So true. These people think their giants and actually have influence on policy and public opinion.
In reality, in terms of effect, they are immaterial nobody's.
He even makes less money on substack then moldbug to boot. No wonder Curtis was charitable enough to recommend subscribing to Noah's newsletter.
Not that any of us ever would. Not because he's liberal, but because he's a flowchart liberal. If I ever wanted to know Noah's opinion, I would think for a moment about what the standard lib opinion is and know his opinion is just some variation of that.
>I would think for a moment about what the standard lib opinion is and know his opinion is just some variation of that.
I work in a liberal college town and this sums up basically every person I come into contact with. Like Curtis says they are perpetual children. If you already 'know' then you don't have to learn.
Powers which have won great struggles or at least defeated their enemies are usually boasting about their victory, search for historical justification or try to get recognized as legitimate successors of established heroes inside their respected narratives.
This is not the case in our time. Left wing hegemony never refers to itself as hegemonial or describes itself as the winner of a particular struggle.
The powers that make the left today or whatever one likes to call it, refuse constantly to admit they have won, but prefer instead to speak in the name of the oppressed and that their particular victory was fought against an evil aggression. The storm of the Capitol was the incident they needed to perform this task and in all honesty one can ask, if either Trump or his fans who made that move should not have been a bit more clever than that, to fall into that obvious trap.
But that's water under the bridge. If this hadn't happened something else would have. The fact that the left has won, by doing grass roots activity for decades, by establishing a very effective de-centralised network of communication, which has no obvious leadership, no identifiable centre operates strictly on, what far right intellectuals in Europe call metapolitics. Or in Gramscian terms: taking over politics by winning the wars about culture.
Right wing politics, or whatever you may call it was always shitty in terms of intellectual distribution of discourse, but this intellectual distribution is the basis, why the left has won. So, maybe in the spirit of Curtis Yarvin, right minded people should be more enthusiastic about going to the library, doing the work and come back with an intellectually well grounded knowledge of how things should be done. It takes time to build a stable network of communication, which does the trick and it will alter the political landscape entirely.
The really annoying thing about all this is not, that the left has won, that's just a historic pendulum which has gone one direction lately, but the fact that they have won and don't admit it, and prefer instead to mock and belittle you. The ancients who lost battles and wars were prepared for death, even the fate of getting tortured to death was acceptable, it was part of the game. But they would have never accepted public humiliation as a punishment for having lost. They wanted to die in honour. Or at least to get remembered as people of honour.
The left is powerful and they did this by their own wisdom and intelligence. They outsmarted their enemies, but they are also pretentious little pricks who think that one who is an enemy must be laughed at, belittled and humiliated. They don't want to kill you (yet), but they have to devalue and diminish your existence and become a totally depraved one. The ancients would have rather chosen death and even torture, before being treated this way. The permanent mockery and belittling evokes this cartoon from 1935, "Pluto's Judgement Day".
Not only is authority and power merciless, licentious and unfair, it also mocks you, humiliates you and tries to make you being complicit in your own humiliation, permanent struggle session, an enduring trial of enforced, purposefully wrong confessions. They don't even try to hide it, but make it part of their mockery and your humiliation. It is unbearable.
Anger and hatred are not good advisors. Violence is something that should be avoided, not at all costs, but at costs that hurt and represent a viable trade-off. One nevertheless can try to restore some dignity and pride by refusing to give in to these show trial attitudes. Defend your positions, don't abandon your posts, stand your ground, stand up for yourself. You can lose, but you can at least die in honour.
But we are not there yet. Instead of dying: Get to the books, read and study history. The path is a long one.
"The powers that make the left today or whatever one likes to call it, refuse constantly to admit they have won, but prefer instead to speak in the name of the oppressed and that their particular victory was fought against an evil aggression" - i.e., they cry out in pain as they strike you.
> the effects of helping people, or trying to help, can be only so nasty
Insert something about "Omnipotent moral busy-bodies" here.
Fun Fact (one MM is aware of, I mean, he spent much of this post invoking two cases of it): most of the death in the 20th century was caused by people who were only trying to help humanity. They meant well! Perhaps that's why their arms never tired of flogging the targets of their helpful ministrations.
