In response to an administrative question I deleted because of an unfortunate typo:
When I have a big box, or perhaps several big boxes, of copies of Gray Mirror the book, I will email everyone who subscribed in June and ask for an address. This data will be deleted after use and generally treated with the same care as the email list itself (which will stay on Substack, unless I need it for a very good reason like this).
I am no longer worried about the difficulty of fulfillment. I have realized that my children can do it. This will build character -- no one should feel too delicate about subscribing in June. Next chapter soon -- as well as the audio version.
I subscribed but since I'm a cheapo and dirt poor, my question is: how long do we have to stay subscribed to receive a book? I'm appealing to your honor here.
I’ve been assuming from June through publishing— which will be a minimum of a year based on a comment I remember he made during one of his recent podcast appearances.
Since the books are numbered I worry that if there is a tragic accident, (something crazy that would *never* happen like the mail truck gets raided by looters in Minneapolis) a replacement would be a non-starter. I would hope that there would be the ability to receive a "normal" non-numbered non-signed copy if a mail mishap occurs.
I just subscribed using my unemployment stimulus. Does this make me a dissident or collaborator? Thank You Mr. Trump! - From San Francisco South of Market
Second, I'm trying to figure out what detachment would look like in the current context. One of the tenets of antiracism is that you are either a racist or an antiracist--there is no such thing as a non-racist. Consequently, unless you take antiracist actions, you're being racist. So: should I protest despite my fears of getting the coronavirus? Should I research antiracist topics in my academic research instead of what I'm currently doing? If I do antiracist research, should I do it a la John Toland's _Christianity Not Mysterious_, or should I just mouth all the platitudes?
This depends, of course, on how one performs antiracism. There's a sense in which antiracists aren't serious--I have seen no calls for A. G. Sulzberger to resign as publisher of the NYT and make Hannah Nikole-Jones the publisher, nor I have seen calls for Jeff Bezos to turn Amazon over to, say, the Obamas (I also haven't seen public health experts say that you shouldn't be allowed to vote Republican, on the grounds that doing so damages public health). So, I'm guessing that the "either you're with us or against us" talk is just talk. But what are they really saying instead?
Very good post WCP. The nature of these totalitarian movements is to forcefully compel public worship of the ruling ideology, and Mr. Yarvin is clearly aware of this fact. So what would detachment look like, in either our budding Western cultural revolution or the Maoist cultural rev of the 1960s-70s?
I may have missed something in this essay, I will re-read it, but it would be nice if Mr. Yarvin could clarify how this would manifest in a concrete case. Perhaps the only answer is: if the cultural rev is in full swing you hunker down as best you can, do the minimum acceptable amount of public worship, and wait until the worst of the storm has passed. The problem is, some of us aren't great at acting out roles that we don't believe in.
To West Coast Philosopher's point about "either you're with us or against us":
I don't see it as merely talk, I see it as a tactic of war. Do you want to be with the weak, immoral, shameful and backwards outgroup, or do you want to be a member of the powerful, moral, progressive ingroup? If you don't join the side of the righteous, they will do whatever they can to make your life miserable. They don't care about logical consistency, ethical principles, or the like- all they (and the ideology) cares about is winning the war.
To be clear, I enjoyed this essay, and I find many ideas within it to be insightful and attractive, especially detachment. The dopamine hits one receives from engaging with the current bullshit are poisonous over the long term. To engage in a practice of detachment, using a version of the serenity prayer, is to help co-create a world of less suffering.
I find that just not reading social media is immensely helpful to my mental health. Also, taking a systemic view like Yarvin does is also helpful -- if you see everyone as simply acting out their role, responding to incentives, etc., you get less judgmental and a little less afraid. Moreover, you just stop caring about trying to get to the bottom of questions like "was pursing the case against Michael Flynn political overreach, or was dropping the case against him political overreach?" (If you stop being Christian, then you may still be interested in the problem of evil, but you probably won't care as much about whether a Boethian or Ockhamist approach to the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge is better.)
That said, if you work in an industry like mine, where appearing to care about the latest radical left-wing cause is the currency of the realm, it's not obvious what you should do. That's why I asked my question above.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that the lip-service aspect of this explains a lot of it. Though my philosophy department has told us that we should all make our pedagogy explicitly anti-racist and stop teaching western philosophy as central to our courses, they haven't said that we should all change our research to focus on anti-racist topics. And that's probably because (a) some of them don't want to research anti-racism and (b) others who *are* researching anti-racism don't want the competition.
Moreover, though I probably know more about anti-racist pedagogy than the rest of my department (that's why I don't do it), the ones who know nothing feel like they earn points by doing what they're told, and the ones who will tell the rest of us how to teach earn points by being proactive in the fight against racism.
I close with a paranoid suspicion: I wonder to what degree the move to engage in anti-racist practice is a stealth attempt to get whites fired or at least to get grievances filed against them so that they're more tractable in the future. E.g., Robin DiAngelo in her workshops breaks up small groups into small, whites-only "white affinity" groups and non-whites into "non-white affinity groups". I've read some anti-racist pedagogical theory that recommends I do the same in my teaching. I think if I did, I'd get grievances filed, at least.
Your point about stepping back and adopting a meta-perspective is definitely helpful... as you say, people are highly conditioned beings, and there isn't much sense in becoming upset when they (and we) act out negative conditioned habits. Engaging with positive material helps me in this regard, and this chapter from Curtis has had a positive effect already.
To your point about whether you are paranoid, and your questioning the intent of some of the woke folks: to my eyes, it appears that a minority of the woke are aware that they want power/money/status, and are willing to engage in an Intersectional shakedown to acquire it. It seems more of a religious performance, with congregants repeating the ritual dogma back and forth to each other.
Certainly when elite positions are limited, competition tends to bring out the knives. Still, engaging in intentional Intersectional career assassination strikes me as uncommon in most settings.
In the context of this post; aren’t they saying you must be an engaged collaborater? You must contribute to securing and maintaining the power of the cathedral by being emotionally invested and all in. Being just “not a racist” implies that there are other positive qualities, associations, and possibly institutions that may be worthy of ones attention or affection. Not totally for certain but good questions and thoughts.
Curtis defines detachment very clearly (I was a little slow earlier, I had to re-read the essay), but as you say, the nature of the beast is to exert power in order to get you engaged. It's a tough road to navigate, to give Caesar only the coin and the least amount of public worship demanded.
