The Imperfect Vision of the Past

As Mencius Moldbug noted, if the past is a foreign country, then a reactionary is a patriot of that country.

But the past being past, the reactionary is necessarily a patriot from afar. No man can live in any time other than his own. He cannot actually love the country of the past because he has never been there, unless his patriotism extends only as far as his own childhood. He must necessarily love an image of it, the brochure formed from (depending on how distant it is ) photos, paintings, texts, or just translations of texts.

There's nothing wrong with this, per se. We have almost unlimited information about our own age, and how many of us can claim to really understand it? But there is always the risk that unless careful attention is paid, one will still end up filling in gaps with assumptions from modernity. The problem, even for an honest and attentive broker, is twofold.

Firstly, old sources mostly wrote about what they considered important in their own society. Some of the weirdest parts to us may be things they would have mostly taken for granted, and hence didn't discuss much.

Secondly, we interpret these sources in the light of the controversies of our own age. These tend to become the focal points on which other societies are analysed. But the areas where our society is mostly in agreement are less likely to be studied, even if our agreement is completely different from their agreement.

For instance, I am a reactionary of death. It is not for nothing that this blog has an entire subject label devoted to 'mortality'.

And yet, despite being a fully grown man, I have seen a corpse only once in my life, in circumstances where it was not made plain that the person was actually dead. This is not an accident. This is how our society operates.

Just ponder that. Death has not gotten any less common, but extraordinary lengths are taken to ensure that when death visits, it is out of the way, hidden from sight. The main times you will witness an actual corpse is if you happen upon the scene of an accident. Otherwise, it takes place in a hospital, leading to the implication that it is simply the result of failed or insufficient medical intervention, which technology will eventually overcome.

This is of course absurd. You can realise this by studying life expectancy tables, or just by contemplating the human condition.

But most people today don't even realise that they hold thoroughly modern views on the subject of death. It's because it's largely just taken for granted. There are only a few controversies that touch on it generally, like euthanasia, but that in practical terms is actually a step even further in the same direction - now we can shuffle off this mortal coil with the best of drugs, in a comfortable setting, in a time and manner that doesn't have to alarm those around us. In this way, the already thoroughly medicalised process can also become artificially predictable.

Once upon a time, mortality was considered an important thing for men to wisely ponder, and consider how they wanted to live their life. Medieval Christianity used to emphasize this through a Memento Mori. That is, they took extra steps to remind themselves of mortality, so as to not miss the importance. And even without that, death was all around them. People died in their homes, and died much sooner. Avoiding it was just not an option.

The main reason my my own thinking diverges from the mainstream on this point, and I ended up a reactionary of mortality, is from the influence of Buddhism. In Buddhism death is viewed as terrible, one of the great destroyers of the world that inevitably leads to suffering. Unlike in Christianity, it offers no chance of the ascent to a permanent heaven, though there are temporary heavens. Death is often paired with old age, among forms of suffering, to emphasise that the impermanence aspect, and that it is the inevitable outcome of the process of decay. And in Buddhism (which, when I use the term, I mean Theravada, which is my background), even rebirth is not a cause of celebration, but another form of the problem of the endless cycle of suffering and unsatisfactoriness. As a result of all this, wisely contemplating impermanence is a central concern:

“What do you think, great king? Suppose a man would come to you from the east, one who is trustworthy and reliable, and would tell you: ‘For sure, great king, you should know this: I am coming from the east, and there I saw a great mountain high as the clouds coming this way, crushing all living beings. Do whatever you think should be done, great king.’ ...

“If, venerable sir, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, the human state being so difficult to obtain, what else should be done but to live by the truth (Dhamma), to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”

“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the truth (Dhamma), to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“Venerable sire, kings intoxicated with the intoxication of sovereignty, obsessed by greed for sensual pleasures, who have attained stable control in their country and rule over a great sphere of territory, conquer by means of elephant battles, cavalry battles, chariot battles, and infantry battles; but there is no hope of victory when aging and death are rolling in. In this royal court, venerable sir, there are counselors who, when the enemies arrive, are capable of dividing them by subterfuge; but there is no hope of victory by subterfuge, no chance of success, when aging and death are rolling in. In this royal court, there exists abundant bullion and gold stored in vaults, and with such wealth we are capable of mollifying the enemies when they come; but there is no hope of victory by wealth, no chance of success, when aging and death are rolling in. As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should I do but live by the truth (Dhamma), live righteously, and do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“So it is, great king! So it is, great king! As aging and death are rolling in on you, what else should you do but live by the truth (Dhamma), live righteously, and do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

Of course, nobody thinks like that anymore, if for no other reason than that people do their absolute utmost to avoid even noticing death. If mortality is contemplated at all, it's mostly to advocate for mindless hedonism. Or it's contemplated for a day or two when a relative dies, before being shuffled off into the background and beaten down with awkward insistence that the subject is "morbid" whenever the topic of death even comes up.

If I am out of step with modernity, I am quite sure that it is modernity, not I, who is strange. But I would say that, wouldn't I?

Still, there are plenty of other aspects where older societies are different that aren't so flattering to my conceit.

For instance, I've been reading John Dolan's wonderful prose translation of the Iliad. In many ways, Dolan has undertaken the task of re-telling the Iliad to preserve a set of features almost entirely orthogonal to the standard ones. Which is to say, most translations try to preserve the poetic aspect and the literal word choice, at least as much as both parts can be rendered into modern English (which, for the poetic metre, is not very well). But Dolan ditches this to instead preserve aspects which, he argues quite persuasively, would have been far more salient to listeners at the time (and they were listeners originally, not readers). Which is to say, he preserves the gore, the slapstick comedy, the cruelty, and the enjoyment of military violence.

In this respect, the Greek narrative is actually more understandable than many of us would be comfortable admitting.

But as Dolan notes explicitly, apparently echoing Nietzsche, it is a mistake to view the Greeks as being like us. For instance, take Dolan's observations on how lust was viewed:

Now Zeus has to kill even more of the Greeks. His first thought, a painful wincing one: “Hera’s not going to like this”. His wife and sister, Hera, always knows what he’s up to, and she’s soft on the Greeks. She’s permanently mad at him anyway, because he’s just an old horndog pretending to be in command when he can’t even command his own penis.

These people were very down on lust. That’s one of the ways they weren’t like us. We love lust. They didn’t. It was too dangerous, and it gave women too much power, so lust is a bad thing in this story. To these people, a real man doesn’t get led around by his dick, and if he does, he’s not a man at all. A stud, to their way of thinking, is a sissy, and above all, a sissy stud is dangerous, capable of wiping out an entire city. 

The man who started this whole war was a stud, a Trojan prince named Paris, fitting for a man with the sexual ego of Pepe Le Pew. The only reason he didn’t drive a Porsche or wear Ray Bans is because the infrastructure wasn’t there yet. He’d have defected to Malibu in a second if the airport had been ready. This princeling Paris had the chance to judge a beauty contest of three female gods, and that’s what got Troy besieged.

You've gotta say, the Greeks have a point.

And the modern tendency is also to play up another very un-Greek idea - the importance of romantic love. Amazing as it seems to me, there is a tendency of some to view the Paris and Helen story as some kind of tragically doomed but still beautiful romance, rather than the height of folly, stupidity, selfishness, and effeminate behavior which is how it would have been seen at the time.

But not all of the alienness seems flattering of the Greek world view either. In his discussion of the book in the latest Radio War Nerd, Dolan mentions another aspect that is hard to believe at first:

Above all, they were other, they enjoyed cruelty, they found cruelty hilarious, and if you don't understand that about them, you'll never get them...

The Iliad begins with this captive girl watching as her old father limps down the beach to beg Agamemnon, the vile Greek leader, to release her. And Agamemnon purposely shames him in a really over-the-top way. And that's a bad idea, not because you should be nice to people - there's no such idea in the Iliad - but because he's a priest of Apollo.

The idea that cruelty is generally entertaining, and being nice to people is not an important trait, is something so utterly alien that it's hard to even conceive of it.

Remember this next time you're exalting the glory of the ancient Greeks.

