To_Mandalay
4mo ago
That it is impossible to live without the solutions in the world we have created, and that these solutions require an Empire to maintain, which means we are addicted to structures of control.
I still don't see an issue with this. Controlling nature and human behavior are good things.
There are specific examples of technologies that do not have this problem and empower the individual instead of enslaving him to large organizations.
What are some good technologies and bad technologies, in your view?
Have you ever asked yourself seriously why you prefer one over the other instead of assuming without inquiry that they are equivalent?
In other cases my personal feeling goes the other way. A lot of right-wingers think people only pretend to like modern art for clout but I am an unironic modern art enjoyer. I think this is much cooler and more pleasant to look at that anything Da Vinci, or Caravaggio ever produced.
How familiar are you with Kant and the categorical imperative?
I know the wikipedia definition.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Being a middle class-ish American doesn't make me an aristocrat. And if I am then so is everybody else on this forum.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
I am, but would appreciate either elaboration or a link to what you consider the strongest version of the Luria argument.
I don't really know what I'd call the strongest version of the argument, as I don't think Luria really was making an argument (well he was, but the argument was that socialist development was raising the mental level of the peasantry which is not really interesting) so much as just collecting data. But in any case here's a summary of the research. Here is Russell T. Warne describing a study in Africa which showed the same phenomenon.
ut I'd like some detail on exactly what consequences you expect to derive from this claim, such that you think the absence of this ability would make their thought alien to me.
That's a matter of taste. I would find it extremely frustrating and yes, alien, to hold a conversation with someone who was incapable of entertaining a hypothetical.
None of these features seem alien in any way. Widespread examples of all of these characteristics are available in the modern world, and in America even,
Killing somebody over a card game or killing a cat for fun are pretty alien to me. If someone did either of these things I would stay far away from them and consider them dangerous and anti-social, as would everybody else I know. Some people do do these things even today in the modern USA and they are generally considered to be acting in an extremely aberrant and objectionable way.
None of this is even close to as alien as, say, the Apache or Comanche, and I would not describe them as bizarrely alien.
I would. The Comanche used to teach their children how to torture prisoners of war to death. That is bizarrely alien to my experience and I think it probably is to yours as well.
To be a bit more specific, they were "like us" in that they had exactly the same vices and virtues as we have, in roughly equal proportions; only the detail of how these were expressed culturally seems to differ.
That's burying the lede pretty hard. The details of how base emotions, most of which are shared even by non-human animals, are expressed, are very important.
I'm pretty sure they had bullying, crushes, sweethearts, rivals, hated enemies, ambition, jealousy, deceit...
Wild animals above the level of insects have all these too. Maybe not jealousy.
Truly, how could anyone communicate with such alien savages?
You're the only one using the word "savage." They were different from us, which doesn't necessarily make them worse or better. I'm not even passing judgment. I wouldn't wanna live like they did, but that's just my personal preference, being as much a product of my environment as they were.
By the 1600s, the Germans are down to around 10 murders per 100,000, and the dread Italians are around 35.
Compared to Germany's rate of 1 per 100,000 today, I would call that shockingly high.
At that point, the 1600s Guido Menace would have moderately less violent that American blacks in the 2000s, and moderately more violent than those same blacks in the 2010s. I'd guess the Vile Huns were somewhere roughly in the ballpark of Appalachian whites from the same era. American blacks, in any case, are likewise not entirely unfamiliar with domestic violence, or indeed with animal cruelty for sport. And they're like this in the modern world with all the blessings of modernity, not least of which is a system of truly remarkable trauma medicine to turn 1600s murders into mere 2000s woundings. I used to work with a lot of underclass Blacks in an underclass job. Was I likewise underestimating how "deeply alien" my black coworkers were, or are these feelings of alienation reserved only for the distant past?
I can't speak to that specifically, but yes there are pockets of life in modern society which are extremely alien to me. I have also interacted fairly extensively with "underclass" people, or at least people from a different social class than me, mostly whites and Mexicans (including some who have spent time in prison for violent crimes). Yes I have found their experiences and backgrounds very alien to my own, to the point where it was often difficult to find the common ground necessary for any kind of fruitful conversation. The feeling was mutual, and I imagine it would be even more the case with a 17th century peasant commune.
