Morality/Ethics As A Social Prestige Engine

I am not saying the following account exhausts the topic of morality or ethics, I am only saying for a strict empiricist the following account would be (an oversimplified introduction to a rough outline of a subset of…) the actually observable social effects of morality and ethics.

Basically, it is about prestige. When we argue we have a moral obligation to do X we are saying we should deduct prestige points from people who don’t do X. It is fairly obvious from the emotionally laden modern language of morals: “Am I a bad person for eating meat?” “Should I feel bad about eating meat?”

OK, throughout history this kind of modern, liberal emotivist (see Alasdair MacIntyre) language was not used much (besides, it sounds like woman-talk for me, somehow it does not sound like high-T men’s “locker room talk”, I suppose in more patriarchical ages talking like this would have been a prestige loss in itself for a man), but I think this a motive that was always there.(Obviously, arguing that God will punish you if you do X is not a moral argument, it is an argument about practical consequences, an argument to self-interest.) Talking about moral obligations without an obvious allusion to such consequences is the kind that is practically about prestige.

What makes this a bit confusing and maybe difficult to see at first is that the West is a guilt culture, not a shame culture.

As shame is basically low social prestige, it is fairly obvious how shame cultures really work like this.

For a guilt culture, the simplest explanation is that guilt is internalized shame, and thus the idea of moral obligation is internalized shame, internalized prestige loss, you feel bad about yourself if you did something bad, thus basically reduce your own prestige points in your head even if nobody else did.

This is probably a good thing, at some level. Installing a prestige policeman in everybody’s head. Well, it depends on exactly what gets policed. But on the whole it sounds eucivic.

Arguments about the moral justification of political ideas? They are arguments whether such political ideas should carry high prestige or not. The moral justification of coercion, a big topic for libertarians? It is basically about whether we should assign high prestige to our rulers.

Note that it has a clever and stable solution, if an odious one. The rulers simply follow the ideas of those other people who have high prestige. Intellectuals etc. They coerce us to  do precisely those things that would result in a prestige loss anyway if not done. In a voluntary ancap community, do you want to be That Guy who does not give alms to the poor? The social prestige consequences would not worth it.

Thus when coercers punish, they punish low-prestige people and guess what everybody thinks about that: “They had it coming!”  This is why from a power point of view the left-wing Cathedral is a stable structure, a stable equilibrium. To rule and coerce according to the ideas that high prestige people approve of is to sit safely and securely on your throne.  This is the basic rule every wannabee Machiavelli ends up inventing sooner or later. This is why libertarians are pretty hopeless without a systemic collapse. The rulers wield their borrowed prestige as a shield and are able to constantly sabotage the prestige of the libertarian opposition.

The Divine Command theory of morals is another stable equilibrium. We propose that God made the universe, us, and everything we love, and thus deserves infinite prestige. Praise The Lord and all that, religious services largely reduce to channeling prestige up to God. (“Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to thy name give the glory” is a good example of the prestige channel. ) Thus, everybody who disobeys God’s commands automatically suffers a huge prestige loss.  Every violation of socially agreed morality is a prestige loss, but this is really clever subset of it to make an infinite-prestige concept of God and basically hit every heretic over the head with this Prestige Nuke.  It is just WMD level of prestige weaponry and tends to work.

I am proposing that when and if people are atheists, they tend to formulate such Prestige Nukes, Black Holes Of Infinite Prestige Density anyway. As they are useful weapons. “Progress” ? “History” ? “The opinion of the international community” ?

It looks like our grand 400-year civilizational change called Progress or “swimming to the Left” is largely about coming from ages where rulers listened to high-prestige priests who derived their prestige from borrowing from God’s infinite prestige to moving towards ages where the rulers listen to intellectuals who seem to just have a lot of prestige on their own, without such an external source, although they tend to invent such makeshift external sources as “history’s judgement”.

Nevertheless, if morality practically works as a prestige engine, if the basic rule of stable, secure rulership is to listen to high-prestige people and follow their ideas, it is likely that every system will sooner or later take up this  equilibrium. Even if Righties take over after a collapse or anything.

Thus the only potential for true change is to change how prestige is assigned. I mean, prestige is assigned by e.g. socially valued achievements, but also by moral arguments, such as “we have a moral obligation to do X”, thus doing X is high-prestige and not doing Y is low-prestige.

Part of the story is what achievements people value. Have you noticed that in Ancient Greek legends and similar old stuff a man “dreaming of doing great deeds” would basically mean he would be excellent at slaughtering foes on the battlefield?

But moral arguments also play a role, as people who do things deemed immoral are shamed and seen as low prestige, meaning that they will be kept away from power, and others will not be very sympathetic if they get coerced and punished.

The important thing is not simply what we find something moral and immoral, as that is only a result, an outcome, but _how_. How we argue, how we use moral arguments.

