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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   31886 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.

For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.

The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.

Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)

Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.

The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.

As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.

I think there's an extra pole in there. My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again. It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case. It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict, and in the battle for hearts and minds.

Basically, you've got a three-pole attractor scenario, a lot like male lizard mating strategies 1. I'm also open to better name suggestions for the three groups, but I feel that the names I picked are evocative enough to justify them.

In this specific type of lizards, you've got monogamous lizards, alpha large-territory-holding lizards, and pass-as-female-to-sneakily-mate-with-the-actual-females lizards. Monogamous lizards get driven out by alphas, alphas get cucked by infiltrators, and infiltrators don't pass well enough to fool monogamous lizards and can't successfully cuck them.

Not that this is any better, but it tracks with the Geeks, MoPs, and Sociopaths framework.

If you're looking for alternate descriptors, I'd use Leaders/Founders/Builders, Followers, and Parasites. Basically one small class of people who can catalyze change, the vast majority of people who follow the first group and by doing so produce surplus value, and third group that does not produce value but instead consumes it.

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It's unlikely Germany would have taken longer than Russia to catch up in nuclear weapons development.

The USSR caught up so fast because of their absurdly-good spy network. The reason the USSR's spy efforts were so good was that the Western intelligentsia leaned heavily socialist in the same way they lean SJ now; back in the 40s said intelligentsia had not learned of/processed the fact that the USSR under Stalin was a terrible place. This meant basically all security against the USSR was compromised from the get-go in exactly the same way any attempt to do anti-SJ things these days is compromised from the get-go. You had absurd things like the UK chief of anti-Soviet counterintelligence being a spy for the Soviets.

The Nazis did not have that advantage. When the Brits went through Nazi intelligence records after the war they discovered that literally every single Nazi spy in the UK had been caught and either imprisoned or turned into a double-agent. Independent invention takes longer than stealing tech, so I don't think it's plausible that they'd have been as close on Western heels as the Soviets were.

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Oh yes, certainly there were a ton of things where Germany was ahead (including missiles, as you note). But it was behind in this particular thing and "steal" is a very fast way of removing tech leads.

The teutonic war machine didn't lose to Audie Murphy and his ilk.

Except that they very manifestly did...

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how was it that the "hopelessly miscenginated" and "distinctly lacking in Nordic warrior spirit" US was able to out produce the Reich not just in absolute terms but in per-capita terms as well?

...Likewise, for all that Anime and World of Warships fans swoon over the IJNS Yamato, the simple truth is that in the one time she actually fought an enemy ship in a gun-on-gun surface action she and he accompanying task-force got absolutely trashed by a detachment of 4 escort ships commanded by a half-breed Cherokee and who individually weighed less than half as much as one of Yamato's gun turrets. As I keep saying. These sorts of things don't happen in a sane world run by math and autistic notions of genetic destiny. As such the only reasonable conclusion is that we do not live in such a world.

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how was it that the "hopelessly miscenginated" and "distinctly lacking in Nordic warrior spirit" US was able to out produce the Reich not just in absolute terms but in per-capita terms as well?

Why do you keep repeating this nonsense? The Anglo-Saxons are a Germanic people, English is of the Germanic language family! They were every bit as Aryan as Germany even by the standards of Hitler- the Nazis regarded the term "Aryan" as a pan-European designation, even including Italians and Poles under the umbrella according to the racial laws of the time, the "Aryan means blonde hair and blue eyes" is purely post-war propaganda meant to straw man what was a pan-European racial concept (one that has been vindicated by modern genetic analysis).

The diaspora and colonizers of the British Empire lacked the "Nordic warrior spirit", that is just so hilariously backwards. You know they conquered the continent right? They were the greatest examples of such a spirit, leaving civilization to conquer savages, tame the wilderness, and build a new civilization...

You openly deny and despise what were their greatest qualities.

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Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

Only when it is convenient to the woke Bay-Aryan's current argument for it to be so, otherwise it's an uncharitable strawman. ;-)

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It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

Why doesn't it determine the acquisition of material resources and foodstuffs?

I honestly don't think I'm being uncharitable or an ass to ask this. The term is "biodeterminism", but now we're talking about resources and food, presumably tied to arable land. That ain't genes any more, is it? We can soften the theory to say that superior genes give a considerable advantage that tells in the long-term, but then there's the problem that the only long term we can test this against is the past, which we already know the results of, and we're not actually going to be around to see a similar stretch of the "long-term" future, are we?

...

It is. What of it?

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

There was a passage you posted once, that talked about how if you stepped through the last few hundred years in fifty-year increments, reasonable predictions would be completely blown out every time. I can imagine reasons why that sort of pattern might not continue, since there's good reasons to think the last few hundred years have been unusually prone to chaos... but why would one be sure the chaos has concluded?

You talk about Anglos devouring the light-cone, an eventuality that, accounting to translation, I think I agree would be less than preferable. Are they going to devour the light-cone because their biology determines it?

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

For the most part, SAT scores and the like – the distribution of individual human traits.

It also explains how North Koreans can have a functional, technologically sophisticated, orderly society in a situation that would have caused any African nation to implode in months.

It goes without saying that HBD is a skeleton key to a lion's share of American political enigmas.

But you probably understand the intellectually serious version of HBD at this point anyway; this flirtation with Hlynka's «Aryans of pure blood r superiors und prevail» Hitlerist gibberish is not something I need to knock down once again. And, of course, Nazis are less prominent in this school of thought than Jews.

HBD is a powerful framework for intra-social analysis; it allows us to ponder questions like these and its answers gracefully stand the test of time, while their rejection is a festering wound of academic culture.

I concede this is far removed from predicting international events, because the way people with different traits are assembled into a society is not trivially determined by those traits. It would have been interesting to discuss whether there is an inherent biological – or any other – reason explaining why, say, Ukrainians can have meritocratic leadership, while closely related (despite certain protestations) Russians are ruled by back alley thugs such as Zolotov and produce headlines like «“Russian Elon Musk” died from rape and torture in jail». And the OG Elon Musk's own biological potential did nothing for South Africa. Von Neumann, too, did relatively little for Hungary and Germany. I dabbled in theorizing about slots for qualitatively different expressions of human potential that some stable societies have and others lack. But it's a difficult topic.

I don't think Anglos (who are «basically mid», again) will devour the light cone; I'm no Cecil Rhodes who explicitly aspired to that nor someone who takes his racist delusions seriously. I'd guess that Musk is a mutt in Hlynka's terms, and Von Neumann's case is obvious enough. Those are the sort of people you need to come up with the idea of tiling the universe in self-replicating probes and the logistics to bootstrap this process.

The thing is, at least one of Anglo-derived societies had assembled the full stack of necessary slots. And it sure looks like their biology, which molds their moral instinct, played a role in making that possible.

I think you know as well as I do.

The sort of person who uses words like "racial homogeneity" and "Hajnal line" without a hint of irony.

...

As to racial homogeneity. do you really think we have any people who're very much in favor of that here ?

Yes. Absolutely.

I vaguely recall reading about a simulation of an iterated trembling-hand Prisoner's Dilemma game set that evolved like this. You'd expect "Tit-for-tat" (let's call it "Copycat", because Nicky Case is awesome) strategy to be the natural winner. But once it's naturally won, in a world full of Copycat players of trembling-hand games it pays to be "Cooperator" instead, because unlike Copycat the always-cooperate strategy doesn't get into nearly-interminable feuds when it or its partner makes a mistake. But when the world then starts to fill up with Cooperator players, it only takes a single always-defect "Cheater" mutant to sweep through the population, so Cheater takes over next. And finally, when the world is full of Cheaters, even a single pair of Copycat has enough of an advantage via mutual cooperation to take over again, and the cycle repeats.

Although, I don't recall that simulation showing any equivalent of the "Copykitten" strategy, which you'd think might be able to short-circuit the Cooperator takeover. I'm not sure whether that's because it just never managed to take over or because the simulated agents didn't have that strategy as an option.

grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case

Seeing this repeated is too much for me. If 'Teutonic war machine' lost to anything American, it was the 1/3rd+ of global industrial output and a continent worth of resources supporting the Europeans - and it was these Europeans that Germans lost out to. List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Edison, Dow, Carnegie... of all the things to imply America was short on, you picked titans of industry?

EDIT: wait, I think I misread what you were saying. Nevermind...

I did not say America was short on them, I implied the opposite - by 'if anyone' I meant, if you're going to list any individual to represent the forces that were of foremost importance in US success in the two wars.

My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again.

This sounds pretty similar to the dicks/pussies/assholes trichotomy popularized by Team America: World Police.

Hard times are darwinistic and kill off weak men. Hard times require group oriented people. Under difficult conditions individual self expression is valued less than the survival of the group.

Group oriented people with strong genetic health create good societies.

Strong socieites allow for more individualism and self centered people. People start avoiding military service, become atheistic, marriage is no longer sacred, immigration increases.

Self centered people create chaos. Andrew Tate-types, Tribes such as the vandals or Mexican drug cartels flurish in this environment. These people party their civilization into hard times.

This reminds me of Ronald Inglehart's Cultural Evolution thesis. He argues that people's social values evolve and are shaped as a function of the extent to which their survival has been established and secured.

One argument essentially takes the position that the values of creativity and self-expression (traditionally associated with liberalism and the left) trump the values of self-preservation and group consensus, only at the point that the group's survival becomes taken for granted. I think that's true. But it's even more instructive for what doesn't get said about that observation. Once you've reached the point where you've taken your survival for granted, you've already made a crucial, civilizational error in your habit of thinking. It reminds me of Lenin's axiom: "Every civilization is three meals away from anarchy." And I think he articulated something that conservatives have known all along. That no matter how technologically advanced, or sophisticated, or well defended your society is, you're never all that far away from the precipice of collapse.

And that's where it really illustrates the fundamental flaw in prioritizing creative self-expression, and independent thinking over group-oriented consensus. The latter which has always been necessary historically, to withstand the rigors of intergroup conflict and external threats. Just ask yourself how pathetic it is when questions about transrights (even if you think they're important) have become a top-shelf item of importance, as far as our cultural discussion goes, in the west today. And then just ask yourself, do you think objectively, that issue will (or should) 'ever' become a top-shelf, issue of importance? This is why I think issues and conversations like this are worth spending virtually no social or political capital one. Because they're so unimportant and inconsequential to bigger issues that'll never go away. No matter how much you think you've secured your place in the world.

I think it’s somewhat true that hard times create stronger people. The problem is that in order for human brains to mature properly, they need to have challenges to be met. The thrivers tend toward immaturity, they would rather play games and put forth minimal effort toward useful things.

I mean sure, but on the other hand in some sense the immaturity (play etc.) is a valid purpose of humanity. What else are we striving for with the term "good times" if not a reduction in demand for useful things, leaving more overhead for playing games?

Well, in my view, you do need a balance of both, but if you end up creating a completely “playful” culture, a lot of things don’t happen simply because those things that need to happen are hard and boring. This is a problem both personally and in wider society.

On a personal level, things like getting a job and doing it, cooking and cleaning for yourself are not exactly fun. And things like gaming, internet scrolling, partying and so on are fun. So a lot of people choose the latter. They take minimal jobs if they take one at all and spend the rest of their time playing. They accomplish very little and end up less happy because they haven’t accomplished much. (https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSYjCgXKOXE)

On a more societal level, building things, fixing things and getting along with everyone else is necessary to keep society humming along. Those things are boring. Who wants to pay taxes to fix roads? That’s not very sexy. Who wants to do the hard work of learning advanced math so they can invent and build important things to make society better? Sitting around discussing literature is much more fun. And self control is not as much fun as doing whatever you want and whenever you want to. It just doesn’t work because unless people know what the rules are and that you’ll mostly go along with them, they can’t really cooperate as they’d have to to make society work.

I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die. Any money you are paid for your labor is only reinvested to make you a more effective employee. Children are still raised (16 hours of schooling and training per day, enter the labor force at 12), but they refund their parents the cost of raising them and thus are merely another labor-raising device. All fun that one has is optimized for perfect recovery to maximize socially useful labor. I think if we look at why such a society was bad, we find what the proper role of fun is: this society doesn't seem to be for anything aside from itself. Is society for man or is man for society? Whereas from the "fun" perspective, or rather the "human values" perspective, we find that we don't need to justify labor: a life with a balance of meaningful challenges, self-actualization and silly fun seems more preferred, even on its own merits, than a life of only one of them. So there are two arguments for labor: first, a society with only fun quickly runs out of fun overhead. This is an argument that even fun-maximalists will embrace, but it doesn't give you meaning in a post-singularity setting where the amount of labor strictly required for fun maximization is zero. The other is that meaningful labor is fun. (At least, if we stretch the meaning of fun somewhat, to mean "fulfilling".) This offers a blueprint for a post-singularity world of voluntarist labor. And in that model, we may imagine that some people genuinely are most satisfied by a life filled entirely with vapid fun, and so what? Their fun does not diminish mine.

I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die.

For most of human history, this has been the case. And the demand for this kind of work hasn't gone away either, just because we live in the modern world. Someone, somewhere, has to do the work. Maybe the work's become more dispersed and technological abstractions have made managing the load easier, but the work itself hasn't disappeared. And a lack of respect for that burden, encouraging people to ignore addressing problems at the expense of their leisure, is only going to exacerbate the problem in the long-run.

Society may not be for anything aside from itself. But for most people, that seems to be good enough when you look at the ways people live their lives. I tend to have much more of a collective view of humanity more than I do an individual one. People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from. Despite being individuals, human beings aren't 'only' individuals. And being an individual may not even be the most important part of being human.

But I don't think this post-singularity world is ever going to come. Everyone on Planet Earth is living on borrowed time that's going to eventually come due.

For most of human history, this has been the case.

Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)

I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.

People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from.

I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.

For most of human history, this has been the case.

I see no rational basis for believing this to be true. Current hunter-gatherers are not a 1/1 replica of our paleolithic ancestors, but they seem a reasonable approximation and do not lack for play or leisure. From all available evidence, farming and herding, even the primitive varieties, include a considerable amount of play and leisure. Quite a few slaves in Rome enjoyed some level of play and leisure; slaves who did not, mine and galley slaves for instance, stand out as famous exceptions.

Just a raw evolutionary argument should nix this: if all previous generations had actually operated in this fashion, wouldn't you be fairly-well adapted to handle such circumstances with equanimity?

Do you have examples of societies where strong men created hard times? And an explanation of how good times somehow emerged from the perpetual cycle of hard times -> strong men -> hard times?

Stalin was an example of who I described as survivor-dominant type, and by all accounts times under him were pretty hard both in the heart of USSR and its periphery, only exceeded by even harder times Hitler decided to bring east.

Fortunately, strongman leaders tend to croak, and that is how the cycle can weaken.

As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.

This is an interesting philosophy, but here's where you lose me. Do you want society to dwindle? Because that's what you think happens when strong men don't exist at all.

Is this something you came up with on your own? I have never heard society explained this way before, so I assume it is, but it does feel like it has some value as a perspective, and I have a really strong sense of deja vu about it. Or it's more like it feels like an unstated assumption underpinning many aspects of modern society.

To clarify: if having to choose between two extremes, I'd prefer no future rather than boot future.

Is this something you came up with on your own?

I'll resist the urge to ask "does anyone really come up with anything on their own" and say this isn't directly based on me analysing some philosophical movement or author. I've had an argument on the motte and wanted to solidify my objections into a separate post.

Life is hard. Some people are shielded from this but just by looking at nature, we can see how savage it can be.

I'd never want to the ones that I love through the hardships I went through. This can create a generation that underestimates how hard life can be.

Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times ...

Strong men like good times too. Here's the thing, there are times when life gets hard, that someone has to act. Weak men tend to fail here. This makes for bad times.

Go to a construction site, how many weak men do you see?

Strong men like good times too.

As I said, pretty much no one embodies the pure archetype. But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering. Not a 1:1 correlation, but certainly not orthogonal.

The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too". This is what I'm attempting to expose and warn against in my post.

But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering.

You should examine your biases.

The failure mode of tough construction site man ...

You misunderstood me. Please, go work on a construction site for a few months. Learn what it takes to actually build something. Learn what that strength actually means because judging from your observations, you're rather ignorant.

The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too".

Whether this is a failure mode or not depends on the specific details of "having it hard." Making your children exercise every day is being harder on them than letting them lounge around on the couch watching cartoons, but the outcome is better; making your children exercise until they throw up or pass out from heatstroke is being too hard on them. There can't be any universal rules at this level of abstraction because people's definitions of hardness are conditional and based on their own experiences; some tiger parents need to be told to take it easy and some parents who are spoiling their kids should be encouraged to be more strict.

As an aside, for an example of a culture whose members took shunning pleasures to the extreme but was nevertheless quite successful, look no further than Puritan New England, which banned everything from music to sports but also produced an outsized number of great scientific and literary figures. I've even heard it speculated that New Englanders had a longer life expectancy than all their colonial neighbors because their food was so bland that people inadvertently practiced the sort of calorie restriction that leads to longevity in laboratory mice.

Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them.

What, the Rome of 200 BC was less functional than the Rome of 300 AD? When Rome was run by really tough, martially inclined men like Scipio Africanus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Julius Caesar, they had more than their fair share of wars and civil wars. But they pulled on through! Rome reached the peak of its power, destroyed its peers, grew faster than ever before. They routinely thrashed barbarian migrations - they were the ones 'migrating' into Gaul and elsewhere.

In contrast, the later Roman Empire was run by weak men who totally lacked the Cannae spirit of 'ban weeping, field new armies, fight on to victory' and they got obliterated. They resorted to paying tribute to barbarians, hiring barbarians to do their fighting for them and hiding behind the (admittedly strong) walls of Constantinople. They were passive, reactive not proactive.

Hard times come after weak men take control. Take Russia - was Gorbachev a strong man? No, he was weak. He wasn't in control of the transformation he tried to undertake. Thus the disaster of the 1990s and disintegration of the USSR (which blows anything Putin's done out of the water). Likewise with Nicholas II for that matter. If Nicholas were a strong man, Stalin would've been executed, not given tiny prison sentences. The guy was a revolutionary, a rioter who organized deadly prison breaks and violent bank robberies!

Now, this is not to say that strong men only bring good things. Hitler and Napoleon were about as far on the 'strong' axis as you can get. Things did not go so well for France and Germany under their rule. Yet there's a wider range of outcomes you can get under strong men than weak men. You can have great success as well as great failure. Under weak men, all you get is decline and eventually disaster.

Too many weak men create space for disaster, but who brings it and perpetuates it? You said it yourself: the barbarians or Stalin do.

The barbarians didn't bring disaster to themselves, it was great being a Frank or a Goth or a Vandal, as opposed to being a Roman. Likewise, you did not want to be a Gaul when Julius Caesar was running around.

Stalin is mixed. On the one hand his economic management and wartime leadership leave much to be desired. But on the other hand, he did win and Russia became a superpower. Could Gorbachev have built such a powerful war machine from the mess that Stalin inherited? Or would he have disintegrated the Union and let Germany eat it for breakfast?

That eventually in your last sentence is load bearing.

Rome's decadence and decline took roughly the entire period we think of as modernity, longer in parts of the East. Gorbachev of course came out of the hard times, even moreso Andropov and Brezhnev.

Without a predictable period to the cycle, the gag just becomes Reversion towards the mean: the musical.

Well, disaster is really contingent on external forces and on how resilient the system is. Rome didn't face many strong external threats until the great migrations of the 5th century because they'd already destroyed Carthage, Pontus, Macedonia, Gaul and only had to deal with Parthia. Plus Constantinople is incredibly defensible.

Under Brezhnev, the USSR was stable. Brezhnev didn't hesitate to use force either, he was definitely a strong man: send dissidents to mental institutions, send tanks into Czechoslovakia. The economic problems with the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and afterwards were definitely solvable with some judiciously executed reforms, as we see from China. Reducing the military budget below 15% of GDP would've been a good start!

All I'm saying is 'Strong men cause a range of outcomes, weak men cause hard times', which is pretty intuitive. I don't even have anything to say about cycles, just that, contra OP, strong men aren't necessarily bad but weak men are.

I wouldn't say they're bad per se, rather that they're a stabilizing agent. If there were only strong men, there would be no society at all, as there wouldn't be enough of the type who mindlessly upholds status quo. Too many however, and no necessary advancement and adaptation can occur.

They're the stabilizing rods of the great nuclear reaction we call society. Too few and it explodes, too many and you choke out the necessary chain reactions.

Why can't strong men uphold the status quo? See pic related. Notwithstanding spelling errors or stereotypes, surely it paints a picture of a tough, patriotic, disciplined, brave man (a strong man). In contrast we have a lazy, timid, pacifist (a weak man). Now these are just archetypes, yet there are surely people who more or less match them. I'm willing to bet the Romans who made Rome great were more like the former, Caesar, Marius and so on, leading from the front, risking all for glory and victory. The Romans who made Rome weak were probably more like the latter - the Empire somehow stopped being able to field huge armies, they had to pay for foreigners to fight for them.

There could well be a status quo that revolves around strength, a status quo that rewards bravery and great deeds. Strong men would fit fine in that.

/images/16886265479896488.webp

Well strong men 'do' uphold the status quo. At least for a given time. Will Durant had a useful heuristic of historical thinking, when he said that, "A nation is born Stoic and dies Epicurean." Good conditions have an inherent quality sewn into the environment that allows idiots and weak men to proliferate, at times it seems, with no end in sight. Until eventually the load becomes too heavy, the pendulum swings back and a historical reversion to the mean takes place. And that's usually how it's been, throughout history.

Civilizations tend not to make course corrections. When they're caught in a negative feedback loop/death spiral, history hasn't suggested that they find themselves a way out of it. They die, and they die hard. Going against the weight of that is no task for mere mortals. Which is the 'why' I'd suggest to you, as to why they can't uphold the status quo indefinitely. One thing Jared Diamond suggested in his historical/geographic determinist view of history that I think is highly relevant, was the question he raised about whether or not societies can change their values. If you want a relevant example where that question becomes important, just look at declining fertility rates all across the world.

