I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed this topic because it introduced me to new concepts. When I clicked on this discussion I hadn’t a clue what Neo-Reactionaries were. I knew what a political reactionary is but I hadn’t a clue about this particular movement.
The thing that I have found fascinating is the fundamental concept of the movement (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that they want a way out. That the current system is horribly flawed, eventually doomed and that they want to strike a new deal that would fix things once and for all. The recognition is that even if abolished governments will again form. As such they hope to devise a government that is no longer a sham, and structurally will have finally the best interest of the people at its heart instead of selfishness.
What fascinates me about this is some of the discussions about AGI here. Plenty of people apparently feel that eventually agi will rule over us. They essentially are interested in building “a better tyrant.” I don’t know, give me a thumbs down on this comment if you want but I found the parallel interesting. Of course many ideologies are more alike then people care to admit. For example communism is supposed to be economic and social power sharing and to ensure at the very least everyone’s material needs are met. Capitalism and the corporate structure actually aim for the same thing.
Exit starts to get close to libertarian/anarchic schools of thought (e.g. seasteading is generally thought of as ancap), which is almost diametrically opposed to We Want a King.
Hmm. Well, the monarchists think they are going to get some Vetinari style ruler who lets business faire, although that hasn’t been common historically.
It looks like I further need to distinguish between We Want Exit, and Everyone has a Right to Exit. The latter fads up to World Government, the former falls apart over biological sustainability.
It looks like I further need to distinguish between We Want Exit, and Everyone has a Right to Exit. The latter fads up to World Government, the former falls apart over biological sustainability.
I don’t understand, surely “Everyone has a Right to Exit” is the opposite to world government? And why is “We Want Exit” unsustainable?
Well, seasteading is certainly not particularly scalable. But while its mostly male geeks now, who knows what the demographics would look like when it gets going?
As for who guarantees the right, well, most countries allow their citizens to emigrate if they want.
As such they hope to devise a government that is no longer a sham, and structurally will have finally the best interest of the people at its heart instead of selfishness.
Except that they somehow believe no democracy can ever accomplish this goal.
Since you LinkedIn stalked me and we do look to be associated with common organizations now and in the future, I’m going to restrain my emotions and try to discuss this issue. Instead of, you know, just strangling you through my monitor.
“For the next election!” is obviously a problem with current forms of democratic government. But I do think that if you were honestly trying to address that issue for the good of all, you would at least mention such proposals as commons trusts, if only to argue against them—but they would be in your hypothesis space in the first place. Instead, “we have a problem in current-day democracy, especially American democracy” is taken as justification for, “It’s time for a radical leap back to 1788 France” and other such neoreactionary positions.
To me, this stinks of motivated cognition. What you want is the absolute monarchy, or the seasteading, or the corporatized city-states, or Lord of the Rings, or something; the flaws in democracy are but a justification, not a reason. If you want to have honest discussions about these sorts of things, you can ask that the usual “Holy crap that guy is evil!” reactions be turned-off temporarily (I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum from you, so I know exactly what it’s like to get that reaction upon mentioning my politics in polite conversation, especially in the damn-dirty-liberal-capitalist USA), and then come out and explain your real motivations. Until you admit what your real goal is, nobody can do anything but try to clear away the rhetorical smoke your faction is somewhat rudely throwing into the air.
Maybe you have fundamentally decent and honest intentions. Maybe you have fundamentally malevolent intentions but simply aren’t configured to perceive right and wrong like the rest of us. But if you keep stinking everything up with obscurantist ranting about how everyone else besides you is both malevolent and insane, others will continue treating your ideological faction as logically rude.
But I do think that if you were honestly trying to address that issue for the good of all, you would at least mention such proposals as commons trusts
Following your link, the description is high on left-wing buzzwords and light on actual details. I fail to see why either Michael or my self should waste our time with every crackpot proposal.
Ok, attempting the steelman their proposal it seems to amount to setting up a trust to be managed by a group omni-benevolet trustees. Problems like where these trustees are supposed to come from, how their omni-benevolence is to be maintained, or even the practical details of how the trust will operate are glossed over or given vague hand-wavy answers. Depending on how those questions are answered this trust might even resemble a neo-reactionary state with the aristocrats called “trustees” although there are hints that’s not the direction they’re going.
To me, this stinks of motivated cognition.
Lol, have you read the site you linked to? That’s a good example of motivated cognition. All the statements are of the form “in the trust [buzzword heavy good thing will happen]” with no explanation of what the causal mechanism leading to the thing happening will be. One gets the feeling that their thought process is “[good think] is good therefore in must happen”.
Following your link, the description is high on left-wing buzzwords and light on actual details. I fail to see why either Michael or my self should waste our time with every crackpot proposal.
