FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Regardless of the exact numbers, we are doomed. It's over.
It sounds like this would be a really good time to have solid institutional credibility to draw on with the public at large.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024.
This is probably true. Does it also correlate with believing Biden was senile, Hunter's laptop was genuine, that COVID was a lab leak, and that the lockdowns and vaccine mandates were a mistake? Their estimate of unarmed black men killed by the police would be much closer to the right end of this graph, and opposition to defunding the police, before such fictions and the policies they spawned caused the largest single-year increase in violent crime ever reported. Does it correlate with being able to define the term "woman", and predict that transitioning children would not be a sustainable practice from a scientific point of view? I imagine we could continue in this way for some time, but let's leave it there.
Hanania's argument here is that Trump supporters are more likely to be disconnected from bedrock reality. Would it be fair to say that his implicit argument is that bedrock reality is congruent with the views of professional academics and journalists?
We've had previous discussions about how reality-based Trump's policies are, and Hanania makes a fairly good argument that - except for political loyalty - reality isn't a concern, and that this isn't just true of Trumpism, it's an inherent flaw of populism, in general.
I do not see a way for either you or the author to argue that it is less of a problem for the previous uniparty regime. Afghanistan in particular and the GWOT generally seem like really good examples; for the Afghan war, we have the documents now and can confirm that the entire two decades of policy was founded entirely on lies, that no one ever actually had a plan, and that the entire procedure was built around concealing this fact to the public as extensively as possible to maintain the flow of resources and human lives. The more one listened to "the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics," the worse one's fundamental understanding of that conflict would be.
More generally, the self-serving nature of the argument here would be appalling if it were not so monotonously common from people of the author's ilk.
Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes.
We are in the present situation because the system was not working well, even relatively. Likewise, the previous system was absolutely chockablock with liars, morons, grifters and cranks of all stripes. Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Happy to be of service!
(It also helped clarify, by showing points of agreement, where both of my differences with you, and those with Hlynka, lie.)
If you want to write up your conclusions some time, I'd love to see them.
"We're going to enforce Christianity by law in order to build as spiritually pure a society as possible, but of course the battle against Satan and his works is never over and sin is impossible to entirely eliminate, people are going to keep sinning no matter what, so we must maintain constant vigilance lest we slip into a state of totally unconstrained decadence and chaos". Boom. Done. He still believes in problems. It's right there. And of course you can perform similar constructions with Marxists, white nationalists, etc.
You have just described a solution to a problem, not the absence of a solution. This is also "we know how to solve all our problems."
You seem to be operating off the assumption that theory necessarily matters or is meaningful. I have been arguing all along that "We know how to solve all our problems" is not a rational hypothesis on the nature of reality offered with sound mind and in good faith. It is a line. It is a pitch. It is a scam whose purpose is to secure power for the persons employing it. That's why the immediate corollary is an explanation of why the solutions aren't working and therefore more power is needed.
What breaks the pattern is a real admission of weakness, of surrender. An admission that in this case we cannot have what we want, and we must accept that. A genuine recognition and acceptance of hard limits on our ambition. A point at which we let go, lift our foot off the gas, cease escalating and make peace. And not a hypothetical point in an indefinite future, or a point that we bend all available power against in an asymptotic approach, and not some tangential point off to the side divorced from the core aims of the project. "I assume absolute control over the lives of every person within our borders, but it's not like I'm trying to control the weather..." As they say, the most important thing is sincerity; once you can fake that, you've got it made.
Hlynka was fond of the quote "thank you, but I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds." The point of that quote is that the speaker's worldview also accounts for loss, even total loss, as a realistic and significantly likely outcome. Failure and loss are common events in the human experience; ignoring them makes an ideology more superficially attractive and makes adherents more zealous, but it also makes it much easier and more likely for that ideology to go absolutely insane. As I understood it, he employed the quote as a reminder that if you want to keep your sanity, your worldview and axioms have to be capable of accommodating and accepting loss and failure. This is not a perspective to which I am naturally inclined; I much prefer "...for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." But this is yet another one of the notable areas where he was simply correct.
Does Zizek have room in his theories for loss? Does McGowan? Does Marcuse? If so, it speaks well of them. If not, what does that mean to you?
And even here, I've no doubt that you can construct some bespoke formulation that gives the appearance of limits or surrender, while retaining as much will-to-power as possible. But this, again, is in fact my point: "we know how to solve all our problems" is a lie, and lies are effective and often hard to detect. There is no substitute for shrewdness and discernment. The point is not to pencil-whip a checklist, but to recognize a predator that is actively working to conceal itself.
For the record, what you listed are not caveats, but another position entirely.
You seemed to be offering a summary of my argument that my argument didn't actually fit into, but it was a bit hard to tell whether that was intentional or not, whether your summary was meant to be illustrative or exclusive. I just wanted to make explicit the parts that seemed to be sticking out.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
The consensus among whom? Which proponents of the Enlightenment today do you believe would earnestly claim that the Jacobins better encapsulated the positive core of their beliefs than the Founding Fathers did?
The staff of Jacobin Magazine, pretty clearly. Marx, Marxists, people who adhere to bespoke ideological varietals of Marxism hybridized with other stuff. Egalitarians generally, who look down on slave-owning white supremacist founders. If we expand the question to "consider the Jacobins equally admirable as the Founding Fathers", we get probably some number of the Founding Fathers themselves.
