use of states in America.)
I don't see the current (=last one-two decades) geopolitics as fitting this narrative. I think they fit much better the narrative of a late-stage empire falling into decadence and so unable to enforce Pax Americana well any more.
The idea of bringing civilization, that is "Enlightenment-progressive-libertarian-feminist-liberal-universalism", into the midst of savages, that is "tribalist-reactionary-patriarchal-tyranny", on M-1A Abrams main battle tanks is called neoconservatism, funnily enough, and it didn't fare too well in reality.
Despite being American myself, I don't see the frontier between the Enlightenment and reaction as being an American military front.
The situation in Europe — including the resurgence of fascism in Greece, the emergence of Putin-Stalinism, and the various national conflicts over Muslim immigration and the status of immigrant communities with violent anti-woman, anti-dissident, or anti-free-speech practices — looks much more like a "clash of civilizations" to me than the current generation of American overseas adventurism does.
What is delivered by tank is not civilization; it is resource extraction.
You linked that to "legitimate fear that Enlightenment-... is self-undermining" (emphasis mine).
The Greek fascism is a reaction to the excesses and failure of a semi-socialist crony-capitalist corrupt state. Putin is partly a reaction to the same and partly just business-as-usual for Russia. The conflicts in e.g. France, etc. over Muslim immigrants are pretty clearly tribal conflicts on the basis of "these weird people don't even look like us, have strange customs, and, most galling of all, are unwilling to recognize their cultural inferiority".
So I am not sure where this Enlightenment meme complex (which you clearly think is a positive thing, not leading to failures of corrupt states) is undermining itself.
In all fairness, what neo-cons brought to "tribalist-reactionary-tyrannies" was nothing more than a cargo-cult imitation of democracy. No effort at all was made to introduce even the classical-liberal institutions that modern Western polities are fundamentally based on, let alone anything close to libertarianism or Enlightenment values.
That's because a cargo-cult imitation is all that you deliver on an M-1A tank.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
You are actually wrong on the timeline, the genderwars and the Social Justice movement, came here and produced these symptoms first.
One can plausibly credit the formation of Neoreaction as a direct result of a feeling of persecution and tightening of the acceptable domain of rational investigation on this site, it caused many to leave and seed a whole new blogosphere where once there was just Moldbug.
I suppose it could be so. It doesn't matter really, since the end result is the same. Still, I doubt it because Lesswrong is overwhelmingly left wing (and continues to be according to the polls - the right wing and NRx voices belong to just a few very prolific accounts.) And pretty much all the founding members of Lesswrong and, going back further, transhumanism in general, were of a certain sort which I hesitate to call "left" or "liberal" but... - socialists, libertarians, anarchists, all those were represented, and certainly many early users were hostile to social justice's extremeties, which is to be expected among smart people who are exposed to leftie stupidity much more often than other kinds of stupidity... but those were differences in implementation. We all essentially agreed on the core principles of egalitarianism and not hurting people, and agreed that prejudice against race and gender expression is bad (which was an entirely separate topic from whether they're equal in aptitude), and that conservatives, nationalists, and those sort of people were fundamentally wrongheaded in some way. It wasn't controversial, just taken for granted that anyone who had penetrated this far into the dialogue believed that these things to be true.... in the same sense that we continue to take for granted that no one here believes in a literal theist God. (And right now, I know many former users have retreated into other more obscure spin off forums, and everything I said here pretty much remains true in those forums and blogs.)
But I'm less interested in who broke the walled garden / started eternal september / whatever you want to call it (after all, I'm not mad that they came here, I got to learn about an interesting philosophy) and more interested in the meta-level principle: per my understanding of Neoreactionary philosophy, when one finds oneself in the powerful majority, one aught to just go ahead and exert that power and not worry about the underdog (which I still don't agree with but I'm not sure why). And, homogeneity is often more valuable than diversity in many cases, that's something I've actually kind of accepted.
I have actually strongly argued for the benefits of ideological diversity in a rationalist site several times.
I mean, I still value diversity by default. Valuing homogeneity is something I've kind of come around to slowly and suspiciously (whereas before I just assumed it was bad by default.)
The early OB/LW community didn't have a leftwing vibe, it had a strong Libertarian vibe. Also at the end of the day leftie radicals like to point out that liberal =/= leftist.