I just came across this thread today on Reddit. Which is a great exemplar of this problem. The article isn't as relevant as the comment section, if you can notice how many people are politically blocked (evidenced by Reddit's overwhelming leftist userbase) from noticing the elephant in the corner. If you keep scrolling, a few people noticed it, about midway to the bottom of the thread, and some of them got jumped on for their 'right'-leaning suggestions of an explanation; and why the typical economic explanations are bunk. The reflexive tendency to jump on and attack and dismiss the 'real' source of the problem, are why civilizations broadly speaking, don't recover. And it's why strong men can't uphold them or reverse direction. Because the people overwhelmingly are not allowed to think about the problem, in a way that will allow a correction. And the longer the problem goes on, the worse it gets. And the worse it gets, the more extreme the solutions become. And the more extreme the solutions become, the more unacceptable they are to the population. And then you die.

Good post, agree. I hope people will realize we've been doing things wrong when it becomes more obvious, as economies fail and wars are lost. Like they said about the Soviet Union, 'it was forever, until it was no more'. If not, death is also an automatic stabilizer, the future will belong to those who do things correctly.

Speculation, but I find it suggestive: Strong men increase variation, weak men reduce it. ("Strong men explore, weak men exploit"?) So when things are going bad, you want a certain level of strong men to have a chance to hit a fix; when things are going about as good as can be expected, you want to reduce your strongman:weakman ratio to avoid breaking things. Such a model would also result in the observed men/times cycle if you selected for successful countries.

Phrased like that it sounds suspiciously like "thrive vs survive", which would fit with the "right = strong, left = weak" framing.

Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms via the presidency?

Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms

Possibly. Our success is mostly due to economic output (compare the different nations' military production during WW2, for example), and though our "may the best man win" economy isn't perfect, it's a lot better than "may the best man be chosen by the Ministry of Best Man Allocation and carefully follow the List of Best Man Best Practices".

via the presidency?

Not possibly. Have you seen our presidents?

Up to and including bush senior the majority were extraordinary men. After that the weak men entered the stage.

Obama's considered a great President by a good number of people despite being a fairly 'weak' leader. Hard to tell how history will look back on him a century from now.

That seems entirely dependent on the trajectory our culture takes from now until then.

Does progressivism continue? Then he'll be considered great.

Do we collapse and rebuild? He'll be on the level of James Buchanan.

How muc( of that is geography though? We live in a very stable part of the globe, protected by oceans and friendly neighbors in Canada and Mexico. Americans live in a fortress so long as her navy and air force can keep people from actually landing on our shores.

Of course, if you consider the president whose reign probably most contributed to America's status as the undisputed global champion - FDR - he was a polio-ridden college boy who, at least according to various sources I've seen, was considered bit of an unserious airhead by many "serious" politicians and other types around him - ie. FDR. The only reason why he would be considered a "strong man" was that he succeeded, which means that the cause and effect get mixed up.

Czar Nicholas II is remembered as a weak leader, but if the chips had fallen slightly differently at the start of WW1, he might be remembered as the man who crushed Germany and Austria, took over Constantinople and was one of the greatest Czars ever.

It strikes me that "society attempts to engineer strong men to create/maintain good times" would be an interesting fiction writing prompt. It seems plausible that this could encounter all sorts of pitfalls and ironic outcomes. But I'm sure some authors have already considered this idea ("service guarantees citizenship"), if not head-on. Artificially inducing hard times seems ethically fraught, and seems likely to backfire when discovered. But I'm not much of a fiction writer.

EDIT: I guess Ender's Game largely fits this description, as well.

Starship Troopers is literally that.

That was the source of the "service guarantees citizenship" quote. :)

The Dune series is essentially an extended argument for this position. In fact, Dune makes a stronger point: without war, humanity would go extinct. Too much order (read: good times) lead to decay and death.

Why do people who insist on criticizing the idea of cyclical history always go for the short political slogan version instead of the longform nuanced theories that inspire those political slogans?

A lot of this post seems to stem from arbitrary definitions being held onto a very incomplete understanding of this theory, which is a shame given that people have taken decades to write compelling and detailed explanations of how and why the cycles happen, what they look like, how transition between them look like, and what the quality of the people at any given point of a cycle are.

To boil it all down to strong and weak is appropriate for a political slogan, it is not appropriate for anything beyond that, and certainly not any actual theory of history. If you want to disagree that history is cyclical you can make arguments as to that, and I believe there are strong arguments against (though I am ultimately not moved by them), but argue against Spengler or Khaldun, not some strawman naive palingeneticism even they would deride.

I even think you have a compelling insight in trying to map the survive-thrive axis to Spirit, Asabiyyah, Nomos of whatever quality of organization cyclical theorists use, but actually do that please, don't just map it to some naive (mis)understanding.

Why do people who insist on criticizing the idea of cyclical history always go for the short political slogan version instead of the longform nuanced theories that inspire those political slogans?

but argue against Spengler or Khaldun

Well, I admit - I haven't read those guys, but I've read enough iterations of the political slogan and what were essentially its naive expansions. So I argue against the slogan.

I think the saying is more meme than fact. And a lot of it is just mean reversion. Pre-Roman empire it was likely that randomly one of the many tribes would get excessively lucky with a group of good leaders. They conquor the med. And in good times after luckily having great leaders mean reversion was likely to average leaders. Also Rome lasted for a thousand years. A simple roll of the dice would eventually lead to a string of bad management at the wrong time.

I forget exactly what was in Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” but this meme seems to be based on taking meaning from essentially randomness in leader selection.

Now I’m a big believer in psychic history (Foundation series) so while things like Rome existing I believe in I don’t necessarily think it had to be the Rome we know. Maybe Carthage had better leaders and they conquored the med instead.

For mean reversion think about say Shaq’s son or Jordan’s son. Both played basketball and even college ball but neither are as good as their dad. That’s mean reversion. That’s not this meme.

Now I’m a big believer in psychic history (Foundation series)

Psychohistory?

I think this sort of argument almost always becomes a debate over what exactly the terms "strong men," "good times," etc. mean, but I wanted to bring up one of the better meditations I've read on the topic that agrees with your perspective, namely Bred Devereaux's four part series of posts on what he calls the "Fremen Mirage."

Personally, I'm a bit closer to Ibn Khaldun, in that I've observed degeneration at all scales of biology as soon as selective pressure is released, from yeast in a test tube losing whatever useful (to us) gene you try to insert in them whenever it stops being necessary to survive, to 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants losing the work ethic and conscientiousness that their parents or grandparents honed while toiling away to escape grinding poverty in Asia.

I tend to think of it like a spring that can be coiled and released i.e. all the valuable work comes from the release, not the compression, but it also resets you back to the initial conditions or worse after you let it go. What would be truly great is if we could achieve the advantages of so-called "hard times" or what I call "compression" without actual hardship, whether that's through some sort of mental conditioning, strong enough cultural memes, or direct genetic engineering.

I was going to link Devereaux myself, but I felt OP's post was too crap to bother with haha. Using such vague terminology and just-so stories is akin to calling over all your Motte buddies to look at Rorschach blots, and any useful commentary is despite such a thing.

Your spring metaphor reminds me of a fair amount of literature on athletic performance: everyone agrees that training makes you stronger, but not immediately. Asking folks who just finished a marathon to run another immediately -- but faster now because they've trained more -- is not going to go well. You actually get stronger when resting after training. But rest too long and you start to lose form.

Sports science has figured out all sorts of (imperfect) models for human performance. Generally best results come from periodizing training and recovery to optimize fitness in competition, rather than year-round.

I think your idea generalizes "strong" here to include more than athletic feats. But even accepting that model doesn't make it easy: motivation for self-improvement purely for stoic self-actualization -- thanks, Maslow! -- doesn't in my experience work that well. I try (and do okay, I think) but my greatest efforts and successes in life have had non-actualization driving factors.

Even if we assume it would work -- of which I'm not certain -- it's unclear to me how we'd encourage this at a population level. There have been plenty of pop culture books that have tried, but getting people to clean their room, or even exercise modestly and eat healthier, seems to prove quite difficult for the average human wealthy enough to have a choice in the matter.

In the course of deconstructing the argument, you have thrown out whatever meaning there was to its constituent words.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I believe the original thesis refers to some combination of Darwinism and Turchin's overproduction of elites. It entirely embraces your claim that weak men love to have a good time. Surprise, everyone does. And your «strong men» of the bodybuilders-on-horseback mold are a bugbear, a mirage, a nightmare of confused Hollywood producers and Bay Area rationalists and wannabe "dark elves" – they do not matter and do not last, they are but foam cresting waves of history.

Is Putin a weak man? Are folks on Rublyovka weak, or their children in Western capitals? They've delivered a pretty hard time for everyone, but they sure love to live large. And what about the self-satisfied rich of the developing world, that @2rafa discusses? Are they dedicated to making the whole system more amenable to thriving, or do they find it easy to insulate their kin from the wretched masses and keep having a good time, for their time?

The adage is almost nonsense, but so is your perspective.

I'd say that good men create good times. Good men like the memorable LKY. Good in that they care at all about what happens outside their circle of immediate concern, and strong enough to make hard decisions; which some mistake for them being bad.

In good times, this error becomes more pervasive, as social mobility reaches certain sophistication and a subclass of (some would say, overproduced) elites discovers the utility of playing up those decisions' costs.

Something like this.

You're absolutely right that the body-builder on horseback/Chad Squarejaw meme is a mirage. That is not a strong man, that is a weak man's caricature of a strong man. The strongest and most terrifying of men often come across as unassuming precisely because they are sufficiently self-possessed and confident in themselves, that they don't feel a need to actively project that image.

And yes good men create good times. But good men are rarely reasonable because having principals and caring about people/things outside one's circle of immediate concern is utterly irrational in the conventional sense of the word.

Building on this, I saw no recognition by the OP of the distinctions between types of strength, or even the distinction between power and strength. Weak leaders can have much power, and use the power of their position / context / brute force to paper over their weaknesses against those with less power.

Moreover, the 'strong men are where the survivors are dominant' easily misses that Darwinian selection doesn't select for strength, it selects for survival. Survival only correlates with strength when the selection force is targetting weakness- but it often doesn't. Wars will kill the brave and the selfless first, while cowards who flee live. Purges will select for those with the strength of the (wrong) conviction, but spare the sophists or the deceitful. Darwinian survival isn't survival of the best, it's the propagation of those most likely to multiply. Calling those features 'fitness' is assuming the conclusion.

I think an underestimated component of this is that physical strength/survivability is often down-stream of mental strength/survivability. As the old saw goes, a lot of guys want to be swole, but few have the discipline to eat right, lift weights, and do so with consistency.

Physical strength isn't much good to a doormat, and mental fortitude/astuteness can absolve numerous physical faults, the old Dashiel Hammet bit about how "Guzman didn't move fast, but then then again Guzman never needed to move all that fast because he'd seen you coming from six blocks away" comes to mind.

Agreed, and perhaps a simpler illustration is: why isn't everyone 7ft tall? Sometimes it pays off to be the small guy who just doesn't need to eat very much.

I don't think I agree with your implicit definition of "Strength".

When is Achilles displaying more strength? When he kills Hector and abuses his corpse, or when he accedes to King Priam's request for leave to bury his son? Is a man who can defeat any challenger but cannot rule himself, who remains a slave to his passions truly "Strong"?

You assert that "thrivers" "adjust society" toward thrive conditions. You assert that "weak" men like good times, which seems fair enough. How does their "weakness" contribute to good times, specifically, beyond creating a demand that the less-weak can fill?

You're trading off between "strong/weak" and "thrive/survive" as though they're synonyms. They aren't, and further "thrive" and "survive" seems on a much weaker foundation than "strong" and "weak". The latter we can observe from objective results. The former, from what I've seen, is a model built on the present, and thus assumes its own conclusion, that what we see around us is in fact "thriving", a self-sustaining flowering that can run under its own power in the long-term.

I am not using "strong" here as a positive adjective.

obviously. Likewise, I can assert that "sick" is actually better than "well", but there's no obvious reason why others should take that assertion seriously. See the edits above for more detail.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival. Many men that might be called weak are not useless just because their current skillset would be useless in a harder time. It's also important to note that the ratio of survivor/thriver in a man is not fixed for life.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival.

Yes, but that is an interpretation you are importing from "thrive/survive". That is not the understanding of the person who coined the phrase, nor of the people who repeat it, and you haven't demonstrated why they should, only asserted that they should.

You are claiming that "strength" is nothing but raw animalistic survival potential, and that "weakness" is everything else, and then announce that there are many good things other than raw animalistic survival potential, and so therefore "weakness" is better than "strength". This is obviously true, for what it's worth, but I doubt anyone worth listening to has ever argued otherwise. The question remains of whether "survive/strength" reduces down to nothing more than raw animalistic survival (it certainly does not) and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"? Aesop's grasshoppers "thrived" for a time, and a number of human polities have as well, up until they neglected a few too many things and then died screaming. History strongly indicates that there's no free lunch, that sooner or later the constraints of material reality must be accounted with. The fact that the Thrivers themselves have more or less wholesale begun adopting Survive tools like censorship and enforced conformity kinda paints a bleak picture for the future of Thrive, but hey, as every sucker ever proclaimed: maybe this time really is different!

and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"?

I thought I was rather clear that both extremes are not ideal. Eating your seed corn is the extreme of what I call thrive here.

I don't think the artist is alt-right, but I do think there is an interesting parallel with Nazi propaganda... take this 1932 propaganda poster titled The Negro-isation of France in 100 years, captioned "the last non-colored French form the main attraction of the Paris Zoo"- there's a similar aesthetic with Peterson with the predatory black figures looming over the white people. This Nazi poster and Peterson's work are both interesting to review in context with the current race riots in France, although I do not for a second believe Peterson has the same interpretation of this as the Nazis.

Yes, it's a pretty funny and thought-provoking image really. Black people in it represent competent, essentially Western population, the neo-French (despite crude physiognomy); the legacy French are reduced to smug monkeys thoughtlessly going through the motions, grooming in their effete manner. Unpleasant as it might be for some, it's very different from your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits. Assuming that Blacks surpass whites in those regards, would that image even feel bad for an average believer in the République? Or would he go «eh, why not»?

I wonder how we should understand the author's intent and conception of good and evil.

your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits.

I don't think this is what HBD racists are saying. And if they are saying this, it is because they are trying to distract themselves from the underlying issue, which is that smaller weaker people are afraid on a physical material level of bigger stronger people who are more prone to aggression and violence. Whites and Asians don't "deserve" higher status on contingent merits because they're smarter, whites and Asians "deserve" higher status in society because when you get in the woods the strongest man wins. It's better to try to live in a world where we can have nicer things than simply a brute force competition, all the time, because then you don't have society, you just have the horror of nature which is the very thing society is trying to protect us from to begin with.

Whites are about as big and strong as Blacks and bigger and stronger than Arabs (e.g. Algerians in France), pervasive cuckold fantasies about muh barbarian vigor notwithstanding. This is evident from racial composition in the upper rungs of combat sports.

Asians really are worse off though.

(Freedom of speech.jpg)

It seems pretty obvious from observation of sport that Whites and Blacks are bad units of analysis.

The average of all whites and all Blacks is meaningless, all the outlier athletes come from small sub populations.

Asians really are worse off though.

Kung-fucels in tatters right now. Even as a distant observer, it's funny how the harsh objective crucible of MMA has deflated the mystique of traditional Asian martial arts.

Would MMA allow all the techniques taught in Kung Fu though? I don't think so.

I don't know enough to comment, but I was under the impression that pretty much anything goes in MMA except for kicking the balls and scratching out eyes and biting. Could very well be wrong!

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The marginal techniques like eye gouging, finger breaking, blows to the back of the head, soccer kicks to the head of a downed opponent, etc. Do nothing to prove hypothetical kung fu superiority.

The better fighter will be in a better position to gouge your eyes and to prevent his from being gouged.

Traditional tai-chi masters are indeed in shambles from MMA.

On the other hand, Muay Thai has been proven to be effective fighting style (excuse the dramatic narrator).

This video is of showbox in 1988 between the top American Kickboxer and a Muay Thai fighter using limited rules preventing elbowing, throwing, grabs, and limiting below-waist hits to a low kick. The kickboxer gets kicked in the leg so many times he starts dodging and running around at 5:50, and ends up carried away in a stretcher.

MMA rules allow lowkicks and elbows in some positions. Fighters study techniques derived from Muay Thai, along with other lineages like Greco-roman wrestling and Juijitsu. And "MMA style" is just whatever works in the ring's rules.

Quoting https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/

An analogy: naturopaths like to use the term “western medicine” to refer to the evidence-based medicine of drugs and surgeries you would get at your local hospital. They contrast this with traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, which it has somewhat replaced, apparently a symptom of the “westernization” of Chinese and Indian societies.

But “western medicine” is just medicine that works. It happens to be western because the West had a technological head start, and so discovered most of the medicine that works first. But there’s nothing culturally western about it; there’s nothing Christian or Greco-Roman about using penicillin to deal with a bacterial infection. Indeed, “western medicine” replaced the traditional medicine of Europe – Hippocrates’ four humors – before it started threatening the traditional medicines of China or India. So-called “western medicine” is an inhuman perfect construct from beyond the void, summoned by Westerners, which ate traditional Western medicine first and is now proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

One could say that the European far-right of the 1930s feared humiliation primarily in front of other Europeans, whereas those of the 2020s fear destitution and powerlessness at the hands of the other. The first is about a kind of racial cuckolding (maybe literally, given Nazi obsession with the 'rhineland bastards' etc), the second is the direct fear of becoming destitute, irrelevant, or a victimized minority. I do think a lot of European ethnat rhetoric is strongly influenced by postcolonial Said type discourse and by the experiences of decolonization.

Interesting when it comes to the history of German racial relations is the Reichstag's interracial marriage debate of 1912. They legalized it (or kept it legal, rather) in part because the social democrats showed the parliament photographs of pretty native Pacific Islander and Southwest African girls and even the centrists agreed they were as attractive as German women, and therefore acceptable.

They legalized it (or kept it legal, rather) in part because the social democrats showed the parliament photographs of pretty native Pacific Islander and Southwest African girls and even the centrists agreed they were as attractive as German women, and therefore acceptable.

These are the real conversations we need to be having.

As an aside I'm currently reading a more recent-ish history of the Bounty mutiny and am being reminded at how devastating Pacific Islander women are to the underpinnings of European civilization.

Pacific Islander women, Asian Women, European Women, Thicc Latinas, it makes no difference. The pursuit of the degenerate makes one a degenerate and the wages of sin are death.

In general I have a very low opinion of any piece of commentary that consists of "look at how much they hate you/us". You see it in a much more mainstream way on the US left re. certain recent SCOTUS decisions too. It's an embarrassing way to act, a facile way of trying to drum up rage and aggression and to radicalize your side. Hatred is not uncommon in politics, but it seems to me that it is often less of a motivation than the opposing faction expects.

I once had an internet argument with someone who argued that Mugabe's land expropriation had been motivated by a hatred of whites. I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country. White farm owners were targeted because they were a small minority that owned a lot of land the government wanted to redistribute to veteran soldiers to try to avoid a civil war; whites were the unfortunate victims of that policy. I don't think most ordinary Germans hated Jews in 1939, even though my grandmother and her parents fled the Holocaust and many members of my extended family died in it; in her mid-90s today, she doesn't have any hatred for Germans and enjoyed speaking German on her many vacations there and to Switzerland.

'They hate us, so I will hate them' is the eternally flawed flipside to the 'mistake theory' fallacy, where everyone in the world is just a temporarily embarrassed western liberal with the same ideals but different views on execution. In truth, they usually don't hate you, they're just different to you. And they'll screw you over to save themselves, which is unfortunately true of almost all people, individually and in groups.

they're just different to you

Did you mean to say that they're indifferent?

And they'll screw you over to save themselves, which is unfortunately true of almost all people, individually and in groups.

White people in shambles, bless their hearts 🙏. What negative in-group preference does to a mf. But since they've been nothing but nice to me, I return the favor by doing my best to warn them about the non model minorities, while not biting the hand that feeds.

I don’t have negative in-group preference at all, I just think that outright hatred is less common as political motivation than people think. I also think that ‘mistake theory’ is broadly wrong (and generally vaguely western supremacist, for what it’s worth), but I think a comprehensive understanding of ‘conflict theory’ suggests that conflict is usually a result of expediency rather than hatred.

I did mean difference.

Different peoples have different cultures, identities, interests. They are usually fine with others as long as their own interests are not threatened. This is the best and most full argument against immigration (and one I agree with). But hatred is too strong a conclusion to draw from it. Difference is enough.

I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country.

...and did they counter-argue the pretty obvious selection bias given your context and who you were working with specifically, i.e. the surviving winners and those who had monetary incentives to put you at ease?

I don't think your argument supports what you think it does. The point of 'the collective hates [X]' isn't that every member of the collective shares the same vibe of the group, an objection which itself would be a form of fallacy, but that the group effects is dominated by those who do. Most ordinary Germans may well not have hated Jews in 1939, but they were also onboard with a regime that absolutely did, hence why so much of German post-war political identity had to confront the 'I wasn't directly involved, and thus not my issue' collective identify in order to rehabilite a collective German political identity.

Likewise, the successful surviving white business men you met who were willing to work amiably with you may not have had significant expeirences with those who shared a regime stance... but the white businessmen were, by definition, the survivors who made accommodations and allies and friendships with/within the regime to protect themselves. The ones who didn't- the ones who would have been dispossesed out of spite- wouldn't still be in business for you to deal with.

The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler. Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people. Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency. And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t. I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.

What in your estimation is the percent of black Americans have white people?

The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler.

Well, obviously, but the scope of people who have both the animosity and the means to attempt genocide are very narrow. This is a bar so low the only reason it's not a tripping hazard is the straw.

The point you were challenged on was that you weren't in a position to hear the contrary experiences of others who might have differed from your business partners, who had financial incentives to assure you that you could make good money with/for them.

Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people.

You're conflating the individual for the group, which was the same error with your Nazi metaphor. Just as members at the bottom of a faction may not share the vehemence of a faction, but it's still fair to characterize the faction in a way, this is also true for the people at the top of a faction. Leaders may not believe a certain narrative, but can also be comfortable co-existing with it / leveraging the people who do / the general complicity of not challenging an unjust system they partake of.

Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency.

