Education today - like politics - is failing us all. Something accessible and easy to digest that links up so many strands of thought would be helpful to me.
The revolution in Iran in 1979 established a theocratic government, that replaced the Shah Reza Pahlevi. (Shah means King, the chess game comes from the word.)
The first ruler of the Iranian revolution was Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiite Islamic scholar, who implemented in Iran for the first time in history the "Velāyat-e Faqih", the rule of the jurisprudent, i.e. the government of Islamic clerics, which form the Guardian council. While Irans political system is (at least formally) democratic, there are elections, courts, institutions, a parliament, press and publishing, all power lies by the Guardian council which has to serve (in Arabic this is called shura) as advisory board to the current Supreme leader, Ali Chamenei.
The Shiite Muslims are divided into two branches: the 7er shia and the 12er shia, the numbers refer to the "hidden imams", which lurk in the shadows to come out in times of crisis. Irans ruler are 12er shias, which has a stronger apocalyptic leaning, is expecting the last hidden Imam to come out and declare judgement day and the Shia utopia.
A relatively newly established hereditary monarchy is brushed aside by a democratic revolution (externally sanctioned?) that leads directly to a different form of (non hereditary) monarchy.
Religion of course plays a huge role but as I said, I’m not qualified to pick it apart.
I like neo-hereditary but I oppose the dehumanizing effects of modern birthing programs (not in a small part because of my catholicism).
I would not want to compromise the dignity of a human person, especially the monarch. However, i think it could work if we set up some sort of Bene-Gesserite breeding program for the royal family. This would be humane and dignified, like creating a prized race horse rather than artificial human soup.
After just a generation or two we would have enough swappable, competent princes, that the monarchy could essentially continue on forever. It also gets more robust as time goes on.
I think the context is pretty clear, but I'll explain it. A man making love to his wife is a more fitting way for life to come into existence than him jacking off into a cup. It should be avoided if possible.
A woman carrying her child is a more fitting image of motherhood than frankensteining someone else's egg into her body. It should be avoided if possible.
Ignoring the ethics of it (which shouldn't be discounted, if indeed out goal is a society that lets humans lead thier best lives), the scientific data backs me up on this. People in, and from traditional families are smarter, happier, better adjusted and more successful in general. They even live longer. We shouldn't break something that isn't broken, just for the sake of breaking it.
The difference between an Augustus and a Caligula is significant enough such that millions of people will be affected if you make the wrong choice. Cloning Augustus 10 times and raising miniGustus in stable families will no denigrate their lives. You're Christian so I'm not hoping to dissuade you. It's a roadblock I don't have.
You would think that we would notice a Caligula in his rearing wouldn't you? If you don't think a prince is up to the task, don't pick that prince. We should have enough heirs and a strong backup layer.
Maybe i just don't get the appeal. Sex+education what else about as good as cloning +education, and the cultural windfall seems far less catastrophic.
Hopefully, you'd agree that you wouldn't want every citizen a clone? Since traditional family structure seem to be a net positive according to the data.
> You would think that we would notice a Caligula in his rearing wouldn't you?
Yet a Caligula was emperor.
> If you don't think a prince is up to the task, don't pick that prince
I don't have the power to pick anything, thinking you do is a masturbatory.
> Sex+education what else about as good as cloning +education
Sex introduces an insane amount of variation in ability and performance of offspring. Cloning gives you stability. Education is irrelevant if you don't have the capacity to benefit from it. And even if you do, the value of information someone decided to shove into your brain is marginal. How much of high-school chemistry do you remember?
> Hopefully, you'd agree that you wouldn't want every citizen a clone?
No, I'm fine with plebian masses procreating however they see fit. They'll eventually get around to gene editing their offspring anyway. You need families in any case.
They say Caligula didn't get that way until after he had a fever early in his reign. He was thought to be somewhat promising before that. So you wouldn't have caught it if you were observing him as he was brought up. His father Germanicus was the best of men--kind, competent, and temperate and was "LIttle Boot"'s hero.
You sure got me there man, my whole existence is changed now. 'Who is this "you"' is a rabbit hole, 'making choices' is a rabbit hole, 'right or wrong' is a rabbit hole. I don't want to engage.
Correct. The more I think about it the more negative I see to an artificial approach opposed towards the Bene-Gesserit, even disregarding the inhumanity of it.
First the results aren't that exceptional. As Curtis notes even in this post, even the "random" distribution of genes now produces plenty of capable leaders. A simple breeding program designed to monitor the genetics of perhaps 3 initial royal families (with the intent that the program will merge them in the near future) will ensure a steady stream of competent heirs, even within the confines of a traditional marriage (no polygamy, and limited to no divorce). Good statecraft training will handle the rest. We don't need perfect ubermesch to lead a nation, we just need a fail-safe against nature's humor.
Second, the culture windfall of such an artificial royal family would be negative. Part of the reason we're in the situation we are is because of the degradation of natural order and traditional social technologies. The family is a big part of that. It's almost a rule that the fashions of the ruling class become the fashions of the society. We can see this throughout history. Some of this is simple power leak, but surely not all of it.
As such, we should not want to encourage any behavior amongst the royals that we would not also want to see in the population. Families are a social technology that scales. Arranged marriages also seem to perform better than modern marriage (at the very least they don't seem to perform worse). It would not weaken the society at the very least. Married people are happier, and healthier. If we want the goal of society to make humans the best humans, you need to encourage them to get married, stay married, and have children. Artificial birthing techniques bring about social degradation by dissolving this paradigm that we know works. We don't have to find a sci-fi way to solve the modern concept of "family." Not when there's such an effective workaround.
Third, the Bene-Gesserit program would basically revolutionize medical science. We have an active, multi-generational, medical experiment with measurable results. Biology, Psychology, Medicine, Genetics and numerous other fields that provide direct tangible benefits to the population now receive huge amounts of funding, and have a focus on practical results achieved in ethical ways, while being utterly divorced (and thus uncorrupted) from power itself. The revolutions to these field in the quest to build a perfect ruler will be incredible, and the population as a whole will reap the benefits.
Now downsides:
Familial attachments to regular people (mothers as opposed to donors) might provide a very small power-leak. I think this is a much smaller problem to engineer away than an entirely new family structure.
The Dune problem: The Bene-Gesserits having too much power that they start to do shady stuff. I don't foresee this being a problem. Humanity probably won't develop genetic super-powers, so there's probably no need for odd prophesies involving genetic memory. They're also power adjacent, but utterly distinct from it. There's little to no potential that this caste of geneticists, physicians and educators become a new ruling class. You can't out-compete family in natural attachment, so their influence over these perspective princes is inherently limited.
A breeding program is a selection of bodies does not necessarily select sharp minds. Culture (and religion) provide individuals with that kind of resources.
A breeding program like the Bene Gesserit was solely focused on the selection of a perfect genetic line, but the didn't foresee what Paul Atreides would actaully do.
The mirror of princes belongs to the field of education, not genetic engineering. Only the best bodies will get the job, but the unpredictable competition is what the best mind for that job looks like.
Fully agree, and didn't mean to imply otherwise. The breeding section of the program is only there to ensure a naturally competent royal family. It being a long term genetics study is a happy accident. The rest (medicine, psychology, education) is to ensure that the princes stay competent even under the trials of their tasks and future royal duties.
I recently read the book of a Soviet dissident from the 70s, Igor Shafarevich, called "The Socialist Phenomenon".
Shafarevich was a prominent mathematician in number theory and was due to his anti-Communist views permanently silenced by the Soviet authorities. In the book he describes "socialism" as an age old set of ideas, which appeared already in antiquity and which he saw at least in fractions in most civilisations. He discusses the Inka civilisation, Thomas Müntzer, Bulwer-Lyton the peasants revolts and insurrections of radical Christian sects in the course of European history.
