Sometimes I think that Moldbug is an extrapolated libertarian. The world he describes seems to me as something that would naturally happen after a few iterations of the libertarian paradise.
The “unextrapolated” libertarians imagine a balanced market of power, forever. But in real life, local monopolies sometimes happen. Each such monopoly would create what Moldbug calls “sovereign”—an entity with unlimited power over their resources (including people), but still acting as a participant in the outside market. For the outside market, cooperating with the sovereign, or even just ignoring them, could be a more profitable option than fighting them. (Evidence: What does an ordinary western citizen think about freedom in China? And what about buying cheap products from China?) Moldbug is a few steps ahead; he thinks about what makes sovereigns internally weak or strong.
I think this is a correct extrapolation of “anarcho-capitalism” (zero state) rather than “libertarianism” (minimal state). The minimal state approach could in principle keep a market balance by breaking up monopolies, and generally preserving basic human rights. It’s the zero-state approach which is likely to lead to “firms” owning “territories” and exerting monopoly force within those territories (ie a return to a patchwork of states, though no longer called states).
Intriguingly, on anarcho-capitalist principles, such a firm would be entitled to do whatever it likes with its territory including defining very one-sided contracts to make use of it. Contracts like “Anyone who enters or stays in the territory becomes the firm’s property, as do any of their offspring; anyone who leaves any form of matter in the territory accepts that it becomes the firm’s property”. And if you don’t accept that contract, the firm denies permission to use any matter in the territory, such as food, water or air. Alternatively, the firm could—if it chose—define other forms of contracts, for any sort of social organisation it preferred : liberal democratic, socialist, communist, Islamic republic, whatever really. So under anarcho-capitalist principles, a division of the world into state-like bodies, defining whatever laws they like within their territories, is perfectly legitimate and acceptable. Since that is the world as it stands, I don’t see what the anarcho-capitalists are complaining about.
So under anarcho-capitalist principles, a division of the world into state-like bodies, defining whatever laws they like within their territories, is perfectly legitimate and acceptable. Since that is the world as it stands, I don’t see what the anarcho-capitalists are complaining about.
I think you know that they are complaining about not getting their adolescent utopia of doing what they like, and not being beholden to The Man.
(Evidence: What does an ordinary western citizen think about freedom in China? And what about buying cheap products from China?)
Yet Moldbug somehow argues that external pressure would keep sovereigns from making their patches into slave labor camps (either with physical barriers or propaganda or mind control or something weirder)! So that the tyrants of slave patches sell their slaves’ products to the complacent liberal patches, and import catgirls from there for themselves.
+Tyrants are known to enjoy domination and torture of subjects even at cost to themselves (e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, the Kims, Pinochet or the various post-soviet dictators).
I think that’s an extremely likely, extremely dangerous failure mode that simply kicks the entire proposal back to the drawing board (and wipes the board clean for good measure). Unless strong further evidence for the defense is forthcoming, I proclaim the case on Patchwork closed.
Note that Moldbug spins some long, unlikely, hyper-Functionalist story somewhere on UR—as an attempt to juggle the Holocaust into a different reference class, maybe?
Moldbug somehow argues that external pressure would keep sovereigns from making their patches into slave labor camps
In my opinion this is very similar to the standard libertarian argument, except that instead of companies on the free market, MM speaks about sovereigns. And it didn’t convince me, too.
I am not defending MM here, I am just trying to understand him and pick the parts of his theory that seem correct to me. This is not one of them.
But to be fair, and fight the status quo, imagine that we are both subjects of the Moldbuggian Kingdom in the alternative universe, and we are discussing pros and cons of democracy, as a hypothesis. In that case, Hitler and Pinochet would be actually arguments against democracy. Like: “Let’s imagine that we try this democracy thing here. What makes you believe that people would not vote for an evil charismatic leader like Hitler? Also, even a democratic country needs a strong army, somehow isolated from the election process (otherwise a foreign attack during the election day would defeat the unprepared country). So what makes you believe that an army leader could not take over the power, like Pinochet?” And it would be your turn to convince me that it cannot happen, which would be rather difficult, because in reality, it happened.
To be clear, my point is that horrible evil things can happen in any political regime. Including democracy; including libertarian utopia; including MM’s utopia. Therefore “it could happen in a regime X” is not a sufficient argument for democracy. At best, it could be made to a statistic argument about how likely do different horrible things happen in different regimes to an average person.