Which is exactly the same thing I normally say to your crackpot proposals, but this time I decided to be nice and actually try talking to you. I won’t be so bothered again, since your entire post is basically “lol lefties” instead of actually answering the question as to why you lot seem to jump from “current-day American government is flawed” to “hurrah 18th-century monarchy!” with no distribution over possible solutions, or evidence, or search process in between.
Which rather confirms my hypothesis that it’s a case of motivated cognition, and you’re not worth engaging.
Ok, attempting the steelman their proposal it seems to amount to setting up a trust to be managed by a group omni-benevolet trustees. Problems like where these trustees are supposed to come from, how their omni-benevolence is to be maintained, or even the practical details of how the trust will operate are glossed over or given vague hand-wavy answers.
Not omnibenevolent: stop strawmanning. Accountable through the court system. When beneficiaries believe trustees are acting against their trust, they file suit, and an expert judge makes the actual decision based on the trust’s charter. Just like in all established trusts under current law, some of which are actually-existing commons trusts. Duh.
Lol, have you read the site you linked to?
I had actually wanted to link a Wikipedia page for the subject, but Google yielded none. Alas.
Eli, I found Scott Alexander’s steelmanning of the NRx critique to be an interesting, even persuassive critique of modern progressivism, having not been exposed to this movement prior to today. However I am also equally confused at the jump from “modern liberal democracies are flawed” to “restore the devine-right-of-kings!” I’ve always hated the quip “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” (we’ve yet tried), but I think it applies here.
Do you have a link you can provide which explains your own political philosophy, or something close to it? Since your comments here address exactly the concerns I had in reading NRx material, I’m curious to see where you are coming from.
Do you have a link you can provide which explains your own political philosophy, or something close to it?
Unfortunately, no, as my own views are by now a cocktail mixed from so many different original drinks that no one bottle or written recipe will yield the complete product.
I’ve always hated the quip “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” (we’ve yet tried), but I think it applies here.
What I would say in reply to this is:
A) Dissolve “democracy”, and not just in the philosophical sense, but in the sense that there have been many different kinds of actually existing democracies. Even within the deontological, arbitrary restriction, “ONLY DEMOCRACY EVER”, one can easily debate whether a mixed-member proportional Parliament performs better than a district-based bicameral Congress, or whether a pure Westminster system beats them both, or whether a Presidential system works better, or whatever. Particular institutional designs yield particular institutional behaviors, and generalizing across large categories of institutional designs requires large amounts of evidence.
B) Dissolve “democracy” in the philosophical sense, and ask: what are the terminal goals democracy serves? How much do we support those goals, and how much do current democratic systems suffer approximation error by forcing our terminal goals to fit inside the hypothesis space our actual institutions instantiate? For however much we do support those goals, why do we shape these particular institutions to serve those goals, and not other institutions? (Asking that last question in the form of “If states are democratic, why not workplaces?” is the core issue of democratic socialism, and I would indeed count myself a democratic socialist. But you get different answers and inferences if you ask about schools or churches, don’t you?)
C) Learn first to explicitly identify yourself with a political “tribe”, and next to consider political ideas individually, as questions of fact and value subject to investigation via epistemology and moral epistemology, rather than treating politics as “tribal”. Tribalism is the mind-killer: keeping your own explicit tribal identification in mind helps you notice when you’re being tribalist, and helps you distinguish your own tribe’s customs from universal truths—both aids to your political rationality. Lastly, yes, while politics has always been at least a little tribal, the particular form the tribes take varies through time and space: the division of society into a “blue tribe” and a “red tribe” (as described by Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex), for example, is peculiar to late-20th-century and early-21st-century USA. Other countries, and other times, have significantly different arrangements of tribes, so if you don’t learn to distinguish between ideas and tribes, you’ll not only fail at political rationality, you’ll give yourself severe culture shock.
D) Learn to check political ideas by looking at the actually-existing implementations. This works, since most political ideas are not actually perfectly new. Commons trusts exist, for example, the “movement” supporting them just wants to scale them up to cover all society’s important common assets rather than just tracts of land donated by philanthropists. Universal health care exists in many countries. Monarchy and dictatorship exist in many countries. Religious rule exists in many countries. Free tertiary education exists in some countries, and has previously existed in more. Non-free but subsidized tertiary education exists in many countries. Running the state off oil revenue has been tried in many countries. Centrally-planned economies have been tried in many countries. And it’s damn well easier to compare “Canadian health-care” to “American health-care” to “Chinese health-care”, all sampled in 2014, using fact-based policy studies, than to argue about the Visions of Human Life represented by each (the welfare state, the Company Man, and the Lone Fox, let’s say) -- which of course assumes consequentialism.