Yudkowsky has written articles for Cato, a site considered unbearably right wing libertarian by some.
On questions like Feminism there were quite protracted comment wars long before Neoreaction, for a while early in its history there were more people sympathetic to PUA than Feminism. Even now the consensus seems to have settled on feminist ok-ed PUA not being bad, which is not the mainstream consensus. See gentle silent rape for an early example of rational dating advice for a late example.
I recommend you also check out my early commenting history. I interacted with many core, very right wing, rationalist like Vladimir_M and so on who left later in the history of the site.
Those examples of departing from left-canon (libertarian, "feminism-isn't-perfect", and "pua is often questionable in practice but not fundamentally bad from first principles") are okay by me. I depart from the left-canon on those points myself and find the leftie moral outrage tactics on some of those fronts pretty annoying. All those things are still fundamentally egalitarian in values, just different in implementation. The homogeneity I was referring to was in egalitarianism and a certain type of emotional stance, a certain agreement concerning which first principles are valid and which goals are worthy, despite diversity in implementation.
(But, as ChristainKI pointed out, Moldbug himself was a commentator, and that predates me, so it's true that the seed has always been there.)
That's not exactly right. Moldbug did comment on OvercomingBias in the days before there was LW. This community came into contact with neoreactionary thought before LW existed. Michael Anissimov who funded MoreRight was MIRI's media director.
Huh. Oh right. I knew about the Moldbug thing, and I still said that.
I'm wrong. Mind changed. Good catch.
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.
Yup. Foretold many times, actually. We even talked about Walled Gardens and such. I'd place a fairly high probability that many of the founding members would view LW as a lot less interesting now - not because of Reaction, but because of the net total politics.
LW doesn't downvote to indicate disagreement. They upvote whenever an argument is phrased in an interesting way even if they disagree entirely. NRx is interesting. In short, LW are the "open minded progressives" to NRx's Open Letter.
All of which would have been fine, actually, if it didn't increase the total amount of time in useless arguments. The main thing of value that was lost was Total Amount of Homogeneity (and well, I suppose the acquisition of a bunch of people who really like talking about politics doesn't help).
I suppose liking to talk about politics is the core of the problem here. Merely giving a name to a political faction is a package fallacy already.
For example, why are we debating "neoreaction", instead of tabooing the world, replacing the symbol with a set of specific statements, and debating each statement separately? By debating "neoreaction" we have already failed as rationalists, and what we do then is just digging the hole deeper.
Or you could call it a win in diversity.
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?
Wait, what is your tribe?
Oh, that was directed at nydwracu, I misread the comment nesting loops.
The plurality of American blood comes from Germany, and the descendents of that immigrant wave tend to be Evangelicals, Lutherans, Catholics...I don't know whether this bloodline is actually more likely to follow Guns and God style conservatism, but that seems to be the notion here.
I think if I was going to label nydwracu's comment in one word I'd call it Völkisch.
Who counts as 'Evangelical'? Colin Woodard's 'Midlands' nation is generally plurality-Methodist. I lived out in Western Maryland for a while, where you can see some Constitution Party signs when election years roll around, and they're Methodists out there, not Southern Baptists.
I'm not sure how trustworthy the census ethnicity data is, since I don't think the Anglos were genocided; I'd trust Woodard before the census data, with the caveat that everything out past Michigan (and possibly including Michigan) had enough non-Anglo Germanic immigrants that it's not really Yankeedom anymore. (Woodard's map is in general not a good guide to current cultural distinctions, but it's not trying to be. The Tidewater region doesn't really exist anymore; in its place, there's the Eastern Corridor, which runs up from northern Virginia (maybe even Richmond) through DC, Baltimore, and Philadelpha to NYC and Boston. Some people call this general region the Mid-Atlantic, but that obscures the difference between the DC/Baltimore area and everywhere else in Maryland.)
And in case I wasn't clear, I do think the "NRx-lefty" attitude is common among progressives.
I don't know who counts as what - it's pretty confusing, and that's why I just went with Völkisch, since I'm guessing your defining criteria is not really religion or genetics but some mix of culture, ideology, and physical appearance and you know it when you see it and it's loosely German-American.