Would you consider Mark Twain to be an advocate of Enlightenment thought? Did you read his quote I provided above? Likewise Duranty, and by extension all his colleagues.
Surely you’re aware that a substantial majority of the users of this site would self-identify as fans of the Enlightenment, broadly construed; of those users, how many do you believe agree with the supposed “consensus” that you’re claiming exists?
For users here, I don't know. That's why I ask. I think it'd be a solid majority of politically-aware redditors, though. I have been repeatedly told by other long-time commenters here that it's understandable to give a pass not only to the French Revolution but the Bolsheviks, because they had "good intentions".
My support for the Enlightenment is guarded and contingent at best, so perhaps I don’t count, but I would certainly say that the naked bloodlust evinced by the Jacobins — the ardent, unthinking zeal with which they pursued their aims, the hasty and slapdash nature of their kangaroo courts, and the resulting devolution into vengeful recriminations and purity spirals — pretty clearly mark them as failing, in a catastrophic way, to hew to the better natures to which the Enlightenment purports to urge us all to aspire.
The whole point of the French vs American revolution comparison is that the two revolutions were very different in character, and therefore we ought to be able to say that one was a more central example of the Enlightenment than the other. If you think the American Revolution is the central one and the French is the outlier, then you need to explain why so many experts and elites seem to think the opposite. If you think the French revolution is the more central example, you need to explain why people think that tyranny and slaughter are disqualifiers for placement within the Enlightenment set.
The whole point is that people will claim that the Enlightenment is about liberty and freedom and human flourishing and rule of law, and then will turn right around and argue that ideological movements that claimed to be part of the Enlightenment and were recognized by others as being part of the Enlightenment trampled all these things in horrifying ways, and their crimes were systematically ignored by the Enlightenment's apparent champions. This isn't a subtle pattern.
This strikes me as a disastrously shortsighted comment. You’re just begging to end up looking foolish, making predictions like this. I see no signs that technological advancements (“bedazzling” or otherwise) are slowing down any time soon.
I like my odds.
Others in this thread are defending the Enlightenment based on the massive increase in wealth and general luxury resulting from the scientific and industrial revolutions. Whether or not Enlightenment ideology actually was responsible for that ludicrous increase in wealth, the increase itself was very real; I'd point to the quote about west Texans supporting FDR because he brought them electricity. That sort of massive increase in standard of living buys a movement a lot of loyalty, and claiming credit for multiple generations of such improvements is how Enlightenment ideology cemented its intellectual hegemony.
Those increases haven't been happening for some time. The last plausible candidate was the Internet, and a decade and change ago I would have argued that it was straightforwardly a wonder of the world. Now I've seen too many downsides, and it seems to me that so have a lot of other people. Scarcity of various sorts is setting in. Increasingly, technology is no longer a source of wonder and delight, but of fear and angst. For previous generations, tech made life glorious; for the current one, it increasingly makes us wretched. And crucially, this stagnation has already been enough to burn down the large majority of Enlightenment ideology's social capital. Trust in The Science, Academia, the Press, trust in experts and elites, trust in social systems, in leadership, all of those have absolutely cratered over the last decade. The Culture War has escaped containment and now crushes all before it. If science and tech could have kept the streak going, probably Enlightenment ideology could have kept policy starvation to a minimum and stayed on top. But they didn't, and so here we are.
Maybe AI will change that, and cause another explosion of prosperity and wonder. And if so, that's wonderful; I've long argued that a resumption of the tech whalefall would be one of the clearest and most likely positive solutions to the Culture War, and in that eventuality, none of this will matter because we will be too busy being fat and happy to bother with it. But if that doesn't happen, if AI or some other pivotal technology doesn't deliver a fair impression of an actual singularity, then the present trends are likely to continue, and the tottering structures above us come right on down, I think.
My accusation of Traditionalism Of The Gaps is, I’m sad to say, somewhat vindicated by your comment.
I don't remember this one. Could you link or elaborate?
You recognize the two previous statements of increasingly strong materialism in that paragraph which I explicitly stated do not fit the pattern, right? You understand that the distinction is not actually about Materialism in any way, but is about an understanding of what power is, how it works, what it can and should be used for? You understand that this same category can easily fit a non-materialist, and indeed could perfectly fit someone claiming to be a Christian whose entire ideological program is drawn from their interpretation of the Bible? For example, a "Christian" who believes that Christianity should be enforced by law, and children who don't seem likely to properly adhere to Christianity should be put to death before they reach the age of accountability to ensure their souls are not lost? Such a person also believes that "We know how to solve all our problems", and for bonus points might not even have any intellectual connection to the Enlightenment itself.
With those caveats clearly stated, sure, fair enough.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Sorry, just mapping the labyrinth.
Although I would point out that Hlynka said, directly, that belief or non-belief in God is part of "the core of what positions we hold".
Then this is a point that I disagree with him on and would love to debate him on the subject.
I will ask directly: are all your enemies "the same" in some sense, just because they are your enemies?
Absolutely not. Radical Islamists are very clearly not running on Enlightenment ideology. Organized Crime is very clearly not running on Enlightenment ideology.
If not, then why is it relevant that Bismark sees you as an enemy? Why did you bring it up?
