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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"?
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.
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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