The Puritan Hypothesis Personified

We live in a period where Whig history is the only history that most people know. The west conquered the evils of Nazism and racism, and is moving towards a progressive utopia. People don't know the term 'Whig history', but they know the idea alright.

To me, the best summary of Whig history comes from our modern secular saint, Martin Luther King, who summed it up thus:

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

The history of this quote is a fascinating one.

The MLK quote is actually a paraphrasing of a longer quote by Theodore Parker, who said:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

I'd never heard of this guy before. I actually came across this while looking up the MLK quote as part of writing a different post, but ended up down this rabbit-hole instead.

The reason is that the story of Theodore Parker seems almost shockingly tailor-made to support Moldbug's puritan hypothesis of leftism - that it is primarily an offshoot of mainline American Protestantism that came out of New England Puritans, and over time gradually morphed to replace God with Social Justice.

First off, where would you guess that Theodore Parker was born? Where else, but Massachusetts! Lexington, MA, to be precise.

And for some reason, it wasn't a big surprise to find out that the rest of his life story fits almost eerily into place.

He was an ardent abolitionist, living from 1810 to 1860.

If I told those facts alone, what might you guess about his education and profession?

Would you guess, perhaps, a Unitarian Universalist preacher who had both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University?

Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

Even his ancestry is exactly on point:

His paternal grandfather was John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia at the Battle of Lexington. 

Remember this the next time conservatives are revering the founding fathers. Their descendants, both literal and intellectual, are leftists. Skip the standard Jefferson and Washington hagiographies and read some Thomas Hutchinson instead.

Among his colonial Yankee ancestors were Thomas Hastings, who came from the East Anglia region of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, and Deacon Thomas Parker, who came from England in 1635 and was one of the founders of Reading.

East Anglia, East Anglia, where have I heard that name before?

That's right, it's from David Hackett Fisher's book 'Albion's Seed'. It's where the English Puritans came from before they moved to Massachussetts.

But so what, a skeptic may say. Who cares about his background if he was able to perfectly capture the importance of aiming towards what is just and right?

Well, perhaps it might do to know exactly what the "justice" was that he thought the universe was bending towards. Because it looks an awful lot like "leftism".

First up, feminism! From Parker himself

"The domestic function of the woman does not exhaust her powers... To make one half of the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made"

and from the mouths of others

Stanton called his sermons "soul-satisfying" when beginning her career, and she credited him with introducing her to the idea of a Heavenly Mother in the Trinity.

I'm no Christian, let alone a biblical scholar, but I apparently missed the Heavenly Mother part of the Trinity.

But don't strain yourself too hard trying to reconcile it, as Parker was pretty upfront about his perversions of Christianity. Next up, trying to bowdlerize the Bible to take out anything he perceived as inconvenient, leaving a mush of vague sentimental spiritualism:

  “I preach abundant heresies,” he wrote to a friend, “and they all go down—for the listeners do not know how heretical they are.” For years he had wrestled with the factuality of the Hebrew Scriptures, and by 1837 he was wishing “some wise man would now write a book…and show up the absurdity of…the Old Testament miracles, prophecies, dreams, miraculous births, etc.’”

In 1841, Parker laid bare his radical theological position in a sermon titled A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, in which he espoused his belief that the scriptures of historic Christianity did not reflect the truth. In so doing, he made an open break with orthodox theology. He instead argued for a type of Christian belief and worship in which the essence of Jesus’s teachings remained permanent but the words, traditions, and other forms of their conveyance did not. He stressed the immediacy of God and saw the Church as a communion, looking upon Christ as the supreme expression of God. Ultimately, he rejected all miracles and revelation and saw the Bible as full of contradictions and mistakes. He retained his faith in God but suggested that people experience God intuitively and personally, and that they should center their religious beliefs on individual experience.

The Bible is all a metaphor filled with mistakes and superstitions, just go with what you feel, man. But I'm still Christian, don't you know.

It will not come as a shock to find out that Parker's successors felt less bound to utter the last part. But Parker himself was definitely ahead of the curve, as you have to be when you're deemed heretical by the Unitarian Church (of all organisations).

By contrast, if you want to find out what someone thinks who actually does take the bible literally and cares what it says about slavery, read Robert Dabney's 'A Defense of Virginia'. In it, you will find over 100 pages of exhaustive yet fascinating discourse on what exactly the Bible has to say on the slavery question, and it's probably not what you'd think. Dabney was well acquainted with men like Parker, and skewered them wonderfully:

The Socinian and skeptical type of all the evasions of our Scriptural argument has been already intimated. If the most profane and reckless wresting of God's word will not serve their turn to make it speak abolitionism then they not seldom repudiate its authority. One of their leaders, long a professed minister of the Gospel, declares at the close of a train of tortuous sophisms that if he were compelled to believe the Bible countenances slavery he should be compelled to give up the Bible, thereby virtually confessing that he had never been convinced of the infallibility of that which for thirty years he had been pretending to preach to men as infallible. Others more blatant and blasphemous when compelled to admit that both the Bible and the American constitution recognized slavery exclaimed "Give me then an anti slavery constitution, an anti slavery Bible, and an anti slavery God!" 

This is almost exactly what Parker did.

And even outside slavery, the list of causes Parker supported is almost straight out of modern leftist orthodoxy

As Parker's early biographer John White Chadwick wrote, Parker was involved with almost all of the reform movements of the time: "peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, the physical destitution of the poor" though none became "a dominant factor in his experience" with the exception of his antislavery views. He "denounced the Mexican War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847 'to protest against this most infamous war.'"

Let's just count up how many modern leftist causes this guy managed to hit - blacks, hispanics, pacifism (of a sort), education, feminism, criminals, poverty, hating the rich. Parker loses points, however, for not having the foresight to also agitate about homosexuality and the environment. Had he been slightly more visionary on these fronts, he'd be a shoo-in for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination.

But still, justice! Who can forget that famous arc of justice, to which the moral universe is inevitably tending?

Well, it might not hurt to examine how exactly Parker advocated pushing that moral universe on its way, because he certainly wasn't interested in letting the universe work things out in its own due course. Parker was unusually far-sighted in terms of how he applied leftist aims too. Behold a life full of civil disobedience, incitement to violence, funding of guerrilla violence, and general Alinsky-style agitation:

He wrote the scathing To a Southern Slaveholder in 1848, as the abolition crisis was heating up and took a strong stance against slavery and advocated violating the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a controversial part of the Compromise of 1850 which required the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Parker worked with many fugitive slaves, some of whom were among his congregation. As in the case of William and Ellen Craft, he hid them in his home. Although he was indicted for his actions, he was never convicted.

Guilty as Sin, Free as a Bird. He's the Bill Ayers of 1850.

During the undeclared war in Kansas (see Bleeding Kansas and Origins of the American Civil War) prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, Parker supplied money for weapons for free state militias. As a member of the Secret Six, he supported the abolitionist John Brown, whom many considered a terrorist. After Brown's arrest, Parker wrote a public letter, "John Brown's Expedition Reviewed," arguing for the right of slaves to kill their masters and defending Brown’s actions.

Obviously, the South were the untrammeled instigators of the Civil War through their reckless secession. They should have just stuck around to deal with guys like Parker who advocated for terrorism and slaves murdering their masters. Be reasonable, Southern slave owners!

Of course, you may think this is all just incidental to the original quote with which we started - the guy liked justice, even if in other arenas of his life he was a bit extreme.

But it turns out these ideas aren't incidental to the main point. They are in fact the essence of the idea. Here's the full context of the quote, from quote investigator

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.

