vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
After my reading on Renaissance humanism, I don't really think of the thing that makes our society work (to the extent that it does) as a "democracy", but as an attempt at an Aristotlean "politeia" or constitutional republic.
Many parts of this are tangled up in a system that also sells itself on everyone having a voice (the modern meaning of "democracy"), but I think the lynchpins that make things work are the fact that we brainwash most of the populace for 13 years via public schools and the media, and that we received the individualist-trending practices of Christian Europe (nuclear family, incest taboo, etc.)
It also doesn't hurt that we're the wealthiest, most technologically advanced and highest state capacity nation in history. Even if parts of your system rely on sanding off the rough edges of human nature, where you fail to do that, it is a nice consolation prize to have a system where almost no one is starving, dying of thirst, etc. People don't want to rebel against rulers that keep them materially comfortable, even if they can feel the friction of the society rubbing against their human instincts.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I mean, I think we've already created a society where humans aren't "from top to bottom" racist.
Humans will always be tribal, but I think that different circumstances can turn the dial of how much that tribalism affects their behavior in practice. Having a food-rich, water-rich society is a great starting point for interracial harmony. Adding men with guns forcing people not to act racist, and a set of societal institutions that are designed to brainwash people to be even less racist, and I think you've got the "best" possible form of sanding that bit of human nature off.
You can't change human tribalism, but you can make it less salient depending on how you constitute society.
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
I assume /u/FarmReadyElephants was referencing bimbofication fetishes, and I have also observed a huge overlap between transwomen and bimbofication fetishes online.
It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.
Mostly, my "grand unifying theory" of kink is that most fetishes (in the non-clinical sense) involve sexual power dynamics filtered through an "unusual" power hierarchy. So gigantification/shrinking fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of size, bimbofication fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of intelligence and low class beauty norms, weight gain fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of weight, etc., etc.
I suspect that normal human psychology in both men and women goes out "looking" for power hierarchies to internalize, and that most people in our society converge on a broadly overlapping set of hierarchies (wealth, beauty, class, height, etc.) Those hierarchies then play a role in what a person goes looking for in a sexual partner. But in a subset of the population, they become fixated on a single power hierarchy, like height, weight, or intelligence and so when the internalized hierarchy interacts with their psycho-sexual development, it manifests as a fetish.
I suspect that "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is off the beaten path of power hierarchies, though I suppose it could have overlap with teacher-student roleplay.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Because, I don't think most traditional libertarians support the "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" part of the equation, and I think that is a central part of how the idealized form of modern American politics actually works in practice.
I still call myself a "state capacity libertarian" or "liberaltarian" because I want the lightest touch version of this in practice. I'm fuzzy on it, but I think I'd limit it to, say, public schools, employment, banking, and housing. Men with guns can force people to not discriminate in those domains, and then we can leave the people free to discriminate everywhere else in society.
I'm pretty sure that the forced integration of hospitals, hotels, gas stations and public schools that happened at gunpoint in the United States is the only realistic way that could have happened. I'm open to being proven wrong on this point. I would love to be pointed to real world historical examples of oppressed, othered minorities being successfully integrated into wider society without the state forcing the issue.
Also, I think the problem of petty tyrants is not limited to racism. It is just one of the easiest to describe examples. I think even something as simple as, "I'm the black sheep of my family, and the pariah of this small town" can be a case where petty tyranny makes living a happy, fulfilling life difficult. The anonymity of a corporation like McDonald's or Walmart makes us "exile-proof." Even if I reach my lowest point, if I become the most socially hated and cancelled person, the wonderful thing about Capitalist Liberalism is that it shapes us into interchangeable cogs, and I can still get a job at McDonald's or Walmart, and become a part of the background radiation of other people's lives.
vorpa-glavo
16d ago
At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians)
While I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that women are less oppressed than is commonly claimed, I do take issue with your claim here. In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. I would argue that lack of access to credit in one's own name is a form of oppression, even if it could be counterbalanced by paternalistic or progressive benefits.
