The gravest error: misunderstanding the division of power

I am just reading this. Taylor writes:

“Oh, and Moldbug’s claim that sovereignty is conserved is bullshit. (Update, 1-19-2014: As David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, 2nd ed., p. 18, puts it: “Power is diminished when it is divided. If one man owns all the food, he can make me do almost anything. If it is divided among a hundred men, no one can make me do very much for it; if one tries, I can get a better deal from another.”) ”

I think this is the biggest conceptual mistake anyone who is leaning broadly rightwards could commit, a real ur-confusion. But also an understandable one, because I too struggle for the words to express this clearly, it is just not part of the generic vocab. But basically it is this:  there is a difference between dividing power or dividing the thing over which power rules.  What is a proper English term for a thing that which gets ruled over? I’ll go with domain or property.

You and I find a pot of gold together. We can share it 50-50 and do whatever we want with our share. Or we can put into a common bank account and spend it on things we both agree with. Is this really the same thing? Obviously not. In the first case we divided the gold, in the second we divided the power over the gold. In this example, the gold was the domain.

Similarly, it is different to go from monarchy to democracy in a large country or divide up a large monarchy to many small ones.  (Germany and Italy in time-reverse. Also, worth pondering: if they hadn’t unified, there wouldn’t have been world wars.)  Divide power or divide the domain?

Professor Friedman, If one man owns all the food, and we want to change that, don’t you see a huge difference between we just divide the food (supposedly broadly equally) and each privately owns his share, or keep it common property and vote democratically on who gets to consume how much? The first solution is free market capitalism, the second solution is democratic socialism.  I mean, it is almost the literal textbook definition of both.

Professor Friedman, you support free market capitalism, not democratic socialism, right?  Therefore, you actually cannot support the division of power. You can only support to divide that thing which is ruled over – divide the domain, divide the property. You probably don’t want everybody and their dog have a say in how a corporation is ran. You probably want only the owners to have a say. That means you don’t support the division of power over a corporation. What you support instead that there should be a million corporations, not one huge one. That means dividing the thing that is ruled over, the property, the domain. Not rulership itself.

(Also, if you want to take the division of the domain seriously, why not add a bit of a Distributist flavor to your Libertarianism?)

This is why democracy and socialism are inherently linked, and so are capitalism and monarchy. But my point is not to argue for monarchy here, but to claim that Moldbug’s sovereignty-is-conserved hypothesis, while far from being proven right, is certainly not so trivially wrong.  The division of power is democratic socialism, not private property. So let’s examine that.Basically the hypothesis says that if all the food is owned as one socialist commony-property blob,  it does not matter much if one king  (party secretary) decides how much you get or ten aristocrats  (party bigwigs) decide in common (by a vote), or a hundred voters in a democratic process decide it in common. I mean, if one aristocrat (bigwig) alone can decide to give you food, that is good, because then they have to compete for you.  But that again would be private property in anything but name.  (The Soviets did have this kind of virtual private property for the big dogs, but that made them theoretically less socialist.) So if it is truly socialist property, so no one can decide a thing alone,  and if it is a majority vote of 6 out of 10 aristocrats or party bigwigs, and  if it is secret ballot, so you cannot even just work for the 6 lowest offer to sell a vote for work out of the 10, yeah, then you are just about as much screwed. I am not that versed in Public Choice Theory to really work that out, but my bet is that instead of giving back rubs to the king, you end up giving back rubs to 6 out of 10 big guys. At least the king has one back only, not six.  Inflate it to 100 democratic voters, and you really have far too many backs to rub.This can be used to demonstrate the desirability of monarchyies – very small ones, dividing countries (things ruled, domains, properties) not power itself (rulership), but that is a further step, what I am arguing here is simply that democratic socialism does not make you more free than monarchy. Hence, power is not diminished by dividing it, it is only diminished by dividing the thing ruled over.

By dividing power, sovereignty is thus conserved. By dividing the domain, sovereignty is also conserved –  over the domain.  In Professor Friedmans example, the domain, the property divided is the food. Not yourself. This is the Big Idea here, really – you don’t evaporate sovereignty over a domain by dividing either power or a domain, but you can be not part of the domain and thus more free by dividing the domain. Owners of corporations have total undivided power over their corporations, but not over you: you are a customer. Not part of the domain.