Because he's demonstrating a specific ideological pattern, and I believe that pattern matters deeply and should not be tolerated. I talk about him being very clearly an enemy to note that this does not seem to be a borderline case; the way he chooses to describe his own thinking and philosophy puts him very far on the other side of a very clear line.
Likewise, where you see Hlynka latching on to something to put all his enemies onto one side, if his method allows him to sort friends from enemies in a consistent fashion, that is straightforwardly and obviously useful to him and to anyone who shares his values. I use similar logic to sort friend and enemy, and to make predictions about where current ideology will lead people, and this seems like an obviously useful and relatively uncontroversial method of reasoning.
If it's ultimately just about distinguishing "my friends" from "my enemies", then that's fine. I would have nothing further to add. But you should just say that, instead of arguing that vastly heterogeneous groups of people are committed to a complex web of philosophical assertions that they are not, in fact, committed to.
My understanding is that ideology is useful because it provides a structured, reasoned framework to help me understand the world around me, the better to effectively pursue my values. Further, it is useful in providing a structured, reasoned framework to help me effectively understand and predict the behavior of other people, the better to coordinate cooperation with those possessing compatible values and meanness against those sharing incompatible values.
I am claiming that there are specific, identifiable ideological markers that are quite useful to me for this purpose. You appear to be claiming that these specific, ideological markers are an illusion, and that the people I mark with them are essentially being marked at random. But it seems to me that you are perceiving randomness because you ignore or discard all the non-random data-bits.
Eugenics was straightforwardly an attempt to reshape "human nature" through the mechanism of social institutions?
Well, through technology and biology. Not social institutions.
Eugenicists used large-scale social institutions to engage in large-scale social engineering in an effort to directly manipulate "human nature" on a global level. Communists likewise used "technology and biology" in a variety of ways to try to achieve New Soviet Man. I continue to have no idea why you see this as a meaningful distinction.
they believe they can sort people into the good and bad bins by population-level metrics, when in fact they absolutely cannot do that.
Is this the assertion of a new criteria for determining identity among ideologies?
No, I've been asserting it for years now in these discussions. You can find a ton of examples by searching "author:fcfromssc we know how to solve problems" and then searching through the results; the two are often paired, because my argument is the latter follows directly from the former. See here, for instance:
In doing so, he demonstrates both the founding principle of the Enlightenment, as well as its first corollary:
- We know how to solve all our problems
- If a problem can't be solved, that failure is the fault of specific people with names and addresses.
...Or here.
...And now I'm worried that you'll start providing examples of "this problem is the fault of these people" to claim that this isn't a meaningful category, but the point is that this is a chain of logic. Claim to offer expansive, open-ended solutions to problems you can't actually solve, and then then claim that certain people are the obstacle that needs to be removed, even when those people have no rigorously-determined connection to the problem beyond being in your way. There is a fundamental difference between "people committing crimes are a problem, we should set up a system to punish crime" and "low-IQ people are a problem, we should stop them from breeding/encourage them to abort their children/enact state policies of sterilization or euthenization."
How is it related to the other proposed criteria ("humans as naturally good vs evil", "knowing how to solve all our problems vs not knowing", etc). Are they all equivalent formulations of each other? Is one of the formulations at the root, and the others are derived from it?
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It is the corollary to "we know how to solve all our problems", which explains why problems aren't being solved and what to do about it: remove the bad people who are in the way.
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If humans are naturally good, it's evidently tempting to conclude that humans who aren't good, or humans who are getting in the way of your efforts to make other humans good, aren't actually human.
Is there any set of circumstances that's better than any other set of circumstances for anyone, ever? Or is everything just all the same?
It is clear to me that there is a fundamental difference between "I think this specific problem would be solved by making this individual change to our society" and "An unbounded set of problems would be made unboundedly better if we fundamentally reshaped our entire society, with that reshaping being controlled by me or someone very like me." Or in more specific terms, there is a fundamental difference between "I think we should add/remove tariffs with an aim to improve these economic factors" and "We should solve poverty".
Humans are what they are because of what their made of. If you change what they're made of then you could (potentially) change what they're like.
No such change has ever been demonstrated. In the case of IQ, I think I have solid evidence that it absolutely doesn't work. If it did work, that would not be a good thing, because "changing what they're like" necessarily involves making them controllable. Either the humans remain as they are despite your changes, ie they have free will and thus the full capacity for evil, or they are actually changed by constraining their will and making them your slaves.
If this fundamental metaphysical commitment makes all materialists ideologically "the same" in some sense, then that lends further credence to the assertion that the fundamental divide for you is really about materialists vs non-materialists.
Again, I assert the distinction is between rigorous materialists and non-rigorous materialists. "There is zero significant proof that a God or Gods exist" is not an obstacle. "I do not believe that God exists, and I organize my life and choices around this axiom" is not an obstacle. "Material is all that exists, free will is an illusion, humans are machines that we can engineer to our liking" is an obstacle, and also very clearly a statement of faith that requires discarding vast amounts of contrary evidence[*]. And note the connection back to the concept of choice.
It should be noted though that materialists are not necessarily committed to the idea of an infinitely malleable human nature.