The thing is, I don't think believe members of the populations you outline actually consider themselves as a tribe, at least not in the ethno-nationalist light that you're using (If they did, there would exist a simple word to describe them). Would you agree that their is a certain artificiality inherent in constructing an ethno-national identity around this group?
It's totally artificial and metapolitically hopeless, just like everything else available to white people in this country, unless they're Episcopalian or something. And the Episcopalians have bigger problems.
As far as I can tell, there is no possible way to solve the problems of identity in this country. Most of the white population is deeply psychologically damaged in a way that is rarely even noticed, and there's nothing anyone can do about it other than maybe join a frat.
Wouldn't go that far. I mean, they could just look at what they actually are, and construct an identity around that. What they actually are has little to do with Germanic heritage, and race is only one of many possible ways to create a tribal affiliation anyhow. I'm pretty culturally removed from most members of both racial group in my family tree, but I don't feel psychologically adrift or anything. (Granted, I might just not know what I'm missing - I do feel pretty good when I meet people who are similar to me in real life.)
Obviously, i's hard for ethno-nationalists, since they are basically contrarians in this society and can only reach "tribe" level numbers via the internet. But it's not hard for most white people. White Americans are a lot more culturally homogeneous than say, Hindus. (Or any large non-Western grouping. Technology homogenizes.)
What are we actually, then, that we can construct an identity out of?
The feeling of missing something only kicks in, I suspect, after the thing that is missed is experienced. A good example is dance: it doesn't really exist in our society outside subcultures, but I thought that didn't matter until I took up contra. (Which I really ought to get back into now that I'm in NYC -- do they even have it up here? It's been something like five years, too...)
Similarly, I first noticed the importance of thedish identity, ritual, and traditions when I went to a very interesting summer camp that had a strong local identity backed up by its own rituals and traditions. Most of what I understand about these things now comes from there.
It had several sites; I attended four. One site was shut down for lack of attendance shortly after the rituals and traditions failed to be passed down, and the strongest site was the one with the strongest traditions. I talked to some other people who, like me, jumped ship from a site with weakening traditions to the site with the strongest traditions, and I got the very strong impression that it was causal: weakened traditions made the site worse at the de facto functions it performed for its attendees.
(One unique sociological factor that existed at the site with the strongest traditions was a semiformal aristocracy dedicated to preserving and teaching the traditions.)
Then again, from what I've heard of Alain de Benoist, he only understands what he writes about on an intellectual level.
In my mind, the tribe aught to be constructed out of people who 1) care about you, which is accomplished through shared experience 2) who understand you - that is, they are similar enough that when you say something, they hear what you meant. There's no vast gulf of un-shared ideas and thoughts and notions that separates you, and inferential distance is short.
I definitely see the importance of having one, but in my experience race is a pretty poor proxy for what I talk about above. Shared culture is better, shared experience is best, and optimally those co-occur. (Genetic) family is a decent method, since you're likely to match in personality as well as culture, but even that is a proxy.
I suspect you are somewhat overestimating the degree to which people in other racial groups identify with each other. Two random Indians in India don't care about each other more than two random whites in America. That's because the "white" category (or the "Indian" category) is too large for tribal affiliations to build up. Granted, they'll understand each other better than they will, say, a Japanese person, but baseline friendliness levels are pretty much set at "stranger". Minority cultures tend to have a different situation, since there is a very limited number of people who belong to their group, so it becomes an easy schelling point for a community to cluster.
Essentially, your tribe should be a group of <200 people, in close proximity, who share a large number of things in common with you in terms of psychology and knowledge. To the extent that people within Western culture are "damaged" by modern life creating a situation where very few people consistently come into contact with more than 1-3 other people (the same people each time), I agree, but I don't see a racial identity as a workable solution at all. Humans really don't form tribes that large in nature, although you can get sort of a hollow illusion of identification by aligning yourself with some sort of abstract concept.
So my answer to "what are we" is basically, [insert church here] [insert small rural home-town here] [insert college here][insert secret-club here], or whatever it is that your social hub is primarily based around. Ideally you can assume people in those groups share a certain understanding with you... and if you don't have that, it's probably because modern life has forced you to trade off that stuff in exchange for mobility, and you should try to find ways to acquire it.
Would you care to expand on that?
See here.
