A New Perspective To The Old Divide

Humans are animals, but also humans are very special and unusual type of animals. If we want to understand ourselves, sometimes we need to focus on what we have in common with other animals, and sometimes on what sets us apart from other animals.

This makes it complicated. How do decide which perspective to take in a given case? If a random topic is proposed, like eating, will you focus on what we have in common with other animals, our need for macro-and micronutrients, or will you focus on our unique rituals and taboos and etiquettes with regard to eating – which on the highest level turn a meal into a sacred, sacrificial act? If we talk about sex, will you focus on the bull-like raw animal desire, or the uniquely human poetry of romance? There is no clear-cut answer to that. And when there isn’t, one may as well shrug and keep an Aristotelean middle way, trying to be about equal part animal and human. The human part is animal, too, but in this context the human, also the humane, the humanitarian, and the humanist, means those – ultimately biologically rooted – human characteristics that are different and separate and set us apart from other animals.

You see, when you see Scott Alexander and Jack Donovan apparently agreeing about something or being on the same page, there is surely something interesting going on. When Scott defines the political Right as “survival values”, “tiny unstable bands facing a hostile wilderness”, that is exactly the topic of Jack’s The Way Of Men and Becoming A Barbarian. But Jack defines these are masculine values, not politically right-wing values, although of course everybody keeping their eyes open already noticed there is a huge overlap between these two concepts.  Anyway, maybe time to offer a new perspective: masculine values or the values on the Right focus more on what is animalistic in humans, what humans share with other animals. Sex. Fighting. Dominance. Submission. Tribal raids. And this comes in largely two forms. There are men who actively endorse being humans behaving like other animals – “wearing a wolf’s head” – and this is what Jack Donovan is writing about and I don’t mean it as an insult. Being called an animal is an insult only amongst the civilized. Call a barbarian a lion, a wolf, a bear, and he will feel honored, he would be proud to have the lion’s courage and the bear’s strength.

However, the vast majority of the historic Right did not propose going barbarian: they wanted to protect civilization from barbarians, they were not with the pirates but with Caesar nailing the pirates to a cross. Conservative, right-wing, traditional, historic societies punished outlaws, criminals, gangsters far more harshly than liberal, Universalist societies. Most reactionary kings of history would at least jail Jack for seditious propaganda. This is fairly obvious. So while conservatives, reactionaries of the past generally opposed barbarian, animalistic behavior, they were at least keenly aware of it, keenly aware of how normal, how natural, how widespread it is, and how difficult it is to suppress, they believed the barbarians are at the gates at the slightest slip up of the guards, they believed civilized people themselves become barbarous and animalistic if things turn south and even every new generation of children are barbarians who need to be civilized arduously. To borrow a term from Thomas Carlyle, the conservative always wants to “chain the Beast”. They were openly repressive because repression was aimed at the Beast. Jack wants to unchain the Beast. What is common in both of them is seeing the Beast. Seeing ,realizing, accepting that there is a lot of ineridicable, hardwired animalistic behavior in man.

If anyone happens to be an Eric Fromm reader here: no, the animal is us is not that kind of blind and aimless destructiveness he proposed. Rather it is dominance, it is brutal, aggressive dominance. It is not about destroying a province just for shit and giggles, just for the fun of destructiveness, but rather it is about wanting to rule a province or country so bad that you don’t mind if you destroy half of it during the conquest if you must.

Just to put things into perspective… I used to think anger (and hatred) is a reaction to perceived injustice. Oh boy. What a naive angle. Anger is actually showing dominance. It is not injustice but simply the weakness of the other, the vulnerability of the other that fuels the flames of anger. It’s how humans and animals challenge each other and establish dominance. The idea of feeling wronged, feeling that the other committed injustice against us, is the whole I am mad at you because you did X to me and it was wrong, is actually a very roundabout thing. We expect – socially, perhaps also biologically – that “society” punishes people who are perceived as wrongdoers. So by framing others as wrongdoers, as committers of injustice and the breakers of rules, we can feel society is our side, hence we are strong and they are weak, hence we can humiliate them and establish dominance. Chew this for a while, it was not exactly easy for me to stomach either. Try to pay attention the next time a car driver is yelling at a cyclist jumping a red light, if you can sense an “Aha! I caught you now! You broke a rule, now I can assert dominance over you and society will support me!” element there. I bet there is.

If you feel something sort of a sinking feeling, you are beginning to get just how animalistic humans really are. No civilized society can work without rules. No rules will be obeyed if we don’t get mad at rulebreakers. And yet, we don’t get mad at them because they broke the rules: we get mad at them because we want to establish dominance and having broken a rule puts them into a weak, precarious, hard to defend situation, so we smell blood… this, this is the human animal for you. And this is precisely what the Left does not want to admit.

You see, values on the Left are those that are specifically human, that set us apart from animals, the specifically human, humane, humanitarian, humanist, intellectual, elevated, sophisticated, lofty, and many ways spiritual. Either they openly confront and fight everything animalistic – when they call you a fascist, they are basically calling you a werewolf – or tend to forget about it, deny the animalistic part of human nature, claim we have progressed beyond it or will shortly, and assume everybody is good and not a vicious animal at all. There is something gentle and lofty about them but therein lies the danger, the mortal danger. Since they keep denying the Beast – considering it a social construct, a product of oppressive social relations, they have no idea where it will rear its head, where it will strike next. They will just “lose faith in humanity” once again, until the next wannabee Messiah lifts them out of their depression again.

(You join the Right when your “faith in humanity” is irrevocably, permanently lost. But I admit it is hard not to be depressed about it. I am not exactly the cheeriest guy around.)

To give you a concrete example, the Left cannot really understand crime as such. They find it inherently abnormal and make up explanations like poverty or reflected racism. What they are missing – what they are incapable of understanding – is that crime is first and foremost fun. A very visceral kind of power trip. The dog chasing rabbit does not seem frustrated, angry or hateful – what you see on his face is pure joy. He is having helluva time. Come on. You have probably enjoyed simulated raiding in Clash of Clans. Do you really think the mugger doing it IRL needs a special reason to humiliate you and take your wallet? It is his idea of having fun. You are outside his tribe, you are fair game, you shouldn’t be surprised, the only question is really why were you unable to teach him Universalist morality i.e. that no humans are fair game ever. Finding an answer to that is something for a different occasion, though.

Anyhow, my point is that this humane loftiness, this softness, this compassion and empathic morality, this denial of the animal side of human nature makes the Left dangerous because they are the enablers of barbarians, they cannot predict when will large-scale organized barbarism like Communism or Fascism or Jacobinism break out, they are unable to understand and prevent small-scale barbarism i.e. crime, they are disgusted by all this and busily wishing these truths away. They act as unwitting enablers, urging the crowd on to rise up because they expect they want justice, and are utterly surprised when the crowd just morphs into a bunch of bloodthirsty animals instead. It is their lofty goodness that makes them dangerous: they constantly block the conservatives and reactionaries when they would try to keep the barbarians outside the gates.  The Left’s values are certainly higher. But the irony is, the appeal of the higher is in itself animalistic: it is the animal desire for status. All this loftiness comes from a desire to be higher than all those humanoid animals, and yet a desire for this highness comes from an animal desire for dominance status which somehow metamorphosed into prestige status, the kind of status intellectuals and artists have.

