If you care about culture, (traditional) values and intact families, then democracy is empirically very bad (far from being “the worst form of government, except for all the others” it would place among the very worst). The question is then how you come to care about these things. For me it proceeded negatively: from a critical reading of political philosophy, I came to believe that the foundations of liberalism are incoherent; that what liberalism sees as constraints on individual freedom are nothing of the sort. That many of the norms, values and practices that make up a traditional society are non-voluntary—in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to speak of people assenting or not assenting to them—and therefore cannot be seen as constraints on human freedom at all; we’re born into them, they form part of our identity and they provide the context (even possibility) of our choices.
So I came to believe that the Enlightenment was the result of this kind of philosophical error and that it is no different from the kinds of philosophical error that bring people to, say, question whether an objective reality exists. The heady feeling one gets from an argument that leads to an absurd conclusion, in this case, led to the false belief that traditional society consisted of arbitrary constraints on human freedom and, eventually, to pointless reforms and revolutions. Consider this: If somebody proposes a model of the physical world and it’s incorrect, they have to change the model. But if somebody proposes a model of society and it’s incorrect, they can insist on reorganising society to fit the model. This is essentially what has been happening for the last several hundred years. If I said this is what happened with communism—that Marx developed a flawed model and Lenin tried to fit society to that flawed model—most people would probably accept that. Is it so hard to believe the same kind of process led to our own political order and continues to inform it?
On reflection, the contemporary Western view of politics, which I once accepted without question, appears to be utterly absurd. It has no choice but to see the history of humanity as one of oppression and this oppression is becoming increasingly bizarre. It was, perhaps, easy to believe that religion was inherently oppressive, at least given an overly literal interpretation of religion, or to believe that monarchy was oppressive, but now one must believe that the family was oppressive, that gender roles were oppressive, that sexual morality was oppressive, that even having a gender was oppressive, that monogamy was oppressive, etc. The list is ever expanding, the revisionist history gets more absurd by the day. Moreover, most people miss the fact that we’re talking about traditional society being inherently oppressive. There were, of course, bad monarchs, bad religious leaders, bad family circumstances, etc, but the liberal claim is that it was all bad, all the time (although it is apparently unnecessary that anyone noticed, since everyone was also ignorant). This is quite an extraordinary claim.
In my view, none of these things were oppressive. You’re born into a society, it has its pre-existing norms, values, roles and practices. You’re born into a set of pre-existing relationships and roles. These are not constraints, they’re part of your identity, they’re part of the enabling context in which you have and make choices. This includes things like how leaders are nominated, the roles of men and women, children and parents, etc. That you can imagine different ways of doing things does not imply that you are being deprived of a choice. Moreover, they are in many respects immutable. They continue to exist whether we understand them or misunderstand them and try to rebel against them. Thus, there is just no such thing as a liberal society. What we have instead is a traditional society where there are, for example, arbitrary constraints on leaders (constitutional “checks and balances”, elections, etc) that do little more than to ensure that we have incompetent leaders. We have family law and a welfare system that is bad for families. We encourage men to be bad fathers and husbands and women to be bad mothers and wives. We encourage children to rebel against their parents. So what we’re doing, in fact, is not ‘reform’ but just being bad in our roles as parents, spouses, leaders, lawmakers, etc, because we have a bad model of how society works that lead us to mistake incompetence, negligence and immorality for freedom.
If I said this is what happened with communism—that Marx developed a flawed model and Lenin tried to fit society to that flawed model—most people would probably accept that
It’s not just society. It’s more like he looked at Marx’s (flawed, yes) model, thought “that’s cool and all, but I want to feed the Tsar his yarbles now”, and hit it with a wrench until it gave him some half-assed philosophical justification for starting a revolution (and later for running a totalitarian state, though not as totalitarian as Stalin would make it).
See, orthodox Marxism isn’t really a blueprint for revolution. Insofar as it’s even a call to revolution, it’s saying—to the industrial workers of the entire world, and that’s important—that revolution is inevitable, it’s going to happen anyway, the only thing holding it back from happening is self-delusion. Instead, it’s better understood as a future history: it purports to lay out the historical forces that drive large-scale social changes and to predict what the next one’s going to look like.
Now, there are a number of ways you could challenge that in light of the real history that’s happened in the century and a half since Marx wrote. But Lenin had bigger problems than that. By Marx’s lights, Russia in 1917 wasn’t ready for a communist revolution: it was at the time the least industrialized major European country (relative to its population), with most of the economy still running on a semi-feudal agrarian system. Its serfs had been emancipated less than a century before. Worse, the rest of the world looked like it wasn’t going to be getting on the revolution train anytime soon. This ran completely counter to Marx’s future history, but Lenin, in essence, said “fuck it, we’ll do it anyway”.
