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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35038 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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On Inferential Distance

There's a pair complaints that get made here on a semi-regular basis to the effect of how "The right" lacks a positive vision/will to power, and more generally the how the whole Left/Right spectrum is incoherent. These complaints are often deployed in tandem with the old Bryan Caplan take about the left is defined by being anti-market and the right is defined by being anti-left. I disagree, and given how I've been accused by multiple users of "torturing the meaning of words" and "doubling down on obvious falsehoods" over the last couple months, and I feel kind of obligated to elaborate.

Entering college life as I did (as Freshman on the GI-Bill Student after 12 years as combat medic), I found it difficult to discount the degree to which certain cultural assumptions dominated the school's culture. I often found myself feeling a bit like Captain Picard in that one TNG Episode where the alien-of-the-week's individual words are readily translatable but their meaning is not. When I first read Yudkowski's post on "expecting short inferential distances" it crystalized something that I had already grasped intuitively but had been struggling to put into words. The concept of "inferential distance" subsequently became something of a bugbear of mine. In 1984 Orwell posits that the key to controlling discourse was to first control the language and I think he was on to something with that. As I've previously observed, for all the talk of theMotte being "right wing" it's userbase is overwhelmingly progressive in background. Being college educated is the default here. Atheism is the default here. A belief in identity politics and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics is the default here. These assumption (and yes I am calling them assumptions) get baked into the discourse and people who don't already buy into them end up facing an uphill battle if they wish to participate in the discussion. Often times I'll find myself choosing to not bother but I can't help but notice that this amplifies the problem, "evaporative cooling" and all that.

While I recognize that language is more performative than it is prescriptive what I am endeavoring to do here is something like a rectification of names. A lot of what I am about to say is going to be a rehash of things that some of you will have already read before on Lesswrong, SSC, or on theMotte prior our departure from Reddit. But in the interests of engaging with people we disagree with I will attempt to restate my case for the record...

What do I mean when I say "Western Civilization"? I refer to the intellectual tradition that is essentially a marriage of middle eastern mysticism and classical Greek/Roman formalism. This tradition rose to prominance in the first century BC and spread rapidly along the mediterrainian coast ultimately conquering most of Europe and eventually spreading to the new world. One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye. There is a debate to be had about to what degree early Christianity created these conditions or was simply a reaction to them but I don't think they matter all that much. It looks to me like a chicken and egg type question as regardless of on which side you fall in the debate the two are inextricably linked. The venn diagram of cultures considered "western" and cultures "heavily influenced by Christainity" (as opposed to other faiths Abrahamic or otherwise) is practically a circle with Jesus himself quoting Homer and Aeschylus in his sermons.

Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other. The core points of disagreement being internal vs exterenal loci of control and the "default" state of man. While this model may have fallen out of favor in acedemia over the last few decades I still believe that it holds value in that it "cleaves reality at the joints" by pointing to real differences in how diffrenet classes within the west approach questions of legal authority/legitimacy while still accurately reflecting to the original etymology, IE which side would one be expected to take in the French revolution.

Users here will often argue that the existance (or non-existance) of "an imaginary sky-friend" or individual loci of control are not relevant to whatever issue is being discussed but I disagree. I believe that these base level assumptions end up becoming the core of what positions we hold.

I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place. 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 a fundamentally Rousseauean viewpoint where in violence, inequity, and injustice are all products of living in a society. Meanwhile I find myself barrowing pages from Hobbes and Burke, grand ideas are nice and all, but social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.

Edit: Fixed link, spelling

If left and right are different versions of enlightenment philosophy, this leaves open the possibility of an opposition from outside the enlightenment. But you dont seem to think theres anything in that box. Anytime you argue that someone is not a real rightist, they are placed firmly in the "left" box. Why do you think that is?

I argue that they're both versions of Enlightenment philosophy. @HlynkaCG, if I've understood him properly, believes that the Right we mutually draw from is the true Enlightenment, and the left branch out through the Jacobins and Hegel and Marx is something else. This is, near as I can tell, pretty near to a purely terminological disagreement.

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.

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.

Basically this ^

But you dont seem to think there's anything in that box.

There is but it's not particularly relevant to this discussion. If anything your formulation of the problem is precisely backwards. Anything that isn't hugging the extreme left of the Overton Window gets painted as "right wing" because when as far as most academics are concerned secular progressivism with at least two-scoops of Marx and Hegel is the default.

However, and this is kind of the point of this whole series. To someone who grew up outside the academy the difference between a queer intersectionalist preaching social justice because they believe blacks are incapable of succeeding on their own merits and a queer intersectionalist preaching white nationalism because they believe in HBD seem trivial in comparison to the differences between both of them and the median voter. That the former may be identified as "far left" while the latter is identified as "far right" is a product of the narcissism of small differences and a demonstration of just how divorced academia (and theMotte) has become from mainstream US politics/culture.

ETA: Also Holy thread necromancy Batman.

There is but it's not particularly relevant to this discussion

I wasnt particularly disagreeing with you; I genuinely would like to know what you think is in there.

secular progressivism with at least two-scoops of Marx and Hegel

How much do you know of Hegel? My impression is that while he caused a lot of brainrot, you are closer to his object-level positions than to Hobbses.

Also Holy thread necromancy Batman.

Im here so rarely now, I pick out the pearls.

I'm fairly skeptical of "Western Tradition" as a thing to be worshipped the way it is in some circles (not here). Socrates and Jesus were not at all the same. There is the historical point that Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem often had influence on the same cultures, but even then it's not as if that was always the same thing, or always some even mix of the various traditions.

In any case, where would Jesus have quoted Homer or Aeschylus? I've never heard of that. The closest I've seen is Paul quoting I-forget-whom in Acts.

But I do agree with the overall point that this is not exactly a place full of traditional conservatives.

where would Jesus have quoted Homer or Aeschylus?

"As a dog returns to it's vomit a fool returns to his folly"...

"By the sword you have made your living, and by a sword you will meet your end"...

...and "faithful are the wounds of a friend"

Are literary aphorisms that significantly predate their appearances in the bible and would've presumably been familiar to a Greek speaking audience through the Iliad and the great Tragedians. Ditto "having sown a wind we will reap the whirlwind" though there is no independent attestation for that one. Something that's easy to forget these days is that the Gospels (if you accept that they happened) are not happening in isolation but within the context of a wider culture.

So the first and third of those are from Proverbs. The fourth is from Ecclesiastes. The second alone is from the New Testament, from Jesus.

I'm not sure what Greek influence it might have, but the quote by Jesus could plausibly be influenced by Genesis 9 (which, of course, by no means excludes the possibility of Greek influence, or influence from both).

But for the others, I'm really not sure how that would be understood to be from the Greeks, since my understanding was that they antedated them.

Of course, there was a good deal of Greek influence on things (the New Testament is written in Greek after all!), but I'm not sure that that influence is necessarily from the things that we ordinarily think of as classical Greek—Plato, the tragedians, Herodotus, and so on. But I'm really not adequately read up on this.

I'd heard that the Sadducees were considered to be more influenced by the Greeks, what with a denial of the resurrection and so on.

Also, I was wrong, it wasn't Ecclesiastes but actually Hosea, which is certainly pre-Greek. (this is what I get for going with vibes instead of checking)

I'll have some of what you're smoking if you don't mind.

The problem, Hlynka, is that you are always trying to shoehorn reality into what suits your fancy, rudely at that. This is something I've accused women of doing recently, to some understandable disapproval from @gemmaem, but I did say that this is not so much a particularly female moral failing as a natural outcome of having power (maybe it could have been better described with some of TLP's writings about narcissistic rage, which of course have nothing to do with psychopathology). You serve the greatest power on Earth, one that feverishly seeks to extend its monopoly on violence to the furthest reaches of the Universe, you identify with it, so it is a given you succumb to this temptation as well.

To begin with, while you were indeed accused of torturing the meaning of words and the like in relation to your hot takes on tribal affiliation of right-wingers, the «doubling down on obvious falsehoods» was specifically about your bizarrely hostile – and easily disproven – insistence that language models don't have certain capabilities. You can't deal with that issue by doubling down on your politics.

But since language models and your politics are, in fact, only tangentially related, I'll only comment on the latter.

Your politics are not conservative or progressive in some principled philosophical sense. They are technically center-right but, first and foremost, American – and this pretty much exhausts their content.

All nations are, to an extent, imagined communities, where the actual cohabitation is fortified, like democracy can be, with clever psyops and retcons. Your nation is a Proposition Community – and one heavily reinvented in your lifetime to become as expansive and comfortable to the power brokers within it as possible. The marriage of Jerusalem and Athens can result in any number of political systems, and each one would seek to claim the mantle of Western Civilization as such, this has happened a few times before. Indeed, even the Proposition Nation idea, very infectious as of late, can take many forms. Singapore is the Proposition Nation with mercantile East Asian characteristics; France is the Proposition Nation of Reddit Rationalism. And like Alasdair MacIntyre has said,

…But perhaps a systematic recognition of this incompatibility will enable us to diagnose one central flaw in the political life characteristic of modern Western states, or at least of all those modern Western states which look back for their legitimation to the American and the French revolutions. For polities so established have tended to contrast themselves with the older regimes that they displaced by asserting that, while all previous polities had expressed in their lives the partiality and one-sidedness of local customs, institutions and traditions, they have for the first time given expression in their constitutional and institutional forms to the impersonal and impartial rules of morality as such, common to all rational beings. So Robespierre proclaimed that it was an effect of the French Revolution that the cause of France and the cause of the Rights of Man were one and the same cause. And in the nineteenth century the United States produced its own version of this claim, one which at the level of rhetoric provided the content for many Fourth ofJuly orations and at the level of education set the standards for the Americanisation of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century immigrants, especially those from Europe.