Aside from not really being relevant to changes over time (Mugabe not having static policies over 30 years implies he had changing opinions, not that he never had certain opinions), the first 20 years of Mugabe's presidency were more or less the American unipolar/western hyper-power period, which included multiple American interventions in Africa, while the last 10 years coincided with both the post-American/western low of the financial crisis and pre-ISIS/post-Iraq... both of which offered opportunity and basis for movements to arise blaming nebulous white-west types as scapegoats.

And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t.

Am I expected to deny the OP before or after I deny beating my spouse?

I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.

And your supporting argument of personal experiences in Zimbabwe don't support this point, and was not immune to challenge on grounds of you self-selecting the narratives that would deny an issue if there had been one.

People whose jobs it is to convince white people, or people with many white bosses and coworkers, to invest money in a place are typically not going to tell said white people that their money is more likely to be stolen on account of them being white.

He doesn't need to personally hate white people in order for them to be a convenient whipping boy -- see, uh -- J Edgar Hoover springs to mind?

But if somebody acts as though they hate you for other reasons, is it really worth parsing out the difference between the people who actually hate you and the ones that are only pretending to be retarded racist?

Yeah, this is an interesting one. What was that Scott Alexander concept, a scissor statement?

The artist seems to generally give a huge range of his figures the same kind of face no matter what role they are playing in the paintings.

Both his Mueller and his Trump in this one have the same kind of eyes and mouth as the supposed savage blacks in the other paintings, which makes it less likely that the black figures in the other ones are supposed to be ethnic Africans.

The black figures here and here pretty clearly are meant to be representations of an American police state, not of virtuous ethnic Africans.

Then there's stuff like this where aggressors and victimized look the same.

Ancient Greek vase painting, with its sharp outlines, exaggerated human figures, and black/red/white color fills, has a heavy influence on his stuff. Of course he might be using the colors racially, but as I have pointed out above, this is far from clear.

His attacks on America and his hatred of Trump and cops are not necessarily signs of any sort of extreme leftism. All those are common attitudes among people ranging from boomer liberals to libertarians. In our political climate, they of course code left, but there are ten million fairly moderate boomer Hillary voters who share those opinions yet are not some sort of frothing antifa members.

Cleon Peterson is a leftist creep and makes it plainly obvious in his work. If you saw his 'art' on the wall of someone's house, you would immediately assume they're part of some villainous organization, or that they want to look like a villain.

Go look through his Artsy page: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson

It's pretty clear he hates the USA (Destroy America), Donald Trump (Stop the Virus, Useless Idiot and about 1/10th of his portfolio), racists (Practice Intolerance). There's not an apolitical bone in his body. I challenge anyone to tell me that they've looked through 4 or 5 pages of his work and believe he could be altright.

Say I made a painting of a long-nosed, weaselly, greasy, fat, lecherous bastard clutching onto coins being hung from a lamp-post by some stern-faced Teutonic workers - people would quite reasonably assume it was aimed against Jews and that I was a Nazi. I might protest that it was really about destroying the values of greed with hard work - that it was just timeless symbolism. Yet it's pretty obvious that it's not just about that. Images have meaning. Ideas have meaning.

If you make a bunch of paintings about brutish, Uruk-Hai looking blacks slaughtering whites, then people are going to make perfectly reasonable assumptions about the implied meaning, based on context and the clear slant of the artist.

Is this to say that you actually believe the interpretation in OP's first link, that is, that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable? The "Uruk-Hai looking" figures are intended as the protagonists? Can you think of any historical example where a political group depicted themselves or their allies in such a fashion, without the slightest connotation of righteousness, beauty or heroism, or do you believe that your outgroup is actually the most morally and aesthetically alien group of humans to have existed on the historical record?

that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable?

Well he couldn't possibly have missed it, it's pretty damn obvious. Contra OP's suggestion that Mr Peterson is apolitical, he's clearly aware of and makes obvious use of political imagery. A quick glance through his portfolio reveals that. A quick glance at the titles of his paintings reveals that.

Motte: Timeless representation of power dynamics and authoritarian violence with caustic debauchery in a revealing display of...

Bailey/What's In Front of Your Lying Eyes: Destroy America, kill Trump, kill racists, the police are oppressive, democracy is a joke, orgies of violence with the strong and obvious implication of whites being killed en masse.

Context is key. If you look at someone's portfolio and just see stuff like this then sure, you could say he might be far right. There is that whole day of the rope meme after all: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/cleon-peterson-absolute-power-7

Or if his portfolio is all stuff like this then sure, he might be a centrist: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/cleon-peterson-what-have-we-lost

But that's not predominantly what Mr Peterson produces, I've looked through his work and it's pretty clear! Didn't you have to go through English in secondary education, where they'd teach you how to find hidden meaning from far less obvious texts. Robert Frost's Fire and Ice for instance, I was taught that it actually had reference to future world wars which might be fought over hot emotions like desire, or stem from a chilling lack of care for the plight of others, that inaction might doom the world. People read in ridiculously far to hidden meaning in poems and art, yet we're not allowed to take what's immediately obvious from Mr Peterson's portfolio? It all but drips malevolence.

Can you think of any historical example where a political group depicted themselves or their allies in such a fashion, without the slightest connotation of righteousness, beauty or heroism

I can think of many actually. It's a very common thing in warfare and other pursuits where it's in your interest to be seen as a savage with no regard for decency.

If you want a recent one consider Russians depicting themselves as Orks. If you want an older one, consider Pirates.

But interestingly in the particular example we're seeing here (modern leftist ideological art), there is an ideological reason for it, which is the explicit deconstruction of those things you list: beauty, righteousness and heroism. Those are all oppressive norms of whiteness that must be abolished. And instead we must "center" "ugly bodies" and "black bodies".

Is this to say that you actually believe the interpretation in OP's first link, that is, that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable? The "Uruk-Hai looking" figures are intended as the protagonists?

I don't believe they're intended as the protagonists per se. You were looking for a historical example, so let's look at some ancient Roman art - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Tunisia-3363_-_Amphitheatre_Spectacle.jpg

People making art like this are not identifying with the beast - the protagonist is actually the observer, who is seeing a savage animal painfully kill, torture and degrade their enemies. Cleon himself isn't actually black either, which isn't what you would expect if the black figures were meant to be the protagonists as you describe... but it does match up with the reading that these white figures are his outgroup, and his art is just glorifying the dispossession, dismemberment and raping of his outgroup in the manner that he believes they would find the most distressing.

As far as I can tell the original video is no longer online.

An unofficial reupload on youtube exists. I wonder if Europeans were similarly offended when they discovered that people in African and Asian art look more like natives than Europeans.

it's a peculiar sort of chauvinism.

And given the apparent racial overtones of the art, who’s to say that Peterson isn’t a rather extreme member of the Alt-Right, rather than a progressive leftist, and is trying to depict blacks as vicious barbarians that must either be evicted or destroyed?

Contra

I'm not going to dispute that Peterson is a leftist,

From here it looks like you were either purposely trying to deceive people here, or are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot be bothered to spend ten seconds looking at an artist's body of work before trying to write intelligently about the topic. I don't want either of those to be the case so I'd really like to hear a good explanation for why you think this is acceptable behaviour in a conversation (not trying to backseat mod or anything, but if somebody did this to me in a real conversation I'd be seriously offended and want to stop talking to them).

From here it looks like you were either purposely trying to deceive people here, or are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot be bothered to spend ten seconds looking at an artist's body of work before trying to write intelligently about the topic.

"I don't want either of those to be the case" is not enough of a disclaimer for throwing a line like this. Please be less antagonistic even if you think someone is being disingenuous.

I don't understand why the great grandparent post of the chain did not already invite a moderator response. Do you consider referring to public figures as "(outgroup) creep[s]" to be within the rules, conducive to maintaining a good tone of debate here or at all inviting (outgroup) to participate, or do you think there are some extenuating circumstances here that justify it in this particular case? As childish as the impulse is, I'm really finding myself wishing I could go around referring to moderately respected figures on the other side as "rightist creeps" until I find out directly, but I presume that the only thing that would happen would be downvotes and outpourings of organic hostility that would make any modhat warnings on top of them superfluous in broadcasting how one is now okay around here but not the other.

Would you be bothered if Ranger had just called him a regular creep and a shitty, hateful artist, rather than specifying the group identification of the creepiness?

I would consider it bad, but not bad in a way that specifically infringes on the goals of this forum like the political group qualification does. Similarly, it surely would make a difference if someone were called a "Jewish creep" (and probably draw much more mod attention, as they still seem to be interested in keeping the forum from pushing away anyone outside of the "JQ right").

Trump

I don't think those are good either, but well. It's already been the case for quite a while that the more intellectual right wingers want to lower Trump's status so as to move on to a better strategy, explaining why organic opposition to anti-Trump posting is lower. Finally, the group identifier really is doing a lot of work. (Compare calling Epstein a "creep" to calling him a "Jewish creep".)

One is just denigrating the person; the other one is suggesting that the imputed negative qualities are related to, characteristic of or even a consequence of being a member of the group in question.

Do you consider referring to public figures as "(outgroup) creep[s]" to be within the rules, conducive to maintaining a good tone of debate here or at all inviting (outgroup) to participate, or do you think there are some extenuating circumstances here that justify it in this particular case?

Generally speaking, we'd prefer people not just throw insults, but public figures are more or less fair game as long as there is some substance to the post and not just ranting about how much you hate Trump or Biden or Cleon Petersen. But yes, if you were complaining about, say, right-wing media and called Matt Walsh a "fascist creep," you'd probably get downvoted, but you would not be modded for that alone.

Ugh. I don't think this is a good interpretation of the rules (and I think I explained in a parallel post why I think that). Allowing this sort of insult adds nothing to the discourse, raises the temperature and very likely turns away people in a way that reinforces any existing ideological slant as it simply allows dominant majorities to assert their dominance. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part but I think we used to be much stricter about that sort of thing, which, yes, resulted in a constant low rumble of discontent -- but it's not like even CWR, which embodied the "we will not stifle your ability to express your righteous feelings" approach and predictably listed right until it capsized for it, didn't have the same amount of malcontents for whom even the little rules that were still enforced were too much.

On that matter, how would you feel about "Jewish creeps"? (I'm now noticing to my dismay that my phone's predictive keyboard app has already learned to suggest the second after the first thanks to this subthread.)

Ugh. I don't think this is a good interpretation of the rules

If you can persuade Zorba we should crack down on insulting public figures, we'll do that, but generally speaking, we've never modded someone just for being mean to celebrities and politicians. Only if their entire post is a screed about Person I Hate or general booing. Frankly, I am not willing to go through an election season trying to enforce "charity" towards all political candidates. "Trump is a big orange fat-ass!" is a pretty easy comment to mod because it's low effort and inflammatory for no good purpose, but IIRC you (or someone else) wanted me to mod someone for calling Kamala Harris a "weak candidate." Come on.

On that matter, how would you feel about "Jewish creeps"

The rules against making derogatory generalizations about a broad group of people (which includes posters here) covers that.

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The original comment presents an argument for why the paintings can be perceived through either a far left or far right lens.

This argument exists because you are being deceptive about the artist behind them. You actively called him "apolitical" - again, you were actively lying in order to bolster your argument, in the same way I would be if I took one of those dumb Trump NFTs depicting him as a superhero and said "Oh, we can't really be sure of the original artist's beliefs - you could interpret this from a left wing OR right wing perspective!".

However, in both comments, what I'm saying is that's it's irrelevant what Peterson actually believes

You were the one who claimed that he was apolitical, so you very clearly thought that what he believed was actually relevant, otherwise you would not have brought it up.

(and for the record I don't think his intention is to depict black people slaughtering white people because he hates whites or something

My reading is that this work is as shallow as it appears to be on the surface - a depiction of his outgroup (right wing/flyover white people) being humiliated and tortured in the way that he thinks they would find most distressing (racial violence from THEIR outgroup). When you look at the piece in the context of the rest of his work, the most obvious interpretation seems all the stronger to make.

You might want to look at a broader range of his stuff. See what I wrote here. He is certainly not apolitical, but I do not think that the idea that his work is meant to depict "his outgroup (right wing/flyover white people) being humiliated and tortured in the way that he thinks they would find most distressing (racial violence from THEIR outgroup)" holds up.

Plato would likely argue that an intellectualized interpretation of art should have no influence on whether art is permissible. The purpose of art is to better the mind and soul of the median viewer, the citizen. If the art fails to do this, it ought to be banned. The public viewer is not going to over-intellectualize the art, but come away with an essentially intuitive understanding of what is happening. Peterson’s art is degenerate, and has no good in it whatsoever for a citizen of Plato’s Republic, for these reasons:

  1. The viewer just saw an ugly and violent scene, but with no practical and memorable warning to his own conduct, and with no cathartic release of emotion. In other words, the scene promotes stress but with no prosocial or beneficial emotion or consequent. So, you’ve just made a common person stressed for no reason.

  2. Not only have you wantonly stressed the viewer, but you’ve done this when he has expected something quite the opposite, and you’ve taken the spot of something that could otherwise have been very beneficial to the median citizen.

I find the question of what is beneficial and what is degenerate art easy to answer, it just requiews reasoning about the implications of the exposure. Let’s consider It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a stressful movie with some tragic elements, but the stresses act as a warning to your practical conduct in world affairs. This will increase the chance of living a wonderful life in the future. Let’s consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. A true tragedy with a fate of everlasting torture! What could be the benefit? Well, to induce a beneficial fear. Let’s consider a Clockwork Orange. Does it condone violence? Yes, and perhaps it does this too well — but it asks the viewer the important question of whether we ought to modify behavior using top-down conditioning (apropos!). How about, hmm, a Wes Anderson movie? If there are beautiful shots and scenes that sooth a person and inspire someone to live a more wholesome life, it is good. And so on. What would be banned? A show like Ozark that is a kind of “stress porn” stimulator but with no discernible practical takeaway to your life. A show like Kardashian’s which reduces sum total happiness among women. Fast and Furious movies. And so on.

The Peterson work they picked to go underneath the eifel tower is not one of the violent ones. It's based on some 1400's Italian book where a lovers kiss wakes someone from eternal slumber. If you don't project ideas of racialized dominance on the stylized white and black figures it's a sort of romantic piece with people dancing around the central couple.

The violent ones are shown in galleries to precisely the sort of person likely to develop an overly intellectual view of art.

I increasingly believe that politics, rather most people's political views, is mostly just a function of culture. It's all just a function of the cultural lens. Perspective and values don't make a distinction between the political and cultural realm. Every generation is characterized by a specific dominant cultural lens that is unique in a. what it identifies to be a problem and b. the solutions it prescribes as a response to those problems (generally just meaning the ideal state of existence, which is generally just the inverse of what the state created by the problems is, so ultimately just meaning the norms that are implied and advocated for by the cultural lens). Political views are simply just the attempt at constructing the reality that culture upholds as the ideal; culture is the architect and politics is the builder. That's why when you consume entertainment, comedy in particular, from previous generations it isn't as enjoyable: because culture, which entertainment plays a key role in (in terms of its ability to convey and construct norms), is highly contextual.

But every generation thinks they have arrived at the correct perception of things, and as a corollary they have arrived at the correct view of how things should be. But when this perspective is implemented it always falls short and its shortcomings are evidenced by the fact that the implementation doesn't achieve what its supporters expect for it to achieve. That is what moves thought: the dialectic, the implementation of the counterpoint that reveals the excesses of the counterpoint which eventually necessitates a reversion to a midpoint that seeks to preserve the merit of both the status quo and the counterpoint. It's this constant movement through the dialectic that forces thought and perception to evolve, which is itself powered by shifting perspectives which are rooted in realizing the limited merit of the previously implemented perspective but also that the world which is being perceived is constantly changing (i.e. there are two types of movement: movement within the dialectic and movement of the centerpoint of the dialectic, or what substance the dialectic framework is meant to address). I often wonder if the world had just stopped changing, would we have eventually arrived at a perspective that was objectively supreme, correct, and accepted? Would thousands of years of evolution of thought, with its ability to shape the subject of evolution slowly to be a perfect response to that which it is evolving in response to, eventually have brought us to a cultural lens that is a perfect understanding of how the world is and should be, and, further, would it have eventually brought us to a world that is objectively perfect? But I guess to get back to the point the reason I think we never arrive at that perfect solution is that the focus of this dialectic movement is changing. It's like you're constructing a car optimized to drive on roads, but the roads keep changing.

...

From the 1964 "Suicide of the West" by James Burnham. Which ends with this black pill:

If a decisive change comes, if the contraction of the past fifty years should cease and be reversed, then the ideology of liberalism, deprived of its primary function, will fade away, like those feverish dreams of the ill man who, passing the crisis of his disease, finds he is not dying after all. There are a few small signs, here and there, that liberalism may already have started fading. Perhaps this book is one of them.

How’s that working out for him?

I’d be interested in reading more about how that book held up.

I would argue that both are often preceded by philosophy. Why do we believe that equality is even a social good, or that the common man should ever have a voice? For tens of thousands of years prior to the enlightenment, the very idea was mocked. You were born into a social position and there you stayed. It was simply expected that if you were the child of a king that alone gave you legitimacy as the ruler of your people. If you were the child of a peasant farmer, it was a waste to teach you to read because you were destined to be a farmer on some lord’s land. Nobody ever thought about it or if they did, they came to the conclusion that this simply should be.

Likewise we understand the universe in a rational empirical way. For most of human history, it wasn’t so. The universe was run by some kind of spirits and that’s why things are as they are. That tower fell? God caused it.

And later on politics tries to enact things that philosophy has taught. We believe in equality, so we better do something because it’s not happening on its own.

...

There is a level lower than culture: material reality. Unlike less intelligent beings, humans can adapt quickly to a new ecosystem by learning traits that are advantageous in that ecosystem. We don't have to wait for multiple generations for small changes in behaviour, we can develop a culture in a company in a matter of weeks. A national culture can evolve in centuries, while the corresponding differences would take at least three orders of magnitude longer if they were genetic.

Culture changes as the ecosystem changes and new cultural adaptations arise. These changes can be due to cultural changes as well as the material reality changing. Much of the cultural change we have seen in the past decades has happened in the parts of the world that consume the most oil. The social upheaval of the past century is less grounded in cultural innovation and more grounded in the ecosystem being fundamentally altered by fossil fuels. Hyperindividualism makes sense when mortality salients are largely gone. When there is enough material excess for people not to have to rely on social networks in order to get by the selection becomes a function of standing out in the crowd.

The Afghan culture is a function of small groups of isolated people trying to survive in a resource constrained environment.

Climates change, resources become more or less scarce, pandemics, wars and other factors will change the ecosystem. I do agree with human cultural change being a major driving factor but the world around us has changed profoundly.

if you re read the second paragraph I think you’ll see we agree that it’s a combo of cultural and external change

This appears to be a straight copy-paste of the following article:

https://caffeineandphilosophy.com/2017/05/15/the-violent-artwork-of-cleon-peterson/

Written by "C.B. Robertson" on May 15, 2017.

This author has clearly never considered that this minimalist and highly symbolic artwork (by the commenter’s own admission) might not be depicting the different colors of people literally. The black men and the white men may or may not be blacks and whites; they could very well be the darker halves and lighter halves of a shared human nature ... What this means for the cultural Platonists is that even if we are not libertarians (as I am not), we still ought to act as if we are civic libertarians on most matters that fall outside our realm of expertise, and even some matters that we do know a fair deal about.

A friend of mine is hugely into art, has an MFA and has worked at NYC galleries. We were touring some galleries once, looking at some modern art sculpture that some high concept title and description on it ... but it kind of looked like poop. I asked him, "Do you think the artist knows it looks like poop?" He replied: "Of course, that's part of the game." And then later I pointed out one that looked phallic, and my friend said "of course the artist intended that."

The grug brain / midwit / topwit meme really comes to mind here...

Modern artists seem to be addicted to trolling. Telling people who point out the obvious, intuitive message of some piece of art that they have a dirty mind and they are simply not sophisticated enough is part of the trolling. I don't think the artist is propagandizing in favor of white genocide -- but rather he is probably getting a private chuckle from watching all the sophisticated, effete, white male art critics who will praise the artwork and its "symoblisms of unity" while studiously avoiding saying the blatantly obvious.

There is no reason to reward this trolling with display in public areas. As /u/coffee_enjoyer points out, this "art" does not educate us, does not spiritually uplift us, does not display some amazing abilities of craftsmanship so there is no reason to give it any respect at all. The mural should be replaced by something better.

I lost all faith in the interpretation of 'art' by others due to this sort of trolling. It just ceased to be worth my time beyond my own personal judgment and enjoyment.

For a personal anecdote, the first time I came across this idea of trolling was when an artist friend of mine was trying to get funding for an orchestra to play the Jaws theme at one of the most popular beaches in our city as part of a larger display. Once you've seen behind the curtain, it's impossible to unsee it.

Seems like a lot of words to say very little. You needed 1069 words to say Australians wanted to be white untill 1960?

"This will be the first in a five part series on Jewish influence on Austrlian immigration policy."

You can stop at one part, buddy.

Although I cannot find the link (@2rafa's Google fu is apparently better than mine), this certainly looks like something copypasted from Kevin MacDonald, complete with citations of his own works.

I'll give you an opportunity to convince me otherwise or explain yourself, otherwise you are looking at a ban for bad-faith engagement. (You are allowed to link and quote people, you are not allowed to copy an entire essay from elsewhere and pretend it's yours, just to test for reactions.)

Imo you should delete first and ask questions later, he’s abusing your charity with his alts. He wants eyeballs for far right blogs, and you’re cooperating with a defectbot. I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda, when this guy is constantly flooding the forum unprompted, and just far far worse.

We will never satisfy everyone, between those who want us to ban first and ask questions later, and those who think we should never ban anyone without absolute proof of wrongdoing.

I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda

No one has suggested banning Hoff.

I thought Hlynka was too trigger happy too (still think he was, most of the time). I don't support bans generally, but this is a clear-cut case.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

He's used up all the benefit of the doubt he's entitled to. Treat him as guilty and let him appeal if it's some insane coincidence.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

Dude, give us a minute. I am not going to make a snap decision ten minutes after I post the warning.

I think you should delete the comment, it's a bad look, it takes up space in the thread, and it's a clear troll and a sign that people who violate the rules blatantly and repeatedly can have their trolling stay up.