It is pretty funny actually. This post may sound like a sales pitch for Leftist values, after all, I am admitting they are higher, purer and cleaner, and the values of the Right are far lower, dirtier with a lingering smell of blood and testosterone and unwashed peasants. So why I am still with the Right? Partially it is because I consider myself what the Americans call “red blooded”. It is a wonderful expression. It means the animal is strong with this one. It is the desire to eat big, drink big, lift big, fight big and fuck big. I’d say whereever Scott Alexander feels happy I would be bored to death. Those spaces tend to exclude dominance games. But beyond personal preference, there is something else, something actually important. To be aware of the Beast is a precondition to chaining the Beast. A full recognition of barbarism can lead to actually protecting civilization. Leftism by not recognizing the Beast, by thinking most people are basically well-meaning (in reality, they are most often just afraid), by tail-spinning into ever purer holiness signals, enables the barbarisms of the truly huge scale, the killing fields of Cambodia and that sort. And funnily enough it is the humane and humanist in me that says no to that. That level of cruelty, even if accidental, is something I cannot stomach. By understanding the animal, in yourself and others, ultimately fewer people end up getting killed. And this is actually a Universalistic moral proposal.

But here is a riddle. Why do we associate the animal with the masculine and the brutal? Half of animals are female. I mean, when I say “animalistic behavior” you think of some kind of aggressivity, not an infant suckling breast milk, even though that is more common and necessary for (mammal) animal life. Well, maybe masculinity needed to be tamed more for civilization to emerge than femininity, because feminity was already controlled and tamed, when needed repressed by the the pre-civilized, barbarian patriarchs. Animalistic men always repress the feminine in women if it causes any problem for them, so the real question for civilization is whether something can repress animalistic men or not. But it is not a full answer. There is more to animal behavior than conflict. There is more to specifically human features than avoiding conflict. And you cannot just equate the lack of conflict with The Way Of Women. I don’t think I can really reduce the worldview of the Scott Alexander types to saying they dislike conflict and that is feminine. There is more there, and thus I think there is some more figuring out to do.

As for me, I really have to make up my mind one of these days. Jack’s stuff is highly romantic, but any moderately reactionary historically figure would have had them all hanged without a regret. Should I be on the side of civilization, the sheepdogs protecting the idiotic liberal lambs with no survival instinct who aren’t grateful at all, or one of the wolves? I still don’t know. I guess one thing Jack haven’t figured out yet is the ethnic angle, when the lambs are predominantly white and the wolves not, how exactly this white wolf thing is supposed to work. Who is ingroup with whom.

Anyhow, I feel like I sort of figured politics out now and should maybe focus on technology or fitness. It is at the root a conflict between the general animalistic features in man vs. the specifically human features. As the specifically human is higher status, the animal dominance drive, metamorphosed into a prestige status drive, leads a lot of educated, intelligent, nice people to constantly deny the lower-status animalistic drives. Thus they rear their heads at unexpected times and then Utopian designs collapse.

The Right has two problems. One of them being constantly made to feel low status due to constantly focusing on what is animalistic and dangerous and low and definitely not lofty in in Man, and thus having a difficulty to offer an attractive club to join. We are bit like a pig breeder club, right, our conversations don’t smell of lilies, they have a lingering smell of the nasty and the messy because we are trying to deal with real, not idealized humans. The other problem is that the Right is naturally divided. Some are just Realist Universalists: they want to suppress the Beast everywhere, their main difference with the Left is that they understand how hard it is. Others want to play sheepdog only for their nation or tribe, and some are actively trying to be the wolves preying on another nation or tribe. Thus the Right is divided.

I think this is why also Jim is describing history as a contest between warriors and priests. The priest, the holy man, the scholar, the preacher, the intellectual is the quintessentially human: he is doing what only humans can do. The warrior represents what almost every animal can do – after all Nature is red in tooth and claw. Warriors like to call themselves Wolves. Priest consider that rude, crude, stupid and unholy.  Huh. It will sound conceited, but I have a strange gut feeling that I have figured out the most important roots of politics and history. Can someone please be so kind and pop my bubble?

UPDATE: this is how it works on the average grunt level, like the guys mud-wrestling on Reddit under “Left” and “Right” flags, the Machiavellians on top of the social ladder are an entirely different question, they are just using both.

Anyway, a few more correlations. Why I think the survival values = animalistic values = masculine values = struggle for dominance =  Right path is better? Because it makes you secure and confident at a very basic level, you accept your sexuality fully, accept being a man, enjoy your atavistic urges and become sexually successful  with women, so it satisfies you at a very basic level. The price is that you will be seen as a stupid by the the elites and low status and in certain circumstances it can be intellectually boring, fighting and fucking is all fine but gets old after a while if there is nothing else. However, we live in a special period of history where it is actually intellectually stimulating, because contrarian. But make no mistake, actual reactionary socities were pretty boring, there was not much else for a rural nobleman than fighting and hunting and feasting and fucking. And a barbarian society was even more boring, mostly it is just herding your cattle and really taking care that the neighboring tribe doesn’t steal it. You wouldn’t go raiding all the time. They were basically cowboys and that is one boring job.  While in our modern times being such a contrarian is intellectually stimulating, we should be aware how in general, the price of being at peace with our animal, masculine nature was intellectual stagnation.

The reverse of it is true for the opposite, thrive values = specifically human, humane and humanist values = feminine to neuter values = competing for prestige and coolness points = Left camp. At some level it is awesome! You get to do the kind of only humans can and generally speaking only smart humans, you can feel yourself soooo much above others, it is a heady feeling. You get to feel you lead, you are shaping policy, you are changing the world and making an impact (i.e. power trip), and you count and matter in the big picture… it is refined, it is sophisticated, it brings you prestige, status and interesting parties to get invited to, and it used to be intellectually stimulating, though no longer so because it became the dominant mainstream so right now any guy who wants to make everybody equal with everybody else does not sound like a brave new critical thinker anymore but more like a tired parrot, but nevermind, the whole thing still feels like you are the educated guys who are in the know and mingle with the experts. So it is  totally awesome – however. However. There will be a hollow. There will be a gaping hole in your existence. There will be a gnawing insecurity deeply buried, because while you furiously denounce patriarchy and racism you will not feel like you are really a man. You will feel a strange disconnect with your body and instincts. You will not be half as confident as some dumb plumber with his narrow minded opinions and it hurts. Every time you are not under police protection and someone promises you an ass whooping, you will not see it as a challenge to take but a threat to be scared of and you will loathe yourself for. Your successes with women will be anything but stellar. You will often be lonely. Sometimes you will score a low quality woman and rationalize her getting fat and walking all over you like a she-boss as  independence from patriarchical standards. And when you get cucked, you might feel for a second to react like an actual man and beat the crap out of the other man to show who dominates this bedroom – but not being used to it, the motive will quickly dissipate and all that is left is formless self-loathing. This path is treacherous – it can turn you into a Bono, a celeb,  but a hollow one who feels at some level fake.

Our secret weapon is precisely this hollowness of the prestige path. The Left hand path does make people famous and celebrated and all-around high but it gives them no dominance. They don’t get to rule, don’t get to say this dirt up to that fence or border is mine and do as I say, only their Machiavellian puppetteers get to say that who are far higher and far more hidden. Women won’t throw them at their feet. Men don’t submit and don’t treat them like a pack leader. Even their kids talk back. All he finds is shallow admiration with a tinge of envy and perhaps a backstab coming when someone tweets he said something dubious ten years ago. His success is hollow.