Change the techniques of moral argumentation and you changed what deeds people find moral and immoral. Change what deeds people find moral and immoral and you changed who will get high prestige and who will get low prestige. Change who will get high prestige and who will get low prestige and you changed which way playing field of the game of thrones tilts.  Rulers entangled with high-prestige ideas and people are secure and safe, rulers entangled with low-prestige ideas and people are prone to getting toppled.

Of course, what achievements people value also matters. It probably mattered a lot that Einstein praised Socialism.

I am not really sure which aspect is more important. It could be that moral argumentation is the most important aspect, and even that kind of prestige that is assigned to socially valued achievement derives from that because it determines what achievements are valued.  Colonial empire builders of the Sir Cecil Rhodes type were lionized at one point of history and absolutely loathed at another point.

But it could also be that that objective circumstances determine what kind of achievement gets socially valued, and then morality just flows from that: whatever arguments or even rhetorical forms the current Officially Cool Guys just happen to prefer, gets accepted as the obviously correct moral argument and thus everybody argues like that to have that prestige rub off on them. This version actually sounds stabler.

One thing we may notice is that the West does not really value the large-scale transformation of nature through technology anymore (see environmentalism, which is precisely about lowering the prestige of the formerly high-prestige captains-of-industry thing), nor is there much of a war psychosis going on. You can only hate on the 1% as long as there is not this kind let’s-all-stick-together-against-the-common-enemy thing going on. So  currently social achievements are most valued if they are… altruistic? The invent a better water filter for Africa kind. The modern hero is the doctor. Or the activist.

Suppose this changed? Suppose asteroid mining or generally the economic utilization of celestial bodies would bring so immense wealth that industrialists, discoverers and homesteaders would get high-prestige again in an Age of Sail way? And thus whatever kinds of moral arguments they like would be seen as obviously correct? E.g.  space exploration would be immensely lucrative but also a  dangerous adventure, thus it would attract brave people, we would value bravery because of the wealth it brings, and if the brave space prospectors are asked about a moral opinion, they would say “we should not do X, because that is  a cowardly thing to do” and this would again sound like a very convincing way to argue and everybody else would argue like that, too?

Suppose we had a huge interstellar with with some alien species? Thus heroism and the rather dominant alpha-male attitude of succesful military generals would become respected again? Imagine a long drawn-out war with so much human losses that motherhood is once again seen high-prestige because we really need another generation of soldiers, and antinatalist feminists are seen as traitors to the human species? And whatever kinds of moral arguments the New Cool Guys would be seen as obviously correct?

Scott, this is not about wealth. Civs don’t move their morals on their own, as if by a market or evolution process. It is small groups of highly powerful and highly prestigious people who decide to give those values a push.  But, you may be right that objective conditions like wealth or national security may determine which group of people, what kind of achievement, gets socially prestigious and it all may flow from that.

Another idea. What if the West is moving away from its guilt traditions, towards shame? What if this swimming-Left is about that? In guilt societies it is more often “you did bad” and in shame societies it is more often “you are bad”. See this. I certainly hear more “you are bad” these days. I mean, for example, how many people on the Left think e.g. racists are essentially normal people with wrong views, as opposed being completely rotten people? Not many. Of course we are not much better in these kinds of things either. The spirit of the age is just more shame and less guilt. The more prestige fights we have, the more it is about shame and less about internalized guilt.

Maybe the Restoration would / should be about restoring guilt? But what kinds of conditions could do that? True guilt is about literal compassion, as in, it causes you literal pain to see that you have hurt someone who really matters to you.   Complete strangers halfway across the planet usually don’t, that is usually just posturing. Thus this should be contrasted with how  compassion is understood in modern times, as “being a good person with basic human decency” which is just about outwardly presented compassionate behavior as a way to gather prestige. How could we return to feeling actual pain, not just shame, over our actions? By retiring into the Dunbar Number? Clannishness?

Finally, let me remind the reader that I have not even tried to exhaust morality here. There are forms of morality where prestige plays a small role, like contractual ethics.

Why Fat Activism Is A Godsend For The Right

I wanted to write a long article, but I found a photo on Voat that made it unnecessary.

It’s just so goddam perfect. One civilized, yet devastating way to fight people whose views you find harmful is to parodize and satirize them, largely by finding their real faults and inflating them into ridiculousness.

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

And we don’t even have to do this, because Fat Activists do this “for free” ! They act exactly like a fifth-column operation would, discrediting Progressivism by planting totally ridiculous double agents on them.

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good! And given that the only oppression they actually face in reality is people not finding them attractive (at least in a polite city where people stop making snickering remarks at 13), the very idea that attractiveness could be a political goal also speaks volumes – how feminism is all about an alternative sexual strategy for unattractive women, how Red-Pill theories about “solipsism” and “hamstering” are actually true for at least some women and so on.