But the weirdest of all to me is something taken even more for granted - the importance of a sense of humor. Robin Hanson had a great post on this. He cites Rod Martin:

Prior to the eighteenth century, laughter was viewed by most authors almost entirely in negative terms. … All laughter was thought to arise from making fun of someone. Most references to laughter in the Bible, for example, are linked with scorn, derision, mockery, or contempt. … Aristotle … believed that [laughter] was always a response to ugliness or deformity in another person. … Thomas Hobbes saw laughter as being based on a feeling of superiority, or “sudden glory”, resulting from some perception of inferiority in another person.

 From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, popular conceptions of laughter underwent a remarkable transformation, shifting from the aggressive antipathy of superiority theory, to the neutrality of incongruity theory, to the view that laughter could sometimes by sympathetic , to the notion that sympathy was a necessary condition for laughter. 

 As recently as the 1860s, it was considered impolite to laugh in public in the United States.

 In the United States, [a sense of humor] came to be seen as a distinctly American virtue, having to do with tolerance and democracy, in contrast to those living in dictatorships, such as the Germans under Nazism, or the Russians during the Communist era, who were thought to be devoid of humor. … By the end of the twentieth century, humor and laughter were … seen as … important factors in mental and physical health  

Which actually casts the earlier Dolan quote in a different light, which I'm not sure that Dolan fully appreciated. If the Greeks found cruelty hilarious, it wasn't just because they had a different attitude to cruelty. They also had a different attitude to hilarity, and what it was meant to represent.

If you want to see what noble character without a sense of humour looks like, read Marcus Aurelius. The seriousness of purpose shines through vividly, but he is not there to entertain you. There are more important traits than a sense of humour.

The sheer range of strange alternative values and thoughts shows, if nothing else, that if there indeed is a psychic unity of mankind, it comprises a far smaller set of traits than you might believe possible.

In the end though, there is no particular virtue in trying to exactly resurrect the past wholesale, even if it were possible. We can only grapple with the world we actually live in, and importing some contemporary assumptions is almost inevitable.

The value in studying how past societies operated, rather, is to illuminate the assumptions that we take for granted, and to inspire a greater imagination as to how things might actually work.

In The Current Year, even getting people to acknowledge that much is a non-trivial victory.

Cognitive Dissonance Judo and the Surprising Malleability of Beliefs

There are few things in this world more stable than a man’s self-image.

You might think, perhaps reasonably, that values and core beliefs are the heart of man – what’s right and wrong, how he ought to act.

You might think, if you’re more scientifically inclined, that facts are the core – bare understanding of the basic reality of the world from which people figure out the rest.

But the psychology of cognitive dissonance doesn’t work that way.

What is stable, rather, is the conception of self. Usually, but not always, this is based on flattery and conceit. I am clever. I am pretty. I am moral. I am loved by those around me (or at least those of good character and judgment).

Whatever you like about yourself, in other words.

And the rest of reality – morals, beliefs, the whole lot – typically gets fitted in around that.  This isn’t to say that morals don’t actually matter, of course. Just that in this fallen world we live in, men make their rationalistions in quite predictable ways.

A beliefs-centred view says that a man starts with morals – that it is wrong to commit adultery, for instance. Believing this, he refuses to cheat on his wife. Having not cheated on his wife, he views himself as a good man and a good husband.

A self-image-centred view says that a man begins with the view that he is a good man and a good husband. He has a tentative view that adultery is wrong, and because he is currently satisfied with his wife (and also because there is no convenient way to have an affair with someone hot), he doesn’t feel the need to cheat on her. Having not cheated on her, he affirms the view that refraining from adultery is an important moral issue, and a key part of what makes him a good husband.

As long as a man doesn’t commit adultery, it’s very hard to tell these possibilities apart.

But what happens when a man’s marriage starts to deteriorate, and he ends up cheating on his wife?
The beliefs-centred view is a Dostoyevsky novel. It says that he will be wracked with guilt, and view himself as being an immoral and unworthy person.

The self-image centred view says that, rather, he will update his views on what is right and wrong to maintain his self-image. Having committed adultery, adultery must not be so bad after all, at least in the circumstances when he has done it. Perhaps it’s okay if the marriage has already broken down. Perhaps it’s okay as long as nobody finds out. Perhaps it’s okay if they were going to get divorced anyway. The beliefs about right and wrong can change. The only thing that can’t change, however, is his view of himself.

Like all models, this simplifies reality. Some people, especially the more introspective and intellectually honest, really do get wracked with guilt after doing bad things. Dostoyevsky didn’t imagine it out of whole cloth.

But looking at the world, how many husbands having affairs seem to be wandering around like Raskolnikov, torn up over their infidelities and unable to get up from bed? Is it more or less than the number that seem to have a spring in their step about finally getting laid again, and don’t seem much troubled by the fact that this flies in the face of the solemn vows they took years earlier?

And all of this has a lot to do with the leftist holiness signaling spirals that seem to characterize the early 21st century so vividly.

In order to gain status over one’s rivals, and signal ever greater fealty to the principles of progressivism, modern society has the need to change one’s opinion suddenly on all sorts of matters, firmly and publicly committing to the new zeitgeist and denouncing those not on board with the program. Cognitive dissonance being what it is, the targets of progressive ire are always those recalcitrants not on board with the current program today- the kulaks still to be beaten. The targets are definitely not the exact same progressives, like themselves, who in prior years held exactly the same views as the reactionaries they now denounce. Ever hear Bill Clinton being publicly seeking forgiveness for signing the Defence of Marriage Act? Ever hear liberals renounce themselves for voting for Barack Obama in 2008 when he opposed gay marriage, even as they renounce those who vote for politicians supporting religious conscience exceptions on gay marriage today?

The need to stay high status trumps the need to stick to one’s beliefs, so the old views get jettisoned. But part of one’s self-image is usually also that one is honest and upright, someone who believes things for good reasons, not a craven fool with no fixed principles who shifts his beliefs with the merest breeze of public opinion. And so having changed views, people are positively eager to forget that they ever held their previous views. Since bare facts about the world are also easy to manipulate in the service of self-image, this turns out to not be hard to do.

As part of my low level troll’s entertainment of provoking leftist cognitive dissonance, I enjoy sometimes asking progressives enamored of the latest fashion, such as transgender bathroom rights, exactly when they started caring about this issue, and why. They almost never have an answer to this. It may be only two years ago, but their mental distortions of ego-preservation are such that these origins are shrouded in mystery, and their own previous worldview is utterly inaccessible to them. What they think now, they must surely have always thought. The alternative would be to admit that their motive for joining this latest moral imperative (even if the current stance is presumed to be correct and virtuous) in fact rests with far baser motives – following fashions, fear of being denounced themselves, signaling their virtue.  And admitting this would defeat the whole purpose.

Sure, when pressed, they can’t think of any actual conversations they held or actions they took on the crucial issue of bathroom policy before, say, 2014. But this was only because they simply hadn’t yet fully comprehended the scale of the injustice. This lack of comprehension until the New York Times came knocking might itself seem to be a blight on their moral record, but rest assured this kind of introspection is highly unusual, and nobody but the most reactionary cynics like myself is in a hurry to point it out either.

Provoking cognitive dissonance is fun, but it won’t change anyone’s mind. If you want to at least have a chance at that, you can’t fight self-image, you need to use it to your advantage. This is the judo strategy – using an opponent’s own momentum against him.

One way to do this is to force progressives to consider that they may not always be the one getting to do the judging, and will one day themselves be the judged.

In other words, take a progressive interlocutor, and ask them the following hypothetical:

Progressive causes change over time. For a long time, nobody cared about gay marriage, then all of a sudden they did. That’s fine. Let’s merely posit the following – that this process will continue. In other words, in 20 or 30 years’ time, it seems likely that progressives will have found some new moral point that they care about passionately, but which people today don’t care about at all. Who knows what it will be specifically, but assume that they will feel about it as strongly then as you, my progressive friend, feel about gay marriage now, and they will see the absence of this cause as a huge injustice. If you need to make it concrete, pick fringe views on some cultural trait and substitute it as needed as the possible change –allowing polygamy or adult incest, breaking up the family unit, lowering the age of consent to 12, mandating veganism, whatever. To be ideal, it has to be something wacky that you’ve probably never thought of, like giving the vote to children, rather than something you’ve already encountered like veganism.

