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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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The culture that these people all seem to want to “R E T V R N” to is pretty explicitly not just Christian, but Catholic, isn’t it?

The idea they are supposedly criticizing, that human beings have dignity, is not a “slave mentality”, it is the foundational idea behind ending the standard where the vast majority of humans were subjects of their King. Christianity is a liberating ideology at its very core.

Of all the dumb, grifting things that people like Richard Spencer have said, this is perhaps one of the dumbest. This puts him into the same category as people like Andrew Tate; just absolute luke warm IQ people who would be working some low intelligence job if it were not for social media.

William Luther Pierce of Turner Diaries fame came up with Cosmotheism: Darwinism and German romanticism all wrapped with some early spiritual transhumanism and white supremacy. No slave morality whatsoever, he quotes Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Spengler, Shaw in support of the ethos.

There is only one reality, and it is the Whole -- the purposeful, selfcreating, self-evolving Cosmos, which has both material and spiritual aspects, inseparably conjoined. Thus, Creation and Creator, Cosmos and Theos, Whole and God, are but different names for the same reality. Man is part of the Whole, and his consciousness is one manifestation of a universal, immanent consciousness. Man's ordained or natural purpose is the same as the Creator's purpose, which is self-realization.

Man properly serves his ordained purpose by striving toward ever higher ever more conscious levels of existence, both biologically and spiritually. His ordained task is to advance, generation by generation, along the Creator's path of evolving selfconsciousness. In the past he advanced blindly, driven by the immanent urge toward self-realization, self-completion. Now we must guide his advancement.

It didn't catch on, it withered away when Pierce died. You need a certain kind of prophetic authority and a bit of luck to make new religions, failing that enormous amounts of money and manpower.

I need a good bio of him for my book report, do you know any? Obviously I can't trust anything from Wikipedia.

The only one I'm aware of is The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. It's quite interesting, the author got to interview Pierce for many hours at a time, I think he was around for the funeral. Pierce explains a fair bit about his time with Rockwell, about the trouble of forming organizations, selecting recruits, getting the right people... It includes the whole story of his life, his experience with conservatives, the books he wrote.

You can get the book physically or read it on Unz: https://www.unz.com/book/robert_s_griffin__the-fame-of-a-dead-mans-deeds/

Thanks, that's something to chew on. I was only going off the novel, looks like I was on the right track about his takes on religion.

Both seem to be intelligent people with some sociopathic traits.

Spencer will probably be more successful without social media and his politics.

Tate would be less successful, but he was successful before social media, albeit he used cam whores, or allegedly might have engaged in illegal activity as a pimp.

They would likely be successful, for a time, in various systems too, but also might get in trouble by overstepping legal and moral boundaries.

How can you separate "just hating on them incredibly uncharitably" from simply noticing the stupidity of their arguments?

Both are obviously intelligent people

Are they? I've listened to an uncomfortable amount of Richard Spencer speaking, and haven't been able to avoid almost as much Andrew Tate (and this is often stuff he curates himself!). I'm not blindly "hating" them. What Spencer is doing here is just historically and philosophically illiterate, and it does seem comparable to what other very online people like Andrew Tate sell.

I don't agree with Spencer's viewpoint, although I don't agree with the destroy nations, or european nations ideology. I am more team ethnopluralism than team one ethnic group dominating the others.

Tate, makes some true and astute observations that trigger people, and also says dumb stuff, and promotes also exaggerations in the semi ironic, just joking, but am I really, way. For the dumb and later parts of Tate's rhetoric, being annoyed is understandable. He also has this sketchy history and it is understandable to gain dislikes from that.

You can disagree with them, and even dislike them, but obviously that doesn't make them stupid.

Also, stupid philosophy, =/ underperforming idiot, fortunately or unfortunately.

Both the way they talk, their notoriety, and accomplishments, don't show them to be the underperformers you label them as because you dislike their views. Spencer was an editor IIRC before his notoriety too.

And why is their success with social media, not something that demonstrates some ability? For Tate especially. Being charismatic is a helpful trait for success, and just like it and other behaviors helped him with social media, it might have helped elsewhere. Or he could take advantage of the same idea of trying to cultivate a following, in other instances.

I think they want to return to pre Christian Germanic paganism, aka a remnant of the time of living in mud huts like the Africans they love to hate.

Like it or not, Europe broke out of those conditions from 1,000 years of Catholic theocracy. Asia modernized by copying them. This is a well-known, historically supported story that’s perfectly compatible with reactionary ideas about things like the place of women.

I think some of these DR types are too racist for actual Christian reactionaries in real life, or find that their autistic NEET edge lord behavior is otherwise unwelcome in IRL Christian reactionary communities so try to go further back. Twitter edgelordism is escapism whether it’s on the left or the right.

Like it or not, Europe broke out of those conditions from 1,000 years of Catholic theocracy. Asia modernized by copying them. This is a well-known, historically supported story

Citation needed on this claim that somehow Christianity is the source of the technological advancement required to advance out of mud huts. Particularly when for the most of this time period everyone below a noble and a few wealthy merchants, still lived in mud huts.

The claim comes from The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich, in which he demonstrates

  1. Cultural change from genuine belief in the Christian God
  2. Catholic marriage law dissolving tribal and clan based social structures which led to the invention of capitalism
  3. Societal structures built by the Catholic Church spread innovations much more quickly than otherwise, supported iterative improvements in technology and lifestyle, and meaningfully reduced time preferences in European populations

Thanks, I got the book and I'll check it out.

Varg certainly does. Literally burning down historical churches and making a whites only pagan tabletop RPG.

Himmler was big on this, but other Nazis made fun of him behind his back about his faux Germanic pagan mystical stuff.