It may be almost impossible to achieve in certain arenas like Western academia, but as highlighted in the essay, detachment is fundamentally a practice. If you aren't able to achieve it in on one particular day in one particular setting, there will be more opportunities in the future. I think the effort is worth it- less fear and more psychic freedom.
I also want to add a thought about the Manichean tactic of "you're either with us or against us":
During the Columbian civil war, with atrocities being committed by both government backed forces and the FARC, some Columbian towns explicitly proclaimed their neutrality in the conflict. Both the gov and the FARC were opposed to this, and if memory serves, some such towns still suffered attacks and reprisals. I don't know if their attempts at neutrality protected them to a degree or not at all, it's been many years since I looked into it.
Do you work in academia? Just curious, that really is a whole different playing field. Though I’m seeing this militant wokism creep into the finance world where I work. We need a an ethical and moral overhaul, but not this pseudo compassionate supposed Great Leap Forward.
Marketing bogeyman reporting in. I would suggest that in order to exist or flourish in academia or any other "woke is the whole of the law" pursuit you're going to need to carry on performative acts of regime reinforcement. You're not the only one performatively carrying these out -- many corporate progressives are simply sociopaths at their core. You can remove the mask at home or among friends, but be prepared to play a role unless you're willing to leave the field.
I am willing to leave the field. My wife makes enough money to support me. That said, my department was trying to get its members to sign a loyalty oath a couple of weeks ago, one that required us to start employing antiracist pedagogy (among other things), and I, along with four others, didn't sign it. Yesterday, during a group discussion hosted by Thad Russell, I asked Curtis whether he thought I should have signed it, and he said no -- given that I have tenure, it's important that I not give my persecutors rope to hang myself with. (I.e., the more times I say, "yes, I agree with you about X", the more they can say "hey, since you agreed with us about X, you now are logically committed to Y.")
Thanks for this post, Curtis, I'm curious for the next. However, one question remains with me, a question that I have had since I read about your 'steel rule'. If you are detaching anyway, why spend your time on designing the next regime? Why not give up politics completely, and focus on canooing, physics or literature? Why not go full Taoist, and just focus on spiritual enlightenment?
I can’t unthink this detachment strategy (is it best to call it that?) as something that must people spiritual-like in nature; it will definitely require “faith” in even the intellectual frame being proposed.
Really enjoyed the post, Curtis. Just wanted to point out a typo in the first paragraph of 'A Final Intervention:' "we will will do so in considerable detail." If this will be published as a book eventually, you might as well use the internet as your free editor.
I am interested in your thinking about going full Heinlein (Starship Troopers--the book not movie--mostly explained and justified in chapters 8 and 12) with only veterans voting or holding office and 98% of the population being utterly indifferent to political matters.
It would seem to track with what you are aiming at. If the current disorder continues, there is a path to achieve a Starship Troopers type regime change in a way exactly described in Chapter 8 of the book and perhaps even have it welcomed. The political formula of this regime makes sense in the real world. If you are familiar with Spandrell's concept of Bioleninism, full Heinlein fixes that. The non-exhaustive failure conditions that you define for regimes in this essay (like lack of physical and property security etc.) do not seem to apply to it which makes it at least worthy of some consideration. There are veterans organizations like the American Legion that already exist so you don't have to build it from scratch.
Could a Starship Troopers type regime be engineered to be stable? We would need a few tweaks to keep the veterans from voting themselves all of the benefits or becoming kind of a Samurai class, but these are probably doable.
You asked for Yarvin's opinion so sorry to piss on your fire hydrant, to paraphrase Sarah Jeong.
But I see a few problem with Starship Troopers model of limited democracy:
First is that is has power without dominion, without ownership. This is the same case as with democracy, communism, and even fascism. If the people who don't ultimately control the country own the country (or if they are not acknowleged to do so), then you cannot have responsible government.
The second, related to the first, is what incentive binds the troopers to the service? Desire to be involved in political life. Now if you make it such that only front line combat troops gain the unique "service guarantees citizenship" incentive, you are going to have a rough time managing the spaceship custodians and the other supporting roles that comprise the bulk of a civilized military. Either they will have to be outside of military discipline and be pure soldiers, or they will be counted as real soldiers which will eventually make the scope of "service" creep up to involving a large bureaucracy that has no martial virtues. Basically you are binding lurid incentives to areas that require much camaraderie and you will eventually get the modern bureaucracy. Not that I wouldn't press a button to bring that about right now.
True, the veterans do not own the country in a formal way like a King or sovereign corporation does. However, in Heinlein's formulation, the veterans submit themselves to the state for service up to and including risking their lives in this service and thus eventually gain the right to rule the state by exercise of their franchise. I guess you could say that their service is their ownership buy in if you want to. If you wanted to take the additional step of having the American Legion the titular owner of the country as a sovereign corporation, I guess you could, but I don't see the necessity. Maybe there is one I am missing, but I don't see it.
In Heinlein's novel just as in our system, active combat troops are a minority and only discharged veterans can vote or hold office. I don't think he addressed whether the bureaucracy could be civilian or not---flavor that to taste. People in support jobs get franchise too including spaceship custodians.
Your points are well taken and I wonder if one can solve for "service creep" where democratic agitation to count more and more activities as federal service until the distinction is meaningless breaks the system. You might count on a counter-force among veterans who do not wish to dilute citizenship and who have memories of the disorder that caused the adoption of the new system for at least a few generations. That might be long enough to eliminate the democratic virus from people's indoctrination by doing a dogma rewrite making the idea of full democracy ridiculous by pointing out how bad the results were when the people of the past made the mistake of having it. You could anathematize democracy as the current regime does for ideologies it wants to suppress.
This is one of several systems I can think of that seem like they would be an improvement on the current system. Is is the best we can design? I don't know. I suspect Yarvin will come up with something very different, but I can see a path to its existence and that has to count for something.
Structuring the American Legion as a sovereign corporation would be a tremendous improvement in my opinion and really could make the system work better. There is an important difference between owners and absolute rulers, the former being a subset of the latter. The question is can the ruler legitimately and publicly take any action explicitly for his own good? If, like Napoleon, you can order all the nation's young men to their deaths but you can only do it on behalf of the people or ideals, you are not an owner. So if the Federation has a similar role to that of the US Government, it cannot consider itself formally the owner, only the ruler of the country.