But I am getting too analytical here. This is something to be cherished, to enjoyed, laid back , with a glass of wine, as the best comedy ever. Just the very thought of a self-important blubberwhale climbing on a stage and telling everybody with a stern, sincere face how to adore her laziness and gluttony as a way to end the patriarchical opression of women makes me want to roar with laughter. And when you imagine all the gammas nodding sincerely and sadly instead of laughing her off the stage it just becomes so much better.

I just watch this online quasipolitical freak show on Tumblr and basically want to buy all of them an extra large pizza or something, and pat them somewhere where I think their backs may be, for a job well done. My perfect, ideal satire, parody of a liberal, progressive, feminist, just offered voluntarily, without having to invest time and work! It’s glorious, and it is so well made! This is a case of reality being better than imagination really.

Imagine you are directing a satirical stage play and want put the ideas you disagree with into the mouth of a role who looks so obviously un-respectable, having crap for a character, and is generally low-status in a well-deserved way! How do you make it obvious? Poor clothes? Could be just tough luck. You want low-status but middle-class. You have to make their appearance suggest that their lot on life is not so bad, they just used it badly. What is an obviously good candidate for this? That they spend whatever resources they have on sugary slop and porked up.   If you want to cast someone in a satirical stage play as a middle-class idiot, you will probably come up with the role of the suburbian fatty. This is why it is so perfect a satire. And adding the plot twist that the suburban fatty is actually on a political campaign to convince people fatties are actually attractive and it is oppressive to think they aren’t – that is such a good satire, that reads like something written by Juvenal.

This is why all this self-satire is so glorious. It is just perfectly written and perfectly directed.

If there are any liberals reading this: this is roughly how you would feel if the media would catch Rush Limbaugh, Tony Abbot and Viktor Orban having gay sex in N@zi uniforms.  It is that kind of “All I want now is some popcorn…” type of feeling.

RE: The DIM Hypothesis of History

http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/10/27/book-review-on-objectivisms-sweeping-theory-of-history-the-dim-hypothesis/

The basic logic sounds familiar to me, interestingly, another influential group of people who tend to say distrust in Reason being able to grasp the actual truths of the world, and who also tend to consider civilizational rot is about distrusting Reason, are Catholics. Most famously Chesterton, who made the the following argument in Orthodoxy:

“If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.” There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called “Doubts of the Instrument.” In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—the authority of a man to think.”

But there is one problem. The radical doubting of Reason does not necessarily have to lead to this kind of modern rot. It only has to do so if people use it in a hypocritical way – they put a lot of trust into the Reason that does not trust itself. In other words, if people still give high prestige and status to intellectuals, if they still value books of philosophy, political manifestos, slogans, abstract concepts like equality and so on.

I mean, isn’t it weird that increasing doubt of Reason did not lead to the intellectual class losing power and status, in fact it led to them gaining more? Isn’t it weird how intellectuals can get more status by denying their job matters?

My point is that modernity sounds like a sham denial of the powers of Reason.  A true denial leads one back to practical experience (custom-conservatism) or emotion (Romanticism) or instinct (barbarism). When a Princeton professor (Rorty) denies Reason, somehow it is not to mean that the world should stop listening to Princeton professors and they should get a job as a carpenter instead.

Many great conservatives used to have a strong skeptic strain in them, and still do – Derb, Oakeshott, Burke, just from the top of my mind. Note how they were all British. There is something in British culture that cherishes the unthinking, unreflexive following of custom and tradition, which is far closer to true skepticism that this above mentioned sham. This is perhaps why we see dear old Scruton focusing more and more on rural life, hunting, and wine tasting – perhaps he is trying to demonstrate that essentially British thinking that one should live life, not analyze it.

(This made a certain impact here in Continental Europe around the 1980’s when leftie French Intelligentsia seemed to have started to run out of steam.)

Thus true skepticism is basically conservative. Not believing in Reason, the most basic thing we can believe in is experience, pattern recognition, and its accumulation called tradition.

And this skeptical conservatism has led many to turn off from modern dogmas. This was also my first steps on the path of the “heretic”.  Scruton, Burke and similar thinkers taught me how to trust experience more than logic. A liberal could give me a hundred and one logical arguments and I could simple point out the window and ask “Look, does it look like it is actually working?”  It explained me, for example, that while reading a million books often fails to make you more conservative, actually lived life experience can. Many liberal books taught me the world looks by clean rules of logic, actual life experience taught me life is messy, complicated, and pattern recognition works better than logic and anti-fragility works better than elaborate, detailed plans. In other words, life experience taught me to value sanity over reason or logic, and that is how I started to get fed up with modern ideology that is simply not rooted in hugging reality.