So our progressive of 30 years’ time feels as strongly about this as you do today about gay marriage. You, on the other hand, believe everything that you currently do today. They will view you exactly the same way that you view people who opposed gay marriage in 1986 – as unbelievably hateful and bigoted, part of a society-wide cruelty that is almost unfathomable.

And at last, we have our question. Who’s right in this argument about voting ages or adult incest? Are you, dear progressive, hateful, bigoted and disgusting in ways you don’t even understand today, on issues that you’ve barely given any thought to, for reasons you can’t yet guess? Or is the progressive of 30 years’ time merely taking on extreme views that disrupt a reasonable and understandable social compromise today?

If it’s the latter, are you willing to commit every one of your current views to paper (no matter how infrequently you ponder them) for all the world’s future employers to see, and defend them when the social zeitgeist changes? You might get to be the Brendan Eich of 2025, fired for having an insufficient commitment back in 2016 to the cause of extending US citizenship to everyone on the planet or whatever.

At this point, one is left with only a few options.

Either one actually writes a blank moral cheque to the progressives of the future and says ‘Yes, I am hateful! I am bigoted in ways I don’t even understand! Forgive me, President Chelsea Clinton!’.

Or one admits that these changing views are not actually crucial moral issues, but in fact moral fads and fashions that people follow for reasons other than the inherent justice of the causes at issue. This, if acknowledged, begins the descent down a rabbit hole that ends up a long way from modernity.

Or one says ‘No, I’m pretty comfortable with how society is currently arranged, and don’t wish to upend everything for the whims of the progressive elite of the future’.

In the third instance, congratulations. You’re now a gay marriage opponent in 1986.

Whether this will actually change minds, of course, is far more doubtful. But I have gotten flashes of introspection out of this line of questioning, which may at least somewhat cause them to think twice about the next great trend. That’s the hope, anyway. The path to understanding is rocky and circuitous.

On the Decline of Wisdom

The Dissenting Sociologist began a post recently with a quite striking sentence:

“The principle that “the wise shall govern the strong” is a law of Nature so basic that human society is inoperable and indeed altogether inconceivable without it. Democracy as such is an illogical Utopian fiction that doesn’t exist anywhere and cannot. In human society anywhere we find it, men in the physical flower of their youth allow themselves to be bossed around by senior men they could easily overwhelm, and legitimate authority assumes the form of a pyramid such that positions of authority, by definition, are fewer to the extent that the scope of authority attached to them is greater."

And my immediate thought was to wonder: this is a fascinating idea. Is it actually true?

The second sentence is definitely true. Society would definitely be better ordered if the first sentence were also true. But the universe isn’t usually ordered the way we would like it.

So what would be the similar, purely positive version of the same idea that might be closer to being true? I’d say that the elite will always rule over the masses. Like most, if not all, seemingly universal truths in the social sciences, it has a somewhat tautological aspect – the elites are defined as the ruling class, because ruling itself confers status. Sometimes the rulers are priests, or warriors, or kings, or judges, or bureaucrats. But everywhere there are the leaders, and the led.

Power is always jealously sought, even if not actively contested at every point in time. And so any elite must be savvy enough to at least maintain their own supremacy against other contenders for power. If you are incompetent enough, you probably won’t stay in power that long. Strictly speaking, you don’t need to be competent at any task other than maintaining your own power. You can run your country into ruin and beggary, as many long-lived dictators have done, as long as you maintain your own power. So you can definitely have an evil, psychopathic elite. But a sufficiently incompetent elite is a fragile equilibrium, at risk of collapsing. This also is the strongest evidence against frequent claims that some or other presidential candidate is a moron – Trump, Bush, Kerry, whoever. There are simply too many other people viciously vying for the presidential job for any true moron to get that close to succeeding.

Of course, the number of true psychopaths is rather small. So most leaders will have at least some regard for their people. And so if there is a general quality of intelligence and good judgment needed to maintain power, that will hopefully flow over into competent administration of the rest of the country (perhaps one of the biggest mercies the world provides, actually). The main hitch here, of course, is that psychopaths (though numerically few) are disproportionately attracted to power, and ruthless in the methods they are willing to use to obtain it. Hence the horror of the many dictators of the 20th century, from Mao to Mugabe.

A lot of elites will have a need to occasionally augment their ranks with competent administrators who can help them secure their rule. And this is where the starting quote is quite interesting, particularly with regard to exactly what qualities are being sought. What is needed is competence. But this can come from a number of different base qualities.

Reactionaries are generally drawn to old ideas, and wisdom is one such concept. Wisdom connotes judgment, nuance, experience, and a sense of doing what is right. It is related to its less lofty and less mystical relative, good judgment (of which wisdom is in some sense the pinnacle). It is not surprising that these are also associated with age – if someone is wise beyond their years, it is because wisdom is generally thought to be more likely to reside in the elders of a society.

Wisdom, dear reader, is a quality whose heyday has largely passed. The thoroughly brilliant Google NGram viewer charts the decline for us.

It should not therefore come as a surprise to find that modern society, which places relatively less emphasis on wisdom, should also come to have less respect for the elderly relative to the young.

So if the elites aren’t selecting on wisdom, but have to select on competence (broadly defined), what else are they selecting on?

Here’s one answer:

First ‘clever’, then ‘smart’.

‘Wise’ has been more or less declining as an idea since 1820 or so. Its decline was also marked by the rise of ‘clever’ – more intellectual, but in a way that seemed to prioritise shrewdness and savvy behavior, as opposed to good judgment.

But the big rise of late has been ‘smart’. This goes mostly to intelligence, raw cognitive firepower. This is a trait that (at least at an individual level) is generally considered to be inherited at birth, and which displays itself more in youth than old age.

The modern ideal of innovative success is the young tech CEO. Mark Zuckerberg is assuredly smart, and often described as such. I have yet to hear anyone praise him as wise.

The other striking aspect of this perception is that if good decisions are thought to come mostly from being smart, then they are something that one is either just born with, or can acquire merely by turning one’s gigantic brain to the subject at hand. And since every man flatters himself that he is smart, he is thereby largely relieved of the obligation of humble study at the feet of those that have come before him. Hence the modern progressive wet dream of the show ‘The West Wing’ – brilliant young minds elevated straight from their Harvard Political Science undergrad education to being White House advisors, solving the world’s problems as understudies to a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics (or at least Hollywood writers’ limited conception of one).

Intellect alone is presumed to be able to solve the world’s problems, from Syria to Washington.

Good judgment, by comparison is considered far too prosaic a quality to be encouraged, and wisdom seems almost archaic.

I am far from convinced that this shift in emphasis has been for the good.

Why did 'racist' achieve what 'bourgeois' never could?

Out of the things that distinguish neoreactionaries from conservatives, perhaps the most striking is the following: both are interested in what's wrong with the modern world, but the neoreactionaries are more interested in how exactly we got here. Conservatives, by contrast, seems to just assume that the answer is to fight harder against the things you don't like. Moreover, fighting is assumed instinctively to just involve the standard methods of protesting, voting, writing letters to the editor, buying the right bumper stickers etc. Conservatives do not seem to notice that they've been trying those things for quite a long time now, and that's how we got to the present world.

It is this, perhaps more than anything else, that turned me away from mainstream conservatism. They keep losing, they don't know why they keep losing, and they're not devoting much thought to trying to figure out the answer.

So in the spirit of understanding losses, here's something I've been pondering:

Cultural Marxism has proven far more effective at taking over the west than Economic Marxism ever was.

Put simply, it is very hard to think of a slur that the left had at its disposal with anything like the power of 'racist'.

It is a widely mocked term by the right, of course, and justly so.

But that's not really the point, is it? The point rather is that any borderline credible accusation of racism (or most of the other -isms and -phobias) is likely to be career-ending, and everyone knows it. The people doing the mocking tend not to use their real names, or not to have careers in corporate America. By contrast, in 1950 it was being a communist that was liable to get you fired. Being a Nazi probably would have been dicey too, but it seems unlikely that just casually throwing around accusations of nazism in 1950 would have had anything like the same effect as accusations of racism today. Being accused of being 'bourgeois' or 'a capitalist' would have just been laughed at.