I'd likewise prefer to see this thread deleted and the poster banned. Copy-pasting someone else's essays is low-effort by definition, and they're clearly making a habit of it. Leaving the post up gives them a limited win, and I see no benefit to allowing them to see their strategy rewarded.

As always, though, I defer to the judgement of the mods.

link: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/10/01/the-war-on-white-australia-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1-of-5/

quotes around the entire thing for exact matches are good for trying to find a source for a verbatim sentence

Thanks. I tried the quotes thing but for some reason didn't get that hit.

From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.

I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.

Do you not get the option for verbatim mode, or does it not work for you? It's buried in there for me, but if I do a search, I get a little "Tools" button below and to the right of the search bar, and then from there I can switch from "All Results" to "Verbatim", where "Verbatim" actually respects quotes still.

If they're removing even that escape hatch I think it's time for me to find a new search engine.

Admittedly it's been years since my experience with it, but I don't recall that being an option at the time. Could've just missed it though. Thank you for mentioning it, it'll likely help me out in the future.

deleted

Now unlike the above, this is merely "something I read somewhere at some point" and not official, but:

I've read that it's worse than that. They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

The A/B testing is specifically trying to make the experience worse for users.

They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

I was not in search quality, but that would not match my experience at Google. The idea was to return a useful result, not to keep the user searching.

Good to know, and I'll take your word for it over random-poster-on-other-forum.

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The only thing I've encountered in this vein lately is that their bot-detection algorithm seems to interpret "many searches for slightly different search terms in rapid-ish succession" as bot behaviour, resulting in a captcha -- which kind of adds insult to injury when one is trying to nudge the algo to stop serving an infinite selection of (bot-generated?) obvious clickfarm results as the first page...

You could have just posted the article and talked about why it’s interesting in the OP

I'm removing this comment. I am writing this reply but I don't actually know if this reply will still be visible after I remove this comment; I apologize in advance for whatever problems that creates!

The comment I am removing was recognized as uncredited copypasta by users. If the mod team had immediately recognized it as such, we may have removed the comment more quickly, as uncredited copypasta is a form of spam. But we had to verify, and there was some inter-moderator discussion going on.

I remind everyone that while our default position is not to remove comments--and certainly not to censor debate or stifle discussion of difficult topics--some users are not interested in discussion, as Zorba talks about in the latest META post. Sometimes it's hard to know who these users are. Sometimes we make bad calls as moderators. I apologize in advance if that's what I'm doing now.

But I admit, for the moment, that I doubt it. I'm also perma-banning the user for spam at least until such time as I am persuaded that they are not, in fact, just a spammer.

Just copy-pasting articles from Kevin MacDonald's blog in 2018 (Google said it might originally have been from a site called 'Expel The Parasite' although it was reposted by the 'Occidental Observer'), or anyone really (especially without attribution) isn't acceptable on this board, sorry. I suggest that you take your ban and, instead of making another alt this time, think carefully about how you might actually contribute to this forum in future.

Anyone have any inside information on the riots in France? Are they de-escalating yet? From the outside it seems hard to find undigested information.

It certainly looks like the riots are dying down (the number of arrests per night have gone down), but this impression may also be an effect of the government leaning on the media (this is a tried and tested method in order to limit competition between different suburban groups).

The government is also testing the waters for possibly imposing a black out on social media, I assume in part to encourage social media companies to self censor incitement to riots.

There might be flare-ups though in case of deadly shootings, or also on Bastille day next week. Some people were asking last week: why don't they start shooting? I guess that shooting makes a few people dead, but a whole lot of people very angry.

For the moment, the situation appears to be one of exhaustion in many relevant groups. The easy targets have been looted, and looters caught in the act have been sentenced immediately and harshly. Finally, messing with the police is much less fun if your mum is angry with you because she now has to walk much longer to find a supermarket that hasn't been looted or burnt down.

It is also an easy way to limit unapproved narratives that are damaging to the current government and support the out of power party (parties).

The next election is four years away, it’s less of a problem than if this had happened two years ago.

All the better to get the precedents sorted out now, so you have them ready when you really need them.

Is that falsifiable?

Macron can call another legislative election whenever now that a year has passed though, right? I was kind of assuming he planned to do that right at the year mark to get out of the minority but I guess coming right after the pension protests no one expects he’d win.

I saw on observation on Twitter that even the worst riots have about a five day lifespan. Watts, Newark, Rodney King, and so forth would all burn out as the rioters basically got tired of rioting. Something with staying power beyond that would be something worth worrying may become more than a riot.

That casts the 2020 riots in a different light. While most of the individual riots didn't have staying power, a few did. The assaults on the federal courthouse in Portland happened every night for about three months. CHAZ/CHOP lasted about three weeks.

And the Gilets Jaunes unrest in France lasted much longer than five days.

Unlike this, those had concrete political aims. They fizzled once those got too vague to maintain, but here the only goal is basically a sanctionned chaos. There is no reason to keep burning things once the fun is over.

Potentially lockdown conditions caused more of a pentup energy/less access to other activities that'd otherwise serve as a natural distraction.

Also my understanding of 2020 was that a lot of rioters weren't even necessarily local to the areas they were rioting in, which surely would contribute to the ability to stay focused.

Potentially lockdown conditions caused more of a pentup energy/less access to other activities that'd otherwise serve as a natural distraction.

France saw the closest thing the world got to a general uprising against lockdowns in it's colonies.

In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:

“Inquir’st thou not what spirits

Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass

Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin

Were blameless; and if aught they merited,

It profits not, since baptism was not theirs,

The portal to thy faith. If they before

The Gospel liv’d, they serv’d not God aright;

And among such am I. For these defects,

And for no other evil, we are lost;

Only so far afflicted, that we live

Desiring without hope.”

Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.

This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.

This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.

I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.

Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.

At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.

There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.

It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":

[...] Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts - including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory - which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.

(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)

It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:

[...] And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.

Fuck me sideways, I wrote a massive essay and had it gobbled up into the ether when I received a phone call. @ZorbaTHut, is it too much to ask for text entered into a comment to be temporarily saved for a little while even if not posted? It would be a lifesaver on mobile.

Sigh, I'll rewrite it:

I think this is an excellent post, and it largely aligns with my view.

That being said:

The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

It strikes me as deeply misguided if not outright pathological to extend modern intuitions about the need for "responsibility" to a distant future where the universe is plausibly dominated by entities akin to Matrioshka Brains or computationally oriented Dyson Swarms that monopolize the resources of entire star systems each. That's fetishizing responsibility for the love of responsibility, entirely divorced from whether it's needed for other terminal goals.

Such entities are robustly self-sufficient and powerful in their domain to a degree that the modern mind finds hard to comprehend.

Our intuitions about responsibilities have been built up over a lengthy evolutionary period where no man was an island to himself (the closest that ever was to being feasible was hunter gatherer times and even then it was deeply suboptimal).

We currently need each other to live fulfilling lives, and not even the wealthiest billionaire can setup a system that lets them divorce themselves from the rest of humanity.

This will be categorically untrue in the future, because interstellar trade, to the extent it exists, will be primarily of information and not physical goods.

It seems to me that there is very little that such an entity can't make entirely by itself, be it through normal resource collection, transmutation of matter, or direct energy to matter conversion.

Further, the absolutely colossal distances between star systems makes trade of anything that is not extremely high value economically infeasible, at least if you want to receive the goods in non-astronomical time frames.

I refuse to shackle such beings with our norms, and the maximal set of things we recognize today as "responsibilities" that I expect them to adhere to are:

  1. A commitment to avoiding coercion when positive sum trade is available. Don't violate the NAP in short, since you're already a largely post-scarcity entity (even if scarcity is unlikely to be obviated entirely over cosmological timespans unless we invent literally infinite energy sources).

  2. Don't trash the cosmic commons, say by throwing relativistic debris about that could plausibly ruin someone else's day as an RKV. Further, entities should avoid being wasteful where possible, for a very relaxed notion of waste, and when they ruin their cosmic endowment they should not expect others to bail them out without cause.

  3. Drawing on the above, they ought to avoid intentionally creating negative externalities in general, such as creating unaligned superintelligences that they can't control, though such a task is unlikely to be difficult to a being superintelligent itself. Nobody wants a nasty case of a Hegemonizing Swarm even if it's unlikely to be a real threat, at least don't let them burn pristine star systems.

Such entities simply do not need much from each other, albeit they are capable of wanting a great deal.

Further, they are sovereign, to a degree that exceeds the fevered dreams of modern nation states and their leaders. You will have a very bad time getting them to do things they don't voluntarily want to do.

They're also almost certainly strongly godlike, beyond the ken of most conceptions of godliness we have today. Zeus's lighting bolts have nothing on a Nicoll-Dyson beam or an RKV. Sure, not omnipotent, but as close as physically feasible.

I myself wish to become such a Peer of the Universe, such that no worm turns or sparrow falls without my consent within my domain.

Now, if lesser beings still share the cosmos, they might find our conceptions of responsibility to be of some utility, and once we have actually robust means of memetic engineering, unlike the paltry and inadequate systems of schooling and cultural indoctrination we have today, I expect them to be used right until they're no longer needed.

At any rate, such gods might nod approvingly at Von Neumann when he says:

“All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.”

And like it or not, they shall control a great deal indeed..

avoiding coercion when positive sum trade is available.

Biggest unintended loophole since the Commerce Clause? Today people trade, so the Copenhagen Theory of Ethics kicks in, and then we feel we have carte blanche to coercively micromanage the results. In the future people trade, so they get to the Pareto frontier and the "no more positive sum trade is available" condition kicks in, and then we explicitly can coercively micromanage the results...

I'd have been more rigorous if I thought a comment made today actually served as a constitutional document for entities living thousands if not millions of years im the future haha

(Founding Fathers of America, I feel your pain!)

@ZorbaTHut, is it too much to ask for text entered into a comment to be temporarily saved for a little while even if not posted? It would be a lifesaver on mobile.

I actually don't know of any way to implement it easily, as far as I know we'd have to be doing frequent callbacks to update some saved serverside field. Can you name any websites that do this? I can at least take a look at how they're doing it.

(this is honestly a thing web browsers should be doing, but they aren't)

Beat's me! The closest I can think of is something like Google Docs that automatically saves your text as you go, and I don't know how taxing that will be to either implement for dev-time or resource reasons.

To spitball from a position of ignorance, perhaps have a "draft" feature someone can enable, which preserves text input server-side for a short duration? I can't imagine even an OOM more saved text will be taxing on the servers, but I could be wrong.

Can't you use local storage for this?

If anything I would think storing everything you enter into fields server side is bad for a whole host of reasons.

Store it in cookies, or local storage. If the Storage variable is not empty, paste it into the comment form. Clear the variable on sucessful send.

this is honestly a thing web browsers should be doing, but they aren't

They sort of do. If you lose your post because you clicked a link, you can usually recover it just with the "back" button.

as far as I know we'd have to be doing frequent callbacks to update some saved serverside field

You can save drafts client side, via the local storage API.

That's fetishizing responsibility for the love of responsibility, entirely divorced from whether it's needed for other terminal goals.

I'm not sure if you're simply reiterating your disagreement here, or if the view that I was describing is so foreign to your own thinking that it does not even appear to you as a view; instead it appears as a non-view, as nonsense.

To take an accounting of all your commitments and goals, to reflect on which ones are "needed" and which aren't, to have the freedom to add or remove values and rearrange their relative priority: all this is, obviously, to still remain within the logic of consequentialism. I am raising the question of something that is outside of consequentialism altogether.

The response to the accusation that this view loves responsibility for its own sake is simply yes_chad.jpg. It's not an objection; it's just a restatement of the view itself. You are free to call this "fetishization" if you want. I don't view that term in any way as disparaging. We all have our fetishes, after all (such as your fascination with vast timescales and regions of space, for example).

I try not to attribute disagreement to fundamental values differences unless I can no longer help it. If that's the case, we either all agree to live and let live, or there will inevitably be bloodshed.

I'm not sure if you're simply reiterating your disagreement here, or if the view that I was describing is so foreign to your own thinking that it does not even appear to you as a view; instead it appears as a non-view, as nonsense.

Mostly the former as far as I can gauge. I recognize it as a view at the very least, but I don't think it's really reflective of a fundamental underlying difference for the majority who espouse it. They simply don't have horizons as broad as mine, and have never stopped to really think of the ramifications of that approach when extended out of the circumstances that are mundane to us today.

After all, if I was asked whether inculcating certain kinds of responsibility today is something I endorse, I'd say yes. I'm not against the concept, I'm just against thoughtlessly extending it to where the intuitions underpinning it become irrelevant.

And I (probably) wouldn't have discussed the extremal case of utter atomization that a galactic scale civilization involves if you hadn't invoked the kind of thinking that leads to it or hints at it. Namely:

The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

In my eyes: Superhuman AI - - > Space Colonization of some description is a link so robust that I struggle to think of anyone accumulating evidence to persuade me otherwise.

The problem that religions face regarding hell is that the adherent can pick whether or not to believe in it, and whether or not to go to church or believe in anything at all. Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior. As a method of ultimate deterrence it can’t be triumphed over by good deeds. Why? For too many reasons to list really, but the big ones are: doing good deeds for their own sake puts the focus on an action, whereas morality comes from focusing on the Good which is God, and there would be no need to focus on the Good if a simple ToDo list saves all eternal ills; not every person can immediately do good deeds, even if they are essentially on a perfect moral path given their past behavior, which could lead to people like alcoholics and the infirm to feel that they are damned until they are cured; it reduces a person‘s interest in all religion, if all Good can be received from a simple checklist, and Christianity is a religion designed to socialize morality communally within the fully human Christ.

If hell is perfect deterrence, a huge problem arises in how to condition a person into this deterrence who is not seriously religious. A serious Christian sees the options as heaven or hell, but someone less religious sees it as “non-hell and probably heaven” vs hell. In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all? So in order to even buy into the punishment of hell, you need to first buy into religion generally; in the same way that first you need the boy to sign up for the Great War, and only later can you force him to walk through no man’s land at the battle of the Somme.

This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell. But in order for the magic of hell to work, you need to be always and perpetually saved from it by knowing the next moral action or step. And, in an ideal variant of Christianity, this is Christ — the socialized Good — and every step in your moral life would be his very steps on his path.

I am a big fan of hell, as an idea. It should be conceived of as not an additional thing to fear, but instead the One True Fear. So the kids today who are afraid that their zoomer haircut isn’t perm’d well enough, or that the Taylor Swift tickets are sold out — all of their petty fears would be sublimated to one great fear, the fear of evilness (which in Christian thought is eradicated from believing and imitating Christ).

Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior.

My belief is the exact opposite of this. The whole reason hell's nature and existence is not obvious to everyone is so that it doesn't modify our present behavior.

I also find your focus on good deeds interesting. Good deeds accomplish nothing in the end, yes, but moral growth is what God wants, and moral growth leads to good deeds. I agree that hell is a deterrent, but that's not it's ultimate purpose. It is a fundamental necessity to satisfy the law of justice. We only know about it because knowledge of justice also aids in our moral growth and helps us to "grow up" spiritually. Also, we know that evil will always be punished, whether in this life or in the next. This helps us to rest assured that justice will be served, and focus on our own moral growth rather than chasing revenge or growing to resent God due to the success we see in wicked people.

This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell.

I think it's more that believers are less harmed by fearing hell than nonbelievers, while the benefits of fearing hell are constant regardless of your level of belief. Doing good because you fear hell is the same as doing good for the reward. It's pretty much worthless and is not what God wants.

My belief is the exact opposite of this. The whole reason hell's nature and existence is not obvious to everyone is so that it doesn't modify our present behavior.

I really don't want to come across as unnecessarily combative (what would the point even be? Empirically, religious debate is people yelling at each other and not convincing anyone of anything), but holy shit, the sheer amount of mental gymnastics espousing this requires..

Doing good because you fear hell is the same as doing good for the reward. It's pretty much worthless and is not what God wants.

I can't reconcile a omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity intentionally creating a hell in the first place, let alone building entities it knows with 100% certainty will end up there. (And if it doesn't know with 100% certainty, it's not omniscient is it?)

That, to put it bluntly, is an asshole move.

I don't expect you (or anyone else) to have a good answer, because that problem is fundamentally irreconcilable, at least until you zoom out and realize you're arguing about the properties of a nonexistent entity.

I think Christians have plot-holed themselves into a corner, if they hadn't shot for the moon and claimed a truly all-powerful creator, then they could at least claim that evil exists because of an inability to completely stamp it out, while also endorsing that believing and practising was still a net positive in expectation.

When people complain about utilitarians having to grapple with repugnant conclusions, none of the conclusions are as offensive as this is to any reasonable sensibilities.

It's akin to some bored kid setting up a terrarium, not feeding anything it, and then crucifying the starving survivors for the crime of cannibalism. It's all on you dog backwards.

Well you could start by figuring out my actual beliefs instead of telling me that the beliefs you've imagined I have are wrong. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as a Mormon, so keep in mind my beliefs aren't shared by the majority of Christianity.

I can't reconcile a omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity intentionally creating a hell in the first place, let alone building entities it knows with 100% certainty will end up there. (And if it doesn't know with 100% certainty, it's not omniscient is it?)

God is omnipotent compared to us but not literally omnipotent. He has to follow the rules. He can't change what 'good' is, and probably cannot create or destroy matter either. Most importantly, he cannot give us agency without allowing some of us to be evil. If we do not have agency then none of us can truly choose to be good, so having agency is more important than guaranteeing that we're all good.

I think Christians have plot-holed themselves into a corner, if they hadn't shot for the moon and claimed a truly all-powerful creator, then they could at least claim that evil exists because of an inability to completely stamp it out,

I think it's consistent to view God as all-powerful, but incapable of changing the fundamental rules of logic. Having been through quite a bit of physical pain in my life I remain unconvinced that natural evil exists or is very important anyways. I think if we were all hooked up to 5 gallons / s IVs of heroin, we would experience a temporary rate slowdown to 4 gallons / s as pain. We need some natural opposition in order to be able to recognize the good for what it is.

If God were Logically Omnipotent and could change the rules of logic, then yes, that would imply that he has chosen for 'evil' to exist. Still, I'm not sure that means he's not omnibenevolent. To remove evil would require changing the rules in ways we humans cannot possibly understand in our current forms. Would you choose to delete suffering altogether? Doing so would perhaps lead to vast consequences related to our ability to perceive joy at all. Magically recreate our ability to perceive joy, even though we've never experienced anything else, and I would wonder whether perhaps then a more fundamental rule of logic would be violated, and so on.

To be clear, I suspect we are already metaphorically in the 5 gallon / s IV scenario. Like I said I have experienced extreme pain, and even in the moments that it was worst, existence felt much happier and more pleasurable than nonexistence.

This is pretty esoteric at this point but I really do think there are satisfactory answers to the problem of theodicy.

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as a Mormon, so keep in mind my beliefs aren't shared by the majority of Christianity.

My apologies for assuming, but the majority of the Christians I've argued here with on-and-off for years were from more standard denomination.

That being said, I have no idea how anyone remains a Mormon when the overwhelming evidence of fraud in its very foundation exist. At least Catholics and Protestants make claims that were so far in the past they can't be trivially debunked.

God is omnipotent compared to us but not literally omnipotent. He has to follow the rules. He can't change what 'good' is, and probably cannot create or destroy matter either. Most importantly, he cannot give us agency without allowing some of us to be evil. If we do not have agency then none of us can truly choose to be good, so having agency is more important than guaranteeing that we're all good.

Sure, I can grant that it's still meaningful omnipotence even if God can't ignore the laws of logic.

That being said, I don't see how you can hold that a decrease in pleasure is pain, while not recognizing that it's possible to have diminished agency while still having agency.

Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.

It doesn't forgive the outright infinite amount of suffering consigning even a single person to hell does. That's the work of an asshole, or at least someone who doesn't claim to be benevolent. There are certainly people I'd consign to Hell myself, but I never claimed perfect benevolence as fact about myself.

I think if we were all hooked up to 5 gallons / s IVs of heroin, we would experience a temporary rate slowdown to 4 gallons / s as pain. We need some natural opposition in order to be able to recognize the good for what it is.

Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. This does not gel at all with a biological understanding of pain as a whole, since pain is a qualitatively different qualia, and not merely the absence of the sensation of pleasure.

The very existence of gradients of pleasure is sufficient to allow one to infer the opposite direction, and posit something that is outright negative pleasure, not merely no pleasure or a lesser yet positive level of it.

For an obvious proof, humans had never encountered negative numbers in their ancestral environment, and there is no single physical entity in the world that itself can be negative. It's only by interaction between entities that we can usefully build intuition of negatives. You can have 1 or 2 apples, not -1 apples, but you can use that concept to simplify the mathematics of things such as being indebted to provide someone an apple on demand. But at no point do you actually have less than zero apples.

Since humans have shown a distressing ability to invent untrue and useless concepts like souls on a regular basis, I think that even in some utopian environment where nobody ever felt outright pain, someone will inevitably invent the concept of "pain", if only as a plot point in their equivalent to a horror scifi novel.

That being said, I have no idea how anyone remains a Mormon when the overwhelming evidence of fraud in its very foundation exist. At least Catholics and Protestants make claims that were so far in the past they can't be trivially debunked.

Easy, I have overwhelming personal evidence of the truth of the church. Besides, I bet the vast majority of the "overwhelming evidence" you have in mind boils down to "well obviously that can't happen because God isn't real." There is some weird stuff in the church's past for sure but not nearly enough to outweigh my own experiences confirming the truth of the church's claims.

That being said, I don't see how you can hold that a decrease in pleasure is pain, while not recognizing that it's possible to have diminished agency while still having agency.

Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.

I'm going to assume you don't have "warp the rules of logic" in mind here, because IMO it's pretty futile to talk about the effects of that sort of change, except to say that they would be vast and we cannot possibly understand what would happen (since our understanding relies on logic). So the only two possibilities I can think of here are that either all choices are basically the same, or some choices are substantially better than others but all choices are good. The former I think removes agency entirely. Humans entirely lose the ability to make any difference at all. The latter definitely allows for evil IMO. If you are consistently choosing to bake cakes for your friends rather than saving orphans' lives, I think you are an evil person even though both choices are "good".