And I note that whether an ideology explicitly asserts explicit infinite malleability is far less important than whether they recognize an actual limit to malleability that impinges on their desires. "Man is infinitely malleable, we can make him as we wish" ~= "Man is malleable to a very high degree, we can make him as we wish" != "Man may be somewhat malleable in some ways, but we have no idea how to change these parts and are just going to have to accept them for the foreseeable future."
At any rate, there are non-materialist Christians among both the communists and the dissident right, rendering the whole line of questioning somewhat moot.
Materialism is not the dividing line, so it is indeed moot.
You have expressed a great deal of anger on this forum previously about what you see as Blue Tribe overreach and abuse of power. Would your life be better, in any way, even a little bit, if Blue Tribe had less power over you and the things you care about?
Absolutely. But this doesn't require me to have power over them, or to eliminate all Blues forever, or to establish a thousand year Red Reich. There's a set of simple actions with obvious limits that can achieve the far more modest goal of "don't be ruled by people who hate you". And notably, I'm committed to not taking some of those actions, because they're morally wrong, even though I hate Blues and believe that things would be much better if I and people like me were free of their power. Even having an actual, bounded solution isn't enough, the solution has to be sufficiently cheap in terms of power and moral cost. And so I not only have abandoned "plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem", but have expended some effort to deter others from finding or pursuing those specific solutions.
[*] Assuming "Material" is defined as "stuff we can directly observe and interact with", this is pretty clearly false under Materialism's own assumptions; effects follow causes, and we have directly observed at least one effect, the Big Bang, that leads back to no cause observable even in principle. Consequently we can be confident that something exists that we cannot observe or interact with, hence is not "Material" in the rigorous sense. Taking it as an axiom that this something is just more elaborate material of the sort we can observe is a reasonable approach. Asserting that it has to be this and any other axiom must be rejected is very clearly a statement of faith. We likewise have abundant observations of another effect, human will, which has no apparent material cause, but which very clearly "exists" in all useful senses of the word; we build much of our world off the assumption it exists, for instance, and doing otherwise is wildly impractical. Materialists often argue that Determinism must be true and all our observations of Free Will must be discarded, because they contradict Materialism. To the extent that these observations contradict Materialism, they are also evidence against Materialism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Why, given these facts about his work and thought, do you persist in saying that “he thinks he knows how to solve all our problems”?
I persist in suspecting that he thinks he knows how to solve all our problems for the following reasons:
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Because he appears to still be claiming allegiance to an ideology whose central feature is one of the best-possible examples of "we know how to solve all our problems".
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Because your own description of him makes it pretty clear that he is not speaking plainly about his model ("Intentionally left vague" above), and "I'm totally a communist, just not the bad kind of communist, I definitely wouldn't do the bad things, I would instead mumble mumble and that's why communism will work this time" is not terribly persuasive.
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Because he appears to intellectually associate with people who much-less-ambiguously employ "we know how to solve all our problems (as you say, "The sorts of ultra-left economic policies that you’ve heard of before", plus the Academy generally)."
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Because I do not think he would agree with, much less ever say anything like the following:
Prior to the conversation with Hlynka, I was thinking in terms of plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem. Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.
My understanding is that he is still entirely committed to "plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem". He thinks there is a plan, that there is a solution, and I do not find his efforts to distinguish himself from his ideology's failure modes persuasive. You argue that his idea that the end-state is not static is a significant difference, but I am not confident this is true due to the aforementioned intentional vagueness and cultivated ideological associations.
From our brief discussion of Marcuse:
FCfromSSC: Because he doesn't seem to see that statement as an obstacle to attempting solutions to all our problems. He says institutions can never resolve all the conflicts, that Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos. And then he concludes that the Revolution should proceed anyway, endlessly, and that this is a good thing. Doesn't he?
"Limits" stop things. This "limit" stops nothing, instead it "drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom", and he seems to consider this a feature, not a bug: "it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced". "Revolution" is commonly understood to mean the seizure and exercise of power. He claims that "revolution" will never end, and that this will plausibly deliver benefits indefinitely.
I do not see how this statement cashes out in a practical limit to socialist ambition. To the extent that it proposes a limit, the limit is entirely theoretical, and it appears to explicitly claim that such a theoretical limit will and should be ignored.
Primaprimaprima: He's saying that socialism can't create a perfect utopia, but it can make things better. This is a pretty common attitude across multiple ideologies. A standard American capitalist liberal might not think that we can create a utopia, but he does advocate for making things better through legal reform, scientific advancements, etc.
But my whole question is, "are these people capable of recognizing situations in which they can't make things better?" Are they capable of lifting their foot off the gas pedal? I suspect they are not, for a number of what seem to me to be entirely valid reasons, starting with their willing adherence to an ideology that has repeatedly proved itself incapable or doing so. And sure, this is a common problem across multiple ideologies, because the Enlightenment won three hundred years ago and most currently-popular ideologies are its direct descendents. My whole point is that vast swathes of ideologies suffer from this core problem, because they inherit it from the Enlightenment! I think most "standard capitalists" are in fact capable of recognizing that they don't actually have solutions to some problems, so it's not worth trying to fix them, but to the extent that some specific capitalist isn't so capable, my critique applies to them as well.
But the thing that really confuses me is that I've actually gone out of my way to describe in detail that I'm not actually certain about any of this, and recognize that I could be wrong about the disposition of specific theorists!