Hegel employs a useful distinction which he marks by his use of words Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit. Sittlichkeit is the customary morality of each particular society, pretending to be no more than this. Moralitiit reigns in the realm of rational universal, impersonal morality, of liberal morality, as I have defined it. What those immigrants were taught in effect was that they had left behind countries and cultures where Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit were certainly distinct and often opposed and arrived in a country and a culture whose Sittlichkeitjust is Moralitiit. And thus for many Americans the cause of America, understood as the object of patriotic regard, and the cause of morality, understood as the liberal moralist understands it, came to be identified. The history of this identification could not be other than a history of confusion and incoherence, if the argument which I have constructed in this lecture is correct. For a morality of particularist ties and solidarities has been conflated with a morality of universal, impersonal and impartial principles in a way that can never be carried through without incoherence.

The modern American system, however, is a particularly extreme case in that it reduces this civilization to a citizenship and a rather short list of legal precepts (and one more thing we'll return to shortly). Not the people (which drives @SecureSignals or @Hoffmeister25 to predictable indignation), nor an ideology (as those are quickly exchanged), nor religion, nor heritage, as even history is rewritten and reinterpreted at a whim. Who are your people? Degenerates and mongrels (your words, not mine). What is the living spirituality of your people? Something something Jesus quoted Homer when drinking at Moe's, but also live and let live, man; further, myopic pragmatism dressed as virtue. What is your idea? «Grand ideas suck», but you're always itching to bash some egghead's skull in for having the temerity to propose one and expect an argument in return. The power you have amassed, however, seeks expression, and it takes the shape informed by grand ideas you prefer to haughtily ignore until they become received wisdom, the water you swim in, and you become willing to murder and get murdered in their name – with nothing, really, except some confused childish platitudes about good and evil to justify the call.

Naturally this can't be how it works. How it works – coming back to the one more thing – is that you do have a grand idea. The grand idea is circular self-worship bringing the confused identification of Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit to the logically final point where no distinction is, strictly thinking, conceivable; America is its own God. This faith is not grounded in any intellectual tradition, in fact not in any tradition, but remains as jealous as any other. All people who found their beliefs on other frameworks, and therefore are or might become disloyal, are seen as heathens or heretics, depending on their background. In your lingo they are «progressives», but this means less than an Orthodox Christian accusing a Catholic of being a schismatic. In the lingo of your Legal Enemies, enemies playing another part in the two-tact regime of American political worship, defectors from the vacuous self-worship cult can be called «fascists» or «far right». There is an asymmetry between sides of the performance in their ability to publicly make use of those allies, and other slight details, but we've been discussing those asymmetries for years now.

It's about time to scrutinize the median case, which you represent well enough.

The problem, Hlynka, is that you are always trying to shoehorn reality into what suits your fancy, rudely at that. This is something I've accused women of doing recently, to some understandable disapproval from @gemmaem, but I did say that this is not so much a particularly female moral failing as a natural outcome of having power (maybe it could have been better described with some of TLP's writings about narcissistic rage, which of course have nothing to do with psychopathology). You serve the greatest power on Earth, one that feverishly seeks to extend its monopoly on violence to the furthest reaches of the Universe, you identify with it, so it is a given you succumb to this temptation as well.

What if there is no monopoly on violence to be had? What if our interlocutor's "narcissistic rage" is exactly that? Am I to become a narcissist?

What is the living spirituality of your people?

Good question. What keeps Americans of all races and creeds together?

It is not politics, it is not voting - about half of eligible voters do not bother to register and vote, but no one wants to excommunicate them from ranks of American nation.

Yes there is something, and this is sport - more precisely, sports that are played only or mostly in good ole US.

Throwing big ball, kicking ball (but in completely different way than rest of the world kicks ball), beating small ball with big stick.

This is why everything stops during the biggest sport event of the year, this is why it is so big deal what music is playing and what advertisements run in this grand event.

This is the way it is, and it had been for a long time. Remember what happened during WW2 when Americans needed to find enemy infiltrators in American uniforms speaking English? Knowledge of baseball players and trivia was the shibboleth to find out real Americans from the other kind.

("American" who knows nothing about hitting small ball with big stick is no real American and will not be missed)

("American" who knows nothing about hitting small ball with big stick is no real American and will not be missed)

I know you were trying to mock the whole thing, but writing it down in Grugspeak makes it sound pretty based.

Yes it is based and ball pilled.

In the late unpleasantness in god fearing Yugoslavia, when thugs with guns wanted to find who are you, they forced you to cross yourself. If you did it the wrong way, you were fucked.

In today's Ukraine, a foodie place, it is Palianytsia. Do not know what it is, cannot pronounce it correctly? You doubly fucked.

In America, it is the ball. If you expect interesting times incoming, get prepared, learn all what you can about balls.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here like "this but without the irony".

As I've previously observed, for all the talk of theMotte being "right wing" it's userbase is overwhelmingly progressive in background. Being college educated is the default here. Atheism is the default here. A belief in identity politics and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics is the default here. These assumption (and yes I am calling them assumptions) get baked into the discourse and people who don't already buy into them end up facing an uphill battle if they wish to participate in the discussion.

The SS was highly college educated, particularly in the officer corps (especially prior to 1939 when they started watering down entrance requirements). 30% were university graduates, compared to 2.5% of the general population of Germany in 1962. Half of those present at the Wannsee conference had doctorates. Likewise with Einsatzgruppen and Kommandos, a majority were headed by officers from an intellectual background. 18/23 defendants at the Einstazgruppen trial in Nurnberg were university graduates.

There are long and complex debates over to the religiosity of the SS and it's uncertain. A fair few of the more notorious officers claimed that killing thousands of Jews did not sin against the Commandment of Love, that they were raised as Christians. Others seem to be agnostic or atheistic, or 'spiritual but not religious' in a volkisch sense. There are a fair few Christians and non-materialists here + the whole simulation crowd. I recall reading someone talking about tithing.

I think it goes without saying that the SS had a strong and pervasive belief in identity politics and oppression/oppressed dynamics.

So was the SS a progressive organization? In a certain sense of the word yes. They had their own definition of progress. But that definition does not really match our definition of progressive, given that both would consider themselves totally and irredeemably opposed to eachother. And both are pretty different from motte users!

I don't think you can carve a neat dividing line through Western civilization and say 'all people who want radical, fundamental change are on the same side'. There's a lot of internal variance here!

Take Rousseau. There's the conventional progressive position that society causes all these problems of violence and inequality so we need to change or abolish elements of society. Or the SS-progressive position, where we need to change society so we're better at inflicting violence and inequality on others, honing our society to the peak of its competitiveness with eugenics and discipline.

But that definition does not really match our definition of progressive, given that both would consider themselves totally and irredeemably opposed to each other.

Yeah? There seemed to be plenty of people who thought otherwise at the time.

At the time, sure. But now? The modern progressive is not favorable towards eugenics.

At the time, sure. But now? The modern progressive is not favorable towards eugenics.

*Cole_Phelps_doubt.jpg*

This just seems obviously false to me. It's not conservatives that I see arguing that babies with disabilities ought to have been aborted or that we should to be euthanizing the mentally ill. It's guys like Justin Trudeau, and edgy kids on theMotte. To the degree that Eugenics seems to enjoy any support at all in [current year], it seems to me that it's coming from progressives.

Trudeau doesn't frame euthanizing the mentally ill on eugenic grounds. 'Edgy kids' on the motte is a pretty inappropriate descriptor too.

Progressives are at the forefront of advancing rights for babies with disabilities and the mentally ill. They call for more funding for them, more care, less stigma, including these people in jobs. They have these qualms about curing deafness since its sort of like genociding the deaf community! I've read papers about this, it's a real thing.

Then there are people who actually want to genocide the deaf community by sterilization or other methods.

If you include people who want disabled people killed and those who want them expensively supported by the state in the same group, it becomes almost meaningless. These are diametrically opposing visions of progress! An 1850s Democrat and a 2020s Democrat are very different ideologically, even if they have the same name. If you classify the average SS officer, the pink-haired leftist university student and the right-leaning mottizen all as progressives, what good is the definition?

Trudeau doesn't frame euthanizing the mentally ill on eugenic grounds.

Why should that matter? Between "dogwhistling" and "systemic X-ism" progressives reject the idea that the grounding needs to be explicit, in order to be criticized as grounded in X.

They call for more funding for them, more care, less stigma, including these people in jobs.

They're all for reducing stigma, and throwing money at them, but there's actually very little talk helping them resolve their mental health issues. Call me crazy, but destigmatizing something combined with subsidizing it looks like you're trying to create more of it.

If you classify the average SS officer, the pink-haired leftist university student and the right-leaning mottizen all as progressives, what good is the definition?

The definition is useful if the groups actually have something in common, despite their differences. Whether @HlynkaCG can successfully articulate the commonalities is another issue, but he openly admits that he's struggling with that because of the inferential distance.

