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Consolidating responses to a couple comments here.
From your post above:
I would strongly disagree with all three of these statements. I think we can agree that "left" or "right" are essentially meaningless, but whether human beings are naturally good or evil and the locus of control seem to me to be extremely important questions. Likewise, where you see Hlynka latching on to something to put all his enemies onto one side, if his method allows him to sort friends from enemies in a consistent fashion, that is straightforwardly and obviously useful to him and to anyone who shares his values. I use similar logic to sort friend and enemy, and to make predictions about where current ideology will lead people, and this seems like an obviously useful and relatively uncontroversial method of reasoning.
At a minimum, you should consider that a categorization system that you don't find useful for your purposes and values might still be useful to people with different purposes and values.
Would you concede that, under the framing you're employing here, Eugenics was straightforwardly an attempt to reshape "human nature" through the mechanism of social institutions? Do the DR types believe that Eugenics was a bad idea or doomed to failure? Like, there's obviously a serious miscommunication happening here, because you are conflating "bad genes will always produce bad people" with "regardless of nature, regardless of nurture, the line between good and evil will always run through every human heart." These are not remotely equivalent statements.
I have and will argue that intelligence is orthogonal to morality, and that there is no reason at all to believe that even highly intelligent people are in any way more moral than dullards. Arguments to the contrary, from what I have seen, rely on a model of "morality" that rounds off to crime statistics, as though a person who never commits a crime, much less never gets caught committing a crime, is therefore morally perfect. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that those who commit crimes are necessarily less moral than those who do not, and that is even ignoring the part where immoral people can give their immorality the force and imprimatur of law. The logic that would argue otherwise is absurd for a whole host of reasons, but near as I can tell it is actually what a number of HBD enthusiasts I've encountered seem to be explicitly arguing.
Likewise, is Walt Bismark a reasonably representative example of a DR thinker? When he says:
...what part of that passage would you describe as a recognition that human nature is immutable and immune to manipulation by social institutions? Would you argue that subjugating people wholesale is not a form of manipulation by social institutions? Do you understand that, completely separate from any charged keywords or references to specific identity groups, the core logic evident in that passage marks the author, to me, as the most mortal sort of ideological enemy? Someone with whom no cooperation is or likely ever will be possible?
And Yarvin's Hobbits and Dark Elves essay is much the same, though he maintains a far more diplomatic approach; his core logic marks him firmly as an enemy.
You might as easily quote Bismark above, who clearly argues that not all whites make the cut. But as I understand it, the core objection isn't that the DR believes "white people inherintly good, everyone else inherintly bad", even though I have seen plenty of examples of exactly that sort of logic from what I thought were adherents to the DR here. It seems to me that one of the actual core objection is that they believe they can sort people into the good and bad bins by population-level metrics, when in fact they absolutely cannot do that.
Diversity is infinitely fractal. Focusing on specific commonalities that seem of primary relevance to one's own model is not "ignoring diversity". Relevance to the model at hand is the whole question.
As above, I think of Bismark and Yarvin as examples of Dissident Right thinkers. Both seem to share a view of human nature that fits much better with Progressive ideology than with my own. Likewise, when we've discussed psychoanalytically-inflected strains of marxism, it seemed that the examples you offered argued for no final end in the sense that an asymptote has no final end.
I do not think Bismark, Yarvin, or the the psychoanalytically-inflected marxists could engage with the fundamental truth of "the poor you will always have with you."
How would you characterize Bismark's call for a "thousand year Reich", aiming for "divine creation"? But let's say you're correct, and the DR doesn't argue that Utopia will be achieved if all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down. Would it be fair to say that they believe things will get a whole lot better, if they can simply remove most of the silly barriers keeping them from exercising unrestrained power to reshape and organize society?
Maybe they don't. Yarvin seems to, and Bismark definately seems to. Maybe they're not representative?
I can say that I personally am very confident that this formulation is incorrect; belief in the Christian God is not required in any way. What is required is an understanding that we are not in control, that we are inside the box looking out, not standing in the lab looking in at the world in a box. Such a worldview is compatible with Christianity, in the sense that cooperation and productive coexistence between the two are possible, and the opposite worldview is incompatible with Christianity. That's the connection I think you are twigging to. The hubris required to assume that one is fundamentally in control is the same hubris necessary to believe that "rational Christian" is an oxymoron, and so the two correlate strongly; there is a reason Bismark claims that building his hoped-for society is a spiritual, even divine act of creation. Further, I find that one can argue persuasively against this hubris from entirely within a rational, materialist framework, provided one is sufficiently rigorous in their materialism.