D1) This means that while the Soviet Union is not evidence for the total failure of “socialism” as I use the word, that’s because I define socialism as a larger category of possible economies that strictly contains centralized state planning—centralized state planning really was a total fucking failure. But there’s a rationality lesson here: in politics, all opponents of an idea will have their own definition for it, but the supporters will only have one. Learn to identify political terminology with the definitions advanced by supporters: these definitions might contain applause lights, but at least they pick out one single spot in policy-space or society-space (or, hopefully, a reasonably small subset of that space), while opponents don’t generally agree on which precise point in policy-space or society-space they’re actually attacking (because they’re all opposed for their own reasons and thus not coordinating with each-other).
D2) This also means that if neoreactionaries want to talk about monarchies that rule by religious right, or even about absolute monarchies in general, they do have to account for the behavior of the Arab monarchies today, for example. Or if they want to talk about religious rule in general (which very few do, to my knowledge, but hey, let’s go with it), they actually do have to account for the behavior of Da3esh/ISIS. Of course, they might do so by endorsing such regimes, just as some members of Western Communist Parties endorsed the Soviet Union—and this can happen by lack of knowledge, by failure of rationality, or by difference of goals.
E) Learn to notice when otherwise uninformed people are adopting political ideas as attire to gain status by joining a fashionable cause. Keep in mind that what constitutes “fashionable” depends on the joiner’s own place in society, not on your opinions about them. For some people, things you and I find low-status (certain clothes or haircuts) are, in fact, high-status. See Scott’s “Republicans are Douchebags” post for an example in a Western context: names that the American Red Tribe considers solid and respectable are viewed by the American Blue Tribe as “douchebag names”.
F) And finally, a heuristic that tends to immunize against certain failures of political rationality: if an argument does not base itself at all in facts external to itself or to the listener, but instead concentrates entirely on reinterpreting evidence, then it is probably either an argument about definitions, or sheer nonsense.
G) A further heuristic, usable on actual electioneering campaigns the world over: whenever someone says “values”, he is lying, and you should reach for your gun. The word “values” is the single most overused, drained, meaningless word in politics. It is a normative pronoun: it directs the listener to fill in warm fuzzy things here without concentrating the speaker and the listener on the same point in policy-space at all. All over the world, politicians routinely seek power on phrases like “I have values”, or “My opponent has no values”, or “our values” or “our $TRIBE values”, or “$APPLAUSE_LIGHT values”. Just cross those phrases and their entire containing sentences out with a big black marker, and then see what the speaker is actually saying. Sometimes, if you’re lucky (ie: voting for a Democrat), they’re saying absolutely nothing. Often, however, the word “values” means, “Good thing I’m here to tell you that you want this brand new oppressive/exploitative power elite, since you didn’t even know!”
H) As mentioned above, be very, very sure about what ethical framework you’re working within before having a political discussion. A consequentialist and a virtue-ethicist will often take completely different policy positions on, say, healthcare, and have absolutely nothing to talk about with each-other. The consequentialist can point out the utilitarian gains of universal single-payer care, and the virtue-ethicist can point out the incentive structure of corporate-sponsored group plans for promoting hard work and loyalty to employers, but they are fundamentally talking past each-other.
H1) Often, the core matter of politics is how to trade off between ethical ideals that are otherwise left talking past each-other, because society has finite material resources, human morals are very complex, and real policies have unintended consequences. For example, if we enact Victorian-style “poor laws” that penalize poverty for virtue-ethical reasons, the proponents of those laws need to be held accountable for accepting the unintended consequences of those laws, including higher crime rates, a less educated workforce, etc. (This is a broad point in favor of consequentialism: a rational consequentialist always actually considers consequences, intended and unintended, or he fails at consequentialism. A deontologist or virtue-ethicist, on the other hand, has license from his own ethics algorithm to not care about unintended consequences at all, provided the rules get followed or the rules or rulers are virtuous.)
I) Almost all policies can be enacted more effectively with state power, and almost no policies can “take over the world” by sheer superiority of the idea all by themselves. Demanding that a successful policy should “take over the world” by itself, as everyone naturally turns to the One True Path, is intellectually dishonest, and so is demanding that a policy should be maximally effective in miniature (when tried without the state, or in a small state, or in a weak state) before it is justified for the state to experiment with it. Remember: the overwhelming majority of journals and conferences in professional science still employ frequentist statistics rather than Bayesianism.
EDIT: Holy crap, this should probably be its own discussion post.
No, but I find the juxtaposition of Marxist universalist ideas being fervently communicated by those who enjoy the economic and social benefits of an ethnostate to be amusing.
Fair enough! And I would say we’ve got several social transformations to go through (ie: a general increase in the level of education and an improvement in methods of government) before we can actually abolish ethnostates.
