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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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What's TheMotte's opinion on the legitimacy of protecting individuals from inadvertent value drift? Or in other words: is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will? Is it liberating to just not let them? It seems to me like answers explain one of the core differences in conservative versus liberal schools of thought. This is rather low-effort, apologies.

What's the saying? Enlightenment is hard, which is why so few people will ever reach it, and none can be forced?

My position is that self-discipline is is a good thing, but that enforcing discipline others is to be avoided as possible outside of broadly agreed upon contexts because of it's propensity to abuse by people without self-discipline. There is no system of evaluation or screening that ensures only self-disciplined will have power for pretty much the same reasons there's no way to ensure that only Good Kings will reign- not only is it not reliable for the (wo)man at the top, but it's the system from top to bottom that matters. Insert the ever-useful insight about self-righteous tormenters, the people who would censor information, the rationalization of self-interest by those who see themselves as enlightened, etc. It's all old hat, and if you weren't convinced before, you won't start now.

Value drift occurs. It's a part of life in all directions and connotations. You yourself refer to your own with what you call an overly frantic escape from Russia. This is a characterization / connotation that can only exist due to value drift brought on by perspective- at the time, while you were certainly in a maniac-depressive state, your values were different. In the coming months/years, there is liable to be future developments and worsenings in Russia that may make your escape seem wise and insightful in a way you don't credit it now. As the fable goes, this too shall pass. There is never a point in your life where you will have the 'correct' value perspective and insight to be qualified to decide it for others.

Instead of top-down impositions, lasting changes to individuals come from the bottom-up, from affecting the common culture of shared beliefs and values. But culture is shared beliefs and values, not the values you compel someone to state. Nearly all deliberate social engineering efforts struggle with this, as the values they claim to espouse are not the things actually motivating behavior or being shared- hence the common refrain of the those being loudest about their selflessness are really most out for themselves, and that's the values being taken. You can ask for someone's consideration of your values, you can share your values, but you can't force it on the unwilling.

There's an old internet poem, probably not actually adopted from a Christian monk but with plenty of regional/cultural variations, that's long stuck with me that seem relevant to this topic.

“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”

In this comparison, you are the man-who-is-not-yet-old. I note in your piece, while you spend considerable words on how he has so much less to say, you make only a passing note on that you have talked with him increasingly less over the years. I do not know what you have talked about, if/how you have raised concerns with him directly, but per your own mutability as seen over just the last year, you still have the opportunities to change yourself, and thus impact your family and friends, and through them, more.

It's a lot less heady and gratifying than ambitious reform, but it's there.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”

A seductive thought, but still wrong. If the young man had changed himself, it would have been merely to be a cog in the machine, with no impact and not having changed anything at all. Railing against the machine may have no effect, but so does self-modifying to fit into it.

A seductive thought, but still wrong. If the young man had changed himself, it would have been merely to be a cog in the machine, with no impact and not having changed anything at all. Railing against the machine may have no effect, but so does self-modifying to fit into it.

Without defining this injected 'machine,' or what qualifies as 'impact', 'change', and 'effect', this means nothing in a way that demonstrates the claim is wrong.

Railing or raging against the machine is a common idiom. The machine here is hydroacetylene's "machinery of civilization", what's often called "society". The promise of the little story is that if its protagonist had simply changed himself instead of attempting to change the world, he could have thus changed the world. That's a lie and an obvious one; if you change yourself, you won't change the world because you no longer want to.

That's a lie and an obvious one; if you change yourself, you won't change the world because you no longer want to.

Whether it's a lie or not it's certainly not obviously so. I interpret that story as: by changing yourself for the better you inspire others to be better, and when enough people better themselves the world will improve as a result. You could interpret it as encouraging people to become cogs in the machine, but IMO that's an overly-cynical interpretation and incorrect.

Convincing young men to be a cog in the machinery of civilization is the entire point of that story. Liberalism rails against this, conservatism half-asses trying to do it, and progressivism wants to throw out the machinery of civilization and replace it with something entirely else(I, uh, can't steelman what they want to replace the current structures with, so I'm not going to try).

Convincing young men to be a cog in the machinery of civilization is the entire point of that story.

Perhaps, but it's still a lie.

Value drift occurs. It's a part of life in all directions and connotations. You yourself refer to your own with what you call an overly frantic escape from Russia. This is a characterization / connotation that can only exist due to value drift brought on by perspective- at the time, while you were certainly in a maniac-depressive state, your values were different. In the coming months/years, there is liable to be future developments and worsenings in Russia that may make your escape seem wise and insightful in a way you don't credit it now

We disagree here in small but frustrating methodological detail.