Noted atheist Sargon of Akaad just put out a video more or less on this subject. For fictional/vibes examples, I thought Glen Cook's The Silver Spike and Shadowline were interesting attempts within the bounds of genre fiction. Kipling himself seems most of the way there.
I'd like to thank you for this post, because it very much sums up neatly a lot of my own disagreements with the sort of "Dissident Right" thinkers you mention. (I also thought of that same Sargon video you linked when I was reading it.)
(It also helped clarify, by showing points of agreement, where both of my differences with you, and those with Hlynka, lie.)
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I want to try to achieve an understanding of what the root of this disagreement is, on a deeper level. The Christianity hypothesis was one attempt at that. If you have an alternative read on the situation that's fine. I encourage you to share your own interpretation. Although I would point out that Hlynka said, directly, that belief or non-belief in God is part of "the core of what positions we hold".
If it's ultimately just about distinguishing "my friends" from "my enemies", then that's fine. I would have nothing further to add. But you should just say that, instead of arguing that vastly heterogeneous groups of people are committed to a complex web of philosophical assertions that they are not, in fact, committed to.
Well, through technology and biology. Not social institutions.
Unsurprisingly, materialists believe that human nature is grounded in some combination of biological/physical properties and environmental factors, because that's all there is. Humans are what they are because of what their made of. If you change what they're made of then you could (potentially) change what they're like. If this fundamental metaphysical commitment makes all materialists ideologically "the same" in some sense, then that lends further credence to the assertion that the fundamental divide for you is really about materialists vs non-materialists.
It should be noted though that materialists are not necessarily committed to the idea of an infinitely malleable human nature. There could be logical/physical constraints on the "space of all possible minds". The psychoanalysts believe that the necessary preconditions of subjectivity itself put certain constraints on any conscious mind that look a bit like the fall of man and original sin if you squint at it (Lacan, despite being an atheist, had a complex relationship with Christianity).
At any rate, there are non-materialist Christians among both the communists and the dissident right, rendering the whole line of questioning somewhat moot.
I will ask directly: are all your enemies "the same" in some sense, just because they are your enemies? If not, then why is it relevant that Bismark sees you as an enemy? Why did you bring it up?
Is this the assertion of a new criteria for determining identity among ideologies? How is it related to the other proposed criteria ("humans as naturally good vs evil", "knowing how to solve all our problems vs not knowing", etc). Are they all equivalent formulations of each other? Is one of the formulations at the root, and the others are derived from it?
Is there any set of circumstances that's better than any other set of circumstances for anyone, ever? Or is everything just all the same?
You have expressed a great deal of anger on this forum previously about what you see as Blue Tribe overreach and abuse of power. Would your life be better, in any way, even a little bit, if Blue Tribe had less power over you and the things you care about?
Because if you can imagine specific changes to society that would make your life even a little better, then we're just haggling over numbers at that point. Your proposed changes would only improve life by a modest 50 utils, so you're on the Red Tribe side, traditionalist, anti-Enlightenment, etc. But Yarvin thinks he can improve life by 300 utils, which is over the cutoff of 250, so he's on the Enlightenment side with all the Nazis and communists etc.
This is not tenable.
Then this is a point that I disagree with him on and would love to debate him on the subject.
Absolutely not. Radical Islamists are very clearly not running on Enlightenment ideology. Organized Crime is very clearly not running on Enlightenment ideology.
Because he's demonstrating a specific ideological pattern, and I believe that pattern matters deeply and should not be tolerated. I talk about him being very clearly an enemy to note that this does not seem to be a borderline case; the way he chooses to describe his own thinking and philosophy puts him very far on the other side of a very clear line.
My understanding is that ideology is useful because it provides a structured, reasoned framework to help me understand the world around me, the better to effectively pursue my values. Further, it is useful in providing a structured, reasoned framework to help me effectively understand and predict the behavior of other people, the better to coordinate cooperation with those possessing compatible values and meanness against those sharing incompatible values.
I am claiming that there are specific, identifiable ideological markers that are quite useful to me for this purpose. You appear to be claiming that these specific, ideological markers are an illusion, and that the people I mark with them are essentially being marked at random. But it seems to me that you are perceiving randomness because you ignore or discard all the non-random data-bits.
