Horseshoe theory: as you go towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum, positions become more similar to each other rather than to mainstream positions. It may not be literaly true in all cases, but it does seem to be a valuable heuristic, North Korea is the most obvious example.
As for SJWs vs NRs, SJWs are often accused of being misandrists and anti-white racists, while NRs are, more or less overtly, male supremacists and white supremacists. It could be argued that these are both instances of tribalism, although in the SJWs case there is usually also some degree of counter-signalling, since most of them are white and perhaps half of them are male. Futhermore, both movements are essentially totalitarian, as they seek to police aspects of people’s lives which are considered to be outside government jurisdiction under classical liberalism (e.g., public expression, sexual and romantic life, and, to some extent, private contracts and hiring practices).
EDIT:
Oh, almost forgot: “Patriarchy/Rape culture” vs. “the Cathedral”, or, how to explain away the fact that the world hasn’t already adopted our obviously saner and morally superior ideology by assuming that they must all be infected by some sort of vague, unfalsifiable, memetic virus we just made up.
“The Cathedral”, according to Moldbug, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press (i.e. not the National Enquirer), Hollywood, the Ivy League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. It’s not a way of explaining away anything; it’s an attribution of blame for how present public opinion has turned out, combined with an assertion that these information organs form a natural group (left). Somewhere between Moldbug’s rants about how the big universities should be torn down and their grounds sown with salt and their professors forbidden to teach ever again, there are some statements with a bit more gravitas.
Falsifiable assertion: The New York Times and publications like it will report on (for example) the SPLC’s assertions with a tone of “and we should do as the SPLC says”, but will report on (for example) the Pope’s assertions and the Vatican with a tone of “and isn’t it strange how Catholics believe such funny things?”
(Unstated premise creating relevancy: The NYT has higher status than Fox News. General form: Left-wing media outlets have higher status, and closer ties to high-status institutions, than right-wing media outlets.)
Particular example: Consider the effect noted at The Federalist where the violent treatment of one side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called disgusting pointless brutality, but the violent treatment of the other side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called an important moral message.
As LW has discussed, nonsense can serve as a rallying point and a signal for demonstrating group loyalty. Anyone willing to buy into a group’s insane nonsense is probably going to be a devoted member of the group. NR learned and copied quite a lot from LW (in particular, More Right was spawned from Less Wrong) including this, so there’s no need to explain it away. But even before LW was created, Moldbug wrote:
from the perspective of the security forces, it may be quite useful to have one or two questions for which the bad answer is true, and the good one is nonsense. Some people are just natural-born troublemakers. Others are naturally loyal. Separating the sheep from the goats gives the authorities a great way to focus on the latter.
Nonsense also gives a basis for arbitrary acts of power. Following the Principle of Explosion, once you’ve incorporated something nonsensical or contradictory into your ideology, you can use it to rationalize any action or outcome you want. Isn’t that great for the group in power?
“The Cathedral”, according to Moldbug, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press (i.e. not the National Enquirer), Hollywood, the Ivy League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. It’s not a way of explaining away anything; it’s an attribution of blame for how present public opinion has turned out, combined with an assertion that these information organs form a natural group (left).
And “Patriarchy/Rape culture”, according to SJWs, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the video games industry, the Ivy League, and so on.
(Unstated premise creating relevancy: The NYT has higher status than Fox News. General form: Left-wing media outlets have higher status, and closer ties to high-status institutions, than right-wing media outlets.)
Do they?
Anyway, there is no question that conservative (can we say that Fox News is neoreactionary?) and leftist media outlets exist, and at some point some one side may be more popular than the other. The point is that both SJWs and NRs perceive their “enemy” not limited to some specific people or organizations, but as a diffused cultural element, which is thought to somehow “brainwash” the uninitiated into not seeing the obvious Truth of the One True Ideology. This is similar to the religious fundamentalists preoccupation with the Devil’s influence, or the militant communists preoccupation with bourgeois propaganda. In fact, it could be argued that the defining trait of radical movements is a black-and-white morality that paints themselves as the morally righteous brave knights who fight a world of corruption.
And “Patriarchy/Rape culture”, according to SJWs, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the video games industry, the Ivy League, and so on.