Right, but it’s that sort of transition from the descriptive and the prescriptive that I’m highlighting. In liberal philosophy the issue is much more subtle, but there has been a constant interchange between the descriptive and the prescriptive. So if you look at society as sovereign individuals engaged in contractual relationships with one another, that’s essentially descriptive. It was intended to be descriptive. But then your model for why individuals give up some of their rights to have a state doesn’t look right and the answer to that isn’t to change the model but to make a prescriptive assertion: the state should be more representative of our interests. So you’ve gone from descriptive to prescriptive.
Likewise, with feminism: under a model that emphasises individuals in voluntary relationships, women look oppressed, so you derive the prescriptive conclusion that we should alter family law, etc. Under the traditional family-oriented model of society, it’s not even clear why anyone but the head of a household should vote, since people aren’t ‘sovereign’ individuals, they’re members of an institution—the family—and they play different roles within it, and the head of the household is its representative in society. From this shift to an individualist view you can derive much of the rest of modern liberal/progressive prescriptivism. It problematises the family—the status of women and children, the fairness of inheritance (wealth, status and genetics), familial obligations, etc—and it problematises the institutions of the state.
It’s a view of people magically appearing in the world fully formed, with their own interests, and they’re shocked to learn that they have parents, that they have roles in society, that society has existed long before they were born and has its own traditions, values, etc. So they’re encouraged to stomp their feet and say, “Why wasn’t I consulted about any of this?”
IMHO the issue is that this kind of individualism in Western society, for wealthy white males, was created really long ago. Roughly late 18th century. So anyone without an explicit interest in history, esp. from the angle of questioning the whole modern epoch, will see this individualism already as an old, established, traditional stuff, i.e. pretty much conservative stuff. In the West, pretty much every step of progressivism, leftism or liberalism since that was largely about expanding it to other people, poor white males, non whites, women etc.
So you have the problem here that once one group of individuals got it, it is hard to defend why others should not. The issue is with having the first group have it, but that is a really old story, and so old that it looks downright conservative.
You are not being entirely fair to Lenin, he wrote a fair amount. They call it “Marxism/Leninism” for a reason. Lenin was a lot of things, but he was not a stupid man.
You forget the Marxist idea of morality where there’s a moral imperative to do things that make history progress. Starting an inevitable revolution is such a thing.
This is all fine, but let’s move one level higher. What is the reason that almost everybody who reasoned like this was religious? Why does it seem like this kind of thinking is fairly impossible to defend without some reference to religion e.g. https://bonald.wordpress.com/the-conservative-vision-of-authority/ ?
(I am assuming we all agree here that ideas that cannot be defended on a secular ground are not worth defending)
Basically it sounds a lot like the conflict between human volition vs. actual happiness or good lives. A lot of modern liberalism reduces to “if you get what you personally want, you will be happy / OK”. So it is all about moving people from inborn roles to roles they want and choose. And a lot of religious thought is all about trying to convince people to reduce or give up their self-centered volition, desires, viewpoints, whatevers, basically to convince them to find happiness through other means than following their own wills.
I am aware of this because I practiced a lot of Buddhism which uniquely focuses on it, on how the ego, the will, volition, vanity, is the source of suffering itself. Much of Christianity sounds like a half-assed version of a Buddhist ego reduction therapy—when people get down on their knees and pray “your will be done” it essentially means “NOT my will be done, I will train by brain to accept that the world does not revolve around me”. The core idea in Buddhism, Christianity etc. is that there is true happiness to be found in surrendering your will.
THIS is the psychological basis from which we can understand the difference between traditional and modern societies. This is why reactionaries are religious, mostly.
The question is, just why cannot we justify this non-egocentric psychology on a scientific basis? Why do we need religion for this? Why cannot we figure it out naturalistically?
And if we cannot figure it out naturalistically, scientifically, isn’t it likely this is at some level wrong?
That many of the norms, values and practices that make up a traditional society are non-voluntary—in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to speak of people assenting or not assenting to them—and therefore cannot be seen as constraints on human freedom at all
......even by the individuals affected? If they tell y8u that they hate being forced into a particular role, you’re going to tell them that their feelings don’t matter, because you can prove logically that it is non voluntary, and that you can’t rebel against your identity?
There were, of course, bad monarchs, bad religious leaders, bad family circumstances, etc, but the liberal claim is that it was all bad, all the time (although it is apparently unnecessary that anyone noticed, since everyone was also ignorant).