Eugenicists used large-scale social institutions to engage in large-scale social engineering in an effort to directly manipulate "human nature" on a global level. Communists likewise used "technology and biology" in a variety of ways to try to achieve New Soviet Man. I continue to have no idea why you see this as a meaningful distinction.
No, I've been asserting it for years now in these discussions. You can find a ton of examples by searching "author:fcfromssc we know how to solve problems" and then searching through the results; the two are often paired, because my argument is the latter follows directly from the former. See here, for instance:
...Or here.
...And now I'm worried that you'll start providing examples of "this problem is the fault of these people" to claim that this isn't a meaningful category, but the point is that this is a chain of logic. Claim to offer expansive, open-ended solutions to problems you can't actually solve, and then then claim that certain people are the obstacle that needs to be removed, even when those people have no rigorously-determined connection to the problem beyond being in your way. There is a fundamental difference between "people committing crimes are a problem, we should set up a system to punish crime" and "low-IQ people are a problem, we should stop them from breeding/encourage them to abort their children/enact state policies of sterilization or euthenization."
It is the corollary to "we know how to solve all our problems", which explains why problems aren't being solved and what to do about it: remove the bad people who are in the way.
If humans are naturally good, it's evidently tempting to conclude that humans who aren't good, or humans who are getting in the way of your efforts to make other humans good, aren't actually human.
It is clear to me that there is a fundamental difference between "I think this specific problem would be solved by making this individual change to our society" and "An unbounded set of problems would be made unboundedly better if we fundamentally reshaped our entire society, with that reshaping being controlled by me or someone very like me." Or in more specific terms, there is a fundamental difference between "I think we should add/remove tariffs with an aim to improve these economic factors" and "We should solve poverty".
No such change has ever been demonstrated. In the case of IQ, I think I have solid evidence that it absolutely doesn't work. If it did work, that would not be a good thing, because "changing what they're like" necessarily involves making them controllable. Either the humans remain as they are despite your changes, ie they have free will and thus the full capacity for evil, or they are actually changed by constraining their will and making them your slaves.
Again, I assert the distinction is between rigorous materialists and non-rigorous materialists. "There is zero significant proof that a God or Gods exist" is not an obstacle. "I do not believe that God exists, and I organize my life and choices around this axiom" is not an obstacle. "Material is all that exists, free will is an illusion, humans are machines that we can engineer to our liking" is an obstacle, and also very clearly a statement of faith that requires discarding vast amounts of contrary evidence[*]. And note the connection back to the concept of choice.
And I note that whether an ideology explicitly asserts explicit infinite malleability is far less important than whether they recognize an actual limit to malleability that impinges on their desires. "Man is infinitely malleable, we can make him as we wish" ~= "Man is malleable to a very high degree, we can make him as we wish" != "Man may be somewhat malleable in some ways, but we have no idea how to change these parts and are just going to have to accept them for the foreseeable future."
Materialism is not the dividing line, so it is indeed moot.
Absolutely. But this doesn't require me to have power over them, or to eliminate all Blues forever, or to establish a thousand year Red Reich. There's a set of simple actions with obvious limits that can achieve the far more modest goal of "don't be ruled by people who hate you". And notably, I'm committed to not taking some of those actions, because they're morally wrong, even though I hate Blues and believe that things would be much better if I and people like me were free of their power. Even having an actual, bounded solution isn't enough, the solution has to be sufficiently cheap in terms of power and moral cost. And so I not only have abandoned "plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem", but have expended some effort to deter others from finding or pursuing those specific solutions.
[*] Assuming "Material" is defined as "stuff we can directly observe and interact with", this is pretty clearly false under Materialism's own assumptions; effects follow causes, and we have directly observed at least one effect, the Big Bang, that leads back to no cause observable even in principle. Consequently we can be confident that something exists that we cannot observe or interact with, hence is not "Material" in the rigorous sense. Taking it as an axiom that this something is just more elaborate material of the sort we can observe is a reasonable approach. Asserting that it has to be this and any other axiom must be rejected is very clearly a statement of faith. We likewise have abundant observations of another effect, human will, which has no apparent material cause, but which very clearly "exists" in all useful senses of the word; we build much of our world off the assumption it exists, for instance, and doing otherwise is wildly impractical. Materialists often argue that Determinism must be true and all our observations of Free Will must be discarded, because they contradict Materialism. To the extent that these observations contradict Materialism, they are also evidence against Materialism.