Separately, like I was saying, goodness is only valuable to the degree which it is a choice. Agency is valuable in its own right. So it's not clear to me why God would limit our agency (and thus our ability to be good) rather than allowing for both good and evil.

Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.

Can be and must be are two very different things. If people are forced to make being better their life's goal, they have no agency at all. If they are not forced to, and they choose not to, then they are evil.

It doesn't forgive the outright infinite amount of suffering consigning even a single person to hell does. That's the work of an asshole, or at least someone who doesn't claim to be benevolent. There are certainly people I'd consign to Hell myself, but I never claimed perfect benevolence as fact about myself.

Sure. I don't believe hell is literally infinite anyways.

Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. This does not gel at all with a biological understanding of pain as a whole, since pain is a qualitatively different qualia, and not merely the absence of the sensation of pleasure.

You've cherry-picked certain parts of biology in order to claim that the objective truth is on your side. I agree that pain is not simply an absence of pleasure, but my claim was not that it always was. What I said was that we would experience an absence of pleasure as pain. When I say "pain" I obviously don't mean "solely physical pain".

That said, brains have a remarkable ability to adapt to new baselines and ignore predictable stimuli. I am currently in a fairly large amount of pain--probably the equivalent of stubbing a few toes, if I had to guess, though my estimation is untrustworthy for reasons which will soon become clear. I do not notice this pain unless I think about it. It has remained at that constant state for years and now essentially feels like nothing to me.

On the flip side, pleasure seems to work the same way--we quickly gain tolerance to the strongest drugs. I think if someone were to remain on heroin or something for a long period of time (rather than experiencing the "down" when they come off their high) they would quickly stop noticing the high at all. Of course there would be plenty of neurological side effects, but basically what I'm saying is that if there was a magic button we could press to give ourselves a high, with no side effects at all (an impossibility I know), someone who kept it pressed all the time would be indistinguishable, both to themselves and to others, from someone who never pressed it. I think it would be fair to characterize the experience of someone addicted to hard drugs, but not currently on a high, as "pain".

Besides that, pain is simply not important. Getting broken up with hurt way more than crapping out liters of blood. The very worst pains which we as humans can experience have to do not with experiencing suffering, but with experiencing a loss of pleasure. Losing parents or a girlfriend or w/e only matters because those people were valuable sources of joy in the first place. I have not experienced any suffering due to my lack of a third parent, but I will suffer quite a bit if one of my parents dies, therefore deriving me of the joy which they would provide to me.

The very existence of gradients of pleasure is sufficient to allow one to infer the opposite direction, and posit something that is outright negative pleasure, not merely no pleasure or a lesser yet positive level of it.

Negative numbers still don't exist though. They only exist to the extent that they affect positive numbers. You can't have -1 sheep. At best you can have to work much longer to buy your first sheep, since you first need to pay off your debt before you get one. The minimum amount of sheep a person can own is 0.

Similarly, yes, I agree that negative pleasure exists, but it does so only inasmuch as it subtracts from existing pleasure. You could basically call it the absence of pleasure. I believe pain to be in this category. It does subtract pleasure, so it can certainly be called negative pleasure, but I don't believe it can subtract pleasure to below 0. I don't think any human can ever experience such agony that their existence is actually more painful than not.

Besides, I bet the vast majority of the "overwhelming evidence" you have in mind boils down to "well obviously that can't happen because God isn't real."

Sure, but even putting myself in the mindset of someone who had a propensity/desire to believe in some supernatural entity, the sheer degree of willful ignorance needed to become a Mormon would almost certainly make me opt for a denomination that had the kind fig leaf of being founded centuries or millenia ago, where these kinds of irregularities can be found.

Sadly, I don't expect to convince you of this, because of the robust memetic immune system your upbring has inculcated in you. (I'm assuming you were raised Mormon, feel free to correct me)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith

In 1835, Smith encouraged some Latter Day Saints in Kirtland to purchase rolls of ancient Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibitor. He said they contained the writings of the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Over the next several years, Smith dictated to scribes what he reported was a revelatory translation of one of these rolls, which was published in 1842 as the Book of Abraham.[292] The Book of Abraham speaks of the founding of the Abrahamic nation, astronomy, cosmology, lineage and priesthood, and gives another account of the creation story.[293]

The papyri associated with the Book of Abraham were thought to have been lost in the Great Chicago Fire, but several fragments were rediscovered in the 1960s. Egyptologists have subsequently determined them to be part of the Egyptian Book of Breathing with no connection to Abraham

https://www.mrm.org/sharing-with-mormons-joseph-smith-lie

Professional Egyptologists to whom the Alphabet and Grammar was submitted for examination were quick to point out that the material in Joseph Smith’s notebook bore no resemblance at all to any correct understanding of the ancient Egyptian language. As one of them, I. E. Edwards, put it, the whole work was, “largely a piece of imagination and lacking in any kind of scientific value.” He added that it reminded him of “the writings of psychic practitioners which are sometimes sent to me.” There were many similar verdicts, all confirming that the person responsible for what [William] Berrett had glowingly called “the first Egyptian grammar in America” could not possibly have understood the ancient Egyptian language.[

Once I again, I reiterate that I'm helpless to convince you, and I submit this primarily to convince impartial observers that I'm not talking out of my ass.

Negative numbers still don't exist though

Sure, doesn't mean they're not useful. Similarly, even our conceptions of "1 apple" aren't atomic, since the intentional separation of the apple from the environment from its environment is at least partially arbitrary. An apple is not an ontologically fundamental entity, to find truly discrete entities, one must dive down to the depths of Quantum Mechanics, such as "Planck time".

It does subtract pleasure, so it can certainly be called negative pleasure, but I don't believe it can subtract pleasure to below 0.

Sure, it can't literally delete the signal of pleasure, but it can produce states that are practically indistinguishable from only pure pain.

Someone getting their dick sucked while their teeth are being pulled out with pliers is getting some pleasure out of it, since the nerves in the penis don't give a shit what's happening to your teeth. But I think it's obvious that the situation is tantamount to someone experiencing a slightly less bad form of torture, or at least the person would be indifferent between the two.

Besides that, pain is simply not important. Getting broken up with hurt way more than crapping out liters of blood. The very worst pains which we as humans can experience have to do not with experiencing suffering, but with experiencing a loss of pleasure

I chose somatic pain because it's by far the best studied, and the one I'm most familiar with it. But unless you disagree that even more emotional kinds of pain don't bottom out in the firing patterns of neurons, the analogy stands tall.

Also, I'm happy for you if you're lucky enough not to have experienced bodily pain so fucking bad merely losing all of one's pleasure in life is getting off lightly.

Someone breaking up is certainly not as unhappy or in pain as another having their skin flayed off.

I can't say that even my worst breakup was anywhere near as bad as a bout of appendicitis in my childhood that had me curled up into a ball.

Sadly, I don't expect to convince you of this, because of the robust memetic immune system your upbring has inculcated in you.

The implication that the memetic immune system associated with my religion is responsible for my beliefs is flatly incorrect. By far the strongest "immune response" it supposedly taught me was to trust in the results of prayer above all else. This is not something which I believed, and honestly still not something which I can bring myself to believe most of the time, due to its obvious epistemic danger. Far more likely is that I'm simply biased to believe in what my parents taught me. Honestly I think I overcorrected for that though, and spent much longer reading philosophy textbooks, atheist arguments, etc. than I should have, fearing that my belief was purely a result of my upbringing rather than due to any connection to the truth.

Memetic immune systems are simply not that powerful, full stop. There is nobody alive, and no possible memetic immune system, which renders anyone with their mental faculties completely immune to the truth. At best you can claim that it takes longer to convince someone of the truth than it should.

The papyri associated with the Book of Abraham were thought to have been lost in the Great Chicago Fire, but several fragments were rediscovered in the 1960s. Egyptologists have subsequently determined them to be part of the Egyptian Book of Breathing with no connection to Abraham

I hope you have enough respect for me to realize that I have already heard and looked into these sorts of concerns far more than you have. Besides, it's not like it takes much research at all to hear of this sort of thing. The church itself published the results you mention (that the recovered papyri were part of the Book of Breathing) in church magazines very soon after the original report was released.

If you look into it more, the papyri which the Book of Abraham came from were actually pretty clearly not the ones which were recovered. The eyewitness accounts alone establish this, while simple deductive reasoning sufficiently confirms it. IIRC Smith had about 100 feet of papyrus, most of which he himself claimed to be unrelated to the Book of Abraham, and of which only about 2.5 feet has been recovered.

As far as the Alphabet and Grammar, the theory about it which I prefer is that it was an attempt to reverse-engineer the language post-translation. It seems pretty clear from contemporary accounts that the language was not actually used in the "translation". I put "translation" in quotes because at other times Smith simply wrote "translations" of things, such as rewriting certain chapters of the Bible, from whole cloth. In most cases (as with the Book of Mormon) the source material does not actually seem to have been used for most of the process. This of course sounds pretty absurd. All I can say is that it is obviously possible with God involved and I have seen sufficient evidence in my own life to convince me that these things must be true, whatever the actual explanation turns out to be.

Sure, doesn't mean they're not useful. Similarly, even our conceptions of "1 apple" aren't atomic, since the intentional separation of the apple from the environment from its environment is at least partially arbitrary. An apple is not an ontologically fundamental entity, to find truly discrete entities, one must dive down to the depths of Quantum Mechanics, such as "Planck time".

I think I was pretty clear in my position that negative numbers are useful. Your point about ontologically fundamental entities seems pretty irrelevant to me. There's no such thing as a negative Planck length either.

I chose somatic pain because it's by far the best studied, and the one I'm most familiar with it. But unless you disagree that even more emotional kinds of pain don't bottom out in the firing patterns of neurons, the analogy stands tall.

I feel like I've been pretty clear here and you're trying to sidestep me. I absolutely believe in biology, but your focus on your own limited understanding of neurons is muddying the water. You totally ignored everything I was saying about the pain that I experience, as well as the obvious tendency people have to grow tolerant to all forms of pain and pleasure. If your position is that pain is pain is pain, you are flat out wrong. The brain mediates all experiences quite heavily before our conscious minds perceive them, and can easily turn pain into pleasure or pleasure into pain. Heck, spicy food literally activates a pain receptor in the tongue and we experience that as a somewhat pleasurable experience.

Also, I'm happy for you if you're lucky enough not to have experienced bodily pain so bad merely losing all of one's pleasure in life is getting off lightly.

Yes. Me too. My assertion is that such pain does not exist.

Someone breaking up is certainly not as unhappy or in pain as another having their skin flayed off.

I disagree, as someone who has experienced more pain than that. I would rather have my skin flayed off a thousand times than go through what I went through again (at least as far as physical pain goes). I would rather go through what I went through a thousand times than go through that breakup again.

Sure, it can't literally delete the signal of pleasure, but it can produce states that are practically indistinguishable from only pure pain.

Someone getting their dick sucked while their teeth are being pulled out with pliers is getting some pleasure out of it, since the nerves in the penis don't give a poop what's happening to your teeth. But I think it's obvious that the situation is tantamount to someone experiencing a slightly less bad form of torture, or at least the person would be indifferent to the two.

Sure, and states indistinguishable from pure pain are what I would call 0. You are losing a vast amount of joy by being incapable of thought, appreciating the world around you, etc. and that's it. The pain itself is entirely irrelevant.

I can't say that even my worst breakup was anywhere near as bad as a bout of appendicitis in my childhood that had me curled up into a ball.

What I experienced was severe ulcerative colitis which lasted about 8 months. Appendicitis has basically the exact same symptoms as ulcerative colitis, to the point that people with ulcerative colitis often mistake appendicitis as another flare-up of their own symptoms. I don't know which is more painful in the moment, but given appendicitis is much shorter-term I would choose to experience that every time.

Would you honestly choose to break up with your partner rather than experience appendicitis again? If so, I simply think you're wrong and would be happier suffering through the appendicitis again. If not, you understand my point, which is that the vast majority of suffering stems from a loss of joy. The correct way to think about pain is to give it basically no importance, except inasmuch as it interferes with actually important things like your ability to hold down a job and experience life.

More comments

I can't reconcile a omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity intentionally creating a hell in the first place, let alone building entities it knows with 100% certainty will end up there. (And if it doesn't know with 100% certainty, it's not omniscient is it?)

Well, under a Christian view of how serious sin is, having sin with hell is better than the same sin without hell, since at least in the sin with hell, the sin is punished. The actual difficulty is why God would create beings that sin in the first place.

One possible answer is that the redemption of some that did happen—Jesus dying and rising from the dead and converting sinners and God's converting sinners, from the patriarchs to Israel down to the Christians of today—made the whole worth it, that this is in some way better than just having men that never fell.

Seems to me that the big problem with hell is that in the modern world we don’t know what the next right step is. Things are so complex and even Christianity is so divided it’s hard to know who is right.

Christianity solves this problem in a neat way. Imagine that you have with you a perfect friend and mentor who wants to shape you into a morally great person, and who uses the moral principle of “do unto others what you would have them of unto you”, and who has a collection of teachings he sent you. Now imagine he died to rescue you from eternal punishment. Then imagine the power of his moral teaching (the substance in a sense) resurrected himself, and that he will come back to judge you according to your soul — and those who are evil he will cast into hell.

Whatever action results from the belief is the next step, which is wholly contingent on a person’s background, personality, place in the moral process, etc (as it should be). By this I mean that a repentant pathological liar who cuts his lies by 5% every day is going to please God, versus a usually truthful person who has begun to lie 1% more every day without guilt. And it’s like this with all sins obviously. This is one of the points of the parable of the tax collector (an immoral profession) and the Pharisee, and the lesson of the widow’s mite. This is why the topic of moral discussion is not the consequent effects (actions) but the antecedent source (“out of the heart…”).

Then you might say something like, “oh, well then I will save my repentance for much later in my life”, but of course if you imagine an intelligent future judge this will not fly. What will be magically different about your procrastinating soul that is not in it today, when you are younger? It will be even harder to repent if your soul grows hardened, and of course there are many parables about this too. How would you personally judge someone who puts off the most important tasks out of cleverness? That is how God will judge. And in any case, the hour is near (the early Christians lived as if Christ was already “at the door ready to knock”; whether they truly believed that the world will end is far less significant than that they lived accordingly).

I’m, uh, pretty sure that the problem is all the suffering. The infinity of suffering. Squaring that circle with a loving God has led to far more contortions than mere earthly disagreements.

Under a Christian understanding of hell, that suffering is earned, and so carrying it out is just. The real difficulty is why God would create humans who would do so grievous a thing as sin. There's the "free-will" response, but I'm convinced that Calvinism is correct. I'll just go with Romans 9:

14 What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! 15 For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” 16 So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. 17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” 18 So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.

19 You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” 20 But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” 21 Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? 22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— 24 even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

That is, a hearty dose of "who am I to judge God" (see Job), while recognizing that that is indeed within God's righteous judgment—here giving the possibility that at least some is intended to highlight the his mercy, where it does exist. And, of course, Genesis 50:20's "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good" (referring to Joseph's brothers selling him) is relevant.

Yeah, no, that's a big problem too. It's sad, I genuinely want to believe in Christianity and/or God, but good lord is it difficult to square the mythos with the modern world in any logical or rational manner.

...

People don' choose what they believe in. They choose what they profess to believe in.

...This meme is absolutely maddening. Are you asserting that profession of belief has no identifiable connection to actual belief? Do you at least agree that beliefs actually exist? If they exist, how do they come to exist, given that we can observe their absence at one point in time and their presence at another?

I read him as saying that beliefs are involuntary.

Yes. Why would one believe such a thing? Is there a FAQ or a Sequence this meme derives from?

Can you believe right now that your computer is on fire? (if so, could you take a second and do so?)

I find that I cannot bring myself to believe my computer is on fire. Likewise, I find that I cannot bring myself to believe that Communism is a beneficent and efficient political system. Granted, I did not try very hard; a handful of seconds each.

Examining these two failures, I find that while instantiating each of these beliefs is too hard to manage with minimal effort, they are hard for entirely different reasons. When I try to believe that my laptop is on fire, my brain checks against sense data of my eyes and hands, which immediately contradict the idea. When I think of Communism, my brain goes to memory, cached thoughts and arguments. It seems to me that the two types of belief are engaging with completely different mental processes; concrete vs abstract, say.

Suppose I concede that concrete processes really can enforce belief. Why should this make me believe that abstract processes can be similarly forced?

It's not just sense data. For an example, suppose I asked you to believe that your computer (or phone or whatever you're using) would catch on fire in 1 minute. You have no sense data to contradict that (at least, for the next minute). But I assume you can't just make yourself believe that your computer's about to catch on fire without being given any sort of evidence in favor of it.

This wouldn't seem to be using the concrete mechanism you described, I would think?

...

There's probably a bit of confusion here because due to interactions with my native language (slavic), I mostly use 'belief' in the sense of 'religious faith / axioms the individual assumes' etc.

No, I'm just grumpy today, sorry. I'm arguing this same thing in a separate thread.

So, to restate, I don't think it's common for a person to consciously decide to e.g. 'believe in God' or 'believe that pitbulls are as harmless as other dogs'.

Suppose a missionary travels to some small country in east Asia, preaches to the locals, and some of them decide to convert to Christianity. They are clearly professing to believe in God, but suppose they also make significant changes to their way of life to conform to what they've been taught are Christian principles, and continue this new pattern of behavior indefinitely. Can it be said that these people have in fact consciously decided to believe in God? If not, what is happening here?

Ditto for belief that "trans women are women", or "love is love", or whatever other charged slogan you've observed abruptly exploding in popularity.

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Hell is not purely deterrence, if you believe in some form of penal substitutionary atonement. If any part of Christ's death was to take on the penalty for sin, then it is not at all clear why that would be necessary or good, under a deterrence model—punishing Jesus doesn't really deter anyone, and it is mostly unclear what doing it in someone else's stead would accomplish, instead of just dropping the punishment.

In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all?

Should people be trying to get away from fear, or from hell?

The proper model of hell is of it not being primarily about deterrence, but about retribution, not about setting up incentives, but that punishment for evil is a thing valuable in itself. I'm sure there are better quotes out there, but it was the martyrs in Revelation that came to mind: "They cried out with a loud voice, 'O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell on the earth?'"

What I mean by deterrence is that the excellent philosophers of antiquity (probably including Philo) crafted Christianity in an attempt at an optimal way of life, which included the essential concepts of reinforcement and punishment baked in — or, incentive and deterrence. As in, the concept of hell has a utility. This is why the living philosophy of Christianity matches so well an optimal prosocial reinforcement model of behavior; because that was the point.

What would be the purpose of Christ in a narrative seeking to be the best possible reinforcement / punishment model of behavior? There’s a lot accomplished here. For one, if Jesus saves us from hell then it increases love for Jesus optimally. Second, if imitating Jesus is the way to heaven, then the person imitates an optimally prosocial and wise way of life. Third, a community gathered together to mourn our Perfect Martyr is a community which has perfect guidelines, a perfect exemplar, a perfect story, and a perfect friend and mentor in spirit, or in persona et spiritus Christi. Fourth, we see the damage of sin on display when humans killed God. Fifth, we see the holiness of God on display that he bore man’s sin while forgiving him. Sixth, we see the eternity of God in that he is resurrected.

Importantly, at least IMO, a Christian must fear Hell. This is literally commanded of us:

I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!

What I mean by deterrence is that the excellent philosophers of antiquity (probably including Philo) crafted Christianity in an attempt at an optimal way of life, which included the essential concepts of reinforcement and punishment baked in — or, incentive and deterrence.

But that isn't really the case, at least, universally across Christianity. Protestant strains of Christianity separate works from reward in a way that removes much of the incentives. Protestants do of course believe that you should do good things, and they do believe that those who are changed will be sanctified, not remaining in the mire of sin to the same extent, but salvation in the end is not based upon the quality of the subsequent works. This lessens the incentives, and ends up with good works being done more out of duty or gratitude or, well, just thinking that it's a good thing to do.

I guess I also don't really see why you identify as a Christian (which I assume you do by the final us), if you seem to think of it as a merely human sociological phenomenon. Do you think it's beneficial, but not true? A noble lie?

This view of Christ is sorely lacking. You seem to view Christianity as an attempt to make people good. And so, it seems that Christ is useful, but not essential.

I see Christianity as the manifestation of the divine work of reconciling God and man. Christ cannot be dispensed with in this, he is at the center of everything. The second Adam, our substitute, the mediator between God and man, our intercessor, the firstborn from the dead. In Ephesians, this is shown powerfully, as over and over again we are told that every blessing that we have, from predestination to adoption to redemption to our inheritance is all "in Christ." Our being made better is merely one (important) aspect of that work.

Protestantism is a strange case, because iirc the original Protestants (Luther et al) believed that works followed nearly intrinsically from proper faith. Today, I don’t think this is really the case among Evangelicals. I find this impossible to square with the contents of the Gospel, for instance that those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not help poor brothers are damned and in fact never knew him. This is one of the last things Christ said before the Passion and it is clearly explicated in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. I think what happened is a kind of superstition where “believe in Christ” turned into “believe I don’t have to do anything because Christ will do it”, whereas the original believe/faith meant in assenting to the whole of Jesus as a living message from God. As Jesus clearly says for us to do things, “believe in Jesus” would very much mean that we have to do things. But it’s more expansive than that, and also means that we have to imitate him.

If I could be most charitable to early Protestantism, I would say they were trying to prioritize motivation from love with no fear of hell and no care for conscious imitation. The atonement works through pure spectating, with none of the “carry our cross daily”. Instead of imitating Jesus, the focus is purely on how Jesus healed your sins. This should turn into maximal thanks and gratitude; the gratitude then naturally leads you to follow Jesus because he suggests you do, but you do it with zero faith. I think such a theology could work if a person has a perfect love for Jesus. But that perfect love is hard to come by. I think contrite repentance, continual thanks, and some fear is much more likely to develop a perfect love over time than a “once and for all” Herculean spectator crucifixion.

merely human sociological phenomenon. Do you think it's beneficial, but not true

I definitely think Christianity is beneficial, provided it is explored in the right way. I consider it something like… “clothed philosophy”. The Logos becomes Man, to ease the yoke and lighten our burdens. Because I think if a person is able to see how maximally joyful human life could be, they would consider their current lives to be approximately hell. Religion is about the perfection of human life, so it turns philosophy into story and ritual. So I see everything in Christianity as intended to make us better, not just morally but in emotion (spirit) as well. I think without this in mind, religion is apt to become superstitious and then wasteful and ultimately deadening.