And we should include all the horrible things that happen, not just those caused by the government directly. To take everything that happens in a country as a result of the government action or inaction. If the tyrant executes one hundred people, that’s one hundred people dead. If the small criminals independently murder one hundred people, that’s also one hundred people dead. The government is equally responsible for both. Just like the tyrant could decide to not execute those hundred people, so could the government decide to spend a bit more money on police instead of something else. Sovereign government has total power over their territory; therefore also it has total responsibility. All crimes that happen in a democratic country are the crimes of the democratic government. And that is a lot of crimes. Again, no government can bring that crime to zero, but we can still discuss whether government X can bring the total crimes in the country to a lower level than government Y. According to MM, the democratic governments are pretty bad at this.
The American patchwork resulted in civil war.
The Italian patchwork was eventually invaded.
Both were still extremely productive and raised living standards dramatically and furthermore made innovations that changed the world for the better. I consider the evidence that patchworks are bad insufficient.
Recall that in Neocameralism/Patchwork CEOs are under plausibly tight control to ensure profit maximization. You are using loaded terminology. Your argument is much better if you talk about profit maximizations not necessarily being as benign as imagined in a transhuman world rather than importing connotations of alpha apes doing anything they want and this ending badly.
+Tyrants are known to enjoy domination and torture of subjects even at cost to themselves (e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, the Kims, Pinochet or the various post-soviet dictators).
Disappointed you would do this. Down voted.
Note that Moldbug spins some long, unlikely, hyper-Functionalist story somewhere on UR—as an attempt to juggle the Holocaust into a different reference class, maybe?
Oh come on. Pot calling kettle black. You kind of do stuff like that all the time my friend. Without linking to the actual article related to this (which I don’t recall) is from a consequentalist view of communication nothing but a boo light.
Recall that in Neocameralism/Patchwork CEOs are under plausibly tight control to ensure profit maximization.
And? So someone can quite legally buy/acquire all the shares of a patch and order the CEO to do fucking anything, not just “maximize cash flow”. Doesn’t even have to be a single shareholder. What if the shareholders desire control over their property, huh—who’s gonna stop them then? The CEO? What if they promise the CEO a cushy deal?
Of course there would probably be more “rational” slave camps on average than “sadistic” ones. I’m going for the worst case scenarios here simply because… why shouldn’t I? I see zero evidence that, among a million patches, the worst cases would never ever arise once.
Psychopaths/sadists have amassed capital before, they have amassed influence before, they have gained partners’ trust before. Why wouldn’t they be able to exchange those for total+secure sovereignity within a Patchwork model?
I see zero evidence that, among a million patches, the worst cases would never ever arise once.
Looking at the real world spending of people with power and wealth and the traits these people have it seems to me that you would see many many more Dubai’s and Singapore’s than summer camps for sadists.
Why is one in a million that terrible? Its a far better track record than democracy or monarchy have… Indeed why would one in a hundred or one in ten be that horrible? Your opinion if this is an acceptable utilitarian trade and even desirable compared to modern third world misery, depend strongly on where you stand on torture vs. dust specks.
Looking at the real world spending of people with power and wealth and the traits these people have it seems to me that you would see many many more Dubai’s and Singapore’s than summer camps for sadists.
In the 20th century, in a world where democracy and human rights are actively promoted, all factors that would be missing from Moldburgia. Look at the real world behaviour of autocrats in the past.
Sometimes I think that Moldbug is an extrapolated libertarian. The world he describes seems to me as something that would naturally happen after a few iterations of the libertarian paradise.
Oh LessWrong. Figuring out in 2012 what leftists have been saying for centuries.
“There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”
C’mon people, I’ll be disappointed if my comment is not at −10 by tomorrow!
P.P.S. what am I trying to achieve with such trolling?
I hesitate to say—as it might sound rather extremist—but I’m trying to hint that 1) “right-wing” leanings might be incompartible in their essense with both neurologically egalitarian leanings and the acquired memeplex of Universalist morality, 2) that most readers of this are likely to share—on a fundamental psychological level—a sufficient part of the Universalist memeplex, and 3) that it follows that right-wing philosophy might be in its core objectively hostile to your extrapolated volition.
