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There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
@hydroacetylene said:
It's not entirely clear what's supposed to be the determining criteria of identity here. Are wokeism and the DR the same because they're both revolutionary, or are they the same because they only differ on who gets the cushy sinecures? At any rate, I'll address both points.
Revolution (defined in the most general sense as rapid dramatic change, as opposed to slow and gradual change) is a tactic, not an ideological principle. You can have adherents of two different ideologies who both agree on the necessity of revolution, and you can have two adherents of the same ideology who disagree on the viability of revolution as a tactic. Although Marxism is typically (and correctly) seen as a revolutionary ideology, there have been notable Marxists who denied the necessity of revolution for Marxism. They instead wanted to achieve communism through a series of gradual reforms using the existing democratic state apparatus. But does that suddenly make them into conservatives? Their tactics are different from typical Marxists, but their core underlying Marxist ideological principles are the same. I doubt that any of the Hlynkaists on this forum would look at the reformist-Marxists and say "ah, a fellow conservative-gradualist! Truly these are my people; they too are lovers of slow, cautious change".
"Tradition above all" is an empty formalism at best, and incoherent at worst. If tradition is your sole overriding source of moral truth, then we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending? What if it's actively malicious? "Support tradition" is a formal principle because it makes no mention of the actual content of that tradition. If you are living in a Nazi or communist (or whatever your own personal avatar of evil is) regime whose roots extend back further than living memory, are conservatives obligated to support the existing "traditional" regime? Perhaps they're allowed to oppose it, but only if they do so in a slow and gradual manner. You can understand why this response might not be appealing to those who are being crushed under the boot of the regime. And at any rate, you can only arrive at the position of opposing the regime in the first place if you have an alternative source of substantive ethical principles that go beyond the formal principles of "support tradition" and "don't change things too fast".
As for the assertion that wokeism and the DR only differ on "who gets the cushy sinecures"; this is simply incorrect. They have multiple substantive policy disagreements on LGBT rights, traditional gender roles, immigration, foreign policy, etc.
Hlynkaism to me represents a concerning abdication of reflection and nuance, in favor of a self-assured "I know what's what, these radical Marxist-Islamo-fascists can't pull a fast one on me" attitude. This is emblematic of much that is wrong with contemporary (and historical as well) political discourse. The principle goal of philosophical reflection is to undermine the foundation of this self-assuredness. Actually, you don't know what's what. Your enemies might know things that you don't; their positions might be more complicated and nuanced than you originally thought. Undoubtedly the realm of political discourse would become more productive, or at least more pleasant, if this attitude of epistemic humility were to become more widespread.
Is there any particularly reason that your belief of the core tenets of Hlynkaism accurately reflect the core tenets of Hlynkaism?
I'm not exactly a fan of top-level posting denouncing the beliefs of someone who isn't permitted to clarify their position, but this is specifically an accuracy question. Hlynka wasn't exactly adverse to elaborating his position at length, even going so far as to do so in multiple top-level posts in his Inferential Distance series, and you've linked to none of them to allow a cross-reference of your claim of the position and the position as provided by the man whose views you raise to denounce.
Which itself wouldn't be a failure by any means if you accurately characterized his position. But Hlynka's narrative had some pretty clear and specific keywords that you've not even raised. Some of Hlynka's tropes included raising the divided nature of the Enlightenment, early Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, the concept of the loci of control and agency against different paradigms, and so on. These are relatively distinct keywords of Hlynkaism, the sort that are easy to CTRL-F to search for to see if one is even referencing related texts. You are not, which is indicative that you are not speaking from the same sheet, or even referring to the same base of reference, as the Hlynkaists.
Which, itself, is emblematic of one of Hlynka's major claims- that there is a major hole in the discourse of current politics from a spectrum of Enlightenment-derived groups that do not acknowledge / recognize / are unaware of the relevance and salience of certain major Enlightenment influences, i.e. the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that he regularly referred to.
This was central Hlynka's reoccurring thesis because Hlynka claimed that this was a commonality amongst people who internalized the other spectrum/side of the enlightenment, a group which rejected the Hobbes-and-Burke premise. Call it whatever you want- left or right, whether humans are naturally good or evil, the nature of the locus of control as internal (individualist/person-centric) or external (you can change people and the world by taking and changing the institutions), but this was a cluster of concepts that served as a dividing premise in Hlynkaism.
These Englightenment-traced premise clusters were the grounds of what Hlynka viewed as bringing people who nominally despised each other on 'fundamental' or 'tactical' differences into an animosity of close-differences. The paradigm of comparison was the cluster of enlightenment principles they derived from. The adoption of those sorts of clusters vis-a-vis the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that wasn't even considered a meaningful alternative was the grounds of claiming commonality. You raising reformation and revolutionary marxists tactical differences is demonstrating a fundamental confusion of the paradigm in question. Hlynkaism is far more interested in their enlightenment cluster paradigms they share (class-based analysis of society, external loci of control prioritizing institutional control) than the tactics.
