"Anyone who grows up in a narrative, then learns to distrust it, will look for alternatives—and the first place to look is the villains in the narrative itself.
"If you land in this trap, you have failed to escape power’s frame. You’re still in the same movie—you have just switched characters."
Yarvin has identified a major problem here, perhaps THE problem.
It's funny that getting kudos on your comment made you self-conscious. I'm the same way. This is relevant to what epistemologists call the stakes conception of knowledge: many of us are prone to saying "I know X", but if you raise the stakes high enough for being wrong, then much of the time we'll downgrade from "I know X" to "OK, probably X" or "I'm no longer sure of X". (Example: "do we have a test tomorrow?" Nope. "Are you sure?" I'm sure. "You know, there's only 1 test, and it's worth 50% of our grade." [Pause] Ok, let me check.
I admit, it is a bit strange for the 4 hearts to count to you as high stakes, but if you have heterodox views, especially ones that you know you'd suffer for if your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, or strangers discovered them, then almost any amount of attention on you may feel like the eye of Sauron.
Or, you might be someone who is happy to give advice when asked, but terrified when people tell you they're going to take it. In that case, you might be even more like me than I thought!
The eye of Sauron is certainly the superego at play. Even giving advice scares the bejesus out of me. Say you have a friend with a severe drug problem, and you yourself have recovered from one in the past. You think back on all the stupid things people told you that were actually counterproductive. The last thing you want to say is something so alienating, that your friend falls deeper into his addiction.
Detaching rather than preaching, whether you fall on the right or left, allows you to start from scratch. Today, the stakes are so high that we might have to first disengage to better assay the cultural & political environment, and frame questions more precisely.
Can people really do that if they're constantly triggered by this or that thing, Civil War monuments being taken down, being called the wrong pronoun, etc?
We have an addiction to issues. I think the author mentioned on a podcast the we ought to try cooling off our limbic system and have the prefrontal cortex handle the things the trigger rage individually and collectively.
I'm all for it. But there's certainly a kind of restlessness that comes with committing to detachment. You're going to want another swig from the flask or hit from the crack pipe again.
By the way, any good psychoanalyst will tell you that the superego is not an ethical agent, but something more akin to the eye of Sauron. I don't know much Tolkien, but I've glanced at the movies and that thing looks like a malicious entity if there ever was one.
So maybe the best thing to do isn't so much to stop caring, but to detach from the eye of Sauron so you can possibly begin the work of building something worthwhile, clean slate.
Very simple question: why would detachment work any better than dissidence? The people in charge have already said that not pledging fealty to them is the same as opposing them. So, if you try to be nonpolitical, that's itself seen as a political act of a quite disreputable sort. Remember, *most* public health officials said that, *from a public health point of view*, the *best* thing to do was take part in the George Floyd protests. Consequently, insofar as you didn't protest, you were actually endangering public health.
Trying to check out is just *being* a dissident. Indeed, even if all dissidents just gave up and said we won't resist--no one ran as a Republican, no one protested even the most elaborate and radical rituals, there would just be a new way of being described as a dissident: lack of enthusiasm, for instance.
But the point is, you can't *not* have dissidents. To take an extreme example: if the powers that be said, "all white babies must be aborted" or "all wealth from white people must be expropriated and devoted to blacks as reparations", there's just no way that wouldn't cause pushback. And that's kind of the point: if you're right that dissidence helps the regime, then the regime can just up its demands until it can guarantee dissident reactions. That's just a matter of human psychology.
But: you're not right. The cathedral is not invulnerable. It's a human state of affairs. If the Chinese started using clever psy-ops against the USA, the cathedral would be kind of powerless -- it's one thing for the Russians to be the bad guys; they're white. It's quite another for the Chinese to be -- it calls to mind too many uncomfortable associations with Japanese internment camps. The Cathedral, just like the bourgeoisie, or the capitalists, or the vanguard, makes mistakes. There are market failures (e.g., the NYT has to get ever more extreme for risk of alienating its employees, but the more extreme it gets, the smaller its market share and the more opportunities it creates for competitors). There are government failures (e.g., the iron law of bureaucracy means that government officials will tend to choose advancing their own interests over the interests of the institution).
And look, you have to give a pretty good argument for thinking that history is both deterministic and teleological. Even if history is teleological, I'm highly skeptical that it's deterministically so.
tl;dr: (a) if it were true that serving power and being a dissident just serves power, then detachment would just serve power as well; and (b) it's not true that being a dissident always serves power.
"Very simple question: why would detachment work any better than dissidence? The people in charge have already said that not pledging fealty to them is the same as opposing them."
Good question WCP. I believe Yarvin talked about this in an interview elsewhere, and the answer depends on the relative heat of the revolutionary fires, so to speak... the ability to avoid the tip of the Regime's spear is variable. During the early communist phase in the USSR, dissidents (which also included some of the "less than enthusiastic") were tortured and murdered in slave camps. As the decades went by, eventually dissidents merely had their economic livelihoods destroyed, similar to what we are seeing now in the West. By the time of the late 1980's, the regime had lost a significant amount of steam.
I also think that the sheer degree of official lies eventually takes some toll. The more implausible the official myths and lies, the harder it is to stoke the flames, especially over time.
Yarvin has also endorsed Joe Biden, for his blinding intellectual brilliance, err I mean for the fact that he should take down the temperature of the culture war quite a bit. Trump undoubtedly excites the brownshirts of the regime, and at the same time he (and the GOP generally speaking, with a few exceptions) does nothing substantive to protect his own supporters from the Regime. If he had half a brain, he would have switched from Twitter to any non-monopolistic social media alternative immediately. He would have used anti-trust legislation, anything at his disposal, especially during the first two years of the administration when the house and senate were GOP controlled. Instead, he gave the Kochs and their lapdog Paul Ryan a massive tax cut for the wealthy, his signature "accomplishment". Clearly, he had no idea what he was doing, and he was such a toxic boss, he couldn't attract good people who do know what they are doing (in his defense, the Regime certainly worked to poison the well around him...but that has to be expected.)
Yarvin has also discussed how the current revolutionaries and brownshirts are pale shadows of their archetypes from past eons. The overall energy looks high to many of us modern observers, but historically speaking, it's a lotta weak LARPing compared to the battle of Blair Mountain. But who knows how things could proceed, hence my belief that people should be thinking of an exit plan. If the fires get really hot, detachment will not be an option.
Yes, regimes can always generate enemies out of thin air, but in a way the more bizarre ways the regime employs to paint people as enemies, the more ridiculous, the more insecure and unsure of itself it would look like. It can call everyone not taking part in the protests racists and dangerous to public health elements, but:
a) there is just no way _the current_ American regime will go after every single "racist" and send him or her to struggle sessions. Despite all the Cultural Revolution comparisons, pretty much no one in power cares seriously enough to actually enact any sanctions against all these people. Hence, all it will amount to will be just empty threats (mostly; not for unlucky ones who are not that good at hiding their power level), which will only make the regime look more pathetic.
b) not only empty threats and ridiculous allegations make regime look pathetic, they alienate people away from it. Engaging in what can appear as sensible democratic process is one thing, engaging in functioning of some barely sane laughingstock, which calls everyone and his dog evil raycist is quite another. And isn't further mass disillusionment/detachment just what we need?
>the more bizarre ways the regime employs to paint people as enemies, the more ridiculous, the more insecure and unsure of itself it would look like
MM makes this point too but think about it, do you think "Okay, now THIS is just too bizarre!" has a quantified value? What about the pace of the last few years suggests this couldn't roll on for decades? You're about to have blue-haired otherkin they/them with nuclear launch codes.
>Despite all the Cultural Revolution comparisons, pretty much no one in power cares seriously enough to actually enact any sanctions against all these people.
You are misjudging the nature of the people in power. They don't have to do the dirty work if you can be fired for not going along with the struggle session at work, or complain about it publicly. "Enact sanctions" has been totally obsoleted by the Diversity/Corporate PR merger.
I suppose that to make regime exciting it needs great stories and ability to give away victories. It's pretty short on the latter (everything that could be infiltrated and captured, _is_ infiltrated and captured, this is not the Sixties), and the stories are getting more and more banal. That's why I'm somewhat optimistic; I could be wrong, of course.
Someone still has to exercise the power, to do the firing decision, even if it comes from the diversity/HR committee. Even the WokeCorp is not that woke: there is absolutely no way e.g. the FAANG will just discard a sizeable part of their staff just because this part doesn't duckspeak the party line.
To play devils advocate, this is where Peter Turchin’s analysis is perhaps useful. Of his three major predictors of social stress and potential upheaved, intraelite competition is probably the most important (the other two are state finances and popular immiseration). There just aren’t that many of the “best” jobs, and there are a lot of people who want them. Throw in the growing push to expand H1B1 visas by even Trump/Kushner and the DNC policy of de facto open borders, such competition is only going to get more fierce, hence more room for the Regime to use the weapon of political filtration.
So a world class superstar isn’t going to be purged, but at a level below that, the knives are out.
While increased intra-elite competition increases Regime fragility, a cohesive elite can tolerate a lot of popular immiseration (and increased financial fragility).