"[T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
>> You would think no grownup could take this shit seriously.
As far as I can tell, in my lifetime, no Western school has actually taught history. It's mythology with a pipe and a mortarboard. (Cannot speak for the rest of the world.)
>> I offer Noah, and his work here, as a representative sample of today’s market for cruelty.
[Man just inside entrance of Rick's Café Américain]: "Are you buying or selling, sailor?"
Speaking for an Indian high school, it exactly is the same. At least the history taught in America has a small quantity of truth to it and not Marxist hogwash.
You have to see a high resolution version of the bayonet image to really appreciate the pathos of these common community organizers' faces as they are subjugated by Army regulars.
Getty helpfully describes the photo: "Three men from the mob around Little Rock's Central High School are driven from the area at bayonet-point by these soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division September 25th. The presence of the troops permitted the nine black students to enter the school with only minor background incidents."
By framing this as an insurrection, President Eisenhower got away with using the Insurrection Act to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy the 101st.
Helps explain why the mostly peaceful party at the Capitol was framed as "insurrection."
I heard from one of Michael Malice's people on Malice's live stream a few weeks ago that this already happened, but I couldn't find anything anywhere (and just checked again, still nothing)
I recall Weinstein mentioning on his podcast or some show years ago that he had met Curtis at a dinner party. I've been waiting for Weinstein to have him on The Portal ever since. Weinstein is a smart guy but sometimes says ridiculous, outlandishly blue-pilled things. I'm curious to see how he would defend his worldview against Curtis.
Agreed. I have a similarly exhilarating overall experience punctured by moments of frustration along the way listening to each of them [with Eric its the ocassionally blue-pilled overly sincere sentimentalism and with Yarvin it's the constant irony and branching off from solution offering or under-sincerity that can frustrate me]. It's undeniable thought that they are both brilliant "heterodox" thinkers. Just having one of them in a conversation ensures that it will go into fascinating directions, but with both, who knows what would happen?! If anyone can find record of this interaction, then please let me know. I'm doubtful it will, because both are notoriously selective with who they choose to have conversations with in public spheres.
I watched the episode of The Portal where he had Peter Thiel on, cuz I probably searched for "Peter Thiel in the past year" on YouTube, but I haven't found any of the other episodes attractive enough to click. So, I would really like to see Curtis on his podcast, but only because I like seeing Curtis anywhere (just like I like seeing Peter Thiel anywhere).
1. Yarvin is very confident in his powers of modalization. I.e., he thinks that he knows what would have happened if something else had happened (e.g., if Trump had been murdered, the NYT would have gravely intoned, "this is what happens to fascists..." or whatever). I'm not nearly as sure of my powers of modalization, though for what it's worth, I tend to have the same judgments that Yarvain does.
2. Yarvin believes that history has a telos: Cthulu always lurches left, as he used to say. If you deny that history has a telos, and *really* believe it -- I think few people deny that history has a telos -- then you can't be so confident that the left will win and the right will lose.
3. There's almost certainly a reason that the intellectual class is always and everywhere left-wing ("always and everywhere" is probably too strong, but I don't know of any place where the intellectual class is mostly right-wing. That said, I don't know much about history). My guess: the psychological traits that make one interested in ideas ("openness to experience", maybe?) tend to also make one take the left-wing side of things. I realize that's a shitty theory, though: you'd think people who were open to experience wouldn't lunge headfirst into dogma and demand everyone jump in with them. Regardless, if it's true that conservatives tend to be ... let's say, "practical", and liberals "idealistic", then there's not really anything intellectual conservatives can do to change this state of affairs, short of coercive eugenics or outbreeding the lefties.
4. I'd like Yarvin to explain more why he thinks everyone went woke all of a sudden.
5. If it's true that the left is utterly dominant, then how come the Democratic party doesn't have, as part of its platform, the plank it's illegal for private individuals to own productive capital? I'm not as sure as so many people on the right seem to be that, at least in the economic realm, leftism has gone from strength to strength. If anything, we're less economically left-wing than we were in the 60s.