In other words, if you feel a coherent moral objection to what Keith Preston says in the above links—something like here (and here) [1], where actual Anarchists operating within the Anarchist tradition kick the shit out of his “national anarchism” - this by itself means you’re ultimately a “Universalist” in these coordinates, and it might be incoherent/irrational for you to oppose Universalism instead of trying to fix its errors. Even if you thought you were broadly against “leftism”—this breaks down the borders of “leftism”.
Yeah, that’s a very radical claim even for me. I’m not sure how serious I am about it.
[1] Damn, this “Aster” in the comments is simply so badass.
Isn’t doing politics here kind of dull? If you want to discuss this start an open thread politics discussion. If you want I can produce random quotes from respectable and influential leftist authors about various demographics that they believe will need to be physically removed for their utopia.
Does that sound like a certain Sam0345? You bet it does!
This seems like an ad hominen since you know many readers dislike Sam0345. They do sounds similar in that they are right wing.
I hesitate to say—as it might sound rather extremist—but I’m trying to hint that 1) “right-wing” leanings might be incompartible in their essense with both neurologically egalitarian leanings and the acquired memeplex of Universalist morality, 2) that most readers of this are likely to share—on a fundamental psychological level—a sufficient part of the Universalist memeplex, and 3) that it follows that right-wing philosophy might be in its core objectively hostile to your extrapolated volition.
I can point to many neurologically produced leanings that universalism requires us to suppress as well. Also I can make the argument that most people have sufficent non-Universalist memes in their mind that a logical extrapolation of where universalism might evolve in the next century or so will terrify them.
So what does that leave us with? Try to preserve the balance between Universalist and non-Universalist human values we are most comfortable with? Heh, say hello to a strategy that we have empirical evidence is a losing one: Conservatism.
Many people who go “yuck conservatism” today will be going “yay conservatism” in 2030, especially if we really are living in a period of rapid evolution for the Universalist memeplex where many people can’t abandon their old values and opinions fast enough to keep pace. This still won’t make conservatism a winning strategy.
I’m pretty sure that principled or even pragmatic libertarians are already considered extreme. Indeed they have been called “far right” and possibly scary to non-libertarians on this very forum. How extreme might they be considered in 10 or 20 years when their few remaining status raising talking points are largely accepted as common wisdom among educated people?
Three Worlds Collide, dude. Three Worlds Collide that doesn’t require non-humans. Total war of cultural annihilation might be the only logical, coherent and moral option for all three. As you can already see, I pick Normal Ending in such an eventuality.
(Might writing it have been EY’s Dumbledore-like plan to give us a reference point for when we discover this very kind of situation in ordinary human history? I’m asking you to ponder this last one seriously, paranoid as it might sound.)
In particular:
If you want I can produce random quotes from respectable and influential leftist authors about various demographics that they believe will need to be physically removed for their utopia.
Duh.
So what does that leave us with? Try to preserve the balance between Universalist and non-Universalist human values we are most comfortable with? Heh, say hello to a strategy that we have empirical evidence is a loosing one: Conservatism.
Duh. There’s no Alderson line to blow up!
I’m pretty sure that principled or even pragmatic libertarians are already considered extreme. Indeed they have been called “far right” and possibly scary to non-libertarians on this very forum. How extreme might they be considered in 10 or 20 years when their few remaining status raising talking points are largely accepted as common wisdom among educated people?
The real logical end point “superhappies” won’t care about the things they agree to care about in the story. The logical end point of universalism isn’t even superhappies, the logical endpoint is a singularity of holier than thou signalling inspired behaviour.
In its most memetically virulent form possible. I see a bunch of puritans lecturing and torturing each other over how evil they are, forever. I rather take a good boot stomp on my face forever than that. Humans are better at dealing with that kind of pain.
But obviously I could be wrong, I’ve changed my mind on this in the past before and I’m not confident at all in predicting the path of change. What I do have a high confidence in is that it is highly unlikely that a process like the evolution of a religious/ideological parasite/symbiont is to produce human friendly outcomes. I have seen Azathot’s work elsewhere.
The logical end point of universalism isn’t even superhappies, the logical endpoint is a singularity of holier than thou signaling inspired behaviour.
I think not, I think you’re strawmanning Universalism without having given it as much thought as I have, and we need much more time and space if we are to pursue this disagreement further. Thanks for letting us seize upon it, at least!