Take religion as an example. Progressives tend to be atheist, conservatives tend to be religious, so how can Dissident Rightwingers, who also tend to be religious be progressive? Well, as someone familiar with the psychology of the last group I can tell you that they're the kind of people who convert because they got convinced religion is good for society. That's not how normal religious people think, though! That's precisely the sort of thing that marks you as a progressive.

Between "dogwhistling" and "systemic X-ism" progressives reject the idea that the grounding needs to be explicit, in order to be criticized as grounded in X.

But grounding is still important. There's also context to consider. Suppose I hypothesized that Trudeau was a eugenicist. I'd look to see if he was encouraging wealthier or smarter people to have children - he's not. His reforms to family spending are progressive in the sense that they help poor people more. The very definition of the word progressive in this economic sense means favoring the poor. Is Trudeau sterilizing the mentally ill? Not in any clear way. Is he banning immigration from low-IQ regions? Not at all, he's encouraging it! Thus I conclude that Trudeau is not a eugenicist.

They're all for reducing stigma, and throwing money at them, but there's actually very little talk helping them resolve their mental health issues. Call me crazy, but destigmatizing something combined with subsidizing it looks like you're trying to create more of it.

Well, I too agree with the 'if you subsidize something you get more of it' line of argument. I agree that our treatment of mental illness isn't actually effective but I'm confident that progressives think it is, that therapy and anti-depressants or whatever is good. Anyway, there's a clear distinction between subsidizing disabilities and Aktion T4. That certainly doesn't encourage mental illness or disability!

Progressives tend to be atheist, conservatives tend to be religious, so how can Dissident Rightwingers, who also tend to be religious be progressive?

I deny that dissident right wingers are progressive. There's a concept of progress, certainly. There's a desire for social change. But the people who dominate the word 'progressive' have a specific direction in mind. Likewise, the people who dominate the phrase 'national socialist' bring in anti-semitism automatically. You can be nationalist. You can be a socialist. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and a socialist for instance. But he wasn't a national socialist.

I'd create more categories. You have your atheistic progressives. You have your church-going progressives who go 'who am I to judge' about homosexuality, believe they should do more to help other races, everyone born equal. You have religious conservatives too, or secular conservatives, agnostic conservatives. But you also have religious rightists - the SS official who sees nothing wrong with cutting down Jews Commandment-wise. Or they might have some kind of alternate spiritual viewpoint, Pierce's Cosmotheism or Japanese Shinto nationalists. Or they could be atheistic. I'm sure you believe that there are such things as Christian progressives, so why not religious or irreligious rightists?

The cleaving point is internationalism vs nationalism, concepts of race and hierarchy IMO. This is how we distinguish the SS officer from the pink-haired university student. Both want major changes to modern civilization. But the former wants more nationalism, extensive racial purity laws, military dominance over other powers, sexual deviants removed from society. He might also be in favor of economic equality in the sense that we're all ____ans and so the nation will be stronger without any internal divisions or envy. But that's not the key thing. The pink-haired university student wants more internationalism, more cooperation with other countries, class war at home such that the oppressive billionaire class is crushed, everyone to breed with eachother such that race is abolished (I heard this in person once, not a strawman), sexual diversity celebrated, to avoid wars unless they're with enemy regimes that pattern-match to the above type.

They might agree on things like a national health service but for different reasons - improving the health of the nation makes it stronger, vs people having a right to health. In most areas, they're opposed.

Trudeau doesn't frame euthanizing the mentally ill on eugenic grounds.

Granted, instead he frames in in terms of "minimizing costs", "maximizing Potential", and "reducing suffing". My position is that it all boils down to the same shit. That the claim that there is a meaningful difference between 1920s democrats and 2020s democrats is a lie that has been sold to us by a media-establishment that is allied with the democrats.

"Identity politics" and "hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics" seem to fit the nazis quite perfectly as well.

So was the SS a progressive organization? In a certain sense of the word yes. But that definition does not really match our definition of progressive, given that both would consider themselves totally and irredeemably opposed to each other.

Stalin and Trotsky (and Zinoviev, and Bukkarin, and many more) were all totally and irredeemably opposed to each other, eventually. Being willing to fight to the death is evidence of conflict, but there are many forms of ideological conflict, and many forms of non-ideological conflict as well.

Stalin and Trotsky (and Zinoviev, and Bukkarin, and many more) were all totally and irredeemably opposed to each other, eventually.

Eventually is doing a lot of work here! Those guys were all in the same party together for a long time. The Nazis kicked out Strasser, who was very socialist. But he was also very nationalist and anti-semitic. Rohm might've been gay buy he was also a keen nationalist, militarist and anti-semite. Both men participated in the 1923 putsch too, they had a necessary disdain for democratic norms. But at no point would the Nazis have let in anyone like a modern progressive. Go directly to Dachau, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Modern progressivism: gay rights, trans rights, privileges/equality for non-whites, anti-authoritarianism, anti-militarism, anti-anti-semitism... you can see the SS officer clenching his pistol

At no point would the Soviets invite Ayn Rand into the Communist Party, at no point would Ronald Reagan join up with Pol Pot. Just because people got purged for power or other reasons, it doesn't mean that they're totally and irredeemably opposed.

I don't think it takes away from your overall point, but Reagan actually very much did support PolPot for many years. That was a real thing that happened.

Damn, that does rather undermine my argument. I suppose there's a distinction between using someone weaker than you as a disposable tool and a genuine alliance. I originally thought of contrasting Reagan vs the Chinese Communist Party but considered that they were working together throughout the 1980s against the Soviets. Obviously the plan was to turn China later on, along with Cambodia for that matter. On a strategic level, strange bedfellows... things are somewhat purer on an ideological/political level.

I don't think it does undermine your point, just a funny coincidence. There's a world where Che and Castro are fighting alongside Kennedy against the great Brazilian fascist menace, or something like that. Things like that are contingent, I think your larger point stands; though it should be noted the ideologies are themselves contingent. Ho Chi Minh was a communist because he needed the help. There's no reason gay rights and anti capitalism are considered allied; they're natural enemies.

There's no reason gay rights and anti capitalism are considered allied; they're natural enemies.

How so?

Gay Rights only co-occurs with Advanced Capitalism. There are no traditional feudal countries with gay rights, there are no communist countries with gay rights, not now, not historically. The closest you get is specialized roles for catamites in certain traditional Asian, Muslim, and Greco-Roman societies. The litany of Marx is always relevant here:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Capitalism is the universal solvent, and one of the things it has most thoroughly dissolved are the religious, cultural, and moral strictures on human sexuality.

You make several very bizarre claims in this post, which reinforce my perception that you basically have no theory of mind as it regards people on what you call “the alt-right”. (Pro tip: pretty much nobody identifies with that term anymore; the “alt-right” as a movement splintered years ago.) You have correctly identified that we radically disagree with mainline American-style conservatism, but you go totally off the rails when you start imputing to us views that you associate with progressives.

For example, you consistently accuse me and others of believing in a “Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamic”. Surely you must know that many of us, particularly those who are inspired by figures like Moldbug, are sympathetic to the idea of an absolute monarch. Many of us reject the entire constellation of ideas about “human rights”, meaning that the concept of “oppression” is not really coherent under our worldview. A common through-line in most dissident-right thought (although certainly not all!) is a warm embrace of natural hierarchy, and a consequent belief that it is both right and proper for some people to have significant power over others as a result of the naturally unequal distribution of relevant qualities between different groups in society. Some on the more esoterically-inclined corners of the right are even interested in the ancient Indo-European “trifunctional hypothesis”, which holds that the division of society into three distinct and essentially impermeable castes - a theory of sociopolitical organization which recurred in basically all Indo-European-derived societies, and which has its most enduring expression in the still-extant Hindu caste system - is a reflection of the divine will. These are not people whom you will ever hear calling something “oppressive” or “unjust”. Sure, most of us believe that the current ruling class that has power in much of what you call “the West” is illegitimate and has lost the Mandate of Heaven, but in no sense are we opposed to the existence of a ruling class in general, nor of hierarchical and unequal distributions of power more broadly.

You also make several claims that suggest that you yourself are operating under a very sanitized and cherry-picked model of “Western” history itself. For example, you claim that

One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye.

How the hell do you square the latter claim with the very easily verifiable fact that the societies you identify as “Western” happily operated the largest and most sophisticated global chattel slavery operation in human history, doing so for several centuries, and did so while developing elegant theological and philosophical justifications for that slave trade, which they saw as entirely consonant with the “Western” and “Christian” worldview? If these men don’t count as “Western”, who does? Similarly, you claim that valuing women’s consent in regards to marriage is a hallmark specifically of “Western culture” - which you define is explicitly requiring Christianity (or “eastern mysticism”. Yet the Greek and Roman historians like Tacitus famously identified the pagan Germanic tribes - who had no exposure either to Christian mysticism nor to Greco-Roman formalism - as significantly more egalitarian in terms of gender than the Greco-Roman civilization. These historians would comment bemusedly on how much power women had in these cultures, relative to how much power the women back home in Greece and Rome had. (And this is to say nothing of the incomparably greater power that women had in, for example, many Bantu societies, which were even more profoundly removed from any remotely “Western” influence.) So, it’s very difficult for me to take seriously your claim that women’s liberation is something that sets “Western civilization” apart from other civilizations.