I find this impossible to square with the contents of the Gospel, for instance that those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not help poor brothers are damned and in fact never knew him.

I don't see how that example is at all difficult to be squared with the beliefs of the early protestants (If I'm parsing that correctly). (Feel free to model me as an early protestant.)

As Jesus clearly says for us to do things, “believe in Jesus” would very much mean that we have to do things.

Right, believing in Jesus is not separable from doing things, though it would not itself be the doing of those things.

With none of the "carry our cross daily"

Are we reading the same early Protestants?* Here's Calvin:

[W]e are consecrated and dedicated to God, and therefore should not henceforth think, speak, design, or act, without a view to his glory. What he hath made sacred cannot, without signal instult to him, be applied to profane use. But if we are not our own, but the Lord's it is plain both what error is to be shunned, and to what end the actions of our lives ought to be directed. We are not our own; therefore neither is our own reason or will to rule our acts and counsels. We are not our own; therefore, let us not make it our end to seek what may be agreeable to our carnal nature. We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and the things that are ours. On the other hand, we are God's; let us therefore, live and die to him. We are God's therefore, let his wisdom and will preside over all our actions. We are God's; to him, then, as the only legitimate end, let every part of our life be directed…Let this, then, be the first step, to abandon ourselves, and devote the whole energy of our minds to the service of God.

and

The pious mind must ascend still higher, namely, whither Christ calls his disciples when he says, that every one of them must "take up his cross." Those whom the Lord has chosen and honored with his intercourse must prepare for a hard, laborious, troubled life, a life full of many and various kinds of evils; it being the will of our heavenly Father to exercise his people in this way while putting them to the proof. Having begun this course with Christ the first-born, he continues it toward all his children…Why then should we exempt ourselves from that condition to which Christ our head behooved to submit; especially since he submitted on our account, that he might in his own person exhibit a model of patience? Wherefore the apostle declares, that all the children of God are destined to be conformed to him. Hence it affords us great consolation in hard and difficult circumstances, which men deem evil and adverse to think that we are holding fellowship with the sufferings of Christ that as he passed to celestial glory through a labyrinth of many woes, so we too are conducted thither through various tribulations.

So there certainly is a carrying of your cross. But if your point is that that is not the means by which the atonement applies, that is correct.

What do you mean by "you do it with zero faith"?

I definitely think Christianity is beneficial, provided it is explored in the right way. I consider it something like… “clothed philosophy”. The Logos becomes Man, to ease the yoke and lighten our burdens. Because I think if a person is able to see how maximally joyful human life could be, they would consider their current lives to be approximately hell. Religion is about the perfection of human life, so it turns philosophy into story and ritual. So I see everything in Christianity as intended to make us better, not just morally but in emotion (spirit) as well. I think without this in mind, religion is apt to become superstitious and then wasteful and ultimately deadening.

Am I correct in reading this that you don't think that Christianity is true, merely beneficial?

*a rhetorical question

Going to use bullet points just for ease of replying to individual things

  • If Protestants hold that “believing in the crucifixion is sufficient to save us from the punishment of sin and guarantee the new life”, then they can’t also hold “Christ says you must perform certain actions to be resurrected into the new life”. Christ specifically says that those who believe in him but do not perform certain actions will be thrown into hell, because Christ is found in the poor-off brother, and so whatever you do to him you do to Christ. These two conceptions of the Judgment are mutually exclusive. If anyone holds that “believing alone” guarantees salvation at the judgment, or that the crucifixion alone as something one agrees happened, they have to deny what Christ said on numerous actions: that certain actions are required to be saved from hell. Now, if instead you take “faith” to mean “assenting to every word Jesus says”, then this expansive-defined faith is sufficient. Because under the umbrella “faith” you find “must do certain actions to be freed from hell”. These actions are in Christ in the sense of spirit, they spring up from the Christ in a person versus a person’s identity. Yet, they must be performed using your mind and body and heart.

  • Re “it would not itself be the doing of those things”, Christ specifically says that it is the doing of those things. If Christ wanted to say that simply professing he is God saved, then he would say that. But he says certain things just be done, else hell.

  • The Protestants you posted do not believe that imitating Christ is what grants heaven and the new life. Instead they suggest you do it. This is actually what I wrote by the way. The problem is that there is hardly a motivation, because simply believing that Jesus died for sins is sufficient to save someone from damnation.

  • Re: truth of Christianity, no. Truth does not necessarily mean historicity or literalism. Literalism is not the way many early Christians interpreted scripture. A thing can be true because it represents greater truth.

Re: what faith is, the historical protestant definition involved both knowledge and trust, not knowledge purely.

If Christ wanted to say that simply professing he is God saved, then he would say that.

And he does express, several times, that faith is sufficient.

John 3:16: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

John 6:40: For this is the will of my Father, that whoever looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.

Romans 10:9: If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Romans 3:28 For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.

Protestants usually understand the passages about what sorts of people enter eternal life either to be true because those who are justified by faith are also sanctified by the work of the Holy Spirit, or to be talking about what the law requires, which Christ has satisfied.

Re: truth of Christianity, no. Truth does not necessarily mean historicity or literalism. Literalism is not the way many early Christians interpreted scripture. A thing can be true because it represents greater truth.

Ah, but look at what Paul says:

1 Corinthians 15:14: And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

So Paul, at least, thinks that the actual literal claims are important, in at least one particular.

Jesus also consistently takes scripture seriously.

More comments

Anyone who conceives of Hell as a concept, as opposed to an actual thing, is already atheist right?

[Hell] is an attempt to control other people. If these people, who always say I should trust them, already want to control me, they'd probably be willing to lie to me. Once I saw that, the lie was plain.

So to be clear, the people being deterred can't know they're being deterred, right?

This depends on what you mean by “actual thing”. Philo of Alexandria was an influential Jewish Platonist who interpreted the Old Testament allegorically and had a large influence on early Christianity. Does this mean he didn’t think the stories were “actual things”? He believed that they conveyed actual, spiritual truths by way of allegory and symbolism. Same with Origen, another influential early Christian. When we talk about the reality of religion we also have to understand that perfect certainty in God is rare; hence the leap of faith, the “I believe, help my unbelief” in the Gospel. Believing with all your mind and heart that God is real, and tries you and judges you, and hell is an ever-present danger, is hard even for the most fervent literalist.

the people being deterred can't know they're being deterred

Religions must persuade people, and they are competing against lifestyles that abound in much more primitive pleasures. A person can believe in hell and know that hell is a deterrence IMO, but there’s a moral or philosophical development that must take place, or else they might opt out of the entire religion.

People have believed in hell, or similar, without a concomitant heaven. The classic example is the view of the afterlife for the Greeks and Romans, as shown in the Odyssey where the shades of the dead are mindless twittering things until they lap up the blood of the sacrifice and where Achilles says 'better a live dog than a dead lion', more or less:

Another key scene relating to the Homeric portrayal of the underworld and death is the interaction between Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles confronts Odysseus: ‘How did you dare to come below to Hades’ realm, where the dead live on as mindless disembodied ghosts?’ Achilles, arguably the greatest hero of Homeric epic, seems to despise the underworld. Later, he comments, ‘I would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some landless impoverished peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead.’ The contrast between ‘serf’ and ‘King’ is significant and would speak volumes to the Greeks - death is so negative and unbearable to Achilles that he would even prefer to endure the pain of losing his freedom to a peasant than to exist within the underworld.

Hence why the Elusinian and other mystery cults which held out promises of a better life after death were popular.

Other cultures have similar concepts, or concepts of the dead as malevolent, jealous of the living and so eager to work them harm. The idea that ordinary people could go on to a pleasant afterlife may not be unique to Christianity, but I think it had to be a big selling point.

"Enlightenment" causes revolt, for the slave desires the unconditioned, he understands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals, he loves as he hates, without NUANCE, to the very depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness—his many HIDDEN sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems to DENY suffering. The skepticism with regard to suffering, fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of the last great slave-insurrection which began with the French Revolution.

Beyond Good and Evil, III.46

Consider, though, how many of your sample ideologues persisted after Nietzsche lamented mankind’s loss of a “will to power.”

I’m not quite sure what your intention is here. Would you be willing to elaborate? And who are the “sample ideologues”? Did you mean Freud and Derrida?

I want to make sure I’m clear on what your position is before I start throwing around quotes that may or may not be relevant.

This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries.

Really? I thought it was canon that Christ descended to the pre-Crucifixion afterlife and preached to the souls imprisoned there to gather to Himself those who accept Him, and bring them to Paradise.

It is. 1 Peter 4:6:

For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does.

(barring a few nitpicks about the way you phrased it - 'bringing people to Paradise' is a slightly misleading way of talking about the Resurrection, but no matter)

You can extrapolate whatever you like from this, but I tend to think the implication is that everybody, whether living or dead, whether they heard the gospel preached in their lifetime or not, will have a genuine opportunity to know the gospel and choose to follow God.

That said this has not been universal Christian consensus and you can easily find missionaries panicking over the billions of people who never had a chance to accept Christ - but personally I think the case for it is pretty strong.

I think without the firm conviction of a Truth or Right Way to Live such a thing is impossible. Dante could damn people to hell because he lived in a time and place where everyone agreed that hell existed and that God had certain conditions to be met if one wants to avoid going there (and everyone agreed on what they were of course, as this was Roman Catholic Europe). We’ve lost that because we no longer have a bedrock of Certain and Known Truths that must be reckoned with.

And going to the point you bring up with the church, the thing that softened her most was plurality. Protestants at first, then monotheistic religious people and so on. She doesn’t want to drive wedges between people and herself and so she softens her position on as much as she can without anyone noticing. In the early days of Trent, they ordered the faithful not to accept a Bible from a Protestant. In fact, the idea was to take it an throw it in the fire with obvious contempt. Obviously they no longer do that, and in fact consider that Islam and Judaism are now okay even if imperfect (from their point of view). Why? Because now the church is trying to not seem like meanies to other religious groups who look at Rome.

Of course the problem is that once a social institution loses the idea of absolute truth and one right way, it essentially becomes a social club. They still wear the robes and chant in Latin on occasion, but without the ability to give a firm Yes or No, without a Thus Saith The Lord, there’s no power behind it. University is going the same way as it abandoned the idea of a dispassionate search for Truth and teaching of Truth it’s just glorified indoctrination with a side of hopefully useful job skills. It’s lost authority because it no longer believes in Truth, searches for Truth, or teaches even the Truth it does know.

Sorry. My phone ate a more thorough response twice, probably because I kept switching to a memory-hungry tab for the source. So I gave up and posted the short version. Let’s see if I can’t flesh it out.

I think your theory shares a lot with Nietzsche’s. First, that modern culture lacks an ethos present in older societies. Second, that this loss was driven by ideological colonization. Third, that the absence of this ethos cripples Western ability to organize.

211: …THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS; they say: "Thus SHALL it be!" They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past—they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their "knowing" is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is—WILL TO POWER.

Your description of Dante reminded me of this passage. He had his conviction and enacted it, critics be (literally) damned. While I concur with the other comments—Dante was not as authoritative as this portrayal—I see what you were intending. A man who either takes his psychosis seriously or never considers that it is psychotic at all.

Of course, Nietzsche labeled Christianity not as the moral authority, but as the “slave-revolt in morals.” He argued that Judeo-Christian aesthetics had colonized the aristocratic mindset. As Christianity grew, it taught would-be philosophers that ruling was actually cringe—they should renounce their worldly wealth, preach the gospel, et cetera. In other words, they should abandon their duty.

Nietzsche always sketches this subversion as an abuse of Rome’s cosmopolitan tolerance. By analogy, this would be the influence of liberalism and pluralism, methods by which our society demands public consideration of consequences. But Nietzsche perceived it as the hallmark of the Catholic Church.

46: Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave—this faith is NOT that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his God and Christianity, it is much rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason…

Clearly, Luther gets some credit. I can’t say whether Nietzsche would have extended a grudging respect to Lenin. Those are the “sample ideologues” I had in mind, rather than Freud and Derrida. Speaking of philosophy-workers, you actually came to opposite conclusions regarding Kant.

5: …The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his "categorical imperative"—makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers.

Regardless, you and Nietzsche converged on skepticism towards a civilization which labors under slave morality.

212: …At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding-animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong—I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness—at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts "He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called GREATNESS: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full." And to ask once more the question: Is greatness POSSIBLE—nowadays?

He is very clear in condemning his Europe as slavish, utilitarian, masochistic and sometimes effeminate. If postmodernism were around, he’d have hated it too. Surely no culture, no empire can enact its will when hamstrung by a lust for suffering?

And yet.

The 20th century saw dictatorships and aristocracy on a never-before-seen scale. Unimaginable blood and treasure backed up the ambitions of a few men. Regimes warred against Christian thought, not to mention liberalism itself. “Will to power” in action. And what did it buy them? Most went out with a bang. The USSR, a whimper. Outcompeted by the essence of materialist pluralism.

In the end, we may lose out, too. Perhaps even to a certain allegedly socialist, decidedly authoritarian power. But it will not represent the triumphant return of master morality. Even if the wheel turns, Nietzsche missed his chance.

...

I think your theory shares a lot with Nietzsche’s.

That's not too surprising - he taught me everything I know! I'm incredibly indebted to him. I'm pretty sure I've read all of his published works (with the exception of WtP).

We do have points of disagreement though - I think he's probably friendlier to transhumanism than I am.

The 20th century saw dictatorships and aristocracy on a never-before-seen scale. Unimaginable blood and treasure backed up the ambitions of a few men. Regimes warred against Christian thought, not to mention liberalism itself. “Will to power” in action. And what did it buy them? Most went out with a bang. The USSR, a whimper. Outcompeted by the essence of materialist pluralism.

War was certainly one factor Nietzsche thought would contribute to the realisation of the overman (I'll quibble on the point about this being the same as bringing back master morality, he says too many good things about slave morality for the overman to be a mere negation of the slave revolt), but if we're discussing how Nietzsche missed his chance - the wasted opportunity he saw in the Jews as a partial antidote to the nationalistic small-mindedness which was holding the Europeans back from truly becoming clay in the hands of a deserving ruling class should be mentioned. From Beyond Good and Evil 251 (bolding mine):

That Germany has ample quantities of Jews, that the German stomach and the German blood have difficulty (and will continue for a long time to have difficulty) coping with even this number of “Jews” – as the Italians, the French, the British have coped, due to a stronger digestion –: this is the clear statement and language of a universal instinct that needs to be listened to and acted on. “Don’t let in any more Jews! And lock the doors to the east in particular (even to Austria)!” – so commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indeterminate enough to blur easily and be easily obliterated by a stronger race. But the Jews are without a doubt the strongest, purest, most tenacious race living in Europe today. They know how to thrive in even the worst conditions (and actually do better than in favorable ones) due to some virtues that people today would like to see labeled as vices, – above all, thanks to a resolute faith that does not need to feel ashamed in the face of “modern ideas.” The Jews change, if they change, only in the way the Russian empire makes its conquests (being an empire that has time and was not made yesterday): namely, according to the fundamental principle “as slowly as possible!” A thinker who has Europe’s future on his conscience will, in every sketch he draws of this future, consider the Jews, like the Russians, to be the most certain and probable factors at present in the great play and struggle of forces. What gets called a “nation” in Europe today (and is really more a res facta than nata – every once in a while a res ficta et picta will look exactly the same –) is, in any case, something young, easily changed, and in a state of becoming, not yet a race let alone the sort of aere perennius that the Jewish type is: these “nations” should be on a careful lookout for any hotheaded rivalry and hostility! The fact that the Jews, if they wanted (or if they were forced, as the anti-Semites seem to want), could already be dominant, or indeed could quite literally have control over present-day Europe – this is established. The fact that they are not working and making plans to this end is likewise established. Meanwhile, what they wish and want instead, with a unified assertiveness even, is to be absorbed and assimilated into Europe; they thirst for some place where they can be settled, permitted, respected at last and where they can put an end to the nomadic life, the “wandering Jew” –; and this urge and impulse (which in itself perhaps already reveals a slackening of the Jewish instincts) should be carefully noted and accommodated – in which case it might be practical and appropriate to throw the anti Semitic hooligans out of the country. Approached selectively and with all due caution, the way it is done by the English nobility. It would clearly be unproblematic for the stronger and more strongly delineated types of new Germanism (the officers of noble rank from the Mark, for instance) to get involved with them: and it would be very interesting to see whether the genius of fortune and fortitude (and above all some spirit and spiritedness, which are in very short supply in the place just mentioned –) could not be added into, bred into, the hereditary art of commanding and obeying – both of which are classic features of the Mark these days. But I should really break off my cheerful speeches and hyper-Germania here, since I am already touching on something I take seriously, on the “European problem” as I understand it, on the breeding of a new caste to rule Europe.

Yeah, BG&E has a number of interesting takes on Jews. A motivated antisemite could cherrypick any number of quotes to support his position. Same for a motivated philosemite!

Sorry. My phone ate a more thorough response twice, probably because I kept switching to a memory-hungry tab for the source. So I gave up and posted the short version. Let’s see if I can’t flesh it out.

I've already had this problem many times, and even asked Zorba for a fix recently.

In the interim, I get around it by using the clipboard feature in SwiftKey to save the text of my comment as I write it, and that also makes it easier to juggle several links as necessary.

It's a pretty good keyboard, if that helps.

My solution was to finish drafting on a notes app. iPhone master race :P

I've used Google Keep in the past, but just using the clipboard is more convenient since I don't have to leave the website I'm browsing in the interim.

Going off on a tangent, that translation quoted above is old-fashioned. A more modern one, which I like very much and would highly recommend for the notes and commentary which help explain so many of the references in the poem, is the one produced between 2000-2007 of the entire Divine Comedy by the late Robert and Jean Hollander. Sample for comparision of the same text below:

Here, as far as I could tell by listening,

was no lamentation other than the sighs

that kept the air forever trembling.

These came from grief without torment

borne by vast crowds

of men, and women, and little children.

My master began: 'You do not ask about

the souls you see? I want you to know,

before you venture farther,

'they did not sin. Though they have merit,

that is not enough, for they were unbaptized,

denied the gateway to the faith that you profess.

'And if they lived before the Christians lived,

they did not worship God aright.

And among these I am one.

'For such defects, and for no other fault,

we are lost, and afflicted but in this,

that without hope we live in longing.'

When I understood, great sadness seized my heart,

for then I knew that beings of great worth

were here suspended in this Limbo.

'Tell me, master, tell me, sir,' I began,

seeking assurance in the faith

that conquers every doubt,

'did ever anyone, either by his own

or by another's merit, go forth from here

and rise to blessedness?'

And he, who understood my covert speech:

'I was new to this condition when I saw

a mighty one descend, crowned, with the sign of victory.

'Out of our midst he plucked the shade

of our first parent, of Abel his son, of Noah,

and of Moses, obedient in giving laws,

'the patriarch Abraham, and David the king,

Israel with his father and his sons,

and with Rachel, for whom he served so long,

'as well as many others, and he made them blessed.

And, I would have you know, before these

no human souls were saved.'

Actually I'm very fond of the old-style language! I would be interested in the notes and commentary in the newer edition though.

I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution.

By the way, this notion of growing up and being a man who knows the stakes and plays his part etc. etc. has become a topic of some contention among the homoerotic sim cluster of the online right (BAPists). I found it interesting in how it clashes with the view prevalent here, espoused e.g. by Hlynka, FC and others. Says BAP:

Most "right wing" Public Intralexuals are under the thumb of wives or Ezra Levant types and impotent "advocacy" for flag, cross, FAMILY--which comes pre-caricatured and has done nothing for decades--is a cynical advantage for people who just want to be on TeeVee. Few things are more useless than pontificating how Liberal Capitalism destroyed Community and like, you should have a family, be religious, etc.; what would actually be effective--all-male groups, parties, factions--is not only not encouraged but derided as "gay" and fascistic. Of course this line of argument, so popular since at least 2017, also has the advantage of being completely safe and acceptable to the academic left, which gives these people an "edgy" thrill...to "reach out" to Socialists for a Conversation.

Also quoting the Samurai.

His follower cites from The Podcast a rant which contains one extremely clear-headed take:

If you're in a secret society, or whatever small group of men, not a secret society, a group of men who devote themselves to, let's say a great scientific task or such, or if you're in Order of Teutonic Knights or Templar Knights or other such, and one of you, he pines to go home to his wife and that's his priority. And he does your thing during the daytime hours for work, or for money, or entertainment, but his real priority is his wife at home. That man is a traitor. And if that sounds extreme to you, this is why nothing gets done today by the way, because of what I just said now, because it sounds extreme to you. Whereas if you took even seventy or eighty years ago, communists, let me say, not fascists because whatever you can say about, you take communists eighty years ago, or you take a group of scientists or artists with the ambition that French artists had in the nineteenth, early twentieth century, everything I have just told you would have been a complete matter of course for them. But if you say it now, you're an extreme nihilist, misogynist, you don't respect family, you don't respect women, you're gay. Well I tell you that any man historically who would have put his wife and private household as his number one priority would have been mocked in an aristocratic society, ridiculed as a stay-at-home, as a househusband, would have been laughed at as a henpecked creature, a woman-man little better than what you call a cuckold now. […] This is actually what is meant by atomization by the way. A male's descent into private family life, which really means a henpecked husband.

Clarifies another:

(As a family man myself) BAP is right about all of this, about the impossibility of great work and great action under social circumstances dominated by the priorities of a man to his family, to his home above all else. But it is not complete… This leaves out the problem of being born into a time when even imagining the kind of society, or brotherhood, or endeavor that one might undertake that could justify setting aside familial obligations, or even reconstructing what those obligations are, is near impossible.