The Great Awokening is primarily an elite ideological movement, it’s most extreme expressions are typically at the most privileged and elite institutions. The ideological purification can be seen as a mechanism to homogenize the entire class of Anywheres, and orient them against their Enemy, the Somewheres who ignorantly voted for Trump/Brexit. (This is obviously only one lens to view the Great Awokening- i believe another key lens is as a burgeoning fundamentalist and proselytizing Religion for “secular atheists”.)
The recent and ongoing kerfuffle with Zuckerberg
/Facebook daring to not toe the line and reject Trump political messaging/advertising is very telling. A who’s who of the Fortune 500 is currently boycotting Facebook for this lack
of solidarity. Soros has even made the ludicrous claim that Facebook execs are trying to get Trump re-elected.
This is a nice response, and it illuminates it for me. Good: there are limits to the cathedral's power. I often get the same sense reading Yarvin that I get from reading vulgar Marxists: the cathedral/capital always wins; if you think you're beating it, that's just what it *wants* you to think (e.g., Adolph Reed, Jr., a marxist political scientist from U Penn, thinks that the great awokening is just capital's way of co-opting leftism. Maybe he's right! But I'd love to know more about the microfoundations behind this power-grab).
But your comment helps me put it in perspective: the members of the cathedral want to maintain power, and they do this in two ways: (1) convincing people that their cause is great, and so getting them to directly support it; or (2) convincing people that their cause is evil, and so getting them to be dissidents. However, even human beings find some things outlandish, so sometimes it's hard for the cathedral to convince people of things. E.g., if I say to you, "white supremacy explains almost all of the bad things in the universe, which is why you need to buy my fish oil pills", a lot of people will find that unconvincing, even if they agree about white supremacy. But if a bunch of people are screaming, "blacks are an inferior race, which is why you shouldn't buy fish oil pills!", then the original pitch will seem more convincing.
I'm still not sold on dissident-activity being wholly ineffective. E.g., if Mickey Kaus is right that a new migration amnesty would Brazilify the USA in an unfixable way, then why not try to repeatedly make that point? Is the problem that a lot of his allies are saying, "yeah, he's right, and also we need to keep America white and free of mud-people!", and these are the people whose anti-immigration message get amplified? If I'm Mickey, should I give up, or should I instead spend my time on figuring out a way to get these other people to shut up, or to get anti-immigrant candidates to win? (I mean, sometimes anti-immigrant candidates *do* win. Trump won, and, boob though he is, I really don't think the cathedral wanted him to win.)
I think what could be said to be universally true is that dissident action always expends more energy than it produces. Even if you succeed on a particular issue, the net effect on the lives and careers of those involved will be negative. Curtis alluded to this.
Cessation of dissident activity would definitely remove a fuel source from the cathedral, but it seems fairly evident that it would remove obstacles faster than it would remove fuel (if every tenth conservative embraced detachment, the left would gain a massive political advantage, but I doubt they'd suffer from a lack of fuel). And the practical effects of such a political rout would make it harder to convince people to detach.
So while detachment could make sense for people who could do more good by flying under the radar, it's not clear that the contribution made by ordinary conservatives isn't net positive (in a marginal sense).
Well, yeah, of course, effectiveness of political action in a way is a spectrum. On one pole of it you can find things like having anti-abortion protests or, maybe, electing Republican president, on another — something like "months of covert and intense work culminating in passage of some act, which scores a clear and unequivocal win for your objective". The latter examples clearly look much more desirable to me than the former, but it's worth noting several moments:
a) The latter things are also way less activist-y in a traditional way compared to the former: they don't involve hunting for cheap publicity, ten minutes of glory, or etc., they are going to be much more rational and pragmatic, and so on.
b) We don't really have good reasons to think that marketplace for causes and potential solutions for them is going to select for something easy solvable (see Curtis's piece for this), so picking any hot cause of the day is probably a pretty bad idea.
c) Of course, after a single win it's probably easy to get on a power trip and just start making mistakes.
tl;dr: from my point of view "don't do activism" is more of a pretty good heuristic than the Law of the Universe. If you have a pretty clear path showing how your actions will bring success, sure, go for it.
And, sorry, this probably didn't look too related to your post. About opposing immigration specifically: it appears to me that the larger and the more important your goal is, the more narrow is the space of possible reasonable methods to achieve it, so I guess here abstinence from action within regime would be the best choice.
I'm not really convinced by the anti-abortion activism example. Yes, the end point (end all abortions) is pretty much impossible to attain, as well as concrete acts (ex: repealing roe v. wade). Where activism has been very successful however, is in changing the culture surrounding abortion (pro-life sentiment has been increasing since the 90s), passing some local restrictions and generally reducing abortion rates. Most importantly, it has made being pro-life a relatively tolerable position within the regime (against the regime's wishes) as opposed to other positions such as being against gay marriage (which was the case for a majority of Americans 10 years ago). I generally agree with dissident activism = bad sentiment, especially on the nationally level. But Pro life activism actually seems like a pretty notable exception (2A activism too in some instances)
(on the other hand, "limiting immigration" is a much more clear and defined objective than, say, "making SV more tolerant to non-communists/non-progressives", so, in a way, it is more reachable within regime, I guess)
Child euthanasia is legal in some European countries and debated in others, but still outside the overton window in the US. Occam's Razor would suggest the anti-abortion movement has had something to do with that.
Dissident activism doesn't generate power (for the dissidents), so it's always Pyrrhic. Thus all the right-wing energy in the country is barely sufficient to hold the line on one issue.
What's not clear is how losing battles would make it easier to win the war. Unless everyone detaches at once, the left can prevent further detachment by making their demands arbitrarily onerous.
"But the point is, you can't *not* have dissidents. To take an extreme example: if the powers that be said, 'all white babies must be aborted' or 'all wealth from white people must be expropriated and devoted to blacks as reparations', there's just no way that wouldn't cause pushback. And that's kind of the point: if you're right that dissidence helps the regime, then the regime can just up its demands until it can guarantee dissident reactions. That's just a matter of human psychology."
And at that point, the overton window would've shifted far to the left. This is basically what happened with racial issues in the 60's. The conservative positions of 1960 (ranging from Goldwater's support for freedom of association to Buckley's explicit pro-segregation views) had been completely abandoned by 1970. All that capitulation gained them was a few decades of relative peace, but now we're faced with new demands and a left-shifted range of acceptable views.
Yarvin in this piece is generally discussing regimes that are not yet explicitly and irreconcilably hostile to some portion of their population . If rephrased slightly from "obey the rules" to "don't taunt authority" the general principle could be extended to regimes that are explicitly persecuting your group. If you're a Jew in 1942 Poland, no you don't have to report to your nearest death camp, but you shouldn't publicly mock Hitler and Germany as that is purely transferring your energy to the benefit of your opponents, no matter how much they deserve to be mocked.
So don't abort those babies, if you can hide them. If they catch you they execute the law on you, and as long as you don't But probably don't have a white mother's day parade.
As I understood it, West Coast's scenario wasn't about an actual abortion mandate being enforced, but the prospect of one being passed. A handful of Congressmen introducing such a bill would neutralize any movement toward detachment.
The problem is that there are some actions which both transfer energy to the regime and tactically obstruct it. Voting Republican being an obvious example.
Unlike occupied-Poland, political resistance in America actually can slow the Cathedral down (while also energizing it). If people stop resisting, the Cathedral will speed up, which will freak people out and make them start resisting again. It's a self-regulating system that ensures there'll always be a ready supply of dissident energy to keep it going. While a complete cessation of resistance would probably kill it, I don't see any way to get from here to there.
Sure, but that doesn’t affect my point. My point is that Yarvin’s strategy won’t work, given his assumptions. It may work if his assumptions are wrong. Either way, though, he’s wrong about something big.
Thus far, Yarvin hasn't presented a strategy. Rather, a state of mind, or vantage point from which to think strategically. Yarvin's entire work so far has been about intellectual/emotional detachment. If you were out there waving Tiki torches in 2016, I highly doubt you're reading this. If you're a leftist, planning your next protest, I highly about you're reading this.
Yarvin's audience is small, but we're dealing with some big problem problems, and I think we need some guidance right now. I certainly do. My mother is over 60 and being forced to read "White Fragility" over the summer. She knows it's nonsense and is asking me if she should tell her fellow teachers. My friend came up to me the other day, eyes bulging, and asked me "what have you done for black people today!?!" I don't know about you guys, but reading Curtis is a breath of fresh air.
I'm enjoying reading the comments here. Still waiting for Curtis' theory to mature.. at the moment my some lucidity and improvement in my mental health is good enough.
Let’s remember we’re not even on chapter 3 ! Haha. Yarvin hasn’t even began detailing his version of detachment. We’re in the lead up. Let the man write. :)
You're right, of course. But I would hardly be a good critic of detachment if I detached myself!
More seriously, I think it's important for people to see why someone might not get on board. Seeing where someone might object to view X helps you understand the defenses of X better. And this is so far a small enough community that perhaps my remarks help to do that, at least for some people.
Oh, and I also suspect I'm misunderstanding Yarvin's take in a big way, which "too online" showed me above. But I think seeing where people misunderstand is also important! Maybe Curtis himself reads these comments and is using them to affect how he presents his ideas! A boy can dream.