Overall, I think that you speak far too overconfidently about things that you lack the background to comment in an informed manner about. That’s totally fine; most of us in this sub are generalists who overestimate our own knowledge on certain subjects from time to time. What causes you to draw extra criticism for it is the specifically grouchy and condescending “get off my lawn” demeanor with which you approach these conversations; you seem to think you have some gatekeeping power, maybe as a result of your status as a former mod, and you seem to consistently act as though you know what people believe better than they themselves do. I’m telling you that you don’t, and that it might behoove you to have a far more open mind as it regards people telling you what they actually believe, rather than trying to fit everyone into an increasingly stale and restrictive schema whose limitations are becoming more abundantly obvious with every passing year.

Many of us reject the entire constellation of ideas about “human rights”, meaning that the concept of “oppression” is not really coherent under our worldview.

Oppression as a concept does not rely on human rights, only the loosest idea of justice, of some sense of right and wrong, good and bad. The nazis didn't appear to believe in "human rights", but they definately believed in oppression, and defined it roughly as them not being the masters of the world. The Communists didn't believe in "human rights" in any meaningful sense either, but likewise believed in oppression, which consisted of them not being the masters of the world. I'm not sure I can argue that the current "alt-right" does the same, though their racial identarian angle certainly seems in the same general trajectory.

I'll freely admit that I've read only a fraction of Moldbug's output or that of the "alt-right" generally, so if the following impressions are in error, I stand by for correction. I'd imagine the following is mainly useful for illuminating distinctions in perspective.

A common through-line in most dissident-right thought (although certainly not all!) is a warm embrace of natural hierarchy, and a consequent belief that it is both right and proper for some people to have significant power over others as a result of the naturally unequal distribution of relevant qualities between different groups in society.

...emphasis mine, with the question being: as leaders or followers? There's a fundamental difference between "it's a messed up world, and I just need to rule it" and "I'll try to lead if there's genuinely no one better stepping up, and otherwise am happy to follow". Compare Moldbug's prescription that the proper way to gain power is to become worthy of power, then be handed it. Does he have any interest in building, or only in ruling what others have built? Contrast this with the trad right, which has no problem following, supporting from below, and sees this as a necessary component of leadership as well. As mentioned above, "servant leadership". I've yet to see any indication that Moldbug is capable of grasping the concept. One could argue that while the trad right is excellent at growing grassroots power, it's terrible at exercising power at scale. Unfortunately, so is Moldbug and the rest of the "alt-right", who remain complete pariahs to the existing establishment.

Moldbug and his compatriots seem to regard common folk with, at best, poorly-concealed disdain. They seem to regard the wellbeing and prosperity of those common folk as a sort of waste product from the actual goal of society, which is to maximize the wellbeing and joy of the Better Sort. But of course, traditional conservatives reject the idea that there is a "better sort", in the sense that some men are of greater moral worth than others, while also rejecting the Progressive idea that behavior can or should be decoupled from outcomes. TradCons maintain that your value comes from doing what is right, and further that, say, IQ does not actually assist greatly in this endeavor. Certainly neither wealth nor, criminality or its lack are decisive indicators; it is easy to be a complete moral monster while breaking no laws. This matters, because the TradCon approach has observably done relatively well at dealing with the problem that the people who pursue power are often the exact people who should not have it. Moldbug's solutions to the problem are not tested, and I'm skeptical of whether they'll perform well under load.

Sure, most of us believe that the current ruling class that has power in much of what you call “the West” is illegitimate and has lost the Mandate of Heaven, but in no sense are we opposed to the existence of a ruling class in general, nor of hierarchical and unequal distributions of power more broadly.

The Communists likewise were in no sense opposed to the existence of a ruling class, nor to hierarchical and unequal distributions of power. This describes all known social systems, great and small, and so is of no use as a distinguishing characteristic. What matters is how that heirarchy is implemented and understood by its implementers. On the one hand, we have people who believe that they are better than others, and want to be above them, and on the other hand, we have people who observably bear one another's burdens in the most concrete of fashions, building obviously net-positive, durable communities thereby.

How the hell do you square the latter claim with the very easily verifiable fact that the societies you identify as “Western” happily operated the largest and most sophisticated global chattel slavery operation in human history, doing so for several centuries, and did so while developing elegant theological and philosophical justifications for that slave trade, which they saw as entirely consonant with the “Western” and “Christian” worldview?

Slavery was a constant of human existence from before recorded history, because it's a strict improvement over the previous tech of "every fight is a fight to the death." Whether it's actually gone now is something of an open question: we have no shortage of people working in literal chains. What is not questionable is that slavery developed into a particularly pernicious form in the runup to the modern era, and was then largely eradicated specifically by the forebears of the trad-right, often over the objections of people appealing to the innate inferiority of those enslaved. Notably, the people who eradicated modern chattel slavery were the direct forebears of the modern trad-right, while those who argued for maintaining it made arguments very similar to the Progressives and the "Alt-Right": some groups of people are better, and others are worse, as a matter of innate nature.

If these men don’t count as “Western”, who does?

There is a difference between a person who sees the west as a resource to be exploited, and a person who sees it as an inheritance to be stewarded faithfully. One can be descended from the West, and yet reject their birthright and its attendant responsibilities.

Is the French Revolution "Western", when they rejected everything that came before them, desecrating cathedrals built over hundred of years in an explicit repudiation of the values of those who built them? Calling such people "Western" is perverse, when they've rejected the core values that created and sustained the world they seek so eagerly to grasp. And in fact, those people abandoned the old identity, founded on faith and honor, in favor of novel ideologies based on race or class, which led to swift ruin. By contrast, those who embrace that birthright, who can feel an instinctual kinship and affinity to the carefully-preserved words and values of their progenitors a thousand years dead, those are the true children of the West.

So, it’s very difficult for me to take seriously your claim that women’s liberation is something that sets “Western civilization” apart from other civilizations.

The traditional approach to male and female roles is pretty clearly not "women's liberation", a term more accurately applied to modern feminism. It's also distinct from either various primitive pseudo-matriarchies, or the baked-in misogamy of cultures like China. It's its own thing, and has quite the track record to commend it. For that matter, it's an improvement over Rome and the Greeks, which though they processed many admirable qualities, had considerable faults as well.

[EDIT] - It's been observed that one can tell the difference between a Rightist and a Leftist by the question "Are some people better than others". I'm not sure this is true, given statements by the Communists, but it seems obvious that the ambiguity can be removed by asking "why"?

Oppression as a concept does not rely on human rights, only the loosest idea of justice, of some sense of right and wrong, good and bad. The nazis didn't appear to believe in "human rights", but they definately believed in oppression, and defined it roughly as them not being the masters of the world. The Communists didn't believe in "human rights" in any meaningful sense either, but likewise believed in oppression, which consisted of them not being the masters of the world.

Do you mean to say that the notion of justice, and even good and bad, are progressive inventions now, and based conservatives like you and Hlynka operate without that nonsense?

If the belief in «Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics» is characteristic of the group Hlynka is castigating as not truly right-wing, there must be more to it than that.

Does he have any interest in building, or only in ruling what others have built?

I will note that Moldbug for all his arrogance rules no one and has built something (indeed something very elegant), which is more than can be said of Hlynka, who is essentially an expert in destruction and state-approved murder.

There's a fundamental difference between "it's a messed up world, and I just need to rule it" and "I'll try to lead if there's genuinely no one better stepping up, and otherwise am happy to follow"

More generally this attack on natural hierarchy advocates is very tired and very incoherent. I see it, I recoil in horror. These people say that the only reason someone could posit human inequality is to assert being superior. Is their acceptance of their lot in life entirely predicated on thinking that everyone is the same? Do they just… suppress their psychopathy and power-seeking with this clear absurdity?

Contrast this with the trad right, which has no problem following, supporting from below, and sees this as a necessary component of leadership as well.

Well, one answer is that slavish loyalty to some disgusting grifter like Trump, thrown to them like a bone to elicit predictable swarming behavior, solely because of his lower-class aesthetics and manners, is not a cause to pat yourself on the back. I'm with Hanania in thinking «trad right» should be mocked about this until they learn that pride is a sin and pig-headedness is a potentially lethal disease.

But of course, traditional conservatives reject the idea that there is a "better sort", in the sense that some men are of greater moral worth than others

This is plainly false, as can be gleaned from the usually very severe and hostile trad con attitudes to punishments for antisocial behavior (your own too, if memory serves) and beliefs about moral worth of criminals and worth of «restorative justice». Tradcons very easily label men as irredeemable – perhaps as easily as wokes do, since this is the thread of equivocation.

Better sort is a matter of behavior; and inasmuch as capacities like IQ matter here, they do so as proxies for behavior (although casually it's the other way around, with IQ affecting behavior, of course).

What is not questionable is that slavery developed into a particularly pernicious form in the runup to the modern era, and was then largely eradicated specifically by the forebears of the trad-right, often over the objections of people appealing to the innate inferiority of those enslaved.

Which side did Hlynka's forebears fight for?

Do you mean to say that the notion of justice, and even good and bad, are progressive inventions now, and based conservatives like you and Hlynka operate without that nonsense?

No. Everyone (to a first approximation) believes in Justice, in Good and Bad. Oppression is badness enforced as a norm, so everyone believes that oppression is a thing that can happen. People differ on the details of what Good and Bad are, on how to define Oppression, and this is where the disagreements come in. Some people (Nazis, Communists) have an extremely deranged definition of Oppression that makes coexistence with them flatly impossible. Progressive and race-based definitions of oppression are similarly deranged, if less extreme, because they collapse their moral judgements down to identity, rather than actions chosen. Regardless of how they dress it up, their beliefs in practice are that some people are good and some bad innately, as a social class, regardless of individual behavior. This is what Hlynka and I are objecting to, and drawing an equivalence from.