So, as a skeptic, I don’t think skepticism is responsible for the modern rot. It is more like sham skepticism, insincere skepticism being responsible for it, the kind where denying the efficacy of Reason does not lead to a healthy dose of skepticism towards intellectuals as a class and trusting experience (such as tradition) instead.

Perhaps, if we would examine more closer this kind of sham skepticism that made modernity, we would find that it is entirely inverted. Perhaps we would find the edge of sham skepticism was turned not so much against Reason but against experience. After all one typical modern Progressive thing is assign low status the kind of people who are called rednecks in America or Deep France in France. “Peasants” tend to typically those people who value experience (tradition) over Reason.  Respect for experience often means a certain respect for wise old farmer who perhaps cannot express his opinion in a sophisticated way but “he saw everything already” i.e. collected enough input from life to match the most important patterns.

And… perhaps we would find that the modern sham-skeptic  loves to argue.

To make it clear, what the conservative skeptic dislikes most is arguing. Arguing is all about appearing smart and knowledgeable about a thing by saying the right words about it and connecting them with brilliant logic – but to actually know a thing, it is better to look at it. Arguing is a far more a status game than anything else, and when a conservative is skeptical about Reason and logic, he is skeptical about their uses in arguing, not their uses in individual investigation. We are inherently social creatures, and a conservative way to distrust logic and Reason is to say we  humans tend to terrible poor at detecting seductively logical and reasonable-sounding, but still false arguments.  “Being reasonable” is a statement about our social, communicational behavior,  it’s not about lone minds wrestling with reality. It mostly means “arguing by the agreed rules”. And then the conservative skeptic says “Don’t argue – look!” So the kind of conservative skepticism I described approvingly tends to distrust Reason and logic primarily because of the role they play in arguing.

And now notice how the typical modern sham skeptic loves to argue.  This was true even of Kant. From Kant on they were absolutely great at arguing and this was their main weapon… how does a skeptic of Reason love to argue? What does he argue with?

Urbit And The Impatience Principle

Amongst the factors that determine the popularity of a technology meant for end-users, user-friendliness or usability plays a fairly huge role. I don’t simply mean pretty GUIs that can be added later on, as an afterthought (right, Unix/Linux?), I mean a certain principle which I will call the impatience principle here.

Suppose I need to reserve a flight to London for the next week and I heard Hipmunk is a good place to do that. When I go to that site, I will want to be able to find my flight ASAP. I don’t want to configure anything, I don’t want to learn anything, I don’t even want to understand how it really works or what it really does, I just want to find my flight ASAP.

(Programmers of the 1980’s used to be sore about this, “you can make idiot-proof programs but the universe just makes bigger idiots”, at some level it is disrespectful that your customers outright refuse to understand the work you are doing for them. Although the newer generation of programmers seem to have accepted this better, largely because they see the big $$$ in swallowing their pride and idiot-proofing everything. Ultimately, I as the user may even be a non-idiot and curious about how Hipmunk really works. But I will want to learn that later, when I have some free time to learn and discover things for fun, right now if I need a flight ticket, I just need that flight ticket ASAP! Hence the impatience principle.)

Now, in case of technologies meant for programmers, techies, IT folks, there is a similar impatience principle at play influencing how popular it is going to be and how quickly.

When complete non-programmers realize they have a problem they can only solve through programming, they are impatient, tehy want to invest a minimal time in learning the whole idea of programming, they want to bang out live productive code ASAP and solve their problem already.

Of course the code will be horrible, but whatever. Hence the popularity of Visual Basic. And early PHP which was exactly about this, too, web graphics designers found Perl too hard, because that actually requires learning programming knowledge, in early PHP they could just ask on IRC what built-in functions to call in what order.

Then sometimes actual programmers want to solve problems that are outside their expertise, like systems programmers wanting to whip up a web app. Again they will be impatient, they will want tools where they need to invest as little time as possible in learning their specifics and getting code running live ASAP. Hence the somewhat slower popularity gain of Ruby, Python and associated frameworks.

Then there are cases where you must be patient and really learn what it is about, but it makes you super productive for life. That is Common LISP and you can see how popular it is: not at all.My point is simply I don’t see the impatience principle at work in these early phases of Urbit – and it should not be an afterthought.

Admittedly I only looked at the theory at it so far, did not go deep into learning the specifics. But what the theory means, in my interpretation, if you want to purchase something from a webshop, you learn what a planet is, set up one for yourself, you learn what a shopping assistant application is, set it up, point your browser at it, and then go on buying things. This sounds like something that, starting from zero, takes even tech literate people _hours_ to do: the first time only, of course, but that is the point! There is always a first time, and usually people are looking for a new tech because they they want a problem solved that they could not really solve well before, and if they face hours of investment to solve that very first problem…

Yesterday I suddenly remembered a good book someone mentioned to me and, impatiently, I wanted to read it immediately. I took my Kindle, which was not used this way before, because I just used it to read ebooks acquired from other sources. So the first time in my life, without any learning or configuration, I entered the books title in Kindle’s search, found it, tapped one button to purchase it, and 15 seconds later I was reading it.

