Hey, really enjoyed your triple review on power lies trembling, but imo this topic has been… done to death in the humanities, and reinventing terminology ad hoc is somewhat missing the point. The idea that the dominant class in a society comes from a set of social institutions that share core ideas and modus operandi (in other words “behaving as a single organisation”) is not a shocking new phenomenon of twentieth century mass culture, and is certainly not a “mystery”. This is basically how every country has developed a ruling class/ideology since the term started to have a meaning, through academic institutions that produce similar people. Yale and Harvard are as Oxford and Cambridge, or Peking University and Renmin University. (European universities, in particular, started out as literal divinity schools, and hence are outgrowths of the literal Catholic church, receiving literal Papal bulls to establish themselves as one of the studia generalia.) [Retracted, while the point about teaching religious law and receiving literal papal bulls is true the origins of the universities are much more diverse. But my point about the history of cultural hegemony in such institutions still stands.]
What Yarvin seems to be annoyed by is that the “Cathedral consensus” featured ideas that he dislikes, instead of the quasi-feudal ideology of might makes right that he finds more appealing. That is also not surprising. People largely don’t notice when they are part of a dominant class and their ideas are treated as default: that’s just them being normal, not weird. However, when they find themselves at the edge of the overton window, suddenly what was right and normal becomes crushing and oppressive. The natural dominance of sensible ideas and sensible people becomes a twisted hegemony of obvious lies propped up by delusional power-brokers. This perspective shift is also extremely well documented in human culture and literature.
In general, the concept that a homogenous ruling class culture can then be pushed into delusional consensuses which ultimately harms everyone is an idea as old as the Trojan War. The tension between maintaining a grip on power and maintaining a grip on reality is well explored in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus (which also has an imo pretty decent second half on AI). In particular I direct you to his account of the Bavarian witch hunts. Indeed, the unprecedented feature of modern society is the rapid divergence in ideas that is possible thanks to information technology and the cultivation of local echo chambers. Unfortuantely, I have few simple answers to offer to this age old question, but I hope that recognising the lineage of the question helps with disambiguation somewhat. I look forward to your ideas about new liberalisms.
Hey, thank you for taking the time to reply honestly and in detail as well. With regards to what you want, I think that this is in many senses also what I am looking for, especially the last item about tying in collective behaviour to reasoning about intelligence. I think one of the frames you might find the most useful is one you’ve already covered—power as a coordination game. As you alluded to in your original post, people aren’t in a massive hive mind/conspiracy—they mostly want to do what other successful people seem to be doing, which translates well to a coordination game and also explains the rapid “board flips” once a critical mass of support/rejection against some proposition is reached. For example, witness the rapid switch to majority support of gay marriage in the 2010s amongst the population in general.
Would also love to discuss this with you in more detail (I trained as an English student and also studied Digital Humanities). I will leave off with a few book suggestions that, while maybe not directly answering your needs, you might find interesting.
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (as close to a self-portrait by the modern humanities as it gets)
Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton (high level perspective on how cultural, material, and social currents impact our views on reality)
How minds change by David McRaney (not humanities, but pop sci about the science of belief and persuasion)
P.S. Re: the point about Yarvin being right, betting on the dominant group in society embracing a dangerous delusion is a remarkably safe bet. (E.g. McCarthyism, the aforementioned Bavarian Witch Hunts, fascism, lysenkoism etc.)