Regarding number 5, the point is that leftism is an evolved co-ordination mechanism for the a polycentric power structure. It swims left because that's the most method of co-ordination what works best. The problem is that if you keep swimming left, you eventually get beached. This has already happened with economics: many decades ago the leftwards swimming reached the point where it actually makes ordinary functioning of the economy impossible. This Cthullu cannot swim any further left economically, it can just oscillate around the maximum it has reached. Indeed, this maximum is actually receding rightwards because the more dysfunctional society becomes, the less economic leftism it can afford without collapsing. Fortunately for the system, there are a whole bunch of other ways of swimming left which work just as well for co-ordination purposes.
Another way of putting it might be this: in the socio-economic system we have, the left will always beat the right, but the left cannot always beat reality.
Yes - you even see this "accommodation with reality" in overtly communist states (Lenin's NEP, Gorby's perestroika, Deng's reforms in China, etc.). Reality can only be bent so far before it snaps back with a vengeance.
I suspect this applies to non-economic truths as well - gender being an obvious one at the moment. Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I have a hard time imagining twenty-second-century parents putting their children on hormone blockers. It's just not lindy.
The simplest answer to #5 is that leftists like being rich too. The left's goal is not to socialise capital, but to transfer it to themselves - the only historical difference being the best cover story for this goal. Communism used to be the best cover story, but it doesn't work anymore, because everyone knows now that communism sucks (see Gabriel M's comment for more - you want to avoid getting "beached").
These days, instead of socialising the capital stock in the name of the workers, or what have you, you just destroy small businesses to reduce competition for larger businesses, then extort the larger businesses (hence BLM receiving $megabucks from bigcorps).
I realize that leftists like having stuff, but there hasn't been an actual attempt at communism since 1991 -- that's thirty years. The majority of the people--maybe the vast majority--who are pontificating about current events have no or little personal memory of communism. So, I don't see why they would believe that communism doesn't work. As Michael Malice points out, the right doesn't ever toot their own horn about beating the reds, and the left certainly isn't going to dwell on that. And indeed, a lot more people of generation Z are willing to describe themselves as socialists. Sure, it's not clear they know what socialism is, but that's kind of the point -- just call something socialist, and they'll support it, as long as the right people call it socialist. If that means socializing productive capital and distributing its fruits to the workers, why the hell *would* leftists oppose that?
I'm pretty sure those young people pontificating about current events have even less personal memory of Nazism, and yet none of them are eager for Nazism. Moral of the story: you don't need much personal acquaintance with failed ideologies to know that they don't work. Again, everyone knows communism sucks, even young people.
So: what accounts for the popularity of collectivism with youth? My guess is: if you have the choice between being high-status in a command economy, and being low-status in a market economy, people will prefer the former based on how concerned they are with social status (something typically of more concern to younger people than older people, hence the greater affection for command economics among young people - you'll notice that they don't envision themselves being low-status in the glorious collectivist future).
Hence the way to convince young people to not be collectivist is not to convince them that collectivism sucks (they already know this), but to convince them that their social status would fall in a command economy.
One evolutionary lens with which to view the left-right dichotomy is that the left mode tends to be activated under conditions of rapid change. Of course it is now Homo sapiens who is producing radical changes in its own social and functional environment, and not a meteor strike, persistent droughts, etc.
This “leftist” mode perhaps evolved as a way to adapt to radically new conditions where older cultural structures may lack sufficient survival value. If your environmental niche is drastically altered, it behooves you to be unusually open to new ways of procuring your food and shelter.
This of course doesn’t mean that a hyper-left mode is actually more functionally useful in current times- it is by definition more willing to shed older ways of cultural knowledge, some of which may be critically important for the tribe’s survival.
One of the fundamental insights in the field of cultural evolution is how conservative humans have been, and had to be, in order to survive and thrive. A paradigmatic example is Joseph Henrich’s discussion of cassava root preparation (from The Secret of Our Success), where multiple non-intuitive steps are involved in order to produce a non-poisonous final product.