I think we are missing a positive definition of this detachment philosophy. We’ve been given what it’s not by means of defining these other terms, but— and, no, I don’t expect a “5 Steps to Beat the Old Regime and Thrive in the World to Come” article— we will need more.
I think it might have something to do with detachment’s Z-outcome. For example, a dissident does X to get Y but really gets Z; detachment’s unintended consequence is paradoxically power.
I must give some stylistic feedback: All of your sentences are of the same short length which makes the writing feel very stilted. I first noticed this with your pieces in the American Mind, so it may be a result of feedback from your editors. Editors are retarded; don't listen to them. They were trained by the universities to sap the soul of the writer and create a mono-voice that prevents any connection between the author and the reader.
Editors would have scoffed at the highly stylized tone of UR and forced you to edit it down until you no longer sounded like a mischievous truth-sayer, but instead like some kind of bored journalist forced to report on a weird story that he didn't care about or understand. Make no mistake, content and aesthetics are inseparable. Vary sentence length!
Curtis - in #2b, you invoke Havel's notion that working along with the regime as an infiltrator causes one to lose the original "soul" which drives his opposition to the regime. For this reason, you disapprove of even the most impenetrable methods of infiltration of regime systems. However, Havel isn't merely talking about infiltration - he's talking about the experience of working for a regime at all, and whether a motive to accrue some kind of power is present is irrelevant.
Since the most desirable and comfortable jobs are regime-adjacent, how can anyone, including the detached, avoid falling into the trap Havel describes?
Minimally complying with the latest progressive demands over time which escalate as they go...there's a name for this. Conservatism. There is another . Appeasement. It hasn't worked out so well. I know this has not escaped your notice as you are the man who told me that Cthulhu always flies left. Mao kept fighting when it seemed hopeless and he won. Washington did the same. The only guy I can think of who won by not fighting was Fabius Maximus (or maybe Kutuzov) but even he needed Scipio to fight and win the battle. Maybe you won't win if you fight, but you'll have to show me that inaction results in anything but more losing.
I share your reservations regarding detachment, though it should be noted that Curtis isn't promoting compliance in thought. That's an important difference between his position and (the practical M.O. of) mainstream conservatism.
Maybe I am jumping the gun here, or not understanding correctly, but if detachment is the best course of action to reduce (or at least not grow) the power of the regime, then wouldn't the detached become de-facto dissidents? What I mean by this is that a concerted effort of detachment by a significant portion of the population would result in some slowing of power acquisition by the regime, due to a lack of "fuel" (dissident thought/speech/action). Wouldn't this loss in velocity be noticed by the regime and then acted upon?
A recent example of this is the current progressive position of "white silence equals violence", basically, if you do not participate in this latest cause, then you are marked as an enemy of the regime. I believe that the intended purpose of this statement is to threaten politically uncaring individuals (those who are naturally detached) into action, but will affect those who purposefully detach as well.
I guess this then means to be detached, you must then speak up as an "anti-racist". If you do, you allow the regime to seize more power by lending your voice to the cause as an involuntary collaborator. So what is the detached position? Speaking up or finding a better hiding place? Surely you cannot run forever.
It seems like the regime is already going after those who are naturally detached. A purposeful detaching movement would undoubtedly be noticed (say if 10% of reactionaries detached) and would instantly be targeted, making just a new class of dissidents.
I think the idea is to do the bare minimum to comply with power. And Moldbug is very clear that power also operates through non governmental channels such as corporate HR departments, the ADL, and leftist doxing campaigns. Do only what power actually requires, and no more. When it starts requiring loyalty oaths and struggle sessions, like now, we know it's already close to the end.
Thanks for the response Pablo! What you are saying makes complete sense to me. What I was trying to get at was a bit different I think. Detachment is the course of action which does the least to give power to the current regime. It seems like Yarvin's main goal here is to convert dissidents to detachment (also collaborators but the argument seems more persuasive for dissidents). By doing so, the reduction in dissident action will result in slower power accumulation by the regime (due to dissidents becoming detached).
My question is then how can the power of the regime be slowed without expressing your own power? Becoming detached must have its own power if it is capable of impacting the regime's power, which is obviously an existential threat to the regime. If Yarvin is smart enough to figure out that detachment reduces the power growth of the regime, surely members of the regime will also reach the same conclusion and co-opt the power of the detached or destroy them.
It seems to me almost tautological that detaching will just become the new form of dissent, which we have already identified as serving to increase the power of the regime. So detaching becomes impossible.
I think detachment increases the amount of effort they must go through to enjoy the power process (no opposition), like junkies developing a tolerance for a drug- and eventually requires that they actually govern (be judged by whether their expressed intentions match results) rather than simply getting collaborators to go along with the power process for fun and thrills. If there is no one to crush or humiliate, no enemy that sabotages the utopia, whose fault is it when nothing works? Does that make sense?
Take MGTOW as an example. I know many men who are in effect fully MGTOW, yet I would bet most of them don't even know that MGTOW is a thing. Detachment is similar - it's not a movement, it's just a self-interested choice that follows from a rational assessment of reality.
Furthermore, just because 'white silence equals violence' has become a prominent slogan doesn't mean that there's going to be any real enforcement of it any time soon. Even in the USSR things didn't quite work that way.
1. Pointing out the hypocrisy of power is pointless, I agree. But it's the same deus ex machina to then say "Eventually, things will get so crazy/bizarre that Power will collapse." This seems like another thing people assume someone has run the numbers on and haven't.
2. A good historical problem to test the strategy of passivism would be the Holodomor. Would passivism have saved anyone from being murdered or starved? It likely included thousands of people who were already honest, checked-out, non-participants in power politics.
In support of your point, the cult of North Korea seems bizarre to outsiders, but has existed for many decades now. Humans are obviously capable of believing "crazy" stuff for a long time (I put crazy in quotes, because the shit moderns believe would look batshit crazy to many historical peoples, just as it looks to many of us.)
I tried to address your second point in another comment, that it all depends on the context. "Detachment" makes little sense when your people are being rounded up to be shot. But in the late Communist phase it made a lot more sense. Curtis' thesis depends on our current revolutionary energy being closer to mid to late communism than early (Holodomor). I think there is evidence to support his hypothesis. I also think that human brutality is always lurking just a hairsbreadth beneath the skin.
We often compare the lifespan of regimes to the lifespan of people, but regimes don't actually age in a biological sense. Had the Soviet Union (for example) been at the center of its own world (as America is) and therefore not collapsed, it isn't clear that Stalinism couldn't have restarted at some point.
Right now we're in a Brezhnevian phase, but I don't think it's impossible to return to an earlier part of the cycle.
I agree with you that there is no guarantee that a tyrannical Regime can’t persist for a long time, and even if it collapses it could re-sprout, so to speak.
At the same time, I am generally persuaded by Peter Turchins cyclical analysis of societal change (I highly recommend his Age of Discord and Ultrasociety) and of course we have lots of empirical evidence that regimes rotate from monarchy to aristocracy/oligarchy and back (and even to the occasional and typically brief “democracy”).
I am also a fan of Girard’s idea of mimesis, in particular how it drives cultural evolution, and I believe that the West provided an important and visible alternative to the Soviet totalitarian model (and vice versa) especially as the decades rolled on. Soviet elites heard enough of the facts/propaganda from the West to know that it was out there, far more than in modern North Korea. And even in North Korea we see defectors who know that rival regimes exist that may well have higher standards of living and wellbeing than those within the PRK.
And to your point about Stalinism re-sprouting, it’s amazing how such different cultures such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, and China were infected by the memeplex virus of Marxism/Leninism, which speaks to the raw power of that ideology. It does a fantastic job of cultivating high degrees of resentment which in turn can be harnessed by elites to effect radical change.
My biggest dystopian fear is a mix of Orwell’s 1984 and an algorithmic-driven Big Tech/Big Gov corporate de facto world monopoly, where no real alternative is allowed to exist—a Totalitarian system with the automaticity that Vaclav Havel describes but without any viable external alternative for humans to copy and no way out of a technologically enforced hall of mirrors until some external shock comes along and shakes the frame.
Huxley’s Brave New World is a gentler form of such a totalitizing regime, but at least he creates an alternative for the members of the regime to compare themselves with (the “savages”).
I'm a big fan of detachment. However, as sadurni points out, I think this interpretation of Kant is arguably incorrect.
To elaborate on sadurni's 3):
The CI states that you are to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. This formulation makes no use of well-being, or whether acting in accordance with that maxim will bring about universal disaster. Kant is trying to a) ground morality in reason, and b)tell us what we are forbidden from doing.
To understand what the CI as written above means, we need to know what a maxim is. A maxim, for Kant, is something that states _what we are about to do_ and _why we are doing it_. An example might be 'I'm going to make some food, in order to satisfy my hunger', or 'I'm going to take a vow of celibacy and poverty to show my devotion to God' or 'I'm going to falsely promise to repay a debt in order to secure some funds'.