I think everyone wants to go back to some idealized Rome. Our art features it's stand ins, half of Europe speaks a hand me down version of Latin, Americans use the mile Latin for thousand paces even though most people have no idea what it measures lb is the abbreviation for Libra and makes negative sense for pound, out calendar has 4 months that count months in Latin, and we still celebrate people forgetting when Rome moved their New Year, and our planets bear their gods' names. Not even the originators of those deities, the Greeks names for them.

I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.

I think some of these DR types are too racist for actual Christian reactionaries in real life

I'm not so sure, given that the Christian reactionaries I know IRL can get pretty racist, despite (or maybe even because of) being mixed-race in some cases (Elwood "Chief Red Cloud" Towner was not unique).

Twitterati edgelords are on a whole other level; being a Christian reactionary myself I'm well aware that politically incorrect racial attitudes are common in the community. But going on unbidden rants on the subject doesn't seem particularly common, nor does unqualified praise for Hitler or support for ethnic cleansing or population control.

Twitterati edgelords are on a whole other level

Agreed

going on unbidden rants on the subject doesn't seem particularly common

No, because they've got jobs to keep, because they've got kids to feed. But in private conversations, or anonymous online spaces…

or support for ethnic cleansing or population control

I know a trad-Cath civil engineer who hates suburbs, and argues that instead of the "white flight" retreat that drove their growth and "urban decay," whites should have defended the inner city by "just shoot[ing] all the n*****s." (He's also a rabid antisemite of the "gas the k***s" variety, and has been on some TRS podcasts.) Then there's the Russian Orthodox Native guy who said that of all the terrible things the white man brought to this continent, the worst, above alcohol and smallpox, is black people.

I know a trad-Cath civil engineer who hates suburbs, and argues that instead of the "white flight" retreat that drove their growth and "urban decay," whites should have defended the inner city by "just shoot[ing] all the n*****s."

This is probably because he, like most IRL tradcaths, believes commie-coddler powers that be engineered the civil rights movement to direct the worst of the white flight generating violence against Catholic neighborhoods in an effort to break the cultural power of Catholicism(on the upswing in the 50’s and early 60’s due to very high fertility rates and strong group identity), not because he literally believes blacks should be exterminated.

not because he literally believes blacks should be exterminated.

Did you miss the part where he literally believes Jews should be exterminated? We went to high school together, so I've seen his views evolve from the Heinleinian right-libertarian sort to Trad-Cath Fascist (that's not an insult, that's self-identified).

I have never met a mentally OK enough to be basically functional tradcath who believed Jews ought be exterminated(and I have met a lot of tradcaths, including many who voice politically incorrect ideas and strong antisemitism quite freely), but I have no trouble believing you’ve found one- you wouldn’t be the only friendly or neutral observer who claims to have. I admit to being curious as to his attitude towards converts from Judaism, who would be ethnically Jewish but not religiously.

I recall, particularly, a traditional Catholic priest who once told me that bishop Williamson was of course right about the Holocaust, but he shouldn’t be allowed to say it because he doesn’t believe it would have been a tragedy if it had happened. Even if not exactly mainstream within traditional Catholicism, I don’t harbor delusions of bishop Williamson being one of a kind.

You really do encounter some idiosyncratic characters now and again. It sounds fake, but the boyfriend of one of my good friends, an Arab woman, for about a year at college was a black Muslim African guy (raised in Europe, but first generation and his family mostly still lived in their home country) who was a huge fan of Moldbug and Pat Buchanan. He was ambivalent about HBD/The Bell Curve (which I’ve always found is a remarkably widely-read book for wrongthink) but would discuss it with almost everyone he did coke with, which was a lot of people.

I was chuckling and looking for the retweet button before realizing this is a different site. Your friend sounds like he posts bangers

Also the problem is that almost all modern paganism is a LARP. Since there are no unbroken continuities of pagan faith in Europe (apart from the Mari native religion within the Mari Republic in Russia - though Mari pagan organizations have cooperated with the Muslims in Tatarstan), any "revivalist" efforts are basically based on imagining what such a group surviving to modern age might look like.

Of course if you have a racist Asatru group or whatever, formed by people who have explicitly left the Christian tradition because they think Christianity is Semitic and cucked, you're going to have a group that's more racist than Christians on average, but that's also obviously pretty circular. Other pagan groups think otherwise - most pagans that I've met tend to be far left. It doesn't really explain in any way whether a hypothetical pagan Europe without Christianity would be more "based", or whether a hypothetical future one where Christianity has gone away would be.

I'm aware that most pagans are into hippie nonsense, not racist nonsense, and that even most pagans with conservative tendencies are not particularly racist- the radical esoteric traditionalist crowd is truly fringe of the fringe- but if we're talking specifically about radical esoteric traditionalists, well, they're truly extremists and I suspect have a large fraction which just Does Not Play Well With Others, same as any other frighteningly extreme fringe of the fringe group.

The median pagan just wants to do drugs, and maybe sleep with some rebellious hippy chicks. Most racist pagans are in prison gangs. The 'ethno-conscious paganism as an ideological choice' thing is a small enough group that it's worth asking why people who claim to want reactionary social norms don't join the much larger communities which offer much more reactionary than average social norms which actually exist.

The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.

They wouldn't. Best they could get, they'd be some kind of household staff dealing with running the kitchens and stores for the real LORDS AND MASTERS. Worst case? They'd be ground down into the dirt. "But I am so smart and big-brain!" "Yes, and I have big sword. Which of us wins this contest?"

Flashback to Follett's Pillars of the Earth in which the IQ 150 builder gets bullied by the IQ 90 teenage son of the local noble.

The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.

They wouldn't.

Absolutely agreed when it comes to the Spencer set.

Meanwhile, there are those of us who want the "lords and masters" that we already have to stop with the lies and pretense, and just admit that they're in charge, and that they don't actually care what us "ignorant, servile, and downtrodden" peasants think. That, and preferably to have "lords and masters" who aren't Blue Tribers unremittingly hostile by nature to the continued existence of the Red Tribe as a culture.