Our civilization contains an absence of a nigh-universal trait that has historically proven itself to be compatible with civilization (and perhaps even beneficial to civilization; certainly the Roman emperors thought it was); that's at least a sign that something else is going on. There are obvious historical reasons for this that don't involve any abstract, instrumental-rationality-seeking processes: the quest to create a totalizing Christianity purified of any 'pagan' influences. (How many of our current rites are German or Irish in origin? Christmas is mostly German -- trees, stockings, etc. -- and... hm, apparently jack-o'-lanterns may actually be English.)
The Pledge of Allegiance was a Progressive Era reform; I wonder if this was part of a general program to try to introduce a civil religion similar to Roman emperor-worship. Mount Rushmore was carved at around this same time, and its main supporter was Peter Norbeck, a Progressive. (And what of the folk musicians?) But I don't think there's very much to work with there; the Roman emperor-cult failed in the end.
Anyway... I don't want to phrase it in the Alain de Botton-style language of pure instrumental rationality; while perhaps the best way to communicate the general points (especially around here), it's likely to backfire. Doing something for the conscious purpose of acquiring whatever instrumental gains are believed to follow from it may undermine the instrumental value of the thing. So perhaps it will be impossible for me to change anyone's mind on this without employing the Mencius-style strategy of reasoning by bringing up shared intuitions/experiences, and that requires a degree of targeting that is difficult to pull off on the internet.
But consider subcultures: why do people join them? What is it about raves, or Dan Deacon's concerts (I've never been to one, but I've heard about them, and read about what he's trying to do with them), or any of that -- and what is it about subcultural identity itself? There may be some degree of psychological sortation going on (though even this would result in a closer approximation to the ancestral environment, where, due to a deeply shared context -- there was an excellent SSC comment on cultural context a few days ago, but I can't find it -- and genetic similarity, most people would probably be more psychologically similar to most people they encounter than is the case today), but it's also about having a sense of identity, which very few things but subcultures and frats can provide.
Frats are an even better example. Most people who join a frat identify strongly with it and see it as a beneficial thing in their lives. Why? (Note that this is despite the hazing process -- i.e. the initiation ritual -- that the consensus frowns upon today. But initiation rituals are cross-culturally common, no?)
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.)
Sounds like the mid-late stage British Empire to me.
more on that further down the thread
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.
Or you can manufacture consent, in both cases. Monarchies have not been free of oppressive violence, any more they they have been fire of memmetic engineering.
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.
Is it supposed to 'be a fact that you are more likely to be allowed to keep yourself, under a monarchy or rightist dictatorship?
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?
Adaptation to circumstances.
Have you looked for culturally conservative NRxers?
First, I haven't read much of NR literature beyond Moldbug, and my post was mainly aimed at the tie in between him and libertarianism. When you don't expect to have the numbers to win by voting, what then?
I don't see Moldbug as interested in demotic dictatorship. The lack of support in the "demos" is the problem.
I think the premise is that they don't have the numbers, and are unlikely to get them.
Envy and lust for power. The Master Slave impulse is a problem on both sides.
I don't think so... I think it is more like the ego-driven feeling of "why is he better than me?" the issue not directly being power, but rather giving someone power being a strong signal they are "better".
The problem of the ego is something I have been trying to figure out for about 15-17 years now. This can mean two things, either I am knowledgeable about it, or I developed a strong bias seeing the problem of the ego everywhere, even where it does not apply. So it is a topic I can be very right or very wrong about but little in-between. By the problem of the ego I mean I had some exposure in the Buddhist approaches of how the human psyche works, and quickly realized that the problem of modern people is not as much desire or anger, but more like vanity/pride. For example, a huge reason why we are atheists is not simply because it is irrational, but because theism demands a sense of knee-bending humility and submission that goes right against todays culture and mores.
Take this example. Scratch the gay-marriage debates and what you find is that the primary motivation is not securing pragmatic advantages for gays but rather not making them feel like second-class citizens. A grand social approval / validation. So there is this huge motive today that people absolutely loath feeling second-class or less worthy than others. This is some sort of a pride and I think this lurks behind a lot of political stuff today. One is that elected politicians are servants (ministers) of the public hence cannot feel superior to it. The idea being being uncomfortable with having rulers who could be said in some sense superior or more worthy. This is not so much envy as hurt pride.
This is difficult to discuss on LW because the whole process of Rationalism means setting aside this kind of pride, and probably most of you did it unconsciously long ago. Because with this kind of pride self-improvement through the outside view would not be possibble.