What the CI asks is whether we _could_ still rationally act according act according to our maxim in a world in which our maxim has become a universal law (where everyone always followed this maxim). In the case of making food, it seems like if everyone acted according to this maxim, nothing at all prevents me from achieving the goal of that maxim. However, take the case of falsely promising to repay funds. In a world in which everyone always falsely promised to repay a debt in order to secure some funds, I _would not_ be able to secure funds by doing this, because either a) no one would believe such a promise in such a world, or b) there would be no such thing as 'promising' in such a world. Whether or such a world is disastrous or not doesn't enter into the equation. This comes up when we look at the celibacy/poverty example.
It arguably _would_ be disastrous if everyone took a vow celibacy and poverty in order to show their devotion to God - it would be hard to think of a more destructive thing for the entire population of the world to stop procreating and commit themselves to a life of poverty. Nevertheless, in a world in which everyone does take such an oath, I can still achieve the goal of my maxim by doing the action described in my maxim, and so I am not forbidden from doing the act, even though disaster would result if everyone did the same thing.
Curtis is wrong about Kant, as you said. He's not a rule-utilitarian. That's Mill's view, and Mill's interpretation of Kant. Curtis might want to replace mention of Kant with Mill instead.
As for maxims, there's a lot of debate about what they are. Some people, mostly in the Anglo-American world, take Donaldson's view, and some, mostly in the German-speaking world, take sadumi's view.
Incidentally, Kant may be on his way out in humanities departments in the Anglo-American world. Recently, at Daily Nous -- one of the top two philosophy websites in the Anglo-American world -- the website's proprietor, Justin Weinberg, somewhat positively supported the idea that monuments to Hume should be taken down, on the grounds that Hume was not only racist, but that racism was central to his philosophy. There wasn't much pushback in the comments.
If you have experience in an Anglo-American philosophy department, this is quite shocking. Hume is probably a plurality of philosophers' hero. For philosophy to do an about face on Hume like this, and to cast him out, is like ... well, I don't know what it's like. The best analogy I can think of is: it would be like Democrats consciously repudiating FDR/LBJ and their legacies, on the grounds that racism was the most fundamental moral quality of both the men and the New Deal/Great Society, and receiving almost no pushback from Democratic party partisans. It's really that dramatic.
It really doesn’t undermine his project, for a few reasons.
First, at least one Kant scholar, David Cummiskey, reads Kant as a consequentialist, and his reading is taken seriously.
Second, the Kantian question—what would happen if everyone did that?—is, arguably, the main motivating insight behind Kant’s ethics. How to capture what it means may not be the most important thing.
Third, even if Yarvin gets Kant wrong, his rule-utilitarian spin may make for a much more plausible ethical theory than Kant’s.
Fourth, with all due respect to Christine Korsgaard, Barbara Herman, Henry Allison, and John Rawls, Mill is a better philosopher than they are. Much as I think his interpretation is wrong, he may have a lot of convincing stuff to say in defense of his interpretation.
"- They’re just wrong, as people who read and discuss other people’s readings of classical authors (instead of reading the classics themselves) mostly are. They should read Kant’s works. He gives enough examples that can not be mistaken. Apart from that, the meaning of „Grundsatz“ and „Maxime“ in German also only allow for the understanding I laid out here. Also, Kant did not invent the terminus „Maxime“, it’s already established with a precise meaning in his time, contemporary discussion and standard handbooks."
Dude, they've read Kant. Believe me. And the precise meaning of Maxime, as established by Christian Wolff, undermines your point, it doesn't support it.
For Wolff, "Maximen" were the major premises of practical syllogisms, and Wolff thought that we implicitly drew practical syllogisms every time we acted. In other words, you're right that they're relatively general for Wolff, but they also govern such things as concluding, "I should exercise." E.g., in the practical syllogism, 1. "Exercise is good for you", 2. "running is exercise", "therefore, 3. I should run", premise 1 is the maxim. But then, you can use 3 as the major premise of a new practical syllogism (to say "X is good" and "I should X" are equivalent, at least if you have only one kind of goodness, as Wolff did). So, if you take your tack, then you'll end up with the Anglo-American commentators that every action is action on a maxim. (In addition, there's a passage in Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics where he says acting without acting on a maxim is impossible.)
The German view requires Kant to someone who took maxims to be how La Rochefoucauld understood them. Rüdiger Bubner, Rüdiger Bittner, Otfried Höffe, Michael Albrecht, and, lately, Sven Nyholm defended this view. I think it's got a lot going for it -- I recently tried to publish a paper on how to understand the Gesinnung in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen blossen Vernunft that relied on this understanding of maxims, but alas, it was rejected on the ground that the German understanding is clearly wrong (and also on the grounds that I understood transcendental idealism as a metaphysical rather than purely epistemological doctrine). But I do think the German understanding fits Kant's own examples better than the Anglo-American version.
I just don't think you can say that your understanding is clearly right, and that all the Americans who have read Kant in the original German and even produce translations (like Allen Wood and, if I'm not mistaken, Henry Allison)* have just never read Kant. Yes they have. Their problem is not that they haven't read him; their problem is that that they want Kant to be relevant to the contemporary discussion, and are embarrassed by any departure by Kant from contemporary academic values, and so they read him in a motivated way.
*--Yes, I agree, Christine Korsgaard can't read German. But I don't even think of her as a Kant interpreter. I think of her as Kant-adjacent.
You’re right we should wind this down. Just a few last bits:
1. If you do Kant’s first critique, then you can take a metaphysical read on TI. Guyer does, Ameriks does, van Cleve does, and the leading lights of the younger generation (Allais, Bader, Jaernig, and Stang all do). But if you do his ethics it’s not really allowed. You’d get rejected.
2. What problem do you think Kant wants to solve in KrV?
3. IMO, the Timmermann translation of GMM is good.
At the end of essay #2a (commenting here since I can't comment there), both hyperlinks need to be fixed. Where it says "Go back to chapter 2, or forward to 2b."
This might just be my lack of understanding or self-awareness (I have a lot of problems here) - is "detachment" more of a...state of being, or an actual prescription for action? Perhaps this flew over my head. For example - I might see my local government as a more functional entity where I would be somewhat enticed to involve myself in (as a dissident, contributor, etc.), given the impact that I might have on it (and it's real impact on myself). Perhaps I don't see it as broken as the federal clown show, so I try to involve myself in it, while still being politically detached at a philosophical level.
Or, given the fact that I know I am playing with power, I might want to pick up a cause because easy - I will inevitably prefer a presidential candidate over another. I'm probably wrong (in the sense of objective results vs. subjective intent), but should I just cast a vote anyway? What's it to me? (I get a cool sticker, right?)
Anyway, perhaps just looking for a clarification, or a shoutout in the text to people like me who might not understand your intent.
I think he needs to provide a more positive definition a detachment to a degree— at least I’d like one. We have been introduced to what it’s not, but I think you are on the right track recognizing that it’s like a state of being. He did describe it akin to a spiritual discipline of sorts, but we will see! It’s still early in this project— though I already have lots of similar questions.
The only problem with this line of reasoning is that the Cathedral is not a unified force (if it were it would be something else entirely). Politics can obstruct it, and while dissidents lose energy by acting, that doesn't mean there are no causes worth acting for. A person trapped with a limited amount of food will exhaust his resources as he eats, but he should still eat something.
It's also possible for dissident causes to have anti-regime effects which are not in line with their stated goals. For example, "pro-lifers" are suckers, they will never succeed at banning or meaningfully restricting abortion anywhere in the country. However, their movement has been successful at keeping opposition to abortion within the overton window. That isn't much for all their effort, but it's not clear how things would be any better for them if they just went home.
OK, reading it for the third time. I think I finally understand this fella. In fact, hardly a day goes by that I don’t revisit a little Yarvin think. I do believe he’s the only one who understands the meta-phenomenon, which is to say: how shit works.
This is a significant accomplishment on his part. I’m tagging along and I am kinda chuffed that I’m getting it.
From #2B:
"Anyone who grows up in a narrative, then learns to distrust it, will look for alternatives—and the first place to look is the villains in the narrative itself.
"If you land in this trap, you have failed to escape power’s frame. You’re still in the same movie—you have just switched characters."
Yarvin has identified a major problem here, perhaps THE problem.
Getting kudos on this comment made me terribly self-conscious.
Yes. I'm that much of a handicapped dissident to let a mere four hearts make me think I said something wrong.
"THE problem" might instead be an overarching or all-pervasive one? Help me out here folks.
I personally want to see more of a meditation on ideological narratives.
Slavoj Zizek once said, or quoted someone as saying, "The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is a lie."
And while we're busy deluding ourselves, we're also becoming unwittingly instrumental to power or whatever you want to call it. Literal tools.
In the introduction, Yarvin says that in 2020, everyone can be relevant and important. Relevant and important tools.
I see this as a warning. When you're told to "lead, follow, or get out the way," perhaps in 2020, the third option is best.
Of course, this could all change by 2021. I have no fucking idea.
It's funny that getting kudos on your comment made you self-conscious. I'm the same way. This is relevant to what epistemologists call the stakes conception of knowledge: many of us are prone to saying "I know X", but if you raise the stakes high enough for being wrong, then much of the time we'll downgrade from "I know X" to "OK, probably X" or "I'm no longer sure of X". (Example: "do we have a test tomorrow?" Nope. "Are you sure?" I'm sure. "You know, there's only 1 test, and it's worth 50% of our grade." [Pause] Ok, let me check.
