And I doubt that things could have turned out very differently, that the Chesterton’s Fence of older values, notably mourned even by Orwell, would have protected against all possible disasters in the face of technological change.
I agree with this, the traditionalists where not equipped for the technological change that took place. Of the various offshoots that tried to grapple with it Soviet Communism wasn’t really that disastrous. It didn’t result in a break down into the bleak dystopia of North Korea or the barbarism of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
I think it plausible that mild fascism (think Franco) in conjunction with monarchy would have worked better for Russia.
(Regarding modern history, I would further argue that the leftward radicalization effectively stopped in 1968, that the “60s’ revolution” ended up a kind of counter-revolution in disguise—but that’s a difficult subject for another day.)
I would be very interested in this take on recent history, please write up a email if you feel it wouldn’t be productive to discuss it here.
In particular, it seems to me that Soviet imperialism and Mao’s radical reforms, for all their unnecessary evils and wilful stupidity, led to far more net human welfare—never mind the gain in more nebulous things like “Human development”! - than their actual, really present alternatives at the time: America’s pre-war relative non-interventionism; Chang Kai-Shek’s conterfactual rule in China (read up on him!) and so on.
I’m not so sure. Right wing capitalist authoritarianism, the sort of outcome I think the Kuomintang could have provided has a good track record of development in East Asian states. I’m not suggesting China would have been a Tawian(!) or Singapore, it was too large and in the early years too chaotic for that. I do think they would have been far wealthier and I think it would probably be more democratic today than the PCR (not that I would necessarily approve of that). Though again a West allied China may have gone to war with the Soviet Union which would have been a disaster.
Also check out the strong socialist elements in the original ideology and practice of the party. Had it gone in that direction again, I can’t see them doing worse than Mao.
It might be true that they could have lost grip of the country and see it descent into the hands of various warlords, which might have meant decades of trouble for China. The almost unified China under the PRC would obviously beat that out.
To be fair though Mao’s revolution was basically a Chinese peasants revolt installing a new dynasty in some Marxist drag. Hardly exceptional in Chinese history, the more surprising part was that Mao was dethroned with relatively little bloodshed.
Frankly, the absolute worst disaster that resulted from “World Communism” was probably the premature and devastating so-called decolonization—and America even at its most right-wing always disapproved of European colonialism anyway.
Moldbug makes the case that was mostly America’s doing. It is quite plausible Communism isn’t to blame for it. Indeed by providing a opponent ready to spread to new states in Africa and Asia it may have made the Anglo elites more careful and measured in their decolonialization mania than they would have otherwise been.
But I disagree, I think the opportunity costs for Eastern Europe and East Asian in particular are pretty high.
Concerning Singapore and why the “traditionalist” conservatives and the atheist alt-right really ought to split on their attitude to it (as of now, they all seem to think that it’s a nice clean place free of all that liberal insanity):
You know how Lee Kwan Yew has occcasionally been complaining about the “crass materialism” around him in his latter interviews and such? The loss of nice, cozy traditional values? Well, I think that he hasn’t fully comprehended what he has been ushering in, culturally speaking. Behold.BEHOLD AND WEEP! Right out of trashy dystopian sci-fi… hell, it totally reminds me of this classic music video (at 3:10).
And here some Catholic woman is trying to pin this shit on leftism. Can’t she see that old good Universalist morality is her only surviving ally against such horrors? (Rhetorical question: I understand that the less insightful conservatives simply lump all formally irreligious societies together as The Other. But the brighter ones should see how this is much worse than leftist academia.)
I don’t believe this is so. Most any liberal professor type—hell, most lefties I know—would flip their shit around the phrase “manufacture life” or earlier. Maybe I’m too rosy-eyed, but I really can’t see them remaining unperturbed. In theory, those lyrics manage to tick off just about every sacredness/profanity box of stereotypical liberal mentality. (I’ll run a poll!)
They might not put much stock in family, but they sure as hell believe in parenting, upbringing, etc, and will at least see that an ad for breeding that doesn’t even mention parenting or parental love is critically, fundamentally wrong. (Also, the gut reaction to social control of intimacy/sex. And other feelings along these lines.)