(Damn, just imagine how batshit crazy we must be looking to the average liberal here right now. :D)
P.S.: from Muflax’ post about Catholicism that you’ve linked to above:
I sometimes wonder, just for the lulz, what would the most un-progressive kind of belief system look like? It would have no salvation, no deliverance, no unity, no equality, no hope, no mercy. It would be painful, and gladly so. It would have strict hierarchies you couldn’t even in principle overcome. There would be no goal, and only purity. It would want you to be alone, sick and other.
Sounds reasonable enough. So… um… WTF? Why would the most progressive belief system apply the same torture to you, except with guilt-tripping you about Universalist morality instead of simpler, generic ways?
My line of reasoning here is dead simple. I just think that if there are only two possible stable equilibriums of values, and they are both at extreme ends of this ideological spectrum we see, and one equilibrium is like what Muflax describes above… the Universalist one has to be better for you and me.
I think not, I think you’re strawmanning Universalism without having given it as much thought as I have, and we need much more time and space if we are to pursue this disagreement further. Thanks for letting us seize upon it, at least!
I have thought about universalism a lot, especially its monotheist or pseudo-theist implementations. I agree we should discuss this further in the future. I enjoy our discussions and find them intellectually productive so I’m looking forward to that (its why I don’t mind paying the 5 karma penalty to respond).
As we have debated over the past year or so both privately and publicly I feel more and more that we may not really have value sets that different, but disagree in our map of reality in certain vital parts.
I did say before that I consider “extreme authoritarianism”—like Moldbug allowing a Keith Preston to run a Preston patch and a Kim to run a Kim patch—to be just as evil or worse as “extreme totalitarianism”, like your hypothetical puritan maniacs. And both, presumably, have the super-advantage of finally having collapsed into memetic stability.
If you’re curious about this Preston character, here’s a long and detailed analysis of how his ideas fit into the broader context of American right-wing decentralized anti-progressivism. (By some leftist I’ve never heard of.)
If he’s become actively hostile to libertarianism, then this is a reverse from his originial position put forth here:
That leaves libertarians. Now, I love libertarians to death. My CPU practically has a permanent open socket to the Mises Institute. In my opinion, anyone who has intentionally chosen to remain ignorant of libertarian (and, in particular, Misesian-Rothbardian) thought, in an era when a couple of mouse clicks will feed you enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose, is not an intellectually serious person. Furthermore, I am a computer programmer who has read far too much science fiction—two major risk factors for libertarianism. So I could just say, “read Rothbard,” and call it a day.
On the other hand, it is hard to avoid noticing two basic facts about the universe. One is that libertarianism is an extremely obvious idea. The other is that it has never been successfully implemented.
This does not prove anything. But what it suggests is that libertarianism is, as its detractors are always quick to claim, an essentially impractical ideology. I would love to live in a libertarian society. The question is: is there a path from here to there? And if we get there, will we stay there? If your answer to both questions is obviously “yes,” perhaps your definition of “obvious” is not the same as mine.
I believe that this statement was not an endorsement of libertarianism, but rather a sop to libertarian readers, based on my knowledge of his style.
Moldbug draws a clear distinction between libertarian policies, which he believes meet straightforward criteria for effectiveness and sanity, and would (not ought to, but would) be implemented by a Responsible Government (see: neocameralism), and libertarianism as a political philosophy and movement.
He identifies the fundamentally Sisyphean nature of advocacy for libertarian politics within a democracy, and also the untenable assumptions of the Rothbardian non-aggression theory of natural rights, which, barring some bizarre change in the present technological-military détente, makes the absence of a geographically-based state with a monopoly on violence equivalent to ‘money on the table’.
Yes and no, he’s mentioned that he ‘loves libertarians to bits’, and in general seems to think they have a better idea of the problem than most but don’t go far enough with their solution.
Indeed, ‘libertarian’ is not the word I really want; it’s hard to fit Moldbug into any of the usual categories, but libertarian is probably the closest. I observe that while the state he favours has in principle the right to hang you upside down by the Achilles heels, his predictions for what it will actually do, as a means of maximising its revenue, are all pretty libertarian-sounding, except for the Laffer-maximising tax rate.
I don’t think a libertarian would predict that a government with near absolute power would behave anything like what Moldbug predicts. For example, public choice theory predicts increased corruption and self-dealing (like the monopolies that kings granted to friends and political insiders). Moldbug thinks this will be avoided via “vote with your feet,” but doesn’t explain why the government would allow this remedy when it doesn’t allow any other remedy.