Regarding service creep, it might be slowed down very significantly by such tactics. However the basic weakness is that there is a binding contract from the state to the people, whereas all the state should be giving to the people is a reputation for great customer service. So while such a system could be strengthened so that the decline toward demotism is negligible, the measures needed would probably A: be a bit of a hassle for some honest people and B: probably need to be set up and maintained by a single absolute ruler/owner. Kind of like a school principal and the student council, except in the Federation the student council can administer lashings.
But ultimately the idea of a qualified democracy certainly can squelch all of the more thoughtful and widespread concerns that brought about and maintain democracy and is not a bad way to go but yes, we'll probably see something different in this book.
In terms of seeing something different in the book, I am sure of this. The regime I propose would be a Vaisya led one if you use his American Castes nomenclature and I don't think Yarvin has much respect or liking for us so I doubt that any scheme of his would put us on top. I think his bias and cultural background would cause him to exaggerate its flaws and dismiss it as a version of the brown pill.
Curtis thank you for writing this. It directly helped me today practice a measure of detachment while co-workers were engaging in religious performance of the woke kind. I also gave the chapter a second reading today, and I want to give a longer comment riffing off of some of the ideas later this week. Cheers!
Obviously this is not a parenting blog, but I would love to hear your advice for raising children under this framework. Do you guide them to be disengaged? Do you push them to be volunteers in hopes they might have a chance to participate in the regime? (To clarify, by “children” I mean elementary to middle school kids, pre-high school.)
Of course you want your kid to be a critical thinker, but kids are being fed propaganda regardless. The choice of disengagement doesn’t seem to apply. I may tell my kids “Lincoln was a hero!” Or “Lincoln was a tyrant!” But it’s hard to say “Lincoln was a complex historical figure—let’s think critically” when my kid’s school is teaching him about the honest, rail-splitting emancipator that we’ve all grown to deify (or maybe encouraging him to tear down Lincoln’s statue—whatever the prevailing view may be). Children love stories—good guys and bad guys. So what stories do we tell our kids? Do our kids need the mental furniture to be collaborators?
Would really appreciate your insight on applying these disciplines as parents.
I listen to a podcast called _The Fifth Column_, with libertarians Michael Moynihan, Matt Welch, and Kmele Foster. Moynihan and Welch have school-age children, and both have fairly typical skeptical views on antiracism, etc. (e.g., neither of them would have any truck with the likes of Steve Sailer, say, but they would agree with Andrew Sullivan on woke culture). Both report that their daughters are quite skeptical of what they hear in school, both because they hear their parents talk about these issues, because they're smarter than their teachers, and (perhaps) because they are genetically predisposed to having the same politics as their parents. So far as I know, neither child has gotten into any serious trouble at their schools, but they're only 9 and 11.
I would wager that, if you're a reasonably good parent, your children will trust what you have to say over your teachers. Also, you can engage them much more directly than their teachers can. (When you're teaching 25 kids, you can't run through 25 separate catechisms.)
That said, if you're asking, "what should I tell my kids about how to react to their teachers?", I would say don't teach them to be oppositional, but just to give the answers that their teachers want to hear. After all, for now getting good grades in primary and secondary school is still important.
It should also be fairly easy to tell the teachers what they want to hear -- the gospel of antiracism is, right now, very easy to understand, and things that complicate it (e.g., black nationalists, non-woke leftists, Asians) won't be brought up unless someone brings them up. No need to do that.
Both volunteers and dissidents are seeking the same kind of action - I would phrase it as they are seeking agency over their own lives, in a world where humans live like ants in a colony and have very little agency over their own lives. with regards to what value systems they inhabit, modern people have essentially *no* agency.
This makes disengagement difficult, because it can make life unfulfilling. I don't think too many people can live disengaged lives given the evolutinary human psychology you mention fairly often.
Rather, the answer is something impossible : decentralization of power entirely, e.g. city states. perhaps we only reach this situation when the nation states have exhausted themselves utterly, in some sort of post apocalyptic wasteland. or perhaps we never reach it. but it is likely to be the environment in which people find the most fulfillment, because they will *actually* matter to their small, splintered tribe, instead of imaginary value imparted to them by the circus of the modern state that comprises several hundred million souls.
just as the state exploits dissidents for energy (by giving volunteers concrete targets),
dissidents exploit the state for energy, because being a dissident (esp internally) is a more accessible way of *feeling* like you have agency over your own life than being a volunteer does. Only a very few volunteers get to really feel they are "driving the cause". Other volunteers have to make do with petty sadism and celebrity worship.
But being a dissident always feels a little cool, via the electric thrill of *not* serving an increasingly abusive state and its lies. Inside the mind is free: for now.
From here, we can take a big leap and hypothesize the existence of cyclical power shifts from volunteers to dissidents. Let's argue that power steadily leaks from the latter to the former over a long enough time scale.
However, without decentralization, this doesn't actually change anything. Only the flavor
of the despotism changes. Today's dissidents are tomorrow's tyrants, just as we can see now that yesterday's dissidents are today's tyrants. Another way of saying this is that the dissident movement is co-opted by power even as it thinks it is subverting power.
The gist of the essay is that there are two forms of detachment that seem like they don't fit together...
A) “Detachment is a hard spiritual task in which no one can succeed perfectly. It is not a fact or even an idea. Detachment, like Zen, is a practice.”
B) “A pure subject has no emotional relationship with power. Power demands nothing but physical compliance. Minimal compliance is nonaggression plus taxation: le libertarian paradise. While real history was never so pure, this abstraction is a normal civilized condition that we can call natural detachment.”
Can you see the difference? In the first case one intentionally takes on a difficult spiritual task. Common sense would dictate that only the few, the excellent, are capable of hard spiritual tasks. The second case, natural detachment, is different. It is natural and without effort, achieved by anyone living in pre-civilized regimes. It is a detachment that is possible for the many.
These are two different contexts. So of course they don’t fit.
The person described in example A is assumed to be in today’s context and circumstances— living within a total state.
Example B is describing a person in a premodern state long before modernity.
I do agree that detachment will have to be described in greater detail of this blog is to be prescriptive, but I don’t think you uncovered an inconsistency— just somewhat ambiguous writing.
I see why you disagree--but I think my question is more about typology than history. There are the few and the many in all times and places. The kind of detachment that is possible for the few excellent, and the mediocre many, will be different.