Admittedly, the Right hand path is harder. I personally haven’t even done much IRL beyond the gym lifting – and that already helped tremendously, still, let’s face it, I am not a boss, not an alpha of a group, and if I will ever be it will be more of a workplace promotion for my intellectual qualities, rather than the outcome of a manly dominance challenge. And my kid talks back too. Yet, at least seeing these glimpses of the road ahead, feels like a return, a homecoming, a reconnection.

I guess Jim got that right with this warriors vs. priest model after all. Being a warrior can be incredibly narrow, stupid, primitive – but whole. Being a priest is all over fantastic and stimulating, the horizons are huge – but there is a connection missing, between the mind and the body, the instinct, the nature, the sex. While here “priest” is used as a metaphor for intellectuals, the Catholic Church actually got this right by demanding celibacy. That at least made the disconnect, the missing link, the lack of wholeness formal and official.

Why “the code is law hence no fork” position with regard to the Ethereum DAO is inconsistent

“The code is law, working as written, not as intended, investors must accept that!” Well, let’s take it to its logical conclusion then! Ethereum , Bitcoin, all major cryptocurrencies allow the majority of miners to do basically whatever they want for whatever reason whatsoever via soft or hard forking. Trustless, immutable self-enforcing contracts are so only in a limited sense. They replace the lower level courts, but the Supreme Court are the miners. So human choice can override smart contracts, cancel transactions, return or block funds. It is not my opinion: it is what the code says i.e. the platform allows. If you loathe humans having that kind of power, if you want truly 100% not overridable contracts or transactions, you need to make a very different technology. This technology explicitly allows and empowers miners to act as a Supreme Court. Accept it or make a very different code. And this looks like a pretty good case for them to consider exercising their code-granted powers and intervent via forking, but the choice is theirs.

However, anti-forking “code lawyers” have a good point, too. If miners have the supreme overriding power – and they do, the code says so – it should be explicit, formal, and open for all to petition, to present a case for their consideration. We need a platform where everyone can formally petition the Supreme Court Of Ethereum Miners to consider raising the forkhammer to overturn a malicious transaction or contract. Everyone, not just the EF. This is how crypto grows up. Take away power from humans if you can, but if you cannot, and with the current code you cannot, then make that human power explicit, formal, and open for all to petition equitably: like a proper court of law.

UPDATE: This miner had put it better than I did

UPDATE2: Recent client change making miners easier to execute their Supreme Court role

Getting Status Right

There is the standard sociobiological model of status i.e. that there are two kinds, dominance and prestige, the increase of either gives one a testosterone boost (probably that is  what we call power-tripping) and so on, the relevant literature is fairly well known and I won’t hunt for links now. I just would like to point out one thing: “normally”, status ought to be a combination of both.

I mean, if you imagine a stereotypical aristocratic gentleman from the 18th century, he is dressed in expensive clothes, has a refined taste, reads and writes poetry, quotes the classics, talks in formal, elaborately polite ways and so on – and all this is prestige.

But on the other hand, he is fiercely proud, he challenges men who insult him to duels, he is expected to show intrepid courage in battle and charge cannons on horseback if need be, and has ways of teaching the peasants a lesson if they fail to respect him – and this is dominance. Not necessarily in the sense of dominating others, but at least in the sense of not letting others dominate him i.e. not being a “pushover”.

Dominance without prestige just gives a crude barbarian warlord or a thuggish crimelord. Prestige without dominance is something effete, weak and ridiculous – maybe the stereotypical “art fag” or Ginsberg-type intellectual.

It’s sort of obvious that any social structure and hierarchy, in order to function in as table way, has to have both. It’s basically carrot and stick. When the peasant asks why should I respect that lord, there is first the carrot answer – because the lord is smart, educated, and good and generally wishes the best to you. That is prestige. If the peasant isn’t happy with the answer, then there is the stick answer: because he has ways to force you to – that is dominance. Prestige is the good cop, dominance the bad cop, both maintain the social order. Elites try to be liked if they can, and if they fail, then they try to be feared.

However, before we think it all is just tools for justifying “oppression” we should consider human tribalism and group dynamics. People are generally more afraid of getting oppressed or otherwise harmed by the outgroup, like the neighboring country or the other ethnic group or religious group or something. Thus having strong, dominant, even intimidating leaders is at some level reassuring – because it suggests they are a good at kicking the outgroup’s butt and protecting you from them.

This is what goody-good liberals like Kevin can’t get right. Dominance is intimidation and bullying! And the judgement that it is therefore bad is between the lines. What is missing is the recognition of the fear from the outgroup. Imagine a bunch of Dothraki raping their way through the Lamb People and you have a pretty good account of most of human history and prehistory. Compared to that, oppression by your own landlord or king is a piece of cake really. You first and foremost want your own leader to be tough as nails and stand up to the invaders or potential invaders: to protect you from them, hence, dominate and press them out when they invade. This suggests you will trust only a leader who has generally a dominant and repressive personality. Only a guy who takes no lip from no one and never lets his authority get questioned seems tough enough to really stand up to the potential invaders. Thus people often actually like dominant and intimidating and oppressive leaders of their ingroup, in order to protect them from the outgroup! Because they reassure them: just obey me and I will protect you from the ugly, nasty orcs out there and all will be right. This is also how women tend to fall in love with bad  guys and alpha-males. Same story. Assholes demonstrate they have the guts to protect others – or at least are sufficiently good at fooling others into thinking so.

This masochism or inner submissiveness, that makes a lot of people actually like dominant, intimidating bullies because they make them feel safe, is something sort of a black pill about the darker aspects of human irrationality. As it suggests much of the mainstream narrative about the idea of oppression is wrong. People very often like to be oppressed, as long as it is not some sort of a faceless structure but an actual person doing the job. Movies about fictional fascism like Hunger Games, V for Vendetta, Children of Men or the Empire in Star Wars  portray the fictional dictators like this and never how they were really like because there is a danger some people might actually like that and that is not the intended purpose of the movie. Charismatic leaders are charismatic and much of that charisma is the reassuring kind of dominance that makes one feel protected.

But this is only an extreme. Modern dictators were extreme bullies because moderns were and are extreme in everything, but for a more moderate take on what the combination of prestige and dominance entails, just look at any random old painting of kings. The posture and the sword suggests dominance, the refined clothes suggest prestige. A barbarian warlord could be imagined with the same posture and sword, while similarly flashy clothes – toned down – could be imagined on a high-prestige, Voltaire-type noble intellectual. This is the essence of social structure. Swords and arts.

Social class interpreted thus as a combination of dominance and prestige went on hand in hand in the West up to the fifties, maybe up to the 1968 era, when then student revolutions changed everything. That is when the current streak of leftism began and signals got all confused. They were very often from wealthy and influential families who decided to dress and talk like the lowest of the lower class, according to some theories it was about differentiating themselves from the middle-class petit bourgeoise as nobody would have actually confused them with hobos and unskilled laborers no matter how hard they look like them, but I think this does not fully explain it all – why were they the first generation to do it, why was it always so before that that the higher you were on the social ladder, the more expensive your clothes were?