I really hope Urbit takes off, because I am damn curious about the politically philosophy Yarvin supposedly burned into it. It is not obvious to me how to get from his political writings to Urbit.

But for it to take it off, it must own the impatience principle.

Now of course, it is possible that the principle is already there, just not so visible yet. If most of the logic is in your planet, then maybe your computer, your browser, could actually be just a really dumb, cheap generic thin client? So in theory, a vendor could make pre-configured planets, and you had to do is to point your e.g. tablet at it? Purchase a tablet, purchase a card with a scannable barcode URL on taking you to your planet? Use it immediately, then as you go on, as you gradually learn it, you slowly take ownership of it and customize it? That could be satisfy the impatience principle well enough…

I know Urbit philosophy is closer to homesteading the web, of having your own nice little ecosystem, property on it. (There is a whiff of deliciously ruralistic, conservative philosophy there. Tolkien’s Shire as a web architecture model? Would love it.) But I think most people like buying ready-made things, and generally providing them as a service instead of a property seems more and more popular and succesful. Many people just don’t have this kind of ownership instinct. Even accounting software is going SaaS these days.

For example, I think home ownership is slowly on the way out. I don’t like that, but that is  the direction the world (at least, Europe) is moving toward. Renting a flat isn’t simply having a temporary property but more like using a service, and an enterprising landlord can couple it with other services provided for tenants, like cleaning, lawn-mowing, repairs etc. and thus it can more and more move towards a pleasant, lazy “hotel-like” experience. I think this is where we are moving towards. I don’t like it, I’d rather own and maintain my property both offline and online.  But I am not like most people.  If a technology wants to get popular, it has to follow what “normal” people want.

I actually intend to participate and contribute, so try not take it as an attack, but as an, I don’t know, strategic advice, strategic idea or something like that. Or just a personal observation how this angle is not yet obvious to me.

Virtual And Real Status, Left, Right

This is just an idea that occured to me during discussing a status-grab model of politics with Spandrell and re-reading Scott Alexander’s classic That Other Kind Of Status.

Basically I see a certain correlation. The more “real”, objective, solid, tangible, effective kind of status you want, the more right-wing / conservative you tend to be. The more virtual, subjective, feelings-level status you want, the more left-wing / progressive you tend to be.

Things conservatives I know tend to like. Owning a business. Owning land, agricultural, or other. Owning antiques, gold, old artwork. Owning large houses. Being physically strong. Having some capability at self-defense or violence, such as learning martial arts or owning guns. Owning powerful, fast or heavy (offroad)  cars. These are all things that can be bring one status (in certain circles at least), but they are also things that are intimately connected with reality and utility.

I don’t have that many liberal friends, but basically much of their status seeking is appearing to the smart, knowledgeable and enlightenened by saying the right kinds of things. Don’t you find that is somehow a more… fleeting kind of status than the one given by owning solid, valuable stuff? Or they take prestigious sounding jobs, but they don’t really get that well paid in cash. I think cash, savings, converted to valuables are far more real and long-lasting than the prestige generated by a job title? Or the whole SJWery, all that stuff about never offending anyone’s feelings and letting everybody feel perf. E.g. fat activists seem to be less bothered by not finding sexual partners and more bothered by people directly telling them this is because they are fat. Looks like they are more interested in keeping the illusion that they are attractive than actually getting more succesful in dating. Feelz before realz.

Imagine if the liberal is trying to gain status by buying a hybrid car and the conservative is trying to gain status by buying a Ferrari or expensive off-road Jeep. The first carries more social approval in those circles, but it is just based on the very far, distant, complicated idea of saving the planet – telescopic morality. The conservative’s  gas-guzzling sports car or jeep may be less popular in those circles, but some people will still respect it, and they will respect it for their real properties, that reflect real power: price, speed, or capability to deal with rough terrain.

Imagine you are a member of an oppressed group. Not in the modern and rather ridiculous sense, but more like it was in older times. Lefties talk about how you deserve equal rights and consideration as a fellow human being and citizen. But that is a bit… virtual? I mean that is essentially just talk. Imagine that instead of that someone just gave you a bag of gold so that you can buy yourself property, nice clothes, education for your kids and all the other purchasable kinds of status.  That would be somehow more solid and real?