Even today you probably know a few people who can take on hard spiritual tasks and you know many who are better off never reading the news or having political opinions (and plenty in between). Yarvin is obviously writing to group A, the few,--but sometimes, at least in the Unregistered podcast, he made appeals to the kind of detachment he admires that cuts in both ways I am suggesting:
1) Philosophic historian detachment. He says in the Unregistered interview that it would be weird if a historian wrote a book about the War of the Roses and was passionately partisan; we would think that he was a weirdo. Yarvin seems to counsel that we obtain this level of detachment in real time. It is not clear that this is possible for most people. This detachment flows out of a deep vision and acceptance that all peoples pass away. Thucydides imagines what the ruins of Athens and Sparta will look like to future observers.
vs
2) Peasant/hedonic narrow vision detachment. Yarvin’s other example from the interview is this: when you travel to a South American country, you don’t care about voting there, you don’t want political power, you don’t strive for influence. Rather, you just want to be safe, have fun, and just generally avoid anything painful. Yarvin suggests that this is how we should feel about our own country. You don’t need deep vision to want to have a safe and pleasant time. This seems to me to something that is more achievable for the many.
Does this help the argument have more bite? Or is it still not convincing?
Yes. This helps a lot. I see more what you are getting at with the additional examples.
It will be interesting to see where he goes with these detachment ideas because if this book is a “mirror for princes” it will have to be more instructive than past writings.
The part where he defines dissidents as a special case of collaborator and renames non-dissident collaborators volunteers seems unnecessarily confusing.
One thing I want to know is, where does one run if one wants to minimize the effort that goes into compliance? I sure as hell am not looking forward to playing along with the Cathedral's increasingly weird behaviors for the rest of my life. Curtis mentioned in one of his recent interviews that countries like Hungary won't be the same in 20 years or so. Are there any that will last longer?
I've been thinking of South America personally. They generally have a strong, family based and religious culture that I think will resist the Great Awokening far better than most.
If progressives get complete control Over the USA then Uruguay won’t be any safer than Iraq was. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and all that.
I don't agree WCP. The ability of the USA to project force (both soft power and hard) has been steadily declining, and the fragility of state finances has been growing.
While the corrupt Red Wing of the Neoliberal Party has done very little to reign in spending, if the corrupt Blue Wing gets complete control they will almost certainly accelerate debt and fragility.
The most conceivable way that I can see Woke Religion influencing South America is through the continued growth of Woke trans-national monopoly Corporatism, and that influence will be increasingly difficult to avoid regardless of location.
To my eyes, Western elites would love to have a CCP style Sesame social credit score system applied to their own citizens. Some of the Davos set like Chase and PayPal have already implemented little piecemeal measures, for example refusing financial accounts to active dissidents (Laura Loomer, Proud Boys members, etc.)
An interesting document was released by the EU this week that called for a European firewall/cloud/internet "similar to what has happened in China in the past 20 years... Like the Chinese firewall, this European internet would block off services that condone or support unlawful conduct from third party countries."
I see a steady convergence of Western and Eastern censorship and economic repression. Western Corporatism shows profound deference to the CCP. Even a shock as large as the coronavirus seems unable to dent this force.
But I'm a natural pessimist, and I could well be wrong. As you said in another post, nobody knows how History will proceed, and unforeseen events can have major consequences.
With modern technology transcending borders as it has, it feels to me that the limits of the prevailing power structure are no longer a nation's borders, but the reach of its language. Painting in broad strokes, it seems to me that English-speaking countries have largely adopted America's norms of power-reinforcement and virtue signalling. For alternatives, I'd look to high-functioning countries with low levels of English literacy and American cultural influence. Many countries in Asia fit this bill, in my opinion--from emerging countries that seem to be doing it right, like Bhutan, to more steady-state first-world countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. These countries consume American cultural exports like celebrities, some music, etc.--but the language barrier seems to prevent more meaningful concepts and memetic mind viruses from really taking hold. Political discourse if very different there, in my personal experience.
I don't expect this to be in the book and not sure id even want it to be exactly, but I would love to read a comparative analysis of Yarvin and Foucault's conception of power, knowledge and their relationship.
There is certainly a strong superficial resemblance as I see it. I have often thought a crude but succint summation of Moldbug thought is Foucauldian analysis turned on its head.
So in this post Mr Yarvin writes 2 different hypotheses about the attractiveness of power:
A: Power is always attractive and therefore any powerful ideology is hip
B: A powerful regime, such as our own, can be inherently ugly and need some ideological rhinoplasty to make people like it.
I struggle to see how B can be true given A. That is, if coolness is completely a primate attraction to power, why any powerful entity needs to disguise itself. Is this just due to western cultural conventions that tell people that might doesn't make right? Would such makeup be needed in a completely unwesternized regime like premodern China with it's mandate of heaven or any other country that has not developed the western psychosis?
The answer to how both A and B can both be true was answered when it was stated that Power feels insecure. So In that insecurity, though A remains true, it can do things that fall under B.
Yes thank you I think I did fail that reading comprehension test (I read it over a few times, honest). So you have insecure government, it wants to look nice.
Perhaps the answer is that where power exists but is undisguised, people wish to become part of it, but are put off of getting close to it without immediately getting the power themselves, whereas where it exists but is dressed up prettily, they are happy just to get closer to it? But I agree it needs more exploration.
Those "Western cultural conventions" didn't just happen, of course. The power today was not always in power, and creating those conventions was a large part of how it displaced its predecessors.
OK so what you're saying is that real power is always cool to have, but fake power really needs to be spiffed up if you want enough little collaborators that you don't have to give power to? That does make sense, although it differs some from what Yarvin was saying which seemed to say that such people were granted minuscule amounts of real power. Maybe this is a distinction without a difference since such small amounts of power won't make any impact on one's real life and ideological filler must supplement it.
And yes, you're absolutely right about using the term "western" in that passive eternal way. I hope you will forgive me on account of my "western" education.
In response to an administrative question I deleted because of an unfortunate typo:
When I have a big box, or perhaps several big boxes, of copies of Gray Mirror the book, I will email everyone who subscribed in June and ask for an address. This data will be deleted after use and generally treated with the same care as the email list itself (which will stay on Substack, unless I need it for a very good reason like this).
I am no longer worried about the difficulty of fulfillment. I have realized that my children can do it. This will build character -- no one should feel too delicate about subscribing in June. Next chapter soon -- as well as the audio version.
As a late subscriber signing up an hour into July, I'm hoping you hold a loose definition of June.
Just pretend you were on Baker Island (UTC-12) at the time.