He identified as main features of all these forms of "socialism": the idea of common goods and the rejection of private property, the rejection of all authority except their own, the destruction of family kinship by imagining and implementing quasi eusocial structures, and at least the later versions the idea of people being constrained to permanent work and working conditions. No spare time in socialism.
He quotes from several authors and writers over the century which reflected on utopia and the ideal society and he finds everywhere these features. The destruction of family by keeping children apart form their biological parents to educate them in the spirit of utopia is something he despises the most about socialism.
Hard to say, because few countries are actively stupid enough to destroy the institution of family, except here in the west where it's been overall disastrous
Research in autism has shown that evolution in all the most interesting traits are not really mendelian. They happen through gene duplication events. I think of them as these genomic waiters that go back and forth to the kitchen and neglect to drop off the dirty plates. There are these defined regions in the human genome where these duplication events take place.
You can line up these regions of evolution across all the primates going back 50m years. They are notoriously difficult to sequence, because the regions are so long and have so many duplicate regions (read lengths are ~100-500bp with most seq platforms, you need way more expensive machines to pull this off). These are the regions that map to intelligence and interestingly, (of course!) to autism. So your dreams of engineering a master race have some inherent brakes put in by Mother Nature, or what I like to call God.
So continually marrying math geniuses with each other ends up filling madhouses instead of Physics departments, which is probably a good thing in the long term this will keep everybody human.
I should modify a little: Of course in the general case, smart people having kids with smart people will beget smart kids, but if you're an asshole about it, if none of your ancestors fall for the occasional milk maid, then the above applies. The autism spectrum disorders happen through spontaneous deletions/mutations/re-combinations in a number of genes in those duplication regions. Those figurative waiters occasionally drop some of the pates or crash into each other during meiosis.
Totally on board for the Neo-hereditary monarchy. Imagine instead of some lame election with octogenarians fumbling over words put in their heads by cringey academics, we have the fucking Thunderdome. Where the ten genetically engineered super humans compete in some insane blood sports cooked up by the ring bearers to 1. test their aptitude to become monarch and 2. entertain the hell out of the peasants. Mandatory day off for everyone, you have until 12 pst to order and consume as many party trays and obnoxiously large sandwiches as possible, then its on.
Curtis, when are you going to tackle the problem of state religion? I'm sure it doesn't escape you that no government can work without a morality that gives the board members a shared vision of what exactly is the public good they should strive for. So the rulers would need to have a cultural mechanism that keeps them all on the same page on the ultimate values.
Friend, you sound like a Chinese peasant. This desire to go into space is goofy itself, as far as human life is concerned. Clearly, the human body is too fundamentally tied to Earth and it's 4.5 billion years old hijinks, it's obvious that we'll need to design a new body from scratch specifically for space travel. But then it's no different than making a temple to please Gods - you're fundamentally spending colossal resources doing an irrational thing hedging your bets on uncertainty. You do need better arguments to stand on, my brother. In post-post-modernity, you simply can't appeal to goofiness as we live in an hyper-ironic meta-conscious awareness of fundamental arbitrariness of everything.
You say that as if Woke is any less ridiculous than the ancient and profound traditions of the religious West, yet seems to be doing a perfectly good job of motivating public fervor.
The ancient and profound religious traditions of the west are inadequate as a unifying force or ideological tool to achieve GM’s goals. That’s all I’m saying. I think disagreement with that position is a pretty steep hill.
i'd like to see an argument that Woke-ism is in line with humanity's evolved/created biological/reproductive prerogatives. something the dune fiction addresses
i'm inclined to think it's runaway "hyper-ironic meta-conscious awareness of fundamental arbitrariness of everything" and computers should be outlawed (for example)
Justin Murphy concluded that Curtis is a Catholic or believes somehow in the Catholic God, whatever this means. I am a faithful Catholic and would like to hear more about this.
I usually don't question anybody's self description, but I found Justin Murphys interesting for the reason I couldn't see in Curtis writings any hint that he follows the "Catholic God" (Murphy).
And since I follow the one true God and not the Catholic one, I was interested in how other see this problem. The consensus seem to be the same: Curtis is an atheist and speculations about his presumed beliefs are irrelevant speculations.
He's an atheist but has no animosity. He will use God as a synonym for "reality", as the ultimate authority that makes all things move. I sense clear sympathy bordering on comradery with Jesus happening in his writing.
I think Curtis may be close to a Spinozist, but I can't see him being a fan of Jesus' teachings. Turn the other cheek would seem from Yarvin's PoV to be a recipe for disaster and self-deception.
Spinoza, one can argue is a good mediator between Jesus and Machiavelli. Spinoza is still a kind of humanist, but recognizes the constraints and necessities of power in regard to good governance.
Do you see Spinoza as picturing his CosmiGod as a Self sort of containing all of us finite selves within Himself so that He's the background-thinker of our thoughts?
When he asserts that everything's a body on the one hand, an idea on the other, is he imagining that bodies exist as objects of a SuperSelf's awareness -- so that (putting this together with his Substance=CosmiGod) it turns out that this SuperSelf's self-awareness constantly converts Him into the body-universe or something like that?
Spinoza never talks in this trippy 19th Century way so I'm not strongly inclined to see him as imagining these things -- but if he's not imagining these things then what's he doing in the Ethics?
Doesn't a non power leaking regime subvert this issue completely. People would be free to engage in whatever religious practice they like without posing any threat to the regime or the people who do not share their views, because they can't exercise any power over those people. That's my hope anyway. Not sure it plays out.
True. Suggested minor modifications to your last paragraph: "power-hungry" rather than "greedy" (because "greedy" suggests money-lust) and something along the lines of "that provides them with a psychically necessary domination-justifying myth by allowing them ..." as opposed to "that at the same time allows them".
Following Test's comment above, any successful civilizational shift will require some form of state religion as a major component. The current Davos religion is obviously Woke, which is a weak derivation of Christianity. Elites are the primary drivers of any state religion, and while I'm sure some of them dislike Woke's anti-intellectualism, it ultimately serves their power interests well. It also supplies personal meaning in the Western consumerist flatland, and it allows hundred millionaires and billionaires to see themselves as Heroes fighting for the oppressed.
I have a difficult time seeing traditional forms of Christianity make a big enough resurgence to be able to serve as a state religion again, mainly because it has been gradually losing popularity with Western elites for 300 years now. I think it will have pockets of support, and its most conservative forms (Orthodox in particular, maybe Catholicism if they can get quality leadership) will perform the best overall.
A psychologized form of Judeo-Christianity is a possibility, and this was essentially what Jordan Peterson was creating. It clearly struck a chord with large numbers of people... Calvinist pastor Paul Vanderklay has said that his church saw a large spike in church attendance from people who had been inspired by Peterson.
But, there is only one Peterson. It's not easy to take ancient biblical stories and use them to create teaching metaphors that can directly relate to the personal problems of modern and postmodern people.
Islam is another possibility, especially in Europe. I don't think the current demographics will allow it to gain enough traction in the USA.
"In most periods, most peoples are in this condition. Like the Romans of the Empire, they are depoliticized."
Yarvin is using the word "depoliticized" equivocally. Most people throughout history were much more manly and virile than now. Their "depoliticization" consisted in being concerned with the local world around them rather than the world, or even their nation, at large. Today we have exactly the opposite situation.
"The submodern stage—the stage in which a society can latch on to its first simple modern idea with the absolute conviction of a duck imprinting on its mother—lasts at most one generation. Even if the submodern world had somehow managed to avoid setting itself on fire, this flammable world would still be a memory."
The "submodern" stage lasted for two or three centuries in the Anglosphere. Even after two world wars it took a generation to fully end. A more plausible explanation for the decadence of postwar America is one that should come naturally to Yarvin, that we stagnated in the absence of any meaningful opposition.