In the context of everything he did and said, it is hard to read the last line as anything but a threat.

This was in 1853.

12 years and 620,000-odd corpses later, America had done a lot of trembling alright.

This is the context of the famous MLK quote with which we began. You will find a version of this quote on the MLK memorial in Washington D.C., which tells you how much the idea has become a source of bipartisan inspiration.

And this, incidentally, is the second Parker quote lightly paraphrased by a modern secular saint, and memorialised in Washington D.C. The other is even more famous. Parker, as well as agitating for violent overthrow of slavery, was a big fan of democracy:

A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people

And so at last, we see an odd correspondence between the old and the new.

For in fact,

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

in practice means

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward leftism. 

Which could be ever-so-slightly rephrased as:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.

Indeed.

When stripped of the marketing, Parker, MLK and Moldbug can all agree on the trend, even if they disagree on how they feel about it.

It's not for nothing that they carve it in marble in Washington D.C.

On Self-Control and Eating Disorders

Years ago, I had a friend who once described herself in a moment of honesty as having gone through a period where she was, as she put it, an exercise bulimic. She would exercise obsessively, going on runs every day and working out all the time. The label itself was perhaps the most interesting part, and seemed to be her own creation. We have mental categories for eating disorders. Most of us, however, do not have categories for exercise disorders.

Eating disorders, at least in the popular telling, are usually associated with looking excessively emaciated and thin. But instead of just not eating, she ate a more or less regular (albeit modest and vegan) diet and exercised like crazy. The result was looking thin but toned, not the stick figure arms that I always associated with anorexia or bulimia.

And this proved almost the perfect disguise, because someone who just likes to exercise a lot fits the aspirational ideal of our society. We envision them as ourselves but with more willpower, doing all the gym classes that we always meant to do but never got around to doing.

By contrast, someone who simply refuses to eat meaningful quantities of food, certainly in public, strikes many more people as inherently suspicious. Having willpower being channeled into straight self-denial of something so basic like food, rather than hard work on something "virtuous" (in the modern telling) like exercise, raises far more alarm bells about sanity. These alarm bells themselves are quite telling, of course. They arise because we live in an inherently self-indulgent society dedicated to consumption and self-centredness, where self-denial seems like a bizarre refutation of what we hold dear. But nonetheless, the perception was what it was.

I have known a number of girls over the years who claimed to have eating disorders at some point or other.

Parenthetically, I even knew one girl who claimed this was a very useful cold reading technique on women. Say to them "I'm guessing that you possibly had an eating disorder at some point, though you may not have ever told anyone about it." The reason it worked, she claimed, is that this described a sufficiently sizable majority of women in the population, so was a safe bet to make regardless of who you were talking to, especially given the ambiguity in understanding of the term 'eating disorder'.

But among those few who claimed to have an eating disorder, there were some things that stuck out.

Firstly, the claim was always in the past tense. I had an eating disorder some time ago, not I have an eating disorder. But the story somehow never made it clear that the underlying mindset had changed that much. The circumstances had changed, sure, but the stories tended to lack a defining end which stated "and that's when I figured out that I had to change my way of thinking, and so I did." Instead, the descriptions of past eating disorders always had a distinctly confessional aspect about them. I suspect my cold-reading friend knew of what she spoke when she added the clause about maybe not telling anyone about it. One does not lightly confess to things which sound like mental health problems.

People nearly always tell you the unflattering things about themselves in oblique ways, and you need to know how to listen. One way is the one above, and the rarer case, where introspection and honesty have gotten to the point of identifying flaws, but they are phrased in the past tense. When you hear "I was [this unflattering thing]", you should understand it to mean "I fear I still am [this unflattering thing], but I struggle and work to try to change it, with varying degrees of success"

The other way people reveal themselves is by generalization to the population at large, particularly when it comes to mental processes. Whenever you hear someone say "people generally think in manner X", pay close attention, especially if the characterisation strikes you as wrong. They are nearly always describing themselves.

My cold-reading friend, for instance, was not among those who had said they'd had an eating disorder themselves. But it would be a very good bet to make.

The second notable aspect of the eating disorder confessions I've heard is the rationale. And they all said the same thing: it wasn't really about being thin. It was about exerting control over one small aspect of their lives. And the need to do this became strong when the rest of their life seemed to be sliding out of control. The message in multiple cases was the same - "At least I can control this part".

Which fits in with the characterisation of the mindset above. What seemed to have changed to make the eating disorder go from present tense to past tense, if you read between the lines, was that the problems making their life uncertain had gradually subsided. That, more than anything else, was what caused them to no longer obsess about their weight and eating. Everyone wants to look thin, pretty and be in good shape. But what was being felt internally, and what sometimes but less frequently gets observed from the outside, is the excessive control. This was the underlying need - the food was merely the one part they could solve in a life that had gotten chaotic and frightening. In one case it was going to boarding school at age 13. In another it was being in a foreign country and suddenly knowing nobody.

I have a suspicion, though I'm sure many psychiatrists will disagree, that a decent amount of what we classify as mental disorders really represent points on a continuum of character traits, rather than binary instances of a disease. At some point, we have a general view that the threshold has been crossed into the pathological territory, but this is nearly always a judgment call on which people will often disagree. The distinction between being a clinical narcissist, a sub-clinical narcissist, and just a general selfish asshole, is not an easy one to pin down.

So it seems to be here.

The underlying tendency here is far more common in its less pathological form - that when you can't manage the large things in your life, you at least manage the small. You may not know where your relationship is heading, or how you're going to find a job, but you can at least get the laundry done and make sure the dish cloths aren't too dirty. At some point, I suspect a lot of us have done this, busying ourselves with the musical score of day-to-day activities while the deckchairs of our life slowly slide down the deck of the Titanic.

What we are really observing with something like anorexia, then, is that the need for control has gotten so great that the person can't even see how they appear to the outside world. Keeping yourself 10kg underweight is very hard work. The pathology is that the need to do something extremely hard and controlled outweighs even the need (or ability) to see that others will perceive you as being mentally ill.

And to be honest, this is a pretty good diagnostic of at least some instances when things have tipped over into pathology - when you can no longer even see how you appear to the outside world. But if one focuses only on this aspect, one tends to treat the symptom of the excess, but not think about the underlying cause, especially in the sub-clinical cases.

For instance, one of the girls I knew said that the lesson she had learned was not that she shouldn't obsessively control her weight, but rather that she needed to obsessively control her weight and weigh a few kilograms more so that people wouldn't think that she looked too thin.

It seems, shall we say, optimistic to think that this has fixed the underlying problem, unless you think that eating disorders are merely a problem of low BMI.

For those of us who are not psychiatrists and not dealing frequently with people who are genuinely mentally ill, the interesting thing about understanding pathological behavior is for what it reveals about how to fix our own, non-pathological versions of the same basic trait.

And I suspect the broader lesson is that you should be wary of dealing with the uncertainty and chaos of your life by focusing on the small problems in lieu of the large. Willpower is a finite resource. Spend it on the most important use.

How to Improve the Discourse on Education Policy

Is there a subject of policy debate in modern society more deranged than education? When it comes to primary and secondary education, the sheer sentimentality, mendacity and surreality of most policy proposals borders on incredible. We just need to Fix The Schools™, then everything will be alright with our wayward youth.

Education, curiously, is one of those subjects on which the divide between the reactionary mindset and the mainstream conservative mindset is starkest.

As far as I can tell, there seem to be three main explanations for why some schools perform poorly.

