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Notes -
On Inferential Distance
There's a pair complaints that get made here on a semi-regular basis to the effect of how "The right" lacks a positive vision/will to power, and more generally the how the whole Left/Right spectrum is incoherent. These complaints are often deployed in tandem with the old Bryan Caplan take about the left is defined by being anti-market and the right is defined by being anti-left. I disagree, and given how I've been accused by multiple users of "torturing the meaning of words" and "doubling down on obvious falsehoods" over the last couple months, and I feel kind of obligated to elaborate.
Entering college life as I did (as Freshman on the GI-Bill Student after 12 years as combat medic), I found it difficult to discount the degree to which certain cultural assumptions dominated the school's culture. I often found myself feeling a bit like Captain Picard in that one TNG Episode where the alien-of-the-week's individual words are readily translatable but their meaning is not. When I first read Yudkowski's post on "expecting short inferential distances" it crystalized something that I had already grasped intuitively but had been struggling to put into words. The concept of "inferential distance" subsequently became something of a bugbear of mine. In 1984 Orwell posits that the key to controlling discourse was to first control the language and I think he was on to something with that. As I've previously observed, for all the talk of theMotte being "right wing" it's userbase is overwhelmingly progressive in background. Being college educated is the default here. Atheism is the default here. A belief in identity politics and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics is the default here. These assumption (and yes I am calling them assumptions) get baked into the discourse and people who don't already buy into them end up facing an uphill battle if they wish to participate in the discussion. Often times I'll find myself choosing to not bother but I can't help but notice that this amplifies the problem, "evaporative cooling" and all that.
While I recognize that language is more performative than it is prescriptive what I am endeavoring to do here is something like a rectification of names. A lot of what I am about to say is going to be a rehash of things that some of you will have already read before on Lesswrong, SSC, or on theMotte prior our departure from Reddit. But in the interests of engaging with people we disagree with I will attempt to restate my case for the record...
What do I mean when I say "Western Civilization"? I refer to the intellectual tradition that is essentially a marriage of middle eastern mysticism and classical Greek/Roman formalism. This tradition rose to prominance in the first century BC and spread rapidly along the mediterrainian coast ultimately conquering most of Europe and eventually spreading to the new world. One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye. There is a debate to be had about to what degree early Christianity created these conditions or was simply a reaction to them but I don't think they matter all that much. It looks to me like a chicken and egg type question as regardless of on which side you fall in the debate the two are inextricably linked. The venn diagram of cultures considered "western" and cultures "heavily influenced by Christainity" (as opposed to other faiths Abrahamic or otherwise) is practically a circle with Jesus himself quoting Homer and Aeschylus in his sermons.
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other. The core points of disagreement being internal vs exterenal loci of control and the "default" state of man. While this model may have fallen out of favor in acedemia over the last few decades I still believe that it holds value in that it "cleaves reality at the joints" by pointing to real differences in how diffrenet classes within the west approach questions of legal authority/legitimacy while still accurately reflecting to the original etymology, IE which side would one be expected to take in the French revolution.
Users here will often argue that the existance (or non-existance) of "an imaginary sky-friend" or individual loci of control are not relevant to whatever issue is being discussed but I disagree. I believe that these base level assumptions end up becoming the core of what positions we hold.
I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place. That is an underlying assumption on both sides that if only all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down, utopia would be achievable. This is a fundamentally Rousseauean viewpoint where in violence, inequity, and injustice are all products of living in a society. Meanwhile I find myself barrowing pages from Hobbes and Burke, grand ideas are nice and all, but social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.
Edit: Fixed link, spelling
The SS was highly college educated, particularly in the officer corps (especially prior to 1939 when they started watering down entrance requirements). 30% were university graduates, compared to 2.5% of the general population of Germany in 1962. Half of those present at the Wannsee conference had doctorates. Likewise with Einsatzgruppen and Kommandos, a majority were headed by officers from an intellectual background. 18/23 defendants at the Einstazgruppen trial in Nurnberg were university graduates.
There are long and complex debates over to the religiosity of the SS and it's uncertain. A fair few of the more notorious officers claimed that killing thousands of Jews did not sin against the Commandment of Love, that they were raised as Christians. Others seem to be agnostic or atheistic, or 'spiritual but not religious' in a volkisch sense. There are a fair few Christians and non-materialists here + the whole simulation crowd. I recall reading someone talking about tithing.
I think it goes without saying that the SS had a strong and pervasive belief in identity politics and oppression/oppressed dynamics.
So was the SS a progressive organization? In a certain sense of the word yes. They had their own definition of progress. But that definition does not really match our definition of progressive, given that both would consider themselves totally and irredeemably opposed to eachother. And both are pretty different from motte users!
I don't think you can carve a neat dividing line through Western civilization and say 'all people who want radical, fundamental change are on the same side'. There's a lot of internal variance here!
Take Rousseau. There's the conventional progressive position that society causes all these problems of violence and inequality so we need to change or abolish elements of society. Or the SS-progressive position, where we need to change society so we're better at inflicting violence and inequality on others, honing our society to the peak of its competitiveness with eugenics and discipline.