"It means that enormous changes in political structure are possible, without the risk that the small but inevitable sparks will land on some pile of leaves and burn down the planet again. If this is because the last century already torched it all, we deserve that silver lining. There will never again be a century even remotely like the 20th."
The 20th century was exceptionally violent, but so was the 13th. I'm not aware of the 14th having been more peaceful than any random century, and the 14th didn't have atom bombs.
"Simple: it will agree with the new power in town. Power’s pod-people act as if their brains were controlled by a radio chip tuned to a preset channel. This is not at all the case. The chip just tunes to the strongest transmitter it can hear. If their channel goes off the air, and your channel comes on, they are your pod-people now."
There was a time when the left didn't have power but obtained it. Clearly there is an element missing from this theory.
"Especially appealing is the fact that the incentive of a profitable company is also the incentive of a civilized monarchy: not just to spit out dividends, but to protect and grow the assets. The assets of a monarchy are the land and the people; so the incentive of a monarchy is to preserve and improve the land and the people. Which sounds a lot like protecting and growing the assets."
Investors generally like getting paid. And with a corporation that can't go out of business, there's a lot of room for power dividends.
"The only problem with this science-fiction upbringing is that it seriously challenges the normal idea of family—but that is just another science-fiction problem for tomorrow to solve."
Yarvin seems to think that modern ideas about the fungibility of human nature are true, but only for a small segment of the population ("armigers"). What if, and hear me out here, the idea is wrong in principle? That all human beings are better off living in the ways that have consistently worked across millennia and across civilizations?
On the submodern stage lasting for two or three centuries and also on the left having obtained power at some point -- I remember Curtis arguing in his Open Letter at least a decade ago that there's been a constant trend toward whatever we have now since Puritanism got going in England in the late 16th Century. So that there wouldn't have been a point at which the left obtained power; it would just have been getting constantly more powerful.
It certainly seems as though there have been sudden morphs into deeper weirdness, though -- in about 1965, for example, and then again in about 1995 after which the "Classic Rock" of 1965-1975 (of which the "Grunge" of the early 90s was the after-echo) seems literally classical in the Homer-Virgil sense, full of deep human feeling and spiritual awareness.
"On the submodern stage lasting for two or three centuries and also on the left having obtained power at some point -- I remember Curtis arguing in his Open Letter at least a decade ago that there's been a constant trend toward whatever we have now since Puritanism got going in England in the late 16th Century. So that there wouldn't have been a point at which the left obtained power; it would just have been getting constantly more powerful."
The Protestant Reformation was the most significant pivot in terms of the West accelerating Leftward, although I see the largest seeds of Progressivism having been born from Christianity itself (meaning no offense to Christianity, which I think in many ways has been a force for good.)
Christian fundamental teachings such as The last shall be first, The meek shall inherit the earth, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, etc., all contain potent destabilizing and revolutionary energies for any society they encounter.
Surveying other world religions, I don’t see anything else containing that degree of social gunpowder just sitting around in their basements.
These revolutionary energies have periodically upwelled in the West. I am persuaded by historian Tom Holland’s excellent book Dominion, which argues that the West has undergone several Reformations. In this view, the Woke Reformation is simply the latest iteration in that long line.
The key uber-progressive feature of the Protestant Reformation sparked by Luther was the total attack on tradition, precedent, and custom. Luther argued that only from the Bible, Sola Scriptura, could one ascertain the Truth. Church council decrees, papal bulls, local customs, canon law, the historical teachings of the Church Fathers and Saints—all of them were worthless, unless they agreed with Luther’s personal interpretation of the Bible, which alone was infallible. All past interpretive guideposts were to be thrown away.
Other ambitious and talented men came up with their own personal interpretations of the Bible, regardless of prior tradition, custom, etc., all claiming that they too had divined the one correct universal interpretation.
This was an enormous blow against anything like “conservatism”. We soon saw the rapid expansion of this new hermeneutics with the emergence of the Enlightenment philosophers, many of whom replaced Luther’s Universal conscience with their new worship of eternal Universal Reason.
Kant thought that by sitting in his armchair and using Reason, he had discovered the very bedrock of universal ethics and morality. Later, Nietszche pointed out that Kant had merely created an elaborate rationalization for the ethics and morality he had inherited from his parents.
As current research into cultural evolution is increasingly showing, we throw away all of our traditional hermeneutic guides for navigating reality at great peril.
Cynicism and Stoicism seem kind of politically subversive. Jesus talks and behaves a lot like the Cynics, and the Stoics pushed that "Cosmopolis" idea.
(Marcus Aurelius's MEDITATIONS might as well be entitled "Diary of a Gloomy Loner Who Hates His Job.")
Luther might have been like American conservatives in that he wanted to restore the authority of Paul just as a Mark Levin kind of guy wants to restore the authority of the Founding Fathers -- seeing the Church as Levin saw the federal bureaucracy before the phrase "Deep State" started being used a lot.
(Mark Levin is a Tea Party era radio-talk-show guy; I don't know whether Steve Bannon cares a lot about the Founding Fathers -- maybe he does -- but I remember Levin talking about them all the time on his show; that's why I'm using him as my example.)
Of course Luther didn't say that his "personal interpretation" of the Bible should be the sole judge and arbiter. He said that the Bible Alone should be.
Sola Scriptura.
Not canon law, not papal bulls, not the sayings of the Church Fathers and Saints, not local nor regional church traditions. All of those hermeneutic guides were given zero weight if they did not agree with Luther's personal interpretation, which he arrived at through his "conscience".
As if the Bible sits there like a daisy in the field, just waiting to be naively interpreted in the Lutherian way.
I highly recommend Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation. It expands on this point in great depth.
InB4 some crank replies that he hasn't seen it therefore it's irrelevant. Not every nerd on the chans has seen everything, either and you will inevitably get crankish replies on 4chan threads, too.
I can easily, EASILY imagine a 20th century-level catastrophe occurring in California, and the west in general, amidst all this covid-cuckery. Remember Garcetti's "snitches get rewards"? Following your truck, there is plenty of potential energy for violence to go around. Forests regrow awfully quickly, and you don't need a consistent ideology to light up a tinderbox world. You only need fear and moral grandstanding.
The euphemism (Augustus had several euphemistic titles, of which Imperator was only one, as was Princeps) had several important consequences over time.
one of which was the lack of a formal hereditary line of succession, right down to the end (though the dynastic principle would tend to dominate). People think of the positive aspect of this when they think of the Antonines (who even so adopted all of their successors, for reasons having to do more with inheritance of estates than formal succession to the political offices, something that was still ceremonially granted by the Senate). Until the wisest and best of the Antonines decided it would be wisest and best to adopt his own son as his successor (something that led to modern conspiracy theories such as the film "Gladiator").
But more often than not this indeterminacy led to problems & strife without necessarily avoiding the pitfall of worthless heirs (who the office did not educate). Something to keep in mind since we have the same hangups about Kings. Unless they are kangs n sheet. Kang Kunta Shaka Tupac Amaru Oswald Bates, anyone? The office will edumicate him.
Kindly let me employ a parable... If I cum inside your wife, suppose you know about that and you believe it's your kid still; like, you're so above this bullshit chimp ideology of biology supremacy and not at all desperate to pass sperm through your wife's uterus yourself (one's sperm is as good as any other)... I think there are ways in which the rest of us can agree it's not your kid!
Guys When you write here, pretend this site has already been hacked and you you've just torrented down 2Tb of data from somewhere and you have just launched a python script to comb through the data to find your user name, real email, id, credit card info and all your posts.
They will take the worst thing said on any thread and paint everybody with it and it will be a mob doing it. They are looking for the letterbox emphasis quote, and any sentence with the phrase 'fucking shiksas' would definitely be amongst the top ten. I've never met a Jew that would actually use that term outside of the Autonomous Oblast. Have you ever met a black person that called you honky? (no fair if you are over 70 ).