I am not familiar with either Zizek or McGowen, but the description you provide explains why they don't buy into Marxian Utopianism, not why they aren't adhering to "We know how to solve all our problems." Advocating for "Permanent Revolution" certainly doesn't sound incompatible with the core axiom described above. Do they believe that our present society could be vastly improved through a proper re-ordering of society? Do they believe that poverty, mental illness, crime and so on are essentially ills that our society has chosen to inflict on the less fortunate? Do they believe we might choose otherwise?
But if they have in fact abandoned the core axiom, if in fact they don't believe in Progress toward a Brighter Future, then I'd say they've left the Enlightenment and are doing their own thing. I would also argue that they're no longer a central example of a Marxist, whatever they choose to call themselves. For a similar example, consider Scientology: to me, the most salient feature of Scientology is its hierarchical nature, designed explicitly to crush and control individual members. Scientology splinter groups that have broken from that hierarchy but continue to believe the lore and perform the basic rituals together still call themselves Scientologists, but I can continue to object to "Scientology" as a group while considering them irrelevant to the discussion. In the same way, I don't actually care if someone wants to call themselves a "Marxist"; it's a perennially-fashionable label, as appalling as that is. What I care about is whether they believe, as Marx and all the central examples of Marxists very evidently did, that "we know how to solve all our problems."
I think I am offering reasonable analysis hedged with appropriate uncertainty. I'm not actually clear on why you disagree.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
If I start reading Newton's Principia and finish with Mill's On Liberty I don't observe any discontinuity or hostile takeover halfway through, but a gradual transition from a medieval worldview to a modern one.
How would you describe this "modern worldview"? Empiricism, materialism, skepticism, rationality, something along those lines?
It seems to me like you're trying to draw an arbitrary box around "bad political ideas from the 18th century" and label it the Enlightenment, when I was always taught that it meant "the entire intellectual project of Europe and its colonies between approximately 1650 and the present."
I am trying to demonstrate how bad philosophical ideas that became dominant in the 18th century infested the West with intellectual and ideological cancer from their inception down to the present day. I am critiquing a specific, coherent stream of intellectual thought that dominated the entire intellectual project of Europe and its colonies from approximately 1650 to the present.
The short version is that as Science began delivering massive, obvious benefits, people noticed that they could lie and claim to be Scientists doing Science, and as long as they engaged in a certain minimal amount of social posturing, the empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality could simply be bypassed, and they could reap all the social, fiscal and political benefits of Contributing to Science without actually having to contribute anything meaningful at all. The more people explicitly or implicitly locked into this paradigm, the lower the incentive to resist the bypass became. The result was a parasite class of "intellectuals" growing fat and happy, while at best actively burning value to accomplish nothing, and more often burning value to produce dangerous forms of self-replicating deceit to plague mankind generally.
This parasite class had already grown to the point of having serious geopolitical influence by 1789, and it only grew from there. It inflicted serious harm worldwide in the 1800s, and very nearly killed our civilization in the 1900s. The pattern that generates this parasite class is still going to this day. It needs to be recognized and killed before it does to this century what it did to the last one.
If I start reading Newton's Principia and finish with Mill's On Liberty I don't observe any discontinuity or hostile takeover halfway through, but a gradual transition from a medieval worldview to a modern one.
You should be able to recognize the hostile takeover in the architects, actions and character of the French revolution. You should definitely be able to recognize it in how subsequent generations spoke about the French Revolution; Mark Twain is one of my favorite examples of a purportedly intelligent person spouting insane, mindkilled horseshit. By the time we get to Marx and Freud, it seems to me that failure to recognize the pattern must in some sense be willful; and then there is the 20th century, where we must laugh lest we weep.
Obviously the technologies of the West can be copied by other societies today without copying our liberal politics, but I don't buy the argument that they could be invented in the first place without them (N=1, obviously, so if we disagree on this we come to a bit of an impasse as far as the available evidence is concerned, apart from the lack of internal combustion engines in the Roman Empire, Song China, or Mughal India).
This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened; yet the industrial revolution came out of Britain and then America, both of which stubbornly resisted the succession of ideologies spawned by the French Revolution far longer than their European peers, to their enormous benefit. Likewise, the universal literacy that was an obvious precursor to the scientific and industrial revolutions was a product of Protestant Christianity; the Enlightenment rode that trend, rather than generating it. It seems clear to me that if one actually gets rigorous in assessing where the material prosperity flows from, it is not in fact flowing from Enlightenment Progressivism.
But of course, it is entirely in the interest of Enlightenment ideologues to claim that they alone created The Science ex nihilo, and the alternative to their ideological program is pure benighted ignorance. Getting people to believe this has benefited them massively, and the longer they can keep the scam running the more value they can embezzle from the rest of us.
The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
You could claim that the Enlightenment resulted in a mutilation of man's soul, a great disenchantment that replaced his heart with metal and wheels...
At no point were human souls actually mutilated. At no point did disenchantment actually occur. At no point was even a single heart replaced with metal and wheels. And yes, I understand that you are speaking metaphorically here; I am speaking in the same metaphor.
The historical events and ideologies you are referring to in the first part of this sentence were not science in any meaningful sense of the term. The widespread belief that these acts and ideologies constituted a "scientific revolution" is the result of deliberate lies coordinated by specific, identifiable historical figures. Frued, Marx, Dewey, Watson, Skinner and so on sold humanity on "science" that was not actually scientific, and was in fact provably false.