It’s worth noting both that the oppressed were often denied a voice, in the sense of leaving a written record, as part of their oppression....and that there is plenty of evidence of dissent , in the form of popular revolt.
It’s also worth noting the difference between far left and classically liberal versions of this argument. (A perennial problem with Moldbug is the way he conflates progressivism qua the leftmost 10% of the spectrum with progressivism qua the leftmost 90%). The classical liberal does not regard traditional societies as morally wrong so much as instrumentally wrong, unsuited to economic and technological progress. Where you have a traditional, hierarchical society, the rulers of that society are under a set of incentives to defend their relative position, which is to say they are not incentivised to promote innovation. On the contrary, even technological developments can sunset them, as the English aristocracy was disrupted by the Industrial revolution.
Liberal democracies, by contrast, are so good at reaping the benefits of progress that, they are able attract queues of would be immigrants from more traditional societies.
If they tell y8u that they hate being forced into a particular role, you’re going to tell them that their feelings don’t matter, because you can prove logically that it is non voluntary, and that you can’t rebel against your identity?
Suppose someone hates being short. Being short is mostly involuntary; the primary thing that is voluntary is how they react to being short. Historically, philosophical advice has been of the variety “deal with it; it’s better to be short and untroubled than short and troubled.” Being short and identifying as being tall, insisting on being tall, or resenting not being tall, are all opposed to reality.
The best liberal response, I think, is to note that “being short” has both a physical reality (how long your body is) and a social reality (how others react to the length of your body), and that the social reality is mutable. In a modern, industralized society, the economic use of height is very narrow, and we could adjust the social reality to match the current physical reality.
The worst liberal response, I think, is to claim that “being short” is just a social reality, that the social reality is completely mutable, and that short people have been oppressed by tall people, and we need to work against that oppression.
Liberal democracies, by contrast, are so good at reaping the benefits of progress that, they are able attract queues of would be immigrants from more traditional societies.
I am under the impression that, proportional to the relevant populations, there are more American expats in Singapore than Singaporean expats in America. (There might actually be more in absolute numbers, but I’m having difficulty getting that number.)
The compromise approach, the best liberal morality, is a nice theoretical solution, but that him does it work in practice? In practice, people have a right, or they don’t.
I am under the impression that, proportional to the relevant populations, there are more American expats in Singapore than Singaporean expats in American.
The important point would be whether they are there for so many years, or whether they have torn up their passports.
I had previously thought of the term neoreactionary as just an insult, as similar to any view as “asshole” is to any anatomy. Now I think it is at least in the top half of similar ideologies.
Thank you for the answer and thanks to the original poster for the question.
If you care about culture, (traditional) values and intact families, then democracy is empirically very bad (far from being “the worst form of government, except for all the others” it would place among the very worst). The question is then how you come to care about these things. For me it proceeded negatively: from a critical reading of political philosophy, I came to believe that the foundations of liberalism are incoherent; that what liberalism sees as constraints on individual freedom are nothing of the sort. That many of the norms, values and practices that make up a traditional society are non-voluntary—in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to speak of people assenting or not assenting to them—and therefore cannot be seen as constraints on human freedom at all; we’re born into them, they form part of our identity and they provide the context (even possibility) of our choices.
So I came to believe that the Enlightenment was the result of this kind of philosophical error and that it is no different from the kinds of philosophical error that bring people to, say, question whether an objective reality exists. The heady feeling one gets from an argument that leads to an absurd conclusion, in this case, led to the false belief that traditional society consisted of arbitrary constraints on human freedom and, eventually, to pointless reforms and revolutions. Consider this: If somebody proposes a model of the physical world and it’s incorrect, they have to change the model. But if somebody proposes a model of society and it’s incorrect, they can insist on reorganising society to fit the model. This is essentially what has been happening for the last several hundred years. If I said this is what happened with communism—that Marx developed a flawed model and Lenin tried to fit society to that flawed model—most people would probably accept that. Is it so hard to believe the same kind of process led to our own political order and continues to inform it?
On reflection, the contemporary Western view of politics, which I once accepted without question, appears to be utterly absurd. It has no choice but to see the history of humanity as one of oppression and this oppression is becoming increasingly bizarre. It was, perhaps, easy to believe that religion was inherently oppressive, at least given an overly literal interpretation of religion, or to believe that monarchy was oppressive, but now one must believe that the family was oppressive, that gender roles were oppressive, that sexual morality was oppressive, that even having a gender was oppressive, that monogamy was oppressive, etc. The list is ever expanding, the revisionist history gets more absurd by the day. Moreover, most people miss the fact that we’re talking about traditional society being inherently oppressive. There were, of course, bad monarchs, bad religious leaders, bad family circumstances, etc, but the liberal claim is that it was all bad, all the time (although it is apparently unnecessary that anyone noticed, since everyone was also ignorant). This is quite an extraordinary claim.