For some reason I am reminded of this line:
"A philosemite is an anti-semite who likes jews".
If it would make Abraham Foxman blush try to say it a different way.
Didn't Curtis have a post about this a few weeks ago?
Not down with the Juden Uber Alles approach. Not at all considering how much animus the chosen have against we poor white southerners who never did a damned thing to them.
Yarvin alternates between being very aware that the current Chinese government has most of the characteristics he is looking for, and ignoring it completely in nationalistic hope that the future will be ''American'' in some way.
I don't think so, China is ruled by a one party state that calls itself a democratic socialist state that is in fact ruled by an oligarchy of party leaders competing with each other by accusing each other of corruption etc- such as what happened to Bo Xolai and others- after the disaster that was the cultural Revolution under Mao's fourth wife. They've abandoned communism and are simply a monetary plutocracy with state owned enterprises (SOE) almost like a mutated form of late republican Rome. China, Russia and the US are all on the same trajectory of demotic oligarchic corruption and heading towards a political low energy state, all have sham elections except the US which is fast approaching that state anyway.
In a brilliant scene of Clint Eastwoods "Unforgiven", the gunman English Bob (Richard Harris) tells his listeners on a train how monarchy is superior to democracy. He thinks that a murderer will not hesitate to kill an elected president, who is just a normal man, but his hands will tremble if he points his gun to royalty.
Americans have not known in the last 250 years the a society which is governed by nobles and monarchs, and so lack the historical understanding what this really means. The future will be American, because the past was already American, but Americans are culturally mostly influenced by Europeans.
In order to understand Curtis ideas, you have to become a little more European again and leave the anarchic minds of American history behind you. Yarvin is in many ways a more European thinker, than American, or to be more precise: he is an American thinker, who thinks in European historical terms.
For me, a European, that's one of the most fascinating traits of his writing.
I think that we need to work out a really specific list of American things, not just nebulous stuff such as "free speech" and "family". Something more like a radio ad that used to run when I was a kid: "Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet!" Obviously this was a Chevrolet-ad, but this is the kind of thing that has to be worked out.
Instead of "free speech", something like "telling dirty jokes while playing golf or fishing with your buddy on a Sunday afternoon"; instead of "family", something like "teaching your son how to ride a bike". Things that are obviously incompatible with masks.
Another point tangentially relevant because of what you said about the Duck of Death's comment on Unabommerism (which Curtin referred to by link in his essay as an example of low political energy) -- a big reason that there's no Revolt is that you won't end up imprisoned with your fellow noble rebels feeling miserably awesome together; you'll end up in a dungeon-lab crammed together with sadists and zombies.
On the other hand, maybe the Chinese government indeed does have the right characteristics - for the Han Chinese. Not necessarily for North America, which needs a different solution perhaps. Nor is it the right government for the Uighurs/East Turkestan, I would venture. (I will admit that Gray Mirror 6.4 - Technology of World Domination is difficult to fit into this context - for now..)
The Princelings and the various bodies of the Communist Party may not be able to force Xi out in 2022, but they will almost certainly arrange his succession eventually.
I think it’s possible that China transitions to monarchical structure better and faster than we do. Which is not good because no one should want to be subject to Han thought police.
The problem is that when the government is accountable to oligarchs and not the rest of us, you get a system where individuals needs are subordinated to oligarch interests.
Heh. Of course it will. In some way...i.e. after the last of the rapidly cooling IP drips out of the specimen cup we just shot our last wad into (circa early 50s) is stolen by China (fair game.)
Tangentially related - Read Steve Yegge's "Hurricane China" post. I am certain Mr. Yarvin has.
It's as long, less-well read, less-well argued, and possibly equivalently impassioned as a median GM post, but the dude is influential, and it covers some very straight talk on our CCP friends. Skim and enjoy. Hope our host gives it a mention at some point.
As a fundamentally lazy man, the idea of an easy, peaceful, top-down solution is powerfully appealing.
I don't think it will work, though. Unfortunately, what's needed is trench warfare. Showing up for soil and water commission meetings, zoning board meetings, church councils, etc. Start small, get experience, build out. Think Switzerland, or maybe Venice.
Another 2 cup morning reading Curtis and its almost 1pm...best case for monarchy from him or others I've read and *sigh* my non-fiction TBR grows yet again...
The red line of Jesus popularity could be explained by the growing acceptance of Jesus as a slang word. It has lost its curse word status and is now just an exclamation. In the past a taboo filter limited it to mostly sincere mentions.
filtering by mentions in various dialects, the rapid numerical decline among the terms in recent years is intriguing. maybe some google data collection artifact
all have comparatively flatlined in british english for example fwiw
This is great but you can't write the manuals as if religion doesn't matter or is not part of all these movements, please take a look at the graph No 2 again!
I highly recommend people watch Adam Curtis' new doc series "Can't Get You Out of My Head" despite his leftism he goes into how ghosts of the past rule the political present and the social political stagnation it has caused, he also talks alot about the atomisation of the individual via individualism, global monitoring etc, good for those that want different perspectives.
The accurate, insightful description of Hitler as a bright uneducated misfit similar to some people whom one might encounter on blog-comments-pages isn't compatible with the "Hitler was gay" theme, which is based on a book by some psychoanalyst sort of person who thought that it was weird that Hitler's relationship with a certain male friend meant a lot to him. It seems unkind to misfits who might have an unusually intense need to establish deep relationships with other men to put this in the same box as a desire to have sex with other men. He had intense feelings about that niece of his, too -- he went vegetarian in penance after she killed herself -- so shouldn't this be taken as at least equally convincing evidence that he was "straight"?
Where did my morning just go? Best 10 bucks I've ever spent, better to say invested.
A Gray Mirror University would be welcome.
Nothing more to add but the Iranian revolution is a revolution you don't ever seen to reference. Although I'm working through your back catalogue.
>Gray Mirror University
I'd pay an embarrassing amount of money for a MOOC-style video course featuring Curtis.
The Antiversity with saccharine animated whiteboard drawings and a Curtis narration.
IFF it included core technical observations, not just techno-policy. The man is a technical iceberg, I want to see more.
I like it too but come on
Education today - like politics - is failing us all. Something accessible and easy to digest that links up so many strands of thought would be helpful to me.
Who exactly wants to be ruled by a Shiite monarch, who has apocalyptic visions?
If it was run by a younger Cardinal Ratzinger, I might go for it!
obviously not shiite, but you get what I mean
Absolutely.
Not qualified to answer but always willing to learn more about how things fit into history.
The revolution in Iran in 1979 established a theocratic government, that replaced the Shah Reza Pahlevi. (Shah means King, the chess game comes from the word.)
The first ruler of the Iranian revolution was Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiite Islamic scholar, who implemented in Iran for the first time in history the "Velāyat-e Faqih", the rule of the jurisprudent, i.e. the government of Islamic clerics, which form the Guardian council. While Irans political system is (at least formally) democratic, there are elections, courts, institutions, a parliament, press and publishing, all power lies by the Guardian council which has to serve (in Arabic this is called shura) as advisory board to the current Supreme leader, Ali Chamenei.
The Shiite Muslims are divided into two branches: the 7er shia and the 12er shia, the numbers refer to the "hidden imams", which lurk in the shadows to come out in times of crisis. Irans ruler are 12er shias, which has a stronger apocalyptic leaning, is expecting the last hidden Imam to come out and declare judgement day and the Shia utopia.
A relatively newly established hereditary monarchy is brushed aside by a democratic revolution (externally sanctioned?) that leads directly to a different form of (non hereditary) monarchy.
Religion of course plays a huge role but as I said, I’m not qualified to pick it apart.
I like neo-hereditary but I oppose the dehumanizing effects of modern birthing programs (not in a small part because of my catholicism).