Some lefty could come along and say, “why are you doing this labor intensive step 5, it makes no sense,” but it turns out that this non-intuitive step 5 is actually critical to leach out the low levels of cyanide present in the unprocessed root. And if that step is skipped, the cyanide poisoning takes years to manifest in visible sickness, so it is very difficult to see the causal relationship— and eventually, your entire tribe is ill.
In my opinion, one of the most striking aspects of the modern West is the pervasiveness and severity of anxiety, depression, and mental illness in general.
Obviously I can’t speak for Curtis, but as to your point #4, I think the key proximate factor was the fall of the USSR and the Iron Curtain, which removed the great enemy which had served as a powerful centrifugal force for the US and the West. Lack of survival threat is a powerful stimulus (viewed conversely, survival threat is a powerful stimulus...)
The dominant reductionist materialist religion of the West that grew and evolved through the Reformation also provides very little social glue. Christianity used to provide it, but Western elites had almost completely jettisoned that structure by the 2000s.
So we had a situation with a massively scaled society that had shitty cultural tech to actually glue the society together. Woke Religion was the system’s response to provide that glue, at least for Western elites.
With regards to number 3 - I don't believe that being an intellectual a-priori makes you more likely to be left. Look at political and philosophical thought before the modern era, and especially before the Reformation.
I think it's more a case that the ideas of the religious left make those who hold them powerful. As Moldbug puts it, powerful ideas have an advantage in the marketplace of ideas - Core to leftist thought is that the world should be run by academics.
And then, once these ideas have hegemony, those who hold them have an advantage over those who don't. Being an intellectual dissident is not a good career choice for an academic. Thus, once again, being left is *adaptive*.
The only reason to engage with someone is if they are a legitimate threat to you/your worldview. Responding gives away legitimacy to foolish power barnacles like Noah.
Even if Curtis owns him, Epic Style, Noah will not and cannot change his mind. Same is true for those attracted to the ruling ideology because for them it is a social function and not tied to a larger inquiry.
I know how you feel. I always see Matt Taibbi responding in good faith to tweets criticizing him, and I just had to suppress my maternal instinct and remember that he's a grown man who's been successful at what he does for decades, so who am I to tell him whether and how he should talk to other grown men? Not that that stopped me, haha
Children indeed, at this moment most Deplored of Les Deplorables are brushed out of sight, so our elites do not need to see us, or smell us (8 hour shifts rolling past 24). We need not be seen until riot, or who knows what rushes the Gated Community of Capitol Hill.
Sure, snub and piss off the sleepless help standing between you and the void.
The Rough Beast could use some coffee too, cold out there...
The G.E (lol) could walk in here now and ....
Some rough beast is gonna slouch into Jerusalem, and no Noah your hour has not come at last. Barely tolerable in Liberal Democracy are roaches crushed underfoot in competent authoritarianism.
I’ve met the competent authoritarians, nasty sneering children need not apply.
By the by, Noah Smith isn't O'Brien - Stanley Fish took that role and ran with it ("Boutique Multiculturalism" is O'Brien at his best, even advising arbitrary use of their power aka "ad hockery"). Noah Smith isn't ben Parsons (Yglesias has that role locked down).
I meant to say "isn't even Parsons" but for some reason my fingers decided there was a guy named "Ben Parsons" - maybe a Gunsmoke walk-on-role - that Noah Smith got denied.
Noah smith is just a flowchart lib. His opinion on any subject is easy to predict, and his reasoning is also quite easy to predict.
Don't get me wrong, you smacking him was worth it and I got plenty of good chuckles out of this piece.
But let's not pretend that you aren't punching down here.
So true. These people think their giants and actually have influence on policy and public opinion.
In reality, in terms of effect, they are immaterial nobody's.
He even makes less money on substack then moldbug to boot. No wonder Curtis was charitable enough to recommend subscribing to Noah's newsletter.
Not that any of us ever would. Not because he's liberal, but because he's a flowchart liberal. If I ever wanted to know Noah's opinion, I would think for a moment about what the standard lib opinion is and know his opinion is just some variation of that.
>I would think for a moment about what the standard lib opinion is and know his opinion is just some variation of that.
