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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
You make several very bizarre claims in this post, which reinforce my perception that you basically have no theory of mind as it regards people on what you call “the alt-right”. (Pro tip: pretty much nobody identifies with that term anymore; the “alt-right” as a movement splintered years ago.) You have correctly identified that we radically disagree with mainline American-style conservatism, but you go totally off the rails when you start imputing to us views that you associate with progressives.
For example, you consistently accuse me and others of believing in a “Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamic”. Surely you must know that many of us, particularly those who are inspired by figures like Moldbug, are sympathetic to the idea of an absolute monarch. Many of us reject the entire constellation of ideas about “human rights”, meaning that the concept of “oppression” is not really coherent under our worldview. A common through-line in most dissident-right thought (although certainly not all!) is a warm embrace of natural hierarchy, and a consequent belief that it is both right and proper for some people to have significant power over others as a result of the naturally unequal distribution of relevant qualities between different groups in society. Some on the more esoterically-inclined corners of the right are even interested in the ancient Indo-European “trifunctional hypothesis”, which holds that the division of society into three distinct and essentially impermeable castes - a theory of sociopolitical organization which recurred in basically all Indo-European-derived societies, and which has its most enduring expression in the still-extant Hindu caste system - is a reflection of the divine will. These are not people whom you will ever hear calling something “oppressive” or “unjust”. Sure, most of us believe that the current ruling class that has power in much of what you call “the West” is illegitimate and has lost the Mandate of Heaven, but in no sense are we opposed to the existence of a ruling class in general, nor of hierarchical and unequal distributions of power more broadly.
You also make several claims that suggest that you yourself are operating under a very sanitized and cherry-picked model of “Western” history itself. For example, you claim that
How the hell do you square the latter claim with the very easily verifiable fact that the societies you identify as “Western” happily operated the largest and most sophisticated global chattel slavery operation in human history, doing so for several centuries, and did so while developing elegant theological and philosophical justifications for that slave trade, which they saw as entirely consonant with the “Western” and “Christian” worldview? If these men don’t count as “Western”, who does? Similarly, you claim that valuing women’s consent in regards to marriage is a hallmark specifically of “Western culture” - which you define is explicitly requiring Christianity (or “eastern mysticism”. Yet the Greek and Roman historians like Tacitus famously identified the pagan Germanic tribes - who had no exposure either to Christian mysticism nor to Greco-Roman formalism - as significantly more egalitarian in terms of gender than the Greco-Roman civilization. These historians would comment bemusedly on how much power women had in these cultures, relative to how much power the women back home in Greece and Rome had. (And this is to say nothing of the incomparably greater power that women had in, for example, many Bantu societies, which were even more profoundly removed from any remotely “Western” influence.) So, it’s very difficult for me to take seriously your claim that women’s liberation is something that sets “Western civilization” apart from other civilizations.
Overall, I think that you speak far too overconfidently about things that you lack the background to comment in an informed manner about. That’s totally fine; most of us in this sub are generalists who overestimate our own knowledge on certain subjects from time to time. What causes you to draw extra criticism for it is the specifically grouchy and condescending “get off my lawn” demeanor with which you approach these conversations; you seem to think you have some gatekeeping power, maybe as a result of your status as a former mod, and you seem to consistently act as though you know what people believe better than they themselves do. I’m telling you that you don’t, and that it might behoove you to have a far more open mind as it regards people telling you what they actually believe, rather than trying to fit everyone into an increasingly stale and restrictive schema whose limitations are becoming more abundantly obvious with every passing year.
Oppression as a concept does not rely on human rights, only the loosest idea of justice, of some sense of right and wrong, good and bad. The nazis didn't appear to believe in "human rights", but they definately believed in oppression, and defined it roughly as them not being the masters of the world. The Communists didn't believe in "human rights" in any meaningful sense either, but likewise believed in oppression, which consisted of them not being the masters of the world. I'm not sure I can argue that the current "alt-right" does the same, though their racial identarian angle certainly seems in the same general trajectory.
