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.
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?