Or even in modern groups. You could say gay marriage gave gays virtual status as it sent the message they are not “second class citizens” and “their relationships are of equal value”. But imagine someone identified typical gay professions like interior designers instead and just figured out a way to enable them to charge far more money. Wouldn’t that give them a far more real status increase? If some gay clubs are famous for having the best singers and the best drinks and full of celebrities, isn’t that more of a real status?  Or the basic human territorial instinct, rich gays buy parts of a city, rename it Gaytown, let only gays live there, wouldn’t having such kinds of exclusive privilege sound more like a real status increase?

Animal brains don’t want food. They want the hunger signal to stop in the brain, and the only way they know how to is getting food.

Humans are smart, so we learned to directly tickle various feel-good centers of our brain, such as with drugs, without getting the actual goodies they were “meant” to motivate us to get.

So maybe just subjectively feeling you have status, “status wireheading” is a thing. See also. But I just wonder if it is more of a leftie thing and the rightie thing is to try to get perhaps less good feeling, but more permanent, solid and useful status-giving things.

Moralistic rants look like a perfect example of status-wireheading, so going for virtual, subjective, not real status. People who get to judge people IRL are high status – imagine a king passing judgement on accused subjects. Or pastors delivering moral exhortations. So basically just delivering such exhortations, just on a blog, even when hardly anyone is listening, may subjectively feel like having high status.

This actually could be a big element. Again imagine just some old-time chieftain type basic king, like in the  Brytenwalda period. What is his job and how does he relate and interact to other people? War is a big deal. But war is against outsiders. How does he interact with the in-group? The two big ones are being a war leader, and being a judge.  These seem to be to very fundamental and basic forms of high status behavior.

So going on Tumblr or Reddit and saying “we must fight back against X” or “Y is a hateful asshole” is a way to simulate the two core aspects of kingship! Is it a stretch to think it is status-wireheading, it is status-masturbation, self-stimulation? Like it is a fantasy, you being king, judging subjects and leading charges on the battlefield?

And this is a leftie thing mostly. What do righties want when they want status? I mentioned some examples above, but if you want to simplify it:  money is always fairly high on the list. I am simply wired so that I would certainly feel more high-status as a “bigot” in a BMW (because the BMW is more real than the “bigot” insult) than a guy with wonderfully polcorrect opinions on the bus. Because that kind of respect is more fleeting. Are most righties wired so? Similarly I have a strange fetish for wanting to acquire land one day. Not agricultural, just a field or forest.  Because that is even more solid and durable than a nice car that depreciates every year.

I must apologize that it is not fully well developed theory and I just cannot express it accurately enough. It is just a hunch, it is just seeing a certain pattern. Maybe this patter does not really exist.

Suppose Alice is more interested in having a bombastic job title, which will be lost if she loses the job, and Bob is more interested in having an academic title, like Dr., which is never lost. Wouldn’t you think Bob’s desire for something more solid and durable makes it likely he is more conservative than Alice?

I don’t really know what to make of this hunch, but maybe someone else has an idea and picks it up from here.

Also, obviously – lefties are often going for real power. But only a small fraction of them has any chance of getting it. For their majority, just feeling high status may be the thing. It could be the that powerful minority gains and retains power by feeding high-status feeling into the leftie majority.

I mean if I go to Prez Obama’s Wikiquote page, the very first one is:

“Hopefully, more and more people will begin to feel their story is somehow part of this larger story of how we’re going to reshape America in a way that is less mean-spirited and more generous. ”

Translation:

“You, my voters, should feel you are a part of a group who are capable of reshaping the most powerful thing on this planet.”  Isn’t that basically saying “you my voters should feel high-status?”

Isn’t it this kind of trade – Obama gets real power, his voters get status-wireheading, they get to feel they are subjectively, virtually high status?

Of course we should really test it if the right does not do the same things. But then the problem is how do you define the right. For me someone like Reagan or Thatcher or Kohl just weren’t really right-wing  – and Reagan’s Wikiquote page is full of similar moves. Who should I look at as a proper right-wing example? Churchill? Franco? Bismarck? Someone more contemporary? At a random whim, I looked up Nigel Farage’s Wikiquote page. And behold, he is not saying anything nice about his supporters – nothing at all. The closest he gets to emitting “you are cool” messages is saying the UKIP is not for sale.  And that is more of a fighting message than a “you are awesome” one.

Conservative US Presidents and candidates are a different story, as they are usually just “Cathedral Right”, and this is reflected in the their message like “let’s make America great again” which basically means: “you, my supporter, are great, and can do great things”. They are not really what I would call right-wing so in this sense it does not really falsify this theory.

I don’t think I proved the theory either. I don’t even think I formulated it really.  But I think I can say there is a hunch here that has some amount of probability of being correct.

EDIT: To Melting Asphalt’s great post:

According to Kemper, 1991, “Social Structure And Testosterone” increasing dominance and increasing prestige (eminence) results in boosting testosterone.  You may want to work this angle in.