I subscribed but since I'm a cheapo and dirt poor, my question is: how long do we have to stay subscribed to receive a book? I'm appealing to your honor here.
Bumping the question, because there was no authoritative answear yet.
I’ve been assuming from June through publishing— which will be a minimum of a year based on a comment I remember he made during one of his recent podcast appearances.
As an august subscriber, can I join the party?!?
I'm going to detach from your concept of signed copy and just not give a fuck that I showed up in august.
As usual, the read was a pleasure.
PS: You're on my list, a list just for you. The Yarvin list. It's where I place all the Yarvins that I read.
Thank you Curtis. It's been a peaceful time since l stumbled upon your writing
If I subscribed too late, can I pay for a signed copy of the book?
Since the books are numbered I worry that if there is a tragic accident, (something crazy that would *never* happen like the mail truck gets raided by looters in Minneapolis) a replacement would be a non-starter. I would hope that there would be the ability to receive a "normal" non-numbered non-signed copy if a mail mishap occurs.
I just subscribed using my unemployment stimulus. Does this make me a dissident or collaborator? Thank You Mr. Trump! - From San Francisco South of Market
I'd say it makes you a detatchnik.
First, you don't have to send me a book.
Second, I'm trying to figure out what detachment would look like in the current context. One of the tenets of antiracism is that you are either a racist or an antiracist--there is no such thing as a non-racist. Consequently, unless you take antiracist actions, you're being racist. So: should I protest despite my fears of getting the coronavirus? Should I research antiracist topics in my academic research instead of what I'm currently doing? If I do antiracist research, should I do it a la John Toland's _Christianity Not Mysterious_, or should I just mouth all the platitudes?
This depends, of course, on how one performs antiracism. There's a sense in which antiracists aren't serious--I have seen no calls for A. G. Sulzberger to resign as publisher of the NYT and make Hannah Nikole-Jones the publisher, nor I have seen calls for Jeff Bezos to turn Amazon over to, say, the Obamas (I also haven't seen public health experts say that you shouldn't be allowed to vote Republican, on the grounds that doing so damages public health). So, I'm guessing that the "either you're with us or against us" talk is just talk. But what are they really saying instead?
Very good post WCP. The nature of these totalitarian movements is to forcefully compel public worship of the ruling ideology, and Mr. Yarvin is clearly aware of this fact. So what would detachment look like, in either our budding Western cultural revolution or the Maoist cultural rev of the 1960s-70s?
I may have missed something in this essay, I will re-read it, but it would be nice if Mr. Yarvin could clarify how this would manifest in a concrete case. Perhaps the only answer is: if the cultural rev is in full swing you hunker down as best you can, do the minimum acceptable amount of public worship, and wait until the worst of the storm has passed. The problem is, some of us aren't great at acting out roles that we don't believe in.
To West Coast Philosopher's point about "either you're with us or against us":
I don't see it as merely talk, I see it as a tactic of war. Do you want to be with the weak, immoral, shameful and backwards outgroup, or do you want to be a member of the powerful, moral, progressive ingroup? If you don't join the side of the righteous, they will do whatever they can to make your life miserable. They don't care about logical consistency, ethical principles, or the like- all they (and the ideology) cares about is winning the war.
To be clear, I enjoyed this essay, and I find many ideas within it to be insightful and attractive, especially detachment. The dopamine hits one receives from engaging with the current bullshit are poisonous over the long term. To engage in a practice of detachment, using a version of the serenity prayer, is to help co-create a world of less suffering.
I find that just not reading social media is immensely helpful to my mental health. Also, taking a systemic view like Yarvin does is also helpful -- if you see everyone as simply acting out their role, responding to incentives, etc., you get less judgmental and a little less afraid. Moreover, you just stop caring about trying to get to the bottom of questions like "was pursing the case against Michael Flynn political overreach, or was dropping the case against him political overreach?" (If you stop being Christian, then you may still be interested in the problem of evil, but you probably won't care as much about whether a Boethian or Ockhamist approach to the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge is better.)
That said, if you work in an industry like mine, where appearing to care about the latest radical left-wing cause is the currency of the realm, it's not obvious what you should do. That's why I asked my question above.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that the lip-service aspect of this explains a lot of it. Though my philosophy department has told us that we should all make our pedagogy explicitly anti-racist and stop teaching western philosophy as central to our courses, they haven't said that we should all change our research to focus on anti-racist topics. And that's probably because (a) some of them don't want to research anti-racism and (b) others who *are* researching anti-racism don't want the competition.
Moreover, though I probably know more about anti-racist pedagogy than the rest of my department (that's why I don't do it), the ones who know nothing feel like they earn points by doing what they're told, and the ones who will tell the rest of us how to teach earn points by being proactive in the fight against racism.
I close with a paranoid suspicion: I wonder to what degree the move to engage in anti-racist practice is a stealth attempt to get whites fired or at least to get grievances filed against them so that they're more tractable in the future. E.g., Robin DiAngelo in her workshops breaks up small groups into small, whites-only "white affinity" groups and non-whites into "non-white affinity groups". I've read some anti-racist pedagogical theory that recommends I do the same in my teaching. I think if I did, I'd get grievances filed, at least.
Is that the point?
Your point about stepping back and adopting a meta-perspective is definitely helpful... as you say, people are highly conditioned beings, and there isn't much sense in becoming upset when they (and we) act out negative conditioned habits. Engaging with positive material helps me in this regard, and this chapter from Curtis has had a positive effect already.
To your point about whether you are paranoid, and your questioning the intent of some of the woke folks: to my eyes, it appears that a minority of the woke are aware that they want power/money/status, and are willing to engage in an Intersectional shakedown to acquire it. It seems more of a religious performance, with congregants repeating the ritual dogma back and forth to each other.
Certainly when elite positions are limited, competition tends to bring out the knives. Still, engaging in intentional Intersectional career assassination strikes me as uncommon in most settings.
In the context of this post; aren’t they saying you must be an engaged collaborater? You must contribute to securing and maintaining the power of the cathedral by being emotionally invested and all in. Being just “not a racist” implies that there are other positive qualities, associations, and possibly institutions that may be worthy of ones attention or affection. Not totally for certain but good questions and thoughts.
That resonates for me Brien.
Curtis defines detachment very clearly (I was a little slow earlier, I had to re-read the essay), but as you say, the nature of the beast is to exert power in order to get you engaged. It's a tough road to navigate, to give Caesar only the coin and the least amount of public worship demanded.
