All of these have issues, I like Nick Land’s one best, Moldbug is probably easier to read if you are used to the writing style here, Scott’s is the best writer of the three, but deficient and makes subtle mistakes since he isn’t reactionary.
My own summary of some points that are often made would be:
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society. What reactionaries call the Cathedral is machinery that naturally arises when the best way to power is hacking opinions of masses of people to consent to whatever you have in store for them. We claim the beliefs this machine produces has no consistent relation to reality and is just stuck in a feedback loop of giving itself more and more power over society. Power in society thus truly lies with the civil service, academia and journalists not elected officials, who have very little to do with actual governing. This can be shown by interesting examples like the EU repeating referendums until they achieve the desired results or Belgium’s 589 days without elected government. Their nongovernment managed to have little difficulty doing things with important political implications like nationalizing a major bank.
Moral Progress hasn’t happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.
The modern world allows only a very small window of allowed policy experimentation. Things like seasteading, charter cities are ideas we like but think will not be allowed to blossom if they should breach the narrow window of experimentation allowed among current Western nations.
Democracy is overvalued, monarchy is undervalued. This translates to some advocating monarchy and others dreaming up new systems of government that take this into account.
McCarthy was basically right about the extent of Communist influence in the United States of America after the 1940s. We have weird things like the Harvard Crimson magazine endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the 70s! or FDR’s main negotiator at Yalta being a Soviet spy cropping up constantly when we examine the strange and alien 20th century. McCarthy used some ethically questionable methods against Communists (and yes most of his targets where actual Communists), but if you check them out in detail you will see they are no more extreme or questionable than the ones we have for nearly 80 years now routinely used against Fascists. Why do we live in a Brown scare society while the short second Red scare is by many treated like one of the gravest threats against liberal democracy ever? Why where western intellectuals consistently deluded on Communism from at least the 1920s to as late as the 1980s if they are as trustworthy as they claim?
Psychological differences exist between ethnic groups and between the sexes and these should have implications for into issues like women in combat, affirmative action or immigration.
The horror show of the aftermath of decolonization in some Third World countries was a preventable disaster on the scale of Communist atrocities.
The first three are meta arguments, that contribute to the last four which are object level assessments, that you can make without resorting to the meta arguments.
The claim that the morality of a society doesn’t steadily, generally, and inexorably increase over time is not the same as the claim that there will be no examples of things that can be reasonably explained as increases in societal morality. If morality is an aggregate of bounded random walks, you’d still expect some of those walks to go up.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
Do you think there’s a causal connection between the decline of lynching and the various ills you’ve listed?
How is causality relevant? The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase—unless we add to the hypothesis the possibility of ‘counterrevolutionary’ periods where immoral, anti-Whig groups take power and immorality increases, but expressing concern over things like illegitimacy rates, knockout games, and inner-city dysfunction is an outgroup marker for Whigs.
Demonstrating causality would be doing more work than is necessary. To argue against the hypothesis that the values of A, B, C, … are all increasing, you don’t need to show that an increase in the value of A leads to decreases in any of B, C, …; you just need to demonstrate that the value of at least one of A, B, C, … is not increasing.
(To avert the negative connotations the above paragraph would likely otherwise have: no, I don’t think the decline of lynching caused those various ills.)
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching (A) may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment (B) and illegitimacy rates (C), the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population (D), drug abuse (E), knockout games (???), and so on.
(parentheticals added).
You were originally arguing that some weighted sum of A, B, C… was increasing. NancyLebovitz was pointing out that A has clearly decreased, and so for the sum to increase on average, there has to be a correlation between A decreasing and B, C, … increasing. Then she asked if you thought this correlation was causal.
In response, you punted and changed the argument to:
The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase
which was a really nice tautological argument.
So while showing causality is “more work than is necessary” for disproving the straw-Whiggery of your previous comment, it doesn’t mean anything for the point NancyLebovitz was raising.
I think people not being assaulted and killed by an angry crowd is good. Vigilantism is a sign of a deficient justice system and insufficient pacification of the population, thus poor governance. I’m happy at the reduction of lynching, but I’m unhappy at the increase of other indicators of depacification and deficient justice systems that seem to have grown worse in Western society.
As a side note this is still a disturbingly common phenomena of mob violence from Nigeria to Madagascar, not to mention Southern Asia and some Latin American countries. I’m also sadly quite unconvinced no lynchings occur in Western states for that matter.
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society.
That isn’t an argument amounting to right is right, since the left has its own version...see Chomskys manufactured consent.
What’s more,manufactured consent existed in societies that didn’t run on consent., in the form of actual sermons preached in actual churches and actual cathdrals.
My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:
Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain’s “Strive/survive” theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent factory, this surplus has also been directed towards orthogonal or outright maladaptive goals (in cyclical views of history, Decadence itself).
We no longer have to rationalise the privations of older, poorer societies. This is the sense in which linear moral progress is the most genuine (c/f CEV).
The interaction between the dynamics of holier-than-thou moralising and the anticipatory experience of no longer having to rationalise poverty is complicated. Examination of history reveals the drive for levelling and equalisation to be omnipresent, if not consistently exploitable.
There are three decent starting points:
The Dark Enlightenment (The Complete Series) by the British philosopher Land, 28k word count
The open letter to open minded Progressives series by Mencius Moldbug, 120k word count
Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell by Scott Alexander aka Yvain, 16k word count
All of these have issues, I like Nick Land’s one best, Moldbug is probably easier to read if you are used to the writing style here, Scott’s is the best writer of the three, but deficient and makes subtle mistakes since he isn’t reactionary.