I'll freely admit that I've read only a fraction of Moldbug's output or that of the "alt-right" generally, so if the following impressions are in error, I stand by for correction. I'd imagine the following is mainly useful for illuminating distinctions in perspective.
...emphasis mine, with the question being: as leaders or followers? There's a fundamental difference between "it's a messed up world, and I just need to rule it" and "I'll try to lead if there's genuinely no one better stepping up, and otherwise am happy to follow". Compare Moldbug's prescription that the proper way to gain power is to become worthy of power, then be handed it. Does he have any interest in building, or only in ruling what others have built? Contrast this with the trad right, which has no problem following, supporting from below, and sees this as a necessary component of leadership as well. As mentioned above, "servant leadership". I've yet to see any indication that Moldbug is capable of grasping the concept. One could argue that while the trad right is excellent at growing grassroots power, it's terrible at exercising power at scale. Unfortunately, so is Moldbug and the rest of the "alt-right", who remain complete pariahs to the existing establishment.
Moldbug and his compatriots seem to regard common folk with, at best, poorly-concealed disdain. They seem to regard the wellbeing and prosperity of those common folk as a sort of waste product from the actual goal of society, which is to maximize the wellbeing and joy of the Better Sort. But of course, traditional conservatives reject the idea that there is a "better sort", in the sense that some men are of greater moral worth than others, while also rejecting the Progressive idea that behavior can or should be decoupled from outcomes. TradCons maintain that your value comes from doing what is right, and further that, say, IQ does not actually assist greatly in this endeavor. Certainly neither wealth nor, criminality or its lack are decisive indicators; it is easy to be a complete moral monster while breaking no laws. This matters, because the TradCon approach has observably done relatively well at dealing with the problem that the people who pursue power are often the exact people who should not have it. Moldbug's solutions to the problem are not tested, and I'm skeptical of whether they'll perform well under load.
The Communists likewise were in no sense opposed to the existence of a ruling class, nor to hierarchical and unequal distributions of power. This describes all known social systems, great and small, and so is of no use as a distinguishing characteristic. What matters is how that heirarchy is implemented and understood by its implementers. On the one hand, we have people who believe that they are better than others, and want to be above them, and on the other hand, we have people who observably bear one another's burdens in the most concrete of fashions, building obviously net-positive, durable communities thereby.
Slavery was a constant of human existence from before recorded history, because it's a strict improvement over the previous tech of "every fight is a fight to the death." Whether it's actually gone now is something of an open question: we have no shortage of people working in literal chains. What is not questionable is that slavery developed into a particularly pernicious form in the runup to the modern era, and was then largely eradicated specifically by the forebears of the trad-right, often over the objections of people appealing to the innate inferiority of those enslaved. Notably, the people who eradicated modern chattel slavery were the direct forebears of the modern trad-right, while those who argued for maintaining it made arguments very similar to the Progressives and the "Alt-Right": some groups of people are better, and others are worse, as a matter of innate nature.
There is a difference between a person who sees the west as a resource to be exploited, and a person who sees it as an inheritance to be stewarded faithfully. One can be descended from the West, and yet reject their birthright and its attendant responsibilities.
Is the French Revolution "Western", when they rejected everything that came before them, desecrating cathedrals built over hundred of years in an explicit repudiation of the values of those who built them? Calling such people "Western" is perverse, when they've rejected the core values that created and sustained the world they seek so eagerly to grasp. And in fact, those people abandoned the old identity, founded on faith and honor, in favor of novel ideologies based on race or class, which led to swift ruin. By contrast, those who embrace that birthright, who can feel an instinctual kinship and affinity to the carefully-preserved words and values of their progenitors a thousand years dead, those are the true children of the West.