It may be almost impossible to achieve in certain arenas like Western academia, but as highlighted in the essay, detachment is fundamentally a practice. If you aren't able to achieve it in on one particular day in one particular setting, there will be more opportunities in the future. I think the effort is worth it- less fear and more psychic freedom.
I also want to add a thought about the Manichean tactic of "you're either with us or against us":
During the Columbian civil war, with atrocities being committed by both government backed forces and the FARC, some Columbian towns explicitly proclaimed their neutrality in the conflict. Both the gov and the FARC were opposed to this, and if memory serves, some such towns still suffered attacks and reprisals. I don't know if their attempts at neutrality protected them to a degree or not at all, it's been many years since I looked into it.
Thanks for the response (dopamine hit).
Do you work in academia? Just curious, that really is a whole different playing field. Though I’m seeing this militant wokism creep into the finance world where I work. We need a an ethical and moral overhaul, but not this pseudo compassionate supposed Great Leap Forward.
I work in academia, fwiw. I actually am a professor of philosophy, albeit not a good one!
Marketing bogeyman reporting in. I would suggest that in order to exist or flourish in academia or any other "woke is the whole of the law" pursuit you're going to need to carry on performative acts of regime reinforcement. You're not the only one performatively carrying these out -- many corporate progressives are simply sociopaths at their core. You can remove the mask at home or among friends, but be prepared to play a role unless you're willing to leave the field.
I am willing to leave the field. My wife makes enough money to support me. That said, my department was trying to get its members to sign a loyalty oath a couple of weeks ago, one that required us to start employing antiracist pedagogy (among other things), and I, along with four others, didn't sign it. Yesterday, during a group discussion hosted by Thad Russell, I asked Curtis whether he thought I should have signed it, and he said no -- given that I have tenure, it's important that I not give my persecutors rope to hang myself with. (I.e., the more times I say, "yes, I agree with you about X", the more they can say "hey, since you agreed with us about X, you now are logically committed to Y.")
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.“
Thanks for this post, Curtis, I'm curious for the next. However, one question remains with me, a question that I have had since I read about your 'steel rule'. If you are detaching anyway, why spend your time on designing the next regime? Why not give up politics completely, and focus on canooing, physics or literature? Why not go full Taoist, and just focus on spiritual enlightenment?
I can’t unthink this detachment strategy (is it best to call it that?) as something that must people spiritual-like in nature; it will definitely require “faith” in even the intellectual frame being proposed.
Really enjoyed the post, Curtis. Just wanted to point out a typo in the first paragraph of 'A Final Intervention:' "we will will do so in considerable detail." If this will be published as a book eventually, you might as well use the internet as your free editor.
Being a good collaborator, I see! I will add to this: there's a "the the" just under "The home inspector’s diagnosis."
I am interested in your thinking about going full Heinlein (Starship Troopers--the book not movie--mostly explained and justified in chapters 8 and 12) with only veterans voting or holding office and 98% of the population being utterly indifferent to political matters.
It would seem to track with what you are aiming at. If the current disorder continues, there is a path to achieve a Starship Troopers type regime change in a way exactly described in Chapter 8 of the book and perhaps even have it welcomed. The political formula of this regime makes sense in the real world. If you are familiar with Spandrell's concept of Bioleninism, full Heinlein fixes that. The non-exhaustive failure conditions that you define for regimes in this essay (like lack of physical and property security etc.) do not seem to apply to it which makes it at least worthy of some consideration. There are veterans organizations like the American Legion that already exist so you don't have to build it from scratch.
Could a Starship Troopers type regime be engineered to be stable? We would need a few tweaks to keep the veterans from voting themselves all of the benefits or becoming kind of a Samurai class, but these are probably doable.
You asked for Yarvin's opinion so sorry to piss on your fire hydrant, to paraphrase Sarah Jeong.
But I see a few problem with Starship Troopers model of limited democracy:
First is that is has power without dominion, without ownership. This is the same case as with democracy, communism, and even fascism. If the people who don't ultimately control the country own the country (or if they are not acknowleged to do so), then you cannot have responsible government.
The second, related to the first, is what incentive binds the troopers to the service? Desire to be involved in political life. Now if you make it such that only front line combat troops gain the unique "service guarantees citizenship" incentive, you are going to have a rough time managing the spaceship custodians and the other supporting roles that comprise the bulk of a civilized military. Either they will have to be outside of military discipline and be pure soldiers, or they will be counted as real soldiers which will eventually make the scope of "service" creep up to involving a large bureaucracy that has no martial virtues. Basically you are binding lurid incentives to areas that require much camaraderie and you will eventually get the modern bureaucracy. Not that I wouldn't press a button to bring that about right now.
True, the veterans do not own the country in a formal way like a King or sovereign corporation does. However, in Heinlein's formulation, the veterans submit themselves to the state for service up to and including risking their lives in this service and thus eventually gain the right to rule the state by exercise of their franchise. I guess you could say that their service is their ownership buy in if you want to. If you wanted to take the additional step of having the American Legion the titular owner of the country as a sovereign corporation, I guess you could, but I don't see the necessity. Maybe there is one I am missing, but I don't see it.
In Heinlein's novel just as in our system, active combat troops are a minority and only discharged veterans can vote or hold office. I don't think he addressed whether the bureaucracy could be civilian or not---flavor that to taste. People in support jobs get franchise too including spaceship custodians.
Your points are well taken and I wonder if one can solve for "service creep" where democratic agitation to count more and more activities as federal service until the distinction is meaningless breaks the system. You might count on a counter-force among veterans who do not wish to dilute citizenship and who have memories of the disorder that caused the adoption of the new system for at least a few generations. That might be long enough to eliminate the democratic virus from people's indoctrination by doing a dogma rewrite making the idea of full democracy ridiculous by pointing out how bad the results were when the people of the past made the mistake of having it. You could anathematize democracy as the current regime does for ideologies it wants to suppress.
This is one of several systems I can think of that seem like they would be an improvement on the current system. Is is the best we can design? I don't know. I suspect Yarvin will come up with something very different, but I can see a path to its existence and that has to count for something.
Structuring the American Legion as a sovereign corporation would be a tremendous improvement in my opinion and really could make the system work better. There is an important difference between owners and absolute rulers, the former being a subset of the latter. The question is can the ruler legitimately and publicly take any action explicitly for his own good? If, like Napoleon, you can order all the nation's young men to their deaths but you can only do it on behalf of the people or ideals, you are not an owner. So if the Federation has a similar role to that of the US Government, it cannot consider itself formally the owner, only the ruler of the country.