I imagine German or Italian peasants would be horrified by a description of American abortion practices, or OnlyFans, or Pride Parades,
No doubt.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
This is what Ted denounces, that we made our bed of autism and tooth decay and are decided to invent and sell solutions to the problems we created that only make us less adapted to our environment.
This is a common critique ("We are creating problems which we then have to solve") but I don't really see what the issue with that is. What's wrong with creating new problems and then solving them with new methods?
I don't like that. I think we can have technology without this problem.
I doubt it. I think Marx was right at least that culture and society are largely a reflection of underlying material conditions. The customs and morals that developed in a pastoral society 3000 years ago cannot be freely transplanted onto the 21st century. If they could, it would not last very long. And I doubt there are new moral systems that could be developed to significantly ameliorate the problems of modernity. The only salvation is to hope humanity can technologize itself out of the novel problems it's created for itself by earlier technologizing, and I don't see any problem with that.
I couldn't disagree more. You may as well say there is nothing special or essential about the feeling you get when you are interacting with a great piece of art.
Well, I agree with that too. I don't think there's anything qualitatively different between the enjoyment a person gets from watching Marvel slop #28493 and beholding the Reims Cathedral. And I say that as someone who doesn't like Marvel movies and would probably prefer visiting the Reims Cathedral.
So you are a Kantian of sorts. What is then your stance on Natural Law?
I'm vaguely familiar with both the Lockean kind and the Aristotlean kind from readings in college and a few Catholic apologist books, but I don't recall being convinced by the idea that metaphysical rights or duties of any sort exist.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Whether women wanna date men who make less money than them is a totally different question from whether the disappearance of traditionally masculine jobs from the economy contributes to a crisis of masculine identity.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Marx's specific criticism of capital...
I think this is mostly accurate but the main thing that separates Marx from the reactionaries is that he believed that fundamentally the liberal bourgeois revolutions and the transformation of the peasantry into industrial proletarians was ultimately a good thing.
Read the Autonomy and Surrogate Activities sections of ISAIF and you'll get a precise idea what I mean. Man wasn't meant for email jobs. To cater to your materialism I would say that man is not adapted to such things because they are too recent.
I do not take the suffering of humanity for millennia to adapt to the specific needs of society to be a reasonable course of action. Tradition holds that society should conform to us and our nature in its design.
What I believe Kaczynski misses here is that the humans of industrial society are not the humans of pre-industrial society. Even if we assume a pre-industrial hunter gatherer would give an "8" if asked "how fulfilled are you?" and a modern office worker would give a "5," that doesn't mean the office worker would report an "8" if made to live the life of the hunter gatherer.
I also don't buy that humanity at large is "suffering." In some ways, sure, but this suffering is not particularly greater than the suffering has ever been. How would this would even be measured in theory?
Build a table from scratch until you get a result you like, and then tell me that the feeling you are getting isn't real and what really matters is what's in the spreadsheets with a straight face.
Spreadsheets are not enjoyable and there are other things I find enjoyable like reading, exercise, or wasting time on the internet. If you want to call that actualization you can, but there's nothing special or essential about this feeling. Probably some people do like spreadsheets. "People have to do unpleasant tasks" is not a unique flaw of modernity. I think I would feel much less actualized if I was an illiterate farmer who never got to read an interesting book in his life. The oppression of nature is not preferable to the oppression of industry and the modern state; it's much worse.
I'm not sure his style will appeal to your materialist biases however,
I don't really consider myself a strict materialist. There are obviously some immaterial entities that exist like numbers or logical laws and maybe even more, which is why I don't even consider myself an atheist, but I don't see any reason to include human ideological constructs like the ones I've mentioned in that category.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Because you have a solely material understanding of what is good.