Looking like a hippie signals either a very Christian, hermit-pilgrim type moral holiness or a certain kind of intellectual exaltedness – above the worldly matters, so to speak.  But I think above all it suggests weakness and harmlessness. The signal is that you are not dominant, you are not strong – you are the victorious victim who prevails due to his subdued existence, his virtuous martyrdom – an old Christian theme actually. I see parallels between the John Lennon or Ginsberg types and St. Paul – a certain strength through weakness, victory through non-dominance, the opposite of the glorious, victorious Emperor or Germanic warlord. They acquired the highest status by pretending to not have status. And then  it all took off from there.

This is why the modern, leftist status-competition feels so unreal to me. It lacks the dominance element – they are of course in power: they just not flaunt it. They flaunt non-dominance, harmlessness, weakness, basically the lack of power. It just all feels so unreal and virtual and ultimately ridiculous, a status built upon nothing, because lacking the dominant elements, the meat of it, and having just the icing on the cake.  Outside the West it still works – in Russia for example status is still mostly wealth, and the idea is that wearing an expensive watch signals both prestige (good taste) and dominance and dangerousness (the ability to hire hit men or something of that sort).

 

It really isn’t about individualism vs. collectivism

The most important global event of the 20th century was a prolonged struggle between an America-led West on one side and first Nazi Germany, then later on Soviet Russia on the other side. It is always tempting to put such us vs. them conflicts in simple ideological terms, and thus one way to put it was to say that the Nazis and Commies are collectivists, while Americans / Westerners are individualists. Given the utmost importance of these global conflicts, this description influenced virtually everybody who tries to think about politics in a deeper way. And the thing is, it is even true. America really was and is individualist, and Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia really was collectivist. However, the primary reason it was so is that Germany and Russia have been collectivist cultures for a long time. And America and Britain have been individualist cultures for a long time.

The point is, individualism and collectivism is something that describes whole cultures. It is entirely wrong to call subsets, sides, parties inside cultures individualist and collectivist parties. Thus, it is not true that the American Left is collectivist. Generally speaking it is not sufficiently true that inside any country there is such a thing as a collectivist left and individualist right. Surely, things may look this way, but ultimately what matters far more is which way a country, a culture as a whole leans.

But let’s maybe try to define terms. Individualism is about the interests of individuals and about the idea that only individuals have interests, and collectives don’t have any interest that is more than the sum of the interest of the individuals included in the collective. Collectivism is the idea that a collective, reified as a corporate person, a platonic ideal, such as the Nation or the Volk have interests that are irreducible to the interests of the constituent individuals.

Thus every political idea that can be stated as “my rights” or “my interests” is individualist no matter how Leftist it is. Libertarianism is merely a subset of individualism, a moderate subset that claims that individual rights stop at life, liberty, and property. If someone decides to extend it and claim that individuals also have a right to equal chances, that gives pretty much the mainstream American Left, and if someone also decides to extend it to saying individuals have a right to not have their feelings violated, you get SJWs. It’s all individualistic – the libertarians, who are often seen and see themselves as the individualists, are merely the most moderate kinds of individualists whose claims to individual rights are limited and negative-only: they basically just want to be left alone to do their own thing.

Thus Big Government does not necessarily equal collectivism. It is pretty easy for individualism to create Big Government: all it has to do is to endlessly expand the field of individual rights: claiming that individuals have positive rights, have a right to equal chances, to healthcare, or to not have the their feelings violated, and of course it is the government who protects those rights, the same way how it is the government who protects the limited, negative rights libertarians believe in.

Thus there is a straight and fully individualist line from Minarchism or Classical Liberalism to Socialism. M/CL accepts that the job of the government is to protect individual rights. Simply expand individual rights from life, limb and property to anything from equal chances to housing or unhurt feelings, and you got Socialism. Of course protecting those “rights” means trampling on rights like property, and sometimes life and limb. But then again the Left claims, too, that protecting your right to your property oppresses my right to equal chances and that means you both are individualists, you just don’t agree about exactly what rights individuals have.

One clever way to deal with this is to pull an AnCap and claim that it is not the government’s job to protect even my life, limb and property – hence, it has no job at all. Thus any individualist who wants to stay individualist but also wants to have a consistent position that prevents that kind of slide must be AnCap. Another option is to give up individualism altogether and simply not put political arguments in the form of individual rights – well, have you noticed the title of this blog?

Thus American Left has always been individualist, because it is a part of American culture. Redistribution is an individualist thing: robbing Peter to pay Paul is an enforced transaction between two individuals, and a third one who executes the robbing. Debates typically revolve around redistribution. When did that debate exactly start I don’t know, but 1934 was long ago and Huey Long was a famous redistributionist (hence Leftist). And his slogan? Every Man a King. What can be more individualist than that? I can totally imagine a modern SJW saying every person is a royalkin.

Indeed, pure collectivism is something Americans and Brits have very little historic experience of. The closest you get is nationalistic war propaganda – such as the famous Uncle Sam wants you poster. Basically true collectivism only happens if there is no obvious individual beneficiary of a given policy. For example taxing rich people to give money to single moms is not collectivistic: you can easily identify for whose sake it is done: it is done for the sake of the single moms. (And in a more abstract way, bureaucrats and intellectuals. But all are individuals.) But joining up to server the Nation, Uncle Sam, Motherland, Fatherland, the Volk or whatever it is called in a given country, is not supposed to benefit any groups of individuals: it is supposed to benefit the Nation etc. as a reified universal, a reified collective, a platonic ideal.

Thus collectivism is best imagined as a kind of romantic nationalism. No wonder American culture has few traces of it: white Americans are descendants of those Europeans who said fsck serving the Fatherland, I’ll just go somewhere where it is good for me.  How collectivism disappeared from British culture is a more complicated case  – the Empire certain had something to do with it, but it has already been recorded in the Middle Ages how English peasants feel little attachment to their extended families and villages, easily move to another village if land can be bought cheaper there. For me, personally, the most difficult thing to understand about the Anglo psyche is the utter lack of a romantic attachment to a patch of dirt, the lack of the romantic ideas that this piece of dirt is sacred to me because my great-grandfather used to own it and I must live on it and till it no matter why. Here in Mitteleuropa one of the reason Nazi mind tricks actually worked on people was this sacred dirt concept which they hijacked into Blut und Boden. Pretty dangerous, if you ask me, easily hijackable, but I would not be true to myself if I stopped believing in sacred dirt. Anyhow, HBD blogs tend to say it is all about inbreeding vs. outbreeding patterns, outbreeding reduces small-group collectivism, i.e. “clan collectivism”, thus it cannot be hijacked into nationalism.

Now, there is no question about the fact that Russian Communism was collectivist, but then again, Russian everything is collectivist. The handful of individualists in Russia are mostly America-admirers. It is precisely the “right-wingers”, Putin and Dugin, who are surprisingly nostalgic about the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. Putin has put it this way: if you don’t feel nostalgic about it, you have no heart (i.e. you are not a proper Russian nationalist: you don’t like to feel collectively super-powerful), and if you want to bring it back you have no brain. Stalin managed to change Communism into some sort of a Nationalism, and given that Nationalism is the most standard, easiest way to be collectivist it is easy to see why Russian nationalists can never bring themselves to denouncing him. Stalin took it so far that when he won WW2 he thanked it to the Russian people – and didn’t even mention the Party. (Source: historian John Lukacs: Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred). Nationalism is sort of the local equilibrium collectivism tends towards. That is how Trotsky lost. You cannot be an international collectivist for long. You can be an international leftist, but you must be an international individualist leftist, American style.