@Hoffmeister25 claimed that he can't be accused of framing his worldview in terms of oppressor/oppressed because he doesn't believe in the progressive conception of human rights. I was pointing out that many people don't believe in progressive human rights, but still adopt an oppressor/oppressed worldview. Nor, I might add, does it much matter if one uses the terms "oppressor" or "oppressed", or finds some other term for "good" and "bad". There is a core nature that shines through regardless.

I will note that Moldbug for all his arrogance rules no one and has built something (indeed something very elegant), which is more than can be said of Hlynka, who is essentially an expert in destruction and state-approved murder.

The question was framed specifically regarding his maxim of "become worthy of power, be handed power" maxim. He is indeed capable of being the boss, and being effective in the role. Can he build power, from scratch, and with himself not on top? Can he join someone else's heirarchy and still function? Can he serve a king, not as vizier, but as dogcatcher if that's the job that needs doing? Can he follow?

These people say that the only reason someone could posit human inequality is to assert being superior.

It rather depends on the nature of the inequality being posited. In any case, it's not the only reason, but it's certainly a potential reason, and a cause for concern. People who see power as an end need to be kept as far from it as possible. Good leaders approach leadership as service. Bad leaders approach it as something they're entitled to, something others owe them. Those who actually possess superior qualities do not generally need to trumpet those qualities; in a healthy environment, they will be evident to those around you, who will see giving you a chance to exercise them as a benefit to everyone. But already, I'm presuming a healthy environment, presuming selflessness on the part of the leader, presuming a desire to serve... and it's not obvious that these presumptions can be made for Moldbug or his ilk.

Well, one answer is that slavish loyalty to some disgusting grifter like Trump, thrown to them like a bone to elicit predictable swarming behavior, solely because of his lower-class aesthetics and manners, is not a cause to pat yourself on the back.

I'm not talking about Trump. I'm talking about how one structures their relationships with the people immediately around them, how they come together to form hierarchy in the immediate and concrete sense of ordinary life, not in population-level abstractions. Do they look at the people around them as their community, or as human resources to be exploited? Are they willing to work with those weaker than themselves?

This is plainly false, as can be gleaned from the usually very severe and hostile trad con attitudes to punishments for antisocial behavior (your own too, if memory serves) and beliefs about moral worth of criminals and worth of «restorative justice».

Criminals do not lose their moral value when they commit crimes. On the other hand, moral value doesn't preclude lethal self-defense or lawful execution either. We don't kill people because they have less moral value, we kill them because they are doing something that justifies stopping them by any means necessary, or because they've done something bad enough that no lesser punishment would be just. Moral value necessarily means moral accountability as well. "Restorative Justice", on the other hand, is scorned for being two lies for the price of one; nothing is restored, and so there is no justice.

There is a fundamental disagreement here about what justice is, how violence and conflict work, how interaction between groups of humans works. seeing it pop up over and over again, even in my own thinking, is what convinced me that Hlynka's thesis was correct.

Tradcons very easily label men as irredeemable – perhaps as easily as wokes do, since this is the thread of equivocation.

Willingness to punish is not labeling someone "irredeemable". Likewise, I think it matters a great deal what you punish people for, and how. I do not think there is much similarity between trads and wokes in this regard.

Better sort is a matter of behavior; and inasmuch as capacities like IQ matter here, they do so as proxies for behavior (although casually it's the other way around, with IQ affecting behavior, of course).

...And this is one of the major points of disagreement. There are no proxies for behavior. Smart and Dumb are completely orthogonal to Good and Evil; neither axis says anything meaningful about the other. Dumber people will almost certainly have harder lives, and their evil will be more obviously legible, but that is not the same as them being morally lesser, or the smarter people being morally greater. Scott Aaronson has never intentionally broken a law, and appears to be smart as hell, and yet he's got evil in his heart, just like we all do.

Does he have any interest in building, or only in ruling what others have built?

I'm pretty far from a Moldbug apologist, but this particular criticism uniquely does not land for him. We're talking about a man who built a full-fledged alternative to the internet from the ground up, hand-crafting every stage of its unique and bizarre infrastructure. Now that he's stepped away to let it grow on its own, from what I understand of his current projects, he's become rather enamored with New York's Dimes Square art scene. It seems like a bit of a dead end at best to me, but it's certainly an attempt to build something.

There are many people at whom you can credibly level the "no interest in building" accusation. Whatever else Yarvin's flaws are, this is emphatically not one of them.

Then I've expressed myself poorly. I was referring specifically to his maxim of "become worthy of power, then be handed power". That maxim has always struck me as rather parasitic.

He is indeed capable of building, in the sense that he can be at the top of the hierarchy, do the work, and give orders to those below him. Is he capable of building, in the sense of being at the bottom of someone else's hierarchy, and being a loyal follower? He's happy to be handed power, but is he willing or capable of building power from scratch? From what I've read of him, the impression I'm left with is that he is not. His fear and disdain of revolution is at least partially due to a keen awareness of the devastation that tends to result, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that it's also partially because he knows that if the present system goes away, he has no plan B. It's as though he sees power as a natural resource, like oil or uranium, and the whole question is simply who controls it, rather than it being an emergent property of human choice, and the question is how we generate it step-by-step.

Contrast @HlynkaCG's point about easy questions and hard questions: is the hard part designing a political system, or is the hard part getting people to actually follow it? Yarvin, like most modernists, strikes me as believing the former, and I think he's dead wrong and getting wronger every day.

And in fact, those people abandoned the old identity, founded on faith and honor, in favor of novel ideologies based on race or class, which led to swift ruin.

Maybe this is meant as a broader point including communists and Nazis, but in what sense was the French Revolution built on race? Didn't it explicitly found the tradition that the French state still insists on of not enquiring anything about ethnic heritage? And with regards to class, I don't think that pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a society not based in significant amount of class. A core grievance fueling the revolution was the perceived decadence of the nobility, a social class that justified its position at least partly using class based ideology like the divine right to rule.

Broadly looking at the pre-modern West class ideology permeates everything. Greece had all the politicking about who gets to be a citizen, Rome had the patricians and the plebs, the Migration Period sees a bit of a flattening of class hierarchies due to the general anarchy and Germanic influences but emerges into the Middle Ages as highly rigid and stratified societies. Maybe I'm misreading what you mean by "class based", but I don't see any kind of ideological novelty when French radicals and later socialists start thinking in these terms in the 19th century, just that it's now coming (at least partly) from below rather than exclusively from above.

Maybe this is meant as a broader point including communists and Nazis, but in what sense was the French Revolution built on race?

It wasn't. It was based on Class. My point is that race and class are two variants of the same thing, and because of this shared commonality, ideologies based on race run into similar problems as ideologies based on class.

And with regards to class, I don't think that pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a society not based in significant amount of class.

All societies have some sort of class divisions, just as all societies have something approximating race divisions. The French Revolution centered its ideology on class conflict, on dividing their population into good classes and evil classes, in the belief that all problems could be solved by the former destroying the latter. Pre-revolutionary aristocrats were not in fact trying to destroy the peasant class, and while "divine right of rule" is wrong, it's considerably less wrong than what the Revolutionaries replaced it with.

The French revolution is different from what came before, because it embraced a specific, novel ideology: that through the power of Reason, its adherents had, immediately available to them, every tool necessary to fix every problem they faced. This is the core axiom of Enlightenment ideology, and it is both highly novel and absolutely destructive.

Is the French Revolution "Western", when they rejected everything that came before them, desecrating cathedrals built over hundred of years in an explicit repudiation of the values of those who built them? Calling such people "Western" is perverse, when they've rejected the core values that created and sustained the world they seek so eagerly to grasp.

Did they lose their western cred on religious or political grounds? Might want to eject all protestants, the english for the civil war, and the americans for their revolution as well. The only truly western country appears to be the russian empire.

This goes for Hlynka too. Explain to me how hobbes falls on one side of the american revolution and the other on the french.

Explain to me how Hobbes falls on one side of the American revolution and the other on the French.

In addition to what @FCfromSSC said...

Another obvious difference is that while the de jure rule in the 13 Colonies might have been that everything must go through Parlament and the King (or their duly appointed representatives) the De Facto reality was that it wasn't the british government that was paying the constabulary, maintaining the roads, or adjudicating disputes between neighbors. It was the local officials. To that end the American revolution was not an "overthrow" of the existing social order as much as it was a "rectification" of the de jure and de facto authorities.

Since the commoners were paying for everything before and after the french revolution, it doesn't qualify as an overthrow either.

Is this de jure/de facto thing based on hobbes, or did you just make it up to carve a providential exception? I suppose they should have just acted like they were in a revolution, without legislating for a bit, and later play the de jure/de facto gambit, and then it would only have been a 'rectification' and everyone would be happy.

Is this de jure/de facto thing based on Hobbes, or did you just make it up to carve a providential exception?

No, I did not make it up. It's one of the core questions being wrestled with. Is it the vestments that make a man a priest, and the crown that makes a man a king? Or is it doing God's work, and other men being prepared to die for you?

You're retreating into mysticism now. But I'll humour you. It's military and political genius that makes Bonaparte a king. And his compatriots were certainly prepared to die for him and each other. As to gott mit uns, there are contradictory claims as to who the old man really supported in the various events under consideration.