I work in a liberal college town and this sums up basically every person I come into contact with. Like Curtis says they are perpetual children. If you already 'know' then you don't have to learn.
he's not gonna stop, is he
Powers which have won great struggles or at least defeated their enemies are usually boasting about their victory, search for historical justification or try to get recognized as legitimate successors of established heroes inside their respected narratives.
This is not the case in our time. Left wing hegemony never refers to itself as hegemonial or describes itself as the winner of a particular struggle.
The powers that make the left today or whatever one likes to call it, refuse constantly to admit they have won, but prefer instead to speak in the name of the oppressed and that their particular victory was fought against an evil aggression. The storm of the Capitol was the incident they needed to perform this task and in all honesty one can ask, if either Trump or his fans who made that move should not have been a bit more clever than that, to fall into that obvious trap.
But that's water under the bridge. If this hadn't happened something else would have. The fact that the left has won, by doing grass roots activity for decades, by establishing a very effective de-centralised network of communication, which has no obvious leadership, no identifiable centre operates strictly on, what far right intellectuals in Europe call metapolitics. Or in Gramscian terms: taking over politics by winning the wars about culture.
Right wing politics, or whatever you may call it was always shitty in terms of intellectual distribution of discourse, but this intellectual distribution is the basis, why the left has won. So, maybe in the spirit of Curtis Yarvin, right minded people should be more enthusiastic about going to the library, doing the work and come back with an intellectually well grounded knowledge of how things should be done. It takes time to build a stable network of communication, which does the trick and it will alter the political landscape entirely.
The really annoying thing about all this is not, that the left has won, that's just a historic pendulum which has gone one direction lately, but the fact that they have won and don't admit it, and prefer instead to mock and belittle you. The ancients who lost battles and wars were prepared for death, even the fate of getting tortured to death was acceptable, it was part of the game. But they would have never accepted public humiliation as a punishment for having lost. They wanted to die in honour. Or at least to get remembered as people of honour.
The left is powerful and they did this by their own wisdom and intelligence. They outsmarted their enemies, but they are also pretentious little pricks who think that one who is an enemy must be laughed at, belittled and humiliated. They don't want to kill you (yet), but they have to devalue and diminish your existence and become a totally depraved one. The ancients would have rather chosen death and even torture, before being treated this way. The permanent mockery and belittling evokes this cartoon from 1935, "Pluto's Judgement Day".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUT0PYEeH6o
Not only is authority and power merciless, licentious and unfair, it also mocks you, humiliates you and tries to make you being complicit in your own humiliation, permanent struggle session, an enduring trial of enforced, purposefully wrong confessions. They don't even try to hide it, but make it part of their mockery and your humiliation. It is unbearable.
Anger and hatred are not good advisors. Violence is something that should be avoided, not at all costs, but at costs that hurt and represent a viable trade-off. One nevertheless can try to restore some dignity and pride by refusing to give in to these show trial attitudes. Defend your positions, don't abandon your posts, stand your ground, stand up for yourself. You can lose, but you can at least die in honour.
But we are not there yet. Instead of dying: Get to the books, read and study history. The path is a long one.
"The powers that make the left today or whatever one likes to call it, refuse constantly to admit they have won, but prefer instead to speak in the name of the oppressed and that their particular victory was fought against an evil aggression" - i.e., they cry out in pain as they strike you.
Just got a Qdrop telling me that no one has ever seen Curtis Yarvin and Noah Smith in the same place. The grift is on.
Bizarre bad faith creepy grifting
Shut up, Noah!
> the effects of helping people, or trying to help, can be only so nasty
Insert something about "Omnipotent moral busy-bodies" here.
Fun Fact (one MM is aware of, I mean, he spent much of this post invoking two cases of it): most of the death in the 20th century was caused by people who were only trying to help humanity. They meant well! Perhaps that's why their arms never tired of flogging the targets of their helpful ministrations.
"[T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
He's going full Socrates. It's been an honor.
>> You would think no grownup could take this shit seriously.
As far as I can tell, in my lifetime, no Western school has actually taught history. It's mythology with a pipe and a mortarboard. (Cannot speak for the rest of the world.)
