A Trader is a libertarianish type who prefers to engage in free, equal exchanges. A Master has a clearly dominant relationship with Servants, bad Masters just exploit Servants, good Masters also for them in a paternalistic way. Predators aren’t merely dominant towards Victims, they are downright brutal and violent, which is a different thing.
US Conservatives tend to be Traders, European, Asian, Latin American (e.g. hacienda type) Conservatives tend to be Masters. Good Servants are probably Conservative too, but it is hard to tell, their voice is not exactly loud. The Hard Left of the Robespierre and Pol Pot type are obviously Predators, leading an army of rebellious Servants. Criminals are typically Predators, when more organized, in a Don Corleone sense, they tend somewhat more towards Masters. In Eric Raymond’s terminology, Predators are Wolves, Victims are Sheep, and the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance fighting them are the Sheepdogs.
The process of civilization is about eliminating the worst Predators and turning the less bad ones into Masters – in 900AD you could easily see Don Corleone as a feudal lord, not a very good one, obviously, a type who treats serfs like slaves (they were slaves, anyway). In the longer run, Master-Servant relationship gets nicer, more formal, more benevolent and more free, and finally, like e.g. with the Renaissance, an Age of Traders emerges.
The process of decivilization, or Collapse, is the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance being unable to hold the line against the flood of Predators, and the defense collapses. The thin blue line vanishes and we all get Victimized.
I hope so far it is uncontroversial? Because now comes the controversial part.
Who are the Liberals in this model? The Moderate Leftists, the Progressives, the Scott Alexander type sophisticated, urbane Nice Guys?
They are the Victims.
Once you see this, you will shit bricks… but it is true. Hence the culture of victimhood. Hence the “only victims are virtuous” type of suicidial bullshit. Scott is far better then most, he exposes and debates with much of the lies in Victimhood Culture – but still a perfect Nautral Born Victim at heart.
The problem is, Liberal Victims are kinda “power bottoms”. They rule the world, basically, they are the intellectuals, they are the professors who raise and indoctrinate the next generation of politicians, journalists, even businessmen.
The problem with Victims is that they constantly hold back the hand of the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance when it would be about the strike down, hard, on the head of Predators. That’s not nice! Don’t be brutal! Be civilized!
Why? Holiness status-signalling, obviously, but that is probably not the final answer, that is an intermediate answer, or a partial answer.
I think part of the story is that they tend to confuse these archetypes. They think when a Trader refuses to deal with them, he is like a dominant Master, and a dominant Master is like brutal, hostile Predator. Because, after all, they all are Not Nice. Because they all are Not Victims.
The tragedy is that Liberal Victims focus their efforts against Masters, and also Traders, instead of Predators. To give you a random example, rape is a major issue for feminists, and feminists are female Liberal Victims, largely. The traditional way to deal with rape is that women have a male guardian who kills the rapist. Now I am not saying we cannot make a better system, but why are feminist Liberal Victims are so hostile to the idea? Why do they hate the Master (the Patriarchy) more than they hate the Predator? Why don’t they see the Master as at least the lesser evil than the Predator?
I don’t know what could be done here. Perhaps we could try telling Liberals that they are, indeed, Victims. But maybe they know it. Perhaps we could tell them being a Victim sucks, but you cannot reason people out of a position they weren’t reasoned into: it is obvious that being a Victim sucks, they put up with it for some different reason, like holiness-signalling. Perhaps only a full Collapse will teach Liberals how much being a Victim truly sucks. I don’t know.
Perhaps we should just stop protecting them from the very Predators they enable… but that sounds cruel.
Perhaps we should engage in Catastrophe Tourism. Organize tours for Liberal Victims into the parts of the world where they can see what happens when you don’t allow Traders, Masters, Top Servants to kick Predator ass, hard. But would it really work?
Well, the only thing to be done is to really, consciously form the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance. Libertarians tend to be Traders, NRx tends to be Masters, but sometimes, like in my case, Top Servants. (I don’t have the easy confidence and radiant authority of true Masters, so if it was the year 1200, I’d rather be a feudal lords employed overseeer with a nice pension than the lord himself, rather work with his borrowed authority than generate mine.)
Nassim Taleb is right that nothing really works well without skin in the game. Liberal Victims should be somewhat exposed to the Predator violence they enable, so that they learn, but I can’t think of any non-cruel ways to do that. I think I became a right-winger at least partially because the (white) gangsters in my school. I was exposed to Predators. I know the only thing that would have helped those kids is caning and military discipline, not “addressing” the social fucking causes of the problem, there wasn’t any. Perhaps all you need is truly “integrated” schools, and not let Liberal Victims escape into private schools or public schools in “nice” areas, and their kids stop being Liberal Victims, because regular beatings by school bullies work like a charm against holy-victimhood signalling. But this sounds highly cynical, too.
