In Defense of Buddhism

This is partially an answer to Bonald. I do appreciate how from a Western, especially Christian angle Buddhism sounds dangerously similar to the kind of Enlightenment, liberal-modernist ideas that led to the decadence of the modern age. Yet I think the similarity is superficial and one should not simply judge by analogy. The basic problem is that the whole historical setup is so incredibly different in the West and Asia that you almost cannot really compare and relate ideas so directly.

The important thing is that in Asia religion, philosophy and politics has never been so intertwined as in the West.

Politics in Asia, like in Europe before the Reformation, was just about playing the Game of Thrones. Various powerful guys contended for more power.  But it was not supposed to have any effect on the structure or rules of society. Things like the caste system weren’t a political question the same way in Europe, 1250 or 1477 politics wasn’t about whether the privileges of nobility are okay, but whether you support the Guelph or Ghibelline factions, or where you stand in the French version of Game of Thrones. None of the factions were liberal or conservative or anything remotely like that. They were just after power. And Asia rolled like that, too. The whole idea of politics as a way of restructuring society or changing the basic rules to live by is just as un-Asian as it is un-European in the older sense. Reform simply wasn’t an conceivable term.

And Buddhists shouldn’t be seen as political or religious reformers. They should be seen as a monastic sect, or a special group of philosophers who also try to live their philosophy, like the Stoics, as a fairly small  and elite group living apart  from society and NOT trying to affect society as such.

Why “Dividuals”?

I admit it – the name of this blog was taken from a blog name generator web service. But when it proposed me this word – dividual – I remembered I actually have a beef with the concept called “individual”. You see, it just means “indivisible” in Latin. In Greek that would be “atomos”. So the idea of the “individual”  means our minds should be seen as indivisible, atomic units that do not consist of parts. But of course, EVERY psychology ever, from Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul to Freud or Jung or Adler is precisely about HOW exactly our minds consist of parts.

I think the major issue is that the idea of the “indivisible” mind means that human beings have one unified will. It is fairly obviously false – parts of us have conflicting wills, such as one part of us wants to lose weight while another part wants to eat that cake.

To put it bluntly, this makes me less upset about coercion. If you would force me to not eat that cake, then the part of me that wants to eat it would feel frustrated, the part of me that wants to lose weight would thank you, and a third part, let’s call it pride, would be upset about not being treated like an adult. So my feelings would be more mixed than 100% opposed to that external coercion.

This doesn’t mean I oppose libertarianism or support modern statist coercion.  Let me put it this way, I find much of libertarianism OK in practice, I just disagree with the individualistic the philosophy behind it.  Not being so staunchly opposed to the theoretical concept of coercion does not mean I like the typical ways how it is done today, who does it, to whom, for what purposes, how often, by what means etc. But I guess that would make a longer post and now I just wanted to explain the “dividual” term.

I have to add one thing. Perhaps some readers will think that denying that human beings have unified will means denying personal responsibility and with that rewards, punishments, the logic of capitalism and so on. I think it is not so. At least I am a pragmatic guy: I don’t necessary want incentives etc. to be just, it is enough if they work. And all too often they work precisely through the idea that we don’t  have unified will: if part of me wants to be productive and part of me doesn’t, paying me to be productive strengthens the will of the first part and weakens the will of the second, making the first part win. How would even incentives work if we really had this mythical unified indivisible will? Suppose I don’t want to be productive, with a 100% unified will. Then I would just lazy around and stubbornly refuse to be productive no matter what happens, even if I starve to death. Don’t you find? For an external incentive to change my behavior, I need at least a little bit of disagreement inside myself, and then the incentive latches onto it.

Although of course it means punishing a whole person, a whole body, is something sort of a primitive solution and we use it only because we don’t have a better one. Ideally, we should be only punishing the part of the person that has the will to do bad things. Punishing not the criminal as such, but the inner criminal in him. How that could be done I don’t really know. Perhaps this is what the religious stuff about confession and repentance is about. Overally, I think society can only be organized on the basis of rewarding and punishing whole persons, unless someone has a really, really clever idea here.

The Star Wars mythology as a proper political allegory

I’ve noticed that a lot of people use the Star Wars lore as a social-political allegory – an allegory for the war between Good and Evil, between Freedom and Oppression etc. There is nothing inherently childish or nerdy about that: it is a myth, a modern myth, and using mythological metaphors and allegories have a distinguished place in the history of Western thought – they boil down to attempts to point out human psychological universals.

In this article, I will propose to attempt to turn the whole edifice on its head: by introducing two simple and hopefully reasonable changes in the lroe, I will demonstrate to liberal / mainstream readers how almost everything they believe could be wrong, and a radically Reactionary critique of modernity could be right.

On taxes, fair taxation and political communication

The author of The Migration Period blog proposed that very few people actually care about taxes as such: whenever they protest against their taxes, they basically mean that they disagree what their taxes are spent on.

Two minor disagreements first:

1) I think most right-leaning people disagree not as much about spending them their taxes on poor people but about spending their taxes on fat bureaucrats who pretend to care about poor people.

2) Even with taxes spent for the best possible purposes, one should’t really want too much of the GDP spent by a government because that means central planning and you know how effective is that. Keynes, not exactly a hardcore libertarian, guesstimated the healthy upper limit of sanity at around 25% of GDP.

But what I would really like to point out is this: I think it also matters how things are communicated. Why is it so that in the USA welfare is always communicated as the rich helping the poor, while in  Germany welfare is always communicated as citizens buying services from the government for themselves?

Towards A More Mature Atheism

Human intelligence evolved as a social intelligence, for the purposes of social cooperation, social competition and social domination. It evolved to make us efficient at cooperating at removing obstacles, especially the kinds of obstacles that tend to fight back, i.e. at warfare.  If you ever studied strategy or tactics, or just played really good board games, you have probably found your brain seems to be strangely well suited for specifically this kind of intellectual activity. It’s not necessarily easier than studying physics, and yet it somehow feels more natural. Physics is like swimming, strategy and tactics is like running. The reason for that is that our brains are truly evolved to be strategic, tactical, diplomatic computers, not physics computers. The question our brains are REALLY good at finding the answer for is “Just what does this guy really want?”

(If you still think human intelligence evolved to make us better dealing with nonhuman threats and challenges such as hunting, google “Ecological Dominance – Social Competition”.)

Thus, a very basic failure mode of the human brain is to overdetect agency.

The Suppression Feedback Loop

There is a less discussed feedback loop in action when things like guns or drugs are suppressed by laws, or ideas like, racism, misogyny and communism are suppressed by social ostracism.

As the law-abiding or socially respectable people stop touching those things or stop publicly supporting such ideas, it is largely the criminals, the misfits, the social outcasts who still keep doing so. There will be exceptions, but the average character of people associated with those things or ideas drops like a stone.

Thus, the suppression gets retroactively justified.

From Moldbug to Donovan and back

I like impossible challenges, such as attempting to reconcile seemingly unreconcilable ideas and attitudes. I think Mencius Moldbug and Jack Donovan are the two polar opposites of Reaction. Donovan is something sort of a high-T philosopher of violence-glorifying neo-barbarism, while Moldbug’s political philosophy is largely about the idea that absolute kings did a better job at protecting low-T programmers-intellectuals from high-T barbarians than democratic liberalism does. Can we find ANYTHING in common in them – can we come up with any sort of a theory or analytical method that borrows from both?

The king and the subjects: a thought experiment

Imagine you are the king of a people, 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago.  In what circumstances would you want your subjects to be high-T masculine men, and in what circumstances would you rather want to emasculate them?