It is also worth pointing out that families and social expectations can function as "tiny tyrannies", even if people are theoretically free according to the law. My mom grew up in a fairly patriarchal household, and when my aunt got into the Air Force Academy her dad (my grandpa) said "no, you're staying right here with the family" and my aunt meekly accepted his word as final. On the other hand, my mom got into MIT and when my grandpa told her she couldn't go, she basically said, "I wasn't asking for permission, I'm going to MIT." My mom was also the most stubborn of her sibllings, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she was the one that left the state they all grew up in and became an upper middle class engineer, while the rest stayed nearby like grandpa wanted and mostly didn't do as well (except for the one aunt who got into real estate and banking.)
Women are higher in the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness, and I think that means that even in legal regimes that are relatively favorable to women, they can still get "stuck" in a tiny tyranny through mere social pressure alone. The women who escape are either unusually low in Agreeableness for a woman (like my mom), or autistic/weird enough that they naturally drift away when given the chance (like Aella.)
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I suppose humans are more fundamentally hierarchical than they are tribalist/racist.
As long as the person or people on the top stand to benefit from greater numbers of workers, and they don't personally suffer negative effects from things like immigration and ethnic diversity it is in their interest to encourage it. They command the people below them, who are also made better off in a number of ways from the increased number of workers, and on down through the system.
In this way, you only need a system where diverse races are in the rational self-interest of a smaller group of people at the top, and then they can use men with guns to force a culture that is conducive to their rational self-interest, which works because the hierarchy-minded people below them don't rebel enough to make that entirely untenable. There are going to be limits pushing against these things in various directions, and there's probably a Goldilock's zone where all of these varying aspects of human nature (rational self interest, hierarchy and tribalism) are balanced against each other and you have a relatively functional society. Outside of that Goldilock's zone, either people's tribalism overwhelms their hierarchical social instincts, or it starts to be in the rational self interest of the ruler to care only about the people tribally similar to themselves.
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a political analogy to the idea that 'Science advances one funeral at a time.'
I think you could tell a story of the last 400 years as a time of massive upheavals in traditional ways of life, as the rate at which societies had contact with wildly different societies rapidly increased, better instruments and math led to better understanding of and dominion over the natural world, and society began to change at a more rapid pace than ever before.
Different human societies have always been changed by contact with one another. Just look at Ancient Rome, which saw Cato the Elder rejecting Greek philosophy as an anti-Roman thing that Rome had no need of, only for his great grandson Cato the Younger to become one of the most famous adherents of the Greek philosophical school of Stoicism and a sort of secular patron saint of lost causes complete with a pseudo-martyrdom narrative. If we use that as a measure, it took at most 4 generations for the "anti-Roman" Greek philosophy to be Romanized and assimilated by the Roman elites. That's a glacial pace of societal change compared to modernity.
In the modern day, you can be exposed to different ways of life in a thousand different ways. If you want to go deep on modern China or India as a Westerner, you can do so. If you want to dive into everything the Western world knows about modern "primitive tribes" you can do so. You can read about the history of every great Empire and every historical time period and people we have records for. In a way, a modern person is constantly reliving Rome's first serious contact with the Hellenistic other. I think for most people, it is too much too fast. It is impossible to maintain a stable "Romanitas" in the face of all this information.
While I view it with as much suspicion as any of David Graeber's works, I think the book "The Dawn of Everything" made me realize the double-edged sword of the European Age of Sail. Sure, Catholic missionaries were being sent to what is now Quebec, and trying to convert the native Americans, but at the same time they were learning the languages and ways of life of these natives and sending reports back to the Old World which were read with great interest. I mean, just imagine that you're an educated Frenchman and you're suddenly hearing a ton about a bunch of cultural practices, governments, and religions that are unlike anything you've ever heard about. Even if you start out with a firm conviction that your way of life is superior, it would be hard to not update your view of human nature and what makes for a successful society even a little.
I think that there are two basic orientations a society can have: a rigid, fixed view like the Amish which is slow and deliberate about change, and a more open, changing view which tries to update and assimilate all new perspective which are put to it. The problem with the first view is that in many circumstances it might leave you vulnerable to outside invasion by a superior foe. In one sense, the Amish are lucky that people mostly admire their way of life and don't consider them disloyal or "foreign", because if the United States military wanted to take down the Amish it wouldn't even be a fight, it would be a slaughter.