It's not just jobs either. The desire to show that one isn't racist seems to have captured the zeitgeist almost completely. Europe is in the process of allowing a flash mob invasion by millions of hostile third world young men just to prove how non-racist they are. There is resistance, of course, which gets beaten down with water cannon and prison cell. But popular resistance is not the puzzling bit. The non-resisters are almost sui generis in human history - wanting to give away their own country to prove how generous they are.

As an organising principle, racism seems to be considered these days to be the worst, if not the only sin. Rather striking for a term that was only coined in the mid 1930's.

And so the neoreactionary question poses itself - why did Cultural Marxism win where Economic Marxism failed?

I don't know for sure, but I can think of a few possible contributing causes.

Firstly, Economic Marxism was always liable to generate reasonably firm opposition from big business, because it directly threatened their existence. Old school Marxists were openly hostile to capitalism, and that meant that corporate America knew which side of the fight they would prosper more under. So they were willing to go along with things like the Hollywood blacklists of communists. Economic Marxism was an existential threat to a publicly listed company, so they were more willing to fight it.

By contrast, the costs that seem to be imposed by cultural Marxism are just a few diversity seminars, some wasted money on sinecures for bogus jobs like 'director of outreach' or 'diversity officer' and the like, and the occasional donation to shakedown artists like Al Sharpton. This is a pain, but is just viewed as the costs of doing business. Corporate America probably doesn't like those costs, but it's less important than staying on the right side of those in power, so they do it.

Secondly, cultural Marxism picked a set of traits that better aligned with tribal identity. All Marxism was about inciting group conflict in order to produce a big enough coalition to overthrow the existing order. But economic Marxism wanted people to unite based on their level of wealth. A poor factory worker in Detroit was meant to truly feel a bond of struggle with a peasant in Bolivia. And this simply isn't how people think of identity. Cultural Marxism appealed most strongly to things that people always  identified with, namely race, nationality and religion. It was much easier to get blacks to unite their opposition, or Muslims, or Hispanics, than the world's peasants.

But this leaves a puzzle - wouldn't this evoke a strong response by the antagonised classes, such as middle class whites?

I think this leads to the third reason - the carving up of multiple overlapping identity groups, most notably gender and sexuality. This is a way of letting white women or white gay men get in on the winning grievance team, all the better to increase the alliance against the hated white straight Christian males. Intersectionality was always a ridiculous premise, designed purely to paper over the fact that lots of the groups in the diversity coalition don't actually  like each other very much. But this only becomes a problem after the existing order is overthrown.

Even with all this, it's still an unsatisfying explanation. It's an obviously incomplete list, and I think it's important to understand it better.

"Cthulu always swims left" may be a good starting observation, but eventually you want to figure out how, if not why.

The Eternal Present Tense of the Liberal Mind

Out of all the critiques that Neoreaction makes of modernity, one of the most compelling is the sheer lack of historical knowledge (let alone perspective) that most people today have. The modern world is incredibly left-wing over any perspective longer than about 50 years, but how many people even know that? Liberalism is an ideology that exists only in the eternal twilight of the present tense. The past, to the extent that it exists at all, is merely a collection of evil ignorant attitudes and actions occasionally brought up in order to emphasise the righteousness of modern attitudes (that is to say, the righteousness of our liberal interlocutor).

But as I pointed out here in the context of colonialism, the actual level of knowledge about these matters is usually sparse to the point of being nugatory. Figures in the past are never actual people who might have had serious reasons for their views, no matter how far outside today's Overton Window they sit. There is no examination of why they thought the things they did, other than that they were deluded or evil or both. And because the signalling spiral must continue, even yesterday's liberal heroes are currently at risk of being thrown under the bus for being insufficiently progressive. Witness, for instance, the portrayal of LBJ in the movie 'Selma' about Martin Luther King.

For the left, this process of only focusing on the present views and preoccupations has the useful effect (for liberalism) of keeping people from noticing just how recent many of these ideas are. Despite being ardent cultural relativists in theory, the left's devotion to the absolute humorless eradication of the world's -isms is fanatical. These are deadly serious issues, you understand, and it would be inconvenient to note that it's only very recently that anybody even bothered to notice them.

Don't believe me? Consider the following.

Listen to the song 'Bourgeois Blues'. It was written in 1937 by Lead Belly, aka Huddie William Ledbetter, an American Folk Singer. It chronicles some of the treatment that Lead Belly received when on a trip to Washington DC. It's a great song - personally I like the Pete Seeger version, but I've given you the original. Pay attention to the story, and how he chooses to describe it.

Listen here people, listen to me 
Don't try to buy no home down in Washington DC 
Cause it's a Bourgeois Town, 
Ooh, it's a Bourgeois Town. 
I got the Bourgeois Blues, 
I'm gonna spread the news all around.

Me and my sweet wife Miss Martha,
We run all over that town 
Everywhere we go the people would turn us down 
Lord, in a bourgeois town 
Ooh, it's a bourgeois town. 
I got the bourgeois blues, 
I'm gonna spread the news all around. 

Some white folks in Washington, 
They know just how 
Call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow. 
Lord, in a bourgeois town. 
It's a bourgeois town. 
I got the bourgeois blues, 
I'm gonna spread the news all around. 

Me and my sweet wife Miss Martha, 
We were standing upstairs 
I heard a white man say we don't want no Negroes up there, 
He was a bourgeois man 
Living in a bourgeois town. 
I got the bourgeois blues, 
I'm gonna spread the news all around.

The home of the brave, 
The land of the free, 
I don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie, 
In a bourgeois town, 
Lord, it's a bourgeois town. 
I got the bourgeois blues, 
I'm gonna spread the news all around.

Okay, got it?

So what strikes you about the song? Not about the story - that's obvious. What seems out of place in how Lead Belly describes the mistreatment he receives?

I'll give you a hint - what is the one word that you would use to describe the actions of the people here?

It's obvious - the word is 'racist'.

Now go back and look at the lyrics again - the word 'racism' is (along with its derivations) conspicuously absent. It's possible that this is a rhetorical or lyrical choice, and maybe he just decided not to use it. But the rest of the song doesn't feel that way. Consider again - you have a white man who calls at a married black couple 'we don't want no Negroes up there' (in other versions of the song, the man uses the word 'nigger' instead, suggesting extra malice in the nature of the demand). Now, faced with such a man, think of the list of words you might use to describe him, starting with racist, then bigoted, then ignorant, then whatever synonyms you want. Would you have thought of him as a 'bourgeois man'? Would this have even made top 20? It's inconceivable.

So what the hell is going on here?

The first point, which is the more obvious one, is that as late as 1937, the word 'racist' simply did not exist in the popular lexicon. This mirrors the history of the word racism - some attribute the first use to Leon Trotsky in 1930, and the first use in English to Lawrence Dennis in 1936. What seems hard to refute is that in 1937, it had not filtered down to Lead Belly when he was describing a situation where it pretty clearly applied.

And as George Orwell noticed, language tends to shape thoughts. It's not only that the word didn't exist. The concept simply didn't exist as an organising principle with which to critique various actions and views. Lead Belly knows what he doesn't like about the behaviour, but doesn't have a clear way of describing it. The most deathly important social injustice in the modern world, the worst sin and stain on character possible in today's society, the most important concept ever, dates all the way back to... some time after 1937. It's not only that people tolerated racism. It's that people didn't even have a clear concept of racism as a thing to be condemned.

There are many fascinating aspects to this worth pondering. One might wonder how it was that millennia of humans managed to live and die without even noticing the most important crime one can ever commit. Seems odd, no? If modernity is right, and all of history is wrong, racism is the worst injustice one can commit, and is evident in everything from requiring voter ID to banks failing to issue home mortgages at the same rate for all neighbourhoods. So how come nobody even noticed until the middle of the 20th Century? Don't hold your breath waiting for an answer from today's progressives.

But the song actually does give us a partial answer. It's not just that Lead Belly doesn't describe the behavior as racist, it's that he describes it as 'bourgeois'. Google tells me this means 'of or characteristic of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes'.

What's going on, in other words, is that in 1937 the left was preoccupied with class, not race. 'Bourgeois' was an all-purpose slur for behaviour that the left disapproved of. Hence, it gets slung around in the same way when other words might be more appropriate.