I don’t think Moldbug is literally a monarchist. He just does not like the UK Whigs, and what he thinks the UK Whigs morphed into. The monarchism thing is for effect, it’s not a serious proposition.
Based on my impression, Moldbug is more or less a monarchist. Also, talking as if his main point is that he “doesn’t like UK Whigs” is extremely odd. He is an American who presents a wide-ranging set of political observations spanning hundreds of years, contemporary UK politics per se is hardly his concern.
Based on my impression, Moldbug is more or less a monarchist
One of the many elephants in the room is that monarchy is a system where it was completely normal for the monarch to impose their religion on their subjects. Moldbug makes a big thing about this tenuous, almost invisible Cathedral thingy, but if he gets his utopia he may well find hismelf dealing with the real thing.
I disagree. The use of the term “monarch” might be problematic, but Mencius’ conception of useful hierarchical authority models puts CEO and Monarch in a similar space.
Mencius’ conception of useful hierarchical authority models puts CEO and Monarch in a similar space.
In the sense that there is a single guy at the top, I suppose. But then by that logic you can argue Moldbug ought to have no problems with a parlamentary democracy with a prime minister. The point is not that there is a single guy in charge at the top, but the system of incentives that girds the society and gives it shape. There is a big difference between the British monarchy in the Stuart period (“bring back the Stuarts!”), and what Moldbug is actually advocating.
Moldbug is actively hostile to libertarian thought—he’s more royalist / authoritarian.
Sometimes I think that Moldbug is an extrapolated libertarian. The world he describes seems to me as something that would naturally happen after a few iterations of the libertarian paradise.
The “unextrapolated” libertarians imagine a balanced market of power, forever. But in real life, local monopolies sometimes happen. Each such monopoly would create what Moldbug calls “sovereign”—an entity with unlimited power over their resources (including people), but still acting as a participant in the outside market. For the outside market, cooperating with the sovereign, or even just ignoring them, could be a more profitable option than fighting them. (Evidence: What does an ordinary western citizen think about freedom in China? And what about buying cheap products from China?) Moldbug is a few steps ahead; he thinks about what makes sovereigns internally weak or strong.
I think this is a correct extrapolation of “anarcho-capitalism” (zero state) rather than “libertarianism” (minimal state). The minimal state approach could in principle keep a market balance by breaking up monopolies, and generally preserving basic human rights. It’s the zero-state approach which is likely to lead to “firms” owning “territories” and exerting monopoly force within those territories (ie a return to a patchwork of states, though no longer called states).
Intriguingly, on anarcho-capitalist principles, such a firm would be entitled to do whatever it likes with its territory including defining very one-sided contracts to make use of it. Contracts like “Anyone who enters or stays in the territory becomes the firm’s property, as do any of their offspring; anyone who leaves any form of matter in the territory accepts that it becomes the firm’s property”. And if you don’t accept that contract, the firm denies permission to use any matter in the territory, such as food, water or air. Alternatively, the firm could—if it chose—define other forms of contracts, for any sort of social organisation it preferred : liberal democratic, socialist, communist, Islamic republic, whatever really. So under anarcho-capitalist principles, a division of the world into state-like bodies, defining whatever laws they like within their territories, is perfectly legitimate and acceptable. Since that is the world as it stands, I don’t see what the anarcho-capitalists are complaining about.
I think you know that they are complaining about not getting their adolescent utopia of doing what they like, and not being beholden to The Man.
You say that like it’s not worth complaining about.
If it’s not possible to fix, is it worth complaining out?
Pieces like the formalist mainfesto seem to show obvious signs of this.
Yet Moldbug somehow argues that external pressure would keep sovereigns from making their patches into slave labor camps (either with physical barriers or propaganda or mind control or something weirder)! So that the tyrants of slave patches sell their slaves’ products to the complacent liberal patches, and import catgirls from there for themselves.
+Tyrants are known to enjoy domination and torture of subjects even at cost to themselves (e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, the Kims, Pinochet or the various post-soviet dictators).
I think that’s an extremely likely, extremely dangerous failure mode that simply kicks the entire proposal back to the drawing board (and wipes the board clean for good measure). Unless strong further evidence for the defense is forthcoming, I proclaim the case on Patchwork closed.