The traditional approach to male and female roles is pretty clearly not "women's liberation", a term more accurately applied to modern feminism. It's also distinct from either various primitive pseudo-matriarchies, or the baked-in misogamy of cultures like China. It's its own thing, and has quite the track record to commend it. For that matter, it's an improvement over Rome and the Greeks, which though they processed many admirable qualities, had considerable faults as well.
[EDIT] - It's been observed that one can tell the difference between a Rightist and a Leftist by the question "Are some people better than others". I'm not sure this is true, given statements by the Communists, but it seems obvious that the ambiguity can be removed by asking "why"?
Do you mean to say that the notion of justice, and even good and bad, are progressive inventions now, and based conservatives like you and Hlynka operate without that nonsense?
If the belief in «Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics» is characteristic of the group Hlynka is castigating as not truly right-wing, there must be more to it than that.
I will note that Moldbug for all his arrogance rules no one and has built something (indeed something very elegant), which is more than can be said of Hlynka, who is essentially an expert in destruction and state-approved murder.
More generally this attack on natural hierarchy advocates is very tired and very incoherent. I see it, I recoil in horror. These people say that the only reason someone could posit human inequality is to assert being superior. Is their acceptance of their lot in life entirely predicated on thinking that everyone is the same? Do they just… suppress their psychopathy and power-seeking with this clear absurdity?
Well, one answer is that slavish loyalty to some disgusting grifter like Trump, thrown to them like a bone to elicit predictable swarming behavior, solely because of his lower-class aesthetics and manners, is not a cause to pat yourself on the back. I'm with Hanania in thinking «trad right» should be mocked about this until they learn that pride is a sin and pig-headedness is a potentially lethal disease.
This is plainly false, as can be gleaned from the usually very severe and hostile trad con attitudes to punishments for antisocial behavior (your own too, if memory serves) and beliefs about moral worth of criminals and worth of «restorative justice». Tradcons very easily label men as irredeemable – perhaps as easily as wokes do, since this is the thread of equivocation.
Better sort is a matter of behavior; and inasmuch as capacities like IQ matter here, they do so as proxies for behavior (although casually it's the other way around, with IQ affecting behavior, of course).
Which side did Hlynka's forebears fight for?
No. Everyone (to a first approximation) believes in Justice, in Good and Bad. Oppression is badness enforced as a norm, so everyone believes that oppression is a thing that can happen. People differ on the details of what Good and Bad are, on how to define Oppression, and this is where the disagreements come in. Some people (Nazis, Communists) have an extremely deranged definition of Oppression that makes coexistence with them flatly impossible. Progressive and race-based definitions of oppression are similarly deranged, if less extreme, because they collapse their moral judgements down to identity, rather than actions chosen. Regardless of how they dress it up, their beliefs in practice are that some people are good and some bad innately, as a social class, regardless of individual behavior. This is what Hlynka and I are objecting to, and drawing an equivalence from.
@Hoffmeister25 claimed that he can't be accused of framing his worldview in terms of oppressor/oppressed because he doesn't believe in the progressive conception of human rights. I was pointing out that many people don't believe in progressive human rights, but still adopt an oppressor/oppressed worldview. Nor, I might add, does it much matter if one uses the terms "oppressor" or "oppressed", or finds some other term for "good" and "bad". There is a core nature that shines through regardless.
The question was framed specifically regarding his maxim of "become worthy of power, be handed power" maxim. He is indeed capable of being the boss, and being effective in the role. Can he build power, from scratch, and with himself not on top? Can he join someone else's heirarchy and still function? Can he serve a king, not as vizier, but as dogcatcher if that's the job that needs doing? Can he follow?
It rather depends on the nature of the inequality being posited. In any case, it's not the only reason, but it's certainly a potential reason, and a cause for concern. People who see power as an end need to be kept as far from it as possible. Good leaders approach leadership as service. Bad leaders approach it as something they're entitled to, something others owe them. Those who actually possess superior qualities do not generally need to trumpet those qualities; in a healthy environment, they will be evident to those around you, who will see giving you a chance to exercise them as a benefit to everyone. But already, I'm presuming a healthy environment, presuming selflessness on the part of the leader, presuming a desire to serve... and it's not obvious that these presumptions can be made for Moldbug or his ilk.