The leftist mindset is that the problem with "bad schools" (where this is usually taken to mean "schools with poor measures of student academic achievement) is a lack of resources. School funding is tied to property taxes, so rich schools get more money than poor ones, and that's why they perform better. More money will let them buy textbooks, and ipads, and hire better teachers, and have art programs which will distract kids from joining violent gangs, etc.

Of course, this runs up against the problem that we've been throwing money into education, hand over fist, for decades, with literally nothing to show for it. As Scott Alexander discussed a few weeks ago in his post on cost disease:

Maybe another 50% increase and we'll finally Fix The Schools™!

And then there's the mainstream conservative answer: the problem with bad schools is bad teachers and bad incentives. The teachers unions are powerful, and the Democrats are beholden to them, which means that there's no competition across schools, no ability to fire underperforming teachers, no incentives for better performance etc.

This of course runs into the problem that if this were the main driver of educational differences, then states where the Democrats have strong political power should do worse. Do they?

No. If you take, say 2015 NAEP 8th Grade Mathematics Scores (available here) and correlate them with 2016 Democratic Presidential Vote Shares (available here), you get a whopping correlation of  -0.0595. If you're a regression guy, if you regress mathematics test scores on vote percentage, the t-stat is a paltry -0.417, with an R-squared of 0.0035. 

But even this overstates the case, because DC is a huge outlier in vote share at 90.48%, and an absolute sinkhole in terms of test scores. If you take DC out, the correlation is actually positive, at 0.183 (though the t-stat on the regression is still insignificant, at 1.29). If you use 2012 vote shares, which were perhaps more usual, the correlation increases to 0.214 excluding DC, and the t-stat is 1.52. That is to say, more Democratic states do, if anything, slightly better, though the effect isn't particularly strong. You can see this just by ranking the states:

State	NAEP Math	Dem. Vote Share
Massachusetts	297	60.01%
Minnesota	294	46.44%
New Hampshire	294	46.98%
New Jersey	293	54.99%
Vermont	290	55.72%
Wisconsin	289	46.45%
North Dakota	288	27.23%
Virginia	288	49.75%
Indiana	287	37.91%
Montana	287	35.75%
Washington	287	54.30%
Wyoming	287	21.63%
Colorado	286	48.16%
Iowa	286	41.74%
Nebraska	286	33.70%
Utah	286	27.46%
Maine	285	47.83%
Ohio	285	43.56%
South Dakota	285	31.74%
Connecticut	284	54.57%
Idaho	284	27.49%
Kansas	284	36.05%
Pennsylvania	284	47.85%
Texas	284	43.24%
Arizona	283	45.13%
Maryland	283	60.33%
Oregon	283	50.07%
Illinois	282	55.83%
Missouri	281	38.14%
North Carolina	281	46.17%
Rhode Island	281	54.41%
Alaska	280	36.55%
Delaware	280	53.18%
New York	280	58.40%
Georgia	279	45.64%
Hawaii	279	62.22%
Kentucky	278	32.68%
Michigan	278	47.27%
Tennessee	278	34.72%
South Carolina	276	40.67%
Arkansas	275	33.65%
California	275	61.73%
Florida	275	47.82%
Nevada	275	47.92%
Oklahoma	275	28.93%
Mississippi	271	40.11%
New Mexico	271	48.26%
West Virginia	271	26.48%
Louisiana	268	38.45%
Alabama	267	34.36%
District of Columbia	263	90.48%

Admittedly there's a lot more variables you'd want to throw into the regression, but still, the univariate big picture doesn't look like the Republican story either.

So what's the reactionary position on why there are bad schools? 

Bad schools are primarily due to bad students. Some students are dumb, unruly, lazy, dysfunctional brats. They can't learn, won't learn, and don't learn. You don't even need to take a strong stance on why these differences arise, but just assume that by the time the kids arrive at school, some of them are just a drain and a menace on everyone around them.

And for some reason, this explanation is considered anathema to most right-thinking people. How can you say anything so mean? All students have the potential to succeed, if only they're given the right circumstances!

If the reactionary position strikes you as excessively unkind (especially if its unkindness makes you flinch from accepting its possible truth), I want you to try the following thought experiment.

When you think of "schools", what mental picture comes to mind?

I suspect you are thinking of an idealised brochure, a smiling child at a desk, something that would fit easily as an advertisement for a charity on the side of a bus. The kid is also likely to be young, probably around 5-8 years old, bright-eyed at the world.

Stop thinking of that. Schools aren't like that.

Okay, so what are schools like? 

You don't need me to tell you. You've been to one. 

To borrow an idea from the War Nerd (when he was explaining why it was easy to get young men to fight and die in wars): if you want to think of schools, think of your 9th grade PE class.

Who was in that class? There were some good students, some of your friends that you think fondly of. If you're reading this blog, chances are both you and your friends were pretty high achieving.

Then there were some middle of the road kids, who were nice enough, and filled out the fat part of the bell curve.

Then there was almost certainly a solid rump of kids best described as complete dickheads. Dumb, mean, idiots. That bully who liked to pick on the young kids. That big punk who stole your friend's bike tire. That guy who was thick as two planks, and boasted about taking a crap on some stranger's car while drunk one Saturday night.

Now, think of just those scumbags, because these are almost certainly the underperforming students we're trying to fix. Imagine that you're designing education policy. How can you improve the educational outcomes of those students? Are they suddenly going to apply themselves more if higher property taxes provide them with a free iPad? Are they about to dive into calculus if only they can find some inspiring young teacher with hip and fresh real world examples of differential equations?

Of course they're not. They're just idiots who will make life miserable for whoever is around them. 

If your school has too many such students, it is probably going to be a "bad school". Now, at this stage of argumentation, it is still a matter of conjecture that the scumbag kids of the world are not spread exactly uniformly across every single school district. But is the idea so outlandish? Do you think the adult scumbags are spread precisely uniformly across every neighbourhood and state? Perhaps this matches your experience of traveling around your city or country, but somehow I doubt it. If it were true, you should feel approximately equally happy moving to any neighbourhood in your city, or any state in the country, since everyone is basically the same! Yeah right. And if the annoying adults aren't distributed uniformly, why should the kids be? The first law of behavioral genetics doesn't go away just because you're feeling sentimental about all kids being nice at heart. And given the capacity of nasty kids to have enormous disruptive negative spillovers on the kids around them, it's not clear how much of a difference in distribution you would need to affect the aggregate outcomes. 

But even if you think of the whole distribution of students (rather than just the left tail), did that distribution seem like something pretty fixed over your schooling, or something with a lot of year-to-year variation? Did the students in the bottom third of the class in one year ever suddenly jump to the top third the next year as a result of a really good teacher? Or would you say that the personal traits, and relative test scores, of the students in your class were approximately stable in rank order over your whole school career? How confident are you that your treatment could upset last year's rank order by very much?

If your education policy doesn't seem like it will work on the ne'er-do-well kids in your 9th grade PE class, it's probably not going to work at all.

And thinking about those kids is an incredibly grounding reality check to cure multi-billion dollar sentimental nonsense that every kid is just wanting to get the best possible education in life. Some are. Some aren't. It's not that every child who does badly at school is also mean and of poor character. But thinking about the ones that are is the best cure for hazy, rose-tinted thinking on the subject. It makes it easier to focus on the sheer stubbornness of the problem at hand.

None of this means that the reactionary position is the only difference across schools, or that there isn't any role for other factors. But let's just say that it's a hypothesis that seems like it might be worth considering more than currently is done, at least in the public discourse.