I admit, it is a bit strange for the 4 hearts to count to you as high stakes, but if you have heterodox views, especially ones that you know you'd suffer for if your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, or strangers discovered them, then almost any amount of attention on you may feel like the eye of Sauron.
Or, you might be someone who is happy to give advice when asked, but terrified when people tell you they're going to take it. In that case, you might be even more like me than I thought!
The eye of Sauron is certainly the superego at play. Even giving advice scares the bejesus out of me. Say you have a friend with a severe drug problem, and you yourself have recovered from one in the past. You think back on all the stupid things people told you that were actually counterproductive. The last thing you want to say is something so alienating, that your friend falls deeper into his addiction.
Detaching rather than preaching, whether you fall on the right or left, allows you to start from scratch. Today, the stakes are so high that we might have to first disengage to better assay the cultural & political environment, and frame questions more precisely.
Can people really do that if they're constantly triggered by this or that thing, Civil War monuments being taken down, being called the wrong pronoun, etc?
We have an addiction to issues. I think the author mentioned on a podcast the we ought to try cooling off our limbic system and have the prefrontal cortex handle the things the trigger rage individually and collectively.
I'm all for it. But there's certainly a kind of restlessness that comes with committing to detachment. You're going to want another swig from the flask or hit from the crack pipe again.
By the way, any good psychoanalyst will tell you that the superego is not an ethical agent, but something more akin to the eye of Sauron. I don't know much Tolkien, but I've glanced at the movies and that thing looks like a malicious entity if there ever was one.
So maybe the best thing to do isn't so much to stop caring, but to detach from the eye of Sauron so you can possibly begin the work of building something worthwhile, clean slate.
~third edit of comment~
I made the same comment before reading yours, so now I’m also self-conscious...
HAHA
Very simple question: why would detachment work any better than dissidence? The people in charge have already said that not pledging fealty to them is the same as opposing them. So, if you try to be nonpolitical, that's itself seen as a political act of a quite disreputable sort. Remember, *most* public health officials said that, *from a public health point of view*, the *best* thing to do was take part in the George Floyd protests. Consequently, insofar as you didn't protest, you were actually endangering public health.
Trying to check out is just *being* a dissident. Indeed, even if all dissidents just gave up and said we won't resist--no one ran as a Republican, no one protested even the most elaborate and radical rituals, there would just be a new way of being described as a dissident: lack of enthusiasm, for instance.
But the point is, you can't *not* have dissidents. To take an extreme example: if the powers that be said, "all white babies must be aborted" or "all wealth from white people must be expropriated and devoted to blacks as reparations", there's just no way that wouldn't cause pushback. And that's kind of the point: if you're right that dissidence helps the regime, then the regime can just up its demands until it can guarantee dissident reactions. That's just a matter of human psychology.
But: you're not right. The cathedral is not invulnerable. It's a human state of affairs. If the Chinese started using clever psy-ops against the USA, the cathedral would be kind of powerless -- it's one thing for the Russians to be the bad guys; they're white. It's quite another for the Chinese to be -- it calls to mind too many uncomfortable associations with Japanese internment camps. The Cathedral, just like the bourgeoisie, or the capitalists, or the vanguard, makes mistakes. There are market failures (e.g., the NYT has to get ever more extreme for risk of alienating its employees, but the more extreme it gets, the smaller its market share and the more opportunities it creates for competitors). There are government failures (e.g., the iron law of bureaucracy means that government officials will tend to choose advancing their own interests over the interests of the institution).
And look, you have to give a pretty good argument for thinking that history is both deterministic and teleological. Even if history is teleological, I'm highly skeptical that it's deterministically so.
tl;dr: (a) if it were true that serving power and being a dissident just serves power, then detachment would just serve power as well; and (b) it's not true that being a dissident always serves power.
"Very simple question: why would detachment work any better than dissidence? The people in charge have already said that not pledging fealty to them is the same as opposing them."
Good question WCP. I believe Yarvin talked about this in an interview elsewhere, and the answer depends on the relative heat of the revolutionary fires, so to speak... the ability to avoid the tip of the Regime's spear is variable. During the early communist phase in the USSR, dissidents (which also included some of the "less than enthusiastic") were tortured and murdered in slave camps. As the decades went by, eventually dissidents merely had their economic livelihoods destroyed, similar to what we are seeing now in the West. By the time of the late 1980's, the regime had lost a significant amount of steam.
I also think that the sheer degree of official lies eventually takes some toll. The more implausible the official myths and lies, the harder it is to stoke the flames, especially over time.
Yarvin has also endorsed Joe Biden, for his blinding intellectual brilliance, err I mean for the fact that he should take down the temperature of the culture war quite a bit. Trump undoubtedly excites the brownshirts of the regime, and at the same time he (and the GOP generally speaking, with a few exceptions) does nothing substantive to protect his own supporters from the Regime. If he had half a brain, he would have switched from Twitter to any non-monopolistic social media alternative immediately. He would have used anti-trust legislation, anything at his disposal, especially during the first two years of the administration when the house and senate were GOP controlled. Instead, he gave the Kochs and their lapdog Paul Ryan a massive tax cut for the wealthy, his signature "accomplishment". Clearly, he had no idea what he was doing, and he was such a toxic boss, he couldn't attract good people who do know what they are doing (in his defense, the Regime certainly worked to poison the well around him...but that has to be expected.)
Yarvin has also discussed how the current revolutionaries and brownshirts are pale shadows of their archetypes from past eons. The overall energy looks high to many of us modern observers, but historically speaking, it's a lotta weak LARPing compared to the battle of Blair Mountain. But who knows how things could proceed, hence my belief that people should be thinking of an exit plan. If the fires get really hot, detachment will not be an option.
That's how I personally read it:
Yes, regimes can always generate enemies out of thin air, but in a way the more bizarre ways the regime employs to paint people as enemies, the more ridiculous, the more insecure and unsure of itself it would look like. It can call everyone not taking part in the protests racists and dangerous to public health elements, but:
a) there is just no way _the current_ American regime will go after every single "racist" and send him or her to struggle sessions. Despite all the Cultural Revolution comparisons, pretty much no one in power cares seriously enough to actually enact any sanctions against all these people. Hence, all it will amount to will be just empty threats (mostly; not for unlucky ones who are not that good at hiding their power level), which will only make the regime look more pathetic.
b) not only empty threats and ridiculous allegations make regime look pathetic, they alienate people away from it. Engaging in what can appear as sensible democratic process is one thing, engaging in functioning of some barely sane laughingstock, which calls everyone and his dog evil raycist is quite another. And isn't further mass disillusionment/detachment just what we need?
>the more bizarre ways the regime employs to paint people as enemies, the more ridiculous, the more insecure and unsure of itself it would look like
MM makes this point too but think about it, do you think "Okay, now THIS is just too bizarre!" has a quantified value? What about the pace of the last few years suggests this couldn't roll on for decades? You're about to have blue-haired otherkin they/them with nuclear launch codes.
>Despite all the Cultural Revolution comparisons, pretty much no one in power cares seriously enough to actually enact any sanctions against all these people.
You are misjudging the nature of the people in power. They don't have to do the dirty work if you can be fired for not going along with the struggle session at work, or complain about it publicly. "Enact sanctions" has been totally obsoleted by the Diversity/Corporate PR merger.
Well, yeah, that's a good point.
I suppose that to make regime exciting it needs great stories and ability to give away victories. It's pretty short on the latter (everything that could be infiltrated and captured, _is_ infiltrated and captured, this is not the Sixties), and the stories are getting more and more banal. That's why I'm somewhat optimistic; I could be wrong, of course.
Someone still has to exercise the power, to do the firing decision, even if it comes from the diversity/HR committee. Even the WokeCorp is not that woke: there is absolutely no way e.g. the FAANG will just discard a sizeable part of their staff just because this part doesn't duckspeak the party line.
To play devils advocate, this is where Peter Turchin’s analysis is perhaps useful. Of his three major predictors of social stress and potential upheaved, intraelite competition is probably the most important (the other two are state finances and popular immiseration). There just aren’t that many of the “best” jobs, and there are a lot of people who want them. Throw in the growing push to expand H1B1 visas by even Trump/Kushner and the DNC policy of de facto open borders, such competition is only going to get more fierce, hence more room for the Regime to use the weapon of political filtration.
So a world class superstar isn’t going to be purged, but at a level below that, the knives are out.
While increased intra-elite competition increases Regime fragility, a cohesive elite can tolerate a lot of popular immiseration (and increased financial fragility).
The Great Awokening is primarily an elite ideological movement, it’s most extreme expressions are typically at the most privileged and elite institutions. The ideological purification can be seen as a mechanism to homogenize the entire class of Anywheres, and orient them against their Enemy, the Somewheres who ignorantly voted for Trump/Brexit. (This is obviously only one lens to view the Great Awokening- i believe another key lens is as a burgeoning fundamentalist and proselytizing Religion for “secular atheists”.)