Right. It hits their sacrednss/profanity boxes in such minds but they can’t articulate a rational argument against it based on harm or fairness. Remember they think they don’t have the former box. The typical universalist mind faced with something that fits sacredness/profanity latches on to the nearest rationalization expressed in the allowed stated values to resolve the cognitive dissonance. Such rationalizations then live a dangerous life of their own sometimes resulting in disturbing policies.
To analyse the example you’ve provided, if I’m right we should be seeing in the moderately educated mind a search for a rationalization that fits this shape:
a company with quiet aid of government promoting this might cause harm or unfairness
I think the following does so nicely:
having babies is bad because it hurts the environment and the world is overpopulated anyway
This is ironically part of the environmentalist memeplex that is elsewhere propped up mostly by purity concerns. As evidence of this I submit the most liked youtube comment to the video.
Heh, clever and well-written song. Catchy too! :D
But, it’s just the government and capitalism being on a flawed infinite-growth-based system at fault here. There’s nothing wrong with some shrinking populations with how overpopulated the world is getting. If anything, there needs to be more adoptions. Everywhere. And way less baby-making.
Reading this can’t you just hear the cogs turning in the person’s head? Of the real reasons rooted in tabooed sentiments, only the bolded pro-nurture sentence remains, the charge has been successfully transferred to “babies bad for Gaia!”. Inspect some of the other comments to this story on Youtube and other sites, you will see this particular rationalization consistently win out among the Brahmin and wannabe Brahmin.
Damn right. Hmm, looks like I should post your last PM and my reply in here for kar… I mean, for the public’s benefit.
[Konkvistador messaged me:]
Orwell is dead
and soon Žižek and Chomsky will follow.
You put your hope in the decentness of Universalism as a replacement for Christianity.
I don’t endorse that position because modern Universalism seems to be suffering more or less the same malaise that killed its predecessor.
I don’t know what will happen next.
[I replied:]
You put your hope in the decentness of universalism as a replacement for Christianity.
No, I put my hope in the fact that it is Christianity, mostly intact or even refined under the surface. It was led astray not by immorality but by a philosophical and epistemic error—the folly of rationalization, the is-to-ought thing, “deriving” preferences from “pure reason”, being ashamed of making a seemingly arbitrary stand on an issue, assuming the inevitability of their particular “progress”; you see what I mean.
The irony is that most branches of “Christianity” that remain openly theistic, like Catholicism, still retain many advantages such as better-maintained Chesterton’s fences, but not because they’re a better living fork—they merely remained a century or so behind the “core”, Universalist Christianity, and see no other way to advance. Either they’ll become fossils unable to handle new reality, or they will keep following in Universalism’s footsteps without the vision or the imagination to adjust the course.
I hope that, should this single big error of Universalism be somehow mended—not necessarily or solely through a return to theism—then we can have the good things back and filter the really bad ones. This is why I’m looking into the relationship between the radical/totalizing/”core” current in Christianity and its Gnostic/less-worldly side. As I was beginning to say, I see this “1968 counterrevolution” as the former voluntarily surrendering to the latter in the face of the Left’s Orwell-like fears. However, the resulting paralysis of the Left led to a vacuum of power, where the Right are kept away from institutions by the Left’s massive aura of influence, yet the New Left is unwilling and afraid to approach any really important matters. It’s not about some mysterious lack of “personal responsibility”, “accountability”, etc—there were plenty of unaccountable but good rulers. It’s about the psychology of it, turning inwards instead of forging any sort of a path.
And, speaking of that last one:
(I can’t resist mentioning Evangelion yet again. I’ll do a full, detailed look at its place in historical and political context one day. Malaise is certainly its central theme.)
I think it would probably be more democratic today than the PCR
Language trap here. “Democracy” as meaningful majority vote vs. “democracy” as government attention to broad popular demands vs. “democracy” as a loose cultural view of Vox Populi vox Dei vs. “democracy” as a permissive and liberal stance towards social relations, and hell, there’s even more packed in here.
I, for instance, think that modern China is much more democratic on many such metrics than modern Singapore. Including metrics that I value. (Singapore indeed has legitimate majority vote, but that vote, and the overton window for it, is controlled by the State in several ways that are unlike 1st world Universalist propaganda.)