(This piece in Tablet from B. Duncan Moench is somewhat relevant, though — as always — his solutions are a bit lacking.)

Like I keep telling people, I don't want us to replace meaningful elections where the people select representatives who wield power on their behalf with a semi-hereditary elite who believe themselves entitled to rule as they see fit without care what the peasants think, I want us to admit that this already happened generations ago.

That, and preferably to have "lords and masters" who aren't Blue Tribers unremittingly hostile by nature to the continued existence of the Red Tribe as a culture.

That is the problem, though. The dream is to replace the current overlords with our lot, not their lot. But having overlords who can impose their values over the wishes of the mass of the ordinary people is the antithesis of the slave morality accusation; that's the powerful exercising power as they see fit. There is of course a lot more to the whole concept of master morality versus slave morality, but it doesn't matter that 'the lords and masters are favouring their pets and favourites' except this time they are 'minorities' makes it slave morality; the lords and masters favouring their pets and favourites is what masters do, before the message of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" comes to be widely accepted (and even afterwards).

Having X Tribe lords and masters who, despite that, take into consideration the existence of Y tribe as a culture and accept that they have a right to exist - that's slave morality Christianity.

I don't disagree with any of this. I'm not one of the Nietzschean "master morality" types. That's why I've been commenting on this thread — because some have been talking as if every non-religious person on the "far-right" is this sort of "boo Christianity, boo slave morality" sort. And that isn't so.

Having X Tribe lords and masters who, despite that, take into consideration the existence of Y tribe as a culture and accept that they have a right to exist - that's slave morality Christianity.

Indeed; and I see much more of that here on the Red side than the Blue.

The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.

This is a criticism that frequently gets levied against rightists. And there's some truth to it. Some people really are just greedy sociopaths without any principles.

In an authentic anti-egalitarian politics, it ultimately doesn't matter much who the master is. We might have our own preferences of course, very strong preferences, but the final bedrock commitment is: if not me, then someone. Please let someone be beautiful and happy and triumphant, even if I am not. This is a moral impulse, the fulcrum on which everything turns. It's what separates a rightist from a grifter.

I am sure that with some people, this actually is a moral principle. Tolkien, for example. Based on his works, at least, he seems to have truly appreciated that sort of emotion, something like "I may not be the king, but I wish that whoever is the king is a good and just king who helps his people". There are a number of other such right-leaning (by modern standards) intellectuals who seem to have genuinely been motivated by at least some altruism.

A funny thing though is that on the right, this emotion has long been mixed with something that is very different: an extremely powerful and (mostly) closeted, emotional-sexual complex with overtones of father issues. The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission. Think of those Nazi uniforms and the Nazi cult of the virile young man, and the adulation of Hitler as some sort of almost living god, for example. and in general, think of the whole Prussian style of life, with its stern fathers and hyper-focus on discipline, social rank, and obedience. Or think of Mishima, whose life speaks for itself. In the modern day, think of the Bronze Age Pervert / Greek statue Twitter style of aesthetic, with its emphasis on toned male bodies and the constant dancing around the fact that many of the actual ancient Greeks enjoyed having sex with men very much. Nothing wrong with some gay sex, but it is funny to see the sublimation in action. Even if they have never heard the word, such people long to be part of a Koryos - although, if in reality they actually did get to be a part of some such group, with its intense hazing and male bonding, they might wish to flee from it quite soon. They have their admiration of masculinity bound up with their psycho-sexual natures. While they might be horrified at the idea of being an older ancient Greek man's young companion who gets both mentored and dominated, maybe even fucked, they long for the softer version of something similar that can be found in Fight Club, or in movies about the tight bonds between soldiers. There is a strong psycho-sexual need for an older brother or a "daddy" of some sort. Now, we all could use a nice older brother or a loving father, but among some of the highly online right it is clear that these archetypes have become fetishized.

Such people often have a powerful obsession with the idea that modern society lacks transition rites to turn boys into men, that it is missing a Koryos of some sort. The modern highly online right has a high over-representation of people who for some reason feel like they need to become men by doing something. Now, normally this just happens as one goes through life. One meets challenges, faces them, sometimes gets defeated and learns something to come back to the fray, at other times conquers the challenge and advances to new heights. Over time, one gains a stronger and stronger sense of one's own power.

Men who, for whatever reason, get stunted in this power process, to borrow a term from Ted Kaczynski, make up a large fraction of the people who get drawn to extremist politics with strong sexual connotations. This is perhaps the grain of truth behind the meme of "young anime-loving autist boy has two possible paths in life: either become a super-leftist transgender with pink-and-blue socks, or become a Nazi LARPer who hates women and posts online going by the name of GasTheKikes1488". In either case, these people seem to have a powerful feeling that something key is missing in their self-image.

The 10% of the right that is made up of actual humane intellectuals is simultaneously struggling with the weight of the 80% of the right who have about the intelligence level of a piece of wood, and with another 10% of the right that is made up of raging, messed-up edgelords.

Tolkien, for example. Based on his works, at least, he seems to have truly appreciated that sort of emotion, something like "I may not be the king, but I wish that whoever is the king is a good and just king who helps his people".

From 1943 letter of Tolkien to his son Christopher:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal.

A funny thing though is that on the right, this emotion has long been mixed with something that is very different: an extremely powerful and (mostly) closeted, emotional-sexual complex with overtones of father issues. The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission.

People see homoeroticism in things like this for the same reason they see it in pretty much every anime, TV show, and movie under the sun that appeals to the right crowd. Can you prove that Harry Potter isn't secretly in love with Draco Malfoy?

I believe the correct term is homosociality rather than homoeroticism, though there is an element of homoeroticism in some of these groups of course (like you can find an element of anything in some group involved in anything at all).

I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.

I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.

I think that for the most part, I came to these conclusions independently, being a big history buff. The intense psycho-sexual atmosphere of the typical authoritarian childhood upbringing and the homoerotic, fetishistic quality of fascism and Nazism are so obvious that it doesn't really require any profound insight to notice them.