Is it clear what I am driving at? This is such a well-know problem to me that I don't really find the best words to express them, I belly-feel the problem of the ego since I realized at about 20 that me being rebellious against my parents at 16 was not about the limitations they set to me being too stringent, but more like the hurt-pride feeling how the eff they have the nerve to set me limits and give me orders, do they think they are better than me, that kind of think (around 20 I realized this issue through Buddhist meditation techniques and now am 37)
The issue is still what is the difference. Some dude says now I rule and you shut up. How to tell if it is proper monarchy or yet another dictator?
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.)
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"?
So what's the problem with the Cathedral...that it's not dealing with sacredness enough? Too much? It's making the wrong things sacred?
Basically the third one, and also that it has a religious/sacredness based approach to what it values but extends its sphere to all human behavior.
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.
The main character is a precocious, day-dreaming, socially inept child - is it really surprising that he appeals to precocious, day-dreaming, socially inept children?
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]
Where have I talked about the threat of gays and transsexuals? I merely asserted that one especially insane transsexual (Justine Tunney) not be associated with a reactionary movement. That makes sense, right?
You single out Tunney for being transsexual, not insane.
Yes, not appropriate for being a reactionary leader in a far right group. Neoreaction is a social conservative movement. This is similar to how you wouldn't put an NRA member in charge of the local Democratic Party headquarters.
NRA membership is a changeable choice based on ideologic affiliations. Gender identity is firmware. You can't compare the two.
"Firmware"?
Gender reassignment surgery is not a blanket solution for every case of gender dysphoria. Variable rates of satisfaction with the surgery don't make gender identity any less of a psychoneurological fact as opposed to an ideological affiliation.
It seems like the number of people doing it is strongly correlated to the increased popularity of Tumblr.
<eyeroll>
Is that the Tumblr which is chock-full of straight porn?
I don't necessarily endorse MichaelAnissimov's take on this particular issue, but Tumblr's a big site. You can find everything from cat picture blogs to literal Nazis on it if you look. That doesn't mean it's disproportionately cats (plausible) or Nazis (very improbable), though, nor that people are talking about cat pictures or antisemitism when they complain about Tumblr culture.
More specifically, there are basically two things you can easily use Tumblr for: image sharing and text microblogging. The former lends itself well to porn, the latter to radical politics, and the communities built up around these use cases don't overlap all that much.
You completely lost me there. What does Tumblr have to do with anything?
It promotes gender dysphoria by introducing it where it didn't previously exist.
And I quote:
Yes. In communities where the strength of the family is irrelevant and the only focus is on the self, such behaviors are common. These communities are slowly being replaced by others due to their failure to reproduce.
Alternate suggestions for making families stronger-- oppose whatever tends to weaken family ties.
Make divorce more difficult and/or more discouraged. Teach people how to be good companions.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lasting-relationships-rely-on-2-traits-2014-11
Discourage people from throwing their children out. This means discouraging homophobia and transphobia.
Support telecommuting. Being geographically scattered is hard on families.
Yes, NRx's are trying to do that too.
Is there an actual logical connection between those two sentences that isn't a fully general argument against parents insisting on any ethical standards from children?
You could distinguish between behavior which is clearly dangerous to other members of the family, and behavior which isn't.
That doesn't make families stronger -- that makes people who hate each other live together (usually with pretty bad results).
It does, but less divorce might still make for more stability in extended families. I don't know whether the effects of divorce on extended families has been studied.
I think that in this context stability is the wrong thing to optimize for.
If I understand you correctly, transsexuals are not the problem, lack of family values and low testosterone are the problem, and transexuals are one symptom.
Assuming, for sake of argument, that this is true:
1) A lot of people are pro traditional family values. What do you think the marginal utility of one more advocate is? Or is advocating it amoung certain groups (e.g. LW) more important because we need intelligent people to keep breeding?
2) You say "These communities are slowly being replaced by others" - has your estimate for when the singularity occurs moved far back in time? Concerns about family values seem of little importance if non-biological intelligence is likly to turn up soon.
In reference to your first comment, basically yes.
1) The only reason I joined this thread in the first place is because someone attacked me, I don't particularly advocate neoreaction among LW groups, because I understand the community is hyper-liberalized to the point of absurdity.