I'm not retreating anywhere. I'm standing exactly where I have been this whole time.

Bonaparte's charisma and genius made people want to follow him, and the people following him made him an emperor. Simple as that.

The British Government can claim to rule North America, and the Aristocrats of Europe can whing about who's claim to what throne is strongest, but history is not obliged to listen to them.

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Did they lose their western cred on religious or political grounds?

Say rather on ideological grounds, which is where the two meet. The French Revolution, drunk on its own self-image as titans of rationality, destroyed every social safeguard and descended into an orgy of absurdity and barbarity. The American revolution did not, in fact, do this, and neither did the British revolution.

The breakpoint I'm asserting is not changing the system of government, or even changing religions. It is adopting the belief that your cadre alone has found the universal solutions to every human problem, and that the only reason these solutions won't work is if bad people obstruct your perfect plans. This is not a subtle or ambiguous belief, and it has nothing to do with Protestantism or the English Civil War.

I think the American Revolutionary War was more precisely a war of secession rather than a revolution. A "Declaration of Independence" is synonymous with a statement justifying secession, and IMO the American document is an excellent basis for analyzing other secessionary movements. Arguably, the Constitutional Convention resulted in an actual revolution--in that it replaced the government under the Articles with the Constitutional system, and not via a means permitted under the Articles--though an effectively bloodless one.

You make several very bizarre claims in this post, which reinforce my perception that you basically have no theory of mind as it regards people on what you call “the alt-right”. (Pro tip: pretty much nobody identifies with that term anymore; the “alt-right” as a movement splintered years ago.) You have correctly identified that we radically disagree with mainline American-style conservatism, but you go totally off the rails when you start imputing to us views that you associate with progressives.

The obvious counter in my view is to ask, "where in does 'identity' reside?" I would argue that whether or not anyone identifies with that term anymore is irrelevant because my post is not about what people like Curtis Yarvin, Richard Spencer, or Steve Sailer might identify as. It is about who they are, where they are from, and what positions they hold. Consider this a parallel to the recent posts on "trans rights". Regardless of whether an individual "feels female" (whatever that means) there are those who will never be convinced that the man in a dress is anything other than a man in a dress. They can adopt the superficial trappings of belief in an absolute monarch, but that doesn't make them believers.

How the hell do you square the latter claim with the very easily verifiable fact that the societies you identify as “Western” happily operated the largest and most sophisticated global chattel slavery operation in human history.

By contesting the claim that it was conducted "Happily" or that it was the "largest and most sophisticated", slavery had been the norm/default for pretty much all of recorded history and I don't think it's a coincidence that abolitionism didn't gain traction until when and where it did.

I would argue that whether or not anyone identifies with that term anymore is irrelevant because my post is not about what people like Curtis Yarvin, Richard Spencer, or Steve Sailer might identify as. It is about who they are, where they are from, and what positions they hold.

They can adopt the superficial trappings of belief in an absolute monarch, but that doesn't make them believers.

See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. ”I know what you really believe. You might think you believe something, but I know better than you what you believe. I see into your heart of hearts.” Okay, Hlynka, please tell us explicitly in what sense Steve Sailer believes in Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics. (Aren’t you the one who once stated, with zero evidence, that Steve Sailer is a Hillary Clinton shill? What was the last Steve Sailer essay or tweet you read?) Please also explain what, specifically, unites Steve Sailer and Curtis Yarvin politically; what particular policy positions would they both advocate for?

By contesting the claim that it was conducted "Happily" or that it was the "largest and most sophisticated", slavery had been the norm/default for pretty much all of recorded history and I don't think it's a coincidence that abolitionism didn't gain traction until when and where it did.

We are talking about a vast commercial enterprise spanning entire oceans and transporting over ten million people. Yes, obviously slavery was the norm in human history, and I don’t want to shortchange the very impressive slave-trading prowess of the Ottomans, the Vikings, the Romans, or the Barbary pirates, but they just don’t hold a candle in terms of raw numbers and sheer scale, both geographically and in terms of wealth transferred. Yes, the British Empire was instrumental in ending slavery, but it only did so after being an enthusiastic participant in that same slave trade for centuries before that. It’s all the same civilization! If “being anti-slavery” is a characteristic of Western civilization, then Western civilization began about 1800 years after you claimed it began.

Okay, Hlynka, please tell us explicitly in what sense Steve Sailer believes in Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics.

He cannot and he will not; this is less charitable than I typically am, but from his treatises on this topic I get the sense that he hopes by force of repetition alone to cement a tendentious and sweeping thesis of why everyone who disagrees with him is aligned, no matter the level and incontrovertibility of evidence provided to the contrary. You are not wrong to correct him, but you will get nowhere in doing so.

I'm not claiming that they are aligned, I am claiming that they are of a type, and that the type is specific. The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks might have been bitter enemies, but no one who hadn't already picked a side in that specific fight would try to claim that weren't both "communist".

I am characterizing the whole Id-Pol framework the same way, and for all the accusations of uncharity and attestations that "Our identity politics is different from their identity politics." I have yet see anyone here really grapple with that issue. Why should I, as someone who thinks identity politics is a load of bullshit cooked up by Berkley Marxists, believe in identity politics or treat the different varieties there-of as anything less than equal?

It's not about what one believes, it's about what one is. To continue the trans analogy, you are free to believe that you are a woman but others are just as free to believe that the presence of a cock is proof otherwise.

Beyond that, I feel like @FCfromSSC has already addressed your claims better than I could. What makes you think "class" or "race" are even valid concepts to begin with? What makes you think that that anyone can (or ought to be) judged by anything other than their behavior? As I recall I didn't accuse Steve Sailer being Clinton shill with zero evidence. I accused him of being a tool of the Democrats/Media Establishment because he had chosen to join David French, Jennifer Rubin, various other "Never Trump" figures at the National Review in endorsing Clinton over Trump back in 2016.

It's one thing to abstain/recuse oneself from a scenario where you see no good outcome, it's another to actively aid the opposition...

I'm not sure if responding to these complaints was the goal of your post:

There's a pair complaints that get made here on a semi-regular basis to the effect of how "The right" lacks a positive vision/will to power

But if so, you haven't really addressed it aside from:

social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.

We've been picking up trash for a century, and we probably haven't had a proper famine in the west in about the same timeframe. Unless you're using the word civilization to contain an unarticulated positive vision/will to power, both of those examples conjure images of maintaining a status quo/stagnation rather than progress. Would you like to elaborate on that point?

I'm not sure if this will come across as "elaboration" or "reiteration" but I think that one of the core differences/disputes/sources of inferential distance comes from a disagreement over just how difficult and fundamental certain sorts of tasks are. You are correct in observing that we haven't had a proper famine in the west in close to a century. The difference is in what conclusions we draw from this fact. Are famines truly a thing of the past, or have we just been lucky?

The idea I'm gesturing towards is something like the old XKCD comic about "tasks", where in I would argue that many of the problems we consider "simple" are in fact "the hard part", and that many (perhaps even the majority of) people today take them for granted because they've never known anything else.

Edit to Elaborate: In case it wasn't clear, my claim is that coming up with grand theories and sophisticated parliamentary systems is the civilizational equivalent of figuring out if a picture was taken in a national park. Where as making sure that that grocery store shelves get stocked and keeping people from lynching each other is the equivalent of figuring out if the picture was of a bird.

Where as making sure that that grocery store shelves get stocked and keeping people from lynching each other is the equivalent of figuring out if the picture was of a bird.

To offer a concurrence: The Constitution observably worked quite well for a long time. Did it work well because it was a good ruleset regardless of the people it governed, or did it work well because the values and perspectives of the people it governed made its job relatively easy? I was raised to believe the former, that our system worked well because it was an excellent system. Only, it's not working so well now, and none of the formal rules have actually changed. So if it's all down to the rules as written, why should outcomes be different for one set of people than for another?

Writing a constitution or imagining a system of government is easy. Getting people to actually implement it properly and live in peace under it is very, very hard, even when the plan is as simple as "just please follow the rules, goddammit."

Writing a constitution or imagining a system of government is easy. Getting people to actually implement it properly and live in peace under it is very, very hard, even when the plan is as simple as "just please follow the rules, goddammit."

I feel like this is an underappreciated insight.

Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other.

Which implies that left vs right politics are fundamentally post-Christian.

Drawing this out a bit further: I believe you are right that the alt-right and woke left are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth. But the "red tribe," even the overtly religious part, is just as much a product of modernity and is in many ways post-Christian in outlook, despite the Christian trappings.

I rather think this is a bad thing.

The thing that stops me from simply agreeing with you is that while, is that I feel like there is still a great deal of overlap between the more classical/"trad" right and Old-school Christianity. And while Hobbes' theory that "moral" see pro-social behavior requires submission on the part of the individual might not find much purchase in academia it is still very much alive in the wild and meshes well with Christian admonishments to trust in God. "Thy will, not mine, be done" and all that.

That said I don't think you're wrong, and will concede that my definition really only works in the context of a predominantly Christian, or post-Christian culture. I suppose that in itself would be another example of "assumptions getting baked into the language".

What do I mean when I say "Western Civilization"? I refer to the intellectual tradition that is essentially a marriage of middle eastern mysticism and classical Greek/Roman formalism.

When in history has a civilization ever referred to an intellectual tradition? Egypt? Rome? Greece? India? China? They all have had intellectual traditions that defined their consciousness, and those traditions were very different from ours such that we probably could not relate much to their way of thinking of the world.