This may be wrong by some internal contradiction, it may not be a correct reading of history, but an effective counter-argument to the a central tenet that there is a Hobbes-and-Burke hole in the discourse should probably not avoid mentioning Hobbes and Burke entirely. Nor is it countered by rejecting Hlynka's structure and imposing your own that rejects the former's categorical premise. That sort of rejection / non-recognition of the alternative enlightenment paradigms was / is one of the core tenets of Hlynkaism.
A critique of Hlynkaism that doesn't even mention the "Enlightenment" or "hole" even once is probably not a critique of Hlynkaism's core tenets. It may, however, lend credence to some of his arguments on the relevance of not recognizing or addressing very significant background contexts.
All the more reason he should be brought back to defend himself!
Taking one of Hlynka's positions and using it as a synecdoche for "Hlynkaism" in toto is, indeed, an example of the very behavior I was criticizing, and for that I apologize. (In my defense, it was supposed to just be a cute moniker rather than an assertion of a serious philosophical claim.)
But it did seem to be one of his most critical recurring positions, it's the position that I've encountered most frequently in other conversations with posters here who claim to be carrying his mantle, and, crucially, it's the position that was outlined in the post I quoted from hydroacetylene. So that's what I wanted to respond to in my post. My post was only intended to respond to that position and not any of Hlynka's other positions.
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions. Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
I believe that I'm quite capable of considering all relevant alternatives, but please let me know if I'm missing something.
And yet, he isn't, which you knew when you began to lambast it. I maintain it was in poor taste, as well as inaccurate.
This would be part of the fundamental flaw in your critique, and further bolstering the validity of Hlynka's critique. Hlynka's positions were relatively closely interconnected, much as the various influences of the Enlightenment were interconnected, and attempting to take and argue over one element in isolation of the underlying substructure leaves a substantial hole in the discourse.
The more you talk around the premise of the hole or substructure argument, the more relevant that premises becomes. An argument of substructure doesn't get disproven by surface-level variances when the substructure argument already predicts and allows for surface-level variations.
You are continuing to demonstrate the point of Hobbes-shaped hole in political discourse. The hole exists because the avoiders of the hole reject the underlying premise even when they are aware of it, if they are aware of it in the first place. It is simply another expression of rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as an invalid basis of discussing/analyzing politics.
It really doesn't matter if you feel that underlying framework analysis is a bad way of dividing up different ideologies, any more than the narcissism of small differences discredits outside analysis noting relative commonalities. A characterization of you does not need your consent to be accurate or insightful. The same also applies to groups at scale. The premise that it does- that self-identification of most relevant attributes is what matters most- is simply another element of the common-cluster.
It is also a part of the cluster that creates the hole in social understanding when it fails to acknowledge / recognize the relevance of the hole-clusters, or their basis of analysis.
Put another way- you are demonstrating an analytic failure mode equivalent to those who criticized islamic extremists like ISIS of not knowing their own religion and being irrational. This was quite often false. ISIS did have an Islamic cluster-structure which informed their world view. It may have been different from what observerses believed an Islamic cluster-structure should be, but it was quite real, and quite relevant. It was real and relevant regardless of how little someone from another perspective disagreed or dismissed it, because enough people did share in the cluster that ISIS was able to be a major threat rather than an irrelevant marginal movement.
Hlynka's point on the hole in Enlightenment discourse is that various modern political elements that can be traced back to / self-identify with Enlightenment discourse have a similar cluster dismissal / divide. They do not recognize / acknowledge that their cluster-commonalities are not actually the scope of Enlightenment clusters. In turn, they make assumptions that divisions within their subcluster are major divisions in Enlightenment premise, rather than subdivisions of a sub-section.
You are continuing to conflate what Hlynka's regular arguments on the commonality between groups was. It was not an argument of shared surface-level beliefs and conclusions. It was an argument of shared underlying paradigm-assumptions, the common clusters, that undergird and shape the political discourse that reach diverging surface-level beliefs and conclusions but share underlying logic.
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Earlier you said:
Is this it?
Sure. You not mentioning Hobbes at all, let alone Hlynka's position on Hobbes, is the Hobbesian premise that is being rejected / forgotten.
How I would characterize Hobbes doesn't matter. My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position. Which is rather hard to do without mentioning them, which is generally a precondition to accurately characterizing. If you aren't accurately characterizing Hlynka's arguments, there's reason to doubt the validity of your argument.
The lack of mention in your rebuttal-argument is itself the hole.
I of course want to represent Hlynka's arguments as clearly and accurately as possible. I just reread the three "Inferential Distance" posts. The most relevant section seems to be this from the first post:
But this ignores the diversity of views about human nature you find on both the far right and the far left. The dissident right already has an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature, as far as I understand it. And even on the far left, things are not so clear. Followers of the more psychoanalytically-inflected strains of Marxism stress that there can be no final end to history, no ultimate reconciliation of the individual with the collective.
Further quoting Hlynka:
This is straightforwardly false. The dissident right does not believe this.
And finally:
I suspect that what he wanted to say, but shied away from, is that there are ultimately two camps: those who believe in the Christian God, and those who don't. This is undoubtedly the conclusion that one should draw if one starts from Christian priors. But since I reject Christian priors, I unsurprisingly reject the conclusion as well.