To be fair to the far right, leftist totalitarianism also has this homoerotic, fetishistic quality to some degree.

I mostly just wish people would take the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.

I agree. I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields (economics and psychology, respectively). Not even repudiated, really, it's more like "not even wrong"- they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls. No doubt it was shocking stuff to the victorians to talk about labor revolutions and sex but it's not that shocking today, and we have a lot of real social scientists studying this stuff.

And yet, they're still taken as this huge intellectual cornerstone to the modern humanities. It's like not even questioned, just of course marx and freud* were right, the real question is how do we go beyond their work to update and adapt it for the latest developments. So they take Marx's idea of a class struggle between an oppressive conspiracy of capitalists vs the mass of oppressed proletariats, and mad-libs that to every single other priviledged/underpriviledged group under the sun. it's really amazing. Why can't they read a different book?

Hell, there's even a term for it: Freudo-Marxism. I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?

I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields […] they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls.

Marx just has a political project / ethical vision that many people find deeply appealing. You can say what you want about the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, but many people will always be attached to him for political reasons.

With regards to Freud, I think you'd have to look at specific examples of contemporary work that references him and analyze how it references him, but my basic statement would be something like this:

Some of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not as unique or severe as they first appear. We already tell ourselves a certain "commonsense" story about psychology, a story about a world filled with agents who have intentions and beliefs and desires and emotions. But many of the concepts that make up this commonsense story are already on questionable empirical ground, not unlike the concepts of psychoanalysis.

Consider something as basic as "knowledge", the mental state of knowing something. We attribute knowledge to ourselves and others all the time. I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases. Philosophers have been arguing about the nature of knowledge for the last 2500 years and there's still no good answer.

Or consider the sensation of pain, or any other physical sensation - I mean the first-person qualitative experience of pain. You can't actually observe someone else's pain - you can only observe the behavioral and neurological correlates. For all you know, other people could just be unconscious automatons who don't feel anything at all. But you nonetheless assume that they actually do feel things, as a generalization of your own experience.

Or take the concept of desire, a concept that's very central to the Freudian psychoanalytic project. Again, you can't truly make a direct empirical observation here - if you cut open someone's brain, you won't be able to say "yep, there's the desire, I see it right there". You instead observe someone's behavior and infer the existence of a desire, or maybe you interpret the existence of a desire. And what criteria do you use to make this inference? There are a lot of difficult edge cases. Sometimes people seem to do things that they don't actually desire to do, like a woman who stays in an abusive relationship, or a drug addict who wants to stay clean but can't.

Are these cases of genuine desire? If you say no, and that we're instead dealing with cases of people doing things that they don't desire to do, then it starts to become even more mysterious how we can have a consistent set of criteria for moving from the empirical observation of behavior to the inference of a desire. But let's say that, despite the outward protestations of the subjects, there is a desire at play here. The woman who stays in an abusive relationship despite seemingly not wanting to, does in fact desire to stay in the relationship to at least some degree, even though this might conflict with other desires she has. We're going to say that if someone persists in doing X, then they have at least some desire to do X - call this the repetition criteria.

But how far can we stretch the repetition criteria? What if we look at not just one event, but multiple seemingly isolated events over time? Consider a woman whose last five relationships have all ended due to abuse. She always leaves the relationship immediately after physical abuse starts, and she makes it clear that she really hates all the terrible men she's been dating and she curses her string of bad luck - but nevertheless there's a clear pattern here. On the most literal reading of the repetition criteria, we can infer that she actually desires these relationships! She repeatedly persists in doing "X", where the "X" here is "enter a new abusive relationship", so we can infer that that is her desire. (We can dispense with any worries that this would require her to "know the future" - she could arrange this with better-than-chance-odds if she really wanted to, she could filter for men who showed outward signs of criminality and acted aggressively during courtship, and so on). If you look at any one event in isolation, there are no indications that she desires this state of affairs whatsoever, but if we look at the broader pattern of behavior, then desire starts to become evident. So, does she have this type of desire? If you say "no", then the repetition criteria needs some sort of modification - and this modification would be based not on empirical observation, but rather it would be based on your a priori conception of what a desire should look like. If you instead say "yes", then we begin to approach the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire.

So our commonsense story about psychology already has a lot of potential problems with it. But that doesn't mean we should jettison the whole story. Even the most hardcore reductionist materialist, who believes that anything above the level of a neuron is ontological nonsense, isn't going to stop talking about people as if they had beliefs and emotions and desires - you can't do that, it's not workable. Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling. You can argue that its concepts are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious; but we're already wedded to concepts that are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious.

I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?

The short answer is that Freud provides the theory of the individual and Marx provides the theory of society - it's a natural complement. There are a lot of contingent historical factors involved here of course, but that's the gist of it.

I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases.

Are you familiar with the concept of "password"? It is an ancient empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something.

Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling.

Many people find belief in witchcraft compelling. This perhaps tells us more about said people than about the validity of belief in witchcraft.

Are you familiar with the concept of "password"? It is an ancient empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something.

You haven't ever seen "protagonist blurts out a random phrase that turns out to be the correct password" in fiction?

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Can I ask what your background in philosophy is? How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?

I'm not any kind of expert myself- just a couple undergrad classes and what I've skimmed from wikipedia. So I'm not trying to do battle with you here. If you tell me that you've studied it extensively I'll believe you.

But, from what I've read, this really doesn't seem like an accurate summary. It seems more like you're talking general phenomenology/theory of mind stuff. Lots of philosophers have talked about that, and it goes back way before Freud. (I'm not sure what the first would be- at least Descarte, and arguably all the way back to the Greeks). Of course it's a hard problem. Still, psychologists have found ways to grapple with it. At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.