>> I offer Noah, and his work here, as a representative sample of today’s market for cruelty.
[Man just inside entrance of Rick's Café Américain]: "Are you buying or selling, sailor?"
History lessons in my high school experience were essentially a combination of the Hall of Cost and Civil Rights. So, as you said, mythology.
Damn, sounds like you missed the prologue with Justice Taney and John Calhoun.
Calhoun? The guy who is always standing on his hind legs?
Speaking for an Indian high school, it exactly is the same. At least the history taught in America has a small quantity of truth to it and not Marxist hogwash.
And here I thought we were all siting at a table at the Chestnut Tree Cafe.
Potayto, potahto! As long as we trust in Big Brother!
You know, I recently rewatched that movie, and it’s about as subtle as Hitler Lives
You have to see a high resolution version of the bayonet image to really appreciate the pathos of these common community organizers' faces as they are subjugated by Army regulars.
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/three-men-from-the-mob-around-little-rocks-central-high-school-are-picture-id514880574?s=2048x2048
Getty helpfully describes the photo: "Three men from the mob around Little Rock's Central High School are driven from the area at bayonet-point by these soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division September 25th. The presence of the troops permitted the nine black students to enter the school with only minor background incidents."
By framing this as an insurrection, President Eisenhower got away with using the Insurrection Act to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy the 101st.
Helps explain why the mostly peaceful party at the Capitol was framed as "insurrection."
Curtis, Talk to Eric Weinstein. He was just speaking about Monarchy on the Realignment podcast. You are my 2 favorite Jedi Masters!
https://youtu.be/Nak11yXkvqo
I heard from one of Michael Malice's people on Malice's live stream a few weeks ago that this already happened, but I couldn't find anything anywhere (and just checked again, still nothing)
I recall Weinstein mentioning on his podcast or some show years ago that he had met Curtis at a dinner party. I've been waiting for Weinstein to have him on The Portal ever since. Weinstein is a smart guy but sometimes says ridiculous, outlandishly blue-pilled things. I'm curious to see how he would defend his worldview against Curtis.
Agreed. I have a similarly exhilarating overall experience punctured by moments of frustration along the way listening to each of them [with Eric its the ocassionally blue-pilled overly sincere sentimentalism and with Yarvin it's the constant irony and branching off from solution offering or under-sincerity that can frustrate me]. It's undeniable thought that they are both brilliant "heterodox" thinkers. Just having one of them in a conversation ensures that it will go into fascinating directions, but with both, who knows what would happen?! If anyone can find record of this interaction, then please let me know. I'm doubtful it will, because both are notoriously selective with who they choose to have conversations with in public spheres.
I watched the episode of The Portal where he had Peter Thiel on, cuz I probably searched for "Peter Thiel in the past year" on YouTube, but I haven't found any of the other episodes attractive enough to click. So, I would really like to see Curtis on his podcast, but only because I like seeing Curtis anywhere (just like I like seeing Peter Thiel anywhere).
A few observations:
1. Yarvin is very confident in his powers of modalization. I.e., he thinks that he knows what would have happened if something else had happened (e.g., if Trump had been murdered, the NYT would have gravely intoned, "this is what happens to fascists..." or whatever). I'm not nearly as sure of my powers of modalization, though for what it's worth, I tend to have the same judgments that Yarvain does.
2. Yarvin believes that history has a telos: Cthulu always lurches left, as he used to say. If you deny that history has a telos, and *really* believe it -- I think few people deny that history has a telos -- then you can't be so confident that the left will win and the right will lose.
3. There's almost certainly a reason that the intellectual class is always and everywhere left-wing ("always and everywhere" is probably too strong, but I don't know of any place where the intellectual class is mostly right-wing. That said, I don't know much about history). My guess: the psychological traits that make one interested in ideas ("openness to experience", maybe?) tend to also make one take the left-wing side of things. I realize that's a shitty theory, though: you'd think people who were open to experience wouldn't lunge headfirst into dogma and demand everyone jump in with them. Regardless, if it's true that conservatives tend to be ... let's say, "practical", and liberals "idealistic", then there's not really anything intellectual conservatives can do to change this state of affairs, short of coercive eugenics or outbreeding the lefties.