Yeah? There seemed to be plenty of people who thought otherwise at the time.
At the time, sure. But now? The modern progressive is not favorable towards eugenics.
*Cole_Phelps_doubt.jpg*
This just seems obviously false to me. It's not conservatives that I see arguing that babies with disabilities ought to have been aborted or that we should to be euthanizing the mentally ill. It's guys like Justin Trudeau, and edgy kids on theMotte. To the degree that Eugenics seems to enjoy any support at all in [current year], it seems to me that it's coming from progressives.
Trudeau doesn't frame euthanizing the mentally ill on eugenic grounds. 'Edgy kids' on the motte is a pretty inappropriate descriptor too.
Progressives are at the forefront of advancing rights for babies with disabilities and the mentally ill. They call for more funding for them, more care, less stigma, including these people in jobs. They have these qualms about curing deafness since its sort of like genociding the deaf community! I've read papers about this, it's a real thing.
Then there are people who actually want to genocide the deaf community by sterilization or other methods.
If you include people who want disabled people killed and those who want them expensively supported by the state in the same group, it becomes almost meaningless. These are diametrically opposing visions of progress! An 1850s Democrat and a 2020s Democrat are very different ideologically, even if they have the same name. If you classify the average SS officer, the pink-haired leftist university student and the right-leaning mottizen all as progressives, what good is the definition?
Why should that matter? Between "dogwhistling" and "systemic X-ism" progressives reject the idea that the grounding needs to be explicit, in order to be criticized as grounded in X.
They're all for reducing stigma, and throwing money at them, but there's actually very little talk helping them resolve their mental health issues. Call me crazy, but destigmatizing something combined with subsidizing it looks like you're trying to create more of it.
The definition is useful if the groups actually have something in common, despite their differences. Whether @HlynkaCG can successfully articulate the commonalities is another issue, but he openly admits that he's struggling with that because of the inferential distance.
Take religion as an example. Progressives tend to be atheist, conservatives tend to be religious, so how can Dissident Rightwingers, who also tend to be religious be progressive? Well, as someone familiar with the psychology of the last group I can tell you that they're the kind of people who convert because they got convinced religion is good for society. That's not how normal religious people think, though! That's precisely the sort of thing that marks you as a progressive.
But grounding is still important. There's also context to consider. Suppose I hypothesized that Trudeau was a eugenicist. I'd look to see if he was encouraging wealthier or smarter people to have children - he's not. His reforms to family spending are progressive in the sense that they help poor people more. The very definition of the word progressive in this economic sense means favoring the poor. Is Trudeau sterilizing the mentally ill? Not in any clear way. Is he banning immigration from low-IQ regions? Not at all, he's encouraging it! Thus I conclude that Trudeau is not a eugenicist.
Well, I too agree with the 'if you subsidize something you get more of it' line of argument. I agree that our treatment of mental illness isn't actually effective but I'm confident that progressives think it is, that therapy and anti-depressants or whatever is good. Anyway, there's a clear distinction between subsidizing disabilities and Aktion T4. That certainly doesn't encourage mental illness or disability!
I deny that dissident right wingers are progressive. There's a concept of progress, certainly. There's a desire for social change. But the people who dominate the word 'progressive' have a specific direction in mind. Likewise, the people who dominate the phrase 'national socialist' bring in anti-semitism automatically. You can be nationalist. You can be a socialist. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and a socialist for instance. But he wasn't a national socialist.
I'd create more categories. You have your atheistic progressives. You have your church-going progressives who go 'who am I to judge' about homosexuality, believe they should do more to help other races, everyone born equal. You have religious conservatives too, or secular conservatives, agnostic conservatives. But you also have religious rightists - the SS official who sees nothing wrong with cutting down Jews Commandment-wise. Or they might have some kind of alternate spiritual viewpoint, Pierce's Cosmotheism or Japanese Shinto nationalists. Or they could be atheistic. I'm sure you believe that there are such things as Christian progressives, so why not religious or irreligious rightists?
The cleaving point is internationalism vs nationalism, concepts of race and hierarchy IMO. This is how we distinguish the SS officer from the pink-haired university student. Both want major changes to modern civilization. But the former wants more nationalism, extensive racial purity laws, military dominance over other powers, sexual deviants removed from society. He might also be in favor of economic equality in the sense that we're all ____ans and so the nation will be stronger without any internal divisions or envy. But that's not the key thing. The pink-haired university student wants more internationalism, more cooperation with other countries, class war at home such that the oppressive billionaire class is crushed, everyone to breed with eachother such that race is abolished (I heard this in person once, not a strawman), sexual diversity celebrated, to avoid wars unless they're with enemy regimes that pattern-match to the above type.
They might agree on things like a national health service but for different reasons - improving the health of the nation makes it stronger, vs people having a right to health. In most areas, they're opposed.
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Granted, instead he frames in in terms of "minimizing costs", "maximizing Potential", and "reducing suffing". My position is that it all boils down to the same shit. That the claim that there is a meaningful difference between 1920s democrats and 2020s democrats is a lie that has been sold to us by a media-establishment that is allied with the democrats.
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