As collectivism automatically tends towards Nationalism, Nazis don’t even require much in the way of an explanation. Maybe a historic one. It all began with small German states easily kicked around by Napoleon. They had to unite into one Germany if they wanted to have a chance in the longer run, but the issue was that even today, in 2016, North and South Germans don’t really like each other (nor do North and South Italians, for that matter). The way to deal with it was to engineer a fervent spirit of pan-German nationalism, based on romantic-racial notions of the Volk. This led to WWI which was seen as the collectivistic Kultur of Germany and Austria-Hungary fighting the individualistic Civilisation of England-France. In reality, Austria-Hungary was far more individualistic, interpreted as a loose alliance of diverse people united only by the person (individuum) of the emperor-king. Hayek and Mises weren’t historical exceptions but typical representatives of a culture where such a reified universal as Nation or Volk did not really exist, so Vienna always tended towards individualism, all her inventions, from psychoanalysis to economics to music are individualistic in nature. But German influence was strong. After WW1, Kultur, frustrated and defeated, mutated into a far crazier and more dangerous, yet still recognizable version of itself: Nazism.  After WW2, Germany abandoned  – not exactly in a voluntary way – pretty much all of this Kultur and imported American individualism wholesale.

To sum it up, collectivism and individualism are characteristics of national cultures, roughly corresponding to land and sea powers. It is a mistake to see the Left or the Right inside a country as individualistic or collectivistic, what actually happens is that based on what the culture of the country is, Left and Right expresses their goals in individualistic or collectivist ways. When it is an individualistic country, the Left simply extends individual rights into positive rights, equal chances, things like housing or education, and unhurt feelings, and of course considers it the government’s job to protect individual rights. In an individualistic country, the Right simply believes in a far more narrow, moderate set of individual rights which implies a smaller government. In a collectivistic country, the Right typically defines the Nation as one organic unit: see Integralism, Falangism, National Syndicalism and so on. This is the direction the Dugin-Putin project is heading towards. While the Left either goes full Communist in collectivistic countries, or, what we see today is basically they import individualistic American Leftism.

If I may add a personal note, this all seems to explain very well to me why I dislike Big Government and yet not consider myself an individualist. As I have demonstrated above, one typical way Big Government is made is that basically the government is seen as the protector of individual rights, and they just define everything and the kitchen sink as an individual right, thus everything the government’s job. Of course, collectivism can easily lead to Big Government as well, but only if the sovereign territory of the government i.e. the nation as a whole is the collective, the kind of small-scale, clan-tribe collectivism that I am instinctively attracted to tends to be pretty anarchistic. The insight is that if you don’t necessarily think the primary job of the government is the protection of individual rights, you have no reason why its role should relentlessly expand. If I was an organic rightist, like an Integralist, which I am not, so if I was a national level collectivist, I would still see the government merely as the head of the social organism and not the whole of it, and would not necessarily want the head to expand forever and dwarf the body. However individualist leftism leads to precisely there, because government expands with every expansion of the idea of individual rights, and ultimately all human desires can be presented as rights.

Why does this really matter? Because today the Right will lose if they keep fighting collectivism, thinking collectivism equals the Left. It is the other way around. Leftism today is about a twisted kind of individualism, the kind Brett Stevens called myopic hedonism and it destroyed pretty much everything that ever looked like an actual community. Big Government may still be the enemy, but mostly because it is used to enforce an ever-expanding and ever more destructive definition of individual rights, which pretty much makes it impossible for people to live together in communities anymore.

Today the Right must be a community-builder. Respect the core set of individual rights (the negative, libertarian ones) but be fairly ruthless about the need to sacrifice the rest of them for the sake of community. For example, if you argue with feminists about whether gender roles are biological or social, you are doing it wrong. Why does “social” equal “can safely ignore”? Do our societies deserve no respect? Our countries, our ancestors deserve no loyalty? The correct answer to feminism is that nobody puts a gun to your head to behave like a traditional woman, so in this libertarian sense we respect individual rights, but we withhold status, respect, cooperation and acceptance from people who blatantly transgress traditional roles because even if it was 100% socially constructed, which it isn’t, we think the society, the community, the country and civilization that constructed it  deserves respect and loyalty. To respect only biology and society and its traditions not is disloyalty, the kind of seed from which treason grows. This is how the Right should argue these days, I think.

Tribal competition, status-wireheading and its uses

Sort of a reply to SSC.

When we were kids, we played mostly soccer on the playground, our city being located in Europe. We always kept score and it was actually important which team wins, even though teams were mostly assigned randomly, in the order of showing up. Playing it without counting goals looked so boring, we hardly ever tried it. So we had this spirit of competition in us, and the important thing to understand that is not the economic kind of competition, which is largely about multiple people wanting the same thing. It was empathically not scarcity based. There was nothing to win, other than temporary glory i.e. social status and prestige, but even that was not fully real, as we did not heap much praise on winning teams. We respected good players, individually, and yet we did not turn it into an individual competition, so did not decide to play an individual sport instead. Although we did something like that if not enough boys showed up, but once we were enough in numbers real football started. In short, we mostly played for internalized group status, the sweet, sweet feeling of the power trip when your team defeats the other team. It’s basically self-esteem, but through collective, not individual wins.

This is something that is hard to notice because it sound so irrational. Even buying individual social status – such as with Apple products – is so irrational that a lot of Aspies don’t get it and they think people are just being duped by marketing instead of actually getting their money’s worth: not in technical feature but in status. Getting the kind of collective social status – my team is da champion, we are No. 1 – looks more irrational as it is not even directly about you. And then you realize it is mostly just inside their heads because they are not getting any actual respect and standing out of their team winning. I mean star football players are of course celebrities but Joe Plumber the fan will not get any sort of social standing out of his team winning. It is status wireheading. But the simple truth is that our basic biological instincts are so that we get a lot of good feels out of this “my gang yay, your gang boo” setup and this is why we do it.

And it works very reliably. The FIFA, NFL are huge money-machines, based entirely on group status wireheading. And spectator sports and sport nationalism were more or less explicitly invented in order to replace war.  Videogames that pit team against team like Counter-Striker are hugely popular and they are based on that, too. And teachers know if
they want to make boys to clean up they have to turn it into a game. And a game does not simply means something that allows playing: like some sort of a toy. Oh, no. Game explcitly means teams competing e.g. in who collects more litter, with a clear winner team who gets applause.

I said boys, not kids. I think this sort of thing is closely related to testosterone. Competitive orientation clearly is, that is more or less a scientific fact, but I think even team loyalty, too. In Europe the relationship between machismo and nationalism is pretty clear. MMA fans always seem to have more than the average number of nationalist tattoos. It was always the manliest, highest-T, most aggressive guys I know who really hated traitors and disloyal unpatriots, and never wanted to forget the grievances caused by neighboring nations. Or they go and join PEGIDA and similar ovements. I remember how girls related differently to these sports games in my childhood. Some just wanted to play volleyball for the sake of just playing, not winning. Yes, there were other girls who cared as much about winning as boys did. But while almost all boys cared, only about 30-40% of girls did. These 30-40% of girls were generally annoyed by all the other girls who did not care to win. They often said they rather prefer playing with the boys so that they don’t have to deal with the other girls who don’t play to win, although getting accepted was not easy. I suspect they may have turned into feminists later on.