I'm not talking about Trump. I'm talking about how one structures their relationships with the people immediately around them, how they come together to form hierarchy in the immediate and concrete sense of ordinary life, not in population-level abstractions. Do they look at the people around them as their community, or as human resources to be exploited? Are they willing to work with those weaker than themselves?
Criminals do not lose their moral value when they commit crimes. On the other hand, moral value doesn't preclude lethal self-defense or lawful execution either. We don't kill people because they have less moral value, we kill them because they are doing something that justifies stopping them by any means necessary, or because they've done something bad enough that no lesser punishment would be just. Moral value necessarily means moral accountability as well. "Restorative Justice", on the other hand, is scorned for being two lies for the price of one; nothing is restored, and so there is no justice.
There is a fundamental disagreement here about what justice is, how violence and conflict work, how interaction between groups of humans works. seeing it pop up over and over again, even in my own thinking, is what convinced me that Hlynka's thesis was correct.
Willingness to punish is not labeling someone "irredeemable". Likewise, I think it matters a great deal what you punish people for, and how. I do not think there is much similarity between trads and wokes in this regard.
...And this is one of the major points of disagreement. There are no proxies for behavior. Smart and Dumb are completely orthogonal to Good and Evil; neither axis says anything meaningful about the other. Dumber people will almost certainly have harder lives, and their evil will be more obviously legible, but that is not the same as them being morally lesser, or the smarter people being morally greater. Scott Aaronson has never intentionally broken a law, and appears to be smart as hell, and yet he's got evil in his heart, just like we all do.
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I'm pretty far from a Moldbug apologist, but this particular criticism uniquely does not land for him. We're talking about a man who built a full-fledged alternative to the internet from the ground up, hand-crafting every stage of its unique and bizarre infrastructure. Now that he's stepped away to let it grow on its own, from what I understand of his current projects, he's become rather enamored with New York's Dimes Square art scene. It seems like a bit of a dead end at best to me, but it's certainly an attempt to build something.
There are many people at whom you can credibly level the "no interest in building" accusation. Whatever else Yarvin's flaws are, this is emphatically not one of them.
Then I've expressed myself poorly. I was referring specifically to his maxim of "become worthy of power, then be handed power". That maxim has always struck me as rather parasitic.
He is indeed capable of building, in the sense that he can be at the top of the hierarchy, do the work, and give orders to those below him. Is he capable of building, in the sense of being at the bottom of someone else's hierarchy, and being a loyal follower? He's happy to be handed power, but is he willing or capable of building power from scratch? From what I've read of him, the impression I'm left with is that he is not. His fear and disdain of revolution is at least partially due to a keen awareness of the devastation that tends to result, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that it's also partially because he knows that if the present system goes away, he has no plan B. It's as though he sees power as a natural resource, like oil or uranium, and the whole question is simply who controls it, rather than it being an emergent property of human choice, and the question is how we generate it step-by-step.
Contrast @HlynkaCG's point about easy questions and hard questions: is the hard part designing a political system, or is the hard part getting people to actually follow it? Yarvin, like most modernists, strikes me as believing the former, and I think he's dead wrong and getting wronger every day.
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Maybe this is meant as a broader point including communists and Nazis, but in what sense was the French Revolution built on race? Didn't it explicitly found the tradition that the French state still insists on of not enquiring anything about ethnic heritage? And with regards to class, I don't think that pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a society not based in significant amount of class. A core grievance fueling the revolution was the perceived decadence of the nobility, a social class that justified its position at least partly using class based ideology like the divine right to rule.