If anything Freud was the opposite. He seemed to believe that he could accurately diagnose people's subconscious minds and innermost desires, even better than they themselves could. Like he somehow came to believe that all his patients who came to him with horrific tales of being sexually molested as children, were in fact just lying and telling him a fantasy of what they wish had happened. Based on... ? nothing but "trust me, I'm a doctor". He made all sorts of really bold claims about other people's minds.

I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell. And even better, it's a perverted sexual desire, which most people aren't comfortable talking about. No one wants to have a public debate to try and prove that "actually no I'm not trying to have sex with my mother." So you can win a whole swath of arguments by tarring your adversaries with dark accusations. It's like the Oscar Wilde quote- "Everything in the world is about sex — except sex. Sex is about power."

Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?

I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.

How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?

It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all. It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls". Nothing more.

At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.

Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do. They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me". It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.

I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.

I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious. There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification. Certainly.

But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist? Certainly not! It's pretty clear to me that they do exist! Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest. Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort? I don't think so. They should at least be given a fair hearing. I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either. You don't need a fancy theory to see that.

Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people. Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".

It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken. One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:

This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.

(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)

Based on... ? nothing but "trust me, I'm a doctor".

He seems to have believed it at first, was horrified by what seemed a huge amount of incest and sexual assault by the middle-class on their children, and eventually was talked around/persuaded himself to the view that it couldn't be true, but was instead a sublimation of the Oedipus/Electra Complex; children's first sexual attachment was to their parents as the nearest intimate relationship, girls wanted to marry their fathers and boys wanted to marry their mothers because of this, and once puberty and sexual awakening set in, these impulses were translated into dreams or fantasies of sexual encounters with the father or mother.

As medical/scientific treatment, it's terrible. But as a respectable middle-class Viennese doctor, especially as a Jewish man who was already suspect simply due to prejudice in society? It's understandable; he couldn't imagine such things to be true (any more than in the early days of the Catholic sex abuse scandal people could imagine it to be really true) so an alternate explanation that tidied away the facts was preferable. And then he swung all his authority behind it to show this must be the real explanation, which did all the damage.

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I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.

I think the appeal is that both of them describe how people are shaped by their environment, thus implying that intelligent control of the environment could allow shaping of people, which is an incredibly seductive idea even if most people won't admit it. The contradiction is that Freud says that people are shaped by their families and social circles, and Marx says that people are shaped by their socio-economic class and the economic structure of society.

I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.

I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!

Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).

Yeah, as I'm reading about it now that sounds right. To be more specific it was this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Civilization which really argued the idea, and it got popularized by the Frankfurt school and spread through all of the postmodern academic humanities. What a trip.

I think I got it from "The Modern Mind" by Peter Watson, an "intellectual history of the 20th century":

https://archive.org/details/modernmindintell00wats

Marxism is popular because its the only anti-state movement that managed to on the face of it capture a powerful state entity. Syndicalism, anarchism and other movements all failed to capture states, so there is no extant example to suck in all the intellectual energy. Marxism, by having ostensibly captured one major european population, points to a proximate success story to coalesce intellectual energy around. That marxism/stalinism/communism collapsed into failure is attributed to how It Wasn't Real Communism, and when there was Real Communism it was glorious.

The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission.

There certainly can be an intimate link between politics and sexuality. But I don't view this as inherently delegitimizing or discrediting. The type of phenomenon you describe (and other analogous phenomena) certainly could be a perfectly legitimate expression of individual will, individual creativity, etc, although this determination ultimately has to be made on a case by case basis.

I mean, I yield to no-one in my admiration for the 13th century, but these guys don't want the hierarchical orderly beauty of the Great Chain of Being, they want some imagined ideal Roman Empire where they're lolling around in togas being Great Thinkers and Masters of the Universe, while getting to order around their inferiors without all of that pesky nonsense about women and foreigners are also children of God. Where the strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must, and they imagine they would be the strong, of course. They're wrong, and what's even more is that they have no idea how much of what they want has been shaped by the influences of Christianised Western society for centuries, because it's the water these fish are swimming in.

Chesterton wrote about the dream of the ideal beauty and order of hierarchy, the temptation of it, and the way it can be subtly twisted to the wrong, in The Ball and the Cross, and it's a dream that tempts me because it appeals to my own instincts and what I find beautiful, but these types who sneer about 'slave morality' are not even strong enough to lose or humble enough to be proud; they seem to admire the same kind of show of strength that some gang boss in a grubby slum exhibits in a drive-by spray and pray:

As the flying ship swept round the dome he observed other alterations. The dome had been redecorated so as to give it a more solemn and somewhat more ecclesiastical note; the ball was draped or destroyed, and round the gallery, under the cross, ran what looked like a ring of silver statues, like the little leaden images that stood round the hat of Louis XI. Round the second gallery, at the base of the dome, ran a second rank of such images, and Evan thought there was another round the steps below. When they came closer he saw that they were figures in complete armour of steel or silver, each with a naked sword, point upward; and then he saw one of the swords move. These were not statues but an armed order of chivalry thrown in three circles round the cross. MacIan drew in his breath, as children do at anything they think utterly beautiful. For he could imagine nothing that so echoed his own visions of pontifical or chivalric art as this white dome sitting like a vast silver tiara over London, ringed with a triple crown of swords.

As they went sailing down Ludgate Hill, Evan saw that the state of the streets fully answered his companion's claim about the reintroduction of order. All the old blackcoated bustle with its cockney vivacity and vulgarity had disappeared. Groups of labourers, quietly but picturesquely clad, were passing up and down in sufficiently large numbers; but it required but a few mounted men to keep the streets in order. The mounted men were not common policemen, but knights with spurs and plume whose smooth and splendid armour glittered like diamond rather than steel. Only in one place—at the corner of Bouverie Street—did there appear to be a moment's confusion, and that was due to hurry rather than resistance. But one old grumbling man did not get out of the way quick enough, and the man on horseback struck him, not severely, across the shoulders with the flat of his sword.