I also think that in some ways "Progressiveness" or a Whig impulse is kind of inevitable over the last 400 years. In the United States in 1790 around 90% of people were involved in agriculture, whereas today less than 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. I don't think there's any set of societal values that would survive a transition like that. A modern American city calls for a different approach to society than what works in a 1790's farm society. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply delusional. In 1790 there were no engines, no automated factories, no labor saving devices in the home, no video games, no internet. We didn't have modern antibiotics, automobiles, planes, mass surveillance, or a thousand other modern inventions. Frankly, it makes sense that society would change in response to those things.
I don't think we can start having a super viable "conservatism" again until the pace of technological progress slows down, and we artificially limit the number of "first contact" scenarios with very different cultures from our own, but I doubt that is going to happen. Instead, while we still haven't even ironed out all of the kinks of Modern Society + Smartphones and Social Media, we're adding Generative AI to the mix. We don't have time for healthy norms to develop, instead we just panic about the last problem while a new one starts rearing its head on the horizon.
Edit: Grammar.
Your understanding of the bill and mine are the same, though I certainly see that I didn't word it correctly in the post you responded to.
But even reduced, uneven access to credit is a form of oppression.
Like, are we going to pretend that the moment Esso started serving gas to black motorists nationwide in the 1930's, that suddenly black motorists were completely unoppressed as a group? Having to navigate an environment in which you can get an essential good from some firms, and can't get an essential good from others limits your options and often mean you're left with a worse set of choices.
Edit: Typo
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I think flatter hierarchies might be less likely to benefit from diversity/greater "foreign" populations.
The state as conceived by a libertarian is likely to be "small" and less populated, due to less government capacity for intervention. The liberaltarian state is big, but tries to find a balance with a bigger hierarchy and larger population.
I mean I think many of the Revolutions are less impressive as they always end up recreating the structures that actually work for human society.
I'm not sure I agree. My view of history is that technology often creates a latent possibility for change within society, and that if a Revolution happens "at the right time" it can radically alter the shape of society. If it happens "at the wrong time" it will either destroy a society completely, or just change who happens to be at the top, but reproduce the successful model that preceded it.
The best examples are the French and American revolutions. I think they happened at the perfect time to create a transition from feudalism to capitalism and from monarchy to constitutional republics. The printing press changed us from a network society to a broadcast society, the post-Renaissance engagement with Classical history was stronger than ever, the Age of Sail was exposing European societies to new resources and new ways of thinking, and the Scientific revolution was in full swing. Things were ready for a shake up.
But human nature doesn’t change and truth doesn’t change and the hard realities of life on earth doesn’t change.
I partly agree with you, and partly disagree.
I think there is something to a Steven Pinker-esque argument about how much better our society is from those in the past: Less infant mortality, less war deaths, less starvation, etc. All of those things are tangible differences from the past. (I don't discount that a lot of these could be reframed in a more pessimistic light, where the threat of violence is just as strong as it has ever been - it is just the case that we have created a global system where the stakes are so high that all of the big players with survival instincts choose to engage in smaller scale proxy wars to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.)
However, I think many people feel like something has gone deeply wrong with modern society, and I personally think a lot of it stems from what I like to call "unenriched zoo enclosure syndrome." Anatomically modern humans evolved ~2 million years ago for an ancestral environment very different from anything we see in the modern day. I believe that our basic body plan and capabilities have been enough to give us a massive ability to shape our own environment, but that increased control has allowed us to create societies that aren't good matches for our psychology.
I think things like Bowling Alone, the male loneliness epidemic and many other societal problems fundamentally stem from the fact that we've designed a "zoo enclosure" for ourselves that doesn't fulfill our basic psychological and social needs as animals. It's like the birds that die of stress when put in captivity, or the lions that pace unhappily back and forth in a bad enclosure. Our instincts leave us expecting a highly social world of in person social interactions, full of green and certain kinds of stresses and challenges, and we have produced a world where we get none of that. Materially, we're better off than we've ever been, but psychologically I think we need to find new and better ways to deliver on experiences that "enrich" our zoo enclosures and leave us as happy human animals.
vorpa-glavo
16d ago
I'll concede that "I have to shop around for banks that will give me credit in my own name, and I might not get it in the end" is less oppression than, say, "Society is structured so that the entirety of my future is decided by another person", but I think it still qualifies as oppression.