This is not something I have ever seen asserted, and it sounds to me as though you are drawing a false parallellism here, so I’d be curious to see which SJWs that is according to. Moldbug points to a set of organizations when he says “Cathedral”, and you could taboo the word into a list starting with the NYT. The descriptions of “Patriarchy” I’ve heard generally point to an institutional culture + its internalization in people’s heads + the structure of power relations + male default on ungendered mentions of persons, etc.
“Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right, come from? They can’t both be right, because they contradict each other. But couldn’t they both be wrong? I don’t mean slightly wrong, I don’t mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don’t mean the truth is somewhere between them, I meanneither of them has any consistent relationship to reality. [...] you and I and [conservatism] agree on the subject of the international Jewish conspiracy: there is no such thing. We disagree with [nazism], which fortunately is scarce these days. This can be explained in many ways, but one of the simplest is that if Fox News stuck a swastika in its logo and told Bill O’Reilly to start raving about the Elders of Zion, its ratings would probably go down. This is what I mean by “no consistent relationship to reality.” If, for whatever reason, an error is better at replicating within the conservative mind than the truth, conservatives will come to believe the error. If the truth is more adaptive, they will come to believe the truth. It’s fairly easy to see how an error could make a better story than the truth on Fox News, which is why one would be ill-advised to get one’s truth from that source.”
NR would like to distance itself from conservatism.
The point is that both SJWs and NRs perceive their “enemy” not limited to some specific people or organizations, but as a diffused cultural element,
Imagine you’re kidnapped by inconvenient plot-driving aliens and dropped off a thousand years ago in, say, the Archbishopric of Trier, an ecclesiastical principality in the 1017 Holy Roman Empire. Conditional on you being a typical LessWrongian, I’m going to guess that you would object strenuously to living in a medieval theocracy, and not just because of the low level of technological development.
In one sense your “enemy” at this point might be the Archbishop, and secondarily the Pope who can appoint a replacement if you get rid of the Archbishop. In another sense your “enemy” might be the diffused cultural element that people around you generally accept that having one theocrat appoint another theocrat to make the rules for you is an acceptable form of government.
That’s sort of how the neoreactionaries feel. In one sense there are wrongful people and institutions which are running the show, but making those magically disappear wouldn’t help; because of the second sense in which there’s a wide consensus that those people and institutions, or at least similar sorts of people and institutions, are acceptable ways of running the show. (Now, if the NRs could somehow get control over the NYT&co for a year and set the tone, that would be a different matter.)
which is thought to somehow “brainwash” the uninitiated into not seeing the obvious Truth of the One True Ideology.
Taboo “brainwash” and let’s consider 1017 Trier again. The people of 1017 Trier believe very strange things. The people of 1017 Trier do not believe random things, but consistently similar sorts of strange things—for example, they might believe that it is evil to take a census—partly because someone has been teaching them those things. This is a pattern which happens. NRs believe it has happened to our countries, and is still happening today.
This is similar to the religious fundamentalists preoccupation with the Devil’s influence, or the militant communists preoccupation with bourgeois propaganda. In fact, it could be argued that the defining trait of radical movements is a black-and-white morality that paints themselves as the morally righteous brave knights who fight a world of corruption.
This sounds like lazy thinking, specifically, rounding to the nearest cliche. I thought Yudkowsky had a post on this, but I can’t seem to find it—the thing where journalists frequently describe AI research in terms of the Matrix/Terminator movies.
Furthermore, your use of “preoccupation” etc. sounds like loaded language to me, begging the question by implying that the preoccupation (or its target) is trivial or irrelevant, but that’s part of what is under debate! For example, I don’t think one would say that 1944 America had a “preoccupation” with nazi propaganda.
Horseshoe theory can’t tell the difference between actual similarities, contingent effects of the existing political spectrum (contrarian personality types, say, or people who see the problems with the existing ideology but don’t have answers and end up jumping back and forth between alternatives), and absence of traits unique to the ideology of the observer.
...the postwar American development of a conceptual vocabulary—“totalitarianism”, “authoritarianism”, “statism”, “central planning”, horseshoe theory, “human rights”—by which communism and fascism were positioned as varieties of a broader unitary category and America assured itself that it had always been at war with Eurasia.