“The soldier had no business to do that,” said MacIan, sharply. “The old man was moving as quickly as he could.”

“We attach great importance to discipline in the streets,” said the man in white, with a slight smile.

“Discipline is not so important as justice,” said MacIan.

The other did not answer.

Then after a swift silence that took them out across St. James's Park, he said: “The people must be taught to obey; they must learn their own ignorance. And I am not sure,” he continued, turning his back on Evan and looking out of the prow of the ship into the darkness, “I am not sure that I agree with your little maxim about justice. Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.”

Evan, who was also leaning over the edge, swung round with startling suddenness and stared at the other's back.

“Discipline for society——” he repeated, very staccato, “more important—justice to individual?”

Then after a long silence he called out: “Who and what are you?”

“I am an angel,” said the white-robed figure, without turning round.

“You are not a Catholic,” said MacIan.

The other seemed to take no notice, but reverted to the main topic.

“In our armies up in heaven we learn to put a wholesome fear into subordinates.”

MacIan sat craning his neck forward with an extraordinary and unaccountable eagerness.

“Go on!” he cried, twisting and untwisting his long, bony fingers, “go on!”

“Besides,” continued he, in the prow, “you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.”

“Go on!” said Evan, with burning eyes.

“Just as the sight of sin offends God,” said the unknown, “so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and——”

“Why, you great fool!” cried MacIan, rising to the top of his tremendous stature, “did you think I would have doubted only for that rap with a sword? I know that noble orders have bad knights, that good knights have bad tempers, that the Church has rough priests and coarse cardinals; I have known it ever since I was born. You fool! you had only to say, 'Yes, it is rather a shame,' and I should have forgotten the affair. But I saw on your mouth the twitch of your infernal sophistry; I knew that something was wrong with you and your cathedrals. Something is wrong; everything is wrong. You are not an angel. That is not a church. It is not the rightful king who has come home.”

“That is unfortunate,” said the other, in a quiet but hard voice, “because you are going to see his Majesty.”

“No,” said MacIan, “I am going to jump over the side.”

“Do you desire death?”

“No,” said Evan, quite composedly, “I desire a miracle.”

“From whom do you ask it? To whom do you appeal?” said his companion, sternly. “You have betrayed the king, renounced his cross on the cathedral, and insulted an archangel.”

“I appeal to God,” said Evan, and sprang up and stood upon the edge of the swaying ship.

The being in the prow turned slowly round; he looked at Evan with eyes which were like two suns, and put his hand to his mouth just too late to hide an awful smile.

“And how do you know,” he said, “how do you know that I am not God?”

MacIan screamed. “Ah!” he cried. “Now I know who you really are. You are not God. You are not one of God's angels. But you were once.”

You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.

Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting and enlightening to argue against the strongest version of the position you disagree with? If you're going to critique anarchism, wouldn't you rather go after Bakunin and Kropotkin, instead of teenagers who just like to light shit on fire?

No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.

That's slave morality right there, friend. The old and weak should know when to yield to the young and strong; if they're social inferiors, they should always be aware that they must defer to the squire and get out of his way, or better yet not get in the way in the first place. If they're equals or superiors, they should graciously yield (or, depending how far back we want to get, be slain in combat by the new, virile, younger challenger who ascends to the top of the dungheap over the corpse of the previous alpha).

That's slave morality right there, friend.

See my post elsewhere in the thread on the nature of slave morality, and read essay I of Genealogy of Morality if you want a deeper elaboration. Or just read the whole book. It's unbelievably beautiful.

It's unbelievably beautiful.

I've never found that in previous attempts to read Nietzsche, just ever-more "I really would like to slap this guy hard" reactions.

Respect for the wisdom and status of the elderly is a feature of many societies including those that Nietzscheans would not consider to practice slave morality.

Based on status, though; the old widow gets shoved to the edge of the village to beg or starve, the old male former chief is a respected elder with a voice still in the councils of the village. The old peasant male who gets in the way of the young noble gets shoved out of the way or is supposed to be aware of his surroundings enough to get out of the way.

You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.

It's Chesterton, not Lewis, and the argument explicitly is not that people should beat old men because they don't cross the street fast enough. The argument addressed is:

Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.

and

you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.

and

Just as the sight of sin offends God, so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and...

For this particular brand of argument, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that. There is no stronger version. That's the position, one can either accept it or reject it. @BurdensomeCount wrote quite a lengthy and well-argued post hammering on this exact thesis not too long ago. It's the point of view people argue from here when they cite Nietzche and start throughing around terms like "slave morality". It's the steeliest man of this particular viewpoint that there is.

It's Chesterton, not Lewis

Sorry, I was typing on autopilot, I had AhhhTheFrench's posts on the brain.

Anyway, with regards to Nietzsche's perspective on these points:

Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.

Nietzsche was, above all else, a meta-philosopher. Despite appearances to the contrary, the ultimate object of his critique and analysis was always, in the last instance, philosophy itself.

His aim was not to give a theory of justice (justice has much too long a history for that - "Today it is impossible to say precisely why people are actually punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined." - Genealogy of Morality II.13), nor was it even to explain the historical processes by which people might arrive at an incorrect conception of justice. Rather the properly Nietzschean question is to examine the phenomenon of inquiry into justice (or other philosophical concepts) itself - what exactly are you doing when you ask what is justice, or what is beauty, or what is truth? What is the nature of this practice we are engaged in, where we adopt "positions" and give "arguments" to support these positions? What is the origin of this practice, to what uses has it been put, where did it come from and where is it going? (See On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, and also the chapters "The Problem of Socrates" and "Reason in Philosophy" from Twilight of the Idols)

He certainly does spend a great deal of time outlining what appear to be straightforward first-order positions on ethical questions, but these are frequently subject to qualification, revision, and contradiction at various points in his corpus, because his ultimate concern is with the dyanmical unfolding of thought itself rather than with any fixed static position. Less "you believe X" and more "how did you come to hold X? What type of person holds X? What are the conditions of possibility of holding X?"