I would not want to compromise the dignity of a human person, especially the monarch. However, i think it could work if we set up some sort of Bene-Gesserite breeding program for the royal family. This would be humane and dignified, like creating a prized race horse rather than artificial human soup.
After just a generation or two we would have enough swappable, competent princes, that the monarchy could essentially continue on forever. It also gets more robust as time goes on.
> dignity of a human person
What does this even mean?
I think the context is pretty clear, but I'll explain it. A man making love to his wife is a more fitting way for life to come into existence than him jacking off into a cup. It should be avoided if possible.
A woman carrying her child is a more fitting image of motherhood than frankensteining someone else's egg into her body. It should be avoided if possible.
Ignoring the ethics of it (which shouldn't be discounted, if indeed out goal is a society that lets humans lead thier best lives), the scientific data backs me up on this. People in, and from traditional families are smarter, happier, better adjusted and more successful in general. They even live longer. We shouldn't break something that isn't broken, just for the sake of breaking it.
So say we all.
The difference between an Augustus and a Caligula is significant enough such that millions of people will be affected if you make the wrong choice. Cloning Augustus 10 times and raising miniGustus in stable families will no denigrate their lives. You're Christian so I'm not hoping to dissuade you. It's a roadblock I don't have.
You would think that we would notice a Caligula in his rearing wouldn't you? If you don't think a prince is up to the task, don't pick that prince. We should have enough heirs and a strong backup layer.
Maybe i just don't get the appeal. Sex+education what else about as good as cloning +education, and the cultural windfall seems far less catastrophic.
Hopefully, you'd agree that you wouldn't want every citizen a clone? Since traditional family structure seem to be a net positive according to the data.
> You would think that we would notice a Caligula in his rearing wouldn't you?
Yet a Caligula was emperor.
> If you don't think a prince is up to the task, don't pick that prince
I don't have the power to pick anything, thinking you do is a masturbatory.
> Sex+education what else about as good as cloning +education
Sex introduces an insane amount of variation in ability and performance of offspring. Cloning gives you stability. Education is irrelevant if you don't have the capacity to benefit from it. And even if you do, the value of information someone decided to shove into your brain is marginal. How much of high-school chemistry do you remember?
> Hopefully, you'd agree that you wouldn't want every citizen a clone?
No, I'm fine with plebian masses procreating however they see fit. They'll eventually get around to gene editing their offspring anyway. You need families in any case.
They say Caligula didn't get that way until after he had a fever early in his reign. He was thought to be somewhat promising before that. So you wouldn't have caught it if you were observing him as he was brought up. His father Germanicus was the best of men--kind, competent, and temperate and was "LIttle Boot"'s hero.
Who is this "you" that's making the right or wrong choice?
You sure got me there man, my whole existence is changed now. 'Who is this "you"' is a rabbit hole, 'making choices' is a rabbit hole, 'right or wrong' is a rabbit hole. I don't want to engage.
Modern birthing programs in how you get sociopaths. Stick with tradition on that regard at least Yarvin.
Correct. The more I think about it the more negative I see to an artificial approach opposed towards the Bene-Gesserit, even disregarding the inhumanity of it.
First the results aren't that exceptional. As Curtis notes even in this post, even the "random" distribution of genes now produces plenty of capable leaders. A simple breeding program designed to monitor the genetics of perhaps 3 initial royal families (with the intent that the program will merge them in the near future) will ensure a steady stream of competent heirs, even within the confines of a traditional marriage (no polygamy, and limited to no divorce). Good statecraft training will handle the rest. We don't need perfect ubermesch to lead a nation, we just need a fail-safe against nature's humor.
Second, the culture windfall of such an artificial royal family would be negative. Part of the reason we're in the situation we are is because of the degradation of natural order and traditional social technologies. The family is a big part of that. It's almost a rule that the fashions of the ruling class become the fashions of the society. We can see this throughout history. Some of this is simple power leak, but surely not all of it.
As such, we should not want to encourage any behavior amongst the royals that we would not also want to see in the population. Families are a social technology that scales. Arranged marriages also seem to perform better than modern marriage (at the very least they don't seem to perform worse). It would not weaken the society at the very least. Married people are happier, and healthier. If we want the goal of society to make humans the best humans, you need to encourage them to get married, stay married, and have children. Artificial birthing techniques bring about social degradation by dissolving this paradigm that we know works. We don't have to find a sci-fi way to solve the modern concept of "family." Not when there's such an effective workaround.
Third, the Bene-Gesserit program would basically revolutionize medical science. We have an active, multi-generational, medical experiment with measurable results. Biology, Psychology, Medicine, Genetics and numerous other fields that provide direct tangible benefits to the population now receive huge amounts of funding, and have a focus on practical results achieved in ethical ways, while being utterly divorced (and thus uncorrupted) from power itself. The revolutions to these field in the quest to build a perfect ruler will be incredible, and the population as a whole will reap the benefits.
Now downsides:
Familial attachments to regular people (mothers as opposed to donors) might provide a very small power-leak. I think this is a much smaller problem to engineer away than an entirely new family structure.
The Dune problem: The Bene-Gesserits having too much power that they start to do shady stuff. I don't foresee this being a problem. Humanity probably won't develop genetic super-powers, so there's probably no need for odd prophesies involving genetic memory. They're also power adjacent, but utterly distinct from it. There's little to no potential that this caste of geneticists, physicians and educators become a new ruling class. You can't out-compete family in natural attachment, so their influence over these perspective princes is inherently limited.
A breeding program is a selection of bodies does not necessarily select sharp minds. Culture (and religion) provide individuals with that kind of resources.
A breeding program like the Bene Gesserit was solely focused on the selection of a perfect genetic line, but the didn't foresee what Paul Atreides would actaully do.
The mirror of princes belongs to the field of education, not genetic engineering. Only the best bodies will get the job, but the unpredictable competition is what the best mind for that job looks like.
Fully agree, and didn't mean to imply otherwise. The breeding section of the program is only there to ensure a naturally competent royal family. It being a long term genetics study is a happy accident. The rest (medicine, psychology, education) is to ensure that the princes stay competent even under the trials of their tasks and future royal duties.
"If we want the goal of society to make humans the best humans, you need to encourage them to get married, stay married, and have children."
Might this be a local, not global minima? A properly eusocial humanity would have certain advantages that might prove decisive
I recently read the book of a Soviet dissident from the 70s, Igor Shafarevich, called "The Socialist Phenomenon".
Shafarevich was a prominent mathematician in number theory and was due to his anti-Communist views permanently silenced by the Soviet authorities. In the book he describes "socialism" as an age old set of ideas, which appeared already in antiquity and which he saw at least in fractions in most civilisations. He discusses the Inka civilisation, Thomas Müntzer, Bulwer-Lyton the peasants revolts and insurrections of radical Christian sects in the course of European history.
He identified as main features of all these forms of "socialism": the idea of common goods and the rejection of private property, the rejection of all authority except their own, the destruction of family kinship by imagining and implementing quasi eusocial structures, and at least the later versions the idea of people being constrained to permanent work and working conditions. No spare time in socialism.
He quotes from several authors and writers over the century which reflected on utopia and the ideal society and he finds everywhere these features. The destruction of family by keeping children apart form their biological parents to educate them in the spirit of utopia is something he despises the most about socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Shafarevich
Hard to say, because few countries are actively stupid enough to destroy the institution of family, except here in the west where it's been overall disastrous
Research in autism has shown that evolution in all the most interesting traits are not really mendelian. They happen through gene duplication events. I think of them as these genomic waiters that go back and forth to the kitchen and neglect to drop off the dirty plates. There are these defined regions in the human genome where these duplication events take place.
You can line up these regions of evolution across all the primates going back 50m years. They are notoriously difficult to sequence, because the regions are so long and have so many duplicate regions (read lengths are ~100-500bp with most seq platforms, you need way more expensive machines to pull this off). These are the regions that map to intelligence and interestingly, (of course!) to autism. So your dreams of engineering a master race have some inherent brakes put in by Mother Nature, or what I like to call God.