2) Yes, my estimates of when the Singularity will occur moved from 2030-2040 to 2070-2080 over the last five years. This change is partially what has caused the neoreaction thing. I think there is a real risk that Western civilization will fall apart before we get there.
Is it really useful to give one numerical answer here? "2070-2080" doesn't capture the same amount of information as "if not before (say) 2050, not for a few centuries".
(Of course, the standard LW memeplex hardly has a reason to look forward to a non-Western singularity -- wouldn't it be almost certainly unfriendly by Western standards?)
The LW tone has improved this year and this post is refreshing.
1) I would agree that its probably best to keep NRx and LW separate. Still, this leaves the question of what is the marginal utility of advocating traditional family values?
2) I see, this does make your NRx position more understandable. I too have moved my estimates somewhat backwards.
1) Way too many to list here.
2) I still consider a near-future Singularity possible but not likely.
I don't know which communities you're talking about, but anecdotally I have to say I've found trans bars and support groups to have a much broader range in race, class, and origin than any other places I typically go.
Also, low testosterone you describe in that paragraph is not implicated as a cause of transgender behavior, with people generally being in the typical range for their birth sex before transition, which includes outliers with very high testosterone levels. Giving people additional testosterone has been tried and not been found to "cure" transgender behavior.
Relying on made-up facts for an entire paragraph of your purpose statement is not very encouraging.
According to wikipedia:
So maybe the amount of testosterone would be normal but it would have less effect?
What about low testosterone in utero (or high testosterone for f->m)?
What do you think the most probable cause of transgender behavior is?
I'm not sure about KaceyNow, I suspect transgender behavior is basically a culture bound syndrome.
Wikipedia lists a large amount of evidence for differences in genetics and brain volume. I know its possible that culture could cause changes in brain structure to some extent, but it can't influence genetics.
Given Wikipedia's editorial biases (and academia's publication biases) on these kinds of topics, it's almost certainly filtered evidence.
Citation on the testosterone business?
Do you have evidence for that? The family is not the main unit for transmission of information. Professional educators took over that function long ago.
This comment is a work of art.
I'm guessing the mentality behind this comment is, "oh my god, this guy dares to question transsexualism? that's eviiiilll".
The mentality behind it appears to me to be "that statement is such a blatant misdirection it is amazing".
The mentality is, "wait, why aren't you openly admitting you're evil?"
The more I think about it, the less sense this thread makes. You have openly admitted that you and your own private Idaho are not Cathedral2014!Good, loudly and clearly, for years. Why would I bother pretending like you're hiding it?
Exactly.
From what I heard I thought you were calling for people not to associate with any gays/transsexuals, or with people who themselves associate with gays/transexuals. I thought you thought that the threat posed was one of demographic decline.
I apologise if I have misrepresented your position, but that was how I interpreted the situation from what second-hand sources said. Incidentally, in what respect is Justine Tunney insane?
Apology accepted. Your second-hand sources were wrong, tell them that. It's so difficult to have legitimate discussions about NRx when 90% of the opinion the Less Wrong community has about us is based on stuff that is completely made up.
So, just to be clear... are you claiming that this quote isn't encouraging readers to reject and condemn transsexuals?
Or that the quote isn't yours?
Or that encouraging readers to reject and condemn transsexuals is meaningfully distinct in this context from calling for them not to associate with transsexuals?
Or something else?
It is my quote. It is meaningfully distinct, in the sense that we can participate in a progressive society where it's normalized, but recognize how it emphatically does not fit into a conservative framework.
In general, this position is similar to that of many conservative Republicans. It may be shocking to many of the people on this site to be exposed to view held by a majority of Americans, but that's just too bad. In any progressive "struggle session", I will fail. This is because I reject the entire progressive worldview.
OK. Thanks for clarifying. (I'm not really interested in discussing what about it may or may not be shocking and why it might be if it is, I just wanted to get your perspective on what seemed from mine to simply be two contradictory statements.)
To clarify further, I'm not a universalist, so I don't think everyone "should" condemn or approve of any particular individual or group. I said that for groups that care about strong families, they will need to denormalize alternative lifestyles. If groups don't care about strong families, they can do whatever they like. The "strong families" bit is essential to the meaning of the paragraph.