All that being said as a necessary disclaimer, to show that determining "Nietzsche's conception of justice" is a very fraught question; I'm not sure where in his work you're pulling the claim "Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual" from. To the extent that he ever says anything about the purpose of society as a whole (he is far far more interested in the analysis of individual archetypes, their psychological properties and motivations, etc), he basically thinks that the best thing society can do is to create the conditions for the highest types of individuals to flourish. Society being subordinated to the (or a particular) individual, not the other way around. I can't recall any instance where he talks about a relationship between "discipline" and society. There are innumerable passages where he talks about the opposition between "the herd" and the higher individuals. Gay Science I.3 comes to mind.

you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.

Sure. You can get away with being haughty if people already think you're cool. Trump gets away with antics that most normal people couldn't get away with. A lot of people are fine with this. So I don't think this is a particularly controversial statement, nor does it need a philosophical defense.

Just as the sight of sin offends God, so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and...

There is a passage strikingly similar to this in Genealogy of Morality III.14:

Away with this disgraceful mollycoddling of feeling! That the sick should not make the healthy sick – and this would be that kind of mollycoddling – ought to be the chief concern on earth: – but for that, it is essential that the healthy should remain separated from the sick, should even be spared the sight of the sick so that they do not confuse themselves with the sick. Or would it be their task, perhaps, to be nurses and doctors? . . . But they could not be more mistaken and deceived about their task, – the higher ought not to abase itself as the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance ought to ensure that their tasks are kept separate for all eternity! Their right to be there, the priority of the bell with a clear ring over the discordant and cracked one, is clearly a thousand times greater: they alone are guarantors of the future, they alone have a bounden duty to man’s future. What they can do, what they should do, is something the sick must never do: but so that they can do what only they should, why should they still be free to play doctor, comforter and ‘saviour’ to the sick? . . . And so we need good air! good air! At all events, well away from all madhouses and hospitals of culture! And so we need good company, our company! Or solitude, if need be! But at all events, keep away from the evil fumes of inner corruption and the secret, worm-eaten rottenness of disease! . . . So that we, my friends, can actually defend ourselves, at least for a while yet, against the two worst epidemics that could possibly have been set aside just for us – against great nausea at man! Against deep compassion for man! . . .

But it's worth examining the language closely here (as well as the context of the surrounding passages) to see exactly why Nietzsche is suggesting that "the healthy" should be kept separate from "the sick". It's not because he just thinks, like, being a dick is awesome and fuck sick people. Rather it's because the higher individuals have a special task ("they alone are guarantors of the future"), and this task could be jeopardized if they get bogged down by an excess of despair over the plight of the suffering masses.

The failure mode that Nietzsche is thinking of here would be something like Effective Altruism - maybe you could be a great artist or philosopher, or maybe you could just have a beautiful wife and five kids and a white picket fence, but instead you run yourself ragged working at a job you hate just so you can send all your money to people on the other side of the world who you don't know and who will frankly never reach the same heights of culture and civilization as yourself. Nietzsche doesn't think that's right. Lucky people shouldn't destroy themselves to bring themselves down to the same level as the unlucky.

(It's also crucial to point out that Nietzsche was desperately ill due to a chronic neurological condition for much of his life and frequently bedridden, in addition to just being kind of a loser in his own lifetime who got no personal or professional recognition, so whenever he refers to "the sick", you have to assume that he's at least considering that he could be included in that category as well - and it is precisely this intrusion of the philosopher into his own work, the way the speaker deforms our reception of what is spoken, that is one of the primary meta-philosophical points that he wants us to keep in mind as we read.)

In general Nietzsche is just way too nuanced of a thinker to boil his positions down to a few sentences. There's no substitute for actually reading his original works in their entirety. Just one more example, most people assume that he thinks "the strong" are just straight up better in every way and "the weak" can go get fucked, but look what he says about strength and weakness in All Too Human V.224:

ENNOBLEMENT THROUGH DEGENERATION .— History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles: in consequence, therefore, of their common faith. Thus strength is afforded by good and thorough customs, thus is learnt the subjection of the individual, and strenuousness of character becomes a birth gift and afterwards is fostered as a habit. The danger to these communities founded on individuals of strong and similar character is that gradually increasing stupidity through transmission, which follows all stability like its shadow. It is on the more unrestricted, more uncertain and morally weaker individuals that depends the intellectual progress of such communities, it is they who attempt all that is new and manifold. Numbers of these perish on account of their weakness, without having achieved any specially visible effect; but generally, particularly when they have descendants, they flare up and from time to time inflict a wound on the stable element of the community. Precisely in this sore and weakened place the community is inoculated with something new; but its general strength must be great enough to absorb and assimilate this new thing into its blood. Deviating natures are of the utmost importance wherever there is to be progress. Every wholesale progress must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help it to develop. Something similar happens in the case of individuals; a deterioration, a mutilation, even a vice and, above all, a physical or moral loss is seldom without its advantage. For instance, a sickly man in the midst of a warlike and restless race will perhaps have more chance of being alone and thereby growing quieter and wiser, the one-eyed man will possess a stronger eye, the blind man will have a deeper inward sight and will certainly have a keener sense of hearing. In so far it appears to me that the famous Struggle for Existence is not the only point of view from which an explanation can be given of the progress or strengthening of an individual or a race. Rather must two different things converge: firstly, the multiplying of stable strength through mental binding in faith and common feeling; secondly, the possibility of attaining to higher aims, through the fact that there are deviating natures and, in consequence, partial weakening and wounding of the stable strength; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the more delicate and free, that makes all progress at all possible. A people that is crumbling and weak in any one part, but as a whole still strong and healthy, is able to absorb the infection of what is new and incorporate it to its advantage. The task of education in a single individual is this: to plant him so firmly and surely that, as a whole, he can no longer be diverted from his path. Then, however, the educator must wound him, or else make use of the wounds which fate inflicts, and when pain and need have thus arisen, something new and noble can be inoculated into the wounded places. With regard to the State, Machiavelli says that, “the form of Government is of very small importance, although half-educated people think otherwise. The great aim of State-craft should be duration, which outweighs all else, inasmuch as it is more valuable than liberty.” It is only with securely founded and guaranteed duration that continual development and ennobling inoculation are at all possible. As a rule, however, authority, the dangerous companion of all duration, will rise in opposition to this.