The recent and ongoing kerfuffle with Zuckerberg
/Facebook daring to not toe the line and reject Trump political messaging/advertising is very telling. A who’s who of the Fortune 500 is currently boycotting Facebook for this lack
of solidarity. Soros has even made the ludicrous claim that Facebook execs are trying to get Trump re-elected.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-23/soros-starts-new-global-university-with-1-billion-commitment
This is a nice response, and it illuminates it for me. Good: there are limits to the cathedral's power. I often get the same sense reading Yarvin that I get from reading vulgar Marxists: the cathedral/capital always wins; if you think you're beating it, that's just what it *wants* you to think (e.g., Adolph Reed, Jr., a marxist political scientist from U Penn, thinks that the great awokening is just capital's way of co-opting leftism. Maybe he's right! But I'd love to know more about the microfoundations behind this power-grab).
But your comment helps me put it in perspective: the members of the cathedral want to maintain power, and they do this in two ways: (1) convincing people that their cause is great, and so getting them to directly support it; or (2) convincing people that their cause is evil, and so getting them to be dissidents. However, even human beings find some things outlandish, so sometimes it's hard for the cathedral to convince people of things. E.g., if I say to you, "white supremacy explains almost all of the bad things in the universe, which is why you need to buy my fish oil pills", a lot of people will find that unconvincing, even if they agree about white supremacy. But if a bunch of people are screaming, "blacks are an inferior race, which is why you shouldn't buy fish oil pills!", then the original pitch will seem more convincing.
I'm still not sold on dissident-activity being wholly ineffective. E.g., if Mickey Kaus is right that a new migration amnesty would Brazilify the USA in an unfixable way, then why not try to repeatedly make that point? Is the problem that a lot of his allies are saying, "yeah, he's right, and also we need to keep America white and free of mud-people!", and these are the people whose anti-immigration message get amplified? If I'm Mickey, should I give up, or should I instead spend my time on figuring out a way to get these other people to shut up, or to get anti-immigrant candidates to win? (I mean, sometimes anti-immigrant candidates *do* win. Trump won, and, boob though he is, I really don't think the cathedral wanted him to win.)
I think what could be said to be universally true is that dissident action always expends more energy than it produces. Even if you succeed on a particular issue, the net effect on the lives and careers of those involved will be negative. Curtis alluded to this.
Cessation of dissident activity would definitely remove a fuel source from the cathedral, but it seems fairly evident that it would remove obstacles faster than it would remove fuel (if every tenth conservative embraced detachment, the left would gain a massive political advantage, but I doubt they'd suffer from a lack of fuel). And the practical effects of such a political rout would make it harder to convince people to detach.
So while detachment could make sense for people who could do more good by flying under the radar, it's not clear that the contribution made by ordinary conservatives isn't net positive (in a marginal sense).
I'm glad my comment helped clear something up!
Regarding your last paragraph:
Well, yeah, of course, effectiveness of political action in a way is a spectrum. On one pole of it you can find things like having anti-abortion protests or, maybe, electing Republican president, on another — something like "months of covert and intense work culminating in passage of some act, which scores a clear and unequivocal win for your objective". The latter examples clearly look much more desirable to me than the former, but it's worth noting several moments:
a) The latter things are also way less activist-y in a traditional way compared to the former: they don't involve hunting for cheap publicity, ten minutes of glory, or etc., they are going to be much more rational and pragmatic, and so on.
b) We don't really have good reasons to think that marketplace for causes and potential solutions for them is going to select for something easy solvable (see Curtis's piece for this), so picking any hot cause of the day is probably a pretty bad idea.
c) Of course, after a single win it's probably easy to get on a power trip and just start making mistakes.
tl;dr: from my point of view "don't do activism" is more of a pretty good heuristic than the Law of the Universe. If you have a pretty clear path showing how your actions will bring success, sure, go for it.
And, sorry, this probably didn't look too related to your post. About opposing immigration specifically: it appears to me that the larger and the more important your goal is, the more narrow is the space of possible reasonable methods to achieve it, so I guess here abstinence from action within regime would be the best choice.
I'm not really convinced by the anti-abortion activism example. Yes, the end point (end all abortions) is pretty much impossible to attain, as well as concrete acts (ex: repealing roe v. wade). Where activism has been very successful however, is in changing the culture surrounding abortion (pro-life sentiment has been increasing since the 90s), passing some local restrictions and generally reducing abortion rates. Most importantly, it has made being pro-life a relatively tolerable position within the regime (against the regime's wishes) as opposed to other positions such as being against gay marriage (which was the case for a majority of Americans 10 years ago). I generally agree with dissident activism = bad sentiment, especially on the nationally level. But Pro life activism actually seems like a pretty notable exception (2A activism too in some instances)
(on the other hand, "limiting immigration" is a much more clear and defined objective than, say, "making SV more tolerant to non-communists/non-progressives", so, in a way, it is more reachable within regime, I guess)
When in doubt ask Aesop: https://youtu.be/X5e0S4CLmpw
To take your extreme example:
If the outcome of opposing “let’s abort all white babies” is your death and no change in the number of white babies aborted, did you win?
What if you save some white fetuses now but are weaker for it, and in ten years it ramps up to “let’s kill all whites younger than ten”?
Opposition to power must be strategically, tactically, and operationally viable. Nothing I’ve seen so far is any of those.
Child euthanasia is legal in some European countries and debated in others, but still outside the overton window in the US. Occam's Razor would suggest the anti-abortion movement has had something to do with that.
I agree, resistance to abortion is one of the few things you could call a tactical success on the right.
But has it made future success easier or harder?
I’d say much harder (based on a lack of other successes and declining success even in fighting abortion).
I think the point of detachment is that all dissident victories are Pyrrhic. Every battle won makes it harder to win the war.
Dissident activism doesn't generate power (for the dissidents), so it's always Pyrrhic. Thus all the right-wing energy in the country is barely sufficient to hold the line on one issue.
What's not clear is how losing battles would make it easier to win the war. Unless everyone detaches at once, the left can prevent further detachment by making their demands arbitrarily onerous.
As far as I can tell, Mormons grow stronger every year. That might be a good group to learn from.
"But the point is, you can't *not* have dissidents. To take an extreme example: if the powers that be said, 'all white babies must be aborted' or 'all wealth from white people must be expropriated and devoted to blacks as reparations', there's just no way that wouldn't cause pushback. And that's kind of the point: if you're right that dissidence helps the regime, then the regime can just up its demands until it can guarantee dissident reactions. That's just a matter of human psychology."
And at that point, the overton window would've shifted far to the left. This is basically what happened with racial issues in the 60's. The conservative positions of 1960 (ranging from Goldwater's support for freedom of association to Buckley's explicit pro-segregation views) had been completely abandoned by 1970. All that capitulation gained them was a few decades of relative peace, but now we're faced with new demands and a left-shifted range of acceptable views.
Yarvin in this piece is generally discussing regimes that are not yet explicitly and irreconcilably hostile to some portion of their population . If rephrased slightly from "obey the rules" to "don't taunt authority" the general principle could be extended to regimes that are explicitly persecuting your group. If you're a Jew in 1942 Poland, no you don't have to report to your nearest death camp, but you shouldn't publicly mock Hitler and Germany as that is purely transferring your energy to the benefit of your opponents, no matter how much they deserve to be mocked.
So don't abort those babies, if you can hide them. If they catch you they execute the law on you, and as long as you don't But probably don't have a white mother's day parade.
As I understood it, West Coast's scenario wasn't about an actual abortion mandate being enforced, but the prospect of one being passed. A handful of Congressmen introducing such a bill would neutralize any movement toward detachment.
Yes that was my point!
The problem is that there are some actions which both transfer energy to the regime and tactically obstruct it. Voting Republican being an obvious example.
Unlike occupied-Poland, political resistance in America actually can slow the Cathedral down (while also energizing it). If people stop resisting, the Cathedral will speed up, which will freak people out and make them start resisting again. It's a self-regulating system that ensures there'll always be a ready supply of dissident energy to keep it going. While a complete cessation of resistance would probably kill it, I don't see any way to get from here to there.
Sure, but that doesn’t affect my point. My point is that Yarvin’s strategy won’t work, given his assumptions. It may work if his assumptions are wrong. Either way, though, he’s wrong about something big.
Unless I’m missing something!
Thus far, Yarvin hasn't presented a strategy. Rather, a state of mind, or vantage point from which to think strategically. Yarvin's entire work so far has been about intellectual/emotional detachment. If you were out there waving Tiki torches in 2016, I highly doubt you're reading this. If you're a leftist, planning your next protest, I highly about you're reading this.
Yarvin's audience is small, but we're dealing with some big problem problems, and I think we need some guidance right now. I certainly do. My mother is over 60 and being forced to read "White Fragility" over the summer. She knows it's nonsense and is asking me if she should tell her fellow teachers. My friend came up to me the other day, eyes bulging, and asked me "what have you done for black people today!?!" I don't know about you guys, but reading Curtis is a breath of fresh air.
I'm enjoying reading the comments here. Still waiting for Curtis' theory to mature.. at the moment my some lucidity and improvement in my mental health is good enough.
Your friend coming up to you like that sounds out of a nightmare.
Let’s remember we’re not even on chapter 3 ! Haha. Yarvin hasn’t even began detailing his version of detachment. We’re in the lead up. Let the man write. :)
You're right, of course. But I would hardly be a good critic of detachment if I detached myself!