Most intelligent Aspies people have figured this out more or less actually – such as by looking into spectator sports and asking themselves why exactly do neurotypicals care about whether Arsenal wins or loses – while neurotypicals don’t even need to figure it out because it is more or less their life.

But do people really internalize the lesson? For example, suppose you retire and then get bored and figure out you will breed pigeons as a hobby. But you still feel bored. What to do? The obviously correct solution is to join or form a pigeon breeder club and compete with other pigeon breeder clubs. Individual competition is less fun – you don’t get the same
tribal camaraderie – and having a club that does not compete is aimless and pointless and does not have the same kind of “fire” that one that does. And yet, while this is the correct solution, do many people figure it out?

So this is what is largely missing from Scott’s article is that it is not merely about the benefits of tribal membership. It is that sweet, sweet power trip when we defeat them. But it seems in order to feel that, to crave that, you need to have fairly high testosterone levels and Scott does not seem to be very good at that. So he may easily miss that point.

It is really weird that despite the fact that this is literally everywhere, people are not using this model to actually solve problems. If I lived in a startup-friendly place, I would help solving them obesity problem while getting filthy rich through a web startup that is largely about organizing local, team-based chin-up or pull-up competitions, in various leagues and real money to win (from participation fees). So your other team members who want the team to win would motivate you to lose weight and/or get stronger. You would never have to motivate yourself to work out anymore, they would do it for you, while you would do it for them.  And why is that real corporations who compete in the economic sense never challenge each other to a bet to compete in quarterly profits? Would be a way to motivate people.

Individual status drives matter, but when it is combined with tribal loyalty, when group competes against another group for status, including this merely internalized feeling of the win even if it brings no actual standing, is one of the strongest motivators of the world. Use it to solve basically any social problem you want to, I am not saying it is magic but it can improve anything from fitness motivation to learning at schools. As long as you can really, truly make people identify with the team. This is probably the trickiest part – maybe you need to base that chin-up or math competition on real tribal splits, like people of different races or religions showing each other who is da Boss.

Intertribal competition can take many forms. Sometimes it is literally about massacring each other, sometimes it is about fighting for real prizes like wealth, sometimes it is just like in sports, a short-term glory and a heady power-trip feeling, and sometimes it is just that funny kind of not-even-competition when you sit safe and comfortable with your in-group and crack jokes at that idiot outgroup. Either that, or you praise yours, like, erecting statues to national heroes. Yes, people do it all the time, like how Reddit likes to make fun of religious conservatives. It is all about feeling better than the other group without having to even do a thing like actually winning a match. This the least realistic but easiest kind of status-wireheading and probably deserves a name on its own, I will now use Direstraiting after the  Money for Nothing song.

There is of course the opposite kind of problem, like how to stop tribal violence and friction. The obviously correct solution is the often-raised Patchwork/Archipelago for multiple reasons. One is that violence often comes from feeling the other group is actually winning the status game, so you lash out in frustration. Isolating our group from them, so that within our circles we are still respected is one of the solutions. If in a country an ethnic minority can form an autonomous territory, then they can teach in the schools, put it on stage plays how cool they are and can largely ignore the painful reality that the majority nation may think they suck. This is one handy way of collective status-wireheading. Another reason is that any shared territory will be fought over. Drawing a border and saying this side of the river is ours does not completely stop all raids – it never fully stopped warfare as such – but it reduces them. War is usually less terrible than civil war. I don’t just mean physical territory, but often things like schools or tax spending – any prize that can be fought over.

I mean, for example, how to stop atheists and Christians from hating each other? Look at what they fight about. Education? Then split schools into atheist and Christian schools. Make them as independent from each other as possible. So far it is possible, have atheist and Christian cities, states or countries. If tribes can live in an autonomous way, not struggling with other tribes over dominance over the same territory, it reduces friction. They still crave that power trip, but often find it safer to just sit on their asses and engage in Direstraiting.

What follows from this? Some of the things that follow are less controversial, some are more. The less controversial ones include:

– Support every ethnic secession or local autonomy movement.
– Two-state solution for Palestine.

More controversial ones include:

– Unless your state is very monotribal, like Denmark used to be a few decades ago, privatize everything, keep taxes low or else tribes will keep struggling over who gets what from the public purse.
– In countries like the US where ethnic-racial-religious secession is difficult, a good policy would to allow constituent states a lot of room in designing policies and they should be explicitly designed so that different states should attract different races or religions/irreligions. Eventually these states should be nearly autonomous from each other and the FedGov, effectively isolating major races and other main tribes from each other and reducing the friction of their competition.

– Split South Africa between whites and blacks. Literally separate countries. Two-state solution, remember?
– Stop calling whites racist shit when they want to segregate themselves / secede like that. They just want to do what literally every other ethnic tribe, such as Palestinians: want to have their own place where they can feel they are the best, other groups are worse, and generally run things their own way.
– Stop third-world immigration to Europe. Why the fsck should we need to import more tribalism? Letting these refugees in islike the worst idea ever, because the most likely outcome is that tribalism increases on both lines, theirs against us, and ours against theirs and the other option is that theirs increases but ours gets suppressed by the antiracist crowd, which is just plainly unjust and unfair.

Here is another thing. It can also be done the other way around. We already have independent, sovereign entities called nations (although e.g. European nations are far, far from being sovereign). Anyway, one thing we can do is to try to channel  tribal sentiment towards nationalism, because it is already true that nations, through being independent, are fairly isolated from each other. War is bad, but less bad than civil war, and often it is replaced by Direstrating and other kinds of status-wireheading instead of direct conflict. This idea is actually far simpler than it sounds. It is just the concept that in the average European country everything from street statues to historic stage plays and national poems taught at schools give you the “we are cool” message. So if you identify with your nation, you get status-wireheading for free, and the isolation, sovereignty means you don’t have to face competing viewpoints too much.

I swear I am not trolling. I mean, it looks like I am basically just inverting standard liberal ideas, like mixing with different people and keeping an open mind to different viewpoints are good ideas. I am not actually inverting them, I arrived to these conclusions independently. The issue is that liberals think that bigotry, hatred and so on is mostly just about ignorance. In truth it is about the need to feel your group is better than the other group. The more open you are to the outgroup, the more you know how they think your group sucks, the more you mingle with them, the more pissed you will be. So the open mind does not make you hate them less, but more. This is highly ironic. Ignorance actually protects you from the knowledge that other groups think yours is shit and makes you less hateful, non-ignorance makes you angry  because you know how much everybody else is dissing your gang. If you can sit in a safe bubble where all you hear is your group is great and the other sucks and nobody challenges it, you will at least not be angry. And that is nationalism in the older sense.

I know it sounds weird for liberals, but the trick is that they define their groups differently. They are not actually ingroup with the standard, run-of-the-mill nationalist, ethnicist, racist, religionist Joe Plumber. They define their own ingroup precisely as the “enlightened” people who are opposed to that. One reason there is so much grief about politics is that liberals are disloyal, they do not ally with their natural allies, their own race, religion, ethnicity or nation, but define themselves precisely as different and superior to the average peasant of their nation, ethnicity, race or religion. So for them, the open mind stuff and the mixing with other folks works, as long as he does not get mugged, because this reinforces the belief in his own tolerance and thus superiority.

Anyhow, my point is that nations largely being sovereign bubbles – at least they are supposed to be, these days are hard to be independent from the US State Dept – if people primarily identify with their nation, they can more or less isolate themselves from other tribes that way and that may reduce friction.  So instead of your tribe seceding, you take “that which is already seceded” and make it your tribe.