But Civilization refers to a peoples, and that people's essence and continuity, prestige and hegemony.

Your notion that your own civilization was created and is defined by an idea and not a people is extremely particular and it doesn't generalize anywhere else in history. Is Chinese civilization "an idea?" Chinese intellectual tradition has been highly dynamic, and this serves to contrast the alt-right view with your own.

The alt-right view is essentially that Civilization is how I described it- it's built and maintained by a people, and if you replace those people with other people then you are a complete fool if you expect continuity in the spiritual essence of that civilization. History shows that never, ever happens.

It's the people that create the intellectual tradition, mostly a subset of highly influential intellectual and cultural leaders. In turn, the intellectual tradition over time directs the people towards a common end. It even forms them genetically over larger time horizons. This is the interaction between Civilization and intellectual tradition, but they are not equivalent.

In contrast, you seem to view civilization as a dogged commitment to an idea. The alt-right world view is clearly superior to the conservative worldview on this front.

The Progressivism we know today is only the newest mutation of that synthesis of semitic mysticism and Greek/Roman formalism. The alt-right is correct to view that intellectual tradition as something that should be rejected or moved beyond in order to save civilization or build a better one.

When in history has a civilization ever referred to an intellectual tradition? Egypt? Rome?

Yes, Rome. It is perhaps the Ur-Example of what I am talking about. "Civis Romanus Sum" were words of power in late republic and early empire for a reason. Roman Citizenship was not a matter of blood or soil as much is it was having "bought in" to the Roman program. There were latin-speaking children born on the shores of the Tiber who could not honestly claim to be "Roman Citizens" while there were Gallic tribesmen who had served their time in the Legions that could.

You say "a civilization is built and maintained by people" and I agree. Where I suspect we differ is on what it means to "build and maintain" and what it means to be "a people". A common criticism leveled at conservatives by the alt-right is that we cling to pointless sentimentality and are unwilling to burn everything down in the name of political victory and my reply to that is that "what is the point of 'winning' if we're going to burn it all down?"

The alt-right view is essentially that Civilization is how I described it- it's built and maintained by a people, and if you replace those people with other people then you are a complete fool if you expect continuity in the spiritual essence of that civilization. History shows that never, ever happens.

Replace in what sense? If I take all Ethiopians and transplant them in Egypt, I have no doubt the Egyptian civilization would be fundamentally different. In a sense, it died when it was populated by people who were not raised in it at all.

But you seem to be arguing that it is fundamentally impossible to continue a civilization w/o its founders. The go-to counter-example would be assimilating foreigners into your culture. Or would you argue that foreigners are by definition people not interested in taking on your culture?

But you seem to be arguing that it is fundamentally impossible to continue a civilization w/o its founders.

Civilization is such a massive ship that of course it's going to continue in some form and on some trajectory without its founders. Likewise, civilizational decline is so huge that it can't really be turned on a dime. I am speaking more to the self-defeating ethos of conservatism: people don't matter in their essence, or they are at least interchangeable, only ideas matter and that's what should be conserved.

You can't conserve an idea if you don't conserve a people, that's my argument. Civilization is not an idea, it's a people.

You can't conserve an idea if you don't conserve a people, that's my argument. Civilization is not an idea, it's a people.

To which the obvious solution is: let the people consist of those who embrace the idea. Which is exactly what the Christian Church did, by the way: "There is no Jew or Greek..."; and also "church fathers", "ancestors in the faith".

To which the obvious solution is: let the people consist of those who embrace the idea.

Or they could just use your belief in the idea for their own interests while superficially "embracing the idea" by quoting the Statue of Liberty or something.

Which is exactly what the Christian Church did, by the way: "There is no Jew or Greek..."; and also "church fathers", "ancestors in the faith".

I am aware of that, which is why I constantly ask Hlynka why he doesn't see Christianity as the intellectual tradition that is cut from the same cloth as progressivism.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus

That synthesis of semitic mysticism and Platonism sounds an awful lot like progressivism...

Progressivism is quite distinctively post-Christian and not post-Islamic or post-Hindu or whatever. There is a reason that post-Christian places like the Netherlands and Sweden are quite progressive whereas India or the Middle East or China identify progressivism even among their secular populations as a western import.

I mean, progressivism is post-Christian, it didn't develop in a vacuum. Or, to quote G.K. Chesterton:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

He was writing over 100 years ago, but progressivism has been around for a while.

But in the sense of say, American civilization, there are no people. America is a country but it isn't a nation. It was diverse at its founding, both ethnically and religiously, and it's hard to point to one group as having had an outsized influence on the development of American civilization, both in the founding era and going forward. Which is why the American alt-right nationalism never made intellectual sense, because it's argument is essentially ahistorical.

It was diverse at its founding, both ethnically and religiously, and it's hard to point to one group as having had an outsized influence on the development of American civilization

All civilization has a level of ethnic diversity. That doesn't at all undermine my point, that changing the people would change the civilization. Russia is diverse, but if it became majority Hispanic in 100 years, you wouldn't say "well that doesn't matter because Russia was already diverse." It would obviously change the nature and trajectory of Russian civilization.

To say that it's hard to point at a closely-related subset of groups that have had an "outsized influence" on the development of Western, and American, civilization is just exceedingly obtuse. It was obviously founded and developed as a European civilization with European population groups that colonized the nation.

Which is why the American alt-right nationalism never made intellectual sense, because it's argument is essentially ahistorical.

American alt-right concerns over race are far more aligned with the historical concerns of the founders and public opinion all the way through the end of the second world war and beyond. The idea that "America is an idea and race doesn't matter" is a post-war retcon that is ahistorical with respect to the establishment of American civilization.

The reason alt-right nationalism doesn't make sense is because the ship has sailed, and demographic change is baked into the cake and there's no realistic future in which it does not happen. It's not something that can any more be opposed, it just has to be considered a premise to political and cultural thinking moving forward. But unlike Hlynka, who would maintain optimism that the people don't matter as long as we cling to the same ideas, it's the alt-right that is aware of the revolutionary consequences of demographic change and the incoherence of a conservative mindset in the face of such changes.

But it also presents an opportunity to jettison the toxic "intellectual traditions" and advocate for ones that are better.

To say that it's hard to point at a closely-related subset of groups that have had an "outsized influence" on the development of Western, and American, civilization is just exceedingly obtuse. It was obviously founded and developed as a European civilization with European population groups that colonized the nation.

Well, no. It wasn't founded as a European civilization, it was founded first as an extension of the British Empire and later as an explicit rejection of traditional European civilization. Enlightenment ideals were certainly European in origin, but they were specifically northern, Protestant European in origin at the very widest definition, and for all practical purposes were English and Scottish in origin. The Italians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. had little to nothing to do with Enlightenment thought. And in practice most of Europe was living under a system much more illiberal than that which the colonists were rebelling against.

So to say that the American civilization was founded by Europeans may be a true statement, but if the founders had any nationalist tendencies at the time, they would have been limited to those of English and maybe Scottish or Dutch descent. Those who were wont to deny various outsider groups status as "real Americans" set their sights first on Swedes and German Protestants in the 18th century, then on Irish and German Catholics in the 19th, then on Poles, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Rusyns, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes in the early 20th. Is that the argument you're making now, that the only true inheritors of the American civilization are Anglo-Saxons? If not, why not?

Enlightenment ideals were certainly European in origin, but they were specifically northern, Protestant European in origin at the very widest definition, and for all practical purposes were English and Scottish in origin. The Italians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. had little to nothing to do with Enlightenment thought.

Assuming that Cesare Beccaria ("... widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment... well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology... considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice") does not cut it as Italian contribution to the Enlightenment, doesn't your definition of Enlightenment as "specifically northern, Protestant European" leave out a massive hole by the name of France? Descartes and Pascal, Diderot and d'Alembert, Condorcet, Buffon, Turgot, Montesquieu, Voltaire? (And Rousseau, if we count French-speaking Switzerland EDIT: although admittedly, he was protestant) And there's much more if you also consider scientific and technological contributions, though I suppose this was specifically about intellectual/ideological developments.

Well, no. It wasn't founded as a European civilization, it was founded first as an extension of the British Empire and later as an explicit rejection of traditional European civilization.

You are begging the question and in fact proving my point. Nobody considers the rise of American hegemony to be a break from "Western Civilization"; America is included in that fold despite those liberal innovations in its intellectual tradition. The continuity between the British Empire and American Empire within the broader framework of Western Civilization proves my argument that the West is not defined by a grand intellectual tradition, it's defined by the behavior of European people which has formulated different intellectual ideas at different points of time and in different contexts.

In the American context, liberalism can and should be seen an an innovation on the organization of power, and a (largely post-hoc) intellectual justification for rebellion and legitimacy, with Social Contract theory being hardly less of a "noble lie" than the Divine Right.

An intellectual tradition is a tool of a people or civilization to coordinate behavior and consensus, and justify the use of power. But it's dynamic, an intellectual tradition does not define a civilization.

The entire point is that post-Christianity and post-liberalism may be necessary for the future of Western Civilization. The emergence of liberalism itself proves that radicalism may be conducive for the growth of Civilization if it improves upon or replaces deficiencies with traditional ways of thinking.

Hlynka's arguments could have been, and were, cited by Loyalist traditionalists who opposed the emergence of secular, radical, liberal political thinking. He probably would have opposed those liberal radicals questioning the Divine-Right precepts of Western Civilization in those days.