(It should be stated: I’m a consequentialist, and an objective consequentialist. This means that when things accomplish net good (up to my understanding of “good”), I endorse them, even if they “smell bad”.)
So yeah. For here and now with actually-existing people in actually-existing societies, ethnostates seem to be our best heuristic for making democratic, egalitarian societies actually work, instead of degrading into a civil war between tribal clusters (which, I think, is precisely what you’re so afraid of). That doesn’t make them terminally valuable, but it does leave them instrumentally useful.
No one said ethnostates were terminally valuable, necessarily, but yeah. I wonder what the Tumblr contingent’s reaction to your last paragraph would be. You’re basically saying ethnos is so important that multicultural states fall apart, and that ethnostates are the best pragmatic form of government.
That’s not a historically or spatially universal “best”; it’s not optimal. It’s “the best we can do given the historical and geopolitical contingencies as they actually are right now.” I don’t think you even need transhumans or something to have non-ethnic states actually work, you just need to break out of the “Jihad vs McWorld” paradigm of geopolitics.
(Speaking of silly leftists, the man who wrote Jihad vs McWorld concentrated most of his ire on McWorld, since he was writing in the ’90s and did not think jihad would become a severe problem. I think we can both say, on this one: what an idiot!
But the bigger question is: if he implicitly supported racial and religious chauvinist movements against capitalist globalization, does that make him, and by implication the entire left-wing “antiglobalization” movement of the ’90s and 2000s, reactionary, or some other form of right-wing?
I would say, yes, at least in effect, in the same sense that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist”. You?)
Singapore is a step up from most countries, but I still wouldn’t want to live there—sure, it’s safe and not communist, but as far as I’ve heard, those are its only redeeming values. Since there are safe ethnostates that aren’t communist, that still looks like a superior model.
Me neither, but I think in general NRx likes Singapore—does it not?
Because they’re libertarian and from American cities.
Libertarianism leads them to fail to look beyond “safe and not communist”; being from American cities leads them to think that’s a high bar. Which it is for America, but America’s political situation is insane.
In general, ethnostates look like a Europe-specific phenomenon to me.
In addition to Japan and China, both Koreas and Mongolia.
(North Korea and Mongolia aren’t counterexamples; they were Communist puppet states.)
I am not sure what you are getting at, can you expand..?
@sarahdoingthing would be able to explain this better than I can, but Moldbug consistently ignores questions of social life, identity, and the rites.
Safe is preferable to unsafe, and not communist is preferable to communist—and the possibility of a social life is preferable to atomization, and a stable identity is preferable to anomie and lack of context, and so on.
Not only that, they also are a relatively recent phenomenon. The Austro-Hungarian Empire wasn’t an ethnostate either. AFAICT ethnic nationalism mostly dates back to Romanticism.
“The U.S. has numerous failures” is beyond dispute. “The failures of the U.S. are caused by its unique multicultural, multiracial, and multinational characteristics” is a lot harder to defend.
Yes, as it should, because unless you want to go into specifics there is no statement both true and general that you can make.
Note, though, that the “standard” view says “no failures of the US are caused by any characteristics of races and cultures” (with the possible exception of white men being just evil) :-/
I also don’t understand how pacifism is “objectively pro-fascist”.
Google the phrase. Orwell wrote an essay on the matter.
In the book, he uses Jihad as a stand-in for traditional values everywhere, not just Islamic Jihad.
No, as a matter of fact, he uses it as a word for a new style of increasingly irrational chauvinist movements, not for “traditional values” in any sense that an ordinary conservative would recognize.
Of course, if you’re willing to include Islamism in your term for neoreactionary traditional values… I’m willing to take this as further evidence that neoreaction is a terrible idea.
Islam is certainly not neoreactionary, because neoreactionary refers to the descendants of a certain circumscribed intellectual group that developed from Moldbug in the Bay Area.
Problems like where these trustees are supposed to come from, how their omni-benevolence is to be maintained, or even the practical details of how the trust will operate are glossed over or given vague hand-wavy answers.
There are real word examples, including such delights as the BBC and NHS.
A common, but shallow point. Thefallacy is equating democratic government with elected officials. Most democracies have second chambers , civil services and other added to lengthen time preference. Yes Minister is all about an elected pol being unable to budge the long term plans of his ministry.
Why do ancaps and ancaps even argue? The only way I can see anarcho communism being realised is via reform from contemporary society to increasingly libertarian then anarcho capitalist society. Then, potentially, but unlikely, a voluntarist society, then unlikely, but also potentially, an anarchocommunist society.
I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed this topic because it introduced me to new concepts. When I clicked on this discussion I hadn’t a clue what Neo-Reactionaries were. I knew what a political reactionary is but I hadn’t a clue about this particular movement.