By dividing the food, the total sum of sovereignty or authority or ownership and decision making or power over the sum of the food is obviously not diminished.  But power over you is diminished. (Precisely speaking, you are a customer in all of the cases, just with a vastly better negotiation position. OTOH having a truly poor negotiation position can be defined as “having power over you”. People with really bad negotiating positions can be understood as de facto parts of the domain.)

You cannot evaporate power, but you, apparently, can make humans exempt from its domain.

This is a weird thing, really. It seems to me that power is actually not a very straightforward thing to have over humans. Over things, like land or money, it is straightforward.  Humans not so much. Imagine the clearest kind of power over humans: slavery. If a slave escapes the plantation and wanders around the wilderness, he is not under his owners power, unless caught. So it seems what the slave owner really has power over is the land, the plantation itself, and over the slaves only as long as they live there. This is why they are forced to live there, and the owners try to prevent and punish escape attempts, and recapture and punish escapees. They don’t have a magic remote control to have a power over an escaped slave wandering around in the wilderness. It is the plantation only where they have true power. Hence, they turn it into a prison.

So it seems power is not so much a human-to-human relationship, but human-to-thing, human-to-land relationship. And humans just kind of get caught in the web of it.

Perhaps consider warfare, another very crucial way to exercise power. Is it really about making human bodies die, as an ultimate goal? I think it is closer to truth to say that it is about controlling land. The human bodies die whenever they attempt to contest the taking of land, when they get entangled in the relationship between an army and piece of land it wants to have power over: its objective. Maybe I am completely wrong here, but a land-based power theory would be at least a refreshing new angle.

But back to my slavery example. Suppose that later on a lawmaker liberates the slaves. But the power over the plantation itself does not change by that one act. Just the slaves are now exempt from that power: they can leave the plantation. If they prefer to stay, of course they have to work and take orders.

This is why it is perfectly possible and compatible that power cannot be evaporated and yet humans can be more free.  Power stays, power over things, power over land, just humans get disentangled from the web.

And that is freedom.

The art of human freedom is figuring out how not to get other humans caught in the human-over-things, human-over-land type of power web.

RE: Microaggressions and isolation

https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/microaggressions-and-isolation/

“The source of most microaggressions, in my experience, is not a conscious desire to be a jerkface to the other person, but differences in personality that cause endless friction.”

It all began with Benthamite utilitarianism: maximal pleasure, minimal pain / harm.

Then liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill discovered that people consider VASTLY different things pleasurable. So he decided that  policy should just focus on minimizing pain / harm and leave pleasure to the private decisions. An it harm none, do as ye will.

This had an effect of creating an overly fearful society. If and when people want to have them some dangerous fun, and the policy is blind to fun but is against danger / pain, it will tend to suppress it. Hence the modern world got nerfed. We call ths

What we are discovering today is that people also find VASTLY different things painful.

Well, good riddance to utilitarianism then. If and when people have incompatible utility  functions, you cannot max them all out. You can’t even minimize pain.  What’s the next ideology?

Also, read Kristor here, he has some interesting things to add. Basically, that to make utility functions compatible, you need a common cult, a common culture – something perhaps akin to a state church.

http://orthosphere.org/2015/08/07/disutilitarianism-the-incorrigible-conflict-among-incompatible-utility-functions/

http://orthosphere.org/2015/08/13/disutilitarianism-a-post-scriptum/

(A related problem is the difference between rights and pain. People can demand that other people should not violate their rights. But it is not realistic to demand to never cause them any pain. For example, most people generally don’t find huge morbidly obese bariatric people sexually attractive. This must be surely painful for them. Living as a sexual outcast in a highly sexualized society is surely a painful, marginalized experience. But it is not realistic to demand it as a right. Nobody has any sort of inherent right to be found attractive. This is why the “fat activist” movement is so weird. They don’t have any actual rights violations, manufacturers cater to them more and more, most people are not jerks to them, only a handful people and even they tend to just crack jokes not spew hate.  They are in pain, and they try to manufacture that as a rights violation, with fake grievances (“discrimination”) because this is apparently what today people listen to. Of course, the only ones who actually did anything remotely wrong to them, besides themselves, are the fast food companies.)

RE: Femininity and fashion

https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/femininity-as-fashion/

If your life is easy, you can choose to make it tough. E.g. sports. If it is tough, you can usually not choose to make it easy.