These days, class is on wane as an organising principle of critique. The Cultural Marxists have displaced the Economic Marxists as the leaders of the left, and in the process 'materialism' and 'capitalism' have been shunted to the back of the '-ism' bus, elbowed out by racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia etc etc.

In 1937, the worst possible sin you could commit was to be a capitalist who was exploiting the poor. But times change. While being a capitalist exploiting the poor is still not ideal, in 2015 it pales into utter insignificance next to the currently unthinkable prospect of a hotel proprietor casually telling someone 'we don't want no Negros up there'.

Of course, if you think about this too long, you might begin to wonder whether in 2087, racism will have lost its place as the Worst Possible Thing Ever, and something else that today we don't even have a word for will have taken its place. This may also cause you to second guess whether the current emphasis is in fact misplaced.

Better to not think too much about it, you might end up too far down the rabbit hole, reading Moldbug and scorning modernity.

The next progressive shoe to drop

I cannot be the only one who thinks that the pace of leftward social change seems to have increased of late.

I find it interesting to try to guess in advance what the next cause will be to be taken up by our own vanguard of the proletariat. I’m not sure anything can be done about it, but it least it’s something to ponder.

Some of the causes, except for the benefit of hindsight, appear fairly random (transvestite rights? Removing Confederate flags 150 years after the end of the war?). These are perhaps just markers by which the wrongthinkers will be encouraged to identify themselves, for the lashings of some symbolic pizza shop and the termination of employment for a few more people who made the wrong jokes to someone, somewhere.

But while the particular order of what gets targeted when may be random, the list of targets themselves for the most part is not. In particular, one way to get a sense of likely targets is to ask the following question. Suppose the American governing class were establishing a new society on Mars, and for whatever reason were not able or willing to transport everything from the current setup. What institutions and arrangements that we currently have would they no longer choose to establish?

In other words, what about current society exists only because of social inertia, but does not actually fit the modern liberal mindset? What social arrangements, if they did not already exist, would no longer be invented?

Reader, I submit that everything you would put on that list will eventually be aimed at for destruction and undermining by progressives, if it hasn’t been already.

Not all of it will be successful in the short run. Social inertia is sometimes quite powerful, and while the forces of reaction are weak and divided, they are not zero. But all of it will be aimed at.

So what current institutions populate that list?

Some of them are small. Tax exemptions for religious institutions would not be something you would think up today. At the moment, the left is mostly content to use this as a potential club to beat churches who won’t get on board with gay marriage. But at some point in the increasing bankruptcy of the west, people will start asking why we are subsidizing churches at all (supposing, as they do, that any money not confiscated is a gift from the state). Not the least since most of the elite seems to be fairly atheist. If it is unconscionable to let schools teach creationism, why subsidize Churches to teach about God at all?

As Jokeocracy noted, we would not set up separate local police forces either. Too many of them keep doing reactionary things, like arresting minorities at impolite rates. Better to put everything in the hands of the Feds, who surely will do a better job.

And then we move up to the mid-sized. The modern left would definitely not set up the second amendment. If not for political expediency, they would openly tell you that they’d rather it were repealed. Among Democrats not in the position of running for office, most would probably tell you that quite happily already.

But it’s worth noting that modern progressives would not even set up the First Amendment either. Would progressives not dearly love to set up legal prohibitions on “hate speech”, racial vilification, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism etc.? Just about every western country without a First Amendment has done this to a fair degree, and it is extremely unlikely America would be different. If the First Amendment did not already exist as a categorical guarantee, nobody would think to invent it. Sure, it’s a broadly good policy aim, but it has to be jettisoned from time to time for more important stuff. If you believe the New York Times, there are an awful lot of modern day crowded theatres about which it is deemed extremely risky to let people shout ‘fire!’. The First Amendment has become like the Turkish military in the 1990s – a pro-western, secular, mostly pragmatic military-run state was such an anachronism in the Islamic world that its days had to be numbered. Beware institutions that become anachronistic enough to attract attention.

Of course, the left will not explicitly abolish the First Amendment, probably even if they had the power to do so (though the same can’t be said of the Second). Partly this is because there is a nostalgic semi-religious attachment to certain parts of the constitution and democratic process, no matter how divorced from practicality it becomes. This is one such area. The unwillingness to explicitly target the First Amendment for destruction is not just fooling the rubes either – a lot of the people pushing for these laws will, as I’ve noted before, earnestly carve out absurd ad-hoc exceptions on the fly while claiming to maintain the principle – “I believe in free speech, but that has nothing to do with hate speech” etc. They really feel that they actually believe in free speech, even as they eviscerate it. Though of course fooling the rubes is a key component too. It is much easier to say that you’re just changing this one little bit of First Amendment jurisprudence, rather than saying that you’re junking the whole thing. The latter might give the bitter clingers the wrong idea that their government really is out to get them. The former is just one of those things that happens old chap, nothing we can do about the inscrutability of Anthony Kennedy’s decisions.

But the Mars motivating question really highlights the biggest anachronism of all – in a Martian society, there would be no countries.

There would be different regional governments, to be sure, for some purely administrative matters. But there would be no separate sovereign entities, with the power to entirely decide their own laws, admission of foreigners, and membership of other organizations. There would be no separate citizenship.

You can see this process already at work, in a piecemeal manner, in Europe. Each European country surrenders more and more of its sovereignty to the EU, and at the same time, the definition of ‘European’ keeps expanding more and more, to places of which the assertion of their fundamental Europeanness would have gotten you laughed out of Paris in the 1960s. Would you really bet that if the EU exists in 50 years time, it won’t include any African or Middle Eastern countries? I wouldn’t.

The reality is, the reasons why separate countries existed in the first place are things that nobody is willing to say publicly, and that makes their existence very highly dependent on inertia alone. Two hundred years ago, the reasons that every right-thinking person would give for the existence of separate countries would have gone without saying. They would assert that people of different nationalities are fundamentally different from each other in a variety of ways. They would assert that most people prefer to live mostly with their own ethnic group, celebrating their own culture and history, and that they are right to do so. They would note that, as a practical matter, the people living in their historical homeland will fight to defend against encroachment against their borders.

The last one, I think, people today would still state and agree with. But the first two sound strange and foreign to modern western ears, do they not? It is a case of Steve Sailer’s observation that what goes unsaid long enough eventually goes unthought.

If people believe the third premise, but not the first two, it is far easier to keep the fiction of separate countries but allow open borders (and in the case of Europe, transferal of sovereignty to supranational organizations) to erase the practical importance of them. That way, the rubes will just have a vague sense that “their country” looks very different from how it used to, but there’s no actual invasion to fight. And the young will just see the current demographics as the new normal. Hence the process proceeds without too much resistance.

If you proposed that Guyana be merged as a country with the US, provided we kept the US’s institutional arrangements, people would look at you like you’re crazy. But when it is noted that more than a quarter of the Guyanese population already lives in the US, what, exactly, would be the difference? If we imported the other three quarters, would not the change have effectively already occurred? Is there something particular to the patch of dirt that we are worried about incorporating? Is it radioactive?

The main obstacle here is a practical one. In the first place, the west simply cannot pay for western levels of welfare for the whole world, and hence can’t acknowledge that all citizens in other countries have a right to receive it. This is the Milton Friedman critique that you can either have open borders or a welfare state, but not both.

More broadly, even the most ardent multiculturalists who insist that everybody really deep down values the same thing have, so far, been unable or unwilling to put their conviction irreversibly to the test by organizing a joint democratic election of the 320 million Americans and (say) the 1.11 billion residents of Africa to see what kind of House of Representatives and policies resulted.

A lot hinges upon whether the key clause in the previous sentence is ‘unwilling’ or ‘unable’. I honestly don’t know which it is.

I used to think that you would see a sustained attack on the very concept of citizenship within our lifetimes.

I no longer think that’s true.

You don’t attack the Maginot line. You go around it.

US citizenship is an immensely important and valuable thing, both practically and symbolically. Hence, since everybody is equal, it should be open to everyone who wants to apply. We are a nation of immigrants, after all.

I suspect you will live to see it.