My own summary of some points that are often made would be:
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society. What reactionaries call the Cathedral is machinery that naturally arises when the best way to power is hacking opinions of masses of people to consent to whatever you have in store for them. We claim the beliefs this machine produces has no consistent relation to reality and is just stuck in a feedback loop of giving itself more and more power over society. Power in society thus truly lies with the civil service, academia and journalists not elected officials, who have very little to do with actual governing. This can be shown by interesting examples like the EU repeating referendums until they achieve the desired results or Belgium’s 589 days without elected government. Their nongovernment managed to have little difficulty doing things with important political implications like nationalizing a major bank.
Moral Progress hasn’t happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.
The modern world allows only a very small window of allowed policy experimentation. Things like seasteading, charter cities are ideas we like but think will not be allowed to blossom if they should breach the narrow window of experimentation allowed among current Western nations.
Democracy is overvalued, monarchy is undervalued. This translates to some advocating monarchy and others dreaming up new systems of government that take this into account.
McCarthy was basically right about the extent of Communist influence in the United States of America after the 1940s. We have weird things like the Harvard Crimson magazine endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the 70s! or FDR’s main negotiator at Yalta being a Soviet spy cropping up constantly when we examine the strange and alien 20th century. McCarthy used some ethically questionable methods against Communists (and yes most of his targets where actual Communists), but if you check them out in detail you will see they are no more extreme or questionable than the ones we have for nearly 80 years now routinely used against Fascists. Why do we live in a Brown scare society while the short second Red scare is by many treated like one of the gravest threats against liberal democracy ever? Why where western intellectuals consistently deluded on Communism from at least the 1920s to as late as the 1980s if they are as trustworthy as they claim?
Psychological differences exist between ethnic groups and between the sexes and these should have implications for into issues like women in combat, affirmative action or immigration.
The horror show of the aftermath of decolonization in some Third World countries was a preventable disaster on the scale of Communist atrocities.
The first three are meta arguments, that contribute to the last four which are object level assessments, that you can make without resorting to the meta arguments.
Do you think the decline of lynching is mere change rather than progress?
The claim that the morality of a society doesn’t steadily, generally, and inexorably increase over time is not the same as the claim that there will be no examples of things that can be reasonably explained as increases in societal morality. If morality is an aggregate of bounded random walks, you’d still expect some of those walks to go up.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
Do you think there’s a causal connection between the decline of lynching and the various ills you’ve listed?
How is causality relevant? The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase—unless we add to the hypothesis the possibility of ‘counterrevolutionary’ periods where immoral, anti-Whig groups take power and immorality increases, but expressing concern over things like illegitimacy rates, knockout games, and inner-city dysfunction is an outgroup marker for Whigs.
You need evidence actual decline to justify reaction. Othewise, why reverse random drift?
This is always a bad sign in an argument. If causality doesn’t matter, what does?
Demonstrating causality would be doing more work than is necessary. To argue against the hypothesis that the values of A, B, C, … are all increasing, you don’t need to show that an increase in the value of A leads to decreases in any of B, C, …; you just need to demonstrate that the value of at least one of A, B, C, … is not increasing.
(To avert the negative connotations the above paragraph would likely otherwise have: no, I don’t think the decline of lynching caused those various ills.)
(parentheticals added).
You were originally arguing that some weighted sum of A, B, C… was increasing. NancyLebovitz was pointing out that A has clearly decreased, and so for the sum to increase on average, there has to be a correlation between A decreasing and B, C, … increasing. Then she asked if you thought this correlation was causal.
In response, you punted and changed the argument to:
which was a really nice tautological argument.
So while showing causality is “more work than is necessary” for disproving the straw-Whiggery of your previous comment, it doesn’t mean anything for the point NancyLebovitz was raising.
I think people not being assaulted and killed by an angry crowd is good. Vigilantism is a sign of a deficient justice system and insufficient pacification of the population, thus poor governance. I’m happy at the reduction of lynching, but I’m unhappy at the increase of other indicators of depacification and deficient justice systems that seem to have grown worse in Western society.
As a side note this is still a disturbingly common phenomena of mob violence from Nigeria to Madagascar, not to mention Southern Asia and some Latin American countries. I’m also sadly quite unconvinced no lynchings occur in Western states for that matter.
Here is a recent example.
That isn’t an argument amounting to right is right, since the left has its own version...see Chomskys manufactured consent.
What’s more,manufactured consent existed in societies that didn’t run on consent., in the form of actual sermons preached in actual churches and actual cathdrals.
My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:
Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain’s “Strive/survive” theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent factory, this surplus has also been directed towards orthogonal or outright maladaptive goals (in cyclical views of history, Decadence itself).
We no longer have to rationalise the privations of older, poorer societies. This is the sense in which linear moral progress is the most genuine (c/f CEV).
The interaction between the dynamics of holier-than-thou moralising and the anticipatory experience of no longer having to rationalise poverty is complicated. Examination of history reveals the drive for levelling and equalisation to be omnipresent, if not consistently exploitable.
Word counts: Yvain 16k; Land 28k; Moldbug 120k.
I counted Moldbug from this complete copy.
Useful info, thank you! This reinforces my primary recommendation of Land.