So continually marrying math geniuses with each other ends up filling madhouses instead of Physics departments, which is probably a good thing in the long term this will keep everybody human.
I should modify a little: Of course in the general case, smart people having kids with smart people will beget smart kids, but if you're an asshole about it, if none of your ancestors fall for the occasional milk maid, then the above applies. The autism spectrum disorders happen through spontaneous deletions/mutations/re-combinations in a number of genes in those duplication regions. Those figurative waiters occasionally drop some of the pates or crash into each other during meiosis.
Where can I read more?
Can't we have monarchy without kings? no no hear me out! Longer elected terms, after the second election, vote of no confidence to remove.
Oh wait!, Clinton. 30 years of Clintontonian rule. our own half-baked Stalin.
Secret, revolving electors! Oh God that's the Politburo all over again.
HowBow legislative plan to implement, limited time, then Out!!
Oh God that's the five year plan!
Wasn't there a Southpark episode about this? but here, instead of Simpsons, its soviet russia.
Robot overlords??!!! that's been done too, probably on the Simpsons.
Totally on board for the Neo-hereditary monarchy. Imagine instead of some lame election with octogenarians fumbling over words put in their heads by cringey academics, we have the fucking Thunderdome. Where the ten genetically engineered super humans compete in some insane blood sports cooked up by the ring bearers to 1. test their aptitude to become monarch and 2. entertain the hell out of the peasants. Mandatory day off for everyone, you have until 12 pst to order and consume as many party trays and obnoxiously large sandwiches as possible, then its on.
Tyson Fury, the Gypsy King of America! You want neocameral, here it is, you dosser!
Underrated comment.
Curtis, when are you going to tackle the problem of state religion? I'm sure it doesn't escape you that no government can work without a morality that gives the board members a shared vision of what exactly is the public good they should strive for. So the rulers would need to have a cultural mechanism that keeps them all on the same page on the ultimate values.
Respectfully, we are entering the space age. Splashing holy water around and reading bibles will never again be not a goofy thing.
If you want succeed in building public virtue again, you’re just going to have to think of something new.
Friend, you sound like a Chinese peasant. This desire to go into space is goofy itself, as far as human life is concerned. Clearly, the human body is too fundamentally tied to Earth and it's 4.5 billion years old hijinks, it's obvious that we'll need to design a new body from scratch specifically for space travel. But then it's no different than making a temple to please Gods - you're fundamentally spending colossal resources doing an irrational thing hedging your bets on uncertainty. You do need better arguments to stand on, my brother. In post-post-modernity, you simply can't appeal to goofiness as we live in an hyper-ironic meta-conscious awareness of fundamental arbitrariness of everything.
You say that as if Woke is any less ridiculous than the ancient and profound traditions of the religious West, yet seems to be doing a perfectly good job of motivating public fervor.
The ancient and profound religious traditions of the west are inadequate as a unifying force or ideological tool to achieve GM’s goals. That’s all I’m saying. I think disagreement with that position is a pretty steep hill.
Maybe. I'm certainly not convinced (though I would be more convinced 12 months ago).
i'd like to see an argument that Woke-ism is in line with humanity's evolved/created biological/reproductive prerogatives. something the dune fiction addresses
i'm inclined to think it's runaway "hyper-ironic meta-conscious awareness of fundamental arbitrariness of everything" and computers should be outlawed (for example)
"You know, for the kids."
Justin Murphy concluded that Curtis is a Catholic or believes somehow in the Catholic God, whatever this means. I am a faithful Catholic and would like to hear more about this.
Yarvin himself stated he’s a self proclaimed atheist. Which I always thought was in conflict with what he preaches.
I usually don't question anybody's self description, but I found Justin Murphys interesting for the reason I couldn't see in Curtis writings any hint that he follows the "Catholic God" (Murphy).
And since I follow the one true God and not the Catholic one, I was interested in how other see this problem. The consensus seem to be the same: Curtis is an atheist and speculations about his presumed beliefs are irrelevant speculations.
He's an atheist but has no animosity. He will use God as a synonym for "reality", as the ultimate authority that makes all things move. I sense clear sympathy bordering on comradery with Jesus happening in his writing.
I think Curtis may be close to a Spinozist, but I can't see him being a fan of Jesus' teachings. Turn the other cheek would seem from Yarvin's PoV to be a recipe for disaster and self-deception.
Spinoza, one can argue is a good mediator between Jesus and Machiavelli. Spinoza is still a kind of humanist, but recognizes the constraints and necessities of power in regard to good governance.
Do you see Spinoza as picturing his CosmiGod as a Self sort of containing all of us finite selves within Himself so that He's the background-thinker of our thoughts?
When he asserts that everything's a body on the one hand, an idea on the other, is he imagining that bodies exist as objects of a SuperSelf's awareness -- so that (putting this together with his Substance=CosmiGod) it turns out that this SuperSelf's self-awareness constantly converts Him into the body-universe or something like that?
Spinoza never talks in this trippy 19th Century way so I'm not strongly inclined to see him as imagining these things -- but if he's not imagining these things then what's he doing in the Ethics?
Doesn't a non power leaking regime subvert this issue completely. People would be free to engage in whatever religious practice they like without posing any threat to the regime or the people who do not share their views, because they can't exercise any power over those people. That's my hope anyway. Not sure it plays out.
True. Suggested minor modifications to your last paragraph: "power-hungry" rather than "greedy" (because "greedy" suggests money-lust) and something along the lines of "that provides them with a psychically necessary domination-justifying myth by allowing them ..." as opposed to "that at the same time allows them".
I agree with you Ezra.
Following Test's comment above, any successful civilizational shift will require some form of state religion as a major component. The current Davos religion is obviously Woke, which is a weak derivation of Christianity. Elites are the primary drivers of any state religion, and while I'm sure some of them dislike Woke's anti-intellectualism, it ultimately serves their power interests well. It also supplies personal meaning in the Western consumerist flatland, and it allows hundred millionaires and billionaires to see themselves as Heroes fighting for the oppressed.
I have a difficult time seeing traditional forms of Christianity make a big enough resurgence to be able to serve as a state religion again, mainly because it has been gradually losing popularity with Western elites for 300 years now. I think it will have pockets of support, and its most conservative forms (Orthodox in particular, maybe Catholicism if they can get quality leadership) will perform the best overall.
A psychologized form of Judeo-Christianity is a possibility, and this was essentially what Jordan Peterson was creating. It clearly struck a chord with large numbers of people... Calvinist pastor Paul Vanderklay has said that his church saw a large spike in church attendance from people who had been inspired by Peterson.
But, there is only one Peterson. It's not easy to take ancient biblical stories and use them to create teaching metaphors that can directly relate to the personal problems of modern and postmodern people.
Islam is another possibility, especially in Europe. I don't think the current demographics will allow it to gain enough traction in the USA.
"In most periods, most peoples are in this condition. Like the Romans of the Empire, they are depoliticized."
Yarvin is using the word "depoliticized" equivocally. Most people throughout history were much more manly and virile than now. Their "depoliticization" consisted in being concerned with the local world around them rather than the world, or even their nation, at large. Today we have exactly the opposite situation.
"The submodern stage—the stage in which a society can latch on to its first simple modern idea with the absolute conviction of a duck imprinting on its mother—lasts at most one generation. Even if the submodern world had somehow managed to avoid setting itself on fire, this flammable world would still be a memory."
The "submodern" stage lasted for two or three centuries in the Anglosphere. Even after two world wars it took a generation to fully end. A more plausible explanation for the decadence of postwar America is one that should come naturally to Yarvin, that we stagnated in the absence of any meaningful opposition.