'Stop oppressing us!', the lynch mob thugs cry

I worried, but secretly knew, that this day would eventually come. 

So, I strongly suspect, did he.

It seems that the political retributions have begun against Curtis Yarvin, better known in these parts as Mencius Moldbug. His current project, since he stopped writing at Unqualified Reservations, is Urbit, a bizarre and fascinating new operating system and programming language. The best description I know of as to what Urbit is comes from Clark at Popehat. Read it if you want to get a flavor. It very much is Moldbug doing to computing what he did to politics: rethinking everything from the ground up in a weird but compelling way.

Anyway, he was scheduled to present about Urbit at the Strangeloop tech conference. You can probably guess where this goes next.

Lynch mob leftist thugs complain to conference organiser.

Conference organiser acts like spineless coward, rescinds invitation:

A large number of current and former speakers and attendees contacted me to say that they found Curtis's writings objectionable. I have not personally read them.

I am trying to create a conference where the focus is on the technology and the topics being presented. Ultimately, I decided that if Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus. This would not serve the conference, the other speakers, the attendees, or even Curtis.

Thus, I chose to rescind Curtis's invitation and remove him from the program. 

You didn't want to overshadow the the talk and become the focus, you say? Ha! Perhaps you've heard of the Streisand Effect?

Readers of this august periodical will recognise this pattern. We've been here before. We've been here with Brendan Eich, getting fired from Firefox for donating to opponents of gay marriage. We've been here with Pax Dickinson, fired from Business Insider for having a private twitter account in which he made hilarious off-colour jokes.

The best way to understand this spread of virulent intolerance of any right wing opinion being publicly expressed is as a 'brown scare' - a witch hunt for fascists inside of tech. The definition of fascists, is of course, very flexible, including people like Moldbug who explicitly disavow fascism:

Here is my perception of fascism: it was a reactionary movement that combined the worst ideas of the ancien regime, the worst politics of the democrats, and the worst tyrannies of the Bolsheviks. And what was the result? It is every bit as vanished as the Borboni. For a reactionary, fascism is more or less a short course in what not to do.

But why let that stop you? The whole point of a witch hunt is that there aren't actually any witches, just the fun of bullies persecuting those with different views. The best description of how this process works, both in the case of the technology brown scare specifically (indeed, the article that invented the term) and the psychology of witch hunts in general, can be found here. You should read the whole thing, as it's the best description of the current situation. A mere sample:

The logic of the witch hunter is simple.  It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins' day.  The first requirement is to invert the reality of power.  Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings.  The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters.  By this test alone, we can see that the conspiracy is imaginary (Brown Scare) rather than real (Red Scare).

Think about it.  Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn't waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk.  They're getting burned right and left, for Christ's sake!  Priorities!  No, they'd turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters.  In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won't see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there's a serious witch problem.  In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

We do not see Pax Dickinson and Paul Graham ganging up to destroy Gawker.  We see them curling up into a fetal position and trying to survive.  An America in which hackers could purge journalists for communist deviation, rather than journalists purging hackers for fascist deviation, would be a very different America.  Ya think?

Perceptive, no? Do you know who wrote that?

Mencius Moldbug. The current imbroglio is not exactly doing much to discredit his argument.

My position on these matters is quite simple - thick liberty of speech. As I put it in the case of Donald Sterling:

I want Donald Sterling, and Pax Dickinson, and everyone else, to be able to say what's on their mind with as few negative practical consequences flowing to them for doing so as humanly possible. I want the same thing for people whose views I find stupid or repugnant - "Stalin wasn't that bad" communists, kill-the-humans hardcore environmentalists, carpet-bagging race hucksters, humourless radical feminists, whatever. I want them to be able to express themselves unmolested either by the government or by offended grievance lobbies, regardless of whether they're from the right or the left, trying to get them fired or excluded from polite society based only on things they've said.

But I think, at this point, it is also time to be realistic. You will not convince bullies by defending speech in the abstract.

Those who prosecute this war do not do so because they dislike liberty of speech. This is a war on any right wing thought. Speech is just a casualty, but not one the proponents care particularly about, except as a way of covering themselves.

Abstract defenses of speech will not do anything to convince these thugs, because they will simply carve out absurd ad hoc exceptions on the fly that make this case totally different. For an example in this oeuvre, see this defense from one of the bullies:

The reason I joined the call for Urbit’s author’s invitation to be rescinded is not his political views. Had he spoken, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve interacted with someone who espouses a politics divergent from my own at a technology conference, and nor would I hope it would be the last. I value a diversity of viewpoints, as must anyone committed to democratic processes....

Strewn throughout the Urbit author’s writings are statements in support of racism and slavery. To my mind, this is where the line is crossed from the abstract debate of politics into something more visceral and emotional: hate. Hate is a necessary component of any defense of racism, slavery, and other dehumanizing practices. Hate is necessary to reduce a person to a commodity or strip them of rights based on innate traits. Couch it all you want in the trappings of academic writing: hate is always laid bare for what it is.

Hate has no place in the Strange Loop community, nor in any community with a future. Some have found it convenient and exciting to assume that Urbit’s author was uninvited – nay, censored! – due to his political views. Trust me: those views could not be less frightening or less interesting. What does concern me is the idea that Strange Loop attendees would no longer feel welcome because an avowed racist and proponent of slavery has been given a tacit endorsement by virtue of his speaking slot.

Ah, you see, it's not about political views, it's about hate! How, well might you ask, can you distinguish between 'far right views' (which are okay, nay, valued by this modern day Voltaire) and 'hate'? Well, we're not told, except that it's something to do with racism and slavery.

I would have thought that if Moldbug's writings are so hateful, this clown might have had the courtesy to provide, you know, a shred of actual evidence from his writing. A hyperlink or two would do the trick. But don't worry - they're 'scattered through his writings', trust him.

The reason that you will never convince thugs like Alex Payne is that nobody is the villain in their own narrative. Alex Payne values free speech. Alex Payne values diversity of opinions and tolerates even far right thought. Alex Payne does not support censorship. If the converse of any of these were true, it would be most unfortunate. It might cause you to think badly of Alex Payne. More importantly, it would cause Alex Payne to think badly of himself.

Alex Payne knows this, so he goes to some length to assert that none of these nasty claims apply to him. He does this, you see, because he has to explain why the actions he took seem blatantly inconsistent with the principles he's claiming to espouse. Thus does cognitive dissonance spring eternal.

The logic (and I use the term loosely, of course), is threadbare. Hate! Along with its subcategories of racism and slavery, it's the Deus Ex Machina that makes all the contradictions disappear. I disagree with what you say, but am prepared to fight and die to let you say it, provided it's not hateful.

This is why you will not reason such people out of their views. The reasoning is constructed ex post to justify the tribal vengeance and preserve the self image. Alex Payne simply cannot conceive that he is the bully in this story. If you remove his current justification, he will simply find another equally absurd distinction, and the game of whack a mole will continue.

The grotesque aspect of this charade is the spectacle of the bullies claiming to be either oppressed themselves or standing up for the oppressed. Yarvin giving a technical talk on programming languages is oppressive. Yarvin being in the room is oppressive. Not for Alex Payne, you see, but on behalf of unnamed offended victims. Destroying someone's company by actively trying to make them persona non grata in the tech community, and implicitly threatening consequences to anyone who refuses to join the boycott? That may seem oppressive on a naive reading, but have you considered hate?

The only thing thugs understand is consequences to their bad behavior.

This is an area where I feel the  right has failed to understand the incentives they set up when they respond to these kinds of spectacles.

The first instinct of many is to attack the group that did the firing. Alex Miller, organizer of Strange Loop, is a gormless nitwit, but he was placed in an admittedly difficult position. It's the same position as Business Insider in the Dickinson case, and Mozilla in the Eich case. They're going to get screwed either way once this blows up. Keep Yarvin, and the social justice warriors boycott. Ditch Yarvin, and the conservatives and free speech types boycott. There is a calculus to be made, assuredly, over which group is larger when deciding this question. Even an organizer who didn't intrinsically care one way or another is forced to decide on this, as I noted in the Dickinson case. So when conservatives boycott a conference over this, they are sending a message that there are consequences to acting against free speech and conservatism. This goes some of the way to perhaps convincing future organisers not to side with the social justice warriors if these controversies arise.