I completely agree. All political radicals face this issue, no communist thinks they’d be a manual laborer on the collective farm, they think they’d be a playwright in good standing or an academic or on the politburo.

But I also think you need to look at our current level of economic development. If a Western country became an absolute monarchy tomorrow there wouldn't be millions of peasants because farmwork has been largely automated; it would just look like a modern country that is an absolute dictatorship, and there are many examples of those.

All political radicals face this issue, no communist thinks they’d be a manual laborer on the collective farm, they think they’d be a playwright in good standing or an academic or on the politburo.

Also, as a separate point, as a monarchist/feudalist, I get this sort of critique sent my way quite often: "you only support that because you want to be king/you think you'd be a lord/etc." (despite my protestations to the contrary). But I also end up getting a sort of reverse of it, where I'm told I should think that way.

Specifically, whenever I ask how to go about being politically active — "think globally, act locally," "be the change you want to see…" and all that — as a monarchist in modern America, and on multiple occasions, I've had people respond that the only way to be an active monarchist is to try to personally become king, and if you're not a would-be king, you should do nothing at all. (This, for one, ignores that no man* has ever won a crown for himself purely through his personal actions alone; every such has had plenty of loyal supporters essential to the effort.)

I’m sympathetic to monarchism (I mean I live in a monarchy, and I don’t think it would be a worse place if the king had much more power). I do think it’s a failure state to be aware of, though.

I do think it’s a failure state to be aware of, though.

Sure.

But then, how do you suppose an American monarchist like me might go about becoming more politically active locally, particularly while keeping in mind and avoiding said failure state?

(I mean I live in a monarchy, and I don’t think it would be a worse place if the king had much more power)

By this do you mean it wouldn't be negative for the country as a whole going forward if the king had more power, or that it would be unlikely to impact your life negatively for as long as you live there?

Old soc.history.what-if newsgroup had a rather notorious poster who believed that we should reinstate feudalism and was also perfectly OK with the idea that under feudalism he'd be an equivalent of a peasant.

Or so he claimed when there was no chance of it happening.

I completely agree. All political radicals face this issue, no communist thinks they’d be a manual laborer on the collective farm, they think they’d be a playwright in good renown or an academic or on the politburo.

I keep telling people that my ideal regime — or any near it — would have me executed for being a useless parasite. And yet…

I wouldn't take input on the way society should be organized from someone who's suicidally depressed for the same reason I wouldn't take any from those who place themselves at the apex of the proposed pyramid - clear conflict of interests with not only myself but the majority.

Actual historical monarchies had tons of useless parasites supported by the state, either directly or through corruption.

Given how much of the population was involved in agriculture pre-Industrial Revolution and how little economic surplus above subsistence their was to redistribute, I'd question that. And there's definitely a difference between an "idle courtier" and your average modern welfare recipient.

Idle courtiers- and military reserves who in practice just steal the budget- took up a much larger fraction of a state’s resources in 1700 than the welfare class does today, unless you’re counting pensioners. And, of course, today’s monarchies spend gobs on welfare compared to their normal dictatorship neighbors, or to democracies.

military reserves who in practice just steal the budget

Only until there's an actual conflict.

I'm reminded of this 2020 Los Angeles Times piece: "California once had mobile hospitals and a ventilator stockpile. But it dismantled them"

In 2006, citing the threat of avian flu, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the state would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a powerful set of medical weapons to deploy in the case of large-scale emergencies and natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and pandemics.

“In light of the pandemic flu risk, it is absolutely a critical investment,” he told a news conference. “I’m not willing to gamble with the people’s safety.”

The state, flush with tax revenue, soon sank more than $200 million into the mobile hospital program and a related Health Surge Capacity Initiative to stockpile medicines and medical gear for use in outbreaks of infectious disease, according to former emergency management officials and state budget records.

But the ambitious effort, which would have been vital as the state confronts the new coronavirus today, hit a wall: a brutal recession, a free fall in state revenues — and in 2011, the administration of a fiscally minded Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who came into office facing a $26-billion deficit.

And so, that year, the state cut off the money to store and maintain the stockpile of supplies and the mobile hospitals. The hospitals were defunded before they’d ever been used.

Much of the medical equipment — including the ventilators, critical life-saving tools that are in short supply in the current pandemic — was given to local hospitals and health agencies, former health officials said. But the equipment was donated without any funding to maintain them. The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced.

Together, these two programs would have positioned California to more rapidly respond as its COVID-19 cases exploded. The annual savings for eliminating both programs? No more than $5.8 million per year, according to state budget records, a tiny fraction of the 2011 budget, which totaled $129 billion.

Better to have and not need, than need and not have, after all.

And as for idle courtiers, they may have been individually of little use, but they generally came from accomplished families; thus, if nothing else, they represented a reserve of quality genes, in a way a modern welfare bum most certainly does not.

And, of course, today’s monarchies spend gobs on welfare

Which monarchies are you thinking of here? Are you counting the monarchies-in-name-only that are democracies plus a powerless figurehead? Or are you talking about Middle East petro-states distributing shares of oil revenues to the citizenry, much as we do here in Alaska via the Permanent Fund Dividend?

Neither Bhutan nor Eswatini seem to be particularly generous welfare states — and is there anyone in Monaco poor enough to need one?

I would hope that my ideal regime would help to make me (and you) not a useless parasite. But perhaps that just means you have more self-awareness than me!

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