Why shouldn't I? I don't believe honor, glory, virtue, or tradition exist as real transcendentals beyond the human mind, and I place no value on them. They are only fictions whose persistence is simply because they produce a pleasant (and ultimately, physiological and material) sensation in the bodies of those who cling to them, and because they are useful tools to organize society in a way that also produces pleasant (and again, physiological and material) sensations in those same people. This isn't really an argument against liking those fictions, there's no rational argument why someone shouldn't, but there's no rational argument why someone should either, unless they already do. I believe the same thing about fictions from the opposite side of the aisle like freedom, democracy, equality, and tolerance, but you probably agree with me on that.
This is the only charge against the Enlightenment that sticks, and yes it sticks just as well when Marx says it than when Evola says it
I don't think Marx ever made that charge.
The life created by the unrestrained mercantile impulse is inhuman and torrents of blood have already been unleashed to tamper its excesses or realize its promises.
Inhuman meaning what? "The life" by which I imagine you mean the general state of society over the past several centuries was certainly created by humans, what exactly makes it inhuman? Is it just a personal distaste for it?
When Ted complains that the world is crushing the freedom and actualization of the individual, you can decide to call this right wing and oppose this slander of the industrial system because it's not fair on abstract power structures.
I oppose it because I think talk of freedom and actualization is mostly gobbledygook, like the aforementioned honor and equality and tolerance and glory. What Kaczynski is saying when you strip it all away is just "I don't like industrial society because it makes me upset" which is fine, but it doesn't make me upset, so we've reached an impasse, because I can't imagine any argument which would cause me to privilege what makes Ted Ted Kaczynski upset/not upset over what makes me upset/not upset.
Vico is right. And people who dismiss his insight are behaving like creationists who cling to specific dismissals, attempt to refute specifics individually without considering the whole or grasp at epistemological traps to refuse to acknowledge the plain truth because the big picture shatters their own personal intuitions.
Well I've never read Vico and didn't know who he was before you told me. The "Course of Nations" section of The New Science on internet archive is only about fifty pages; can I get away with reading that or do I have to read the whole thing? What specific insights did he have that have yet to be disproven?
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
The conditions of life in say, tsarist Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries to give one example are pretty well recorded, and they were not vastly changed from those in the 18th or 17th centuries. The vanishing of the traditional agricultural lifestyle is quite recent in historical terms, and it still persists to some extent today in certain countries. So we actually do have a pretty good picture of what pre-industrial life was like.
We have actual histories, songs and stories from people a few centuries ago, and even from many centuries ago. They do not demonstrate a life-experience of unending hell-misery, but rather an existence very like our own.
Naturally, they didn't know anything else. If you lock a kid in the basement from infancy and beat him five times every day of the week and only once on Saturday and Sunday, the weekend is gonna look pretty awesome to him, but most people who weren't raised in a basement wouldn't find being locked in a basement and being beaten once a day on weekends very fun.
Their concerns were similar to ours. Their joy and suffering was similar to ours. Nothing fundamental about human nature or the human experience has changed in any way since at least the invention of writing.
You severely underrate how alien these people were. There's pretty good evidence they were practically incapable of abstract thought or logical exercises that would be easy for a small child in the modern United States (this being in reference to the great mass of common people, obviously, not a very small educated elite). You may be familiar with A.M Luria's study of Uzbek peasants as late as the 1920s and 30s as it's made the rounds in rationalist and rationalist adjacent circles. This was not because of any genetic inferiority, but because their world was so founded in the immediate and concrete that a basic "if A then B" syllogism was beyond their grasp. They were also shockingly violent. Besides their regular wanton cruelty to animals for practical reasons as well as for amusement, they were basically always ready to fight and kill each other over the mildest of slights. Sicilian immigrants to the US as late as the 20s, coming from one of the most backwards and least industrialized regions in Europe, had an astronomical murder rate because stabbing somebody in the throat for cheating at cards or hitting on your sister was just totally normal to them.
