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 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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 just subscribed using my unemployment stimulus. Does this make me a dissident or collaborator? Thank You Mr. Trump! - From San Francisco South of Market
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?
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?