"It means that enormous changes in political structure are possible, without the risk that the small but inevitable sparks will land on some pile of leaves and burn down the planet again. If this is because the last century already torched it all, we deserve that silver lining. There will never again be a century even remotely like the 20th."
The 20th century was exceptionally violent, but so was the 13th. I'm not aware of the 14th having been more peaceful than any random century, and the 14th didn't have atom bombs.
"Simple: it will agree with the new power in town. Power’s pod-people act as if their brains were controlled by a radio chip tuned to a preset channel. This is not at all the case. The chip just tunes to the strongest transmitter it can hear. If their channel goes off the air, and your channel comes on, they are your pod-people now."
There was a time when the left didn't have power but obtained it. Clearly there is an element missing from this theory.
"Especially appealing is the fact that the incentive of a profitable company is also the incentive of a civilized monarchy: not just to spit out dividends, but to protect and grow the assets. The assets of a monarchy are the land and the people; so the incentive of a monarchy is to preserve and improve the land and the people. Which sounds a lot like protecting and growing the assets."
Investors generally like getting paid. And with a corporation that can't go out of business, there's a lot of room for power dividends.
"The only problem with this science-fiction upbringing is that it seriously challenges the normal idea of family—but that is just another science-fiction problem for tomorrow to solve."
Yarvin seems to think that modern ideas about the fungibility of human nature are true, but only for a small segment of the population ("armigers"). What if, and hear me out here, the idea is wrong in principle? That all human beings are better off living in the ways that have consistently worked across millennia and across civilizations?
On the submodern stage lasting for two or three centuries and also on the left having obtained power at some point -- I remember Curtis arguing in his Open Letter at least a decade ago that there's been a constant trend toward whatever we have now since Puritanism got going in England in the late 16th Century. So that there wouldn't have been a point at which the left obtained power; it would just have been getting constantly more powerful.
It certainly seems as though there have been sudden morphs into deeper weirdness, though -- in about 1965, for example, and then again in about 1995 after which the "Classic Rock" of 1965-1975 (of which the "Grunge" of the early 90s was the after-echo) seems literally classical in the Homer-Virgil sense, full of deep human feeling and spiritual awareness.
"On the submodern stage lasting for two or three centuries and also on the left having obtained power at some point -- I remember Curtis arguing in his Open Letter at least a decade ago that there's been a constant trend toward whatever we have now since Puritanism got going in England in the late 16th Century. So that there wouldn't have been a point at which the left obtained power; it would just have been getting constantly more powerful."
The Protestant Reformation was the most significant pivot in terms of the West accelerating Leftward, although I see the largest seeds of Progressivism having been born from Christianity itself (meaning no offense to Christianity, which I think in many ways has been a force for good.)
Christian fundamental teachings such as The last shall be first, The meek shall inherit the earth, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, etc., all contain potent destabilizing and revolutionary energies for any society they encounter.
Surveying other world religions, I don’t see anything else containing that degree of social gunpowder just sitting around in their basements.
These revolutionary energies have periodically upwelled in the West. I am persuaded by historian Tom Holland’s excellent book Dominion, which argues that the West has undergone several Reformations. In this view, the Woke Reformation is simply the latest iteration in that long line.
The key uber-progressive feature of the Protestant Reformation sparked by Luther was the total attack on tradition, precedent, and custom. Luther argued that only from the Bible, Sola Scriptura, could one ascertain the Truth. Church council decrees, papal bulls, local customs, canon law, the historical teachings of the Church Fathers and Saints—all of them were worthless, unless they agreed with Luther’s personal interpretation of the Bible, which alone was infallible. All past interpretive guideposts were to be thrown away.
Other ambitious and talented men came up with their own personal interpretations of the Bible, regardless of prior tradition, custom, etc., all claiming that they too had divined the one correct universal interpretation.
This was an enormous blow against anything like “conservatism”. We soon saw the rapid expansion of this new hermeneutics with the emergence of the Enlightenment philosophers, many of whom replaced Luther’s Universal conscience with their new worship of eternal Universal Reason.
Kant thought that by sitting in his armchair and using Reason, he had discovered the very bedrock of universal ethics and morality. Later, Nietszche pointed out that Kant had merely created an elaborate rationalization for the ethics and morality he had inherited from his parents.
As current research into cultural evolution is increasingly showing, we throw away all of our traditional hermeneutic guides for navigating reality at great peril.
Cynicism and Stoicism seem kind of politically subversive. Jesus talks and behaves a lot like the Cynics, and the Stoics pushed that "Cosmopolis" idea.
(Marcus Aurelius's MEDITATIONS might as well be entitled "Diary of a Gloomy Loner Who Hates His Job.")
> unless they agreed with Luther’s personal interpretation of the Bible, which alone was infallible
This is WAY overstating things. Luther is weird enough you don't need to strawman the guy.
Luther might have been like American conservatives in that he wanted to restore the authority of Paul just as a Mark Levin kind of guy wants to restore the authority of the Founding Fathers -- seeing the Church as Levin saw the federal bureaucracy before the phrase "Deep State" started being used a lot.
(Mark Levin is a Tea Party era radio-talk-show guy; I don't know whether Steve Bannon cares a lot about the Founding Fathers -- maybe he does -- but I remember Levin talking about them all the time on his show; that's why I'm using him as my example.)
Of course Luther didn't say that his "personal interpretation" of the Bible should be the sole judge and arbiter. He said that the Bible Alone should be.
Sola Scriptura.
Not canon law, not papal bulls, not the sayings of the Church Fathers and Saints, not local nor regional church traditions. All of those hermeneutic guides were given zero weight if they did not agree with Luther's personal interpretation, which he arrived at through his "conscience".
As if the Bible sits there like a daisy in the field, just waiting to be naively interpreted in the Lutherian way.
I highly recommend Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation. It expands on this point in great depth.
> there are no panzer divisions of 4chan nerds.
Panzer vor!
Which "Girls und Panzer" girl is the consensus 4chan "Girls und Panzer" wafu?
What are the odds the consensus pick would be the same for the Gray Mirror readership.
InB4 some crank replies that he hasn't seen it therefore it's irrelevant. Not every nerd on the chans has seen everything, either and you will inevitably get crankish replies on 4chan threads, too.
btw the correct answer is: Kei.
FAQ Yeah! Nyahello~~
No, it's Yukari by like an order of magnitude.
*Waifu
I can easily, EASILY imagine a 20th century-level catastrophe occurring in California, and the west in general, amidst all this covid-cuckery. Remember Garcetti's "snitches get rewards"? Following your truck, there is plenty of potential energy for violence to go around. Forests regrow awfully quickly, and you don't need a consistent ideology to light up a tinderbox world. You only need fear and moral grandstanding.
The euphemism (Augustus had several euphemistic titles, of which Imperator was only one, as was Princeps) had several important consequences over time.
one of which was the lack of a formal hereditary line of succession, right down to the end (though the dynastic principle would tend to dominate). People think of the positive aspect of this when they think of the Antonines (who even so adopted all of their successors, for reasons having to do more with inheritance of estates than formal succession to the political offices, something that was still ceremonially granted by the Senate). Until the wisest and best of the Antonines decided it would be wisest and best to adopt his own son as his successor (something that led to modern conspiracy theories such as the film "Gladiator").
But more often than not this indeterminacy led to problems & strife without necessarily avoiding the pitfall of worthless heirs (who the office did not educate). Something to keep in mind since we have the same hangups about Kings. Unless they are kangs n sheet. Kang Kunta Shaka Tupac Amaru Oswald Bates, anyone? The office will edumicate him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7dPprbzNSc
Genetically engineered race of Jewish Elite Kings?
Stop, I can only get so erect.
Well since we already control banking and the media, this might work!
ACKSHUALLY, it's Protestants that control the world. — Curtis Yarvin, somewhere
Michael Simmons know what’s good.