The Enlightenment's core scam is to pretend that it speaks for and owns science in some meaningful way. That was absolutely not true for hundreds of years, and to the extent that it may have become true in the mind of scientists in our own era, science itself seems to have suffered as a result. The Enlightenment is a philosophical ideology. Many of the claims it is founded on are unfalsifiable, and many others have been falsified. It did not invent the scientific method, and it has never been particularly good at applying it.
The actual science, the part that really did deliver all the material benefits you are pointing to, has no actual connection to the ideology that has claimed credit for it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
The founders mostly died expecting their experiment to fail in a big and obvious way
The Civil War seems like a pretty significant point of failure. Otherwise, there's a lot of ruin in a nation, and especially one as fortuitously positioned as the United States. Give it time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Consolidating responses to a couple comments here.
From your post above:
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
I would strongly disagree with all three of these statements. I think we can agree that "left" or "right" are essentially meaningless, but whether human beings are naturally good or evil and the locus of control seem to me to be extremely important questions. Likewise, where you see Hlynka latching on to something to put all his enemies onto one side, if his method allows him to sort friends from enemies in a consistent fashion, that is straightforwardly and obviously useful to him and to anyone who shares his values. I use similar logic to sort friend and enemy, and to make predictions about where current ideology will lead people, and this seems like an obviously useful and relatively uncontroversial method of reasoning.
At a minimum, you should consider that a categorization system that you don't find useful for your purposes and values might still be useful to people with different purposes and values.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions.
Would you concede that, under the framing you're employing here, Eugenics was straightforwardly an attempt to reshape "human nature" through the mechanism of social institutions? Do the DR types believe that Eugenics was a bad idea or doomed to failure? Like, there's obviously a serious miscommunication happening here, because you are conflating "bad genes will always produce bad people" with "regardless of nature, regardless of nurture, the line between good and evil will always run through every human heart." These are not remotely equivalent statements.
I have and will argue that intelligence is orthogonal to morality, and that there is no reason at all to believe that even highly intelligent people are in any way more moral than dullards. Arguments to the contrary, from what I have seen, rely on a model of "morality" that rounds off to crime statistics, as though a person who never commits a crime, much less never gets caught committing a crime, is therefore morally perfect. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that those who commit crimes are necessarily less moral than those who do not, and that is even ignoring the part where immoral people can give their immorality the force and imprimatur of law. The logic that would argue otherwise is absurd for a whole host of reasons, but near as I can tell it is actually what a number of HBD enthusiasts I've encountered seem to be explicitly arguing.
Likewise, is Walt Bismark a reasonably representative example of a DR thinker? When he says:
I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual—I would say divine—creation... In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of white person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere... ...My experiences taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense... ...They have no destiny except under the caligae.
...what part of that passage would you describe as a recognition that human nature is immutable and immune to manipulation by social institutions? Would you argue that subjugating people wholesale is not a form of manipulation by social institutions? Do you understand that, completely separate from any charged keywords or references to specific identity groups, the core logic evident in that passage marks the author, to me, as the most mortal sort of ideological enemy? Someone with whom no cooperation is or likely ever will be possible?
And Yarvin's Hobbits and Dark Elves essay is much the same, though he maintains a far more diplomatic approach; his core logic marks him firmly as an enemy.
Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
You might as easily quote Bismark above, who clearly argues that not all whites make the cut. But as I understand it, the core objection isn't that the DR believes "white people inherintly good, everyone else inherintly bad", even though I have seen plenty of examples of exactly that sort of logic from what I thought were adherents to the DR here. It seems to me that one of the actual core objection is that they believe they can sort people into the good and bad bins by population-level metrics, when in fact they absolutely cannot do that.
But this ignores the diversity of views about human nature you find on both the far right and the far left.
Diversity is infinitely fractal. Focusing on specific commonalities that seem of primary relevance to one's own model is not "ignoring diversity". Relevance to the model at hand is the whole question.
The dissident right already has an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature, as far as I understand it. And even on the far left, things are not so clear. Followers of the more psychoanalytically-inflected strains of Marxism stress that there can be no final end to history, no ultimate reconciliation of the individual with the collective.
As above, I think of Bismark and Yarvin as examples of Dissident Right thinkers. Both seem to share a view of human nature that fits much better with Progressive ideology than with my own. Likewise, when we've discussed psychoanalytically-inflected strains of marxism, it seemed that the examples you offered argued for no final end in the sense that an asymptote has no final end.
I do not think Bismark, Yarvin, or the the psychoanalytically-inflected marxists could engage with the fundamental truth of "the poor you will always have with you."
That is an underlying assumption on both sides that if only all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down, utopia would be achievable. This is straightforwardly false. The dissident right does not believe this.
How would you characterize Bismark's call for a "thousand year Reich", aiming for "divine creation"? But let's say you're correct, and the DR doesn't argue that Utopia will be achieved if all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down. Would it be fair to say that they believe things will get a whole lot better, if they can simply remove most of the silly barriers keeping them from exercising unrestrained power to reshape and organize society?
Maybe they don't. Yarvin seems to, and Bismark definately seems to. Maybe they're not representative?
I suspect that what he wanted to say, but shied away from, is that there are ultimately two camps: those who believe in the Christian God, and those who don't.
