Why couldn’t post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
They could, and there’s the are scenarios in the premise where they likely will, but neoreaction isn’t just a program of political philosophy for post-democracy. There seems to be much rhetoric and general memetic clustering in NRX around the idea that progressivism will fail because it has outstretched itself trying to re-engineer human nature with cultural conditioning, and that social orders which comply more with fundamentally unchanging elements of human nature are a good political attack against progressivism. The reactionary commenters at SSC seem to like narratives about long-term human decline which tend to rely on nothing interesting happening with human reproduction in many generations from now on.
With technology that can re-engineer human nature, you could have brand new chances to go at the progressive wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-people-were-more-like-this stuff. Then you’d have to start thinking which bits of traditional values are actually good for a general population of agents, and which are just time-evolved kludges around previously unfixable human systematic suckiness. I see a divide opening up here between people who value the idea of a reactionary society of baseline humans in itself, and people who just go for whatever gets things done effectively. Though I guess NRX already has formed subcultural divides.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There’s no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. “Whatever gets things done effectively” is presently defined as “whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans”.
The first priority is the here and now, but people also like to talk about what they expect to see in the next 30 or 100 years. A part of what makes an ideological movement run is a vision of the future, and people seem quite capable of getting into arguments and schisms about the principles of those.
They could, and there’s the are scenarios in the premise where they likely will, but neoreaction isn’t just a program of political philosophy for post-democracy. There seems to be much rhetoric and general memetic clustering in NRX around the idea that progressivism will fail because it has outstretched itself trying to re-engineer human nature with cultural conditioning, and that social orders which comply more with fundamentally unchanging elements of human nature are a good political attack against progressivism. The reactionary commenters at SSC seem to like narratives about long-term human decline which tend to rely on nothing interesting happening with human reproduction in many generations from now on.
With technology that can re-engineer human nature, you could have brand new chances to go at the progressive wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-people-were-more-like-this stuff. Then you’d have to start thinking which bits of traditional values are actually good for a general population of agents, and which are just time-evolved kludges around previously unfixable human systematic suckiness. I see a divide opening up here between people who value the idea of a reactionary society of baseline humans in itself, and people who just go for whatever gets things done effectively. Though I guess NRX already has formed subcultural divides.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There’s no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. “Whatever gets things done effectively” is presently defined as “whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans”.
The first priority is the here and now, but people also like to talk about what they expect to see in the next 30 or 100 years. A part of what makes an ideological movement run is a vision of the future, and people seem quite capable of getting into arguments and schisms about the principles of those.