Instead, given our present arrangements, devoting your resources and energies to being a great father/husband is about the best you can do, and seems to be, with perhaps extremely few exceptions, one of the only worthwhile and noble ways to spend the bulk of one’s life […] It has become an all consuming project, so much so that it goes basically unremarked upon, that’s it’s just assumed that family ought to be the centerpiece of our life’s work

I think they're correct in their dunks, to the point no coherent rebuttal can be made (the value of the actually fascistic outlook of BAPists, and its pitfalls, is a topic for another discussion; I, for one, take great issue with their propensity for delusions and dreams of violence, and complete inability and lack of interest in building stuff).

But this familyman ideal is much more authentic and normal than the whole mannerbund LARP – particularly for Europeans with their notion of romantic love and history of pronounced selection by mate preference. It is also more conductive for maintaining order – if at minor scale. And, as with cleaning your room before taking on the world, being a good bourgeois is a deceptively low bar that not everyone can adequately clear.

But that's still a brand of seriousness that's akin to searching for your keys under the lamppost.

But regarding your point.

The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

You might consider that the camel is only the first metamorphosis of the spirit.

Yes, I was almost hesitant to include this example in the OP, because I knew it would be misunderstood. I considered elaborating on this point further, but the post was already at the character limit anyway.

I don't think that men should slavishly adhere to this particular life track - get a wife, get a house, get an office job and climb the corporate ladder - merely because it is the currently fashionable view of what it means to "be a man". I don't want people to live lives of meaningless hedonism, but I don't want them to be rubes either. You first have to ask yourself if the woman is worth loving, if the society is worth serving (in this particular way).

If someone says they have no time to build a family because they have to go be a great artist or whatever, then that's fine by me. He'll probably fail of course, but this is no great catastrophe to himself or anyone else; the social organism can easily tolerate a small number of losses of this type.

For the great majority of men who don't have anything else going on, building a family is probably the most meaningful way they can spend their time.

If someone says they have no time to build a family because they have to go be a great artist or whatever, then that's fine by me.

There's a fuckton of selfishness hiding under that bushel, though; for every one guy who does become a star (or even manages to become a professional who can earn a living from their art), there's twenty who are just indulging themselves and will continue to be 'in a band' or whatever for years and never get anywhere.

I'm probably prejudiced, though, by the case I encountered in social housing of the guy who left his small kids to his elderly mother to take care of, because he had to go 'be an artist' (he was a musician). Of course he never made it as a career, but it was sure handy for him to be able to dump his responsibilities on his family and go off to live the way he wanted.

There's a fuckton of selfishness hiding under that bushel, though

Well, there certainly might be. Or there might not be. It always depends on the specifics of the situation in question. It's certainly possible to use ostensibly noble goals as an excuse for laziness, hedonism, and all the rest; but sometimes a noble commitment really is just a noble commitment with no ulterior motives.

I agree with you that there's very unlikely to be anything praiseworthy about a man abandoning his children. He should have thought about the consequences before he had children, and he should have to live with those consequences even if he feels them to be a burden.

Yeah, my view is "You're single and don't have any committments? Go do what you like". But once you have dependents or committments, then man (or woman, this applies to the ladies too) up and do your duty.

I suppose I'd shrug at that and say 'the great man can devote himself whole-heartedly to his work or passion or art or group of alchemists meeting in masks and funny hats because he has a wife at home making sure he has cooked meals, clean clothing, and she handles running the house and making sure the bills are paid'.

There's a balance in everything. Someone who really is happier at home with his family and his pursuits is not a traitor; better that he go home, than stick around distracted and half-assing the job.

Someone who really is happier at home with his family and his pursuits is not a traitor; better that he go home, than stick around distracted and half-assing the job.

I mean, on one level, sure. Some random person who is happy at home isn't a traitor, but that's ignoring the context of a (possibly secret) society devoted to $GREAT_WORK.

Generally when you join such a group, you would take an oath to put the group above all else. It's the betrayal of this oath that constitutes treason, which requires that you be in the in-group before you can commit it. The in-group membership is important. The same way someone born in Bolivia cannot be a traitor to the country of Iraq, someone who never joined the secret society can't be a traitor. An enemy? Sure. But not a traitor.

Presumably the takeaway is that someone who is happier at home should never take such an oath and join such a society, which seems reasonable. But the context of the quote seems to specify someone who has already made such a commitment.

(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)

I don't think this is a new observation. "Rationalism" in as much as it is a coherent ideology (it isn't) is postmodern. Certainly 'neoreaction', which is arguably closer to the dominant political philosophy on this subreddit rather than Bay Area rationalism, is fundamentally postmodern and as far as I'm aware Moldbug agrees that it is. Many people here are fans of The Last Psychiatrist, the quintessential postmodernist niche online cultural commentary blog of the late Bush - early Obama era.

And besides, even in the mid 20th century it was very common to acknowledge that conservative intellectuals like Oakeshott and Strauss were essentially postmodernists. Most importantly, on the left the largest and most popular (and most regular) criticism of postmodernism (particularly Derrida and Deleuze) was that they were all secret reactionaries, or at least that the logical conclusion of postmodern political philosophy was an implicit small-c conservatism.

If postmodernism is fundamentally a rejection of grand narratives as per Lyotard, then that leaves room for all kinds of other, smaller narratives in their place. Some would call that a form of conservatism, especially given that liberalism / progressivism / leftism is/are far more reliant on grand narratives than reactionary ideologies - particularly non-Christian/Abrahamic reactionary ideologies - are.

@HlynkaCG is correct in saying that large parts of the internet right are postmodernists, but this doesn't mean they're not rightists.

Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life.

He is only following Saint Augustine there; it has long been debated when or in what circumstances lyng is justified, if it is ever justified.

I owe no truth to those who value it not. If a Nazi came to my door asking if I am hiding Jews, he’s asking if I’m hiding a member of an internationalist cabal dedicated to degrading all morality and becoming masters of a communist world plantation. I can easily say no, because I am not, no matter how many Cohens and Goldbergs are in my attic or crawlspace.

...

Is that your real objection? If it was instead a serial killer who you believe doesn't have any particularly inaccurate beliefs about his victims, but simply enjoys killing people and has been hunting the person you're hiding as his next target, would you tell him the truth or would you come up with a different excuse for why it's acceptable to lie?

It seems like probably the real reason you don't tell the truth is simply that if you do it'll result in someone's death and no real gain, just adherence to the "don't lie" rule. But if that's your reason then just say that's your reason, rather than obscuring it behind excuses specific to the situation.

No, it’s not my reason for lying. It’s an attempt to change the feeling of “I’m lying” which can easily be detected on my face into a feeling of “I’m telling the truth”, which I can express easily.

You might be able to take it a step further and say something like "if those Nazis were in their right minds then they wouldn't want to kill Jews." In practice I think it's easier to just say that lying is justified sometimes.

it has long been debated when or in what circumstances lyng is justified, if it is ever justified.

Yes, but Kant put a very unique spin on it: his claim was that the prohibition against lying (among many other prohibitions) followed directly from the structure of rational agency itself; it was not grounded in any external source such as divine law or a natural telos. Anyone who is committed to their own rational autonomy must necessarily come to the same conclusion. The empty form of logic generates its own content without the need for any additional premises. The idea that a mere "commitment to reason" could lead to such apparently absurd conclusions is, I think, part of the lasting fascination with his ethics.

This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms.

I think I should remind you that Dante was not, in fact, a theologian. He never claimed that his work was theological in nature and was not received as such. It was meant as entertainment: it's original title was "Comedy" and large chunks of the book are spent on trivial political diatribes where Dante "wins" the argument by portraying himself as the Yes Chad and his political opponents as crying soyjaks tortured by devils.

Just to underline how much his views did not reflect the official views of contemporary Christianity it's worth remembering that one of his other books, De Monarchia, was declared heretical shortly after his death, burned on the stake and 200 years later it was entered in the very first edition of the Index where it stayed until the late 1800s.

He wasn't held in especially high regards in literary circles either, he did have his own small fan club but generally intellectuals considered Boccaccio and Petrarca to be the better (vulgar) italian authors. His contemporary fame is mostly due to being rediscovered, at the end of the 1800s, as part of the founding myth for the italian language.

On the topic of the Church having softened on the topic of hell... probably. However consider that the idea of Purgatory was very prevalent throughout the middle ages and I suspect most people expected to get that, rather than hell, for their minor infractions. If that wasn't the case it would be hard to explain all the money they made off of indulgences.

Furthermore the concept of universal reconciliation (in some form) isn't alien to old christian theology, Origen (~200AD) being the early example. You can find more examples by reading the history of Apokatastasis. I like Eriugena's version, the theological big crunch: you can use it to make a transhumanist version where we all get eternal life through being part of a LLM.

This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational.

I'd say that the idea of infinite punishments (or rewards) being dished out for finite transgressions is psychotic and possibly betrays the fact that nobody ever truly believed it. As Borges puts it:

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive

I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children.

I think you should seriously consider the possibility that people used to do those things because of the immediate material rewards that they entailed and they don't do them anymore (as much) because the calculus has changed. It's likely that "be responsible" is just an easy cudgel to reach and beat people over the head with when they are not doing what you want them to do.

Per wikipedia, it looks like Eriugena wasn't a universalist, despite having some form of apokatastasis?

So, while everything has indeed returned to God in Eriugena's account, material hell is a "pagan superstition", eternal punishment remains as "the supernatural distinction between the chosen and the condemned will remain whole and will persist eternally, but each one will be beatified or punished in his own conscience."

I think I should remind you that Dante was not, in fact, a theologian. He never claimed that his work was theological in nature and was not received as such. It was meant as entertainment: it's original title was "Comedy" and large chunks of the book are spent on trivial political diatribes where Dante "wins" the argument by portraying himself as the Yes Chad and his political opponents as crying soyjaks tortured by devils.

Commedia in the 14th century didn't mean light or frivolous. It just meant any story that isn't a tragedy. It would probably be more accurate in today's English to translate Divina Commedia as 'The Divine Story' or 'The Divine Narrative'.

You can find more examples by reading the history of Apokatastasis. I like Eriugena's version, the theological big crunch

Could you summarize this? I'm very curious.

Sorry wrong person - @aaa?

The bible is vague on a lot of things, so early theologians filled in by borrowing from greek philosophy, mystery cults, etc. The idea that an infinitely good god will eventually save everyone, and therefore that hell is temporary (i.e. apokatastasis), is not that far fetched (certainly less so than a hierarchy of angels, or the trinity) and thus it circulated, pretty much for all of the history of christianity.

Eriugena's version is explained in his book de divisione naturae and it's a very abstract philosophical theory where creation starts in god as ideas (he thinks platonic forms) which eventually become material. Because god has to be the ultimate form of all aristotelian causes he's also the ultimate final cause so everything returns to him through an inverse process.

Thank you! This is a form of Christianity I might actually be able to believe in. Boy the Catholics really ruined a lot of things huh?

Right, meaning it's a story, it's fictional.

Yes, of course. Dante was a writer, not a theologian or philosopher. I think he did mean Divina Commedia to express truths that he felt were important, both politically and theologically, but he was certainly not writing a scholastic treatise on the way that Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell actually are. He was using his imagination to make a series of other points.

The first circle of Hell is Limbo, and it is a place "of perfect natural felicity". That is, it is our world when all the bad things are solved - war, sickness, poverty, greed and so on. But it is without hope. It is deprived of the supernatural, of the vision of God which is what the enjoyment of the saved and blessed consists of.

It is true that the Church has softened on Limbo and really you never hear of it anymore today. But it was never formally a doctrine (something that has to be believed); rather, it was grappling with the problems of justice and mercy; if infants die before they can be baptised, how can they be condemned to Hell? What about the virtuous pagans and those who never got the chance to hear of God?

On the other hand, if you can be saved just by living a good life, then there was no need for the Incarnation and, crucially, the Crucifixion. If you can be saved without believing in Christ, without ever hearing of Him, then what does that mean for the Great Commission?

So Limbo was a technical solution: a human paradise (for the righteous but unsaved) without the supernatural.

Which is why Limbo, in the Divine Comedy, is on the outskirts of Hell and is a place of sadness, even though there is no pain or sickness or the rest of our earthly woes there. They can never enjoy the bliss of the Divine Vision. And why Purgatory, even though the souls there (by one reading) suffer pains as grievous as the damned in Hell, is a place of hope - because it is where the saved work off the earthly penalties for sin, before they go to Heaven (and it's not a matter of "second chance" or 'earning a place in Heaven' - the souls in Purgatory are already saved).

C.S. Lewis had a somewhat different take on it in his The Pilgrim's Regress, but he too took the view: a place not of suffering, except the suffering of being without hope.

I've often thought about the contrast here - we on earth want an earthly paradise, no more tears or grief or loss, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. And the Church says "yes, you can have that - but it's in the map of Hell, not of Heaven. You can have the secular ideal, but never the supernatural one."

And some people probably would be very happy with that bargain. I never watched The Good Place, but a while back there it was all over social media. And my understanding - SPOILERS - is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.

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War is where we're at our most buglike.

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I do not see how this is true, much less relevant.

I'll expand. War is where you go to die for the benefit of the hive (that's the best case - oftentimes the hive as a whole is not the beneficiary, only the elites are).

War is where propaganda is at its heaviest and most blatant in retrospect. Men will not go to war without this memetic attack pheromone.

That the modern man "suffers without war" is a) not really true and b) he isn't without war. You have a rich pick of various noble causes all over the world: I suggest the recent little proxy operation in Eastern Europe. In the (I assume) rather unlikely event that the system around you prevents you from joining any organized conflict, go to war against the system.

If your objection is that men are no longer forced to go to war, my reply is thus: then suffer.

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Based on what I can tell - I much prefer the warless rates of illness, mental and physical. I, for one, am not in any particular need of Higher Purpose(tm).

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More comments

Really? Ants and wasps are a thing.

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So if you were to step in an ant hill, all of the ants biting your feet would not be cooperating with eachother? I think the analogy you chose fails to illustrate what you want it to.

It's so much more banal than a heaven where you spend eternity contemplating the face of God.

You lost me here; what does this mean? This sounds even more banal than eating at restaurants and going to parties.

You lost me here; what does this mean? This sounds even more banal than eating at restaurants and going to parties.

The short answer is: Love.

The Beatific Vision is inexhaustible because it can never be fully known or totally comprehended even by an immortal intellect. Only God can fully know God. But we love that which is the best and highest, and we are loved, and love is never satisfied by any amount of enjoyment:

Thus all my mind, absorbed,

was gazing, fixed, unmoving and intent,

becoming more enraptured in its gazing.

He who beholds that Light is so enthralled

that he would never willingly consent

to turn away from it for any other sight,

because the good that is the object of the will

is held and gathered in perfection there

that elsewhere would imperfect show.

Now my words will come far short

of what I still remember, like a babe's

who at his mother's breast still wets his tongue.

Not that the living Light at which I gazed

took on other than a single aspect --

for It is always what It was before --

but that my sight was gaining strength, even as I gazed

at that sole semblance and, as I changed,

it too was being, in my eyes, transformed.

In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light

there appeared to me three circles

having three colors but the same extent,

and each one seemed reflected by the other

as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,

equally breathed forth by one and by the other.

O how scant is speech, too weak to frame my thoughts.

Compared to what I still recall my words are faint --

to call them little is to praise them much.

O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,

knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself

and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!

That circling which, thus conceived,

appeared in you as light's reflection,

once my eyes had gazed on it a while, seemed,

within itself and in its very color,

to be painted with our likeness,

so that my sight was all absorbed in it.

Like the geometer who fully applies himself

to square the circle and, for all his thought,

cannot discover the principle he lacks,

such was I at that strange new sight.

I tried to see how the image fit the circle

and how it found its where in it.

But my wings had not sufficed for that

had not my mind been struck by a bolt

of lightning that granted what I asked.

Here my exalted vision lost its power.

But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving

with an even motion, were turning with

the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.

I don't believe in a God whose ultimate purpose for his children is for us to become lotus-eaters, regardless of how tasty the lotus is.

How does "less self centered" turn into "more interesting"?

And how is this less self-centered anyway? If it's something that you want to worship, that's still something that you want.

That's just a much more interesting concept to me than cruise ship heaven. It's less self centered.

I think there's a difference between a more interesting concept and one that would actually be more interesting to live. "endless nothingness" is a more interesting concept to me than cruise ship heaven.

Agreed about The Good Place. Though really I'd be happy with cruise ship heaven too; there would be so much to learn and do. Heaven being nihilist and hedonistic doesn't force you to become that way.

it's very interesting how you recognized the problem at the heart of the show the good place without having seen it. i put off watching for years because the only thing i knew was its setting in heaven and i had doubts on how that was going to be handled. eventually i did watch it, all the way through but not as a binge, i enjoyed it until the ending.

the mistake ZHPL made, the same as @self_made_human, and one that's understandable but not in the best way from people who didn't watch it, is thinking it's an atheist work. if ZHPL did watch it and missed it, bad look. it is ostensibly atheist: heaven with no God, hell with no devil, what's going on? it makes no sense, to disregard God is to disregard the source of objectivity and in the context of a show about the domain of God it renders that show nonsense, it destroys everything. i don't mean this on a level of modern soullessness or even just logically. the grand narrative of the show has a God-shaped hole, it's nothing without it. thing is, the hole isn't supposed to be there.

imagine a fan cut of fight club. the sole purpose of the cut is removing the last reveal of tyler durden's identity. it would leave in everything it could without it being explicit that "pitt is norton's alter-ego." this cut would probably work well enough, it would seem off, like it was building to something and the bombings at the end don't quite resolve that feeling, but it'd have beginning middle and apparent end.

that's what happened with the good place. the show lacks the fundamental truth of the world of the story, and in a show about heaven and hell that can't just be skipped. michael schur is a smart guy, he wasn't ignoring this, it's there the whole time, i think the writers didn't know how schur intended for the show to end because schur didn't want to accidentally ruin the show with a cliched and bad ending.

i'm certain it was supposed to end one of these ways:

  1. the whole show was eleanor in purgatory. the ending was going to be her realizing something was still missing, but how can heaven be missing something? so we get the final twist: she's still not in heaven, she was never in heaven, and what she's missing is God. she'd pass through the door, find herself in actual heaven, and meet God.

  2. reality in the show--hell, mundane, divine--is a simulation, and when eleanor passed through the door at the end she would have met those running the simulation.

the season 1 finale is famous and the narratively perfect bookend with the s4 series finale would be her meeting God, or "god", contrast with the dissonant ending we get. ZHPL criticizes parts of the show as escalating soullessness, like the character of the judge, but it's so obvious as meta-level escalating absurdity. schur takes it farther and farther into nonsense to the point the judge character is as good as schur screaming at the audience "You still don't get it! The characters still don't understand what's actually going on! They still don't see the fundamental truth!" The first intended ending has to be done perfectly or it nukes the show's legacy. The second is the choice if he can't pull off the first, but then it becomes the "too smart for its own good" ending.

schur went with door to oblivion, why risk the legacy of it-was-all-a-dream-ing his show? but that's the problem with the good place: it's so damn obvious it was all a dream.

the mistake ZHPL made, the same as @self_made_human, and one that's understandable but not in the best way from people who didn't watch it, is thinking it's an atheist work

I don't think I ever claimed it was an atheist work, I'm entirely agnostic on the point!

I can easily see a "Cultural Christian", someone who mouths the words but doesn't actually have anything but belief in belief, concoct such a bad story.

I don't know the actual religious orientation of the writers, but what I'm getting at is that I can see a self-professed "Christian" writing it.

I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.

is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.

It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.

A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.

I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.

Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.

To them I say:

How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?

And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?

A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.

Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.

Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.

Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.

And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.

The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.

Quite right. How can all these authors diss immortality? They've never even tried it! Nobody's tried it.

Our revealed preference is to spend enormous amounts of time and effort extending our lifespans in the health sector, despite rapidly diminishing returns in quality of life. Our revealed preference (or at least the revealed preference of governments and thought leaders) was to make considerable sacrifices during COVID lest a few years be shaved off the lifespans of geriatrics and the obese.

It's hypocritical to be so contemptuous of immortality when we go to such huge effort for far lesser fruits.

Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output. I know I'm preaching to the choir with you but there's a fairly large cult of 'growth must slow' when it's the opposite that we need. There's a great deal of unused real estate on Earth - tundra, deep ocean, desert, ice and massively more in the rest of the Solar System.

By all means, preach to the choir, they're going to be in attendance by default haha.

It does deeply reassure me that that people like you exist, who I consider fundamentally sane in a manner that makes me willing to tolerate a great deal of discord in other fundamental values when we see eye to eye on the really big ones (not that I'm aware of such differences!)

Decrying immortality is the epitome of luxury beliefs, since nobody really has a glaring example of it that can be shoved in their face. I'd like to see their hypocritical walkbacks when they begin to argue that no, it's different this time, and we didn't actually mean to dunk on immortality now that it's on sale.

I like what you mean by fundamentally sane, it fits a concept I've been thinking about but couldn't articulate. There are a lot of people who have bizarre ideas about what could be possible visions of the future. I recall an exchange on twitter. Someone like Roko or Alexander Kruel was saying 'oh we could easily fit a trillion people on Earth based on these technical factors' and one of the trad-rightists said something like 'so what, that has nothing to do with the good life, they aren't needed to be squires or knights in the small bands of bodybuilders roaming across the American plains on horseback'.

On the left there are those EcoSophia declining-efficiency of energy production people who think peak oil will eventually result in civilization collapsing down to mid 19th century level forever and that this is a good thing, since it'll reduce human arrogance and get us more in touch with the environment. I particularly dislike the psychoanalytic tone they take, saying that nuclear power and so on is a cope that people clutch to so they can hold onto their preferred incarnation of decadent modernity. The figures don't bear that out.

Now there are all kinds of formidable technical and socio-political problems in achieving our vision of the good life, sovereignty amongst posthumans. I think it's a very long shot, that there are competitive pressures that lead to autocracy or monopoly of a very few. Yet we can't turn back now and play Cowboys and Indians or Trad Farmers. There is no going back, no unilateral disarmament of industry, wealth and power. Much as I might prefer that AI development be paused for many decades so that we can upgrade ourselves steadily and establish a solid political/technical/social foundation, I recognize that it's not practical to hold back, competition won't allow it.

The bodybuilders on horseback would get pummelled by riflemen circa 1870, let alone the drone swarms of 2070. If their vision of the future doesn't include massively more technology than we have now, they're going to get crushed. Likewise with immortality and massive cognitive enhancements. If they're even on offer, we're doing well.