If the public/private divide as thought by classical liberalism is unique to classical liberalism, of course things will look like a horseshoe: as you go further from classical liberalism, you see that the importance of/adherence to the classical liberal public/private divide falls away—which must mean everything that isn’t classical liberalism is the same, right? No.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the stuff about NRs favoring government regulation in private contracts and hiring practices. Or the “accused of”/”are, more or less overtly...” distinction: many SJWs show overt hatred (resentment weakly disguised as contempt, as resentment usually is), and if anything, resentment-based hatreds ought to be treated as more worrisome than contempt-based hatreds, since most genocides are committed out of resentment, and most of the exceptions (like those of the British Empire*) are motivated by a drive for lebensraum, which doesn’t really apply here.
Obligatory footnote to avoid connotationally reinforcing a common misconception: the vast majority of the killing in the Americas was done by Old World diseases and was inevitable given contact before the development of modern epidemic control, and the smallpox blankets are generally considered to be a myth. I’m not sure what the statistics look like for Australia.
the smallpox blankets are generally considered to be a myth
I’m aware of one case (the siege of Fort Pitt, during Pontiac’s Rebellion) that seems to be reasonably well documented. There doesn’t seem to be consensus that it was effective, though, and smallpox existed among the Lenape before the incident.
Horseshoe theory seems to me like declaring North on a compass rose to be “middle”, and saying as you go further “east” or “west” around the compass, the extreme east and extreme west gradually become more similar to each other. This is a mismapping resulting from the confusion of “east” with “counterclockwise starting from north” and west likewise—to restore the analogy to its origin, I think the political axis has here gotten mixed up with some other attribute or set of attributes.
To look at it another way: I could place the horseshoe so it’s quasi-centered (middled?) on anything. Suppose I center it on, for example environmentalism, and declare the sides to be ordered by religion. Then I could argue that moderation is most compatible with environmentalism, while going towards the extreme end of the “religious spectrum” leads to the two sides becoming more similar to each other than to environmentalism—but this is really a feature of antitheists and fundamentalists both being non-environmentalists, which all look alike from the environmentalist position!
Horseshoe theory seems to me like declaring North on a compass rose to be “middle”, and saying as you go further “east” or “west” around the compass, the extreme east and extreme west gradually become more similar to each other.
Which is in fact true. Perhaps a more apt analogy is that, as you go north, east and west become less distinguished, up to the North Pole, where going east and going west reduce to spinning around yourself counterclockwise or clockwise while standing at the same spot.
In this analogy, the North Pole would be ideal totalitarianism, where the government micromanages its subjects’ lives in great detail, it is always right and doesn’t even have to explain itself since it is its own source of legitimacy, and nobody can question its ways. Real-life North Korea sits close to the North Pole.
Classical liberalism/”Progressivism” would be perhaps the South Pole or maybe the Equator.
Horseshoe theory: as you go towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum, positions become more similar to each other rather than to mainstream positions. It may not be literaly true in all cases, but it does seem to be a valuable heuristic, North Korea is the most obvious example.
As for SJWs vs NRs, SJWs are often accused of being misandrists and anti-white racists, while NRs are, more or less overtly, male supremacists and white supremacists.
It could be argued that these are both instances of tribalism, although in the SJWs case there is usually also some degree of counter-signalling, since most of them are white and perhaps half of them are male.
Futhermore, both movements are essentially totalitarian, as they seek to police aspects of people’s lives which are considered to be outside government jurisdiction under classical liberalism (e.g., public expression, sexual and romantic life, and, to some extent, private contracts and hiring practices).
EDIT:
Oh, almost forgot: “Patriarchy/Rape culture” vs. “the Cathedral”, or, how to explain away the fact that the world hasn’t already adopted our obviously saner and morally superior ideology by assuming that they must all be infected by some sort of vague, unfalsifiable, memetic virus we just made up.