The thing that I have found fascinating is the fundamental concept of the movement (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that they want a way out. That the current system is horribly flawed, eventually doomed and that they want to strike a new deal that would fix things once and for all. The recognition is that even if abolished governments will again form. As such they hope to devise a government that is no longer a sham, and structurally will have finally the best interest of the people at its heart instead of selfishness.
What fascinates me about this is some of the discussions about AGI here. Plenty of people apparently feel that eventually agi will rule over us. They essentially are interested in building “a better tyrant.” I don’t know, give me a thumbs down on this comment if you want but I found the parallel interesting. Of course many ideologies are more alike then people care to admit. For example communism is supposed to be economic and social power sharing and to ensure at the very least everyone’s material needs are met. Capitalism and the corporate structure actually aim for the same thing.
I tend to consider Exit and We Want a King as different theories.
Exit starts to get close to libertarian/anarchic schools of thought (e.g. seasteading is generally thought of as ancap), which is almost diametrically opposed to We Want a King.
Hmm. Well, the monarchists think they are going to get some Vetinari style ruler who lets business faire, although that hasn’t been common historically.
It looks like I further need to distinguish between We Want Exit, and Everyone has a Right to Exit. The latter fads up to World Government, the former falls apart over biological sustainability.
I don’t understand, surely “Everyone has a Right to Exit” is the opposite to world government? And why is “We Want Exit” unsustainable?
Who guarantees the right?
A bunch of mostly male geeks in a boat doesn’t look very sustainable to me.
Well, seasteading is certainly not particularly scalable. But while its mostly male geeks now, who knows what the demographics would look like when it gets going?
As for who guarantees the right, well, most countries allow their citizens to emigrate if they want.
Exactly. Which is why exit is actually about entry.
Except that they somehow believe no democracy can ever accomplish this goal.
Yes, because there are fundamentally high time preference incentives in democracy.
Since you LinkedIn stalked me and we do look to be associated with common organizations now and in the future, I’m going to restrain my emotions and try to discuss this issue. Instead of, you know, just strangling you through my monitor.
“For the next election!” is obviously a problem with current forms of democratic government. But I do think that if you were honestly trying to address that issue for the good of all, you would at least mention such proposals as commons trusts, if only to argue against them—but they would be in your hypothesis space in the first place. Instead, “we have a problem in current-day democracy, especially American democracy” is taken as justification for, “It’s time for a radical leap back to 1788 France” and other such neoreactionary positions.
To me, this stinks of motivated cognition. What you want is the absolute monarchy, or the seasteading, or the corporatized city-states, or Lord of the Rings, or something; the flaws in democracy are but a justification, not a reason. If you want to have honest discussions about these sorts of things, you can ask that the usual “Holy crap that guy is evil!” reactions be turned-off temporarily (I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum from you, so I know exactly what it’s like to get that reaction upon mentioning my politics in polite conversation, especially in the damn-dirty-liberal-capitalist USA), and then come out and explain your real motivations. Until you admit what your real goal is, nobody can do anything but try to clear away the rhetorical smoke your faction is somewhat rudely throwing into the air.
Maybe you have fundamentally decent and honest intentions. Maybe you have fundamentally malevolent intentions but simply aren’t configured to perceive right and wrong like the rest of us. But if you keep stinking everything up with obscurantist ranting about how everyone else besides you is both malevolent and insane, others will continue treating your ideological faction as logically rude.
Following your link, the description is high on left-wing buzzwords and light on actual details. I fail to see why either Michael or my self should waste our time with every crackpot proposal.
Ok, attempting the steelman their proposal it seems to amount to setting up a trust to be managed by a group omni-benevolet trustees. Problems like where these trustees are supposed to come from, how their omni-benevolence is to be maintained, or even the practical details of how the trust will operate are glossed over or given vague hand-wavy answers. Depending on how those questions are answered this trust might even resemble a neo-reactionary state with the aristocrats called “trustees” although there are hints that’s not the direction they’re going.
Lol, have you read the site you linked to? That’s a good example of motivated cognition. All the statements are of the form “in the trust [buzzword heavy good thing will happen]” with no explanation of what the causal mechanism leading to the thing happening will be. One gets the feeling that their thought process is “[good think] is good therefore in must happen”.
Which is exactly the same thing I normally say to your crackpot proposals, but this time I decided to be nice and actually try talking to you. I won’t be so bothered again, since your entire post is basically “lol lefties” instead of actually answering the question as to why you lot seem to jump from “current-day American government is flawed” to “hurrah 18th-century monarchy!” with no distribution over possible solutions, or evidence, or search process in between.