The nature of this discussion is that there is going to be some point where the oppression falls below a threshold where it makes sense to draw attention to it, or where the benefits of paternalism and freedom outweigh the downsides of oppression.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that women were oppressed as late as 1974, and that things may have tipped over towards very slightly favoring women on net starting in 1979 (when women became a slight majority of people enrolled in college), but I wouldn't think a person was wrong for choosing slightly different dates for those things either, or for saying that there is rough equality of the sexes in the United States, because both sexes have problems and they mostly fall under the threshold of attention worthiness.
I see shame as the most powerful tool in the social toolbox. It needs to be used sensibly, and using it too much and too trivially is going to make it harder to use it for the things it needs to be used for.
This basic idea is one of the major breaking points between the ancient Cynics and the ancient Stoics.
The Cynics were famous for their shamelessness, which they achieved through rigorous exercises designed to desensitize themselves to shame.
Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates, the third scholarch of the Cynics, and he was assigned the task of carrying a pot full of lentil soup through the pottery district of Athens. Lentils were an incredibly low class food, and carrying them out in the open was basically admitting you were gutter trash. Zeno, who had been a wealthy merchant before a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, kept trying to hide the lentils under his cloak and be as inconspicuous as possible with them. Crates realized what his student was doing, and broke the vessel Zeno was carrying the lentils in, causing lentils to dribble all over Zeno's legs, and embarrassing him enough that he fled the pottery district, with his teacher calling after him, "Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."
Zeno was constitutionally incapable of cultivating the extreme shamelessness that Cynicism demanded, so he founded a less severe philosophical school that found a balance between the extremes of Cynicism, and the irrational and unvirtuous masses: Stoicism. In many ways it was still quite demanding, and had its own exercises designed to instill excellent character and healthy emotional responses in its adherents, but in a way that was a lot more attractive and achievable by a wide variety of people.
I agree with you Maiq, that shame is an important social tool, but I also wholeheartedly believe that cultivating a resistance to shame is important as well. Having a strong enough moral character to go against the crowd or the people in charge is important. It's the kind of strength that let Socrates refuse to obey an unlawful and immoral order while serving in the army during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. It's the strength that let Helvidius Priscus speak truth to power to the Emperor Vespasian, for which he was sentenced to death - a sentence he submitted to with equanimity.
I think this is a weird aspect of how the idea of freedom of speech has developed in the West. Nowadays we view it as a right that governments are obligated to protect, a limit on state power. But for the Greeks and Romans, the virtue of parrhesia (=frankness of speech) was something that a person of excellent character did because it was the right thing to do in spite of the risk of consequences to themselves. In a way, I think the thing missing from all sides of the cancel culture debate are the Helvidius Priscus-es. Where are the sages of strong moral character on the Left or Right, who rather than whining about the injustice of their cancellation, simply nod and say, "You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow."
vorpa-glavo
20hr ago
So, to be clear, I don't think that a liberaltarian state will be "naturally" diverse, and I don't necessarily think libertarian states are locked into racism.
I think the two most important facts about human nature for this discussion are:
- Humans are social animals, but due to Dunbar's number we are probably naturally limited to social networks of around 150 people.
- Humans have had societies much larger than 150 people for at least 10,000 years based on archaeological evidence.
I think this is a mystery that needs to be explained. My preferred explanation is that we've created social technologies over the years that get us to larger societies. Think about how the Roman legions were structured, or a modern military. The chain of command limits the number of people you directly interact with most of the time, and allows for better organization and coordination.
I don't think humans are naturally "racist", but I do think we are naturally tribal. Racism is one form of social technology that gets us to a Super-Dunbar Society (at the cost of creating a racial underclass), but there are many other social technologies along these lines: Religion, Nationalism, Communism, Neoliberal Capitalism, Imperialism, etc.
My problem is a lack of imagination on some level. From a traditional libertarian perspective, I don't get how you get from a society that is using racialized thinking as one of its Super-Dunbar social technologies, to using a different basis that is more compatible with libertarianism.
I suppose it would be possible to switch to religion in principle, but I think that most universalist faiths push against libertarianism on a number of points, and any sufficiently secularized form of religion which doesn't probably isn't strong enough to actually unite a society into a libertarian arrangement. Most of the others just fail right out of the gate. The most potent forms of nationalism are off limits to the libertarian, communism contradicts it, imperialism violates the NAP, etc.