Note that Moldbug spins some long, unlikely, hyper-Functionalist story somewhere on UR—as an attempt to juggle the Holocaust into a different reference class, maybe?
In my opinion this is very similar to the standard libertarian argument, except that instead of companies on the free market, MM speaks about sovereigns. And it didn’t convince me, too.
I am not defending MM here, I am just trying to understand him and pick the parts of his theory that seem correct to me. This is not one of them.
But to be fair, and fight the status quo, imagine that we are both subjects of the Moldbuggian Kingdom in the alternative universe, and we are discussing pros and cons of democracy, as a hypothesis. In that case, Hitler and Pinochet would be actually arguments against democracy. Like: “Let’s imagine that we try this democracy thing here. What makes you believe that people would not vote for an evil charismatic leader like Hitler? Also, even a democratic country needs a strong army, somehow isolated from the election process (otherwise a foreign attack during the election day would defeat the unprepared country). So what makes you believe that an army leader could not take over the power, like Pinochet?” And it would be your turn to convince me that it cannot happen, which would be rather difficult, because in reality, it happened.
To be clear, my point is that horrible evil things can happen in any political regime. Including democracy; including libertarian utopia; including MM’s utopia. Therefore “it could happen in a regime X” is not a sufficient argument for democracy. At best, it could be made to a statistic argument about how likely do different horrible things happen in different regimes to an average person.
And we should include all the horrible things that happen, not just those caused by the government directly. To take everything that happens in a country as a result of the government action or inaction. If the tyrant executes one hundred people, that’s one hundred people dead. If the small criminals independently murder one hundred people, that’s also one hundred people dead. The government is equally responsible for both. Just like the tyrant could decide to not execute those hundred people, so could the government decide to spend a bit more money on police instead of something else. Sovereign government has total power over their territory; therefore also it has total responsibility. All crimes that happen in a democratic country are the crimes of the democratic government. And that is a lot of crimes. Again, no government can bring that crime to zero, but we can still discuss whether government X can bring the total crimes in the country to a lower level than government Y. According to MM, the democratic governments are pretty bad at this.
The American patchwork resulted in civil war. The Italian patchwork was eventually invaded.
Both were still extremely productive and raised living standards dramatically and furthermore made innovations that changed the world for the better. I consider the evidence that patchworks are bad insufficient.
Recall that in Neocameralism/Patchwork CEOs are under plausibly tight control to ensure profit maximization. You are using loaded terminology. Your argument is much better if you talk about profit maximizations not necessarily being as benign as imagined in a transhuman world rather than importing connotations of alpha apes doing anything they want and this ending badly.
Disappointed you would do this. Down voted.
Oh come on. Pot calling kettle black. You kind of do stuff like that all the time my friend. Without linking to the actual article related to this (which I don’t recall) is from a consequentalist view of communication nothing but a boo light.
And? So someone can quite legally buy/acquire all the shares of a patch and order the CEO to do fucking anything, not just “maximize cash flow”. Doesn’t even have to be a single shareholder. What if the shareholders desire control over their property, huh—who’s gonna stop them then? The CEO? What if they promise the CEO a cushy deal?
No one. But then don’t invoke Hitler or Kim or Stalin, invoke slave ownership.
Of course there would probably be more “rational” slave camps on average than “sadistic” ones. I’m going for the worst case scenarios here simply because… why shouldn’t I? I see zero evidence that, among a million patches, the worst cases would never ever arise once.
Psychopaths/sadists have amassed capital before, they have amassed influence before, they have gained partners’ trust before. Why wouldn’t they be able to exchange those for total+secure sovereignity within a Patchwork model?
Looking at the real world spending of people with power and wealth and the traits these people have it seems to me that you would see many many more Dubai’s and Singapore’s than summer camps for sadists.
Why is one in a million that terrible? Its a far better track record than democracy or monarchy have… Indeed why would one in a hundred or one in ten be that horrible? Your opinion if this is an acceptable utilitarian trade and even desirable compared to modern third world misery, depend strongly on where you stand on torture vs. dust specks.
In the 20th century, in a world where democracy and human rights are actively promoted, all factors that would be missing from Moldburgia. Look at the real world behaviour of autocrats in the past.
Oh LessWrong. Figuring out in 2012 what leftists have been saying for centuries.
I strongly disrecommend all variants of “I told you so”.
