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Notes -
On the culture war and the dark arts of communication
How does the average person come to believe certain messages communicated to them about the culture war? The easiest answer is that this process happens sub or semi-consciously. As Moldbug's Cathedral points out, raising an individual from cradle to majority (or beyond) within a certain world view will, intentionally or unintentionally, impart that world view upon him to a greater or lesser degree. But I am interested in more specific and more practical answers.
We all spend a great deal of time and effort writing and arguing about the culture war but it seems obvious to me that most of the effort remains within a small community and its not in a form suitable for general consumption. But how can it be made suitable?
For example, given adult literacy (see here for examples of the levels) and IQ, what types, lengths, and complexities of messages is a person able to understand? And which of those messages become adopted as personal beliefs?
Take Moldbug or Marx. Clearly, the writings of either author are beyond the reach of the average person. What rules would guide the translation of these works into a form consumable by the average person? How many pieces would their works have to be broken up into? How many ideas could be contained in each piece? How many interactions with a given idea are necessary for a person to understand or agree with it? What grade-level should the text be written in? What tone or voice should be used? What changes are more effective for different segments of the population, men, women, rural, urban, etc.?
Surely there are people skilled in the dark arts of communication, advertising, and psychology which know how to translate* the sorts of things we discuss into a form consumable by the average person. Given that these disciplines are not new, surely there is a handbook of basic principles for crafting such messages? Do we have any practitioners of the dark arts that can provide such resources?
*I looked for an AI that can translate a given text into a text of substantially similar meaning but at a specified (lower) grade level. I have not found any such tool.
Why not use the Bible as the obvious example? It seems to me to be, essentially, the most widely and universally disseminated body of work in existence - not only in translation and availability, but also in preaching, outreach, education, ...
Whatever Christian missionaries were doing, it worked.
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These two writers are not comparable at all.
Marx is well within reach of average person (at least in the 19th century was) and was widely read by common workers.
(19th century workers knew who were Metternich and Guizot just like modern workers heard about Merkel and Macron)
Basic principles of Marxism - historical materialism, class struggle as engine of history, labor theory of value - are easy to explain.
Moldbug is not meant for average person, it is meant for educated elites - "open minded progressives" - and it says: time to "formalize" power, time to dispose of the charade of "freedom" and "democracy", time to rule the plebs directly with iron fist. Wouldn't it be better to govern as dukes and princes by divine right instead to have to pretend you "serve the people"?
When workers read Marx, they knew what to do - do not trust the bosses and the politicians, organize with their fellow workers and fight for their rights.
Imagine "ordinary people" today reading Moldbug - what exactly should they do when they finish?
I’ve read Moldbug repeatedly, and I don’t see it as a call to action in any traditional sense. It’s a social and political theory that purports to explain the way society actually works as separated from the propaganda that society tells itself about how decisions are made. In that sense he’s closer to something like Plato’s Republic or Moore’s Utopia in which he’s describing a proposed society as a sort of thought experiment as to how a society ought to be run. He’s not saying “overthrow the government,” he’s saying our current system is more broken than the society of the Middle Ages, so much so that running society in the way that the average medieval fiefdom was run would work better for us than liberal democracy.
He calls for an action, but not one of ordinary peon. He calls Nancy Pelosi to stop pretending she is "servant of the people", crown herself as Queen of California, put her hobnailed boots on and clean her kingdom of all trash.
Nope. His proposed solutions - whether high tech crypto cyber corporate utopia of young Moldbug or monarchist primitivist Polpotist utopia of old Moldbug - are something that never existed in history, actual medieval society has nothing in common with these fevered dreams.
I think his main criticism of modern liberal democratic systems is exactly that no one actually has skin in the game. His suggestion that Pelosi or anyone else put on workboots to clean up their district is pointing out that in modern liberal democracy, the entire system is geared specifically to prevent the buck from ever stopping and as a side effect to promote short term thinking.
Monarchy did manage to avoid these problems as if you destroyed your fief there’s nothing of value to pass on to your child. No prince would be happy to find that they were inheriting a fief with its own map of human feces. In fact this alone would probably make the king fix those problems long before they ever got that bad because he doesn’t want his son to rule over garbage dumps and hobo camps. Monarchy has other problems— it lacks the ability to effectively gage public sentiment. But on the whole, the skin in the game generally prevents problems from getting too bad because the ruler’s fate is tied directly to the fate of his state.
This fact alone makes me a bit more sympathetic to monarchy or monarchy with a parliamentary system. Having a personal stake in the outcome is critical to good decisions.
I too know NRX theory. Actually existing hereditary monarchs, unfortunately, never heard about it and had no interest in "investment" and "development" in modern sense, least of all in investment in sanitation (the technology was well known since Roman times).
Louis XIV, if he wished, could rebuild Paris into miracle of the world, city of paved roads, sewers, fresh water supply and plentiful baths.
He had other priorities.
It had to wait for another monarch, self made one.