Don’t ignore the sexual angle: admiration, flattery plays a role in courting. Men compliment women’sbeauty, women pull a bit of hero-worship flattery on men they love.

But it is a chicken or eggs story.

If  getting flattered (more prestige) increases your T, it makes you hornier and thus more likely to want to mate. Both men and women.  Maybe this is why we flatter when we court / date. A tricky way to make your date horny.

But it could be the other way around. Maybe flattering and admiration evolved directly for the purpose of increasing someone’s T and thus making them hornier, and the other social aspects you described attach to that. I.e. by flattering, the admirer makes the high-prestige person hornier, and this feels good, and creates a form of bonding. Maybe.  I mean basically this Ancient Greek stuff when young men admired accomplished men, who then both taught, mentored them and had sex with them. Flattering up the old warrior gives him T, makes him feel horny, and if the mentored young man also has sex with him, the old man pays for this all with mentoring. Maybe such relationships were not uncommon in the EEA.

I am not sure where this all leads, really. Flattering a brutally dominant one makes him far less dangerous, while it keeps him in the same high-T mode. It could even be a way to domesticate the brutally dominant one, or for early wives to tame their ultra-dominant husbands.

Back to my own theory: feeling one has high status, even when it is not real, is also sexually ticklish, this may be part of its appeal.

RE: A functioning nation: system requirements

I intend to write longer about it, but as for now I just like Malcolm Pollacks IT-inspired wording, so maybe a quick and somewhat frivolous reply for now. If we are approaching nations from an IT angle, why not try to simulate them on a computer? And this is actually being done, there are “niche” videogames that focus on accuracy more than popularity. I am talking about Paradox, of course. One could start there.

Say, you are trying to survive playing Britain in Hearts of Iron IV. For an insane challenge, try it with France. Or try Germany and start the game after Kursk. Anyhow you will notice pretty quickly that you need four things:

• Manpower. This is mainly another word for demographics/natalism, although, of course, you can always increase it with insanely long conscription periods.

• Economic output. Wait, no, the service sector does not matter much there, especially if financial thingamajiks are counted in. Neither foot massages nor credit default swaps are going to help much with the old guns-or-butter problem. Mainly manufacturing and agriculture i.e. productive output it is.

• Morale. Not in the sense of “being moral and ethical”, more like in the sense of ardent nationalism, loyalty, an aggressive fighting spirit and suchlike. I.e. morale is precisely that thing that if you are a liberal type, it looks scary, ugly and halfway evil even if in the case of impeccably Allied countries during WW2. Morale is one good reason why you cannot just import immigrants if your manpower stat is falling due to the lack of births. I mean, it is not in the game, but I would easily model it with an increase in manpower and a permanent or very long term decrease in morale – it is not going away, not before a century or even longer period, because the cohesion of your nation just got essentially lowered and you won’t get it back until they have intermarried so much that there are no internal tribal differences anymore and  everybody is thinking like “we are a we, against them” again. Take some productive output points away, too.

• Intelligent leadership, management and experts. This is probably where the free market matters most – not in sheer quantitative productivity, as the Soviets were able to pump out enough tanks. But designing advanced electronics, i.e. qualitative productivity, now that is something the free market does best. Hearts of Iron IV models this with “research teams”, which are simply a “given”, you as the player, as the leader of a country cannot produce more teams. This inability in the game probably simulates that it is a free market thing, not so close under Dear Leaders control.

But wait a bit. Why am I basing my requirements of a functioning nation on a simulation of a period of total war? (Not that the simulations of the non-total periods, like Europa Universalis IV are much different in this regard.)

Let me ask a question. You need to test the fitness of a person. How do you do it? I would simply send him in the cage for a bit of MMA fighting. Fighting is a perfect test of all kinds of fitness because if you have a weakness in any of them your opponent will use it against you. Low on cardio? You will get tired out, and then easily finished. Weak upper body strength? The opponent will not have to care so much about defending himself. Poor balance (my bane) ? You will find yourself on your ass a lot.  Poor flexibility? Your opponent will make moves that can  only be countered by a head kick, but you can’t pull that off well. Actually your body is all right, but you get mentally easily scared? Will be used against you, too.

Fighting is such a perfect test of fitness, if you think about it, it is almost in the definition. Fitness is an ability to overcome obstacles, and a human opponent is per definition the kind of an intelligent, flexible obstacle who is the hardest to overcome because he will screw with your weaknesses.

The same way, the health and fitness of nations is tested by wars. Just about anything that is truly robust and healthy about a nation, can be used to  gain an advantage, or just about any weakness can be exploited. This justifies the use of computer war simulations for this purpose.