Tough lives make masculine (attractive) men and masculine (unattractive) women who cannot choose otherwise. Easy lives tend to make unmasculine (unattractive) men  but they can choose to make it tough. Easy lives tend to make unmasculine (attractive) women, they can choose to be masculine, but this kind of fashion is usually not through self-imposed toughness (yes, there are female athletes, tough as nails, still it is not the usual way) but easy tomboyish fashion statements. It is not being seriously tough, just playing at it.

One interesting irony is that men having high status is generally attractive to women, yet high status means an easy life and thus high status  men are not forced to become masculine – they can choose to, if they want to. While a low status life – farm hand, 1900 – typical makes a tough, masculine man, which is attractive, but his low status is unattractive. This leads to all kinds of weird results in mating – see Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

It is a bit more complex for women. Men don’t necessarily find low status in women attractive.  This is one of the things Red Pillers don’t get fully right. Yes, doctors marry nurses. But overally they want to marry an intelligent, well-read, “presentable” nurse, who can converse intelligently and teach the kids and so on. If a nurse is dumb as rocks and pretty, she is good only for a quick fling. (Actually if a woman is dumb as rocks, I don’t want to hire her as a nurse either, but whatever.) So men for long-term mating do value status in women, just like to keep it below theirs.  This means the poor farm girl doubly unattractive: her tough life made her masculine (unattractive) and for high status men her low status means she can only be a mistress, not a wife. Usually.

“Let’s go back to 1900 or so. Most people are farmers, and farmers have to work damn hard. The wives of farmers are not delicate wilting flowers, but extremely hard workers themselves, with very little excess time or money to spend on things like closets full of shoes. The traits we associate with femininity and gender role performance were largely luxuries available only to the wealthy, a situation that had probably been largely true for centuries.”

Read: farm girls were largely unattractive, and could not really hope for a really desirable man.

“Then came industrialization, the shift to the cities, and the rapid growth of the middle class. By the 1920s, the middle class could aspire to ape upper class behaviors, spending their new wealth on clothes and shoes and stay-at-home-motherhood. It is probably no coincidence that at the same time, fashionable women began dressing and acting like men, even aspiring to “boyish” figures.”

Ugh, this is going a bit fast, but basically it means that middle class women got more attractive, and got better men. Upper class women, choosing to be boyish in order to differentiate themselves from middle-class women, got less attractive. What does that predict? High status men marrying from the middle-class – middle-class women were educated enough to make a good conversationalist – but what did high status women do? In Europe the answer is clear enough: their compatible aristocratic men were dead on the WWI battlefields. WWI disproportionately killed off the upper crust. So boyishness was not the biggest of their problems. Perhaps they entertained themselves with feminism and suffragettery? After all, women like Virgina Woolfe were absolutely from the elite.

The point I am trying to make is this – in that age, high status men had little incentive to get tough and masculine. They did not want the boyish elite women and the middle-class women would more or less marry them just for status – although possibly cheat with the tough gardener. So I think this was the “dandy” era.

“Then came the Depression and WWII, and people went back to eating spare shoes instead of wearing them. By the fifties, femininity was once again a symbol of luxurious good living, complete with the magical wonders of modern technology like vacuums and Jello.”

The age of attractive women. The age where men also had strong incentives to both gain status and get masculine, because the “prize” had worth it. James Bond movies as an exaggerated version of that era.

“Of course, as soon as the middle class (and even, god forbid, proles,) started aspiring to vacuum in their pearls, such things became horribly retrograde. Poors might aspire to have enough money that one of them might be able to take off a little time to care for their children, but rich people had much better things to do with their time. No self-respecting career woman would be caught dead in public with a parcel of screaming brats; if they must breed for the sake of some horribly chauvinist husband, the actual care and upkeep of the children must be farmed out to suitably low-class (often non-white) nannies. Nor would she deign to humiliate herself by cooking meals or doing laundry. (Such work can also be done by low-class non-white women, to allow rich white women to keep up their masculine lifestyles.)”

Which reduced the masculinity of higher status men – they saw point in getting tough if that is the reward. Meanwhile, things started to look good for lower-status, blue-collar men.

“Of course, poors and proles never quite got the message and continued buying their daughters Barbies and Bratz and whatnot, despite all of their betters’ constant harangues about the dire moral dangers of such toys. As the economy continues to suck and the middle class shrinks, will femininity become again the domain of the super-rich?”