In my view, none of these things were oppressive. You’re born into a society, it has its pre-existing norms, values, roles and practices. You’re born into a set of pre-existing relationships and roles. These are not constraints, they’re part of your identity, they’re part of the enabling context in which you have and make choices. This includes things like how leaders are nominated, the roles of men and women, children and parents, etc. That you can imagine different ways of doing things does not imply that you are being deprived of a choice. Moreover, they are in many respects immutable. They continue to exist whether we understand them or misunderstand them and try to rebel against them. Thus, there is just no such thing as a liberal society. What we have instead is a traditional society where there are, for example, arbitrary constraints on leaders (constitutional “checks and balances”, elections, etc) that do little more than to ensure that we have incompetent leaders. We have family law and a welfare system that is bad for families. We encourage men to be bad fathers and husbands and women to be bad mothers and wives. We encourage children to rebel against their parents. So what we’re doing, in fact, is not ‘reform’ but just being bad in our roles as parents, spouses, leaders, lawmakers, etc, because we have a bad model of how society works that lead us to mistake incompetence, negligence and immorality for freedom.
It’s not just society. It’s more like he looked at Marx’s (flawed, yes) model, thought “that’s cool and all, but I want to feed the Tsar his yarbles now”, and hit it with a wrench until it gave him some half-assed philosophical justification for starting a revolution (and later for running a totalitarian state, though not as totalitarian as Stalin would make it).
See, orthodox Marxism isn’t really a blueprint for revolution. Insofar as it’s even a call to revolution, it’s saying—to the industrial workers of the entire world, and that’s important—that revolution is inevitable, it’s going to happen anyway, the only thing holding it back from happening is self-delusion. Instead, it’s better understood as a future history: it purports to lay out the historical forces that drive large-scale social changes and to predict what the next one’s going to look like.
Now, there are a number of ways you could challenge that in light of the real history that’s happened in the century and a half since Marx wrote. But Lenin had bigger problems than that. By Marx’s lights, Russia in 1917 wasn’t ready for a communist revolution: it was at the time the least industrialized major European country (relative to its population), with most of the economy still running on a semi-feudal agrarian system. Its serfs had been emancipated less than a century before. Worse, the rest of the world looked like it wasn’t going to be getting on the revolution train anytime soon. This ran completely counter to Marx’s future history, but Lenin, in essence, said “fuck it, we’ll do it anyway”.
Right, but it’s that sort of transition from the descriptive and the prescriptive that I’m highlighting. In liberal philosophy the issue is much more subtle, but there has been a constant interchange between the descriptive and the prescriptive. So if you look at society as sovereign individuals engaged in contractual relationships with one another, that’s essentially descriptive. It was intended to be descriptive. But then your model for why individuals give up some of their rights to have a state doesn’t look right and the answer to that isn’t to change the model but to make a prescriptive assertion: the state should be more representative of our interests. So you’ve gone from descriptive to prescriptive.
Likewise, with feminism: under a model that emphasises individuals in voluntary relationships, women look oppressed, so you derive the prescriptive conclusion that we should alter family law, etc. Under the traditional family-oriented model of society, it’s not even clear why anyone but the head of a household should vote, since people aren’t ‘sovereign’ individuals, they’re members of an institution—the family—and they play different roles within it, and the head of the household is its representative in society. From this shift to an individualist view you can derive much of the rest of modern liberal/progressive prescriptivism. It problematises the family—the status of women and children, the fairness of inheritance (wealth, status and genetics), familial obligations, etc—and it problematises the institutions of the state.
It’s a view of people magically appearing in the world fully formed, with their own interests, and they’re shocked to learn that they have parents, that they have roles in society, that society has existed long before they were born and has its own traditions, values, etc. So they’re encouraged to stomp their feet and say, “Why wasn’t I consulted about any of this?”
Can I leave society If I don’t like it? Can I free myself from it’s constraints and take advantage of it as an outsider?
If not, why not?
IMHO the issue is that this kind of individualism in Western society, for wealthy white males, was created really long ago. Roughly late 18th century. So anyone without an explicit interest in history, esp. from the angle of questioning the whole modern epoch, will see this individualism already as an old, established, traditional stuff, i.e. pretty much conservative stuff. In the West, pretty much every step of progressivism, leftism or liberalism since that was largely about expanding it to other people, poor white males, non whites, women etc.