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As far as I can tell you don't translate it. You just gather 'useful idiots' by appealing to them with a message that they can insert themselves into.
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This assumes the problem is that the information is presented in a form that's too complicated for average people to consume. What if, instead, it's a matter of desire? In other words, what if people just don't care about this stuff? At the risk of steering into cynical territory, what if most people are happy to let a small minority fight over Big Questions and leave them free to eat waffles, watch a good movie, go on a date, etc.?
I think you're spot on, and it's not cynical at all. Most people do in fact just want to grill.
Which would be fine, except the safety people want to ban the propane tank (explosion hazard) and the use of the grill (fire hazard), the environmentalists want to ban the charcoal and natural gas and propane (greenhouse gases), the EAs and PETA types the meat, and also grilling is racist and cultural appropriation.
Losing enough of the culture war means you don't get to grill.
Edit: and right on cue, The Graniuad proves me right.
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Regardless of whether Marx’s writings are accessible to the average person or not, millions of average people still ended up living under (self-professed) Marxist regimes. You may want to start with the history of Marxism as a case study.
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With Marx, one simple problem is that he wrote in the 1800s, using 1800s references that are completely obscure to normal current-day people.
I've referred to it as the "Guizot problem", at times. Imagine someone taking up Communist Manifesto - supposed to be the simplest Marxist text available - and reading the first line: "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies."
98% of people reading this for the first time are going to have no idea of who Guizot is. (98% is a high estimate based on the fact that many people are not going to bother picking up the Manifesto in any case and some French people might remember him from history books if he features there, I guess?) Even I had to check Wikipedia once again to remind myself who Guizot was and what, actually, he had done to make Marx hate him. Most are not going to know who Metternich is, either, but I'd guess at least he's a name that most Europeans have heard in their history class, even if they have then immediately forgotten him.
Of course, some people might have enough experience with old texts to know that who Guizot is is not probably supposed to be all that important and to plow on with the text. However, many are going to go "Guizot? Who the fuck is Guizot? Do I need to know who Guizot is? Oh, this is hopeless. I'll never understand any of this" and give up.
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The archetypal format of arguing your position is a debate, not a manifesto, not even a dumbed-down one. Today that probably means some podcast interview. In principle, it's not hard to argue any right-winger take on a podcast convincingly. This isn't rocket science.
I've just watched Jared Taylor make an unbelievably anodyne case for White Supremacy to some Japanese interviewers in simple words a low-literacy layman could understand and nod do. He could do that because his audience was evidently sympathetic and polite to a fault.
A typical popular American debate (to say nothing of worse debate environments) on a politically fraught topic is very different, it consists either of empty blathering and sloganeering or walking on eggshells, and you need a heck of a lot more rhetorical skill to not break any, not get bogged down in interruptions, gotchas and «mask slipping» type attacks. Even if you're that good, by the time you're done with your little eggshell dance and ready to deliver the conclusion, the average listener has long tired of it and switched channels. And the smart listener's time is too expensive for this shit. And what you're left with is either dysfunctional obsessive fanatics or lukewarm information consumers. Not much of a platform, so why bother.
The tragedy is that as a CW-minoritarian and a suspected witch, you have to be leagues better than your opponents who have been given license to uncharitable assumptions and plain savagery in public, and the water level keeps rising as your arguments are added to hate speech checklists and become the setup for gotchas, so you need to run on euphemism threadmill or keep getting fucking better. Being in the right helps, of course, against the more ludicrous and artificially propped-up beliefs; but on the other hand, your opponents have access to institutions of sense-making and memetic engineering. And if that fails, they turn to means of demonization, bullying and deplatforming so you cannot propagate your agenda effectively.
This exhausts people and they leave.
But one shouldn't look down on laymen too much. In a less adversarial situation, an average person wouldn't struggle with understanding e.g. Moldbug, if Moldbug were to be distilled to the standard of a high school essay. Our friend JB did just that once, in fact. Of course, Moldbug when distilled shrinks to truisms, trivialities and a bunch of ludicrous unsupported claims. But he becomes plenty understandable.
To the extent that he does not, this is because of obscurantism, which is a valuable feature of the doctrine, seeing as it helps with building the stratified, loyal movement/cult.
Likewise with Marxism.
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People don't receive their beliefs as propositional statements, they receive them as unspoken background assumptions in other messages, and reinforcement by approval/disapproval from peers. You've misunderstood how minds are changed. Moldbug doesn't change anyone's mind either, not even the super smarties you believe can understand him.
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Since you mention Marx, Kapital was serialized in French worker's newspapers in the 1870s. Marx included this letter as a foreword, and a forewarning, which is often included in translated form with English editions today:
Dear Citizen,
I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.
That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.
That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
Believe me,
dear citizen,
Your devoted,
I'm not confident in any sources on its impact in serialized form, but at least two people (Marx and Lachatre) had confidence that there existed in the French working class enough autodidacts to make it worth publishing.