The poor will stay fat. Fat girls being all Barbie is still not a very attractive offer for men. Rich women are more likely to be fit but also to be feminist.

It is unlikely the economy could shrink back so much that most people are back to hard manual labor. If it does, it will be the least of the problem. The big problem will be that hard manual labor isn’t productive enough to sustain the current level of Western or world population. Which means wars and civil wars. Which means tough men. What do women do at such a situation? Get feminine to attract a tough man? Or the suffering of the war makes them tough and masculine? I don’t really know.

Paganism and Masculinity

There is this general notion kicking around that there is something ur-masculine about being a Pagan – that being a Pagan means being like the fierce Viking raiders drinking blood.  Where this notion comes from is probably 19th century nationalism, the English and Scandinavians discovering and romanticizing their roots.  Today you can see this attitude primary in folk metal from Enslaved to Turisas, and I think primarily it spread from folk metal to everywhere else, such as to  writer Jack Donovan, to the Wolves of Vinland, and into the general consciousness, eventually culminating in History Channel’s super-masculine Vikings series.

Let me be clear – I like it, even when I am not sure about its historical accuracy. But I like the idea.  I yearn for something like this. If Christianity is reverence for Supernature, I yearn for a reverence for Nature. I want to be religious without the supernatural. Not the kind of Nature tree-huggers imagine, but the kind there really is, a Nature red in tooth and claw, a reverence for Gnon, the Rules of Nature, my ancestors, my comrades and my own strength and the responsibilities I have. I could totally imagine myself chanting something like “Ghosts of our fathers, give us strength! Ghosts of our fathers, gives us courage! Help us be your worthy heirs!”  And it indeed looks really likely that I should be finding that somewhere near Neo-Pagans.

There is just one issue, but that is a big one. I search and search and search and have to conclude basically this almost doesn’t exist. It should, but it doesn’t. It seems this kind of super-masculine Paganism is almost exclusively an aesthetical category: it is something in metal songs, it is something on the cover art of metal records, it is in some videogames, it is in the TV, it is in fantasy, but does not actually exist as a ritual and practice.

What do I mean? Go ahead and try to Google up what kind of ritual would an Indo-European Pagan warrior do before battle? After it? How would he mourn his dead comrades? How would he revere his ancestors, especially patrilineal ones? Mourning rituals and ancestor reverence are actually a way to deal with grief, and I am still grieving for my father who passed away 1.5 years ago. So it would be of a practical use to me, not just a curiosity – finding a Pagan i.e. Nature-based way to let my old man go from my thoughts and attachment. We never got around to him officially handing over the responsibility of being the elder male, the patriarch of the family, who protects everybody else. Is there a ritual way to do it after he is gone, so that I can kind of promise to his memory or ghost that I will be worthy to his example and I will grow up that task? But I would want a a 100% masculine, warriorlike Pagan way – for example, I could sacrifice a black rooster on his grave [1] or I could cut my hand and let the blood drip on his grave or something. But I can find nothing. Absolutely nothing. Few sources describe such rituals of the past, and it seems almost nobody practices them today.

No matter how hard I search on the Internet, the Paganism I find hovers between crazy-tits feminism and a kinda beta nice-guy civvie attitude. The first is Dianic Wicca, the second is the “normal” Wicca which aims to keep God and Goddess in balance. In practice, every time people try that sort of equality the feminine side always becomes stronger, because the essence of masculinity is dominance itself: don’t let a man be dominant and he will have his whole self suppressed. That is why true equality does not exist: if  half of the people cannot be themselves it is not equality, and they can only be themselves if they have a bit of a dominant spirit, which does not lead to equality either. Anyway. Even if they manage it, I am not interested in some gender-balanced thing, I am interested in a 100% masculine ritual, and a warrior type at that, not a “civilian” type.

And I can find absolutely nothing. Wiccans are usually fat chicks trying to cast spells. Search Neopagan and you will find is mostly “charms and spells”. Meditation and visualization apparently ripped from Buddhist / Hindu sources. Where is my ecstatic war trance dance please, howling like a wolf?  Most books I could find were as feminine as Cosmo.

The only masculine Wiccan I even heard about is Eric S. Raymond and he seems to compartmentalize the Pagan and  masculine (guns, martial arts) aspects of his life. He doesn’t dance with spears under a full moon, covered in ash and blood. As far as I know. So, no, Wicca is not what I am looking for.