On the left there are those EcoSophia declining-efficiency of energy production people who think peak oil will eventually result in civilization collapsing down to mid 19th century level forever and that this is a good thing, since it'll reduce human arrogance and get us more in touch with the environment.

As one of the people who most commonly link to Ecosophia on this site, I don't believe you have an accurate understanding of the claims being made. The first reason is your placing of Ecosophia on the left - where exactly on the left does pro-Trump Burkean conservatism lie? Your post here isn't just counter to what JMG actually believes but I believe it contains a misreading that he was complaining about having to clear up back in 2011, specifically the idea that the collapse will be sudden or immediately noticeable, like a sharp fall off a cliff which leaves us back in the 19th century forever (though I freely admit I may be misinterpreting you here).

The same gap in perception afflicts most current efforts to make sense of the future looming up ahead of us. Ever since my original paper on catabolic collapse first found its way onto the internet, I’ve fielded questions fairly regularly from people who want to know whether I think some current or imminent crisis will tip industrial society over into catabolic collapse in some unmistakably catastrophic way. It’s a fair question, but it’s based on a fundamental misreading both of the concept of catabolic collapse and of our present place in the long cycles of rise and fall that define the history of civilizations.

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That’s catabolic collapse. It’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds, because each burst of catabolism on the way down does lower maintenance costs significantly, and can also free up resources for other uses. The usual result is the stairstep sequence of decline that’s traced by the history of so many declining civilizations—half a century of crisis and disintegration, say, followed by several decades of relative stability and partial recovery, and then a return to crisis; rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-01-20/onset-catabolic-collapse/

JMG has not been talking about the coming zombie apocalypse where a giant cataclysm completely and dramatically upends the existing order of things - the Long Descent lies outside the "apocalypse/star trek" dichotomy that's so prevalent in modern society. And on the topic of technology, here are some of his actual words on the subject.

Technology is a lagging indicator—it’s quite common for a civilization in terminal decline to push its technologies further than ever before, while its economy turns into a hollow shell propped up by fakery and graft, its political system grinds to a halt in bureaucratic paralysis and hopeless incompetence, and its grip on its outlying regions becomes increasingly fictitious. In every way that matters, modern civilization is more than a century into decline, drawing toward the end of one of the eras of relative stability that reliably punctuate the downslope of history.

https://unherd.com/2022/03/we-are-the-authors-of-our-decline/

Look at what happened to the technology of past civilisations that ended up collapsing. Some Roman architecture still stands to this day, and plenty of the advancements that were made during the Empire were preserved and helped make sure that the dark ages afterwards were a bit more tolerable. The collapse of Rome didn't leave humanity doomed to pre-Roman technology for all time, and the collapse of modern Western civilisation won't do the same either. It's highly likely that bicycles and a lot of the other technology we've developed will be used well into the future, assuming that those skills and ideas are preserved through the decline.

More importantly, the collapse that JMG has been writing about for the last two decades isn't some far-off "eventually" - it is happening now, right outside our windows. In huge swathes of the US you can just look outside and see exactly what he's talking about. To wit:

The decline and fall of a civilization is not a fast process. Neither is the twilight of an empire, the restructuring of a planet’s climate, or the exhaustion of that same planet’s once-extensive fossil fuel reserves. All of these happen over a scale of multiple lifetimes, and they also happen unevenly. Just as the movement of the tides is obscured in the short term by the ebb and flow of waves, the fall of a civilization is obscured by the ordinary vagaries of politics, economics, and culture. Only now and then, when several crises pile up together and disrupt the ordinary rhythms of business as usual, does it become possible to gauge just how far down the slope we’ve already come.

That is to say, the reality of decline becomes most visible in times like the present.

Look around you, dear reader, as you go about your daily life, and compare what you see now to what you saw a decade or two ago, or longer if your memory reaches that far. Here in the United States, it’s been more than two years since grocery stores have reliably had fully stocked shelves; the same condition, all but unthinkable in the industrial world just a few years back, has spread to Britain and more recently to several European countries as well. If you live in or near a big city, compare how many homeless people there are now to how many there were in the past; compare the state of streets and sidewalks and infrastructure now to their condition in any earlier decade you care to name. Consider the impact of product debasement and the general crapification of the conditions of your life. Notice what civil rights you can actually exercise, as distinct from those you have in some theoretical sense. Notice the general texture of life.

Do I need to state the obvious? This is what decline looks like.

The collapse of Rome was not evenly and equally distributed - the Byzantines kept on going for quite some time, and it is highly likely that parts of the modern west will do the same. On that note, you've also missed one of the other central points of his hypothesis - that another civilisation will eventually be born on the other side of the dark ages we're headed towards. The fall or collapse of a civilisation is not a permanent end to human history, but another iteration of a process that we have an increasingly accurate understanding of.

Your post here isn't just counter to what JMG actually believes but I believe it contains a misreading that he was complaining about having to clear up back in 2011, specifically the idea that the collapse will be sudden or immediately noticeable, like a sharp fall off a cliff which leaves us back in the 19th century forever (though I freely admit I may be misinterpreting you here).

I agree with you about what he predicts I think, it's just that it's hard to summarize a quasi-ideology in a single sentence. A lot is riding on the 'eventually' in my sentence. I did read a couple of posts from him where he says 'no the collapse won't be sharp but a steady decline, perhaps accelerating at some points under various competitive pressures'. Also, is he not on the left? I thought the whole 'archdruid' thing and a fairly anti-capitalist tint shone through his work, along with the ecological emphasis. Maybe left-right isn't so clear with these unusual ideologies. Also, since when was he pro-Trump? I never saw anything like that.

More importantly, the collapse that JMG has been writing about for the last two decades isn't some far-off "eventually" - it is happening now, right outside our windows.

This is just bad management of resources and bad politics. If the US decided to criminalize drug dealing as opposed to leaving these festering open-air drug markets... If the US and most of the West wasn't 'investing' in inefficient renewables as opposed to nuclear energy... If the US and West generally didn't decide to send our manufacturing base overseas to China...

Look at the actual predictions he made from the 2011 link:

The notion that America can drill its way out of crisis would be funny if the situation was not so serious; despite dizzyingly huge government subsidies and the best oil exploration and extraction technology on Earth, US oil production has been in decline since 1972.

That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

The date in question is 1974.

neither we nor Britain nor any other of our close allies has a big new petroleum reserve just waiting to be tapped, after all.

And then we had the fracking boom! US oil production reached a record high in 2019, contra Greer. Likewise with global oil production. COVID hit and then we had the war in Ukraine which have thrown things out of whack, yet these crises don't stem from energy problems, they stem from human stupidity in geopolitics and biomedical research. The West's leaders have been working around the clock to sabotage the fossil fuel industry, shut down pipelines like Keystone, ban exploration, shut down power plants, impose punitive taxes, engage in lawfare against coal mines.

On that note, you've also missed one of the other central points of his hypothesis - that another civilisation will eventually be born on the other side of the dark ages we're headed towards.

I said that civilization would collapse down to 19th century standards, I got the sense that he predicted permanent stagnation. Did he not deride all alternate energy sources, including nuclear, as cope? What is left to build back on if there's no fossil fuels, nuclear or anything? Hydro alone seems rather limited. You can definitely maintain civilizations with 19th century tech, use charcoal and so on. Yet technological civilizations like ours need more power IMO.

Anyway, my primary disagreement with him is that we are not short of energy. There's plenty of uranium and thorium if only we bother to use 50-year old, simple technologies like breeder reactors, if only we get rid of all the red tape that slows down construction. The state-sponsored sabotage of nuclear energy is staggering - see https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

Likewise, sulphate aerosols could reverse climate change in a matter of years, if only we chose to deploy them.

Nuclear energy is actually cheaper than coal for electricity in technical terms, it's just that we choose to make it more expensive. More broadly, all the time we're finding new efficiencies, new sources of power, new ways to accelerate development. Fracking is just one example. Peak oil was supposed to come in 1974, 2006, then 2011, it still hasn't come and it won't mean anything more than 'peak whale oil' ever did when it does come, since we'll be onto gas, nuclear fission and fusion, or solar if it ever becomes economically viable. That is, provided our leaders are wise enough to do their jobs correctly, as opposed to flailing around like children. That's what was going on with Rome and Byzantium, their energy sources were stable but their leadership became incompetent.

I agree with you about what he predicts I think, it's just that it's hard to summarize a quasi-ideology in a single sentence. A lot is riding on the 'eventually' in my sentence. I did read a couple of posts from him where he says 'no the collapse won't be sharp but a steady decline, perhaps accelerating at some points under various competitive pressures'. Also, is he not on the left? I thought the whole 'archdruid' thing and a fairly anti-capitalist tint shone through his work, along with the ecological emphasis. Maybe left-right isn't so clear with these unusual ideologies. Also, since when was he pro-Trump? I never saw anything like that.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-one-aristocracy-and-its-discontents/

I am honestly surprised that you have read his work at all if those are the conclusions you drew from it. His articles about Trump were some of his most popular and he wrote an entire book on the subject (a good read, in my opinion). Yes, he does care about the environment, but that's not really unexpected for Burkean conservatives and was in fact traditional for conservatism for a large portion of history. He quite literally has a Master Conserver certificate, and Conservation and Conservatism both share a root word after all.

This is just bad management of resources and bad politics. If the US decided to criminalize drug dealing as opposed to leaving these festering open-air drug markets... If the US and most of the West wasn't 'investing' in inefficient renewables as opposed to nuclear energy... If the US and West generally didn't decide to send our manufacturing base overseas to China...

"If the US decided" - how exactly is that going to happen? The political deadlock and inability of the state to solve these problems ARE collapse! Yes, the US government could just decide to turn around and fix a lot of the problems that society is facing, but this is like saying alcoholism is easy to fix - after all, one just needs to stop drinking and the problem is gone. There's a galaxy of competing interests and power-politics that get in the way of actually resolving the hard problems that face complex societies, and this gridlock is one of the common features of declining empires.

And then we had the fracking boom! US oil production reached a record high in 2019, contra Greer. Likewise with global oil production.

Allow me to quote the man himself on the topic:

Then, just as in the 1970s, a flurry of short-term fixes temporarily flooded the market with cheap petroleum and drove prices down again for a while. Those fixes didn’t involve any of the new energy sources that had been brandished around. They involved taking a well-known oil extraction technology called hydrofracturing (“fracking”), using it on well-known shale reserves that weren’t economical to drill and pump, and having the US government cover the costs by printing money at a reckless pace and funneling it to the fracking industry by way of a flurry of dubious financial gimmicks. (That orgy of money-printing is a large part of why we have runaway inflation now, in case you were wondering.) That was never going to be more than a temporary gimmick, and it lasted only a dozen years: the price of oil was already skyrocketing again before the Russo-Ukraine war broke out. The next stage—well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Fracking isn't a new technology - when Greer spoke about and evaluated his predictions, he mentioned that he didn't expect the flurry of financial gimmicks that ended up allowing the fracking boom to take place. That said I don't have a citation for this one, and I can't find the evaluation he did because it is on his older, archived blog.

I said that civilization would collapse down to 19th century standards, I got the sense that he predicted permanent stagnation. Did he not deride all alternate energy sources, including nuclear, as cope?

He did not predict permanent stagnation at all - and in fact he even points out that the ragged curve of decline will include periods of recovery and prosperity as society is forced to reduce energy expenditures. As for deriding nuclear, yes he did... and while I would very much like him to be wrong, I haven't seen any evidence that he is.

The first of the nonsolutions I have in mind was that endlessly rewarmed casserole of twentieth-century fantasies, nuclear power. A few centuries from now, when some future equivalent of Rev. Charles Mackay pens a new version of that durable classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, industrial society’s obsession with nuclear power will rank high among the exhibits. No matter how many times nuclear power plants turn out to be unaffordable without gargantuan government subsidies, some people remain fixated on the notion that some future iteration of nuclear power will finally fulfill the Eisenhower-era delusion of energy too cheap to meter. If one nuclear technology fails, we hear, surely the next one will succeed, or the one after that. It never sinks in that every nuclear technology looks cheap, clean, and reliable until it’s built.

There are good reasons why this should be so. At the heart of our energy conundrum is the neglected reality of net energy—that is to say, how much energy you get out after you subtract all the energy you have to put in. Nuclear fission looks great as long as you don’t think about net energy. True believers gaze on the fuel pellets that provide the energy behind nuclear power and say, “All that energy in so tiny a space!”

What they never seem to notice is that fuel pellets as such don’t occur in nature. They have to be manufactured from one of a small handful of fissionable metals, which can be found only in very, very diffuse form in mineral ores. Behind each of those fuel pellets, in other words, is a gigantic heap of mine tailings, which have to be dug from the ground and subjected to a whole series of processes to get the fissionable material out. All this takes energy—huge amounts of energy. Then, of course, you have to build, maintain, and decommission the nuclear power plant, which also takes a whale of a lot of energy, and the radioactive waste also has to be dealt with, taking more energy still. All this has to be subtracted from the output, for the same reason that a bookkeeper has to subtract expenses from income to determine the profit.

Net energy calculations are fiendishly difficult, since you have to factor in every energy input into every stage of the process, from the raw ore in the ground, raw materials not yet turned into a power plant, and so on. Fortunately there’s a convenient proxy measure, which is the price set by the market. It’s a source of wry amusement to me that so many of the cheerleaders for nuclear power these days think of themselves as conservatives, insist that they favor the free market and oppose government intervention, and then turn around and back a power source that has been weighed repeatedly by the market and found wanting, and only remains in existence today because of gigantic government subsidies.

Nuclear power never pays for itself. That’s the hard lesson of the last three quarters of a century. The writing was already on the wall back in the 1960s, when the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered commercial freighter, was still in service. It was a technological success but an economic flop, which is why it was mothballed as soon as the subsidies ran out. The handful of other nuclear freighters that were built all met the same fate. You can use nuclear power to run naval vessels because navies don’t have to pay for themselves. Commercial shipping does—and on a much broader scale, of course, so does an industrial economy.

https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-the-peak/

Show me the functioning nuclear power plant that generates energy in a sustainably profitable way (this includes taking waste handling into account) and I'll be overjoyed and freely admit that he was wrong. Oh, and remember that if you are trying to make a proposal for a future plant you can't just instantly vaporise the existing US government and replace them with a squad of enlightened technocrats - if you want to get rid of that regulation you have to explain how you're going to do that from within the confines of the current political system, and all the graft and corruption that entails.

What is left to build back on if there's no fossil fuels, nuclear or anything? Hydro alone seems rather limited. You can definitely maintain civilizations with 19th century tech, use charcoal and so on. Yet technological civilizations like ours need more power IMO.

The same renewable energy sources that powered every empire before the age of fossil fuel usage and extraction - the sun, human and animal muscle, hydro, wind and a few others. You're right when you say that technological civilizations like ours need more power - which means that when we no longer have that power, we no longer have the technological civilization like ours. Renewable energy is indeed unable to power an incredibly wasteful and environmentally ruinous society like our current one, but being unable to support modern society doesn't mean they're useless. Of course the problem is that in order to achieve a smooth transition to renewables the date we have to start making the change is, iirc, about 1974 - but while we've missed that boat, renewables will definitely play a part in the future.

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Unironic endorsement of degrowth is something that makes me doubt my own sanity when I read it, because it strikes me as requiring a deeply broken model of the world to not even see how much all of the technology and progress we take for granted is pushed along by an abundance of cheap energy and an ever increasing number of minds who can employ that energy to new tasks.

At least in the case of those who acknowledge the horrors that would result from such activities and then accept them with open eyes, I can see that we simply have fundamental values differences, as much as I think of them irredeemably evil moral mutants from our perspective.

But worse are the OOMs larger number of useful idiots who enable them, the Extinction Rebellion advocates of the world, who think that we can slam the brakes on industry without ruining the QOL of the globe, any hope for a rising tide that raises the boat of the Global South, or even worse, the death of billions from starvation and fighting as the world goes from an iterated positive sum game where, grossly, the average person keeps doing better, to one that's outright negative sum in outlook.

At least the Powers that Be aren't particularly fond of them, for all that they're often bumbling idiots themselves. But you can never rest easy in a democratically run asylum where at any moment the inmates can vote themselves into power.

I wish I could say that the number of people explicitly oriented towards an optimistic vision of the future, like you, me or Kruel, who think that humanity deserves to do better, outnumber the kooks who fervently desire the opposite.

Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output.

Do you not have enough already?

Of course I am totally opposed to this view of art as a fungible good in the first place - this view that one can simply request "more art" in the way that one might request more bananas or more toothpaste. But even if that is your view of art, I can't see how you would be dissatisfied right now. There's already more art than can fit in one lifetime.

I'm sure @RandomRanger agrees that it's not just art that would be the output of a grossly larger population, but also science and industry.

That being said, I for one have no qualms about saying that yes, there isn't enough art out there, at least of the quality I enjoy consuming.

There aren't enough good movies and video games, and current discovery mechanisms limit me from finding enough of the kind of literature I like to indefinitely satiate my appetite for such.

I'm sure we can manage without all the additional people if we really have to, because of AI doing cognitive labor in their place. That's replacing quantity for quality to a degree.

I think we're pretty much post-scarcity for high quality artistic imagery as early as Midjourney V4. Not quite there when it comes to novels, movies, games or music, though the last is incipient as AI musicians become prevalent and continue improving. I give 30% odds that GPT-5 can write a novella I would enjoy reading, while 4 can't.

I think we're pretty much post-scarcity for high quality artistic imagery as early as Midjourney V4

My reaction upon reading this is, I assume, the same as the reaction you have when you see "unironic endorsement of degrowth": slack-jawed befuddlement.

The suggestion that not only are we suffering from a paucity of good art (which may be partially true, but it would be true for me in a sense that's different from yours), but that the way to rectify this problem is to ask Midjourney to draw certain representational images, is... really quite remarkable.

In spite of the depth of our disagreement, I do sincerely appreciate you being here to articulate these views, really. I would hate to have to discuss these matters in an echo chamber.

Oh, there's plenty of good art out there (at least, in self_made_human's sense). Midjourney makes it cheaper.

Depends on what you're looking to get out of art? I don't care much about the artist's intentions, only what emotional response it provokes in me.

AI art is certainly capable of being pretty, and right now with proper prompting it can also be compelling, and further when LLMs get even better at prompting, you can cut all the humans out of the loop and still have art that appeals to my sensibilities.

I'm sure you can agree that it's at least pretty and technically competent! Most human art doesn't meet that standard, just look at DeviantArt.

Do you not have enough already?

I can think of a few reasons more art is better, even though we already cannot consume all existing art:

  1. More art means more good art. 1000x the art doesn't just 1000x the low-brow stuff but also means 1000 top-quality world-changing pieces for every one which currently exists.

  2. More art means more art in each genre and subgenre. Each teeny tiny hyperspecific subgenre of current art will look like a full genre with its own miniscule subgenres when there is more art. Fantasy will have more books in it than Fiction currently does, Medieval Fantasy will have more books than Fantasy currently does, and so on.

  3. More art means more communication between artists. If there is 1000x the top-notch art out there, people have 1000x the good examples to emulate, which I think adds to the quality of each art piece. The field also presumably evolves faster with all the art coming out.

There's more art than I can consume, yet it's not really good, first-rate stuff that appeals to me greatly as opposed to only a little.

It's the ultimate sour grapes. We can never have it, so we must convince ourselves that we don't really want it. I do believe sour grapes is a perfectly rational and healthy response to impossible desires, however.

The crux is that there's no reason to assume that immortality (in the sense that you don't die except for external accidents or violence) isn't clearly plausible. At least it is to me based off what I know about biology, assuming only modest advances in biotech. At the very least, aging is almost certainly a curable disease!

When you get into the realm of mind uploads, you can trivially guarantee a form of you making it to Heat Death if you regularly fork and hide copies of yourself all throughout the universe where nobody can get to them.

I wouldn't say that going sour grapes is a good response either, when you can simply say that "yeah, that would be nice but it's not happening so no need to dwell on it".

I acknowledge that it is theoretically possible, but it's also been "30 years away" for much longer than that. I don't think anyone on this forum will be living past 2150. And yes, being able to accept the truth with equanimity would be better than self-delusion, but our powers of self-delusion are very strong, so we may as well get some use out of them.

I mean, I evidently disagree! From my understanding of biology (which ought to be better than average, or I've wasted 7 years of my life), aging doesn't seem fundamentally intractable at all. I'd be hard pressed to think of anyone other than the other doctor here, and perhaps @ChristPrattAlphaRaptor who might know more, though I don't know if gerontology and SENS is anything he's interested in.

If I had to put semi-serious numbers on it, I'd say that most people under 30 have a 70-80% chance of reaching longevity escape velocity (when your life expectancy grows faster than you age), in the counterfactual world where AGI doesn't become a reality.

Now, I sincerely expect AGI to become a thing more likely than not, and within a decade at most, at which point it's a tossup as to whether it gives us immortality and catgirl blowjobs, or kills us all.

At any rate, I have no qualms about claiming that a superhuman AGI should trivially be able to solve the problem, not that I really want to take that risk until I'm already old and doddering haha

I can't see it. Increases in average lifespan haven't translated into increases in maximum lifespan (Aeschylus lived to 92 in ~400 B.C., that's still longer than most American men today). It seems to be no low hanging fruit. Diseases that were easily treatable are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, and development of new ones has slowed down. Maybe that will pick up again, maybe it won't. More than immortality, dying of a hyper-MRSA infection after a difficult surgery in late middle age seems a likely outcome to me. Of course, I'm not a doctor or a biologist.

I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was.

It was probably this one from ZeroHPLovecraft, which someone recommended here pretty recently.

That is indeed the one, as much as I might dislike a lot of his politics, I can't deny the man has a consistent ability to churn out bangers. Thank you.

How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?

"How dare you" is not an argument that works if you have no authority or power over those you are using it on. It's just empty rhetorical flourish.

It is indeed added there as rhetorical flourish, empty or otherwise. I'm not legally obligated to be cold, dispassionate and clinical in my writing.

It’s not clear that there’s any way to try to persuade people of your own terminal values outside of rhetorical flourishes.


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