4. I'd like Yarvin to explain more why he thinks everyone went woke all of a sudden.
5. If it's true that the left is utterly dominant, then how come the Democratic party doesn't have, as part of its platform, the plank it's illegal for private individuals to own productive capital? I'm not as sure as so many people on the right seem to be that, at least in the economic realm, leftism has gone from strength to strength. If anything, we're less economically left-wing than we were in the 60s.
Regarding number 5, the point is that leftism is an evolved co-ordination mechanism for the a polycentric power structure. It swims left because that's the most method of co-ordination what works best. The problem is that if you keep swimming left, you eventually get beached. This has already happened with economics: many decades ago the leftwards swimming reached the point where it actually makes ordinary functioning of the economy impossible. This Cthullu cannot swim any further left economically, it can just oscillate around the maximum it has reached. Indeed, this maximum is actually receding rightwards because the more dysfunctional society becomes, the less economic leftism it can afford without collapsing. Fortunately for the system, there are a whole bunch of other ways of swimming left which work just as well for co-ordination purposes.
Another way of putting it might be this: in the socio-economic system we have, the left will always beat the right, but the left cannot always beat reality.
Yes - you even see this "accommodation with reality" in overtly communist states (Lenin's NEP, Gorby's perestroika, Deng's reforms in China, etc.). Reality can only be bent so far before it snaps back with a vengeance.
I suspect this applies to non-economic truths as well - gender being an obvious one at the moment. Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I have a hard time imagining twenty-second-century parents putting their children on hormone blockers. It's just not lindy.
The simplest answer to #5 is that leftists like being rich too. The left's goal is not to socialise capital, but to transfer it to themselves - the only historical difference being the best cover story for this goal. Communism used to be the best cover story, but it doesn't work anymore, because everyone knows now that communism sucks (see Gabriel M's comment for more - you want to avoid getting "beached").
These days, instead of socialising the capital stock in the name of the workers, or what have you, you just destroy small businesses to reduce competition for larger businesses, then extort the larger businesses (hence BLM receiving $megabucks from bigcorps).
I realize that leftists like having stuff, but there hasn't been an actual attempt at communism since 1991 -- that's thirty years. The majority of the people--maybe the vast majority--who are pontificating about current events have no or little personal memory of communism. So, I don't see why they would believe that communism doesn't work. As Michael Malice points out, the right doesn't ever toot their own horn about beating the reds, and the left certainly isn't going to dwell on that. And indeed, a lot more people of generation Z are willing to describe themselves as socialists. Sure, it's not clear they know what socialism is, but that's kind of the point -- just call something socialist, and they'll support it, as long as the right people call it socialist. If that means socializing productive capital and distributing its fruits to the workers, why the hell *would* leftists oppose that?
I'm pretty sure those young people pontificating about current events have even less personal memory of Nazism, and yet none of them are eager for Nazism. Moral of the story: you don't need much personal acquaintance with failed ideologies to know that they don't work. Again, everyone knows communism sucks, even young people.
So: what accounts for the popularity of collectivism with youth? My guess is: if you have the choice between being high-status in a command economy, and being low-status in a market economy, people will prefer the former based on how concerned they are with social status (something typically of more concern to younger people than older people, hence the greater affection for command economics among young people - you'll notice that they don't envision themselves being low-status in the glorious collectivist future).
Hence the way to convince young people to not be collectivist is not to convince them that collectivism sucks (they already know this), but to convince them that their social status would fall in a command economy.
Hi WCP-
In regards to your point #3:
One evolutionary lens with which to view the left-right dichotomy is that the left mode tends to be activated under conditions of rapid change. Of course it is now Homo sapiens who is producing radical changes in its own social and functional environment, and not a meteor strike, persistent droughts, etc.
This “leftist” mode perhaps evolved as a way to adapt to radically new conditions where older cultural structures may lack sufficient survival value. If your environmental niche is drastically altered, it behooves you to be unusually open to new ways of procuring your food and shelter.