So you have the problem here that once one group of individuals got it, it is hard to defend why others should not. The issue is with having the first group have it, but that is a really old story, and so old that it looks downright conservative.
You are not being entirely fair to Lenin, he wrote a fair amount. They call it “Marxism/Leninism” for a reason. Lenin was a lot of things, but he was not a stupid man.
You forget the Marxist idea of morality where there’s a moral imperative to do things that make history progress. Starting an inevitable revolution is such a thing.
This is all fine, but let’s move one level higher. What is the reason that almost everybody who reasoned like this was religious? Why does it seem like this kind of thinking is fairly impossible to defend without some reference to religion e.g. https://bonald.wordpress.com/the-conservative-vision-of-authority/ ?
(I am assuming we all agree here that ideas that cannot be defended on a secular ground are not worth defending)
Basically it sounds a lot like the conflict between human volition vs. actual happiness or good lives. A lot of modern liberalism reduces to “if you get what you personally want, you will be happy / OK”. So it is all about moving people from inborn roles to roles they want and choose. And a lot of religious thought is all about trying to convince people to reduce or give up their self-centered volition, desires, viewpoints, whatevers, basically to convince them to find happiness through other means than following their own wills.
I am aware of this because I practiced a lot of Buddhism which uniquely focuses on it, on how the ego, the will, volition, vanity, is the source of suffering itself. Much of Christianity sounds like a half-assed version of a Buddhist ego reduction therapy—when people get down on their knees and pray “your will be done” it essentially means “NOT my will be done, I will train by brain to accept that the world does not revolve around me”. The core idea in Buddhism, Christianity etc. is that there is true happiness to be found in surrendering your will.
THIS is the psychological basis from which we can understand the difference between traditional and modern societies. This is why reactionaries are religious, mostly.
The question is, just why cannot we justify this non-egocentric psychology on a scientific basis? Why do we need religion for this? Why cannot we figure it out naturalistically?
And if we cannot figure it out naturalistically, scientifically, isn’t it likely this is at some level wrong?
......even by the individuals affected? If they tell y8u that they hate being forced into a particular role, you’re going to tell them that their feelings don’t matter, because you can prove logically that it is non voluntary, and that you can’t rebel against your identity?
It’s worth noting both that the oppressed were often denied a voice, in the sense of leaving a written record, as part of their oppression....and that there is plenty of evidence of dissent , in the form of popular revolt.
It’s also worth noting the difference between far left and classically liberal versions of this argument. (A perennial problem with Moldbug is the way he conflates progressivism qua the leftmost 10% of the spectrum with progressivism qua the leftmost 90%). The classical liberal does not regard traditional societies as morally wrong so much as instrumentally wrong, unsuited to economic and technological progress. Where you have a traditional, hierarchical society, the rulers of that society are under a set of incentives to defend their relative position, which is to say they are not incentivised to promote innovation. On the contrary, even technological developments can sunset them, as the English aristocracy was disrupted by the Industrial revolution.
Liberal democracies, by contrast, are so good at reaping the benefits of progress that, they are able attract queues of would be immigrants from more traditional societies.
Suppose someone hates being short. Being short is mostly involuntary; the primary thing that is voluntary is how they react to being short. Historically, philosophical advice has been of the variety “deal with it; it’s better to be short and untroubled than short and troubled.” Being short and identifying as being tall, insisting on being tall, or resenting not being tall, are all opposed to reality.
The best liberal response, I think, is to note that “being short” has both a physical reality (how long your body is) and a social reality (how others react to the length of your body), and that the social reality is mutable. In a modern, industralized society, the economic use of height is very narrow, and we could adjust the social reality to match the current physical reality.
The worst liberal response, I think, is to claim that “being short” is just a social reality, that the social reality is completely mutable, and that short people have been oppressed by tall people, and we need to work against that oppression.
I am under the impression that, proportional to the relevant populations, there are more American expats in Singapore than Singaporean expats in America. (There might actually be more in absolute numbers, but I’m having difficulty getting that number.)
The compromise approach, the best liberal morality, is a nice theoretical solution, but that him does it work in practice? In practice, people have a right, or they don’t.
The important point would be whether they are there for so many years, or whether they have torn up their passports.
Wow. This makes a lot of sense.
I had previously thought of the term neoreactionary as just an insult, as similar to any view as “asshole” is to any anatomy. Now I think it is at least in the top half of similar ideologies.
Thank you for the answer and thanks to the original poster for the question.