Yes, our ancestors were "like us" insofar as they loved their friends and families, liked to tell and hear stories, enjoyed food and sex, and feared death, but that's a pretty sparse overlap in my opinion. Outside of a tiny handful of intellectuals and philosophers, you probably wouldn't be able to hold any kind of real or meaningful conversation with a 16th century German even if you could speak his language perfectly, and you wouldn't want to anyway because he might crush your skull.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Except that every civilization that has fallen in the past believed exactly that about themselves. T
The ancients had a pretty fatalistic view of history. They tended to view themselves as degraded versions of their ancestors, hence the stories of bygone golden ages. The idea of eternal progress is largely a Christian one. Furthermore the life of the average Roman was closer to the life of an Egyptian 1000 years earlier or a medieval 1000 years later than any of them are to the life of the average US citizen in 2024. It really is different this time.
Obviously modern civilization will not last forever, just because nothing does, whether it degrades into something resembling a past state or advances into something else. But that doesn't really make the fate of the Romans or the Turks instructive.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.
There are a lot less than there used to be and will probably be even less going forward.
There's differences that show up in the modern age too. Engineering is predominantly male (though not as male as the trades), despite vast effort made to change that. But do men get credit for this? No, we get rhetorically beat up for it.
Yes, there are other sex differences. But upper body strength, and what flows from it like fighting, killing, other feats of physical strength was for a long time the single most important sex difference. It absolutely dwarfs most others, even if you assume all other sex difference are 100% innate. Its shrinkage as a relevant factor in modern society is hugely impactful and probably couldn't be otherwise.
A huge portion of the seething over women having "fake email jobs" and what have you probably comes down to the fact that a huge portion of men also have "fake email jobs" nowadays. You can say "well the majority of cutting edge research in XYZ field is still done by men" or whatever, but that's a tiny proportion of all men so it doesn't really matter for the average person. It used to be the case that a miner or a steelworker or farm laborer could tell himself he was doing a job only a man could do and that was a source of pride and identity for him, though even by the 19th and early 20th century the anxiety about the softening of manhood was already well-advanced, evidenced by all of those intellectuals who argued that regular warfare was necessary to maintain racial/national virility. But nowadays a guy who works as a cashier at wal mart or does some rote office job understands full-well that a woman could do his job just as easily and it probably grates psychologically.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
What is more cruel and violent than the plain imposition that you will never own your home, you will never have a loving wife, you will never have a loyal husband, you will never sire children and all you will ever do is pay for pensions working a job you hate while your black rectangle beams images of happier people into your mind as everything in your vicinity including your own life gets slowly but surely worse in every regard. Perhaps the threat of the punishment that awaits you if you dare to contest such a fate?
Being eaten by wolves. Having your head bashed in by a rival war party. Pretty much any given day in the life of a pre-modern man. On feast days Russian peasants used to get drunk and beat each other senseless for fun, and then go home and beat their wives. This is just "words are violence" but right-wing.
Actually none of what you describes strikes me as a fraction as unpleasant as the life of the average person a few centuries ago, which is probably why humanity collectively abandoned that lifestyle as soon as it was materially feasible. "A job you hate" is not fun but it's probably more fun than starving to death because there was a bad frost and the crops all died.
As for "everything slowly but surely getting worse in every regard" idk what specifically you have in mind but most right-wing complaints about everything getting worse are just tautological complaints that everything is getting less right-wing which naturally isn't convincing to anyone who doesn't already buy into all right-wing premises.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.
It hasn't. Cyclical theories of history were always bullshit, though they may have been facially plausible in 1800 . Humanity is in entirely uncharted territory. The past offers no lessons, because it actually is different this time. Modern people aren't 16th century peasants. They aren't even 20th century proletarians.
All of the "weak men strong times" stuff, the idea that the stultifying atmosphere of modernity will ultimately lead to some great revolt for the restoration of meaning, virtue, whatever, none of it has any contact with reality. Angsting about meaning is itself a luxury available to the excessively wealthy, as everyone is in modern developed countries by western standards. Approximately nobody is going to forsake material comfort to embark on some great vitalist crusade, because material comfort is what most people actually care about first and foremost. Even people who are "struggling" today live like kings compared to the average person 100 years ago, let alone 200.
It would take a total collapse of industrial civilization to produce the global warlordism that you dream of, and that's possible, though I don't think it's very likely.