This of course doesn’t mean that a hyper-left mode is actually more functionally useful in current times- it is by definition more willing to shed older ways of cultural knowledge, some of which may be critically important for the tribe’s survival.
One of the fundamental insights in the field of cultural evolution is how conservative humans have been, and had to be, in order to survive and thrive. A paradigmatic example is Joseph Henrich’s discussion of cassava root preparation (from The Secret of Our Success), where multiple non-intuitive steps are involved in order to produce a non-poisonous final product.
Some lefty could come along and say, “why are you doing this labor intensive step 5, it makes no sense,” but it turns out that this non-intuitive step 5 is actually critical to leach out the low levels of cyanide present in the unprocessed root. And if that step is skipped, the cyanide poisoning takes years to manifest in visible sickness, so it is very difficult to see the causal relationship— and eventually, your entire tribe is ill.
In my opinion, one of the most striking aspects of the modern West is the pervasiveness and severity of anxiety, depression, and mental illness in general.
Obviously I can’t speak for Curtis, but as to your point #4, I think the key proximate factor was the fall of the USSR and the Iron Curtain, which removed the great enemy which had served as a powerful centrifugal force for the US and the West. Lack of survival threat is a powerful stimulus (viewed conversely, survival threat is a powerful stimulus...)
The dominant reductionist materialist religion of the West that grew and evolved through the Reformation also provides very little social glue. Christianity used to provide it, but Western elites had almost completely jettisoned that structure by the 2000s.
So we had a situation with a massively scaled society that had shitty cultural tech to actually glue the society together. Woke Religion was the system’s response to provide that glue, at least for Western elites.
Very clarifying response. Thanks!
And I should get around to reading Henrich.
With regards to number 3 - I don't believe that being an intellectual a-priori makes you more likely to be left. Look at political and philosophical thought before the modern era, and especially before the Reformation.
I think it's more a case that the ideas of the religious left make those who hold them powerful. As Moldbug puts it, powerful ideas have an advantage in the marketplace of ideas - Core to leftist thought is that the world should be run by academics.
And then, once these ideas have hegemony, those who hold them have an advantage over those who don't. Being an intellectual dissident is not a good career choice for an academic. Thus, once again, being left is *adaptive*.
That was a super fun read
I'm selling popcorn futures: ~rignet-bicteg
everything the left does is projection.
and are incapable of empathizing with sincerity, Carlyle's main heroic virtue
Responding to these people is both cringe and low status
Nah. This post just completely demolishes Noah's worldview. That's based.
The only reason to engage with someone is if they are a legitimate threat to you/your worldview. Responding gives away legitimacy to foolish power barnacles like Noah.
Even if Curtis owns him, Epic Style, Noah will not and cannot change his mind. Same is true for those attracted to the ruling ideology because for them it is a social function and not tied to a larger inquiry.
I know how you feel. I always see Matt Taibbi responding in good faith to tweets criticizing him, and I just had to suppress my maternal instinct and remember that he's a grown man who's been successful at what he does for decades, so who am I to tell him whether and how he should talk to other grown men? Not that that stopped me, haha
Children indeed, at this moment most Deplored of Les Deplorables are brushed out of sight, so our elites do not need to see us, or smell us (8 hour shifts rolling past 24). We need not be seen until riot, or who knows what rushes the Gated Community of Capitol Hill.
Sure, snub and piss off the sleepless help standing between you and the void.
The Rough Beast could use some coffee too, cold out there...
The G.E (lol) could walk in here now and ....
Some rough beast is gonna slouch into Jerusalem, and no Noah your hour has not come at last. Barely tolerable in Liberal Democracy are roaches crushed underfoot in competent authoritarianism.
I’ve met the competent authoritarians, nasty sneering children need not apply.
By the by, Noah Smith isn't O'Brien - Stanley Fish took that role and ran with it ("Boutique Multiculturalism" is O'Brien at his best, even advising arbitrary use of their power aka "ad hockery"). Noah Smith isn't ben Parsons (Yglesias has that role locked down).
I meant to say "isn't even Parsons" but for some reason my fingers decided there was a guy named "Ben Parsons" - maybe a Gunsmoke walk-on-role - that Noah Smith got denied.