It is self-evident that the world has a substantial fraction of dickheads in it.

All of those dickheads were 10 years old once. 

Most of them were probably dickheads back then too.

On the Folly of Romanticising Dreams

I finally got around to seeing La La Land, apparently making me about the last person in America to do so. It was quite good, after all. But one thing that stuck out was the ever present Hollywood obsession with the idea of fulfilling one's dreams.

This is a theme that never seems to get tired - don't give up on one's dreams, keep working and eventually you'll achieve your dreams, don't sell out your dreams to mundane practical considerations, et predictable cetera.

There is, in other words, an ongoing preoccupation with the plight of how to disembarrass dreamers of their temporary obstacles.

Let us assume, charitably, that this is meeting a real need in society, for those with concrete ambitions and goals. In the world of cinema, everyone has a purpose that they have aspired to from a young age - opening a successful jazz club, becoming a famous actress.

But every time I see these messages, I always wonder: what fraction of the audience actually has dreams in the first place, at least in the way that Hollywood depicts them?

If the average person were asked, "Quick, what's your dream?" and forced to answer in two seconds, I would guess that a lot of answers would begin with "I don't know,…”, and the honest ones would probably end there as well.

What the average person has instead of fixed childhood dreams, I suspect, is a gnawing sense of ennui that they don’t really know what they want to do with their life, but whatever they’re currently doing isn’t quite it. They’d change, but they’re not sure to what, and even if they had a concrete aim they’re not sure they’d be able to achieve it.

That their hobbies and interests have more of the flavour of enjoyable diversions to pass the time in a rapidly vanishing life, rather than genuine passions.

That their hobbies and interests, when they are honest about it, are nearly all just forms of consumption – sex, movies, gadgets, food, alcohol, porn, weed. And like all consumption, the pleasure is relatively fleeting, and sense of purpose is minimal.

That the only hobby that doesn’t quite fit the previous list is hanging out with their friends, which at least has a social aspect to it. But if they’re older than 25, their most common thoughts regarding their friends are either that i) they don’t manage to see them as often as they’d like, and/or ii) they no longer live in the same city as the people they consider their best friends.

You may note that Hollywood has relatively little to say about how to find dreams if you don’t have them. The very concept almost sounds absurd, since dreams presuppose a fixed and concrete aim, which is the very thing lacking most of the time. And if you tried to push people to come up with some kind of dream, they're going to resort to retrieving some mentally cached entry for "what are the kinds of things people claim to dream of doing?". These usually have one of several predictable forms:

-Mindless Adventurism: I want to travel around the world!
-Fame: I want to be in a rock band or a movie star!
-Getting Paid for My Hobbies: I want to be a gossip columnist (because I like reading social media nonsense), a porn star (because I like banging), own a restaurant (because I like eating) etc.

I ask you, dear reader – do you think that the ennui that so characterises our modern existence is likely to be solved by more trips to Europe, aspiring actors, or failed restauranteurs?

What people are genuinely missing, rather, is a sense of purpose in their lives. And purpose is different from dreams in subtle but important ways.

You can find purpose in religion – in aims higher than egotism, and in understanding the human condition. You can find purpose in family – in raising children, in looking after your elderly parents, in loving and supporting your siblings. You can find purpose in community – in bonds with those around you, in brightening the day of neighbours or strangers. For a talented few, you can find purpose in art – in creating things of great beauty which may outlast you.

With the possible exception of art, the purposes listed above are within the reach of the average person, though finding them is far from straightforward. Religion and community have both been declining a lot in the west over the last few decades. Still, as the Last Psychiatrist puts it, you can always fake it until it becomes real - if your parents are still alive, you can call them, right now, and brighten up their day. 

But no one dreams of finding religion, or having children, or volunteering in their neighourhood. Because dreams are at heart about achievement, about individual ambition, about achieving success at the highest levels. And this is almost by definition not a possibility for the average person. Even where the subject matter coincides, like in employment, the emphasis is radically different. You can find purpose in an honest day’s work, and providing for your family, but you can only find success by being a CEO or an astronaut.

There is an extent to which human ambition makes for better stories, which is probably why Hollywood likes the idea.

But eventually, the subtext of the message gets internalized – to be worthy, you must have ambition, and succeed in it.

The left likes this idea, because the left believes in egalitarianism. We are all as good as each other, therefore we all have the same innate ability to achieve anything, if we just set our minds to it. Set our minds to what, exactly? Um, derp... never mind, let's just go with astronaut. How many of those are there again?

The negative consequences of this message never seem to get much contemplated. It does the left half the distribution no favours whatsoever to tell them that they can do things that they are incapable of, and that they are failures if they don’t aim at something incredibly difficult and succeed

What are they likely to conclude?

Well, if they are part of a designated victim group, they will latch on to another social message floating in the ether – that their lack of success is due to the malign influence of the interfering forces of -isms and -phobias. I am not a failure, you see. I have talent and skill, which a bigoted and hateful world has prevented from being realized! Is it any wonder that people to whom these messages apply find them seductive as a psychological balm for wounded pride and failed ambition?

Or if they’re just some white trash loser, for whom this excuse isn’t available, they drink and drug themselves into an anesthetized stupor and premature death.

Setting people up for inevitable failure is no kindness at all. And the reality is that even having concrete dreams is only feasible for those in the right half of the distribution of ambition and talent.

There is no right half of a distribution without a corresponding left half. Egalitarianism has destroyed most people's ability to think seriously about how to improve the lives of the left half through any mechanisms other than charity. The state of the art thinking is to keep reinforcing the message to the left half that they, too, can be the right half.

How much needless human misery do we create by pretending that the left half doesn’t exist?

Carlyle Considered

After a shameful delay, at last I have joined the Froude Society! Previous installments covered Froude's "The Bow of Ulysses: The English in the West Indies" and Maine's "Popular Government". Today's subject is Thomas Carlyle, the grand old man of reaction, and his "Latter-day Pamphlets".

Reading Carlyle is often quite surprising, because while he is indubitably reactionary, it's not always in ways that one might expect. For instance, Carlyle places a lot of emphasis on the great men theory of both history and government.

Indisputably enough the meaning of all reform-movement, electing and electioneering, of popular agitation, parliamentary eloquence, and all political effort whatsoever, is that you may get the ten Ablest Men in England put to preside over your ten principal departments of affairs.

This emphasis means that there is relatively less discussion of detailed policy positions on particular issues of the day. Good government, to Carlyle, is a long way from a set of conservative talking points. It arises by appointing the most competent men to power, and giving them the authority to actually rule.

Carlyle wants, in other words, an aristocracy. But this is an aristocracy of talent and character, not one of inherited class. Men of low birth but noble character are singled out for praise, Robert Burns being a prominent example.

Choose well your Governor;—not from this or that poor section of the Aristocracy, military, naval, or redtapist; wherever there are born kings of men, you had better seek them out, and breed them to this work. All sections of the British Population will be open to you.

To the modern mind, one is more apt to evaluate governments by whether they their preferences accord with our own (and hence whether we want the same things implemented as the leaders do ) and whether they have the competence to actually carry the plans out. In this reckoning, a competent leader carrying out plans we hate is considerably worse than an incompetent leader trying and failing to carry out plans we hate.