If you can agree that the principle political distinction for you is between people who accept this statement and those who reject it, and your other formulations are (in your view) in some sense equivalent to or derived from this one, then I am content to let it be. I can at least understand how you would arrive at such a position.
You recognize the two previous statements of increasingly strong materialism in that paragraph which I explicitly stated do not fit the pattern, right? You understand that the distinction is not actually about Materialism in any way, but is about an understanding of what power is, how it works, what it can and should be used for? You understand that this same category can easily fit a non-materialist, and indeed could perfectly fit someone claiming to be a Christian whose entire ideological program is drawn from their interpretation of the Bible? For example, a "Christian" who believes that Christianity should be enforced by law, and children who don't seem likely to properly adhere to Christianity should be put to death before they reach the age of accountability to ensure their souls are not lost? Such a person also believes that "We know how to solve all our problems", and for bonus points might not even have any intellectual connection to the Enlightenment itself.
With those caveats clearly stated, sure, fair enough.
No, he doesn't. Not necessarily.
"We're going to enforce Christianity by law in order to build as spiritually pure a society as possible, but of course the battle against Satan and his works is never over and sin is impossible to entirely eliminate, people are going to keep sinning no matter what, so we must maintain constant vigilance lest we slip into a state of totally unconstrained decadence and chaos". Boom. Done. He still believes in problems. It's right there. And of course you can perform similar constructions with Marxists, white nationalists, etc.
For the record, what you listed are not caveats, but another position entirely.
You have just described a solution to a problem, not the absence of a solution. This is also "we know how to solve all our problems."
You seem to be operating off the assumption that theory necessarily matters or is meaningful. I have been arguing all along that "We know how to solve all our problems" is not a rational hypothesis on the nature of reality offered with sound mind and in good faith. It is a line. It is a pitch. It is a scam whose purpose is to secure power for the persons employing it. That's why the immediate corollary is an explanation of why the solutions aren't working and therefore more power is needed.
What breaks the pattern is a real admission of weakness, of surrender. An admission that in this case we cannot have what we want, and we must accept that. A genuine recognition and acceptance of hard limits on our ambition. A point at which we let go, lift our foot off the gas, cease escalating and make peace. And not a hypothetical point in an indefinite future, or a point that we bend all available power against in an asymptotic approach, and not some tangential point off to the side divorced from the core aims of the project. "I assume absolute control over the lives of every person within our borders, but it's not like I'm trying to control the weather..." As they say, the most important thing is sincerity; once you can fake that, you've got it made.
Hlynka was fond of the quote "thank you, but I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds." The point of that quote is that the speaker's worldview also accounts for loss, even total loss, as a realistic and significantly likely outcome. Failure and loss are common events in the human experience; ignoring them makes an ideology more superficially attractive and makes adherents more zealous, but it also makes it much easier and more likely for that ideology to go absolutely insane. As I understood it, he employed the quote as a reminder that if you want to keep your sanity, your worldview and axioms have to be capable of accommodating and accepting loss and failure. This is not a perspective to which I am naturally inclined; I much prefer "...for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." But this is yet another one of the notable areas where he was simply correct.
Does Zizek have room in his theories for loss? Does McGowan? Does Marcuse? If so, it speaks well of them. If not, what does that mean to you?
And even here, I've no doubt that you can construct some bespoke formulation that gives the appearance of limits or surrender, while retaining as much will-to-power as possible. But this, again, is in fact my point: "we know how to solve all our problems" is a lie, and lies are effective and often hard to detect. There is no substitute for shrewdness and discernment. The point is not to pencil-whip a checklist, but to recognize a predator that is actively working to conceal itself.
You seemed to be offering a summary of my argument that my argument didn't actually fit into, but it was a bit hard to tell whether that was intentional or not, whether your summary was meant to be illustrative or exclusive. I just wanted to make explicit the parts that seemed to be sticking out.
My interpretation of what you're saying here is "look, I can tell you in plain English exactly what I want. It's a very short and simple list of requests. And after I get what I want, I'll be out of your hair, you won't be hearing from me anymore. But these other guys, the communists, all they can say is that there will always be 'problems'. They can't tell me exactly what problems they intend to solve, or how they intend on solving them. So you never know what they're gonna do. Today everything could be fine, but tomorrow they could want something else, and then it's something else, and then something else, all because they found a new 'problem'. That makes them dangerous, because you don't know what they're gonna do from one minute to the next."