I can say that I personally am very confident that this formulation is incorrect; belief in the Christian God is not required in any way. What is required is an understanding that we are not in control, that we are inside the box looking out, not standing in the lab looking in at the world in a box. Such a worldview is compatible with Christianity, in the sense that cooperation and productive coexistence between the two are possible, and the opposite worldview is incompatible with Christianity. That's the connection I think you are twigging to. The hubris required to assume that one is fundamentally in control is the same hubris necessary to believe that "rational Christian" is an oxymoron, and so the two correlate strongly; there is a reason Bismark claims that building his hoped-for society is a spiritual, even divine act of creation. Further, I find that one can argue persuasively against this hubris from entirely within a rational, materialist framework, provided one is sufficiently rigorous in their materialism.
Noted atheist Sargon of Akaad just put out a video more or less on this subject. For fictional/vibes examples, I thought Glen Cook's The Silver Spike and Shadowline were interesting attempts within the bounds of genre fiction. Kipling himself seems most of the way there.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is?
The short, inadequate answer would be something like "What rules are and how they work" and "what values are and how they work". The Founding Fathers had no context for Postmodernism, for the fully-developed concept of a "Living Constitution", or for the reality that human values could be incoherent at scale. They mistook local values-homogeneity for universal features of human nature, and they assumed that legible rules could meaningfully constrain human Will. They lacked a deep understanding of "manipulation of procedural outcomes" and rules-fragility.
That's my understanding, anyhow.
I am not Hlynka, but I did debate with and eventually alongside him for years, and as I understood his arguments, I continue to believe he was simply correct in the large majority of them. As a vociferous proponent of what one might term Hlynkism, here is a compilation of discussions that seem to me to be good examples of the core idea that usually gets this label. It's a large chunk of quotes; I recommend collapsing it if it doesn't seem useful.
I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occurred a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and consciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.
[...]
And yet, I see people who I'm quite confident would not self-ID as white identitarian, people who I would not argue are white identitarian, people who have been democrat-voting progressives most of their lives but who now have grown progressive-sceptical, lamenting that Red Tribers have "wasted" political capital preventing poor black women from aborting their babies, because HBD. I don't believe that perspective is coming out of what people commonly understand as "the Right", and I certainly don't believe it's coming from the zeitgeist of Red Tribe. It's a fundamentally Blue Tribe perspective, a progressive perspective, an Enlightenment perspective. And it's pretty trivial to see how integrating HBD into their worldview got them from a normie-progressive viewpoint to what most normie progressives would consider an abomination without ever leaving the general Progressive worldview-space.
[...]
The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree.
[...]
I think there's a significant and irreducible difference between the two formulations, and a way to try to begin describing it would be to say that "A" presents itself as on the inside looking out, and "B" presenting as from the outside looking in. I would say further that the former is better than the latter, because there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest. In this way, the passage shows that the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something, and that some ways of thinking are better than others.
[The above is part of a longer conversation, which continued in the following thread:]
I believe that "We know how to solve all our problems" is a brief, common-language encapsulation of the core thesis of a specific ideological movement, and that this ideological movement is best understood as the central example of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment this movement did not exist, and post-Enlightenment this movement has been overwhelmingly dominant throughout subsequent history. I think this movement's axioms are both very wrong and very dangerous, and further believe that its dominance is rapidly approaching an end, for reasons directly related to how this movement was formed and how its ideology predetermines its tactics. [...] Compare the phrase "the poor you will always have with you" to the conceptual bundle represented by the declaration of a "war on poverty". One flatly states that the problem of Poverty is unsolvable under mortal conditions. The other assumes that the problem of Poverty can be defeated through coordinated human action, right now and under present conditions.
[...]
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time. Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
[...]
"Consent" is necessary but insufficient. That is very different from it "not mattering". You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women, the radfems want fornication with fewer consequences for women and more consequences for men. I think you both are awful for basically identical reasons, and would not willingly live under either of your regimes.
[...]
When you design a better microprocessor, that does not give you or your culture additional moral value. Technological advancement does not, cannot, and never will imply moral value. It doesn't matter if I'm knapping flints and you're building star destroyers: our moral responsibilities to each other remain entirely unaltered. To think otherwise is to fatally misunderstand both morality and technology on an extremely basic level.
[...]
He's putting them in the "left" box for the same reason I put them in the "Enlightenment" box: They're secular materialists who believe that they know how to solve all our problems through the twin powers of meticulous sociopolitical theorycrafting and permanent removal of all the Bad People. They have a number of qualities they share between them, and our argument is that those qualities are vastly more consequential than their differences. These similarities are not a recent development, and go back all the way through the history of hard-left and fascist movements.
[...]
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
The American Revolution was, by most accounts, based on the principles of classical liberalism; principles that I imagine Hlynka and his fellow travelers would endorse wholeheartedly. Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution?
I've argued yes in the past, and would do so again. Likewise I've argued at some length that the "principles of classical liberalism" are fundamentally flawed, and they've failed in the ways we observe for clear, predictable reasons.
Does it have to be denounced?
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
Were the founding fathers necessarily committed to a certain "top down rationalist" view of human nature that true Red Tribers would have to reject?