Ásatrú promised to be better, but they are reenactors.  Besides, look at them. Do you notice the conspicious lack of Technovikings dancing in violent ecstasy, shaking spears, their bare chests smeared with blood and ashes? Me neither. Don’t they just look like a bunch of aging liberals who want to give the middle finger to local Christians? So apparently even the Ásatrú are not the Pagans I am looking for.

When I asked Jack Donovan about the rituals of the Wolves of Vinland on Twitter, he said they used Ásatrú as a starting point but then they went on finding their own ways.  This sounds like that he / they could not find these masculine warrior type pagan rituals or spiritual paths I am looking for either, and had to invent them. (Maybe I should ask a permission to visit them, but I live across the ocean, so no luck there.)

What. The. Hell. What is going on here? How comes the “folk metal type pagan masculinity”, depicted in songs, artwork, and by many great fantasy novels, does not actually exist as a real spiritual path to practice?

There are a million self-help books out there, many with a spiritual theme, and even many with the words “warrior” and “path” in the title. I bought a few. They were disgusting. They simply used the word “warrior” as someone who faces his inner insecurities about being a fatass or something. Sometimes written by men, but they all sounded like something written for housewives with huge self-esteem issues. Well, they are the typical customers for self-help books. They did not use this word in the proper sense: someone willing to face violence – and even enjoy the thrill. Where is my actual The Warriors Path to Spirituality self-help book?  Clue: if it does not involve causing some physical pain to yourself, or on each other, it does not count. What manhood initiation ritual worth its salt does not involve a little blood and pain?

It would be easy to say it does not exist because it is all just made up bullshit. But that would be a misunderstanding of how culture and spirituality tends to work.  Apparently, there are men like me who yearn for something like this. And this is the only ingredient necessary – spirituality is the soul working with itself, so to speak. To be blunt, it can be made-up, as long as it works.  And I am fairly sure that such feelings had to be common enough throughout history so that they would “make it up”.

I mean, the folk metal pagan warrior exists as an aesthetics. It clearly does and it is obvious – I have seen it in countless fantasy illustrations, all instantly recognizable. Is it really a big jump from aesthetics to spirituality and ritual? Is it really possible that you can point to a metal album cover artwork, it has such a rapport the the soul of most men that they instantly understand what it is about, and yet it does not exist as a spiritual path?

How comes as a spiritual path it does not actually exist when it so clearly exists aesthetically that I think I  can actually predict and describe some of its features? Features of a nonexisting thing? Here:

It is something practiced outdoors, preferably in the woods, at night, at full moon,  around a campfire, and all male, a small group. First achieve an altered state of consciousness, similar to meditation, but not actually so. Rather use physical exertion, such as a form of war dancing, perhaps with spears, the kind of dance that imitates fighting, it is physical tiredness that leads to the meditative state. Do this to hypnotic drumming. It is a similar mind-altering thing as a rave, just more warriorlike. Psychedelics perhaps, but not really necessary. In this altered state, call out to your ancestors, patriarchs, heroes, ask them for guidance, strength, courage. Animal sacrifice. Do something with the blood, like smear on yourself. Have ritual combat, like some form of wrestling, in their honor. Perhaps only at initiation rituals, but involve physical pain and the courage demonstrated to face it. Have a bonding ritual, like cutting your hand, letting the blood flow in a common cup, then drinking from it.

Tell me, if it does not exist, why can I describe it in such detail? Is it just a fantasy? Perhaps. But if it is at least a widespread fantasy, it should exist as a practice.

I have to admit I have not read many Sagas yet, but for example I’ve read the Iliad, I remember Achilles, and how comes there is apparently no trace of that kind of Indo-European Pagan spirituality left that someone like Achilles could ostensibly practice?

I mean, of course, according to Homer, Achilles did not practice much in the way of rituals and spirituality. Perhaps that is my answer? That it does not exist because the truly masculine men were never actually much spiritual minded?

I’d love if someone could sort out my head regarding this.

[1] PETA liberals, don’t even start shrieking. Cleanly cutting the neck of a bird is a far more humane way to kill it than what factory farms do.  You should not be upset if the bird is killed painlessly just because it is used for ritual purposes before it is eaten. That is called culture, a culture different from yours, and there is nothing cruel about it, so respect it already.