Regarding service creep, it might be slowed down very significantly by such tactics. However the basic weakness is that there is a binding contract from the state to the people, whereas all the state should be giving to the people is a reputation for great customer service. So while such a system could be strengthened so that the decline toward demotism is negligible, the measures needed would probably A: be a bit of a hassle for some honest people and B: probably need to be set up and maintained by a single absolute ruler/owner. Kind of like a school principal and the student council, except in the Federation the student council can administer lashings.
But ultimately the idea of a qualified democracy certainly can squelch all of the more thoughtful and widespread concerns that brought about and maintain democracy and is not a bad way to go but yes, we'll probably see something different in this book.
In terms of seeing something different in the book, I am sure of this. The regime I propose would be a Vaisya led one if you use his American Castes nomenclature and I don't think Yarvin has much respect or liking for us so I doubt that any scheme of his would put us on top. I think his bias and cultural background would cause him to exaggerate its flaws and dismiss it as a version of the brown pill.
Curtis thank you for writing this. It directly helped me today practice a measure of detachment while co-workers were engaging in religious performance of the woke kind. I also gave the chapter a second reading today, and I want to give a longer comment riffing off of some of the ideas later this week. Cheers!
Excellent post!
Obviously this is not a parenting blog, but I would love to hear your advice for raising children under this framework. Do you guide them to be disengaged? Do you push them to be volunteers in hopes they might have a chance to participate in the regime? (To clarify, by “children” I mean elementary to middle school kids, pre-high school.)
Of course you want your kid to be a critical thinker, but kids are being fed propaganda regardless. The choice of disengagement doesn’t seem to apply. I may tell my kids “Lincoln was a hero!” Or “Lincoln was a tyrant!” But it’s hard to say “Lincoln was a complex historical figure—let’s think critically” when my kid’s school is teaching him about the honest, rail-splitting emancipator that we’ve all grown to deify (or maybe encouraging him to tear down Lincoln’s statue—whatever the prevailing view may be). Children love stories—good guys and bad guys. So what stories do we tell our kids? Do our kids need the mental furniture to be collaborators?
Would really appreciate your insight on applying these disciplines as parents.
I listen to a podcast called _The Fifth Column_, with libertarians Michael Moynihan, Matt Welch, and Kmele Foster. Moynihan and Welch have school-age children, and both have fairly typical skeptical views on antiracism, etc. (e.g., neither of them would have any truck with the likes of Steve Sailer, say, but they would agree with Andrew Sullivan on woke culture). Both report that their daughters are quite skeptical of what they hear in school, both because they hear their parents talk about these issues, because they're smarter than their teachers, and (perhaps) because they are genetically predisposed to having the same politics as their parents. So far as I know, neither child has gotten into any serious trouble at their schools, but they're only 9 and 11.
I would wager that, if you're a reasonably good parent, your children will trust what you have to say over your teachers. Also, you can engage them much more directly than their teachers can. (When you're teaching 25 kids, you can't run through 25 separate catechisms.)
That said, if you're asking, "what should I tell my kids about how to react to their teachers?", I would say don't teach them to be oppositional, but just to give the answers that their teachers want to hear. After all, for now getting good grades in primary and secondary school is still important.
It should also be fairly easy to tell the teachers what they want to hear -- the gospel of antiracism is, right now, very easy to understand, and things that complicate it (e.g., black nationalists, non-woke leftists, Asians) won't be brought up unless someone brings them up. No need to do that.
Both volunteers and dissidents are seeking the same kind of action - I would phrase it as they are seeking agency over their own lives, in a world where humans live like ants in a colony and have very little agency over their own lives. with regards to what value systems they inhabit, modern people have essentially *no* agency.
This makes disengagement difficult, because it can make life unfulfilling. I don't think too many people can live disengaged lives given the evolutinary human psychology you mention fairly often.
Rather, the answer is something impossible : decentralization of power entirely, e.g. city states. perhaps we only reach this situation when the nation states have exhausted themselves utterly, in some sort of post apocalyptic wasteland. or perhaps we never reach it. but it is likely to be the environment in which people find the most fulfillment, because they will *actually* matter to their small, splintered tribe, instead of imaginary value imparted to them by the circus of the modern state that comprises several hundred million souls.
just as the state exploits dissidents for energy (by giving volunteers concrete targets),
dissidents exploit the state for energy, because being a dissident (esp internally) is a more accessible way of *feeling* like you have agency over your own life than being a volunteer does. Only a very few volunteers get to really feel they are "driving the cause". Other volunteers have to make do with petty sadism and celebrity worship.
But being a dissident always feels a little cool, via the electric thrill of *not* serving an increasingly abusive state and its lies. Inside the mind is free: for now.
From here, we can take a big leap and hypothesize the existence of cyclical power shifts from volunteers to dissidents. Let's argue that power steadily leaks from the latter to the former over a long enough time scale.
However, without decentralization, this doesn't actually change anything. Only the flavor
of the despotism changes. Today's dissidents are tomorrow's tyrants, just as we can see now that yesterday's dissidents are today's tyrants. Another way of saying this is that the dissident movement is co-opted by power even as it thinks it is subverting power.
I wrote a reply to GM 1: https://experimentsinhonesty17.com/2020/06/25/contradictory-detachments-in-yarvins-gray-mirror-1/
The gist of the essay is that there are two forms of detachment that seem like they don't fit together...
A) “Detachment is a hard spiritual task in which no one can succeed perfectly. It is not a fact or even an idea. Detachment, like Zen, is a practice.”
B) “A pure subject has no emotional relationship with power. Power demands nothing but physical compliance. Minimal compliance is nonaggression plus taxation: le libertarian paradise. While real history was never so pure, this abstraction is a normal civilized condition that we can call natural detachment.”
Can you see the difference? In the first case one intentionally takes on a difficult spiritual task. Common sense would dictate that only the few, the excellent, are capable of hard spiritual tasks. The second case, natural detachment, is different. It is natural and without effort, achieved by anyone living in pre-civilized regimes. It is a detachment that is possible for the many.
These are two different contexts. So of course they don’t fit.
The person described in example A is assumed to be in today’s context and circumstances— living within a total state.
Example B is describing a person in a premodern state long before modernity.
I do agree that detachment will have to be described in greater detail of this blog is to be prescriptive, but I don’t think you uncovered an inconsistency— just somewhat ambiguous writing.