TROLLQUOTE:
Hans Herman-Hoppe, self-identified libertarian, Democracy: The God That Failed
Does that sound like a certain Sam0345? You bet it does!
(Lew Rockwell attempting to run damage control on Hoppe’s quote. Yet… some might question why Hoppe couldn’t run it himself then, eh? Keith Preston unintentionally intensifies the damage instead. Then intensifies the intensification of damage. Isn’t he a charming guy too?)
P.S.: Extra bonus trolling, for the same single downvote of yours! Bryan Caplan vs. feminism. Discussed on PoliticsForum.org.
C’mon people, I’ll be disappointed if my comment is not at −10 by tomorrow!
P.P.S. what am I trying to achieve with such trolling?
I hesitate to say—as it might sound rather extremist—but I’m trying to hint that 1) “right-wing” leanings might be incompartible in their essense with both neurologically egalitarian leanings and the acquired memeplex of Universalist morality, 2) that most readers of this are likely to share—on a fundamental psychological level—a sufficient part of the Universalist memeplex, and 3) that it follows that right-wing philosophy might be in its core objectively hostile to your extrapolated volition.
In other words, if you feel a coherent moral objection to what Keith Preston says in the above links—something like here (and here) [1], where actual Anarchists operating within the Anarchist tradition kick the shit out of his “national anarchism” - this by itself means you’re ultimately a “Universalist” in these coordinates, and it might be incoherent/irrational for you to oppose Universalism instead of trying to fix its errors. Even if you thought you were broadly against “leftism”—this breaks down the borders of “leftism”.
Yeah, that’s a very radical claim even for me. I’m not sure how serious I am about it.
[1] Damn, this “Aster” in the comments is simply so badass.
Isn’t doing politics here kind of dull? If you want to discuss this start an open thread politics discussion. If you want I can produce random quotes from respectable and influential leftist authors about various demographics that they believe will need to be physically removed for their utopia.
This seems like an ad hominen since you know many readers dislike Sam0345. They do sounds similar in that they are right wing.
I can point to many neurologically produced leanings that universalism requires us to suppress as well. Also I can make the argument that most people have sufficent non-Universalist memes in their mind that a logical extrapolation of where universalism might evolve in the next century or so will terrify them.
So what does that leave us with? Try to preserve the balance between Universalist and non-Universalist human values we are most comfortable with? Heh, say hello to a strategy that we have empirical evidence is a losing one: Conservatism.
Many people who go “yuck conservatism” today will be going “yay conservatism” in 2030, especially if we really are living in a period of rapid evolution for the Universalist memeplex where many people can’t abandon their old values and opinions fast enough to keep pace. This still won’t make conservatism a winning strategy.
I’m pretty sure that principled or even pragmatic libertarians are already considered extreme. Indeed they have been called “far right” and possibly scary to non-libertarians on this very forum. How extreme might they be considered in 10 or 20 years when their few remaining status raising talking points are largely accepted as common wisdom among educated people?
Three Worlds Collide, dude. Three Worlds Collide that doesn’t require non-humans. Total war of cultural annihilation might be the only logical, coherent and moral option for all three. As you can already see, I pick Normal Ending in such an eventuality.
(Might writing it have been EY’s Dumbledore-like plan to give us a reference point for when we discover this very kind of situation in ordinary human history? I’m asking you to ponder this last one seriously, paranoid as it might sound.)
In particular:
Duh.
Duh. There’s no Alderson line to blow up!
Maybe.
The real logical end point “superhappies” won’t care about the things they agree to care about in the story. The logical end point of universalism isn’t even superhappies, the logical endpoint is a singularity of holier than thou signalling inspired behaviour.
In its most memetically virulent form possible. I see a bunch of puritans lecturing and torturing each other over how evil they are, forever. I rather take a good boot stomp on my face forever than that. Humans are better at dealing with that kind of pain.
But obviously I could be wrong, I’ve changed my mind on this in the past before and I’m not confident at all in predicting the path of change. What I do have a high confidence in is that it is highly unlikely that a process like the evolution of a religious/ideological parasite/symbiont is to produce human friendly outcomes. I have seen Azathot’s work elsewhere.
I think not, I think you’re strawmanning Universalism without having given it as much thought as I have, and we need much more time and space if we are to pursue this disagreement further. Thanks for letting us seize upon it, at least!