Well my model of right wing capitalist regimes puts “under Western influence they transmute into social democracies when rich enough or after the founder dies” as the default. It happened in South Korea and it happened in Spain.
As to “democratic” I was using it in the standard sense used when discussing international relations and geopolitics:
"democratic" == does things the State Department, NYT and/or the Pentagon like.
"undemocratic" == does things the State Department, NYT and/or the Pentagon don't like.
But I disagree, I think the opportunity costs for Eastern Europe and East Asian in particular are pretty high.
Eh, I think that you and I would have some disagreement due to harder-to-articulate terminal values here, regardless of a little variation in numbers.
I can confidently say that you’re dead wrong on Chiang, though. All contemporary accounts, such as those of Western liasons, say that he was very good at holding on to power via manipulation and intrigue yet very, very bad at using it for anything. He literally took bribes in plain view and spend them on himself and his cronies while his armies were hungry, demoralized and steamrolled by the Japanese; all intelligent Westerners described him with utter contempt, and his own people did not respect his authority. He’s living proof that a self-interested authoritarian ruler can still be a trainwreck. For a good description of his wartime behavior (and an extensive list of sources) see e.g. Max Hastings’ Retribution. Hastings is my favorite World War 2 historian btw. I’ll dig up the sources on Chiang and post them later.
(Regarding modern history, I would further argue that the leftward radicalization effectively stopped in 1968, that the “60s’ revolution” ended up a kind of counter-revolution in disguise—but that’s a difficult subject for another day.)
I would be very interested in this take on recent history, please write up a email if you feel it wouldn’t be productive to discuss it here.
I’ve had that hunch for a while and am researching it right now; this is conjunctive with what I’m trying to analyze about the current/postmodern religious and mystical consciousness. Gonna take a while. Check my yesterday’s email on the New Left for a glimpse. Zizek touches on this “counter-revolution” angle in his rants about “Cultural capitalism”. Also somewhat related is his distinction between the “radical/leftist” core of Christianity and “Gnostic” tendencies within it—the “Gnostics” being the ones who do not seek to immanentize the Eschaton, although I view that in a very different light and think he’s dangerously one-sided here.
Note that I specifically say that a return to warlordism or a protracted civil war would be the worst of all options so Chiang being good at holding on to power is a virtue in itself. Again I’m not saying he was a particularly great ruler, its not like I expect him to live forever. But the fact remains that several decades after his death Taiwan is a first world country while China’s recent growth can be largely credited to Deng’s reforms.
Suppose China was divided in half between Mao and Chiang and they manage to avoid war for several decades due to cold war dynamics similar to the one that kept a divided German and Korea stable. In 2000 which half of China would you expect to be the better developed one?
If you agree with my assesment that the capitalist half would likely be the better developed one, why do you expect a China that is 99% under Kuomintang governance to be worse than a China that is 99% under Communist party governance?
But the fact remains that several decades after his death Taiwan is a first world country
The difference between governing a 10-million enclave (a significant proportion of elite refugees among those 10 million) that serves as a forward outpost to a friendly superpower, and governing a war-ravaged empire of ~600 million (in 1949) - subsistence farmers most of them—seems to me greater than, say, the difference between running a coffee shop and Northrop Grumman. We have much evidence that Chiang was failing miserably at the latter before 1949.
But the fact remains that several decades after his death Taiwan is a first world country while China’s recent growth can be largely credited to Deng’s reforms.
Under Mao, life expectancy literally doubled and the literacy rate went from 20-25% to 80%. And the increase in life expectancy is largely attributed to his vast state healthcare initiatives.
The difference between governing a 10-million enclave (a significant proportion of elite refugees among those 10 million) that serves as a forward outpost to a friendly superpower, and governing a war-ravaged empire of ~600 million (in 1949) - subsistence farmers most of them—seems to me greater than, say, the difference between running a coffee shop and Northrop Grumman.
Very well, you can make that argument. So I’m taking your answer to my alternative history scenario:
Suppose China was divided in half between Mao and Chiang and they manage to avoid war for several decades due to cold war dynamics similar to the one that kept a divided German and Korea stable. In 2000 which half of China would you expect to be the better developed one?