“The Cathedral”, according to Moldbug, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press (i.e. not the National Enquirer), Hollywood, the Ivy League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. It’s not a way of explaining away anything; it’s an attribution of blame for how present public opinion has turned out, combined with an assertion that these information organs form a natural group (left). Somewhere between Moldbug’s rants about how the big universities should be torn down and their grounds sown with salt and their professors forbidden to teach ever again, there are some statements with a bit more gravitas.
Falsifiable assertion: The New York Times and publications like it will report on (for example) the SPLC’s assertions with a tone of “and we should do as the SPLC says”, but will report on (for example) the Pope’s assertions and the Vatican with a tone of “and isn’t it strange how Catholics believe such funny things?” (Unstated premise creating relevancy: The NYT has higher status than Fox News. General form: Left-wing media outlets have higher status, and closer ties to high-status institutions, than right-wing media outlets.)
Particular example: Consider the effect noted at The Federalist where the violent treatment of one side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called disgusting pointless brutality, but the violent treatment of the other side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called an important moral message.
As LW has discussed, nonsense can serve as a rallying point and a signal for demonstrating group loyalty. Anyone willing to buy into a group’s insane nonsense is probably going to be a devoted member of the group. NR learned and copied quite a lot from LW (in particular, More Right was spawned from Less Wrong) including this, so there’s no need to explain it away. But even before LW was created, Moldbug wrote:
Nonsense also gives a basis for arbitrary acts of power. Following the Principle of Explosion, once you’ve incorporated something nonsensical or contradictory into your ideology, you can use it to rationalize any action or outcome you want. Isn’t that great for the group in power?
And “Patriarchy/Rape culture”, according to SJWs, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the video games industry, the Ivy League, and so on.
Do they?
Anyway, there is no question that conservative (can we say that Fox News is neoreactionary?) and leftist media outlets exist, and at some point some one side may be more popular than the other.
The point is that both SJWs and NRs perceive their “enemy” not limited to some specific people or organizations, but as a diffused cultural element, which is thought to somehow “brainwash” the uninitiated into not seeing the obvious Truth of the One True Ideology.
This is similar to the religious fundamentalists preoccupation with the Devil’s influence, or the militant communists preoccupation with bourgeois propaganda. In fact, it could be argued that the defining trait of radical movements is a black-and-white morality that paints themselves as the morally righteous brave knights who fight a world of corruption.
This is not something I have ever seen asserted, and it sounds to me as though you are drawing a false parallellism here, so I’d be curious to see which SJWs that is according to. Moldbug points to a set of organizations when he says “Cathedral”, and you could taboo the word into a list starting with the NYT. The descriptions of “Patriarchy” I’ve heard generally point to an institutional culture + its internalization in people’s heads + the structure of power relations + male default on ungendered mentions of persons, etc.
No. Or at least, please don’t.
From the Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives:
“Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right, come from? They can’t both be right, because they contradict each other. But couldn’t they both be wrong? I don’t mean slightly wrong, I don’t mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don’t mean the truth is somewhere between them, I mean neither of them has any consistent relationship to reality. [...] you and I and [conservatism] agree on the subject of the international Jewish conspiracy: there is no such thing. We disagree with [nazism], which fortunately is scarce these days. This can be explained in many ways, but one of the simplest is that if Fox News stuck a swastika in its logo and told Bill O’Reilly to start raving about the Elders of Zion, its ratings would probably go down. This is what I mean by “no consistent relationship to reality.” If, for whatever reason, an error is better at replicating within the conservative mind than the truth, conservatives will come to believe the error. If the truth is more adaptive, they will come to believe the truth. It’s fairly easy to see how an error could make a better story than the truth on Fox News, which is why one would be ill-advised to get one’s truth from that source.”
NR would like to distance itself from conservatism.
Imagine you’re kidnapped by inconvenient plot-driving aliens and dropped off a thousand years ago in, say, the Archbishopric of Trier, an ecclesiastical principality in the 1017 Holy Roman Empire. Conditional on you being a typical LessWrongian, I’m going to guess that you would object strenuously to living in a medieval theocracy, and not just because of the low level of technological development.
In one sense your “enemy” at this point might be the Archbishop, and secondarily the Pope who can appoint a replacement if you get rid of the Archbishop. In another sense your “enemy” might be the diffused cultural element that people around you generally accept that having one theocrat appoint another theocrat to make the rules for you is an acceptable form of government.