More seriously, I think it's important for people to see why someone might not get on board. Seeing where someone might object to view X helps you understand the defenses of X better. And this is so far a small enough community that perhaps my remarks help to do that, at least for some people.
I think that’s fair & worth noting. I’d rather hear objections to a theory too early than too late!
Oh, and I also suspect I'm misunderstanding Yarvin's take in a big way, which "too online" showed me above. But I think seeing where people misunderstand is also important! Maybe Curtis himself reads these comments and is using them to affect how he presents his ideas! A boy can dream.
I think we are missing a positive definition of this detachment philosophy. We’ve been given what it’s not by means of defining these other terms, but— and, no, I don’t expect a “5 Steps to Beat the Old Regime and Thrive in the World to Come” article— we will need more.
I think it might have something to do with detachment’s Z-outcome. For example, a dissident does X to get Y but really gets Z; detachment’s unintended consequence is paradoxically power.
I must give some stylistic feedback: All of your sentences are of the same short length which makes the writing feel very stilted. I first noticed this with your pieces in the American Mind, so it may be a result of feedback from your editors. Editors are retarded; don't listen to them. They were trained by the universities to sap the soul of the writer and create a mono-voice that prevents any connection between the author and the reader.
Editors would have scoffed at the highly stylized tone of UR and forced you to edit it down until you no longer sounded like a mischievous truth-sayer, but instead like some kind of bored journalist forced to report on a weird story that he didn't care about or understand. Make no mistake, content and aesthetics are inseparable. Vary sentence length!
I both agree, and sorta love the weird, dry, clipped tone of this series.
Curtis - in #2b, you invoke Havel's notion that working along with the regime as an infiltrator causes one to lose the original "soul" which drives his opposition to the regime. For this reason, you disapprove of even the most impenetrable methods of infiltration of regime systems. However, Havel isn't merely talking about infiltration - he's talking about the experience of working for a regime at all, and whether a motive to accrue some kind of power is present is irrelevant.
Since the most desirable and comfortable jobs are regime-adjacent, how can anyone, including the detached, avoid falling into the trap Havel describes?
First
Oh cmon
Minimally complying with the latest progressive demands over time which escalate as they go...there's a name for this. Conservatism. There is another . Appeasement. It hasn't worked out so well. I know this has not escaped your notice as you are the man who told me that Cthulhu always flies left. Mao kept fighting when it seemed hopeless and he won. Washington did the same. The only guy I can think of who won by not fighting was Fabius Maximus (or maybe Kutuzov) but even he needed Scipio to fight and win the battle. Maybe you won't win if you fight, but you'll have to show me that inaction results in anything but more losing.
I share your reservations regarding detachment, though it should be noted that Curtis isn't promoting compliance in thought. That's an important difference between his position and (the practical M.O. of) mainstream conservatism.
Maybe I am jumping the gun here, or not understanding correctly, but if detachment is the best course of action to reduce (or at least not grow) the power of the regime, then wouldn't the detached become de-facto dissidents? What I mean by this is that a concerted effort of detachment by a significant portion of the population would result in some slowing of power acquisition by the regime, due to a lack of "fuel" (dissident thought/speech/action). Wouldn't this loss in velocity be noticed by the regime and then acted upon?
A recent example of this is the current progressive position of "white silence equals violence", basically, if you do not participate in this latest cause, then you are marked as an enemy of the regime. I believe that the intended purpose of this statement is to threaten politically uncaring individuals (those who are naturally detached) into action, but will affect those who purposefully detach as well.
I guess this then means to be detached, you must then speak up as an "anti-racist". If you do, you allow the regime to seize more power by lending your voice to the cause as an involuntary collaborator. So what is the detached position? Speaking up or finding a better hiding place? Surely you cannot run forever.
It seems like the regime is already going after those who are naturally detached. A purposeful detaching movement would undoubtedly be noticed (say if 10% of reactionaries detached) and would instantly be targeted, making just a new class of dissidents.
I think the idea is to do the bare minimum to comply with power. And Moldbug is very clear that power also operates through non governmental channels such as corporate HR departments, the ADL, and leftist doxing campaigns. Do only what power actually requires, and no more. When it starts requiring loyalty oaths and struggle sessions, like now, we know it's already close to the end.
Thanks for the response Pablo! What you are saying makes complete sense to me. What I was trying to get at was a bit different I think. Detachment is the course of action which does the least to give power to the current regime. It seems like Yarvin's main goal here is to convert dissidents to detachment (also collaborators but the argument seems more persuasive for dissidents). By doing so, the reduction in dissident action will result in slower power accumulation by the regime (due to dissidents becoming detached).
My question is then how can the power of the regime be slowed without expressing your own power? Becoming detached must have its own power if it is capable of impacting the regime's power, which is obviously an existential threat to the regime. If Yarvin is smart enough to figure out that detachment reduces the power growth of the regime, surely members of the regime will also reach the same conclusion and co-opt the power of the detached or destroy them.
It seems to me almost tautological that detaching will just become the new form of dissent, which we have already identified as serving to increase the power of the regime. So detaching becomes impossible.
I think detachment increases the amount of effort they must go through to enjoy the power process (no opposition), like junkies developing a tolerance for a drug- and eventually requires that they actually govern (be judged by whether their expressed intentions match results) rather than simply getting collaborators to go along with the power process for fun and thrills. If there is no one to crush or humiliate, no enemy that sabotages the utopia, whose fault is it when nothing works? Does that make sense?
Take MGTOW as an example. I know many men who are in effect fully MGTOW, yet I would bet most of them don't even know that MGTOW is a thing. Detachment is similar - it's not a movement, it's just a self-interested choice that follows from a rational assessment of reality.
Furthermore, just because 'white silence equals violence' has become a prominent slogan doesn't mean that there's going to be any real enforcement of it any time soon. Even in the USSR things didn't quite work that way.
1. Pointing out the hypocrisy of power is pointless, I agree. But it's the same deus ex machina to then say "Eventually, things will get so crazy/bizarre that Power will collapse." This seems like another thing people assume someone has run the numbers on and haven't.
2. A good historical problem to test the strategy of passivism would be the Holodomor. Would passivism have saved anyone from being murdered or starved? It likely included thousands of people who were already honest, checked-out, non-participants in power politics.
In support of your point, the cult of North Korea seems bizarre to outsiders, but has existed for many decades now. Humans are obviously capable of believing "crazy" stuff for a long time (I put crazy in quotes, because the shit moderns believe would look batshit crazy to many historical peoples, just as it looks to many of us.)
I tried to address your second point in another comment, that it all depends on the context. "Detachment" makes little sense when your people are being rounded up to be shot. But in the late Communist phase it made a lot more sense. Curtis' thesis depends on our current revolutionary energy being closer to mid to late communism than early (Holodomor). I think there is evidence to support his hypothesis. I also think that human brutality is always lurking just a hairsbreadth beneath the skin.
We often compare the lifespan of regimes to the lifespan of people, but regimes don't actually age in a biological sense. Had the Soviet Union (for example) been at the center of its own world (as America is) and therefore not collapsed, it isn't clear that Stalinism couldn't have restarted at some point.
Right now we're in a Brezhnevian phase, but I don't think it's impossible to return to an earlier part of the cycle.
I agree with you that there is no guarantee that a tyrannical Regime can’t persist for a long time, and even if it collapses it could re-sprout, so to speak.
At the same time, I am generally persuaded by Peter Turchins cyclical analysis of societal change (I highly recommend his Age of Discord and Ultrasociety) and of course we have lots of empirical evidence that regimes rotate from monarchy to aristocracy/oligarchy and back (and even to the occasional and typically brief “democracy”).
I am also a fan of Girard’s idea of mimesis, in particular how it drives cultural evolution, and I believe that the West provided an important and visible alternative to the Soviet totalitarian model (and vice versa) especially as the decades rolled on. Soviet elites heard enough of the facts/propaganda from the West to know that it was out there, far more than in modern North Korea. And even in North Korea we see defectors who know that rival regimes exist that may well have higher standards of living and wellbeing than those within the PRK.
And to your point about Stalinism re-sprouting, it’s amazing how such different cultures such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, and China were infected by the memeplex virus of Marxism/Leninism, which speaks to the raw power of that ideology. It does a fantastic job of cultivating high degrees of resentment which in turn can be harnessed by elites to effect radical change.
My biggest dystopian fear is a mix of Orwell’s 1984 and an algorithmic-driven Big Tech/Big Gov corporate de facto world monopoly, where no real alternative is allowed to exist—a Totalitarian system with the automaticity that Vaclav Havel describes but without any viable external alternative for humans to copy and no way out of a technologically enforced hall of mirrors until some external shock comes along and shakes the frame.
Huxley’s Brave New World is a gentler form of such a totalitizing regime, but at least he creates an alternative for the members of the regime to compare themselves with (the “savages”).
I'm a big fan of detachment. However, as sadurni points out, I think this interpretation of Kant is arguably incorrect.