Is that you don’t expect the capitalist half to be significantly better off than the communist half?
Under Mao, life expectancy literally doubled and the literacy rate went from 20-25% to 80%. And the increase in life expectancy is largely attributed to his vast state healthcare initiatives.
I have heard similarly glorious statistics for Cuba, and, until quite recently, for North Korea.
Visiting Cuba in 1992 it was obvious to me that living standards, literacy, and health, had collapsed since the revolution. People are living in the decayed remnants of what had been decently comfortable houses fifty years ago. People were hungry, frightened, and desperate.
It is clear that China suffered poverty and economic stagnation under Mao. You don’t double living standards and life expectancy while having massive famines and operating an economy based on slave labor. Taiwan unambiguously and obviously experienced dramatic growth. Kuomintang rule was competent, efficient, and successful. Communist rule was a disaster propped up by foreign intervention.
It is clear that China suffered poverty and economic stagnation under Mao.
It certainly did; I never claimed otherwise, and neither did Lindsay. Mao’s leadership was a little unhinged to say the least. However, we’re talking about the really existing alternatives to China’s particular situation in 1949, not the Cuban revolution or anything else.
You don’t double living standards and life expectancy while having massive famines and operating an economy based on slave labor.
Sorry, but it’s hardly possible to fake such a tremendous increase in such basic statistics.
And equally hard, no doubt to fake the very similar tremendous increase in the basic statistics for North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia.
I notice that in the case of Marxist Ethiopia, we saw a tremendous increase in basic statistics despite bloody and unending civil war, and the massive use of artificial famine to terrorize the peasants.
And when the Marxist Ethiopian regime was finally overthrown in that bloody and terrible civil war, and peace returned, their statistics abruptly fell back to African normal. Did everyone suddenly forget how to read? Perhaps capitalism caused the death rate to suddenly rise, but did it overnight erase all that wonderful education that the communists had so successfully done?
I’d also note that in my reading about the Chinese famines and especially the Great Leap Forward ones is that they were due only minimally due to nation-wide shortages, but mostly to massive failures in distribution such as falsified statistics; this scenario is consistent with both claims.
I agree with this, the traditionalists where not equipped for the technological change that took place. Of the various offshoots that tried to grapple with it Soviet Communism wasn’t really that disastrous. It didn’t result in a break down into the bleak dystopia of North Korea or the barbarism of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
I think it plausible that mild fascism (think Franco) in conjunction with monarchy would have worked better for Russia.
I would be very interested in this take on recent history, please write up a email if you feel it wouldn’t be productive to discuss it here.
I’m not so sure. Right wing capitalist authoritarianism, the sort of outcome I think the Kuomintang could have provided has a good track record of development in East Asian states. I’m not suggesting China would have been a Tawian(!) or Singapore, it was too large and in the early years too chaotic for that. I do think they would have been far wealthier and I think it would probably be more democratic today than the PCR (not that I would necessarily approve of that). Though again a West allied China may have gone to war with the Soviet Union which would have been a disaster.
Also check out the strong socialist elements in the original ideology and practice of the party. Had it gone in that direction again, I can’t see them doing worse than Mao.
It might be true that they could have lost grip of the country and see it descent into the hands of various warlords, which might have meant decades of trouble for China. The almost unified China under the PRC would obviously beat that out.
To be fair though Mao’s revolution was basically a Chinese peasants revolt installing a new dynasty in some Marxist drag. Hardly exceptional in Chinese history, the more surprising part was that Mao was dethroned with relatively little bloodshed.
Moldbug makes the case that was mostly America’s doing. It is quite plausible Communism isn’t to blame for it. Indeed by providing a opponent ready to spread to new states in Africa and Asia it may have made the Anglo elites more careful and measured in their decolonialization mania than they would have otherwise been.
But I disagree, I think the opportunity costs for Eastern Europe and East Asian in particular are pretty high.
