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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31563 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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This is, I fear, a great misunderstanding.

First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.

Here we are talking about a few measly decades. Barely a century. It would have been similarly easy to say that right wing victory is inevitable during the Thermidorian Reaction. And yet Moldbug's point is that even that was ultimately advancing the leftist agenda. Napoleon the monarch did more to liquidate monarchy in Europe than anybody.

And yet, even this view is itself a narrow trend in the whole of history.

Spengler, Vico and all the theorists of cyclical history whom Moldbug is very obviously cribbing from, would instead argue that history repeats itself. That it has seasons. That right wing victories are the stuff of certain periods, whilst left wing victories are the stuff of others. Both causing each other.

And this brings me to my second point, which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.

The man has an explicit definition he goes by in this context: the left-right axis is that of nomos, of either increasing or decreasing the formalism and bondedness of a society.

This is what leads him to state the aphorism about the w-force. That definition of the axis and the oft remarked upon shape of history as short periods of creation followed by long periods of decay. To Moldbug, the "left" is simply the party of decay. You'll notice that when he means "democrat" he usually uses the word "blue" instead.

This leads to unintuitive conclusions that blow up direct comparison between this contemporary lament and his broader historical point.

For instance, FDR, which is very obviously left wing (or rather, blue), is viewed by Moldbug in this context as a right wing figure. He is after all, a monarch, who reshaped and reconstituted the US government after a period of decay. An American Napoleon.

Moldbug's point here is really better stated formally by Nick Land and the Deleuzian concept of reterritorialization: that the forces of history (capital) work through destructive transformation cycles that will take a concept and its connections (territory) and destroy those connections (deterritorialization) and then take that now meaningless disconnected concept and reconnect and recontextualize it in a way that makes it mean something entirely different (reterritorialization).

Cthulhu swims left means that the process of recontextualization actually helps to destroy the original meaning of the concept. That Reaction in the simple sense or a want to return to a past state of things is a vain process because doing so only helps to destroy the past.

First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.

First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.

And second, while MM may want to relitigate enlightenment ideas broadly, in this case he uses examples that are a few decades apart:

But no. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.

which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.

On this part I agree. MM does that obnoxious thing SJW's did by redefining commonly used words to suit his political purposes. Like the left redefining "racism", MM redefines "left" to be basically "everything bad":

First, we need to define left and right. In my opinion, obviously a controversial one, the explanation for this mysterious asymmetric dimension is easy: it is political entropy. Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy and crime. Because values are inherently subjective, it is possible to argue that left can be good and right can be bad. For example, you can say that the Civil War was good — the North needed to conquer the South and free the slaves. On the other hand, it is also quite easy to construct a very clean value system in which order is simply good, and chaos is simply evil. I have chosen this path. It leaves quite a capacious cavity in the back of my skull, and allows me to call myself a reactionary. To you, perhaps, it is the dark side. But this is only because the treatment is not yet complete.

It's a big sneer at the outgroup. MM dislikes where society has headed, so he puts everything he hates in a big bucket, calls it the "left" and says it always wins. It's pure gerrymandering.

First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.

This doesn't match my experience. This phrase is so niche that I don't often run into it, but my memory of it is that decades is roughly the minimum timescale involved, i.e. they're talking about decades or perhaps even centuries, not decades or years, and certainly not even less than years. Timescales of under a decade - or even a handful of decades - are so short that extreme, unsustainable things can win out - and often do, akin to a last-place team beating the first-place team in one of their dozen match-ups during an MLB season - such that people seem to believe that they shouldn't talk about them in such grand, sweeping outside-view terms, but rather with the actual inside-view specific factors.

I've seen Cthulhu mentioned in reference to Trans topics, which haven't been relevant for very long, certainly less long than multiple decades.

Someone will post a headline of the woke left winning some minor flavor-of-the-month battle, then someone will chime in with "Cthulhu always swims left" as a stand-in for "[things] always get [worse]" and "the left always wins".

Trans topics haven't been mainstream for a long time, but they've certainly been a part of the progressive movement for a long time, at least decades. It's merely another instantiation of the concept of equal rights being expanded to cover minorities, following the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movements of a couple decades ago. Heck, the mere existence of trans topics as a mainstream political/ideological topic over the past decade or so is an example of swimming leftward.

I'm more generous about redefining words because any serious attempt at philosophy has to do this and in this particular case, he is actually using the historical meaning from the French Revolution rather than the colloquial one. Arguably his definition has more historical legs than the economic ideology classification from the cold war.

In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions that I find it hard to argue that it is, in fact, malicious. A malicious actor wouldn't hold to using red and blue as alternatives.

Philosophy can be done well enough by using existing words as they currently are. If that's unfashionable, pompous philosophers usually invent new words rather than redefine old ones. Hijacking existing words is almost always a bad idea if the point is clear communication. It's outright deceitful in many cases by seeking to harness the pre-existing emotional valence of words for different ends, e.g. "racism = power + privilege". Alternatively, it's used to wobble between the real definition and the made-up definition at will to confuse people and claim "you just don't get it". I'm not sure if MM himself does this, but people who quote his work certainly do!

In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions

You could say the same thing about leftists redefining "racism". They were quite open about their definitions, often giving them to you unprompted!

I notice you don't address the historical precedence argument. Anybody who uses the term "right" to mean anything but loyalty to the King is guilty by your standard are they not?

Terms do shift meaning, and that change can be used as a political tactic. I don't think that condemns any such change or attempt by nature. And in fact I find that organically promoting memes is a lot more faithful of a technique than prescriptivism.

The word didn't change vis-a-vis monarchism so much as the underlying conditions did. Monarchism became functionally irrelevant.

It's like how "living animals" once included dodos, until dodos went extinct, and then it didn't. The definition of "living animal" didn't change, yet one morning dodos were no longer included.

I don't disagree that words can change, but change usually happens gradually and organically.

And pray tell, what is the mechanism for this gradual and organic change, if not intellectual discourse and its fashions?

Why do people use "gender" to mean something else than category? Why do people use "democracy" to mean something else than mob rule? Why do people use "well regulated" to mean something else than in good working order?

If this is an accurate gloss of Moldbug's perspective, "Cthulhu always swims left" doesn't sound merely trite (according to the stipulative defintion of "left" that Moldbug's using) but actually tautological. If you believe that things used to be good, but now they're bad, it logically follows that they became bad in the interim. Like, duh.

If you use the common definition of "left", as most people implicitly do when using the phrase "Cthulhu always swims left", then the phrase is simply wrong for the reasons I described in the original post.

On the other hand if you accept MM's vague redefinition of "left", then "Cthulhu always swims left" is basically tautological as you say, but you're smuggling in the ideology with the silly definition.

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