Which rather confirms my hypothesis that it’s a case of motivated cognition, and you’re not worth engaging.
Not omnibenevolent: stop strawmanning. Accountable through the court system. When beneficiaries believe trustees are acting against their trust, they file suit, and an expert judge makes the actual decision based on the trust’s charter. Just like in all established trusts under current law, some of which are actually-existing commons trusts. Duh.
I had actually wanted to link a Wikipedia page for the subject, but Google yielded none. Alas.
Eli, I found Scott Alexander’s steelmanning of the NRx critique to be an interesting, even persuassive critique of modern progressivism, having not been exposed to this movement prior to today. However I am also equally confused at the jump from “modern liberal democracies are flawed” to “restore the devine-right-of-kings!” I’ve always hated the quip “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” (we’ve yet tried), but I think it applies here.
Do you have a link you can provide which explains your own political philosophy, or something close to it? Since your comments here address exactly the concerns I had in reading NRx material, I’m curious to see where you are coming from.
Unfortunately, no, as my own views are by now a cocktail mixed from so many different original drinks that no one bottle or written recipe will yield the complete product.
What I would say in reply to this is:
A) Dissolve “democracy”, and not just in the philosophical sense, but in the sense that there have been many different kinds of actually existing democracies. Even within the deontological, arbitrary restriction, “ONLY DEMOCRACY EVER”, one can easily debate whether a mixed-member proportional Parliament performs better than a district-based bicameral Congress, or whether a pure Westminster system beats them both, or whether a Presidential system works better, or whatever. Particular institutional designs yield particular institutional behaviors, and generalizing across large categories of institutional designs requires large amounts of evidence.
B) Dissolve “democracy” in the philosophical sense, and ask: what are the terminal goals democracy serves? How much do we support those goals, and how much do current democratic systems suffer approximation error by forcing our terminal goals to fit inside the hypothesis space our actual institutions instantiate? For however much we do support those goals, why do we shape these particular institutions to serve those goals, and not other institutions? (Asking that last question in the form of “If states are democratic, why not workplaces?” is the core issue of democratic socialism, and I would indeed count myself a democratic socialist. But you get different answers and inferences if you ask about schools or churches, don’t you?)
C) Learn first to explicitly identify yourself with a political “tribe”, and next to consider political ideas individually, as questions of fact and value subject to investigation via epistemology and moral epistemology, rather than treating politics as “tribal”. Tribalism is the mind-killer: keeping your own explicit tribal identification in mind helps you notice when you’re being tribalist, and helps you distinguish your own tribe’s customs from universal truths—both aids to your political rationality. Lastly, yes, while politics has always been at least a little tribal, the particular form the tribes take varies through time and space: the division of society into a “blue tribe” and a “red tribe” (as described by Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex), for example, is peculiar to late-20th-century and early-21st-century USA. Other countries, and other times, have significantly different arrangements of tribes, so if you don’t learn to distinguish between ideas and tribes, you’ll not only fail at political rationality, you’ll give yourself severe culture shock.
D) Learn to check political ideas by looking at the actually-existing implementations. This works, since most political ideas are not actually perfectly new. Commons trusts exist, for example, the “movement” supporting them just wants to scale them up to cover all society’s important common assets rather than just tracts of land donated by philanthropists. Universal health care exists in many countries. Monarchy and dictatorship exist in many countries. Religious rule exists in many countries. Free tertiary education exists in some countries, and has previously existed in more. Non-free but subsidized tertiary education exists in many countries. Running the state off oil revenue has been tried in many countries. Centrally-planned economies have been tried in many countries. And it’s damn well easier to compare “Canadian health-care” to “American health-care” to “Chinese health-care”, all sampled in 2014, using fact-based policy studies, than to argue about the Visions of Human Life represented by each (the welfare state, the Company Man, and the Lone Fox, let’s say) -- which of course assumes consequentialism.
D1) This means that while the Soviet Union is not evidence for the total failure of “socialism” as I use the word, that’s because I define socialism as a larger category of possible economies that strictly contains centralized state planning—centralized state planning really was a total fucking failure. But there’s a rationality lesson here: in politics, all opponents of an idea will have their own definition for it, but the supporters will only have one. Learn to identify political terminology with the definitions advanced by supporters: these definitions might contain applause lights, but at least they pick out one single spot in policy-space or society-space (or, hopefully, a reasonably small subset of that space), while opponents don’t generally agree on which precise point in policy-space or society-space they’re actually attacking (because they’re all opposed for their own reasons and thus not coordinating with each-other).
