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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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I'm not sure how else to start this so I'm just going to dive straight in.

A long time bug-bear of mine is something I've come to refer to as the "Leviathan-shaped Hole in the discourse". It's something that has come up multiple times in the last couple weeks and while I've written about it at length back when this community was on reddit and in the comment section of SSC proper back in the day it's been pointed out to me that I haven't really written about it in a while and that I should probably revisit the subject for those who are just joining us. Aknoldewdgment to @Fruck, @hydroacetylene, Et Al.

The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.

The long version might require a bit of background to explain.

I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent. If anything it was the inverse. I'll be the first to tell you that I am not that fucking bright. I had dreams of being a professional fighter and/or skate-border, but as I moved up the food-chain it became increasinly clear that natural talent was no match for natural talent coupled with the time and money to train full-time. If I were smart I may have figured that out a head of time. In anycase 9/11 Happened and I enlisted. I spent 10 years as a Combat Medic and another 18 months as a feild operative for a Prominant Humanitarian NGO in East Africa before deciding to return to the states and go to college on the GI bill.

As one might imagine, going from being a "Muzunga" in Nairobi to being undergrad at the University of California was a bit of a culture shock. And it is that sense of culture shock that has stuck with me and signifigantly shaped my worldview since. It's one thing to stick out visually, to be visibly older than all the other freshmen, or to be one of half-a-dozen white guys in an otherwise black neighborhood. But it is another to realize that you genuinely walk different, talk different, and think different from your obstensible peers. I was first introduced to rationalism through one of my professors and a fellow-student, and the desire to make sense of whatever the fuck was going on was major part of the initial apeal. I was actually at one of the first SSC reader meet-ups hosted by Cariadoc where I got to meet Scott, and bunch of the other movers and shakers, face to face but as much as I was a fan of the general ideas (systemitized wining Yay!) it was painfully obvious to me that we had fundementally different conceptions of how how the world actually worked. Which in turn brings us to the real topic of this post.

One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society. Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necccesarily hold. Yes, If A & B then C, but that's a mightily Laconic "If". This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion. As such, in order to argue against a liberal in a manner the the liberal will regard as valid one is forced to go through a whole rigirmarole of defining terms that nobody's got time for. Thus the liberal inevitably wins every argument by default. However, winning the argument does not neccesarily equate to being "correct" as one can make a dumb argument for a smart position and vice versa.

The "Leviathan shaped hole" is named for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I find Hobbes signifigant in that he was one of the first guys in the enlightenment/modern era to approach political science as an actual science with theories that could be either proven or falsfied. However these days he's mostly regarded as a joke, a cartoon characterchure of an absolute authoritarian drawn by people who've never really bothered to read or engage with any of his arguments and I believe that this does our society a disservice. It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.

Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so. I'm reminded of an argument I got into with another user regarding the killing of Jordan Neely. The Argument has been made that Daniel Penny acted unlawfully by interposing himself between Neely and his intended victim and subsiquently killing Neely. To call Penny a "murderer" and a "vigilante" implies the pressance of a sovriegn authority that penny was obliged to defer to. Hovever if that's the case why did it not act? The simple answer is that it was not pressant and thus the accusations against Penny ring hollow.

One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.

I think you’ve kind of elaborated on the wrong things (although I’m interested to hear more about the skateboarding and if we know any of the same spots).

The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview

But what are they? I do too though. I believe that there is a human instinct for retribution that has been delegitimized in academic penal theory regarding deterrence, and that a victim is actually owed this retributive justice because it instinctively feels good and its omission is a harm. Additionally I think that there are some things humans naturally find disgusting, and that disgust is also a harm (in a lesser but similar way that assault is a harm), and I found the class I took on Rawls laughable because the professor a priori denied that a person has a right to not feel disgust while possessing a right to not be slapped.

castrated our society's ability to discuss certain topics

But what topics?

Penny / Neely

I definitely agree here. Once a civil authority can no longer predictably keep you safe from crime or make satisfaction after the event, you should have the right to inflict corrective corporal punishment on the criminal provided you have sufficient evidence of the crime occurring (video recording). This is doubly true if the crime will not be investigated or if the response time is greater than half an hour. Our idea of withholding personal justice is predicated on the faith that our victimhood will be satisfied by a higher civil power. It’s also truly insane from a psychological position of (ironically) deterrence theory. Imagine if you withheld administering a slap on your dog after biting a child, and instead waited months before assigning a verdict. Such a process is only effective for rational intellectual creatures and criminals who reason about there actions longterm, not for your average violent or antisocial criminal. We could be deterring so much more crime by simply beating criminals immediately if sufficient evidence is obvious, or at the very least throwing them in a cell without food for 30 hours (the walls decorated with the psychological cues of their crime). This is actually vastly better for the criminal who hopefully develops a minor trauma response when considering criminality in the future.

Our idea of withholding personal justice is predicated on the faith that our victimhood will be satisfied by a higher civil power.

And this points to a major flaw in all social contract theories. There's no remedy within the system for breach on the part of society. Self help of the sort you describe is verboten. The sole judge of cases under the contract is society's representative (called "government").

There's no remedy within the system for breach on the part of society

Except the very obvious one which Hobbes explicitly lays before us. the sword.

@hydroacetylene is absolutely correct, someone is going to keep order even if it's not the government, and one of the reasons you don't see as much petty crime in places like Nairobi as you do in say San Fransico is that it's effectively understood by all involved that if you are dumb or unlucky enough to get caught shoplifting you probably deserve whatever it is that the shopkeeper is going to do to you. Afterall, who's going to call the cops? The Shoplifter? If the cops are called, who do you expect them to side with? Some no-good thief, or an established member of the community?

ETA: If this sounds potentially cruel, unfair, or otherwise prone to abuse, that's because it is.

Except the very obvious one which Hobbes explicitly lays before us. the sword.

That's not "within the system". That's returning to the state of nature.

If indeed it is true that there is less petty crime in Nairobi than in San Francisco, and that this is because the sovereign is too weak to prevent self-help on the part of intended victims, that's an argument AGAINST Hobbes's absolute sovereign. If there is less petty crime in Nairobi because the sovereign in Nairobi is wiser and allows self-help on the part of intended victims, it doesn't contradict Hobbes. But it is also no help for the people of San Francisco. Their choices remain to allow themselves to become victims, or to commit the much greater crime of treason against the sovereign.

That's returning to the state of nature.

It's not "returning" to the state of nature because the state of nature had already been arrived at.

As @hydroacetylene says below, "someone is going to keep order even if it's not the government" and if that someone is the one keeping order, who are you to claim that they are not "the legitimate government"? Again, it is not royal blood, divine right, or even a crown that makes a man a King. It is the obedience of other men that makes a man a King.

It's not "returning" to the state of nature because the state of nature had already been arrived at.

No. Being subject to a bad sovereign who allows some of his subjects to commit crimes against others is not being in a state of nature.

Yes, it is, a big chunk of Hobbes' whole thesis is that the sovereign's primary purpose (and the reason you should obey him) is to prevent precisely this outcome, if he isn't able to do so then he is not the legitimate sovereign.

It seems like it's actually worse than being in a state of nature, since in a state of nature you could retaliate by picking up a big rock and smashing your enemy's head (and maybe his family's heads), while being a disfavored group under a bad sovereign means you'd have to successfully smash the heads of your enemy, his family, the entirety of the city, state, and federal law enforcement to achieve the same result.

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