RE: Servants without masters

I find this article on The Future Primaeval truly insightful and very important, as I think the only thinkable alternatives to the current systems must necessarily entail some form of “feudalism” i.e. more personalized hierarchies.

Let me add a few things. Back when it was still possible to criticize Capitalism from the Right, not from the Left, 19th century British Tories had largely this kind of argument against it. Not exactly Tories, but nevertheless Chesterbelloc carried this on into the early 20th century.  The idea was that Capitalism necessarily keeps the same master-servant relationships as “Feudalism”, because every efficient system of organization must, but it essentially lies about it, paints a false veneer of equality, free consent and voluntary contract all over it. This results in liberating masters from the responsibility of caring for their servants. The old masters considered it a matter of course to support servants if they are too ill or too old to work, the new Capitalist masters could simply end the contract between two freely consenting equal individuals once it stopped being mutually beneficial. And what Belloc basically foresaw in The Servile State, more or less, is that of course the ill or old servant still needs to be supported, so ultimately the government will do it. Welcome to the modern age. Exactly this happened.

In other words, the correct way to preserve the most important aspects of Libertarianism, limited government, low taxes etc. would have been to stop all this Libertarian bullshit about the free and mutually beneficial contracting of equal individuals and admit that yes, we are masters, and we have a personal responsibility to look after our servants. You can only preserve Capitalism through keeping it halfway Feudal. It has a more human face that way. See Schumpeter. (Okay, okay, Socialism obviously was the Left’s power grab, but I am saying this lie in Capitalism opened up the angle of attack.)

If we ever get to design a system (not bloody likely), we will have to learn from this and get status vs. contract right. All this mutually beneficial free equal contracting Libertarian stuff should be restricted to property owners, farmers, artisans, traders, entrepreneurs, those who own their own means of production: also to the proper middle class, the petite-bourgeois and up. Those who don’t, are servants, and their masters are responsible for looking after them, especially if they get sick or old or otherwise unfit for work, the only question is whether enforce this by law or only by custom.

The more important question, namely why do modern people find submission to actual persons intolerable yet they submit without any problems to faceless institutions, I think I can answer that fairly accurately. It is a sort of pride – a not very good kind of pride, but a very definite kind of pride, a kind of pride that could and should be analyzed with the methods of psychology and psychiatry because it is very definitely biological, it feels really like a part of the brain almost shutting down.

Interestingly, perhaps even surprisingly, Yudkowsky got this very, very right in HPMOR, in Chapter 18, Dominance Hierarchies and in the “learn to lose” part of the next one.

Harry feels a white-hot anger over the professors domineering, bullying attitude. I think Eliezer is writing from experience. He felt this white-hot anger. I, too, felt the same at school. It hurts. It hurts so motherfscking much that you would be willing to sacrifice anything, anyone, yourself, the world to just make the hurt stop. I had situations, as a child, as a teenager, where if I had a knife, I would have certainly stabbed the domineering adult, just to not have to live with the shame of cowardly accepting getting bullied even for a second more. Half of my brain got shut down by the emotion and I behaved almost like an insane asylum candidate, so strong was this pain and anger.

It’s the shame. It hurts because of the shame. Because of the humiliation. It annihiliates you, it feels like you are turning into a non-person, your whole identity is disappearing in a black hole. It is often accompanied by a feeling of nausea, vertigo, dizziness, wanting to throw up. (This is why I am saying it is biological and could be studied so.)

I am not 100% sure where this brutally strong sense of shame over getting dominated comes from. I am pretty sure Eliezer felt it, I  felt it, I was a geeky, nerdy, spergy, low-status child and teen and I suspect Eliezer too, so perhaps it is related to that. Is it because if you have low external status or low internal self-esteem, you cannot put up with the shame, the humiliation of getting dominated? Basically it pushes buttons in your own inferiority complex, which is your internalized low geek/nerd status?

Or maybe it is a process? When 10 year old boys bully each other, it is pretty brutal. When an adult treats you in a domineering, bullying manner, it is different, but reminds you of the older hurt, and thus hurts. And when you are a servant in a master-servant relationship, and your master is not domineering, not bullying, is totally jovial, but still expects submission from you, this, too, reminds you of the old hurt, and thus hurts?

I don’t know the actual reason for this. Maybe this is a Cluster-B, Narcissistic trait, or one of the two above reasons.

But beyond this unclear ur-reason, the mechanism of this is really clear. For some reason, certain people feel a burning-hot anger, shame, humiliation over getting bullied and dominated. They overreact to it, and thus are absolutely unwilling to be submissive to actual persons, even when they are not domineering, not bullying, even when they are kind, jovial masters, because it still feels shameful and humiliating. These people tend to be influential intellectuals, this feeling was IMHO behind much of Liberalism from the 18th century on, at least. These intellectuals  have set up society so that only impersonal, faceless, institutional forms of dominance are tolerated, where the dominated person could “save face” by submitting to an institution, not to a person, and thus does not have to feel inferior to any person, he can entertain the delusion that he is “equal”, “equal worth”, “equal value” to every other person.

I think that is the root of it. Perhaps because we seem to believe in the fiction of equality so much, if all persons must be equal, then getting treated as inequal, inferior makes you feel like you are an unperson? I think something like this must be it, and inferiority complexes from being the bullied nerdy child only make it stronger.

It is also crucially important that if you ever felt this burning-hot anger and shame over getting dominanted, the problem isn’t with society, the problem is with you. Eliezer called it “learn to lose”.  You can call it anything. If left untreated, this can turn you into a Liberal/Leftist or even fester into full-on SJW mental illness. For example, look at this SJW:

“I mean, here’s an analogy that might work for you: try being unwillingly unemployed for a while. Awful, isn’t it. It’s degrading, humiliating, debasing, and the longer it goes on the harder it gets to smile when you walk into an interview room. You’ve no money. The writing of job applications is actively shit for you mental health. This whole situation is actively shit for you mental health.”

How would you diagnose this problem? My take would be inferiority complex. Normal people don’t think being unemployed is degrading. But those who already think they are worthless, will see unemployment as an evidence for it. If they lack self-awareness, then they will lash out against unemployment, will feel that is the  real problem, not their mental illness, and demand the government give them a job or something and thus become Leftists.

My luck was that I was somehow self-aware about this inferiority complex and eventually managed to cure it, too, or else maybe you would see a Leftist blog in this spot. I don’t know how I did it, I would share the cure if I could. I did a lot of things. Had career success, some sexual success, lifted weights and meditated. One of these helped. Or all together.