D2) This also means that if neoreactionaries want to talk about monarchies that rule by religious right, or even about absolute monarchies in general, they do have to account for the behavior of the Arab monarchies today, for example. Or if they want to talk about religious rule in general (which very few do, to my knowledge, but hey, let’s go with it), they actually do have to account for the behavior of Da3esh/ISIS. Of course, they might do so by endorsing such regimes, just as some members of Western Communist Parties endorsed the Soviet Union—and this can happen by lack of knowledge, by failure of rationality, or by difference of goals.
E) Learn to notice when otherwise uninformed people are adopting political ideas as attire to gain status by joining a fashionable cause. Keep in mind that what constitutes “fashionable” depends on the joiner’s own place in society, not on your opinions about them. For some people, things you and I find low-status (certain clothes or haircuts) are, in fact, high-status. See Scott’s “Republicans are Douchebags” post for an example in a Western context: names that the American Red Tribe considers solid and respectable are viewed by the American Blue Tribe as “douchebag names”.
F) And finally, a heuristic that tends to immunize against certain failures of political rationality: if an argument does not base itself at all in facts external to itself or to the listener, but instead concentrates entirely on reinterpreting evidence, then it is probably either an argument about definitions, or sheer nonsense.
G) A further heuristic, usable on actual electioneering campaigns the world over: whenever someone says “values”, he is lying, and you should reach for your gun. The word “values” is the single most overused, drained, meaningless word in politics. It is a normative pronoun: it directs the listener to fill in warm fuzzy things here without concentrating the speaker and the listener on the same point in policy-space at all. All over the world, politicians routinely seek power on phrases like “I have values”, or “My opponent has no values”, or “our values” or “our $TRIBE values”, or “$APPLAUSE_LIGHT values”. Just cross those phrases and their entire containing sentences out with a big black marker, and then see what the speaker is actually saying. Sometimes, if you’re lucky (ie: voting for a Democrat), they’re saying absolutely nothing. Often, however, the word “values” means, “Good thing I’m here to tell you that you want this brand new oppressive/exploitative power elite, since you didn’t even know!”
H) As mentioned above, be very, very sure about what ethical framework you’re working within before having a political discussion. A consequentialist and a virtue-ethicist will often take completely different policy positions on, say, healthcare, and have absolutely nothing to talk about with each-other. The consequentialist can point out the utilitarian gains of universal single-payer care, and the virtue-ethicist can point out the incentive structure of corporate-sponsored group plans for promoting hard work and loyalty to employers, but they are fundamentally talking past each-other.
H1) Often, the core matter of politics is how to trade off between ethical ideals that are otherwise left talking past each-other, because society has finite material resources, human morals are very complex, and real policies have unintended consequences. For example, if we enact Victorian-style “poor laws” that penalize poverty for virtue-ethical reasons, the proponents of those laws need to be held accountable for accepting the unintended consequences of those laws, including higher crime rates, a less educated workforce, etc. (This is a broad point in favor of consequentialism: a rational consequentialist always actually considers consequences, intended and unintended, or he fails at consequentialism. A deontologist or virtue-ethicist, on the other hand, has license from his own ethics algorithm to not care about unintended consequences at all, provided the rules get followed or the rules or rulers are virtuous.)
I) Almost all policies can be enacted more effectively with state power, and almost no policies can “take over the world” by sheer superiority of the idea all by themselves. Demanding that a successful policy should “take over the world” by itself, as everyone naturally turns to the One True Path, is intellectually dishonest, and so is demanding that a policy should be maximally effective in miniature (when tried without the state, or in a small state, or in a weak state) before it is justified for the state to experiment with it. Remember: the overwhelming majority of journals and conferences in professional science still employ frequentist statistics rather than Bayesianism.
EDIT: Holy crap, this should probably be its own discussion post.
Yup.
Isn’t Israel an ethnonationalist state with a strong implicit hierarchy?
Ethnonationalist democratic state with a weak implicit hierarchy, actually. Did I ever claim present-day Israel is morally optimal?
No, but I find the juxtaposition of Marxist universalist ideas being fervently communicated by those who enjoy the economic and social benefits of an ethnostate to be amusing.
Fair enough! And I would say we’ve got several social transformations to go through (ie: a general increase in the level of education and an improvement in methods of government) before we can actually abolish ethnostates.
(It should be stated: I’m a consequentialist, and an objective consequentialist. This means that when things accomplish net good (up to my understanding of “good”), I endorse them, even if they “smell bad”.)
So yeah. For here and now with actually-existing people in actually-existing societies, ethnostates seem to be our best heuristic for making democratic, egalitarian societies actually work, instead of degrading into a civil war between tribal clusters (which, I think, is precisely what you’re so afraid of). That doesn’t make them terminally valuable, but it does leave them instrumentally useful.
No one said ethnostates were terminally valuable, necessarily, but yeah. I wonder what the Tumblr contingent’s reaction to your last paragraph would be. You’re basically saying ethnos is so important that multicultural states fall apart, and that ethnostates are the best pragmatic form of government.