Of course the complicated interaction between citizenship-nationalism and ethnic nationalism does not make it easy.

To sum it up, tribalism isn’t just about various advantages but the very basic collective power trip of defeating another group or simply feeling superior to another group. It is just about the easiest way to motivate people or put meaning and purpose in their lives, but it largely depends on testosterone.  It can used to tackle social problems cleverly – you want more X, form teams amongst pre-existing  tribal lines and make them compete in X – at least so far as genetics allows them to be solved. They can be pretty dangerous but a good solution is local autonomy or secession, basically isolating tribes from each other, as this at least reduces friction, or the opposite solution, to base tribal identity on that which is already seceded, and that is called nationalism. The only issue there that every people are allowed to think along those lines, but whites quia whites not, for example nobody is suggesting or has been suggesting a two-state solution for South Africa. Whites must always endure unwanted interference from other groups, other tribes are respected to some extent when they say they want to be autonomous. The main reason for this that whites are split, white liberals are treating other whites as an outgroup.

Oh! I almost forgot something. When I first started reading Alt-Right blogs, the Anti-Semitism of some (very few) authors and (still few, but more) commenters displayed was often very WTF worthy, I really did not understand how they came to those conclusions.  These days I think the main reason is that generally every ethnicity tends to form one ingroup, unless there is a religious split. That fact that in case of whites it is not so is very unusual and one way to  solve this dilemma is to assume liberals aren’t really whites. And thus they call them Jews. It’s just a pattern. When and if people essentially say whites suck, you assume they aren’t white. Then you look at them and you see a pale face. WTF. What then. And basically these guys just think well, then they are no true whites.  That is how I think they think.  As they assume every tribalism is ethnic, they assume white-hating whites are of a different ethnicity. In reality it is true that Jews tend to be highly liberal but largely because assimilating to white liberal elites. Most Jews are liberals but most liberals aren’t Jews. The ethno-racial disloyalty of white liberals is simply explained by the historic winning of the white people. Winners tend to feel safe and thus tempted to infight. Group, tribal identity is depending on external competition, whenever people feel like there is no external competition worthy of the name they will turn on each other i.e. split their tribe into infighting subtribes. We always knew external threats increase cohesion. This is just the flip side of it: defeating external threats leads to less internal cohesion and a formation of subtribes that are at each others throat.

Leftism and Christianity

La Wik on Tony Benn.

When the Labour Party was again in opposition through the 1980s, he emerged as a prominent figure on its left wing and the term “Bennite” came into currency as someone associated with radical left-wing politics.

 

Benn’s mother, Margaret Wedgwood Benn (née Holmes, 1897–1991), was a theologian, feminist and the founder President of the Congregational Federation. She was a member of the League of the Church Militant, which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women; in 1925, she was rebuked by Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women. His mother’s theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were based around the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught righteousness.

This. Is. Perfect.

I mean, perfect as an example. It is not even about what the actual political ideas or issues are: it is simply that prophets should defeat kings and rule over them, because prophets are righteous and kings are not. Leftism/liberalism in a nutshell. It is not about ideas. It is about one side, the righteous one, ruling over the other.

And I must say I really don’t know where I am with Christianity. I have always been an atheist, but I grew fond of Christianity, getting close to becoming something like a “cultural Catholic” for two reasons, partially the Aristotle-Aquinas-Chesterton lineage is IMHO really wise and partially because the what James C. Russel wrote in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, “comitatus values”. It seemed to me Christianity is a profoundly conservative force and its Gnostic-Puritan subversions are rare abominations. I am not that sure anymore. How many Popes were Tony Benns? Why didn’t the Catholic Herald condemn him?

Look, if abortion is the only thing modern Catholics didn’t agree with Tony Benn about, and I certainly think that while I don’t want it here, promoting abortion in the Third World would be an excellent thing for the First World (less immigration pressure and all that), in what sense are we on the same side? Either the author is not conservative or I am not.

And yet it pains me because I know Christianity has been the soul of the West. Without it, what do we have, a collapsed Rome and Viking-like Pagans, certainly awesomely manly but not having much of a civilization? We need to salvage the “Germanized Aristoteleanism” that characterised its best parts.

I must admit I got really confused about this. I used to think Christianity is useful for conservative purposes because if people put their hopes into box called “other world, Heaven” because by engaging in wishful thinking about that, they can be more realistic about this world, and not engage in wishful thinking about it, so not desire stuff like socialism.

But now it looks like Christianity far too often works against conservatism, because it can easily degrade into this “let’s be righteous prophets, defeat the kings” kind of thing.

Perhaps the “nice” guys on the Left who just honestly wish for a utopian hope because they find this Earth unbearable, should rather become Christians so that they have their virtual utopia in the sky. But I think those on the Left who are driven from an intense internalized, moralistic moral virtue, purity, puritanism, righteousness angle, essentially internalized status-seeking, or maybe real power and status seeking: it seems they are often being fueled by a Christian background.

But if Christianity cannot save us from he Leftist Holy Joes, what can? Suppose for the sake of argument that we found a proudly atheistic conservative-reactionary country on Moon. What will we have? What will keep it so? Libertarian capitalism reduces to status through wealth and while a society is rich enough, wealth stops having a high status. You gotta signal something else. Masculinity? Not in a rich society. Education? Part of the story. Holiness? Most certainly. So what else will save us from those who fight for status and power by pretending to be – sophisticatedly educated –  prophets of political righteousness fighting the kings? Paganism? Don’t be ridiculous.

The Goodperson Problem

If I just keep criticizing Liberalism or Leftism or Progressivism the message may not come accross accurately and correctly to some people. Because, you see, these are ideologies. And I bet there are a lot of people – I know some – out there who think they have no ideology, they are just a random guy living his life and having his opinion about things. And I really don’t want to come up with  crazy stuff like if you don’t accept my ideology – do I even have any? – you belong to theirs. So I guess one way to approach this problem is to talk not so much about ideology but about personality types. Some personality types are causing certain kind of problems. Well, it is not exactly an overstatement, that is fairly standard psychology what kind of trouble you are going to have if, for example, your single mom is a narcissist. My point is here that non-obviously but still problematic personality types are causing widespread social problems, even, the whole set of problems we call a Progressive ideology is caused by certain personality types. And now I named that personality type Goodperson.

(Not saying crazy leftie murderers of the Pol Pot type were of the Goodperson type.  But they were rather obviously bad. Goodpersons were always their “useful idiots”, and they were not so obviously bad, this is why this is worth discussing.)

I hope this Goodperson term catches on in the English-language blogosphere. It is not my first language, so I checked, yes, Americans really say things like “if I do X, does that make me a good person?” and goodwife used to be a way to address women, so I guess we can say it is good idiomatic English.

But it does not come from there. It is my best attempt to translate Gutmensch, which is Germany’s buzzword of the year 2015.

I don’t know how old is the term. I picked up two hilarious expressions, mostly from the direction of Austria (who tend to have a better sense of humor than Germans), namely that Gerhard Hirschmann sarcastically called someone at some occasion “the Grand Duke of the League of Goodpersons” and at another occasion even more sarcastically mentioned “the United League of Goodpersons”.

