just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical [...] in the Western world it can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government’s policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of “the contemporary grand narratives of progress” can get some people to think your opinions are weird. “Just like”? Really?
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin’s death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren’t your experience is different… how?
What I’m hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren’t exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their “sexism” or “racism” in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
I didn’t mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some “muscular liberalism” on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn’t at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
I didn’t mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems’ ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one’s reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it’s laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government’s policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of “the contemporary grand narratives of progress” can get some people to think your opinions are weird. “Just like”? Really?
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin’s death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
This was essentially imprisonment and incapacitation without trial for dissenters. You got locked up and basically tortured.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren’t your experience is different… how?
What I’m hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren’t exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their “sexism” or “racism” in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
In other news, Barack Obama is literally Stalin and his Socialist Healthcare will dismantle dissenters for spare organs.
(C’mon, bro.)
Dammit it all makes sense now! I just knew I was missing something.
Seriously, though, the comparison is preposterous. Look at how Anders Breivik (curse his name) is treated.
I didn’t mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some “muscular liberalism” on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn’t at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
The time we are talking about was not “after Stalin’s death”.
I didn’t mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems’ ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one’s reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it’s laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.