I see why you disagree--but I think my question is more about typology than history. There are the few and the many in all times and places. The kind of detachment that is possible for the few excellent, and the mediocre many, will be different.
Even today you probably know a few people who can take on hard spiritual tasks and you know many who are better off never reading the news or having political opinions (and plenty in between). Yarvin is obviously writing to group A, the few,--but sometimes, at least in the Unregistered podcast, he made appeals to the kind of detachment he admires that cuts in both ways I am suggesting:
1) Philosophic historian detachment. He says in the Unregistered interview that it would be weird if a historian wrote a book about the War of the Roses and was passionately partisan; we would think that he was a weirdo. Yarvin seems to counsel that we obtain this level of detachment in real time. It is not clear that this is possible for most people. This detachment flows out of a deep vision and acceptance that all peoples pass away. Thucydides imagines what the ruins of Athens and Sparta will look like to future observers.
vs
2) Peasant/hedonic narrow vision detachment. Yarvin’s other example from the interview is this: when you travel to a South American country, you don’t care about voting there, you don’t want political power, you don’t strive for influence. Rather, you just want to be safe, have fun, and just generally avoid anything painful. Yarvin suggests that this is how we should feel about our own country. You don’t need deep vision to want to have a safe and pleasant time. This seems to me to something that is more achievable for the many.
Does this help the argument have more bite? Or is it still not convincing?
Yes. This helps a lot. I see more what you are getting at with the additional examples.
It will be interesting to see where he goes with these detachment ideas because if this book is a “mirror for princes” it will have to be more instructive than past writings.
The part where he defines dissidents as a special case of collaborator and renames non-dissident collaborators volunteers seems unnecessarily confusing.
One thing I want to know is, where does one run if one wants to minimize the effort that goes into compliance? I sure as hell am not looking forward to playing along with the Cathedral's increasingly weird behaviors for the rest of my life. Curtis mentioned in one of his recent interviews that countries like Hungary won't be the same in 20 years or so. Are there any that will last longer?
I've been thinking of South America personally. They generally have a strong, family based and religious culture that I think will resist the Great Awokening far better than most.
Uruguay: https://www.travelsafe-abroad.com/uruguay/
Makes sense that the most stable country is the one I know least about too.
Well:
If progressives get complete control Over the USA then Uruguay won’t be any safer than Iraq was. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and all that.
I don't agree WCP. The ability of the USA to project force (both soft power and hard) has been steadily declining, and the fragility of state finances has been growing.
While the corrupt Red Wing of the Neoliberal Party has done very little to reign in spending, if the corrupt Blue Wing gets complete control they will almost certainly accelerate debt and fragility.
The most conceivable way that I can see Woke Religion influencing South America is through the continued growth of Woke trans-national monopoly Corporatism, and that influence will be increasingly difficult to avoid regardless of location.
To my eyes, Western elites would love to have a CCP style Sesame social credit score system applied to their own citizens. Some of the Davos set like Chase and PayPal have already implemented little piecemeal measures, for example refusing financial accounts to active dissidents (Laura Loomer, Proud Boys members, etc.)
An interesting document was released by the EU this week that called for a European firewall/cloud/internet "similar to what has happened in China in the past 20 years... Like the Chinese firewall, this European internet would block off services that condone or support unlawful conduct from third party countries."
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/648784/IPOL_STU(2020)648784_EN.pdf
I see a steady convergence of Western and Eastern censorship and economic repression. Western Corporatism shows profound deference to the CCP. Even a shock as large as the coronavirus seems unable to dent this force.
But I'm a natural pessimist, and I could well be wrong. As you said in another post, nobody knows how History will proceed, and unforeseen events can have major consequences.
With modern technology transcending borders as it has, it feels to me that the limits of the prevailing power structure are no longer a nation's borders, but the reach of its language. Painting in broad strokes, it seems to me that English-speaking countries have largely adopted America's norms of power-reinforcement and virtue signalling. For alternatives, I'd look to high-functioning countries with low levels of English literacy and American cultural influence. Many countries in Asia fit this bill, in my opinion--from emerging countries that seem to be doing it right, like Bhutan, to more steady-state first-world countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. These countries consume American cultural exports like celebrities, some music, etc.--but the language barrier seems to prevent more meaningful concepts and memetic mind viruses from really taking hold. Political discourse if very different there, in my personal experience.
I don't expect this to be in the book and not sure id even want it to be exactly, but I would love to read a comparative analysis of Yarvin and Foucault's conception of power, knowledge and their relationship.
There is certainly a strong superficial resemblance as I see it. I have often thought a crude but succint summation of Moldbug thought is Foucauldian analysis turned on its head.
Shoutout to the Mars fam, slide into my DMs @ ~topsyr-lismec
So in this post Mr Yarvin writes 2 different hypotheses about the attractiveness of power:
A: Power is always attractive and therefore any powerful ideology is hip
B: A powerful regime, such as our own, can be inherently ugly and need some ideological rhinoplasty to make people like it.
I struggle to see how B can be true given A. That is, if coolness is completely a primate attraction to power, why any powerful entity needs to disguise itself. Is this just due to western cultural conventions that tell people that might doesn't make right? Would such makeup be needed in a completely unwesternized regime like premodern China with it's mandate of heaven or any other country that has not developed the western psychosis?
The answer to how both A and B can both be true was answered when it was stated that Power feels insecure. So In that insecurity, though A remains true, it can do things that fall under B.
Yes thank you I think I did fail that reading comprehension test (I read it over a few times, honest). So you have insecure government, it wants to look nice.
I like it.
Perhaps the answer is that where power exists but is undisguised, people wish to become part of it, but are put off of getting close to it without immediately getting the power themselves, whereas where it exists but is dressed up prettily, they are happy just to get closer to it? But I agree it needs more exploration.
Those "Western cultural conventions" didn't just happen, of course. The power today was not always in power, and creating those conventions was a large part of how it displaced its predecessors.
OK so what you're saying is that real power is always cool to have, but fake power really needs to be spiffed up if you want enough little collaborators that you don't have to give power to? That does make sense, although it differs some from what Yarvin was saying which seemed to say that such people were granted minuscule amounts of real power. Maybe this is a distinction without a difference since such small amounts of power won't make any impact on one's real life and ideological filler must supplement it.
And yes, you're absolutely right about using the term "western" in that passive eternal way. I hope you will forgive me on account of my "western" education.