Clearly, I wasn't thinking very straight in the first weeks of the invasion, but I maintain that this was a proper reaction to have, given the information available at the moment. That information suggested a decent chance for effective or official border closure from either side in days; that I, in that condition, pegged that chance at like 90% and not some conservative figure like 35% would have been crucial for betting, but not very substantial for decision-making with life on the line. In fact it was probably necessary to subjectively overestimate it, to act appropriate to the true expected value. Rational irrationality or something.

Russia did ultimately declare mobilization; it is only a further failing of the Russian leadership that they did not do so in March. With the way the war's going they'll close borders too, probably. As you note, the mobilization was a strategic blunder in any case – but with their apparent goals and model of the situation, it would have made more sense for them to close borders and throw as many people into training as possible, as early as possible, rather than after losing much of their territorial gains, personnel and materiel. There may be other issues to consider, like higher risks of insubordination or economic shock or more drastic Western actions, which perhaps have diminished in the course of the war; but then, I think they just overestimated those factors – and my expectation was for them to not make this error.

Facts don't change retroactively. I did have more time, ergo I moved out too frantically. My leave won't become any wiser in the future. I also won't regret it, because, as already said, that was the best call I could have made with available data. Were I in a more equanimous mood, my rationally charted Yud-approved Bayesian strategy would've been the same. I had no way of anticipating the real outcome with sufficient certainty to accept the risk. The main lesson here is to strive to have better data.

Mental state can affect values, but my values, with regard to minimizing chances of getting drafted for the invasion of Ukraine at least, are consistent.

But that's not germane to the topic.

Instead of top-down impositions, lasting changes to individuals come from the bottom-up, from affecting the common culture of shared beliefs and values [...] the values they claim to espouse are not the things actually motivating behavior or being shared- hence the common refrain of the those being loudest about their selflessness are really most out for themselves, and that's the values being taken. You can ask for someone's consideration of your values, you can share your values, but you can't force it on the unwilling.

If no lasting changes by social engineering were achievable, would conservatives have any reason to fear CRT in schools and their other bugbears?

As you can see, here's a small wrinkle (emphasized): even allowing that this is true, you can't force your own values on people, but you can force, top-down, the adoption of some trivially bad values, accordingly pushing out others – likely those salt-of-the-earth bottom-up organic ones. The fact that the latter is doable and there are parties attempting the former is sufficient grounds to ask about countermeasures, which automatically implies some equivalent of a social engineering effort, even if devoid of conspicuous High Modernist elements.

And the next reasoning step is that the decent common folk who share their good values horizontally are at a strategic disadvantage against systems with pooled resources and specialized tools for propaganda, even if they achieve higher normalized transmission fidelity.

And the next – that those systems would seek to discourage organized resistance, perhaps by promoting nice simple stories about monks changing themselves, and the need to clean your room before networking and seeking to deplatform the outgroup...

I did omit the «Libertarian» perspective, a variation on the Liberal one, which is, to my understanding, that organizations are not trustworthy enough to be endowed with social engineering capacities for two reasons: due to unknowability of an a priori «good» social engineering scheme and value set (thus, risks of a catastrophic lock-in or some other hard failure), and due to fallibility of people tasked with executing it. So the question is moot: we can only do what seems to be right on our own, and hope that good values at the societal scale evolve as a result. That's pretty compelling.

The issue is one of perspective. There was one Utopian, heavily centralized, social engineering project known as Communism. It had successfully reformatted hundreds of millions of people – in ways, perhaps, not intended by its authors, but profound nonetheless. In my view, it was stopped, pushed back and then crushed by a competing and more intelligently ran system, not by the power of friendship and mutual respect and bottom-up good values and all that jazz.

All that jazz helped, to be sure.

I do not know what you have talked about, if/how you have raised concerns with him directly

I did, almost at every interaction – who wouldn't tell their friend that they should lay off drugs, or wouldn't try to help? I wasn't the only one, too. But there's only so much that words of a peer can do, and only so much tolerance for sermonizing among moderns. As you say: can't force on the unwilling. I opted to assume he's a grown-up, «respect» his choices, and hope for the better; what was the alternative?

The alternative, of course, is a society that recognizes such outcomes to be bad and systematically decreases their odds. And, one way or another, by holding on to what is being pushed out, or by inventing new ramparts, or by pouring old wine into new wineskins, or by seeking entirely new solutions, that amounts to social engineering.