But to Carlyle, competence involves the ability to understand the decrees of Nature or Nature's God, and thus know what will cause justice to be done. As a result, the distinction between competent government and just government is not of primary significance:

To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these. These will lead him to victory; whoever it may be that sets him in the way of these, —were it Russian Autocrat, Chartist Parliament, Grand Lama, Force of Public Opinion, Archbishop of Canterbury, M'Croudy the Seraphic Doctor with his Last-evangel of Political Economy,—sets him in the sure way to please the Author of this Universe, and is his friend of friends. And again, whoever does the contrary is, for a like reason, his enemy of enemies. This may be taken as fixed.

Perhaps the reason that we no longer talk this way is that most of us no longer believe in God (or anything else), and hence don't think of the aim of politics as being to implement his justice on earth. As a result, there's just preferences.

The above quote also illustrates that the focus on competent leaders making competent decisions takes precedence over designing mechanical schemes to implement decisions. As I noted in the discussion of Maine, early Moldbug (in the form of ideas like neocameralism) is a scientist of government, seeking the truth of optimal arrangements. Maine is an engineer of government, grappling with the messy practicalities of what produces generally stable outcomes. But in this taxonomy, Carlyle is an artist of government. Governing is a skill to be learned by able men, appropriately apprenticed to their trade. The only interest in systems and mechanisms is in the extent to which they correctly select the right men, and elevate them to power.

For this reason, Carlyle is generally scathing about the modern implementation of democracy, but not because it is impossible to implement well. The main problem is the fact that the world is full of fools, most of whom know nothing about either government policy or selecting able men. The Laws of the Universe are not easily given up to every Tom, Dick and Harry, so averaging out their opinion with those of the wise is a recipe for disaster:

Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot,—the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic 'admonition'; you will be flung half-frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape Horn at all!

...
Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species of Captains: one wishes much some other Entities,—since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws,—could be brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of Nature.

For democracy skeptics like me, there is much to enjoy. But Carlyle is not easily reduced to slogans, and gives a quite nuanced view on when voting will work better or worse. Latter Day Pamphlets is not wedded to a particular governing system.

For instance, the biggest surprise of the book was that Carlyle is relatively positive about Oliver Cromwell. To me, I had always thought of Cromwell as a disaster, the beginning of where things went badly wrong in English history, and the destruction of genuine monarchy in England. But this isn't how Carlyle portrays it. Cromwell's strong Christian belief is implicitly praised, as is competence in leadership. Remember, the key is greatness of leadership, not forms of government! In this respect, I part company with Carlyle in the importance of institutions and norms. Even if Cromwell were more competent than Charles I, the successor to Charles I would have been a much better bet than the successor to Cromwell. Institutions are not an idea that has much prominence in Latter-day Pamphlets, and the subject of Cromwell and Charles I is not covered in enough detail for me to fully understand the appeal or the implied argument, But the overarching point is still correct - having a crown does not make one a real king, and fake kings are a source of particular disgust to Carlyle. While he does not elaborate much on Charles I, he accurately predicts that constitutional monarchs will not be stable arrangement, nor should we wish them to be:

Imposture, be it known then,—known it must and shall be,—is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible!

...
The Kings were Sham-Kings, playacting as at Drury Lane;—and what were the people withal that took them for real? It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made.

...[The Common Englishman] has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,—what you in your iconoclast humour call shams,—all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting-on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honourable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue saleable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis ?"

Carlyle predicts, in other words, what I have mentioned before - that political arrangements which are no longer actively defended, which persist out of institutional habit and inertia, will not survive. The unprincipled exceptions, if not actively insisted on, will be made into principled disasters. My guess as to the big elephant in the room on this front is citizenship. With Politics as with life -  nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended, as Mr Emerson put it.

By contrast, Oliver Cromwell and the members of the Long Parliament were deadly serious. And Carlyle gives an outstanding Chesterton's Fence justification of what role Parliament actually used to fill (much better than my own poor efforts)

Reading in Eadmerus and the dim old Books, one finds gradually that the Parliament was at first a most simple Assemblage, quite cognate to the situation; that Red William, or whoever had taken on him the terrible task of being King in England, was wont to invite, oftenest about Christmas time, his subordinate Kinglets, Barons as he called them, to give him the pleasure of their company for a week or two: there, in earnest conference all morning, in freer talk over Christmas cheer all evening, in some big royal Hall of Westminster, Winchester, or wherever it might be, with log-fires, huge rounds of roast and boiled, not lacking malmsey and other generous liquor, they took counsel concerning the arduous matters of the kingdom.

...So likewise in the time of the Edwards, when Parliament gradually split itself into Two Houses; and Borough Members and Knights of the Shire were summoned up to answer, Whether they could stand such and such an impost? and took upon them to answer, "Yes, your Majesty; but we have such and such grievances greatly in need of redress first,"—nothing could be more natural and human than such a Parliament still was.

...For, in fine, the tragic experience is dimly but irrepressibly forcing itself on all the world, that our British Parliament does not shine as Sovereign Ruler of the British Nation; that it was excellent only as Adviser of the Sovereign Ruler; and has not, somehow or other, the art of getting work done

In the Carlyle telling, the Parliament worked for two reasons. Firstly, it was composed of men who were themselves Nobles and Rulers, and thus competent to advise on such matters. And secondly, it filled the role of discussing policy choices when there were few avenues available for this. As Carlyle notes, this task is much more competently carried out in modern times (both his and ours) in the press. But the presence of the press makes Parliament not only superfluous, but contemptible, as it turns Parliamentary speeches into performances marketed to the rubes, not serious policy debates. Parliaments, at best, make good advisers but bad sovereigns. Modern parliaments are bad at both. 

There are some parts of Latter Day Pamphlets, especially those that describe the actual workings of government, that read as eerily prophetic. One is forced to do a double-take when one reads the descriptions of how government in England actually worked at the time. For instance:

[I]t is felt that 'reform' in that Downing-Street department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth all others; that those administrative establishments in Downing Street are really the Government of this huge ungoverned Empire

Much has been done in the way of reforming Parliament in late years; but that of itself seems to avail nothing, or almost less. The men that sit in Downing Street, governing us, are not abler men since the Reform Bill than were those before it.

The civil service, in the form of the Home Office, Foreign Office and Colonial Office was already thoroughly in charge of governing...in 1850. Not only that, but the civil service was also fast turning into a sclerotic mess of incompetent bureaucrats badly doing work that didn't really need to be done in the first place. Pause and let that sink in when you hear conservatives talking about how we need to scale back the size of bureaucracy. 

As a consequence, it doesn't matter much who is the Prime Minister, since the civil service makes all the important decisions anyway, and the election and political process is so chaotic and time-consuming that there isn't scope for much else for a leader to do. This is a point that Moldbug emphasises a lot, but the average democracy adherent simply cannot believe. The memorable description of being Prime Minister is that of trying to stay atop a wild bucking horse, with the effort towards not being thrown off crowding out any hope of controlling the direction:

[T]he Right Honourable Zero is to be the man. That we firmly settle; Zero, all shivering with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high saddle; cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and the horse gallops—whither it lists. That the Right Honourable Zero should attempt controlling the horse—Alas, alas, he, sticking on with beak and claws, is too happy if the horse will only gallop anywhither, and not throw him. ... This is what we call a Government in England, for nearly two centuries now.

...Really it is unimportant which of them ride it. Going upon past experience long continued now, I should say with brevity, "Either of them—Neither of them." If our Government is to be a No-Government, what is the matter who administers it? Fling an orange-skin into St. James's Street; let the man it hits be your man.

This has been the government ... for nearly two centuries before 1850.  If you think Carlyle might be right, rolling things back to the 1950's isn't going to cut it.