Consolidating responses to a couple comments here.
From your post above:
I would strongly disagree with all three of these statements. I think we can agree that "left" or "right" are essentially meaningless, but whether human beings are naturally good or evil and the locus of control seem to me to be extremely important questions. Likewise, where you see Hlynka latching on to something to put all his enemies onto one side, if his method allows him to sort friends from enemies in a consistent fashion, that is straightforwardly and obviously useful to him and to anyone who shares his values. I use similar logic to sort friend and enemy, and to make predictions about where current ideology will lead people, and this seems like an obviously useful and relatively uncontroversial method of reasoning.
At a minimum, you should consider that a categorization system that you don't find useful for your purposes and values might still be useful to people with different purposes and values.
Would you concede that, under the framing you're employing here, Eugenics was straightforwardly an attempt to reshape "human nature" through the mechanism of social institutions? Do the DR types believe that Eugenics was a bad idea or doomed to failure? Like, there's obviously a serious miscommunication happening here, because you are conflating "bad genes will always produce bad people" with "regardless of nature, regardless of nurture, the line between good and evil will always run through every human heart." These are not remotely equivalent statements.
I have and will argue that intelligence is orthogonal to morality, and that there is no reason at all to believe that even highly intelligent people are in any way more moral than dullards. Arguments to the contrary, from what I have seen, rely on a model of "morality" that rounds off to crime statistics, as though a person who never commits a crime, much less never gets caught committing a crime, is therefore morally perfect. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that those who commit crimes are necessarily less moral than those who do not, and that is even ignoring the part where immoral people can give their immorality the force and imprimatur of law. The logic that would argue otherwise is absurd for a whole host of reasons, but near as I can tell it is actually what a number of HBD enthusiasts I've encountered seem to be explicitly arguing.
Likewise, is Walt Bismark a reasonably representative example of a DR thinker? When he says:
...what part of that passage would you describe as a recognition that human nature is immutable and immune to manipulation by social institutions? Would you argue that subjugating people wholesale is not a form of manipulation by social institutions? Do you understand that, completely separate from any charged keywords or references to specific identity groups, the core logic evident in that passage marks the author, to me, as the most mortal sort of ideological enemy? Someone with whom no cooperation is or likely ever will be possible?
And Yarvin's Hobbits and Dark Elves essay is much the same, though he maintains a far more diplomatic approach; his core logic marks him firmly as an enemy.
You might as easily quote Bismark above, who clearly argues that not all whites make the cut. But as I understand it, the core objection isn't that the DR believes "white people inherintly good, everyone else inherintly bad", even though I have seen plenty of examples of exactly that sort of logic from what I thought were adherents to the DR here. It seems to me that one of the actual core objection is that they believe they can sort people into the good and bad bins by population-level metrics, when in fact they absolutely cannot do that.
Diversity is infinitely fractal. Focusing on specific commonalities that seem of primary relevance to one's own model is not "ignoring diversity". Relevance to the model at hand is the whole question.
As above, I think of Bismark and Yarvin as examples of Dissident Right thinkers. Both seem to share a view of human nature that fits much better with Progressive ideology than with my own. Likewise, when we've discussed psychoanalytically-inflected strains of marxism, it seemed that the examples you offered argued for no final end in the sense that an asymptote has no final end.
I do not think Bismark, Yarvin, or the the psychoanalytically-inflected marxists could engage with the fundamental truth of "the poor you will always have with you."
How would you characterize Bismark's call for a "thousand year Reich", aiming for "divine creation"? But let's say you're correct, and the DR doesn't argue that Utopia will be achieved if all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down. Would it be fair to say that they believe things will get a whole lot better, if they can simply remove most of the silly barriers keeping them from exercising unrestrained power to reshape and organize society?
Maybe they don't. Yarvin seems to, and Bismark definately seems to. Maybe they're not representative?
I can say that I personally am very confident that this formulation is incorrect; belief in the Christian God is not required in any way. What is required is an understanding that we are not in control, that we are inside the box looking out, not standing in the lab looking in at the world in a box. Such a worldview is compatible with Christianity, in the sense that cooperation and productive coexistence between the two are possible, and the opposite worldview is incompatible with Christianity. That's the connection I think you are twigging to. The hubris required to assume that one is fundamentally in control is the same hubris necessary to believe that "rational Christian" is an oxymoron, and so the two correlate strongly; there is a reason Bismark claims that building his hoped-for society is a spiritual, even divine act of creation. Further, I find that one can argue persuasively against this hubris from entirely within a rational, materialist framework, provided one is sufficiently rigorous in their materialism.
Noted atheist Sargon of Akaad just put out a video more or less on this subject. For fictional/vibes examples, I thought Glen Cook's The Silver Spike and Shadowline were interesting attempts within the bounds of genre fiction. Kipling himself seems most of the way there.
I'd like to thank you for this post, because it very much sums up neatly a lot of my own disagreements with the sort of "Dissident Right" thinkers you mention. (I also thought of that same Sargon video you linked when I was reading it.)
(It also helped clarify, by showing points of agreement, where both of my differences with you, and those with Hlynka, lie.)
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