There was a strong element of this, yes. It was moderated by contrasting, competing worldviews that were absent in, say, the French Revolution, and I believe that these moderating influences explain why it worked as well as it did for as long as it did. The French Revolution provides excellent contrast, as I've argued previously.
I argued this point with Hlynka back in the day, and my recollection was that the dispute came down to semantics; IIRC we both agreed that it came down to Hobbes vs Rousseau, and what label you apply to each of them. Likewise the argument I just linked: The American and French revolutions were very, very different, such that if both were "Enlightenment" revolutions, we should be able to say which was the more "Enlightened" than the other. It doesn't really matter which a given person picks, because the point is that if the term covers both perfectly equally, the term is actually meaningless, and by choosing, one reveals one's own definition. The American Revolution did contain a heaping helping of "top-down, rationalist" thinking, and the structures that resulted have failed us badly, and failed us the worst when we approached them from a top-down rationalist mindset.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
A significant portion number of such people were willing to support or at least accept extrajudicial execution for being an insurance executive or a trump supporter demonstrating in the wrong city.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.
This is in fact what he got banned for. He was an extremely valued commenter, but he eventually decided that he was no longer willing to abide by the rules here, and over the course of a number of repeated and very obvious rule violations presented the mods with a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation. They chose the rules.
@HlynkaCG remains my all-time favorite commenter here, and my interactions with him were, by far, the most constructive and formative of all those I've had here. I maintain to this day that his notable positions and arguments were simply correct. I myself have experienced fundamental conflict between the opinions I wish to express and the rules of this forum, and there was a stretch of time where I fully expected to receive a permaban, not because the mods were unfair in some way, but because I straightforwardly perceived my own intentions as fundamentally contrary to the forum's mission. It's something I and others have written about before: it's entirely possible for good, thoughtful, well-intentioned people to find themselves incapable of further participation here, because what this place requires, often enough, isn't goodness or thoughtfulness or fine intentions, but a peculiar sort of ice-cold abstraction.
To my knowledge, the behind-the-scenes mod drama consisted of mods arguing with him in private that he had to either stop breaking the rules or be banned, and the top-level ban announcement was to increase visibility for the people who had been arguing that him not being banned proved that the rules were fake.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.
Their concerns were ignored for generations. They tried to soldier on in any case, but ended up entirely discredited as FDR-descended systemic changes continued to snowball. And now they are effectively extinct, politically speaking. If their political perspective was valuable, perhaps those who now consider it valuable should have put more effort into preserving it when such effort might have born fruit.
Alternatively, once Trumpism has entirely run its course, secured all its victories, crushed all opposition, and set the bedrock rules for the coming century, there will probably be many who will agree that "We should never have another Trump."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
The failure mode of the US left is the French revolution, where every day the radicals will find their enemies of the state so that the guillotine baskets will be full by nightfall, while the failure mode of the right would be fascism, where party loyalty prevents any insiders from speaking out against crazy ideas.
The left does not seem very good about speaking out about crazy ideas either. And in fairness, I do not think the Right is immune to filling baskets with heads. I'm not sure this distinction works either way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
-Socrates, or so I'm told.
Can these perspectives be reconciled?
There is no health as such, and all attempts to define such a thing have failed miserably.
Is there a good as such? Have not all attempts to define such a thing failed miserably?
...I think this argument relies for its persuasive power on either ignorance of or a peculiar axiomatic commitment to its evident results. I have in my life "enjoyed" variant and deviant forms of "health" at some length. Once upon a time, I did not care much about conventional notions of health, because I quite consciously did not particularly wish to live to advanced age. Now I contemplate that I am rather unlikely to live to hold my grandchildren, and rather likely to leave my wife a widow, despite all promises to the contrary, and I wish I had not been so foolish in my youth. I wish further that others had not been so cruel as to encourage my delusions.
Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health - which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another.
Concrete examples would be really ideal here, and given the language, the higher-contrast, the better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I couldn't really be a psychiatrist if I subscribed to that notion, could I?
Consistancy is the hobgoblin of small minds, or so I'm informed.
I think "healthy at any size" is crap, and I say this as a member of the target audience. But in order to take that position, I'm implicitly making an objective claim that some states are healthier than others, regardless of what the people experiencing those states think. It doesn't seem to me that this sort of position is compatible with your critique of the naturalist fallacy above. The argument against obesity is that it's divergent from our natural state, from what we ought to be. But as you say, rabies, infant mortality, etc, etc, and it seems to follow that any downside to obesity could easily be framed as just a matter of insufficient technology.
I would argue that we should value the places where nature is consonant with our desires, and we should be skeptical of places where our desires require wholesale rejection of nature. To the extent that our desires potentially bring us into conflict with nature, I think we should favor the desires that are as concrete and general as possible, over the desires that are highly individual and unusual. I think doing so would allow us to pursue common ground for a supermajority of the population.
To the extent that values are sufficiently mutually incoherent that the rabies vaccine, reduced infant mortality, and prepubescent gender transition can't be distinguished, it seems to me that Dril rules are in effect.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Would it be fair to say that you view the word "healthy" to be meaningless outside of direct reference to atomic individualist personal preference? That is to say, the question of whether something is "healthy" begins and ends with their subjective opinion of their current state?
I was fortunate enough to read this book near two decades ago, well before 300 vomited "SPARTA" into every corner of popular culture. I remember it being absolutely excellent, right down to the very last page.
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