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Notes -
For those here who follow the notoriously obscure Yarvin:
He has this argument that goes, as I understand it, something like "any Power that's accountable to Truth must promote lies -- putting 'scientists' (broadly construed) upstream of policy means that science gets co-opted to the goals of Power and away from the pursuit of Truth, and legitimating Power on popular consent incentivizes Power to manufacture that consent by controlling the people's minds with indoctrination. Therefore, it would be better for Truth and free thought if Power didn't have to act like it was constrained by Truth (or the consent of people who think they know Truth), and was openly free to act more arbitrarily."
But...what's the use of anyone knowing the Truth if Power can't be moved by it? And why would a Power that acts in flagrant ignorance of known Truth deserve the respect of legitimacy? And how can Power ultimately free itself enough from the constraints of Truth to not still fear it and be tempted to try to suppress its knowledge?
Maybe Yarvin thinks that under the current system, we still get Power acting in flagrant ignorance, and also it's harder to know what's True, so the least-bad development would be to "formalize" Power's freedom to act in obviously ignorant and counterproductive ways -- since Power is bound to that either way, but under the proposed alternative where Power doesn't care what anybody thinks, at least the powerless can have a better idea about the Truth...of how Power is fucking everything up?
I could take some black pill that Power is always the Power to do stupid and counterproductive shit to people just because you can, and that's the Power that's always going to be exercised over us, for various intrinsic-to-reality reasons, and our only consolation, as people in even the best possible society, is to be able to think True thoughts ineffectually.
But I don't know think that's what Yarvin is professing to offer. He talks like Power would act more sanely and productively if it were as formally-unconstrained by Truth as possible. Certainly the alternative where it doesn't act more sanely and productively hardly sounds stable -- with everyone better seeing how things could be improved through more Truthfully-guided management but dutifully resigning themselves to be subject to an openly arbitrary and capricious Power. Is he just betting it all on lucking into a short run of a few Good Emperors before it goes back to shit again?
I think I see the problem he's laying out, but I don't see how any of his solutions make sense.
I have only read a handful of Yarvin's essays so I can't answer any of your questions as an interpretive response to his work. But in my opinion and experience, to answer this question specifically, the use of anyone knowing Truth is so that you can defend yourself against Power and have an advantage over any power that wants to harm you by defining truth in a way that's different from the material underlying Truth. You may not be able to move Power but you can move yourself. The freedom to understand the actual Truth is empowering in the face of Power.
Watching Power assert its own version of Truth over and over for the past few years has been Orwellian and the only solace I've found is in trying to find people spouting a version of Truth that feels more correct to me (like what I find on this forum.)
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Living a good life, surely.
This is sort of the weird critical theory obsession that truth is only useful insofar as it brings power, borne to be sure out of the betrayed promise of the enlightenment that the two are married.
But they're not. Power is really not about truth at all except through the connection of practical means. A good sovereign listens to the scientists, but his power isn't derived from them, otherwise both science and good rule are impossible.
And note that this is as true in a democracy as it is in a monarchy.
Rather he accepts that human nature will do what human nature does and that we should take what we can get. From his point of view democracy guarantees brainwashing, whereas monarchy at least gives you the possibility of doing things so long as you're not meddling in politics yourself.
Frankly the whole point of society is just to have some order so people can live nice little lives unbothered by turmoil and maybe some philosophers can work on improving our lot.
Putting the philosophers on the throne is, whilst deviously tempting, the path of destruction.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the idea that the truth is only useful/true insofar as it leads to political power kind of a core axiom of the whole critical theory/post-modernist edifice? That is the natural conclusion/logical end-point/reductio-ad-absurdam of the personal being political is it not?
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I'm also not sure a reasonable account of historical monarchies proves them less "truth-distorting" in a literal sense than existing societies. Stuff like a de-facto requirement to praise the king or monarchy is a requirement is too easy of a dunk - a world of perfect truth, except for a minor "The King Is Great" tax, is still almost entirely perfect. But both explicit mass hysterias, including ones that took the royal court, and more general confusion seems to be as or more prevalent during whatever historical periods as it is today.
His claim (there's probably a lot of interpretive drift here) is that a monarch's career is more secure than random careerist bueraucrats, so they can use their intelligence to make decisions like "climate change is retarded, you're all fired", while existing climate bueraucrats both have an explicit incentive to not do so (lack of a job) and, further, their entire lives they've been sucking up, playing social games, and doing things not directly in pursuit of truth, so they won't even know/want to discredit climate science even if they could.
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I agree that he seems to be asking to have it both ways. But I also think that a general push to distinguish between truth and policy would be a good meme to spread by scientists for this reason.
There was a poster here a long time ago who wrote about how the separation of Church and State was as much designed to avoid the corrupting influence of power on the church as vice versa, which makes sense to me.
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