Broadly looking at the pre-modern West class ideology permeates everything. Greece had all the politicking about who gets to be a citizen, Rome had the patricians and the plebs, the Migration Period sees a bit of a flattening of class hierarchies due to the general anarchy and Germanic influences but emerges into the Middle Ages as highly rigid and stratified societies. Maybe I'm misreading what you mean by "class based", but I don't see any kind of ideological novelty when French radicals and later socialists start thinking in these terms in the 19th century, just that it's now coming (at least partly) from below rather than exclusively from above.
It wasn't. It was based on Class. My point is that race and class are two variants of the same thing, and because of this shared commonality, ideologies based on race run into similar problems as ideologies based on class.
All societies have some sort of class divisions, just as all societies have something approximating race divisions. The French Revolution centered its ideology on class conflict, on dividing their population into good classes and evil classes, in the belief that all problems could be solved by the former destroying the latter. Pre-revolutionary aristocrats were not in fact trying to destroy the peasant class, and while "divine right of rule" is wrong, it's considerably less wrong than what the Revolutionaries replaced it with.
The French revolution is different from what came before, because it embraced a specific, novel ideology: that through the power of Reason, its adherents had, immediately available to them, every tool necessary to fix every problem they faced. This is the core axiom of Enlightenment ideology, and it is both highly novel and absolutely destructive.
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Did they lose their western cred on religious or political grounds? Might want to eject all protestants, the english for the civil war, and the americans for their revolution as well. The only truly western country appears to be the russian empire.
This goes for Hlynka too. Explain to me how hobbes falls on one side of the american revolution and the other on the french.
In addition to what @FCfromSSC said...
Another obvious difference is that while the de jure rule in the 13 Colonies might have been that everything must go through Parlament and the King (or their duly appointed representatives) the De Facto reality was that it wasn't the british government that was paying the constabulary, maintaining the roads, or adjudicating disputes between neighbors. It was the local officials. To that end the American revolution was not an "overthrow" of the existing social order as much as it was a "rectification" of the de jure and de facto authorities.
Since the commoners were paying for everything before and after the french revolution, it doesn't qualify as an overthrow either.
Is this de jure/de facto thing based on hobbes, or did you just make it up to carve a providential exception? I suppose they should have just acted like they were in a revolution, without legislating for a bit, and later play the de jure/de facto gambit, and then it would only have been a 'rectification' and everyone would be happy.
No, I did not make it up. It's one of the core questions being wrestled with. Is it the vestments that make a man a priest, and the crown that makes a man a king? Or is it doing God's work, and other men being prepared to die for you?
You're retreating into mysticism now. But I'll humour you. It's military and political genius that makes Bonaparte a king. And his compatriots were certainly prepared to die for him and each other. As to gott mit uns, there are contradictory claims as to who the old man really supported in the various events under consideration.
I'm not retreating anywhere. I'm standing exactly where I have been this whole time.
Bonaparte's charisma and genius made people want to follow him, and the people following him made him an emperor. Simple as that.
The British Government can claim to rule North America, and the Aristocrats of Europe can whing about who's claim to what throne is strongest, but history is not obliged to listen to them.
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Say rather on ideological grounds, which is where the two meet. The French Revolution, drunk on its own self-image as titans of rationality, destroyed every social safeguard and descended into an orgy of absurdity and barbarity. The American revolution did not, in fact, do this, and neither did the British revolution.
The breakpoint I'm asserting is not changing the system of government, or even changing religions. It is adopting the belief that your cadre alone has found the universal solutions to every human problem, and that the only reason these solutions won't work is if bad people obstruct your perfect plans. This is not a subtle or ambiguous belief, and it has nothing to do with Protestantism or the English Civil War.
I think the American Revolutionary War was more precisely a war of secession rather than a revolution. A "Declaration of Independence" is synonymous with a statement justifying secession, and IMO the American document is an excellent basis for analyzing other secessionary movements. Arguably, the Constitutional Convention resulted in an actual revolution--in that it replaced the government under the Articles with the Constitutional system, and not via a means permitted under the Articles--though an effectively bloodless one.
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