I think strict libertarianism by default kind of stalls out around the Dunbar level in most cases. Maybe with the right social technology it gets to city-state size, and can still be worthy of the name "libertarianism." But I think that at that size, in a world of non-libertarian countries the libertarian city state is in an incredibly precarious position. If they try to stay an open society, and let people think for themselves, then people are going to be exposed to the imperialist, religious and nationalist thinking of their neighbors, and I think there will always be a temptation to swap out the libertarian-compatible social technologies for something more potent.
My issue is not that I think that libertarianism is naturally racist. I think that if a libertarian city-state was using racism as one of its Super-Dunbar social technologies (perhaps as a way to avoid corruption by outside ideologies), it would be hard to switch it to something else using libertarian means.
By contrast, I think that liberaltarianism is more willing to make compromises with social technologies that actually enable Super-Dunbar numbers that allow for something bigger than a city state, while still retaining most of the benefits of libertarianism. The main one is imperialism - which allows liberaltarianism to reproduce itself generation after generation by forcibly brainwashing the populace to be as libertarian as possible, and thus somewhat avoiding the siren's song of other Super-Dunbar social technologies like Racism.
Oh, I'm aware that what I want is essentially imperialism.
I've struggled with how to think about this.
I think that America's individualism and liberalism are highly unnatural and bad fits for human nature. That's why we had to have the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in human history, brainwash most of the nation for 13 years via school and media, cultivate a culture of ripping families apart through an expectation of moving out of your parents' house, and impose a taboo on cousin marriage to make it all work.
This is my difficulty. Once we've done all that. Once we've inculcated individualism and little L "liberalism" in the population, then it seems like you can have a form of federalism (AKA imperialism) that is compatible with a form of libertarianism (AKA doing what you want outside of what you're being forced to do via imperialism.)
But I do understand that the basic counter argument is that maybe we shouldn't strip people of the non-liberal parts of their cultures. Maybe we shouldn't impose an incest taboo, encourage the degraded form of the extended family we call "the nuclear family", and do all the other things that make the form of life we have in America possible.
I genuinely don't have a good answer for this. Individualism and little-L liberalism are the only way of life I know. I'm the child of two parents who both moved to different states than my grandparents, and I now live in a different city than my parents.
I've never known a collectivist society. I've never known a tightly knit small town community. I'm mostly happy, and a foolish part of me honestly believes we're a few reforms away from making this bizarre system of ours work with the 2 million year old hardware humankind is running on. But maybe the neo-reactionary and post-liberal right are correct, and it was all a doomed experiment from the start.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I do think a lot of that is part of the sub role, but I was also trying to describe the appeal from "both sides."
There are people who want to become the bimbo, and I agree that a large part of the appeal for them is literally "turning your brain off" and giving in to blissful ignorance while letting another person take control. But there are also people who want to make the bimbo, and I think for them it is all about the feeling of seeing someone who was smart being taken down a peg and becoming a parody of themselves.
I think the bimbo sub has a lot of overlap with the sub in ageplay, petplay, hypnoplay, etc. All of those involve embracing a more simple-minded mentality and letting someone else take control for a while.
A much more speculative part for me is why particular kinks end up appealing to particular people. I have a second hypothesis, which I might call the 'horror story hypothesis.' I think that the power dynamic that becomes part of a person's fetish is often a thing that they worry about a lot. Classic examples would be the girl obsessed with staying skinny who ends up with a weight gain fetish, or a smart guy whose greatest fear was brain damage getting a bimbofication fetish - which are both examples I've seen in the wild. I don't think that this explains every instance of someone fixating on a single power hierarchy, but I think it probably explains a good deal of them.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
Did you reply to my comment by mistake? It feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.
vorpa-glavo
26d ago
One of her boyfriends mentioned on her substack that she had a few bad experiences at in person events. Maybe she's skipping Vibecamp since she doesn't want to have to deal with being a microcelebrity at the moment, even if that's the sort of event where people would tend to be neutral to positive on her.
vorpa-glavo
29d ago
I think it was around the time Lukas did his ‘why you should steal a woman’s photo to impersonate one online’ thread.
Could you please link to this thread? Sounds interesting.
While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.
I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?
At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.
But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.
If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.
A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.
I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?
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