That’s sort of how the neoreactionaries feel. In one sense there are wrongful people and institutions which are running the show, but making those magically disappear wouldn’t help; because of the second sense in which there’s a wide consensus that those people and institutions, or at least similar sorts of people and institutions, are acceptable ways of running the show. (Now, if the NRs could somehow get control over the NYT&co for a year and set the tone, that would be a different matter.)
Taboo “brainwash” and let’s consider 1017 Trier again. The people of 1017 Trier believe very strange things. The people of 1017 Trier do not believe random things, but consistently similar sorts of strange things—for example, they might believe that it is evil to take a census—partly because someone has been teaching them those things. This is a pattern which happens. NRs believe it has happened to our countries, and is still happening today.
This sounds like lazy thinking, specifically, rounding to the nearest cliche. I thought Yudkowsky had a post on this, but I can’t seem to find it—the thing where journalists frequently describe AI research in terms of the Matrix/Terminator movies.
Furthermore, your use of “preoccupation” etc. sounds like loaded language to me, begging the question by implying that the preoccupation (or its target) is trivial or irrelevant, but that’s part of what is under debate! For example, I don’t think one would say that 1944 America had a “preoccupation” with nazi propaganda.
Horseshoe theory can’t tell the difference between actual similarities, contingent effects of the existing political spectrum (contrarian personality types, say, or people who see the problems with the existing ideology but don’t have answers and end up jumping back and forth between alternatives), and absence of traits unique to the ideology of the observer.
It’s also a useful propaganda tool:
If the public/private divide as thought by classical liberalism is unique to classical liberalism, of course things will look like a horseshoe: as you go further from classical liberalism, you see that the importance of/adherence to the classical liberal public/private divide falls away—which must mean everything that isn’t classical liberalism is the same, right? No.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the stuff about NRs favoring government regulation in private contracts and hiring practices. Or the “accused of”/”are, more or less overtly...” distinction: many SJWs show overt hatred (resentment weakly disguised as contempt, as resentment usually is), and if anything, resentment-based hatreds ought to be treated as more worrisome than contempt-based hatreds, since most genocides are committed out of resentment, and most of the exceptions (like those of the British Empire*) are motivated by a drive for lebensraum, which doesn’t really apply here.
Obligatory footnote to avoid connotationally reinforcing a common misconception: the vast majority of the killing in the Americas was done by Old World diseases and was inevitable given contact before the development of modern epidemic control, and the smallpox blankets are generally considered to be a myth. I’m not sure what the statistics look like for Australia.
I’m aware of one case (the siege of Fort Pitt, during Pontiac’s Rebellion) that seems to be reasonably well documented. There doesn’t seem to be consensus that it was effective, though, and smallpox existed among the Lenape before the incident.
Horseshoe theory seems to me like declaring North on a compass rose to be “middle”, and saying as you go further “east” or “west” around the compass, the extreme east and extreme west gradually become more similar to each other. This is a mismapping resulting from the confusion of “east” with “counterclockwise starting from north” and west likewise—to restore the analogy to its origin, I think the political axis has here gotten mixed up with some other attribute or set of attributes.
To look at it another way: I could place the horseshoe so it’s quasi-centered (middled?) on anything. Suppose I center it on, for example environmentalism, and declare the sides to be ordered by religion. Then I could argue that moderation is most compatible with environmentalism, while going towards the extreme end of the “religious spectrum” leads to the two sides becoming more similar to each other than to environmentalism—but this is really a feature of antitheists and fundamentalists both being non-environmentalists, which all look alike from the environmentalist position!
Which is in fact true. Perhaps a more apt analogy is that, as you go north, east and west become less distinguished, up to the North Pole, where going east and going west reduce to spinning around yourself counterclockwise or clockwise while standing at the same spot.
In this analogy, the North Pole would be ideal totalitarianism, where the government micromanages its subjects’ lives in great detail, it is always right and doesn’t even have to explain itself since it is its own source of legitimacy, and nobody can question its ways.
Real-life North Korea sits close to the North Pole.
Classical liberalism/”Progressivism” would be perhaps the South Pole or maybe the Equator.