This is something non-obvious and seriously crucial to understand – I used to think I have to work on and test various kinds of my fitness separately. Strength Monday, endurance Tuesday etc. But at some point I realized I can just hand the whole thing over to e.g. a boxing trainer and he will make me overally well-rounded fit.  And the reason is simply that if the purpose of fitness is to be able solve problems, the best test is to find problems who intelligently resist being solved, who will find out your weaknesses and use them against you. In theory it could be any intelligence, from AI to extraterrestrials, but in practice just using other humans works best. It is pretty much the definition of intelligence and this is why intelligent challenges are per def the hardest because they are adaptive challenges.  Get real good at boxing, and it is practically impossible you will fail at an 5K run or neighborhood push-up competition or walking a tightrope or catching flies in the air, largely because you never become real good at boxing without these, so you will have to do all these and more in order to pass the ring test. Even more importantly, you will have to be psychologically fit, too.

And this is just the same for nations. Give me a nation who is very good at not letting other nations of the same calibre and weight class (important!) give them a pounding and I am fairly sure it will be a nation that will be good at solving any other kind of problem either. Because if they have just one true weakness, one category of problems they are really bad at solving: that is how they will get pounded.

And if we accept this hypothesis, we have not only these fairly decent simulations but also immense amounts of analytical literature of the “Why had France lost the Franco-Prussian war?” or “Had Carthage really no chance?” type.

American-talk and woman-talk

Disclaimer: drunk.

My ass lives in Central Europe. My mind lives in a Gutenberg-galaxy of English-language books, media, Internet and whatnot that tends to be so thoroughly dominated by Americans that I might as well say my mind lives in Mediamerica.

One thing I noticed in Mediamerica is how American males – I mean mostly liberals there – tend to use woman-talk. Expressions like “horrified”, “horrifying”, “outraged”, “outrageous”.

I consider this woman-talk, because essentially these all are just different words for complaining. Complaining is a classic female way to solve problems: complain and the man will solve it. Much of feminist “fighting for causes” is complaining: it means if you express something bothers you, a man will fix it. In the less feminist countries in the more eastern parts of Europe this is a recurring joke. How to replace a punctured tire as a woman? Apply lipstick. Wave at passing cars. Smile.

What does it exactly mean to be horrified or outraged? Let’s approach this rationally. (See above: drunk-rationally.) It is feelings, emotions. Are they positive? No. Negative? Yep.

What kinds of negative feelings are appropriate for men? Who are men anyway? It is not just about having something hanging between the legs. Best way to define a man: someone who values himself and is valued by others by what he does, not what he is.

Recipe for being a man: 1) get off the couch and do shit 2) forget the rest.

Anyhoe. Sorry: anyhow.  What are the appropriate negative emotions for a Doer i.e. a man?

1) Anger. I don’t like this obstacle and thus I am gonna remove it.

2) Frustration. I tried removing this obstacle and failed. Tried again and failed again.

3) Tragic sorrow. This obstacle nobody will remove, this is part of human nature / life / conditio humana.

4) Worry / fear for others, far less often than for yourself. People I love have this obstacle and I don’t think I will be able to remove it.

What does “horrified” even mean? I have this obstacle and cannot even try to do anything about it? That is not for a Doer. “Outraged”? Sounds like impotent anger. Why not just be angry and kick some ass?

Thirty thousand years ago, some caveman was surprised by a hungry lion. He was scared, of course. He raised his spear. He figured he cannot defeat it on his own, so he shouted for help, but as long as help arrived, he did what he could, trying to keep the lion at bay with said spear. His attitude, mindset was worry, but also an active kind, a worry closer to anger – he was not paralyzed with fear, he had to do what he had to until help arrived. The best way to describe it he was “stressed out” – but in a way that it did not prevent him from doing what he can.

Thirty thousand year ago, some cavewoman was also surprised by a hungry lion. She was horrified. She just dropped the berries she was gathering, and, paralyzed by fear, she just screamed and screamed. Pretty soon many cavemen were rushing to help her.

A true man is never horrified nor outraged. You see something you hate? Attack or strategically retreat. Maybe negotiate. Challenge or submit. Outsmart it. Button up and fight defensive. Evade and attack later. Hit and run. Lure it into a trap. And so on. There are many strategies of dealing with stuff you hate. Or people. I am of course not saying a true man must charge head-on into shit like a stupid bull. We are humans, we fight with brains.

But horrified and outraged just means screaming because you expect someone else will hear it and drop everything and rush in to help you, like a noble knight on a horse.

And such an expectation is a fucked up attitude for a man to have.

So leave it to women to be horrified or outraged.

And given how easily – mostly liberal – American men, writers, journos, authors throw “horrifying”, “outrageous” and similar woman-talk around,  and yet they still are the leaders of Western civ, as a somewhat peripherical member of Western civ, I am starting to think really seriously that our leadership is lacking the balls.