Well, the humor doesn’t really come accross that well in English. In the original, when the “vereinigte Gutmenschenliga” is very worried that asylum seekers may not have all their human rights instantly fulfilled conjures a comical image of Al Gore types wringing their hands and being worried and somber. And the “Grossfürst der Gutmenschenliga” also carries the message, in a truly hilarious way, that these Worriers tend to be high status, rich, aristocratic, from the educated elites, which is weird, given how the message is generally egalitarian.

So Goodperson basically means a person suffering from pathological altruism. And there is also the intended undertone that they don’t just happen to be pathological altruists, they also find it very important that it makes the G-O-O-D people, either to signal this goodness to others or to themselves enjoy the warm feeling that they are GOOD people.

Note how Goodperson is a gender-neutral, sexless term. This is no accident. If you try to define the expression “a good man”, you will find answers roughly like: a good man supports his family, is loyal to his friends, does his work in a  reliable way and so on. Similarly, a good woman is loyal to her man, take care of her kids, does not spread ugly gossip about her woman friends. In other words, being a good man and a good woman is all about not defecting on people personally close to you. It is not universal. It is particular. A good man doesn’t just support a random family out there, he supports his family. A good woman doesn’t just take care of some random kids: she takes care of her kids.

Now, the Goodperson is entirely different. The general idea is to be altruistic to complete utter strangers even when it endangers the interest or safety of people physically close to you. It is as universal as it gets.

Here is a useful test. Does the idea of a media publishing a photo of you giving food some asylum-seeker child appeal to you? I am not interested if you want to help them in any sort of meaningful way. I am specificially interested in giving food to one kid, because the idea is not about the aggregate utilitarian/consequentialist outcome but how it reflects on your character. Would you like it if the world would see your character is fundamentally altruistic?

If yes, you could be a Goodperson.

I for example would really not want this. I would like to win some sports championship and then have a photo of me in the media, raising that prize with a big grin, that would be cool, as it would reflect on me being hard-working, dedicated, succesful and so on, but winning a prize in altruism to utter strangers just doesn’t come accross as a real prize to me.

I am not even sure if altruism to strangers is really a virtue, I mean, even in cases when you don’t endanger people close to you.  I always figured that utilitarianism should be some kind of a cascade, help someone in a way that he can help someone who can also help someone and so on. Helping someone who will perhaps never help anyone looks rather a waste. Besides, you really have to figure your long-term outcomes. Suppose you are an Effective Altruist and buy mosquito nets to Malawi so that kids don’t die of malaria. Yes, this looks real nice until you figure in overpopulation and the chance it will lead to them horribly killing each other while they fight over food. Or killing not each other, someone else. Perhaps, you and your descendants.

My point is, lots of ways to live a life that people can respect and altruism is just a small part of it, and generally if you want to help others you gotta make sure your helping goes to a good place, and that means, keep it in the circle of people fairly close to you. Don’t you have a poor nephew somewhere who could use a college degree?

Why do Goodpersons feel such a strong need to show or to feel that they are altruistic, they are GOOD? Why don’t they rather want to, I don’t know, signal strength, success, intelligence or achievement?

Well, my best guess is that the European Gutmenschen do it because of the American influence, and American Goodpersons do it because of having been raised in a culture of Secularized Hyper-Protestantism or Cryptocalvinism.

While I used to think religion used to be conservative in the not so long past, these days I wonder more and more, just how much of the characteristics of a Goodperson an average 18th century bishop had?  So I think this may be one element of it.

Another element is women, signalling  Goodperson status is something really popular amongst women, not really sure why, but I think it may be a certain distortion of motherly instincts. I figure, put a fairly modern priest together with ten women, of the type who have too much free time, and remove or emasculate the men, and they will unerringly come up with some kind of a distinctly Goodpersonly project.

A third element is beta/gamma men. They think, perhaps not openly, but subconsciously, that appearing to be a knight in shining white armor will get them laid.

I think this is one of my worst articles, the inspiration just isn’t coming. Let’s try to wrap it up: being a Goodperson means your behavior often has three elements occuring together:

• You are highly altruistic towards utter strangers, whom you don’t even know.

• This altruism of yours has more to do with you than with them, you are more interested in feeling good about yourself or showing you are a good person than providing lasting and meaningful help to the strangers, for this reason, you may be more interested in the pureness or in the dramatic effect of your sacrifice than in its actual effect. You also may engage in altruistic acts that don’t involve actual helping, just signalling, like carrying a refugees-are-welcome sign or changing your Facebook background to a rainbow flag. While you are doing it, your face may be smug. That is often a sign. And this also means you will approve of similar acts of others without really looking into how much they actually helped, rather you will just approve of the purity of the motive.
• You like to signal altruism at least as much as any other virtues. Sure, you may like to be smug about yours success or your fitness scores as well, but about altruism even more.

Why is this all harmful?

Isn’t it obvious? If people take bribes from an enemy tribe to harm theirs, they are called traitors and the act is called treason. And that is something really low. How do you call someone who doesn’t even need to be bribed?

Look, you often cannot meaningfully help utter strangers. You send money halfway over the world, you cannot be sure how it is used. So you let them in your own country and then you get other kinds of problems.

Meanwhile, you may be passing on a lot of options to help people close to you because it does not look that glorious.  When was the last time you bought surprise flowers to grandma? Yeah being such a good boy feels so small. It lacks grandness, it lacks glory, it lacks imagination, it doesn’t show your mind is so broad the whole world can fit into it. So, it lacks status.

But there are so many kinds of status. If you are a young man mostly interested in women, I can guarantee being a Goodperson won’t get you into any panties. If yes, those panties gonna be way too big because being fat is progressive. The kind of status you would get by putting a biceps on your arms, a motorbike under your ass (fun, too) and a bit of a devil-may-care attitude would get you more in the pussy department. When women start calling you that impossible, horrible guy, it is going to get good.

Goodperson-status is only really useful at the top. Obama can’t be a Prez without being a Goodperson, nor can, presumably, the managing editor of a local newspaper of a mid-sized cities in Germany.  They are elites. What are you? Say, are you a computer programmer working as an employee? At this level it is just stupid to care about Goodperson signalling. You are a working bee. No use in doing this at all, goodpersoning won’t get you promoted. Actual achievement, showing leadership skill and intelligence, and suchlike will. And remember, what defines a Goodperson is not altruism but altruism to utter strangers. If you are a fundamentally nice type, you can be a good employee instead of a Goodperson. Engage in altruism directly related to your role in the organization, like a database admin could be proactive at asking users what queries, reports could help their jobs.  Showing that kind of initiative is useful for one’s career, and it is being a good employee, not Goodperson, yet it feels sufficiently “nice” if you happen to need that feeling.  Even when you become a boss, a team leader, there is still no use in being Goodperson to strangers. You can invest all the altruism you want into keeping your team members happy instead.  Only when you become a real BIG big-boss, Fortune 500 CEO, big enough to actually be noticed by the media, that is when you have to write a check to an orphanage in Burundi (which will buy some nice technicals to the local warlord) and have a photo op done with a smug grin on your face. Not before. So why?

How to stop being a Goodperson? I think there is no way to stop signalling, it’s human nature, but try to signal something else, perhaps, success, achievement, strength. Also, if you like to keep the warm glow of altruism around, do it to people who personally matter to you. Better to offer free babysitting to your brother who has a small child or something. That way, you are not a Goodperson, you are a good uncle.

Not sure if this was coherent. I will try to rest more and have a sharper brain and then perhaps write it into a better article.