A related quote:

“Why? You’re a clever fellow, not blind to culture like so many engineers. You could have joined the First Distributed Republic or any of a hundred synthetic phyles on the West Coast. You would have had decent prospects and been free from all this”— Finkle-McGraw jabbed his cane at the two big airships— ”behavioural discipline that we impose upon ourselves. Why did you impose it on yourself, Mr. Hackworth?”

“Without straying into matters that are strictly personal in nature,” Hackworth said carefully, “I knew two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much. The former leads to degenerate behaviour. When I speak of degeneracy, I am not being priggish, sir—I am alluding to things well known to me, as they made my own childhood less than idyllic.”

Finkle-McGraw, perhaps realizing that he had stepped out of bounds, nodded vigorously. “This is a familiar argument, of course.”

“Of course, sir. I would not presume to imply that I was the only young person ill-used by what became of my native culture.”

“And I do not see such an implication. But many who feel as you do found their way into phyles wherein a much harsher regime prevails and which view us as degenerates.”

“My life was not without periods of excessive, unreasoning discipline, usually imposed capriciously by those responsible for laxity in the first place. That combined with my historical studies led me, as many others, to the conclusion that there was little in the previous century worthy of emulation, and that we must look to the nineteenth century instead for stable social models.”

“Well done, Hackworth! But you must know that the model to which you allude did not long survive the first Victoria.”

“We have outgrown much of the ignorance and resolved many of the internal contradictions that characterised that era.”

"I knew two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much."

And to hang a quote off your quote:

He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism. Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity.

I always thought forcing RadFems to hook up with RedPillers, Hoteps with White Nationalists, etc. would be good for society...

No need to be ashamed, better to take action too early than too late. Whole world expected Masterminds of Kremlin(TM) instead of what we got.

If no lasting changes by social engineering were achievable, would conservatives have any reason to fear CRT in schools and their other bugbears?

Is American school indoctrination really so superior, could American schools make CRT and 666 gender LGBTQ+ values stick (while Soviet school teaching Marxist-Leninist values totally failed)?

As I understand it, these "cultural marxist" values are spreading horizontally from peers and "influencers" through tiktok, not vertically from school teachers. Am I wrong?

I did omit the «Libertarian» perspective, a variation on the Liberal one, which is, to my understanding, that organizations are not trustworthy enough to be endowed with social engineering capacities for two reasons: due to unknowability of an a priori «good» social engineering scheme and value set (thus, risks of a catastrophic lock-in or some other hard failure), and due to fallibility of people tasked with executing it.

This. Even if you see The Devil Weed(TM) as The Coming Menace (TM), you could expect Russian government fight it as efficiently as it fights Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexuals in Ukraine. No idea about capacity of government of Kyrgyzstan.

The issue is one of perspective. There was one Utopian, heavily centralized, social engineering project known as Communism. It had successfully reformatted hundreds of millions of people – in ways, perhaps, not intended by its authors, but profound nonetheless.

Yes, instead of creating perfect communist man working selflessly for the common good, the result was ultimate capitalist predator, willing to do anything for profit.

(in this funny tweetstorm Kamil Galeev blames ... Marx for post-Soviet gangsterism)

In the same way, to get back to original topic of this subthread, effect of century+ old war of drugs was to make drugs by several magnitudes deadlier than before. If drug warriors of old who panicked about opium saw fentanyl, they would not be amused.

If your effort produces great effects, but exactly opposite to what you (publicly) intended, you could not be called succesfull.

In my view, it was stopped, pushed back and then crushed by a competing and more intelligently ran system, not by the power of friendship and mutual respect and bottom-up good values and all that jazz.

All that jazz helped, to be sure.

Yea. What defeated communism? "Thirty glorious years" post war, when (social democratic) capitalist West provided better alternative to Soviet system and delivered what Soviet propaganda promised, so better than even life of top 1% of USSR was dismal compared to ordinary Western middle class citizen, so better that all Soviet propaganda was rendered null and void, that everything Western was seen as superior, that even empty cans of Coca Cola or Western beer were collected and worshipped like holy relics.

According to theory, it was supposed to happen the other way - communist science fiction described with relish future where communist world achieved true Star Trek fully automated luxury communism, while capitalist world collapsed into grungy gangster ghetto.

(one classic example is this, grim dystopian cyberpunk future created in ... 1970's East Germany)

In all secret squirrel skullduggery, USSR had always upper hand, and it, ultimately, did not mattered.

Even hard core conspiracy theorists who believe that Gorbachev and Yakovlev were CIA agents who deliberately wrecked Soviet Union, would have problem claiming that everything was going swimmingly at the time, that USSR was going to overcome and surpass the capitalist world as originally intended.

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