To elaborate on sadurni's 3):
The CI states that you are to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. This formulation makes no use of well-being, or whether acting in accordance with that maxim will bring about universal disaster. Kant is trying to a) ground morality in reason, and b)tell us what we are forbidden from doing.
To understand what the CI as written above means, we need to know what a maxim is. A maxim, for Kant, is something that states _what we are about to do_ and _why we are doing it_. An example might be 'I'm going to make some food, in order to satisfy my hunger', or 'I'm going to take a vow of celibacy and poverty to show my devotion to God' or 'I'm going to falsely promise to repay a debt in order to secure some funds'.
What the CI asks is whether we _could_ still rationally act according act according to our maxim in a world in which our maxim has become a universal law (where everyone always followed this maxim). In the case of making food, it seems like if everyone acted according to this maxim, nothing at all prevents me from achieving the goal of that maxim. However, take the case of falsely promising to repay funds. In a world in which everyone always falsely promised to repay a debt in order to secure some funds, I _would not_ be able to secure funds by doing this, because either a) no one would believe such a promise in such a world, or b) there would be no such thing as 'promising' in such a world. Whether or such a world is disastrous or not doesn't enter into the equation. This comes up when we look at the celibacy/poverty example.
It arguably _would_ be disastrous if everyone took a vow celibacy and poverty in order to show their devotion to God - it would be hard to think of a more destructive thing for the entire population of the world to stop procreating and commit themselves to a life of poverty. Nevertheless, in a world in which everyone does take such an oath, I can still achieve the goal of my maxim by doing the action described in my maxim, and so I am not forbidden from doing the act, even though disaster would result if everyone did the same thing.
The SEP has a good entry on the topic
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#ForUniLawNat
It might be that Kant just isn't the guy for this theory.
Curtis is wrong about Kant, as you said. He's not a rule-utilitarian. That's Mill's view, and Mill's interpretation of Kant. Curtis might want to replace mention of Kant with Mill instead.
As for maxims, there's a lot of debate about what they are. Some people, mostly in the Anglo-American world, take Donaldson's view, and some, mostly in the German-speaking world, take sadumi's view.
Incidentally, Kant may be on his way out in humanities departments in the Anglo-American world. Recently, at Daily Nous -- one of the top two philosophy websites in the Anglo-American world -- the website's proprietor, Justin Weinberg, somewhat positively supported the idea that monuments to Hume should be taken down, on the grounds that Hume was not only racist, but that racism was central to his philosophy. There wasn't much pushback in the comments.
If you have experience in an Anglo-American philosophy department, this is quite shocking. Hume is probably a plurality of philosophers' hero. For philosophy to do an about face on Hume like this, and to cast him out, is like ... well, I don't know what it's like. The best analogy I can think of is: it would be like Democrats consciously repudiating FDR/LBJ and their legacies, on the grounds that racism was the most fundamental moral quality of both the men and the New Deal/Great Society, and receiving almost no pushback from Democratic party partisans. It's really that dramatic.
With your philosophy background how much does this undermine Yarvin’s project and ultimate proposition of detachment? Like, is he cancelled? ;-)
It really doesn’t undermine his project, for a few reasons.
First, at least one Kant scholar, David Cummiskey, reads Kant as a consequentialist, and his reading is taken seriously.
Second, the Kantian question—what would happen if everyone did that?—is, arguably, the main motivating insight behind Kant’s ethics. How to capture what it means may not be the most important thing.
Third, even if Yarvin gets Kant wrong, his rule-utilitarian spin may make for a much more plausible ethical theory than Kant’s.
Fourth, with all due respect to Christine Korsgaard, Barbara Herman, Henry Allison, and John Rawls, Mill is a better philosopher than they are. Much as I think his interpretation is wrong, he may have a lot of convincing stuff to say in defense of his interpretation.
"- They’re just wrong, as people who read and discuss other people’s readings of classical authors (instead of reading the classics themselves) mostly are. They should read Kant’s works. He gives enough examples that can not be mistaken. Apart from that, the meaning of „Grundsatz“ and „Maxime“ in German also only allow for the understanding I laid out here. Also, Kant did not invent the terminus „Maxime“, it’s already established with a precise meaning in his time, contemporary discussion and standard handbooks."
Dude, they've read Kant. Believe me. And the precise meaning of Maxime, as established by Christian Wolff, undermines your point, it doesn't support it.
For Wolff, "Maximen" were the major premises of practical syllogisms, and Wolff thought that we implicitly drew practical syllogisms every time we acted. In other words, you're right that they're relatively general for Wolff, but they also govern such things as concluding, "I should exercise." E.g., in the practical syllogism, 1. "Exercise is good for you", 2. "running is exercise", "therefore, 3. I should run", premise 1 is the maxim. But then, you can use 3 as the major premise of a new practical syllogism (to say "X is good" and "I should X" are equivalent, at least if you have only one kind of goodness, as Wolff did). So, if you take your tack, then you'll end up with the Anglo-American commentators that every action is action on a maxim. (In addition, there's a passage in Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics where he says acting without acting on a maxim is impossible.)
The German view requires Kant to someone who took maxims to be how La Rochefoucauld understood them. Rüdiger Bubner, Rüdiger Bittner, Otfried Höffe, Michael Albrecht, and, lately, Sven Nyholm defended this view. I think it's got a lot going for it -- I recently tried to publish a paper on how to understand the Gesinnung in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen blossen Vernunft that relied on this understanding of maxims, but alas, it was rejected on the ground that the German understanding is clearly wrong (and also on the grounds that I understood transcendental idealism as a metaphysical rather than purely epistemological doctrine). But I do think the German understanding fits Kant's own examples better than the Anglo-American version.
I just don't think you can say that your understanding is clearly right, and that all the Americans who have read Kant in the original German and even produce translations (like Allen Wood and, if I'm not mistaken, Henry Allison)* have just never read Kant. Yes they have. Their problem is not that they haven't read him; their problem is that that they want Kant to be relevant to the contemporary discussion, and are embarrassed by any departure by Kant from contemporary academic values, and so they read him in a motivated way.
*--Yes, I agree, Christine Korsgaard can't read German. But I don't even think of her as a Kant interpreter. I think of her as Kant-adjacent.
You’re right we should wind this down. Just a few last bits:
1. If you do Kant’s first critique, then you can take a metaphysical read on TI. Guyer does, Ameriks does, van Cleve does, and the leading lights of the younger generation (Allais, Bader, Jaernig, and Stang all do). But if you do his ethics it’s not really allowed. You’d get rejected.
2. What problem do you think Kant wants to solve in KrV?
3. IMO, the Timmermann translation of GMM is good.
That’s some damn fine detachment right there. Damn fine!
“Do not lean into your enemies’ stereotypes of their enemies” is fantastic insight that I’ve never heard articulated before.
This deserves substantial expansion and refinement.
At the end of essay #2a (commenting here since I can't comment there), both hyperlinks need to be fixed. Where it says "Go back to chapter 2, or forward to 2b."
Here’s another simple question: why isn’t every country in the world, from 1917 on, like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge?
I do think a few case studies in regime change, in light of the detachment model, would be useful for the reader.
Without more information it’s going to be very hollow like the old “Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came” slogan.
This might just be my lack of understanding or self-awareness (I have a lot of problems here) - is "detachment" more of a...state of being, or an actual prescription for action? Perhaps this flew over my head. For example - I might see my local government as a more functional entity where I would be somewhat enticed to involve myself in (as a dissident, contributor, etc.), given the impact that I might have on it (and it's real impact on myself). Perhaps I don't see it as broken as the federal clown show, so I try to involve myself in it, while still being politically detached at a philosophical level.
Or, given the fact that I know I am playing with power, I might want to pick up a cause because easy - I will inevitably prefer a presidential candidate over another. I'm probably wrong (in the sense of objective results vs. subjective intent), but should I just cast a vote anyway? What's it to me? (I get a cool sticker, right?)
Anyway, perhaps just looking for a clarification, or a shoutout in the text to people like me who might not understand your intent.
Thanks!
I think he needs to provide a more positive definition a detachment to a degree— at least I’d like one. We have been introduced to what it’s not, but I think you are on the right track recognizing that it’s like a state of being. He did describe it akin to a spiritual discipline of sorts, but we will see! It’s still early in this project— though I already have lots of similar questions.
Positive causes are vain and unaccountable. *Kanye West enters the chat*
The only problem with this line of reasoning is that the Cathedral is not a unified force (if it were it would be something else entirely). Politics can obstruct it, and while dissidents lose energy by acting, that doesn't mean there are no causes worth acting for. A person trapped with a limited amount of food will exhaust his resources as he eats, but he should still eat something.
It's also possible for dissident causes to have anti-regime effects which are not in line with their stated goals. For example, "pro-lifers" are suckers, they will never succeed at banning or meaningfully restricting abortion anywhere in the country. However, their movement has been successful at keeping opposition to abortion within the overton window. That isn't much for all their effort, but it's not clear how things would be any better for them if they just went home.
OK, reading it for the third time. I think I finally understand this fella. In fact, hardly a day goes by that I don’t revisit a little Yarvin think. I do believe he’s the only one who understands the meta-phenomenon, which is to say: how shit works.
This is a significant accomplishment on his part. I’m tagging along and I am kinda chuffed that I’m getting it.