Naturally, Moldbug has something to say on this, at least for those with libertarian sympathies:
Perhaps the best and most succinct statement of the reactionary philosophy of government—especially considering the context—was this one:
Truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you their liberty and freedom consists of having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, sir, that is nothing pertaining to them.
Where the context he was referring to was:
KING CHARLS HIS SPEECH
Made upon the SCAFFOLD At Whitehall-Gate,
Immediately before his Execution, On Tuesday the 30 of Ian. 1648
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:
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
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).
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 NRx providing a clear difference between monarchy and modern demotic dictatorship
I don’t see Moldbug as interested in demotic dictatorship. The lack of support in the “demos” is the problem.
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 think the premise is that they don’t have the numbers, and are unlikely to get them.
because we as a people became more depraved and not worthy for it e.g. having too much envy.
Envy and lust for power. The Master Slave impulse is a problem on both sides.
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)
I don’t see Moldbug as interested in demotic dictatorship. The lack of support in the “demos” is the problem.
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?
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.
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.
We have this, in practice (the rich buy votes).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That doesn’t explain the difference between a monarch and a dictator, as requested.
The question was specifically about demotic dictatorships. As for dictators in general, that depends on how the dictator legitimizes his rule.
The dictator doesn’t need to manufacture assent, they rather need to quash dissent...as would a monarch, as many did.
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.
The question was specifically about demotic dictatorships.
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,
Monarchs had a lot less dissent to quash. For example, the dress code at Versailles required all men to carry swords.
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,
“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.
Buying votes is illegal.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Scarier then the large participation of students in proto-communist and actual communist movements?
Around the world, youth radicalism was visible in 1908, visible in 1848 and so on.
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.
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 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.
Scarier then the large participation of students in proto-communist and actual communist movements?
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.
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.
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.
Jim’s proposed solution to this problem is based on restoration England:
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.
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.
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.
What is even the point of proposing anything that was vulnerable to getting torn down?
Everything is vulnerable to being torn down. The question is how vulnerable, and how well it works in the mean time.
Maybe if you don’t value stability as much as I do… I find democracy stable
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.
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.
Um, those changes are not politics independent. These changes are being caused by various political forces.
Politics is 100% culture-reducible, culture determines even what political concepts mean.
A number of libertarian outlets are stressing withdrawal. Just let politics go and focus more on evading state power and exercising the freedom you have left than on trying to affect the political process.
Moldbug is in some ways the extreme version of that—stop pretenses of freedom and consent and formally recognize your subjection, so that the rulers have less interest in doing idiotic and destructive things to maintain their power. No voting, just obedience. I don’t think that works, but that seems to be his logic.
If I had, you’d still be in the lead for evidence free points.
Your replies to me have been two evidence free meta assertions about me. Why do you find me such a fascinating topic of discussion?
But in actual fact, I took the opportunity of your information free comment to elaborate on my original theme, sharing my observations about libertarian outlets and my analysis of Moldbug’s position.
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).
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?
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.
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?
Is it supposed to ’be a fact that you are more likely to be allowed to keep yourself, under a monarchy or rightist dictatorship?
Realise it isn’t increasing subjection, outside your imagination.
Denial? Yeah, that’s an option.
A number of libertarian outlets are stressing withdrawal. Just let politics go and focus more on evading state power and exercising the freedom you have left than on trying to affect the political process.
Moldbug is in some ways the extreme version of that—stop pretenses of freedom and consent and formally recognize your subjection, so that the rulers have less interest in doing idiotic and destructive things to maintain their power. No voting, just obedience. I don’t think that works, but that seems to be his logic.
You are just repeating the same evidence free point.
If I had, you’d still be in the lead for evidence free points.
Your replies to me have been two evidence free meta assertions about me. Why do you find me such a fascinating topic of discussion?
But in actual fact, I took the opportunity of your information free comment to elaborate on my original theme, sharing my observations about libertarian outlets and my analysis of Moldbug’s position.