(Damn, just imagine how batshit crazy we must be looking to the average liberal here right now. :D)
P.S.: from Muflax’ post about Catholicism that you’ve linked to above:
Sounds reasonable enough. So… um… WTF? Why would the most progressive belief system apply the same torture to you, except with guilt-tripping you about Universalist morality instead of simpler, generic ways?
My line of reasoning here is dead simple. I just think that if there are only two possible stable equilibriums of values, and they are both at extreme ends of this ideological spectrum we see, and one equilibrium is like what Muflax describes above… the Universalist one has to be better for you and me.
I have thought about universalism a lot, especially its monotheist or pseudo-theist implementations. I agree we should discuss this further in the future. I enjoy our discussions and find them intellectually productive so I’m looking forward to that (its why I don’t mind paying the 5 karma penalty to respond).
As we have debated over the past year or so both privately and publicly I feel more and more that we may not really have value sets that different, but disagree in our map of reality in certain vital parts.
I did say before that I consider “extreme authoritarianism”—like Moldbug allowing a Keith Preston to run a Preston patch and a Kim to run a Kim patch—to be just as evil or worse as “extreme totalitarianism”, like your hypothetical puritan maniacs. And both, presumably, have the super-advantage of finally having collapsed into memetic stability.
If you’re curious about this Preston character, here’s a long and detailed analysis of how his ideas fit into the broader context of American right-wing decentralized anti-progressivism. (By some leftist I’ve never heard of.)
If he’s become actively hostile to libertarianism, then this is a reverse from his originial position put forth here:
I believe that this statement was not an endorsement of libertarianism, but rather a sop to libertarian readers, based on my knowledge of his style.
Moldbug draws a clear distinction between libertarian policies, which he believes meet straightforward criteria for effectiveness and sanity, and would (not ought to, but would) be implemented by a Responsible Government (see: neocameralism), and libertarianism as a political philosophy and movement.
He identifies the fundamentally Sisyphean nature of advocacy for libertarian politics within a democracy, and also the untenable assumptions of the Rothbardian non-aggression theory of natural rights, which, barring some bizarre change in the present technological-military détente, makes the absence of a geographically-based state with a monopoly on violence equivalent to ‘money on the table’.
Yes and no, he’s mentioned that he ‘loves libertarians to bits’, and in general seems to think they have a better idea of the problem than most but don’t go far enough with their solution.
Indeed, ‘libertarian’ is not the word I really want; it’s hard to fit Moldbug into any of the usual categories, but libertarian is probably the closest. I observe that while the state he favours has in principle the right to hang you upside down by the Achilles heels, his predictions for what it will actually do, as a means of maximising its revenue, are all pretty libertarian-sounding, except for the Laffer-maximising tax rate.
I don’t think a libertarian would predict that a government with near absolute power would behave anything like what Moldbug predicts. For example, public choice theory predicts increased corruption and self-dealing (like the monopolies that kings granted to friends and political insiders). Moldbug thinks this will be avoided via “vote with your feet,” but doesn’t explain why the government would allow this remedy when it doesn’t allow any other remedy.
I don’t think Moldbug is literally a monarchist. He just does not like the UK Whigs, and what he thinks the UK Whigs morphed into. The monarchism thing is for effect, it’s not a serious proposition.
Based on my impression, Moldbug is more or less a monarchist. Also, talking as if his main point is that he “doesn’t like UK Whigs” is extremely odd. He is an American who presents a wide-ranging set of political observations spanning hundreds of years, contemporary UK politics per se is hardly his concern.
One of the many elephants in the room is that monarchy is a system where it was completely normal for the monarch to impose their religion on their subjects. Moldbug makes a big thing about this tenuous, almost invisible Cathedral thingy, but if he gets his utopia he may well find hismelf dealing with the real thing.
I disagree. The use of the term “monarch” might be problematic, but Mencius’ conception of useful hierarchical authority models puts CEO and Monarch in a similar space.
In the sense that there is a single guy at the top, I suppose. But then by that logic you can argue Moldbug ought to have no problems with a parlamentary democracy with a prime minister. The point is not that there is a single guy in charge at the top, but the system of incentives that girds the society and gives it shape. There is a big difference between the British monarchy in the Stuart period (“bring back the Stuarts!”), and what Moldbug is actually advocating.
The system being the joint-stock model which Mencius claims effective monarchies approximated.