You're missing my point. I'm not arguing that America is a break from "Western Civilization", I'm arguing that "Western Civilization" is too broad a concept to consider as the basis for nationhood, as is evidenced by the fact that America's founders certainly didn't see it that way (they were arguing for liberal principles, not that the colonies were a separate nation from Britain), and to the extent that some of them did view it as a nation, their conception of that nation was limited to exclude most Europeans. In any event, it still doesn't account for why the alt-right excludes Jews, despite them being as Western as anyone else on the list.

More comments

I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place.

I think the deeper philosophy is opaque even to most adherents. But the entry vectors for the alt-right seem to be libertarians who became disillusioned with democracy, and the largest group, woke progressives who stumbled onto an infohazard like crime statistics, or disparate outcome stats between whites and Jews. I don’t know if any of them are (former) tradcon types.

I actually agree with you. I think the deeper philosophy goes largely unexamined by most people who just go along with whatever their parents/role-models taught them. I think it takes getting immersed in an alien culture to realize just how much gets taken for granted.

I recall a conversation I had with a young BYU med student while I was in east Africa where he asked me if we should call the cops about an incident, and I had to explain to him that being as we were outside the city limits there were no "cops" to call. As smart as the kid obviously was, he just didn't seem to get it.

As I've previously observered, for all the talk of theMotte being "right wing" it's userbase is overwhelmingly progressive in background.

I like Moldbug's concept of the dark elves to explain this phenomenon: heretical defectors from the blue tribe who sympathize with the red tribe on certain key issues, but remain fundamentally blue themselves in their basic gestalt and cultural outlook. TheMotte undoubtedly attracts many such individuals.

A belief in identity politics and Hegelian opprossor/opressed dynamics is the defualt here.

Can you explain what you mean by this? What exactly are these beliefs?

...by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place. 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.

You'll have to clarify who exactly you're talking about when you say "alt right", but, I don't think that's a fair characterization of the alt right. Obviously they think that their political program can improve western society, otherwise they wouldn't bother with being activists in the first place; but, that's not the same thing as ushering in a utopia. Just because you think society can be improved doesn't mean that you hold a radical Rousseauean view of human nature as being fundamentally perfectible.

It is interesting you are drawing the dis toon as Hobbes v. Rousseau instead of Burke / Scottish enlightenment v. Rousseau / French Revolution. To me, the first is all about emergent order and a humility about what can be known and therefore suspicion about grand attempts to change. The second invented the ten day week for reasons. (Obviously a bit tongue in cheek but you get my point). In the end, it seems to me the difference between right and left is that one side believes on limits of knowledge and therefore limits in action and the other believes man and society can be remade.

In a microcosm the right believes man is heavily fixed by his biology (eg human nature) whereas the left believes tabula rasa. You see the same impulse when you zoom up to society.

I agree with your initial assessment but disagree with your conclusion. Yes, the contemporary intellectual internet-right is essentially a postmodernist movement. Especially Moldbug is a right-Foucauldian. Being progressive apostates, they are as rootless - if not more so - as their left-wing counterparts. They tend to think in power structures and class interest. And while they may field an argument for the utility of tradition and religion, they don't believe in it. Not really. It's the equivalent of someone going to church on Sunday for the connections he makes there.

I disagree with your assessment that the alt-right isn't Hobbesian. In stark contrast to progressives, they tend to be rather pessimistic about the malleability of human nature. E.g.: HBD arguments.

someone going to church on Sunday for the connections he makes there

This might also be called community or fellowship. Traditionally popular motives for attendance.

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 a fundamentally Rousseauean viewpoint where in violence, inequity, and injustice are all products of living in a society. Meanwhile I find myself barrowing pages from Hobbes and Burke, grand ideas are nice and all, but social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.

I don't mean to nitpick, but wouldn't Hobbes agree that other people really are the source of quite a lot of the violence, inequity, and injustice that humans have to deal with?

So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is, that Kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it a home by Lawes, or abroad by Wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of Fame from new Conquest; in others, of ease and sensuall pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art, or other ability of the mind.

(Leviathan, Ch. XI)

Which is why, the only thing for it is precisely to have some omnipotent force come in and enforce order through threat of overwhelming, insuperable force:

Againe, men have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all.

(Id., Ch. XIII), and

Justice And Propriety Begin With The Constitution of Common-wealth But because Covenants of mutuall trust, where there is a feare of not performance on either part, (as hath been said in the former Chapter,) are invalid; though the Originall of Justice be the making of Covenants; yet Injustice actually there can be none, till the cause of such feare be taken away; which while men are in the naturall condition of Warre, cannot be done. Therefore before the names of Just, and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power, to compell men equally to the performance of their Covenants, by the terrour of some punishment, greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their Covenant; and to make good that Propriety, which by mutuall Contract men acquire, in recompence of the universall Right they abandon. . .

(Id., Ch. XV)

Even for Hobbes, a society is only actually civil if it accords with certain precepts of justice; if it does not, then no matter the fripperies and trapping of life, the base warring nature of man takes over again:

[N]o man giveth, but with intention of Good to himselfe; because Gift is Voluntary; and of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good; of which if men see they shall be frustrated, there will be no beginning of benevolence, or trust; nor consequently of mutuall help; nor of reconciliation of one man to another; and therefore they are to remain still in the condition of War; which is contrary to the first and Fundamentall Law of Nature, which commandeth men to Seek Peace. The breach of this Law, is called Ingratitude

(Id., Ch. XV)

I think that's perfectly compatible with many alt-right claims; particularly the claims that current society has broken down (or is in the process of breaking down) and no longer follows the basic precepts of justice. Under those circumstances, it no longer makes sense in Hobbesian terms to "be modest, and tractable, and performe all he promises," because doing so "where no man els should do so, should but make himselfe a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruine, contrary to the ground of all Lawes of Nature, which tend to Natures preservation."

Once someone realizes they're being defected against in the game of civilization, they've been thrown back into the Hobbesian state of War, and are justified in looking out for the Big Idea - the "coercive Power, to compell men equally to the performance of their Covenants, by the terrour of some punishment, greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their Covenant..."

Of course the big idea isn't actually perfectly realizable, any more than Hobbesian man is capable of "assur[ing] for ever, the way of his future desire." But the point is that in pursuing it, one attempts to reassert sovereignty over warring passions and defections - the prerequisite for the formation of a just society in the first place.

I don't mean to nitpick, but wouldn't Hobbes agree that other people really are the source of quite a lot of the violence, inequity, and injustice that humans have to deal with?

Yes, but the difference is whether the social barriers/contracts/taboos etc.. we erect are the source of these problems or a bulwark against them. Is peace, prosperity and egalitarianism the "default state"? Or is it a hard-won victory that must be actively cultivated by each successive generation if it is to be maintained? That is the fundamental point of disagreement.

Well, I don't think Rousseau actually proposes that peace, prosperity, and egalitarianism is "default" to humans. After all, the first line of "Emile" is "Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature [i.e. God], but everything degenerates in the hands of man." Moreover, remember that the societies that Hobbes and Rousseau were dealing with were two very different things, and so when each speaks of "society" they're not actually talking about the same thing. I'd bet that Hobbes, confronted with the ridiculously-ossified nonsense of the French ancien regime would not have failed to condemn it as strongly as Rousseau did ("these two words, country and citizen, ought to be expunged from modern languages!"). Similarly, I can't think that Rousseau would have held to his extreme atomistic individualism if he had lived through the horrifying warfare and social turmoil that Hobbes did. Also, Rousseau's optimism has to be read against the ridiculously dour Calvinism that ruled the Geneva of his youth.

But now I really am nitpicking. Sorry!

After all, the first line of "Emile" is "Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature [i.e. God], but everything degenerates in the hands of man."

I feel like your quote only reinforces my point. The Rousseauean take is that "good" is the default and that everything else (ie evil/degeneracy) is the artifice of man. And while we can theorize about what positions Rousseau might have held had he grown up under different circumstances, fact is that he didn't and that his theories still hold a great deal of influence.

So the other day, as I was accusing you of torturing the meaning of words, I also mentioned that I find your ideas interesting, and this would be a primary example of one of them. As much as I balk at the comparison, if not equivocation, between two sworn enemies, I can't shake the feeling you're pointing at something real, even as the details are lost in translation.

I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place. 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 would be an example of one such detail. Maybe I'm already missing the point by focusing on it, maybe it was just meant to be a generic example, but the issue I have here isn't even "no true scotsmaning", it's that he shoe does not fit. Unless some other group, like the ancaps, is being lumped in with the alt-right, I just don't see how you can call them Rousseauean. As far as I can tell, all their assumptions about human nature seem to fit in with yours. On the other hand, they do seem to have a utopian strain, is that what this is about?

grand ideas are nice and all, but social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up

This might be something close to the core of the matter. I've recently realized that as I've ran the circuit of various ideologies meant to fix the world, the thing that they have in common is the obsession with grand ideas. As I got tired of those, and started valuing tangible things I could actually do, even if they weren't grandiose, I started to ask around if there's any trash that needs picking up, only to be met with blank stares.

On the other hand, that would also mean many left-wing / progressive groups are more "right-wing" then it would seem at first glance.

I don't think you're wrong and will freely concede this as a point of disagreement. The problem becomes, what then?

Why so pessimistic? I'm not trying to find problems, just trying to process what you're saying through my lens, and curious if it's stills recognizable to you after being processed.

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