Yet despite these similarities in description of some parts of the world, one sees that Moldbug's description of Carlyle as a reactionary is entirely correct:

A reactionary is not a Republican, a Democrat, or even a libertarian. It is not even a communist, a fascist, or a monarchist. It is something much older, stranger, and more powerful. But if you can describe it as anything, you can describe it as the pure opposite of progressivism. True reaction is long since extinct in the wild, but it lives in Carlyle.

Indeed, reading through Latter Day Pamphlets, one continues to be struck by statements that defy description on the standard modern political spectrum. Authority is not only necessary, but wise and just:

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise

Carve it in stone. This is so far outside the Overton Window that we barely have words to describe it.

But if you were hoping for a defense of mainstream capitalist economics, you will not find it here. Carlyle is shocked and appalled by the level of poverty evident in Ireland. But unlike the left, he is appalled not only because of the suffering, but mostly because the indigence and misery is a sign of a catastrophic failure of governance. The problem with poverty is not ultimately the money, but the wasted lives.

The Idle Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian quagmire of our affairs? Workhouse Paupers; immortal sons of Adam rotted into that scandalous condition, subter-slavish, demanding that you would make slaves of them as an unattainable blessing! My friends, I perceive the quagmire must be drained, or we cannot live.
...
If our Chancellor of the Exchequer had a Fortunatus' purse, and miraculous sacks of Indian meal that would stand scooping from forever,—I say, even on these terms Pauperism could not be endured; and it would vitally concern all British Citizens to abate Pauperism, and never rest till they had ended it again. Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship that is rotten. 

Carlyle is decidedly cool on the ability of markets, not only to solve these problems, but also to generate wise decisions in general. His scathing essay on the possibility of making a statue of railway baron George Hudson, who is presented as a seller of worthless scrip and dubious economic schemes, makes clear why. A democracy of dollars is not much more likely to recognise genuine human worth than a democracy of votes, for much the same reasons. This is not a matter Carlyle takes lightly:

If the world were not properly anarchic, this question 'Who shall have a Statue?' would be one of the greatest and most solemn for it. Who is to have a Statue? means, Whom shall we consecrate and set apart as one of our sacred men?

And he walked the walk too, founding the National Portrait Gallery to make sure that great men were properly commemorated too. 

One is also reminded in odd ways that the world itself was very different in 1850, and not just in the ways that get frequently remarked on. For instance, in an essay discussing the enormous prominence given to people who had the gift of good speech, Carlyle states the following:

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us ; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot ?

Two questions arise, both linked. Firstly, what criteria do we now use to evaluate truth, apart from rhetoric, which gets little discussion in the essay? And secondly, what is the large class of learned careers not discussed in the above list?

The answer to both is: science. One can see that the intellectual impact of the scientific method had not yet permeated much of society, and that science itself was practiced by a small number of mostly independently wealthy people like Lord Kelvin. The rest of innovation was merely lumped in with industrialism, and not at all considered to be an important or primary method of understanding the universe. If you were actually transported back to the world of 1850, it would almost certainly strike you as utterly alien in far more ways than you imagine. As Moldbug said of Larry Auster, it is equally true of Carlyle - he is gone, and so is the country he was born in. To complain of either would be as superfluous.

But the underlying truth of his words still remains. To those of us skeptical about modernity, Carlyle speaks across the ages, addressing our misgivings and pointing a way forward through the morass:

My friends, across these fogs of murky twaddle and philanthropism, in spite of sad decadent 'world-trees,' with their rookeries of foul creatures,—the silent stars, and all the eternal luminaries of the world, shine even now to him that has an eye. In this day as in all days, around and in every man, are voices from the gods, imperative to all, if obeyed by even none, which say audibly, "Arise, thou son of Adam, son of Time; make this thing more divine, and that thing,—and thyself, of all things; and work, and sleep not; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work!" He that has an ear may still hear.

Just so.

The Conservation of Group Conflict

While I find watching sports generally boring, the psychology of why people watch sports is fascinating.

Not so much the fact that people want to watch exciting athletic endeavors, which doesn’t need much explanation. Watching the X-games or parkour is simply pleasure at athletic skill. But the most ubiquitous sporting events have a strong aspect of tribal loyalty to them. People don’t just like watching football in general, they mostly like supporting a particular team. You might say that this is just local civic pride, and to a certain extent this is true (though it still raises the question of why civic pride is invested in a sports team in the first place).

But the cleanest psychological natural experiment comes from foreigners who move to a city. I had an Australian friend who moved to the US, and wanted to watch American football. Since he didn’t have a team already, he picked one, literally at random. Now he’s a Green Bay Packers fan, and watches all their games. His choice is arbitrary, but I think he’s just more honest about what he wants. The underlying choice of who to support is always arbitrary. What people really want is the thrill of battle, of tribal allegiance and the raw passion of shared purpose. The only real reason to organize this along city or country lines is that it’s more fun to be part of a shared tribe with your friends, who usually happen to be the people living near you.

Sports tribalism is to actual tribalism what masturbation is to sex. The act being simulated is that of tribal battle. Of course, real tribal battle is generally frightening. You’ve got a high chance of being killed or maimed, and lots of people are too old, fat or weak to be usefully involved. So we’ve innovated ways to produce the same feeling by turning up and screaming for men to do ritualized battle on our behalf. There is a reason that live sports games are so much more exciting than televised games, and why televised games in a pub are more exciting than televised games in your home, and why televised games in your home with friends are more exciting than televised games in your home alone. The main attraction is the tribal shared purpose. The more visceral, the better. It’s no surprise that in Europe, soccer hooliganism takes the simulated version to its logical real-life conclusion.

It might be tempting to view this as a critique of sports, as being vulgar and base. Which is partly true. But there’s another, bigger angle at play.

The rise of mass audience participation in sports came after World War II, coinciding with a) the decrease in actual mass involvement in armed conflict, and b) the increased demonization of any racial or ethnic allegiance by western whites.

As the average young western male had less opportunity to actually engage in martial combat, and had no other tribe with which to bond, his appetite had to be sated with ritual simulated combat and arbitrary tribal sports loyalty.

In other words, when tribal allegiance and conflict did not exist, someone had to invent them. Because they fill a very primal need in the average psyche.

You can see this pattern operating in wider conflicts. There seems to be something approximating a conservation of group conflict. Obviously, there's periods of high and low average levels, so it's not a strict conservation. But there does seem to be a rough equilibrium, created by forced pushing in opposite directions. When the background level of tribal conflict gets too low, people seek it out. But when there threatens to be too much, some of the people who were previously tribal enemies become acceptable again.

In terms of the first, there are some wars in history that are simply difficult to explain, even in hindsight. For instance, the War of 1812 between Britain and America. Be honest, have you ever read a succinct account of what the hell it was all about? Here’s Wikipedia:

The United States declared war for several reasons, including trade restrictions brought about by the British war with France, the impressment of as many as 10,000 American merchant sailors into the Royal Navy, British support for Native American tribes fighting European American settlers on the frontier, outrage over insults to national honor during the Chesapeake–Leopard Affair, and interest in the United States in expanding its borders west.

 Ooookay. That sounds totally incoherent. Compare it to the far more compelling account from The War Nerd's excellent series 'The 12 Days of 1812'

So why go to war with a great power when you know it’s in a bad mood? And Britain was in a very, very bad mood in the early 19th century, scared out of its wits by France, creeping democracy, disrespectful servants, and the whole revolutionary trend.