Concerning Singapore and why the “traditionalist” conservatives and the atheist alt-right really ought to split on their attitude to it (as of now, they all seem to think that it’s a nice clean place free of all that liberal insanity):
You know how Lee Kwan Yew has occcasionally been complaining about the “crass materialism” around him in his latter interviews and such? The loss of nice, cozy traditional values? Well, I think that he hasn’t fully comprehended what he has been ushering in, culturally speaking. Behold. BEHOLD AND WEEP! Right out of trashy dystopian sci-fi… hell, it totally reminds me of this classic music video (at 3:10).
And here some Catholic woman is trying to pin this shit on leftism. Can’t she see that old good Universalist morality is her only surviving ally against such horrors? (Rhetorical question: I understand that the less insightful conservatives simply lump all formally irreligious societies together as The Other. But the brighter ones should see how this is much worse than leftist academia.)
May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts.
Mainstream Western Universalist morality has no objection to that video except that its tacky.
I don’t believe this is so. Most any liberal professor type—hell, most lefties I know—would flip their shit around the phrase “manufacture life” or earlier. Maybe I’m too rosy-eyed, but I really can’t see them remaining unperturbed. In theory, those lyrics manage to tick off just about every sacredness/profanity box of stereotypical liberal mentality. (I’ll run a poll!)
They might not put much stock in family, but they sure as hell believe in parenting, upbringing, etc, and will at least see that an ad for breeding that doesn’t even mention parenting or parental love is critically, fundamentally wrong. (Also, the gut reaction to social control of intimacy/sex. And other feelings along these lines.)
Right. It hits their sacrednss/profanity boxes in such minds but they can’t articulate a rational argument against it based on harm or fairness. Remember they think they don’t have the former box. The typical universalist mind faced with something that fits sacredness/profanity latches on to the nearest rationalization expressed in the allowed stated values to resolve the cognitive dissonance. Such rationalizations then live a dangerous life of their own sometimes resulting in disturbing policies.
To analyse the example you’ve provided, if I’m right we should be seeing in the moderately educated mind a search for a rationalization that fits this shape:
I think the following does so nicely:
This is ironically part of the environmentalist memeplex that is elsewhere propped up mostly by purity concerns. As evidence of this I submit the most liked youtube comment to the video.
Reading this can’t you just hear the cogs turning in the person’s head? Of the real reasons rooted in tabooed sentiments, only the bolded pro-nurture sentence remains, the charge has been successfully transferred to “babies bad for Gaia!”. Inspect some of the other comments to this story on Youtube and other sites, you will see this particular rationalization consistently win out among the Brahmin and wannabe Brahmin.
Damn right. Hmm, looks like I should post your last PM and my reply in here for kar… I mean, for the public’s benefit.
[Konkvistador messaged me:]
[I replied:]
And, speaking of that last one:
Downvoted for sharing PM’s without permission.
Edit: See Konkvistador’s reply.
Up voted for enforcing a community norm.
I already messaged Multiheaded and explained this to him before you posted. I want to emphasise he now has my permission to post that particular PM.
[I already apologized, damnit, and he said it wasn’t a problem!]
Also!
Language trap here. “Democracy” as meaningful majority vote vs. “democracy” as government attention to broad popular demands vs. “democracy” as a loose cultural view of Vox Populi vox Dei vs. “democracy” as a permissive and liberal stance towards social relations, and hell, there’s even more packed in here.
I, for instance, think that modern China is much more democratic on many such metrics than modern Singapore. Including metrics that I value. (Singapore indeed has legitimate majority vote, but that vote, and the overton window for it, is controlled by the State in several ways that are unlike 1st world Universalist propaganda.)
Well my model of right wing capitalist regimes puts “under Western influence they transmute into social democracies when rich enough or after the founder dies” as the default. It happened in South Korea and it happened in Spain.
As to “democratic” I was using it in the standard sense used when discussing international relations and geopolitics:
Eh, I think that you and I would have some disagreement due to harder-to-articulate terminal values here, regardless of a little variation in numbers.
I can confidently say that you’re dead wrong on Chiang, though. All contemporary accounts, such as those of Western liasons, say that he was very good at holding on to power via manipulation and intrigue yet very, very bad at using it for anything. He literally took bribes in plain view and spend them on himself and his cronies while his armies were hungry, demoralized and steamrolled by the Japanese; all intelligent Westerners described him with utter contempt, and his own people did not respect his authority. He’s living proof that a self-interested authoritarian ruler can still be a trainwreck. For a good description of his wartime behavior (and an extensive list of sources) see e.g. Max Hastings’ Retribution. Hastings is my favorite World War 2 historian btw. I’ll dig up the sources on Chiang and post them later.