Do I have that right?
I will acknowledge that, yes, this is a feature of basically all the non-utopian Marxists. They think the future is fundamentally open. They don't know what's possible, what's impossible, or what will need to be done in the future. They don't claim to be capable of this kind of knowledge. (The utopian Marxists do claim to have this sort of knowledge, but we've already established that they have other problems).
I think however you can easily be a white nationalist while operating on a model that's basically like what you describe, with a more concrete list of demands. Mainly they just want to live in a country with other white people; it's really quite simple. There are many historical examples of 99% white countries. Just copy one of those, add on some extra immigration laws, and you're basically good, besides the continual ongoing maintenance that every state requires. You don't have to be Bismark with infinite will to power in order to be a white nationalist.
I'm curious what you would think of Keith Woods.
Yes! Dear God, yes!
For Lacan (one of the foundational reference points for Zizek and McGowan), the human subject is "constitutively lacking". There's a gaping hole that can never be filled, condemning us to the eternal samsara of desire. Unlike in Buddhism, he offers no escape from the wheel of desire, and unlike in Christianity, you can't fill the hole with God. The "primordial lost object which can never be found" was such an important concept for him that he invented a special name for it ("objet a") and called it "his one true contribution". This is not a mere footnote or aside. It's foundational to everything he thought.
Of course this position does not have universal assent among philosophers/leftists/Marxists/whatever. Deleuze & co. have a position that I think is much closer to the one you're criticizing. Deleuze thought that all desire was "positive" and "productive", and that we weren't fundamentally lacking anything. He thought that suicide was incoherent; "no organism kills itself of its own accord". The organism simply has a "bad encounter" with the bullet, or the ground, etc. This is a major point of disagreement between the Lacanians and Deleuzians.
It's funny that you used the word "loss" specifically, because this specific question has come up before in the canon of leftist philosophy. Derrida said that Hegel's (another one of the foundational reference points for Zizek and McGowan) dialectical system was incapable of conceiving of loss without recompense. McGowan pushed back and said Derrida was wrong, and that Hegel could conceive of loss without recompense. Any interpretation of an author or text can be challenged of course. There was a woman whose name completely escapes me now who wrote a critique of Hegel that went something like, yeah he can conceive of loss, I guess, but he can't conceive of super ultimate absolute loss, and in order to be able to accept super ultimate absolute loss we have to ditch Hegel entirely and go back to Kant. And so it goes, back and forth.
The point, regardless of who's correct in any of this, is that your enemies are already aware of all the points you raise. All of your concerns have been thought about, discussed, and debated in philosophical circles for almost a century now, and some of your enemies have even taken your concerns to heart. I mean, when Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, they had basically the same criticism of the Enlightenment that you have! It was the entire project of the book!
They too recognized that something had gone horribly wrong with the Enlightenment, but they still wanted to see what could be salvaged of Marxism.
If you've already decided that your opponents are lying, and your only job is to ferret out the lie, why even have a discussion at all?
Perhaps this is another candidate for a formulation of the actual fundamental disagreement between us.
I don't look at political ideologies as "predatory". I look at them as social and historical realities. I look at them as concrete social organizations that different people may or may not be attracted to for different reasons. And yes, I look at them as abstract intellectual systems as well, whose study gives me a certain amount of pleasure. But I don't look at them as "predators". Not even wokeism, as much as I despise it.
Why bother looking for concealed predators when you already know that there are predators surrounding you on all sides? I am acutely aware of how many people from all quadrants of the political compass despise me, for various different reasons. When everyone's a predator, no one's a predator; or at least, when everyone's a predator, there's not much point in trying to distinguish predators from non-predators. I have no tribe, I'm an outcast everywhere. I am accustomed to the notion that my allies could betray me at any time. And this affords me a certain amount of flexibility in my outlook. I'll listen to what anyone has to say, but I'll also always keep one eye open as well, even with those who are ostensibly closest to me.
If you do have a tribe, whether it is called Red or some other name, whose support you can be relatively assured of, and from whom predators can be meaningfully and consistently distinguished, then it's unsurprising that this would lead to a fundamental difference in our outlooks.
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