The Bible might be another great, and difficult, text comparable, and intensive bible study is something pretty frequently undertaken by ordinary men. I've been using one of these plans for the KJV. I've also, separately, been attending bible study weekly. The bible study uses a newer translation, which I dislike, but I go anyway because three of my lifelong best friends go to it, and I want to see them and hang out. And that's the sauce.
Those frenchmen weren't reading Kapital in their bedrooms in secret, chainsmoking Gauloises by lamplight. They were reading it as part of socialist parties, and unions, and workingmen's benevolent clubs; chainsmoking Gauloises together. Ordinary men don't read the bible quietly to themselves, they read it as part of a bible study group from their local church. They are not trying to interpret difficult passages by themselves, they are interpreting them together, one and another working through it, finding different meanings and understandings and examples.
So you want the dark secret of the temple of communication? Communication ---> Commun ---> Community. Break it down into digestible chunks (YouVersion gives me three-four bitesize daily chunks of bible, such that I'd read the whole thing in 365 days); then bring people together in a group to read it and interpret it and learn it. Some will read it just to go to the group! You want people to read Moldbug? Bring people together to read it as a club, a group. Drink, smoke, laugh, hang out, learn. F3 groups are a great concept, once again internet RadTrads are reinventing the religious wheel. Take advantage of a shortcut that capitalist modernity is increasingly cutting itself off from, human contact. You think that some asshole twitter consensus or some MSM anchorman with a serious camera gaze are going to mean shit compared to actual friends working through the material together?
As an aside, I'm adding as a second comment to keep the flow of the first comment, you have to have reasonable expectations of what people are going to pull out of a big text. I've taken a lot of classes over the years, and in one pass through a big work like that on my own or in a college format, I might pull out two or three big things I actually remember for the rest of my life. A second pass might produce more. Truly great texts, stuff like Homer, Joyce, Augustine, Dante, Tolstoy; every time I read it I pull something new from it.
So you're probably not going to produce a bunch of guys who quote Moldbug chapter and verse after one go. It will take years, and many tries, but every time a little bit will stick. That's the essence of memetics, right? Some stuff hangs on, like a filter feeding whale.
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A partial solution for your AI problem is this paper-explainer tool, though it's really more for technical language.
https://www.explainpaper.com/papers/transformers
I think we should trust the experts on propaganda. Goebbel's big theme was repetition, simple points, one-sided arguments, intense criticism of the opponent. He clearly knew what he was doing. The problem is that's not what we want to do - propagandising is the polar opposite of this forum's purpose.
https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/goebbels.html
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I'm not sure if it constitutes a 'handbook' but I strongly recommend Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922), who quite literally wrote the book (haha), on public communication and how to manage/manipulate public opinion.
I would also recommend Edward Bernays's Propaganda (1928) or Public Relations (1945). Bernays was kind of Lippmann's protégé.
These two men are basically created the foundation for our understanding modern mass communication, mass media and mass culture. Now-ubiquitous terms like propaganda (in its modern meaning) and stereotype were coined or popularized by these men. Both of them made some highly topical political arguments to our present political environment. Lippmann basically advocated for a technocratic elite/agency that used propaganda benevolently to shape public opinion, believing that (simplifying here) that the informed member of the public/voter is oxymoron, no member of the public is effectively capable of making informed decisions on any number of issues. Bernays has broadly similar views to Lippmann, although where as Lippmann more saw propaganda as a tool to be used by a (benevolent) elite, Bernays more sees propaganda as the inevitable result of an mass liberal democratic society, the alternative is chaos. Bernays is also responsible for making bacon and eggs a stable breakfast food and partially responsible for all the bad shit United Fruit Company did in Central America.
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You could probably start by looking into pedagogy. There's, like, a whole academic discipline dedicated to understanding how best to teach people stuff.
As I understand from dismissive comments by social scientists, it's ed science absolutely the worst, quality wise 'science' out there, compared to which social psychology is diamond hard.
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The people with those talents are the culture creators. Artists, priests, propagandists, filmmakers... But ultimately, it's about the creation of myths and stories. That is how the masses of people will unconsciously internalize the esoteric messaging embedded in the myths they consume.
For a handbook on how this esoteric knowledge can be passed through the generations, you can study the bible. Take the book of Genesis for example. There's the story of Jacob who, working for his father-in-law, makes a deal to receive all the less-desirable spotted or black sheep in the herd as his wages. Jacob then devises a scheme to turn the entire flock speckled. He peels the bark on branches of trees, exposing the inner wood, to create white stripes. “So when the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted” (30:38-39)
The parable demonstrates ancient knowledge of the "dark art" of culture communication. By creating the stripes on the tree, Jacob directs the mate selection of the flock and acquires the herd. Of course, in Christian metaphor sheep are a metaphor for humans. The lesson is that culture, media, and propaganda are themselves the dark art of communicating cultural esotericism and directing the thoughts and behaviors (including the mate selection) of the masses.
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