Mostly because the US was in a good mood--too good for its own good. We had a big birthrate—rich families were bigger than poor families in those days, partly because more of their kids made it to adulthood—and that made for a lot of young, ambitious “gentlemen” who wanted to add “officer” to their resumes, and “wartime officer” at that.

We went to war because we (meaning, as the academics would say, “a handful of wealthy white males, bla bla bla”) wanted to. The happiest memories anybody had were the stories—not always totally factual, naturally—of how we kicked British ass in Washington’s day. Most of the elite still had a vaguely pro-French feeling, thanks to the French saving our ass in the Revolution, and not in the mood to excuse all the Royal Navy’s high-handed behavior. America knew it was much bigger and stronger than it had been in 1780, and wanted everybody to know it. Nothing like a war to make an impression.

...
Lastly, the factor you won’t see mentioned in any of the standard list: War envy. You see this a lot when a war goes big: everybody wants to get in on it. Later, they usually want to get out, but it’s too late then. War meant much more to most upper-class Americans in 1812 than it does now. Decent families were supposed to produce officers, and officers wanted battle creds. Everybody in Europe was getting them; they’d been at it for 20 years, in fact. It was just plain time for another war. The Brits were overextended and impolite; Canada was there for the taking, or looked to be; and a whole new generation of Americans who’d had to listen to dad’s and granddad’s stories about Lexington and Saratoga wanted some material of their own, to bore their grandkids with, the way God intended.

Brecher, who knows more about the psychology of these matters than the vast majority of writers on the subject, is dead right. It's not that the listed casus belli weren't somewhat involved. It's just that they don't add up to a coherent explanation without a significant component that basically amounts to 'people just wanted it to happen'.

And on the flip side, among the odd if largely unremarked developments of the second half of the 20th Century is the enormous decline in military antagonism between European nations. Contra the bureaucrats in Brussels, the prospect of a war between the major European powers is incredibly remote, EU or no EU. There simply isn't the anger for it any more.

As the rising tide of diversity brought more and more minorities into Europe, the primary tribal conflict was completely transformed. The nativists who might have previously been agitating for war with France or Germany, who were the traditional tribal enemies, now had their entire focus absorbed by third world populations in their midst. Correspondingly, the globalist left was far more concerned with destroying nativist opposition at home than with fighting other countries. As the progressive elites pushed further and further into continent-wide alliances to advance the EU idea, the conservatives and nationalists realised that they actually had a lot in common with the nationalists from other countries.

Partly this is just a matter of tactics - if you try to fight everyone at once, you inevitably lose. But still, the idea that nativists in lots of European countries would be all allied with each other, rather than agitating for wars against each other, would be highly surprising to Europeans 100 years ago. As indeed would the currency of the idea 'European' itself. One might be British or German or Polish, but nobody was just 'European'. You can only do so when there is a real, non-European group against which to distinguish yourself.

And this suggests something puzzling about the pan-European nationalism of people like Richard Spencer. Specifically, suppose Spencer et al actually get their way, and the European nations revert to being comprised mostly of people ethnically associated with that region - Anglo-Saxons in Britan, Teutons in Germany, etc. Don't ask me how this happens, but just assume it. What do you think would happen next?

My guess is that there's a good chance that the pan-European sentiment would quickly dissolve without the glue of intra-country conflict to hold it together. The European countries would soon end up a lot more antagonistic to each other than they are now. We had a period where Europe was filled with only white people, and 'pan-European nationalism' sure isn't the way to describe the prevailing mood at the time'. Maybe it would be different this time around, but would you bet on it? And if so, why?

At heart, starting up another tribal conflict it would be the only way to keep the game going. Nativists want to fight other tribes. Globalists want to fight nativists, and feel virtuous by defusing the nativist/outgroup conflict (as they see it). But everyone involved needs there to be a tribal enemy in order to be able to enjoy playing their part in the game, which is the only thing they all agree on.

The economists will tell you that we can't have world peace and disarmament because it creates massive incentives for one country to defect and invade everyone else.

But the psychologists might add another reason. We can't have world peace and disarmament because people would get bored and start conflicts up again.

The Birth Control Basilisk

An ongoing question I've talked about a few times before is that at least some of our toughest social problems are really technology problems. That is, not problems of a lack of technology, but of a surfeit of neutral or even beneficial technology which is having unexpected negative side effects. Mass illegal immigration is mostly a problem of cheap transport, for instance.

I mostly think about the declining birthrates in much the same way as I think about the increase in obesity (which deserves its own post for sure). Specifically, that technology has produced an environment so unlike that to which we’re evolutionarily adapted that people’s instincts no longer produce reliably good outcomes.

In other words, reliable contraception and abortion has been like a basilisk. It short circuits what had previously been a very successful evolutionary adaption which used to have high reproductive fitness. It leaves humans like the moth circling the light bulb, thinking it is the moon and flying in circles until it drops of exhaustion.

What are the instincts that people have with respect to children and reproduction?

1. People have a very strong, uncomplicated and concrete desire to have sex, ideally right now. They don't need marketing campaigns to make them want to do this. Oddities like Japan aside, people seem to have no problem getting laid.

2. People have a somewhat strong, but quite complicated, abstract and malleable, desire to have children, at some point in time.

3. People have a very strong, uncomplicated desire to love and care for the children they have.

#2 and #3 are deliberately split into two parts. As the great Gary Becker put it, you don't love your children as much as you learn to love your children once they arrive. There was usually the option to have one more child, which you chose not to do, often as part of a quite sensible cost/benefit tradeoff. Of course, if people had an unplanned pregnancy and had another child anyway, they'd still love and care for the child. But the fact that each child gets loved intensely once it arrives doesn't cause people to want as many children as possible. The love only kicks in after they arrive, and the prospect of loving another child in the abstract does not exert nearly the same overwhelming pull.

In other words, traditional reproduction worked primarily through #1 and #3. A strong desire to have sex ensures children are produced with fairly high regularity, because birth control is either non-existent or unreliable. A strong desire to care for children once they arrive ensures they live to adulthood if resources allow. #2 served mostly as a general background reinforcement. This is the environment we all lived in from 10 million BC until the 1950's or so.

The whole idea of it being a contentious question whether you chose to have kids or not is, as far as I can tell, a shockingly recent question. If the only way you could so choose would be to either a) not get laid, or b) rely on methods that require practice, discipline in the heat of coital moment, forward planning and/or health risks, the discussion would be largely moot.

With birth control, childbirth has been largely disconnected from being a necessary consequence of getting laid. It seems that most unplanned pregnancies are teenagers who are still learning the ropes of birth control, the very poor who simply can't afford it, or people with very low forward planning skills. But regardless of how you cut it, in the modern era it is very easy to take precautions that mean you can have sex for an extended period and not get pregnant.

As a result, we’re now expecting the second, weaker desire to do the job where previously the heavy lifting was done by the first. You have to choose to have children. Is it a wonder that this doesn’t wholly succeed?

This doesn't mean that the problem is impossible - social pressure can be a powerful force, if the right motivations and incentives are set up. But make no mistake, we're expecting new social engineering to reproduce a result that was previously done just by our evolutionary adaptions.

I suspect that we are only recently finding out that the majority of human survival and reproduction was actually driven by unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. We now suffer from a want of unwanted pregnancies, and we don't know how to make up the difference.

The Leader as King, the Leader as CEO

Of all the ideas in Unqualified Reservations, perhaps the one I found most compelling is the comparison of the state with a corporation.

In the Moldbug view, the state, in any meaningful sense, already is a corporation - a group of individuals working for a shared purpose under an agreed-upon structure. It's just that the modern democratic state is a very oddly run corporation. This was satirised very well in the Moldbug theory of rotary management, where he described how bewildering democratic governance would look if applied to a regular company.

