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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I don’t think a distributed conspiracy is all that weird. The machinations around power and the seeking of power have not really ever changed, except that they’ve become more sophisticated as knowledge of psychology and technology has allowed for greater social engineering capabilities. In the bad old days of feudal societies, thing we’re done fairly openly because there really wasn’t much knowledge about how to do so quietly. You’d openly scheme that you and your faction want power, find Allies whose wealth, power and influence you could use to take power, and off you go, sitting a Lannister on the throne of Westeros. Not everyone involved would be part of a conspiracy. Maybe you stood to gain a trade deal if you had someone on the throne who shared your interests. In that instance you might well support the movement even if you’re not in on the conspiracy. You might well jump on social trends that increase your power. This is how power always works.

I think by the point at which a conspiracy is "distributed" it can no longer meaningfully called a conspiracy, and is just an ordinary political coalition. The concept of a "distributed conspiracy" just seems to be (neo-)reactionaries attempting to tar a political coalition they don't like by describing it using a scary word. No different, really, from woke people calling everyone they don't like a fascist.

What would distinguish a distributed conspiracy from a political coalition for me is methods and goals that the conspirants would not willingly disclose in the open. Without secret communications, coordination on those would be based on ideas that emerge naturally, that are downstream of memes shared by the distributed conspiracy. In a way this is like encryption, people with the correct key (sequence of memes) will decode the coordination instructions correctly. The left often accuses the right of this in the form of dogwhistles. If you want, for instance, to get widespread cheating in an election but don't want to say it out loud because that has consequences, you push very loudly memes that would justify cheating ("the other side will end democracy", for instance), so that without having to organize (at least not in large conspiracies), susceptible people will naturally wink, nod and act in support when they see hints that another person might be cheating in the direction they support.

This seems functionally identical to "dog-whistle politics" and/or "stochastic terrorism". As with those concepts, I could certainly see how something like this could be true, but in practice it only ever seems to get trotted out as a stick with which to beat one's enemies.

In any sufficiently large political faction, you'll have leaders who make impassioned speeches about the importance of accomplishing their goals, and subordinates who take this to heart and end up bending or breaking the rules in an effort to accomplish those goals. If caught, the leader will inevitably claim that he never explicitly instructed anyone to bend or break the rules. Should we believe him?

I predict that if we agree with the leader's goals, then the movement is only guilty of having a few overly literal-minded bad apples who have been swiftly dealt with; if we disagree, then the movement is really a "distributed conspiracy" in which the leaders use "dog-whistle politics" to escape culpability for "stochastic terrorism".

I am sceptical of the utility of any political term so susceptible to Russell conjugations.

Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.

I would say that past a certain scale even referring to such things as conspiracies is losing an essential component of the definition of the word.

Collition is a distributed conspiracy. Lobbying is a distributed conspiracy. I’ve never really noted that the NRx groups would not have considered a rightward leaning lobby or collition as not being a distributed conspiracy. Distributed conspiracies are simply the building and wielding of a power base. And really the biggest difference in modern times is how the influence peddling works due to how we perceive the legitimacy of a power base. In modern liberal democracy, legitimacy flows from the deimos— all of us, so power is wielded by creating the appearance of the public being for something and creating propaganda networks.

Why do they only use the Cathedral in reference to the "distributed conspiracy" of left-leaning academia, news media etc.? Why, to the best of my knowledge, is there no equivalently ominous term in NRx circles for conservative lobby groups, the Koch brothers etc.?

Because until very recently the only conservative lobby groups that had any degree of success were already Cathedral-friendly. Financial liberalisation tempered (controlled) by light government regulation is quite popular among the great and the good. Not amongst deBoer and his ilk but he is clearly a heretic.

The original right wing Cathedral was, literally, the Cathedral. An alliance between priests, lords and burghers, all of whom came from similar backgrounds and had a shared interest in keeping the peasants down and the aristocrats, bureaucrats and propagandists up. Thus the French revolutionary saying: “France will not be free until the last lord is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”. I.e. until the Cathedral is destroyed.

So would you say the Catholic Church was a historical example of a distributed conspiracy?

Precisely. Specifically, that it combined the theorycrafter/propagandist role now filled by academia/media respectively.

AFAIK this is explicitly Moldbug’s thesis; it’s why he uses the specific term “Cathedral”.

Someone brought up the point in discussion with @Ben_Garrison but Moldbug’s thesis is really meant to be a theory of post-1500s modernism rather than modern American politics. Of course these days he’s more public and no longer pseudonymous so he’s slipperier and grifter.

To continue in this vein, as @MaiqTheTrue notes, pretty any stable, functional society has a Cathedral. I would argue that the main failure of the right has been to focus on tearing down the Cathedral (effectively impossible) rather than taking it over or replacing it. Thatcher & Reagan (& many conservatives today) mistakenly believed that if they could free markets from Leftist control, they would be compelled by market forces to avoid being corrupted by ideology. As we know, this was not the outcome. It is natural and human to collaborate with people who share your background and interests, so the Cathedral cannot die. You have to make sure that the Cathedral is staffed with your people, who will then naturally point it at things you care about.

Yes. As would noble houses.

Fair enough.

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