But to focus on this component is to deeply misunderstand the overall lesson future organisers will learn from this event. They will note three possible options.

a) Invite Yarvin, when the progressives complain, side with the progressives. Lose the conservative group.

b) Invite Yarvin, when the progressives complain, side with the conservatives. Lose the progressive group.

c) Don't invite Yarvin in the first place, but don't say that you did it out of politics. Lose Yarvin, perhaps his immediate supporters at worst. Maybe don't even lose them, since they might not know that he was barred because of politics.

What future conference organiser will choose anything other than option c)?

What you punish, in other words, is uninviting Yarvin. But this is not the same as rewarding inviting him in the first place. Indeed, the worse you make the consequences for the organiser for uninviting him, the more future organisers will worry about the possible risk of inviting him in the first place. And as a result, even if you get Yarvin reinstated in this particular conference, the thugs still get their way. 

Are you starting to see why the standard response of lashing out primarily at the person who does the firing may not quite achieve the outcome you wanted?

So how do you stop this thuggery happening?

I fear, unfortunately, that given the zeitgeist is what it is, one cannot.

But if there is to be any hope, it requires bringing consequences for the people who initiated the demands for a boycott in the first place.

That is the only way this will stop. When future Alex Paynes worry that they can't call for a boycott without risking themselves getting excluded from future events, and without their companies and employment suffering as a result.

Without such consequences, these people have absolutely no reason not to start future lynch mobs.

As it turns out, this is not something we simply have to speculate on. The first tweet I posted at the start complaining about Moldbug is from a man called Steve Klabnik. As Nick Steves noted, we have seen Steve Klabnik before, in the discussion of the Pax Dickinson case. It is the same lynch mob each time.

Steve Klabnik, you are a bully and a coward. You may dress your tribalism and will to power in the garments of "social justice", but you cannot hide the sheer malignity of your actions. You are undeserving of living in a free society.

Bodil Stokke, you are a malicious and mean-spirited thug. The glee with which you gang up on others is repugnant and contemptible. I cannot conceive how any person of character would be willing to associate with you.

Alex Payne, you are a miserable hypocrite and a craven fool. Yours is the thinnest gruel of thin liberty that cannot even speak its name honestly. You are unworthy of licking Curtis Yarvin's boots.

Gore the matador and not the cape.

Update: Linked at Free Northerner.

Update: More thoughts on the issue here.

On the Charlie Hedbo killings

It's taken me a while to write about the Charlie Hedbo killings. It takes me a while to write anything anymore in this august journal, but it wasn't just that.

I felt genuinely stirred by one thing, first and foremost. The Charlie Hedbo staff had some pretty damn enormous stones. Drawing original Mohammed cartoons, under your own name, when the location of your office is publicly known, after you've already been firebombed once for doing so? That, my friend, is some serious commitment to thick liberty of speech. The ghost of John Stuart Mill is applauding the glorious dead of Charlie Hedbo. They paid the ultimate price to insist that the right to speak one's mind exists not only as a theoretical construct, but one that you can actually exercise. Behold, the roll of honour:

• Cabu (Jean Cabut), 76, cartoonist

• Elsa Cayat, 54, psychoanalyst and columnist.

• Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), 47, cartoonist, columnist, and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo.

• Philippe Honoré, 74, cartoonist

• Bernard Maris, 68, economist, editor, and columnist

• Mustapha Ourrad , 60, copy editor.

• Tignous (Bernard Verlhac), 57, cartoonist.

• Georges Wolinski, 80, cartoonist

Alas, I fear we will not see their kind again soon.

The whole #JeSuisCharlie show of support was a mixed bag. I was at least heartened by the extent of explicit public solidarity, though I was inclined to agree with the various commentators who noted that there is a definite strain of false bravery by association in the hashtag, at least compared with the stupendous bravery of the actual Hedbo staff. But this is relatively minor.

One odd and yet somewhat positive result to come from this affair is that it finally, surprisingly dragged a number of US publications kicking and screaming into publishing some kind of depiction of Mohammed. They were for the most part unwilling in initial reporting to show any of the original cartoons that provoked the ire of the killers. They were certainly unwilling to print absolutely any of the Danish Mohammed cartoons a few years ago, to their great disgrace. 

But when the cover of the next edition of Charlie Hedbo was released, it seemed to finally shame some fraction of the American media into growing some balls, no matter how tiny and shriveled. Partly I suspect this was out of sympathy for their fellow journalists, partly because they perhaps sensed that they'd have enough of a justification and safety in numbers. Still, credit where diminutive credit is due, a surprising number at long, long last were willing to show something. According to the Daily Beast, the Washington Post ran photos of the cover, while USA Today and the Los Angeles Times put photos on their website. Even the BBC, to my astonishment, put a picture up, in one online story (which seems to be the the 'trial balloon' option, since you can take it back down again if you suddenly get scared). But of course, cowardice continues to win the day at CNN, ABC, AP, The New York Times, and so on. If you're unwilling to even reprint a cover specifically related to the story, whose depiction of Mohammed is not only mild and inoffensive, but which even contains the words 'All is Forgiven' above it, you'd sure as hell better not claim that you, too, are Charlie.

You can bet your ass that even the current crop of the recently less craven won't run more Mohammed pictures again soon. But the current reversal was made possible by the fact that for a short-lived time, a good number of the usual suspects who would ordinarily trumpet how free speech shouldn't include the right to say anything that might hurt the feelings of (certain chosen) religious minorities were at least temporarily shamed into silence. As expected, it didn't last long. It never does.

From this point on, alas, the story had mainly disappointment for me. 

With the distance of a few days, what strikes me the most about it is the fact that the only approved, socially acceptable response is sadness, and a "show of support", whatever that means. (Of course, half the left can't even muster that, going only for mealy-mouthed equivocation of "I support free speech, but..".).

But even take the #JeSuisCharlie people, whose solidarity I'm still glad to have. What exactly does it get you? You can have candlelit vigils in Paris. You can have hashtags. You can "show support", as an individual, and you can even assemble an impressive number of world leaders to do the same.

But then what?

What, exactly, does anyone plan to do in response? What, if any, policies or actions will change as a result?

The men who invaded the Charlie Hedbo offices were willing to trade their own lives, with very high expectation, to make sure that the people who drew and printed Mohammed cartoons were brutally and publicly killed. They were willing to die to send the message that if you create and distribute pictures of Mohammed under your own name, you will eventually be hunted down, even if you have police protection.

Will future such men be deterred by your hashtags? 

Will they be frightened by your "support"?

It is worth asking whether the killers succeeded in their purpose. Depressingly, I have to conclude that they did.

If you were a cartoonist, what would you learn from all this?

I'd learn, if I didn't already know it, that if I wrote a Mohammed cartoon, there's a strong chance I'd get killed. I might also learn that there's a reasonable chance I'd get a sympathetic hashtag going afterwards. How do you think that bargain strikes most cartoonists?

You don't have to guess to find out. Have a look through The Australian's gallery of cartoons drawn in the aftermath. I see a strong sentiment that the pen is mightier than the sword. I see a distinct lack of new drawings of Mohammed. 

I don't mean to single these guys out as cowards. They've just performed exactly the calculation that the terrorists wanted them to perform: if you draw a cartoon about Mohammed and publish it in such a way that we can identify you, you may be killed. Eli Valley drew about the dilemma quite poignantly here. It ends with the depressing conclusion: "The only context for me is this: call me a coward, but I want to continue to be alive." Not exactly stirring, is it? But then again, what have you done lately that's equivalently brave as what you're asking of him?

Mr Valley is absolutely right in his calculation of the stakes. Doubt not that this is deadly serious. Ask Molly Norris, a Seattle cartoonist in hiding since 2010 after death threats were made to her over her cartoons during 'Everyone Draw Mohammed' day. This is happening in America too. The only difference is that very few got printed the first time around, so there's fewer people to threaten.

Hence, the current implied scenario. Reprinting someone else's otherwise respectful depiction of Mohammed probably won't get you killed. Drawing your own anonymous Mohammed cartoon won't get you killed. Owning up to your public drawing quite possibly will.