That’s not a historically or spatially universal “best”; it’s not optimal. It’s “the best we can do given the historical and geopolitical contingencies as they actually are right now.” I don’t think you even need transhumans or something to have non-ethnic states actually work, you just need to break out of the “Jihad vs McWorld” paradigm of geopolitics.
(Speaking of silly leftists, the man who wrote Jihad vs McWorld concentrated most of his ire on McWorld, since he was writing in the ’90s and did not think jihad would become a severe problem. I think we can both say, on this one: what an idiot!
But the bigger question is: if he implicitly supported racial and religious chauvinist movements against capitalist globalization, does that make him, and by implication the entire left-wing “antiglobalization” movement of the ’90s and 2000s, reactionary, or some other form of right-wing?
I would say, yes, at least in effect, in the same sense that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist”. You?)
What historical and geopolitical contingencies would allow for the development of a better pragmatic form of government than ethnostates?
Singapore is not an ethnostate.
Singapore is a step up from most countries, but I still wouldn’t want to live there—sure, it’s safe and not communist, but as far as I’ve heard, those are its only redeeming values. Since there are safe ethnostates that aren’t communist, that still looks like a superior model.
Me neither, but I think in general NRx likes Singapore—does it not?
In general, ethnostates look like a Europe-specific phenomenon to me.
Because they’re libertarian and from American cities.
Libertarianism leads them to fail to look beyond “safe and not communist”; being from American cities leads them to think that’s a high bar. Which it is for America, but America’s political situation is insane.
In addition to Japan and China, both Koreas and Mongolia.
(North Korea and Mongolia aren’t counterexamples; they were Communist puppet states.)
I am not sure what you are getting at, can you expand..?
Both are states now, but historically their statehood varied.
In any case, I can see the advantages of a single ethnicity, I’m just not sure that they override everything else.
@sarahdoingthing would be able to explain this better than I can, but Moldbug consistently ignores questions of social life, identity, and the rites.
Safe is preferable to unsafe, and not communist is preferable to communist—and the possibility of a social life is preferable to atomization, and a stable identity is preferable to anomie and lack of context, and so on.
Japan. Also China for a looser notion of “ethnostate”.
True. China, actually, is a stronger example since Japan is nicely isolated geographically.
And speaking of pragmatic forms of government, Japan, um, has problems. China, too, of course.
Until western contact, China had no other state of comparable power to define itself against.
Not only that, they also are a relatively recent phenomenon. The Austro-Hungarian Empire wasn’t an ethnostate either. AFAICT ethnic nationalism mostly dates back to Romanticism.
It can be argued that the U.S. is not an ethnostate either.
No “it can be argued” about it—it isn’t. And its resulting failures should be obvious.
“The U.S. has numerous failures” is beyond dispute. “The failures of the U.S. are caused by its unique multicultural, multiracial, and multinational characteristics” is a lot harder to defend.
How about “some failures of the US are caused by some characteristics of races and cultures in the US”?
Then it becomes a trivial statement, the scope of “some” being adjusted to the preconceptions of every individual reader.
Yes, as it should, because unless you want to go into specifics there is no statement both true and general that you can make.
Note, though, that the “standard” view says “no failures of the US are caused by any characteristics of races and cultures” (with the possible exception of white men being just evil) :-/
No, I think that’s a disingenuous usage. I also don’t understand how pacifism is “objectively pro-fascist”.
In the book, he uses Jihad as a stand-in for traditional values everywhere, not just Islamic Jihad.
Google the phrase. Orwell wrote an essay on the matter.
No, as a matter of fact, he uses it as a word for a new style of increasingly irrational chauvinist movements, not for “traditional values” in any sense that an ordinary conservative would recognize.
Of course, if you’re willing to include Islamism in your term for neoreactionary traditional values… I’m willing to take this as further evidence that neoreaction is a terrible idea.
Islam is certainly not neoreactionary, because neoreactionary refers to the descendants of a certain circumscribed intellectual group that developed from Moldbug in the Bay Area.
So is merely not in theory...never mind about the practice.
There are real word examples, including such delights as the BBC and NHS.
A common, but shallow point. Thefallacy is equating democratic government with elected officials. Most democracies have second chambers , civil services and other added to lengthen time preference. Yes Minister is all about an elected pol being unable to budge the long term plans of his ministry.
“God” is a more appropriate name.
Why do ancaps and ancaps even argue? The only way I can see anarcho communism being realised is via reform from contemporary society to increasingly libertarian then anarcho capitalist society. Then, potentially, but unlikely, a voluntarist society, then unlikely, but also potentially, an anarchocommunist society.