Kindly let me employ a parable... If I cum inside your wife, suppose you know about that and you believe it's your kid still; like, you're so above this bullshit chimp ideology of biology supremacy and not at all desperate to pass sperm through your wife's uterus yourself (one's sperm is as good as any other)... I think there are ways in which the rest of us can agree it's not your kid!
Guys When you write here, pretend this site has already been hacked and you you've just torrented down 2Tb of data from somewhere and you have just launched a python script to comb through the data to find your user name, real email, id, credit card info and all your posts.
They will take the worst thing said on any thread and paint everybody with it and it will be a mob doing it. They are looking for the letterbox emphasis quote, and any sentence with the phrase 'fucking shiksas' would definitely be amongst the top ten. I've never met a Jew that would actually use that term outside of the Autonomous Oblast. Have you ever met a black person that called you honky? (no fair if you are over 70 ).
For some reason I am reminded of this line:
"A philosemite is an anti-semite who likes jews".
If it would make Abraham Foxman blush try to say it a different way.
Didn't Curtis have a post about this a few weeks ago?
Not down with the Juden Uber Alles approach. Not at all considering how much animus the chosen have against we poor white southerners who never did a damned thing to them.
stop being poor
puhleez see my other comment above (I think).
Yarvin alternates between being very aware that the current Chinese government has most of the characteristics he is looking for, and ignoring it completely in nationalistic hope that the future will be ''American'' in some way.
I have it on good authority that MBS reads GM and actually posts in the comments
Inshallah we will have tech-monarchies in bio-domes across the desert.
I don't think so, China is ruled by a one party state that calls itself a democratic socialist state that is in fact ruled by an oligarchy of party leaders competing with each other by accusing each other of corruption etc- such as what happened to Bo Xolai and others- after the disaster that was the cultural Revolution under Mao's fourth wife. They've abandoned communism and are simply a monetary plutocracy with state owned enterprises (SOE) almost like a mutated form of late republican Rome. China, Russia and the US are all on the same trajectory of demotic oligarchic corruption and heading towards a political low energy state, all have sham elections except the US which is fast approaching that state anyway.
In a brilliant scene of Clint Eastwoods "Unforgiven", the gunman English Bob (Richard Harris) tells his listeners on a train how monarchy is superior to democracy. He thinks that a murderer will not hesitate to kill an elected president, who is just a normal man, but his hands will tremble if he points his gun to royalty.
Americans have not known in the last 250 years the a society which is governed by nobles and monarchs, and so lack the historical understanding what this really means. The future will be American, because the past was already American, but Americans are culturally mostly influenced by Europeans.
In order to understand Curtis ideas, you have to become a little more European again and leave the anarchic minds of American history behind you. Yarvin is in many ways a more European thinker, than American, or to be more precise: he is an American thinker, who thinks in European historical terms.
For me, a European, that's one of the most fascinating traits of his writing.
I think that we need to work out a really specific list of American things, not just nebulous stuff such as "free speech" and "family". Something more like a radio ad that used to run when I was a kid: "Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet!" Obviously this was a Chevrolet-ad, but this is the kind of thing that has to be worked out.
Instead of "free speech", something like "telling dirty jokes while playing golf or fishing with your buddy on a Sunday afternoon"; instead of "family", something like "teaching your son how to ride a bike". Things that are obviously incompatible with masks.
Another point tangentially relevant because of what you said about the Duck of Death's comment on Unabommerism (which Curtin referred to by link in his essay as an example of low political energy) -- a big reason that there's no Revolt is that you won't end up imprisoned with your fellow noble rebels feeling miserably awesome together; you'll end up in a dungeon-lab crammed together with sadists and zombies.
He ignores Putin and basically the entire history of the world monarchies.
On the other hand, maybe the Chinese government indeed does have the right characteristics - for the Han Chinese. Not necessarily for North America, which needs a different solution perhaps. Nor is it the right government for the Uighurs/East Turkestan, I would venture. (I will admit that Gray Mirror 6.4 - Technology of World Domination is difficult to fit into this context - for now..)
Xi is accountable? How so?
The Princelings and the various bodies of the Communist Party may not be able to force Xi out in 2022, but they will almost certainly arrange his succession eventually.
Sounds like an oligarchy then, how is this similar to what Yarvin is saying?
Sure, but it's oligarchy + monarchy as opposed to just oligarchy.
I think it’s possible that China transitions to monarchical structure better and faster than we do. Which is not good because no one should want to be subject to Han thought police.
The problem is that when the government is accountable to oligarchs and not the rest of us, you get a system where individuals needs are subordinated to oligarch interests.
"....the future will be American in some way...."
Heh. Of course it will. In some way...i.e. after the last of the rapidly cooling IP drips out of the specimen cup we just shot our last wad into (circa early 50s) is stolen by China (fair game.)
Tangentially related - Read Steve Yegge's "Hurricane China" post. I am certain Mr. Yarvin has.
It's as long, less-well read, less-well argued, and possibly equivalently impassioned as a median GM post, but the dude is influential, and it covers some very straight talk on our CCP friends. Skim and enjoy. Hope our host gives it a mention at some point.
As a fundamentally lazy man, the idea of an easy, peaceful, top-down solution is powerfully appealing.
I don't think it will work, though. Unfortunately, what's needed is trench warfare. Showing up for soil and water commission meetings, zoning board meetings, church councils, etc. Start small, get experience, build out. Think Switzerland, or maybe Venice.
You’re talking voice friendo, it’s all about exit. https://youtu.be/P5UAtAOV66c
Another 2 cup morning reading Curtis and its almost 1pm...best case for monarchy from him or others I've read and *sigh* my non-fiction TBR grows yet again...
The red line of Jesus popularity could be explained by the growing acceptance of Jesus as a slang word. It has lost its curse word status and is now just an exclamation. In the past a taboo filter limited it to mostly sincere mentions.
Perhaps, but I would also posit that the church continues on. Greater population, greater volume of church related work as well as blasphemy.
filtering by mentions in various dialects, the rapid numerical decline among the terms in recent years is intriguing. maybe some google data collection artifact
all have comparatively flatlined in british english for example fwiw
then explain satan's popularity*, curiously omitted as he is in some circles regarded as the present CEO of the planet
long live thulcandra (not the really fucking good black metal band)
*assumes the red line
This is great but you can't write the manuals as if religion doesn't matter or is not part of all these movements, please take a look at the graph No 2 again!
I highly recommend people watch Adam Curtis' new doc series "Can't Get You Out of My Head" despite his leftism he goes into how ghosts of the past rule the political present and the social political stagnation it has caused, he also talks alot about the atomisation of the individual via individualism, global monitoring etc, good for those that want different perspectives.
Michael Burry also recommended this doc just before he took out his glass eye at 2 am and went all in short BTC and long precious metals.
The accurate, insightful description of Hitler as a bright uneducated misfit similar to some people whom one might encounter on blog-comments-pages isn't compatible with the "Hitler was gay" theme, which is based on a book by some psychoanalyst sort of person who thought that it was weird that Hitler's relationship with a certain male friend meant a lot to him. It seems unkind to misfits who might have an unusually intense need to establish deep relationships with other men to put this in the same box as a desire to have sex with other men. He had intense feelings about that niece of his, too -- he went vegetarian in penance after she killed herself -- so shouldn't this be taken as at least equally convincing evidence that he was "straight"?
My question would be: Do I i really care?
Hitlers sexuality is one of the most uninteresting parts of his life. Certainly he was a pervert, most powerful men are and were.
And I also agree with description of Hitler, because most of his base were (more or less) bright uneducated men, who made a career in elite positions.
But the Nazis had also a substantial foot in academia and the corporations.
I wanted to talk about Spinoza, left my email up for an hour then deleted it.
I am sorry. I only look every couple of hours into the thread and missed it.