I don't even know what "we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence" would actually even look like in practice. Like a based fascist party takes over the US tomorrow and then, what, invades Mexico for fun? Resurrects gladiatorial combat? Nukes China?
I remember when right-wing twitter personality Alaric the Barbarian made a post about how young men need GREATNESS and ADVENTURE and should not settle for the drudgery of living in suburban Indianopolis and someone reasonably said yeah posting photos of Greek statues and larping as a Germanic warlord is cool and everything but what actually are you concretely suggesting people do and he replied uhhh run for dogcatcher.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
All that stuff is good, but none of it can really replace the visceral knowledge that you are directly responsible for keeping yourself and your family alive, which was reality for the vast majority of men for the vast majority of history, but no longer.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.
The "masculinity crisis" is probably down mostly to the traditional foundations of masculine identity, what distinguished it fundamentally from femininity going back several thousand years at least, e.g being physically powerful and being good at killing people/animals are less and less relevant than ever in industrial and post-industrial society and are only going to become more so.
Probably not actually "fixable" short of a Kaczsynskian collapse of civilization and why all proposed solutions whether they be left-wing "build a positive masculinity" stuff or right-wing "retvrn" will fail.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
This one made me laugh.
My daughter is 4. I imagine her twenty years later being disgusted by the betahood of Western whites, somehow avoiding the trap of burning coal, and marrying a based Eastern European, Russian, or Chinese dude and living in those kinds of countries happily ever after.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Love you too.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Just paying the guys in that Kamala ad to read a random selection of themotte.org comments out loud with no alterations would have been much more viscerally repulsive normie-scaring than what they actually did.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Doubt it, the following (calling them racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic and implying "some" of them were irredeemable) was just too juicy to pass up.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
I don't believe there was some smaller number she could have used that would have failed to inspire the same reaction her actual comments did. It was just the usage of "Trump supporters" and "deplorables" in the same sentence which made for a great soundbite. About comparable to Mitt Romney's "47%" remark.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
So if she had said "1/3" surely there would have been no complaining and right-wingers wouldn't have ridden the "THEY CALLED TRUMP SUPPORTERS DEPLORABLES" hobby horse for the next several years.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
"Basket of deplorables" was such an anodyne remark. Especially since she hedged it by admitting she was being "grossly generalistic" and then went out of her way to clarify Not All Trump Supporters. And then proceeded to backpedal even further almost immediately and apologize for saying even that much. "Some of my opponent's supporters are bad" is probably near the mildest sentiment a politician running for office can express without total rhetorical capitulation.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
The difference is the left being weird is already priced in and has been for centuries, while the right's whole schtick is supposed to be that they're the normal people party defending normal people who just wanna be left alone from degenerate leftist freaks, so the left gets a lot more mileage out of pointing out the tradcath/nazi frog/yarvinite/etc. fringes of the right who want to reverse the French Revolution or whatever. Especially since Trump's VP pick has significantly closer ties to those circles than your average right-wing pol, even if it's overstated for propaganda purposes.
To_Mandalay
5mo ago
You allow more guns, you get more gun crimes, including against the politicians that allowed it. If it was practically impossible for private citizens to purchase firearms in the United States, Donald Trump almost certainly wouldn't have almost gotten shot in the head last week.
To_Mandalay
5mo ago
"You guys" meaning the category of right-wingers he wishes would take violent terroristic action, using the specific example of mass-killing prominent antifa figures, a category he presumably identifies with (or else why would he be mad they're not doing terrorism?).
A few replies down he says that Anders Breivik made "a fair effort" so it's fair to say he's pro-mass shooting in principle but takes issue with its practice. Real right-wing terrorism never been tried.
To_Mandalay
5mo ago
Right-wingers have been doing this cope for decades. Does anybody remember "Generation Zyklon"?
Well I don't disagree with that proposition. Does anybody? What is supposed to be drawn from that? Yes if we were reduced to the material level of the 15th century we would probably live similarily to 15th century people. But so what? What is the use of pointing out such a banal fact?
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