But behind the parody was a serious, and brilliant, point. Most educated people in the west think that the way we run corporations is approximately optimal, given their tasks. That is, being run with dispersed shareholders separate from the customer base, elections of board members who appoint an all-powerful CEO who is subject to board dismissal, and a share price to monitor performance. And most educated people in the west similarly think that the way we run governments is approximately optimal, given their tasks - that is, with democratic elections, a permanent civil service, judicial review etc.

But it is not at all clear that the tasks of the two organisations are that different. And since they are governed in such totally different ways, if you think that they are both optimal, it is incumbent upon you to explain what specifically about the differences between the organisational tasks requires such totally different structures.

The Moldbug answer is quite simple - there is no difference. Companies fill essentially similar functions to countries, and we can thus judge the expected success of difference governing structures by the relative success of different company structures. Sovereign corporations would likely outcompete sovereign democracies, in much the same way that regular corporations outcompete co-operatives (which is approximately what democracies are, but with more dysfunction). They just haven't been tried.

But there is another aspect to this metaphor that gets less emphasis.

Suppose we have a family-owned firm. All the shares are owned in their entirety by the male head of the family, the father. The father is both the sole shareholder and the CEO. He passes both the CEO position and his equity stake, simultaneously, to his eldest son upon his death. In this corporation, the two roles are inextricably linked by company by-laws - if at any point the father ceases his role as CEO and transfers it to someone else, then the shares and any cash flow rights are transferred to his successor, except those periodic payments given as a gratuity by the new CEO who may keep him on as an informal adviser. This has some beneficial effects, since the principal-agent problem is basically solved - the CEO now has the strongest possible incentives to maximise the value of his shares.

The father does not have to make every single decision - as CEO, he can hire advisers and delegate certain decisions, but ultimate authority must remain with him in order for him to retain his ability to reap the profits of the company. As both CEO and sole shareholder, there is no board to either evaluate his performance as CEO, or provide external opinions - the only opinions he will hear are those of subordinates directly employed by him, and who may be fired by him at any moment. Indeed, as CEO he is wary of delegating too much, lest people misinterpret these actions under the company by-laws as meaning that his delegate is actually the new CEO and shareholder. As a result, it is hard for him to reap the profits of the company without actively managing it. At first this works okay, but he has to keep doing this even when he is old and feeble - retirement means losing his equity stake.

Because the CEO must hold all the shares, he is prevented from raising outside equity. If he wants to raise capital for a project, only debt financing is available. As a result, if the CEO has a firm that is short in pledgeable assets, he may find it difficult to raise external funds for capital projects. This occasionally makes it difficult for him to ward off competitor firms.

While the father naturally has affection for his son and successor, he loves his other children too, and ideally would like to arrange to transfer his shares to a formal trust to provide for all of them. Unfortunately, company by-laws prevent the shares from being transferred to a trust. Most of the time, he can rely on his oldest son to treat the rest of the family fairly well, but it's always a gamble. In addition, he occasionally suspects that the total profits would be greater if he transferred power to his smarter, younger son, rather than his oldest wastrel son. But the by-laws are fairly strict on that point.

Every so often in the corporate history, the father becomes completely evil, incompetent, or mad. Since this threatens not only the value of his shares, but the livelihoods of his senior employees and the welfare of the customers, they occasionally take drastic action. But since the by-laws don't allow for the removal of a bad CEO, and since there's no way for the CEO to transfer control without impoverishing himself, this usually means that the current CEO has to be killed. Since this is a risky move, which the current CEO has the highest conceivable incentives to prevent, it's only attempted in the most dire circumstances.

There are other unscheduled transfers of power. Sometimes, the eldest son gets impatient, and kills off the father. Sometimes, a junior son will kill off the eldest in a deniable manner, in order to be further in line for the CEO job. You'd think that the by-laws would explicitly preclude someone from benefiting in this manner, and the shares and CEO job would be taken away, but oddly this isn't the case.

Because the parallels are more straightforward, and because I lack the cleverness and imagination of Moldbug, it's probably quite apparent that I'm describing a simplified version of absolute monarchy. I have defended absolute monarchy before, and think that it probably worked a lot better than people today tend to think. But like before with democracy, we can use the history of corporate governance to judge the merits of monarchy versus neocameralism, or sovereign corporations.

Reader, suppose that we unleashed our monarchical corporation into the world, to compete with the firms in the S&P 500. Do you suppose it would succeed? True, it has its advantages. If it started in office with a great CEO, it might do quite well for a while, since it wouldn't suffer from the standard principal agent problems of managers empire-building, or enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders. But how long do you think such an arrangement would last, especially past the first CEO? Most CEOs, even good ones, are only at the top of their game for a short number of years, and when they screw up, they have to get replaced by someone else, who is picked from among the top managers across the whole planet. The advantages here are fairly plain.

It seems quite apparent that our monarchical firm would struggle to compete. Most of the world's successful coprorations have structures that are nothing like the one we describe above. They look more like our regular, familiar public firms.

"But," you may protest, "there are successful family firms too!"

This is true. In the world today, there are large, successful family-run firms. But they tend look more like regular public companies than our monarchical corporation. Many of them are publicly traded as well, like Wal-Mart, with the family retaining only a controlling stake. Out of the rest, the shares can be distributed across family members or held a trust. The CEO job can be kept within the family, or transferred to an outsider (even if the outsider is "adopted" into the family, like in Japan). The firm can raise equity financing.

And for the families that own such firms, they don't seem to be in a huge hurry to change their corporate by-laws to those of a monarchical corporation. By revealed preference, they seem to prefer more modern arrangements.

Out of the various aspects of an absolute king, it seems beneficial that the executive has absolute authority over personnel, budget, operations, and other kinds of organisational decisions. Divided power in this regard mostly just causes problems and inefficiencies. But the linking of absolute organisational authority (which both the King and CEO share) with sole inalienable equity ownership (which only the King has) is not nearly so obviously beneficial. And the process of removing a bad CEO seems far preferable to the process of removing a bad king.

Moreover, if the CEO is not to be the sole shareholder, then it seems misguided to make the CEO the sole judge of his own performance. Having a board, who lacks any major organisational authority except the power to appoint and remove the CEO, along with other major structural changes, seems fairly benign as far as divided power goes, and is very beneficial in the event that you need to change the CEO. It's possible that the board might become meddlesome, but most of the charges against boards made by economists are that they rubber stamp the CEO's decisions too much, not that they're overly combative.

And finally, dispersed shareholders also go a decent way to combating the problem of an owner with perverse or evil preferences. When the sole shareholder in a country is the king, it's possible that the king just has preferences for evil, nasty stuff. Sure, he'd like more profit, but perhaps he's more interested in droit du seigneur, even though it's value-destroying and the citizens hate it.

But if we take the preferences of a multitude of shareholders, and ask what set of preferences can they agree upon, it's typically to just get paid more. In other words, maximise dividends, and let each shareholder buy whatever he wants. There's not usually cross-subsidisation of shareholders in their purchases from the company. It's possible that shareholder citizens in a sovereign corporation might also vote for droit du seigneur, but it seems easier and cheaper to just get hookers or groupies with the extra dividends.

Sovereign corporations have their problems, no doubt. But if your plan for how you'd like a government to be run varies wildly from how you'd like a regular corporation to be run, then you at least want to know the specific reasons why, lest the ghost of William of Occam haunts your country's fortunes.