I’ve had that hunch for a while and am researching it right now; this is conjunctive with what I’m trying to analyze about the current/postmodern religious and mystical consciousness. Gonna take a while. Check my yesterday’s email on the New Left for a glimpse.
Zizek touches on this “counter-revolution” angle in his rants about “Cultural capitalism”. Also somewhat related is his distinction between the “radical/leftist” core of Christianity and “Gnostic” tendencies within it—the “Gnostics” being the ones who do not seek to immanentize the Eschaton, although I view that in a very different light and think he’s dangerously one-sided here.
Note that I specifically say that a return to warlordism or a protracted civil war would be the worst of all options so Chiang being good at holding on to power is a virtue in itself. Again I’m not saying he was a particularly great ruler, its not like I expect him to live forever. But the fact remains that several decades after his death Taiwan is a first world country while China’s recent growth can be largely credited to Deng’s reforms.
Suppose China was divided in half between Mao and Chiang and they manage to avoid war for several decades due to cold war dynamics similar to the one that kept a divided German and Korea stable. In 2000 which half of China would you expect to be the better developed one?
If you agree with my assesment that the capitalist half would likely be the better developed one, why do you expect a China that is 99% under Kuomintang governance to be worse than a China that is 99% under Communist party governance?
I will add it to my reading list.
The difference between governing a 10-million enclave (a significant proportion of elite refugees among those 10 million) that serves as a forward outpost to a friendly superpower, and governing a war-ravaged empire of ~600 million (in 1949) - subsistence farmers most of them—seems to me greater than, say, the difference between running a coffee shop and Northrop Grumman. We have much evidence that Chiang was failing miserably at the latter before 1949.
Under Mao, life expectancy literally doubled and the literacy rate went from 20-25% to 80%. And the increase in life expectancy is largely attributed to his vast state healthcare initiatives.
Very well, you can make that argument. So I’m taking your answer to my alternative history scenario:
Is that you don’t expect the capitalist half to be significantly better off than the communist half?
Thinking.
I have heard similarly glorious statistics for Cuba, and, until quite recently, for North Korea.
Visiting Cuba in 1992 it was obvious to me that living standards, literacy, and health, had collapsed since the revolution. People are living in the decayed remnants of what had been decently comfortable houses fifty years ago. People were hungry, frightened, and desperate.
It is clear that China suffered poverty and economic stagnation under Mao. You don’t double living standards and life expectancy while having massive famines and operating an economy based on slave labor. Taiwan unambiguously and obviously experienced dramatic growth. Kuomintang rule was competent, efficient, and successful. Communist rule was a disaster propped up by foreign intervention.
Sorry, but it’s hardly possible to fake such a tremendous increase in such basic statistics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_%281949%E2%80%931976%29#Mao.27s_legacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_China#Post-1949_history
It certainly did; I never claimed otherwise, and neither did Lindsay. Mao’s leadership was a little unhinged to say the least. However, we’re talking about the really existing alternatives to China’s particular situation in 1949, not the Cuban revolution or anything else.
Um, looks like that’s exactly what happened.
And equally hard, no doubt to fake the very similar tremendous increase in the basic statistics for North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia.
I notice that in the case of Marxist Ethiopia, we saw a tremendous increase in basic statistics despite bloody and unending civil war, and the massive use of artificial famine to terrorize the peasants.
And when the Marxist Ethiopian regime was finally overthrown in that bloody and terrible civil war, and peace returned, their statistics abruptly fell back to African normal. Did everyone suddenly forget how to read? Perhaps capitalism caused the death rate to suddenly rise, but did it overnight erase all that wonderful education that the communists had so successfully done?
Industrialization is a hell of a drug, isn’t it?
I’d also note that in my reading about the Chinese famines and especially the Great Leap Forward ones is that they were due only minimally due to nation-wide shortages, but mostly to massive failures in distribution such as falsified statistics; this scenario is consistent with both claims.