Is there any serious doubt that of the people in the west who were, i) willing to publicly put their name to pictures of Mohammed, and ii) were set to run such cartoons in a major print publication, a large fraction were killed last week?

This is why the the terrorists succeeded.

So let's take it as given that "support", while better than opposition, will not in fact diminish the chances of future attacks occurring, nor will it significantly reduce the likely deterrent that the current attacks provide against new people drawing pictures of Mohammed. On its own, support, in other words, won't achieve anything. We return to the question from before. What, then, does anyone propose to do?

There is a very good reason that sadness is the only socially acceptable response. Anger, by contrast, requires action. When people are angry, they might actually do something. Is there anything that current political opinion will actually allow to be done?

The terrorists who perpetrated the act are already dead, so aside from cathartic displays equivalent to hanging Mussolini's corpse, there is nothing to be done there.

And since since we are loudly informed by all the great and the good that such attacks are representative of absolutely no wider sociological phenomenon but are merely the work of a tiny number of deranged madmen, apparently there's nothing to do directly to anyone else either.

So what if one's anger were turned towards the question of how we might ensure that this doesn't happen again, what might acceptable opinion consider?

Various Deus Ex Machina type answers get proposed. Better surveillance! Stop the flow of weapons to terrorist groups! Convince more Muslims to embrace free speech!

Very good. How, exactly, should this be accomplished?

The only one that might have any chance is the first. At least in America, we tried that. It was called The Patriot Act. While it is hard to judge its effectiveness, when the very name of your policy has effectively become shorthand for 'knee-jerk response to terrorism that permanently eroded important civil liberties', you may see why 'better surveillance' is not in fact an ideal policy response.

As for the second option, if anyone has the vaguest idea about what policy France might have implemented that would have succeeded in preventing the terrorists from having access to the weapons they had, I'm yet to hear it.

As for the third, nobody in any position of political power seems to have much of an idea how to get radical Muslims to love free speech other than 'be scrupulously nice to Muslims, insist that they're all peace-loving, don't discriminate against them, try not to offend them by depicting pictures of Mohammed...'

Give or take a few hiccups, it seems to me that this is the policy we've already been trying, no? This, in other words, is what brought us to the current position. Even if one were to think that we haven't done enough in this direction (like communism, true outreach has never been tried!), it surely seems worth at least considering the possibility that this policy actually does not work, and then what else one might do.

The West has collectively taken an enormous bet. It has bet that it can allow mass immigration from certain Muslim countries and successfully include such people into society in a way that doesn't compromise the West's own core values or result in permanent social conflict.

Maybe that bet is right. Every fibre of my being hopes that it is right. But Gnon cares little what you'd like to be true. It care only about what is.

However, the West, and the left in particular, cannot back away from its bet, no matter how high the stakes, no matter what evidence piles up. Because something much bigger is at issue. To acknowledge the possibility that the policy of large scale immigration from certain countries might have been mistaken would be to contemplate the notion that radical egalitarianism is false; that, much as we may hope it to be true, people are not all the same, and cultural systems are not all equally valid.

This will never be given up by the left. Never, ever, ever. 

Muslim immigration was never the cause, it was only ever the symptom. The cause was always our iron belief in radical egalitarianism. 

And this is why, in the end, we come to the conclusion that we knew all along. 

What, exactly, will the West do in response to all this? 

Nothing.

It will do nothing at all.

What is Said, What is Unsaid

Political correctness, like all successful forms of social censorship, tends to go through two phases.

There is a loud phase, where average people are actively confronted about why they can't say those mean things any more. Sanctimonious and humourless scolds, buoyed with righteous indignation, delight in vocally complaining about the oppressiveness of some other other innocuous set of jokes and observations. Most of the populace doesn't have much of a dog in the fight, so just goes with the default position of trying not to offend people, and accedes to the request. A smaller group of contrarian reactionaries fights a rearguard action of ridicule and stubborn insistence on the status quo, but usually knows it's a losing battle. Cthulu swims left, after all, so you may as well get on the right side of history™.

This phase is the part that everyone remembers.

But after that, there's a quiet phase of political correctness too. Once the kulaks have been beaten into obedience and the new list of proscribed words and ideas becomes the reigning orthodoxy, what's left behind is the silence of the things that used to be said but now aren't. It lingers a while, like a bell that's been struck, and then gradually fades to nothing. Once this happens, it's easy to forget that it was ever there. What goes unsaid long enough eventually goes unthought, as Mr Sailer put it.

And the only way to see what's gone is to look at the past, and see what used to be said but now isn't.

In the case of political correctness, since it's a relatively recent phenomenon, you don't even need to go that far in the past.

Movies are a great example of this. It's a useful exercise to consider which classic movies from the past couldn't get made today.

Some ones are kept around in the public consciousness as examples of how wicked we used to be - everyone knows you can't make Birth of a Nation any more, but very few people today would even want to. Other movies are partially excused because of their cinematic value, although it's well understood that nobody should get the wrong idea - Gone With the Wind, for instance (1940, 8.2 out of 10 on IMDB). People still like that movie, but nobody would imagine that the current script, with its copious references to 'darkies' would get through even the first read-through at a studio. But this was made a long time ago, so they should get some credit for their good intentions - it was progressive for refraining from using the word 'nigger' and including the word 'damn', both choices of which proved surprisingly far-sighted. So Gone With the Wind gets a partial pass, like a racist Grandma that people still find lovable as long as you don't get her on the subject of the Japanese or crime in America.

But interestingly enough, there are some modern examples too, that people still think of fondly, but couldn't get made today.

Rain Man, for instance (made in 1988, 8.0 on IMDB), will never ever have a sequel or a reboot. It is inconceivable that you could make it today. The entire premise of the movie is that Dustin Hoffman is an autistic savant, and Tom Cruise is his intolerant brother who needs to transport him across the country in order to get access to an inheritance. The premise of nearly every joke is Dustin Hoffman's odd and innocent behaviour, and Tom Cruise's aggressive, cynical and frustrated ways of dealing with it. (Sample quote, yelled at Dustin Hoffman's head: "You can't tell me that you're not in there somewhere!).

As it turns out, the portrayal of Dustin Hoffman's character is actually rather sympathetic - while a lot of the jokes involve the absurdity of his behaviour, at least part of it is about Tom Cruise being a complete insensitive dick about it all, so the broad message is certainly not that it's hilarious to make fun of autistic people. But that wouldn't stop the autism activists having a fit if it were made today. It wouldn't get greenlit, it wouldn't get seriously discussed, it wouldn't get through the first glance through of a script reader, and because everyone knows this, it wouldn't get written in the first place.

Or take Silence of the Lambs (made in 1991, 8.6 on IMDB). The offending premise here is a little bit more subtle - the serial killer Buffalo Bill, whom the protagonists are hunting, is a man who kills and dismembers women in part because he was frustrated at his inability to become transsexual. That is to say, he wanted to become a woman as a result of childhood abuse (because why else would you want to become a member of the opposite sex if your thinking wasn't deranged for some good reason), but he was denied a sex change operation due to said abusive circumstances. It's taken as a fairly straightforward premise of the movie that the desire to amputate one's genitals and attempt to become a member of the opposite sex was, prima facie, an indication of likely mental illness. Hence it's not surprising that he would wind up killing women as part of his sexual confusion and jealousy.

These days, it's a mark of bigotry to even raise questions about whether transsexuals should be allowed to use women's bathrooms, or compete in womens MMA tournaments.

If the movie were being rewritten today, Buffalo Bill would probably be a killer driven by misogyny, and his evil childhood influences would be rejection by women and too much reading of the manosphere. THAT will make you kill people! Transsexuals are just fine, in fact they're better than that, they're almost a protected group (or will be soon - trust me).

And these are just the changes that have happened in my lifetime.

The changes in the zeitgeist that happened before one's lifetime are far harder to see.

If you really want to see what they are, pick a few random primary sources from Moldbug, cited next to each relevant post.

If conservatism is the democracy of the dead, the only way to find out how they might vote if they could is to actually read what they've written.

Who knows what ideas are going entirely unthought in your head, not for having examined the subject and rejected it, but by simply having never heard it at all.