RE: The Best Lack All Conviction

Another excellent piece from TFP.

Some remarks:

But look a little past the short term, and this lack of courage results in a horrifying landscape of atomization. In general, every social relationship involves some friction. There is always a temptation to take the easy way out, to exit from demanding obligations to family and friends. But when you spread out a little conflict-aversion throughout a society, this avoidant behavior gets amplified into atomization.

OK, time to tackle this. Deep, meaningful, obligation-like human relationships are essential for a fulfilled life. But they do not come from just hanging out together, nor from directly wanting to have this kind of relationship, simply desiring these deep relationships no matter how courageously does not make them. They don’t even come from a feeling of obligation. They can only come from shared goals.

I mean, if you want to be close to your uncle, it is simply not enough to have this as an earnest goal, no matter how courageously. If you just think you should try to be close because you are relatives, it quickly becomes awkward: not the occasional rancor, but the constant sense of weird artificiality. If you are a good trad boy and strongly feel this kind of obligation, it still does not suffice, it can still be awkard. You must hide your feelings because if you were up front your uncle would say if the only reason you visit me is obligation then fsck off. So this does not work. What works, then? In short: you have to be working on common goals together, that gets people together.

We made friends easily when we were 17 because our interests weren’t just interests. If we were into racecar driving, we probably dreamed about becoming a driver ourselves or working in the sport as a mechanic or something. So we had goals, not just interests. This brought us together with other guys who were into it too. The goal may not have been consciously formed, it was maybe not a clear plan, but there was a goal-like animating spirit that was stronger than just interest, the feeling that in the longer run this thing may not just be a hobby but perhaps we will do more at it… But at 37 such things are usually just hobbies, our families and careers matter more, so we don’t make friendships so easily because we have hardly other goals than to progress in our careers, raise our kids well and have fun in the minimal free time we have left.

One of the great discoveries of NRx is that large parts of human psychology are reducible to to group dynamics and status-seeking.

Families and kinship satisfy both motives in a uniquely well suited way. The basic idea is to compete for status together, to help each other in the individidual pursuit of status and also to gain common status as a family: to bring honor to the family name.  (This is an upper-class way of putting it, perhaps, a lower-class person would have said “going up in the world”.) And of course every family competed with every other family in this because unlike wealth, status is zero-sum, which satisfied the group-dynamics urge. Families even often had more or less officially rival  families (fictional version: Barnes-Ewing feud in the Dallas TV series).

This shared goal of competing for status, or bringing honor to the family name, was what animated families and kept them together. In the long past this was explicit, then in the past few generations rather implicit and subconscious, as in the last few generations  “bringing honor the family name”, and “going up in the world”, and especially “rival families” sounded more and more ridiculous – but people still had ambitions towards social status and still found their family members the most obvious allies in this.

Then… it… fizzled… out.

I am not 100% sure why and how. We can make guesses. Perhaps redistributory governments reduced both the gains of winning and the losses of losing, and it is surely part of the story, but not all – in such a society, a government job would be the highest status, so people should theoretically compete for that. But we don’t see it family members vigorous cooperating so that someone of the family should become an Equal Opportunity Officer and the all can bask in the honor and glory of it. Because there is no actual honor and glory in it. People do see through the fake. Or perhaps it is diversity – without a uniform opinion, it is hard to have uniform high esteem. But again not fully so – the same decadence happens even in ethnically uniform places (say, Prague) and besides ethnic sameness is no guarantee for uniformity of opinion as the ghosts of St. Bartholomew’s Day can testify.

So it is really hard to guess why and how it happened. There is just a slow, slightly chilly wind of lethargic “why even bother?” blowing  through the West. But why is this lethargy? Why exactly can individuals and families no longer gain meaningful status, so that competing for this status with the other families would again unify families? Whence this lethargy?

Part of my best guess would be that Progressives achieved half a success. They managed to turn public opinion away from old forms of status but were unable to introduce new forms of their own. So on one hand they managed to sound it really ridiculous to say I will help my brothers to become the most privileged white males in our country, but on the other hand, nobody thinks Equal Opportunity Officers deserve glory and honor. (BTW this is a real job title in the UK.)

Part of the story is the lack of what the RP types call “inner game”, I would rather call it “internalized status”. Status has multiple aspects:

• Objective status: your actual position
• Interpersonal status: do people actually defer to you or not
• Subjective or internalized status: basically confident behavior, which also means feeling inwardly confident and expressing it outward

So, for example, a young lieutenant, assigned to lead a platoon (objective status) must really learn to fill out his boots (subjective or internalized status) or else soldiers will not defer to him (interpersonal status) and basically his sarge will run the show.

So any decent society has to have the kind of status system that elevates people who aren’t terribly deficient in testosterone. Not meaning we have to have Conans run newspapers (although, it is interesting that Arnold was succesful in everything), but we have to elevate people who can fill out those boots.

I think perhaps this is what got screwed, every aspect of high-T behavior got systematically vilified, to the extent that today e.g. if you start a business and make it big, you cannot really radiate that kind of old-time boss image, standing up like a Teddy Roosevelt and be like “yes, I made this, yes, I own this, yes, I run this show”.  Today you would be ridiculed for this i.e. for actual normal high-status behavior, because this is how normally men who really internalize their high status usually behave. Instead  you basically have to busy deny you have status and if you run a succesful company and say stuff like “we are a creative community of hard-working individuals” and so on, reducing your own role and pretending it is democratic. Look at how virtually all high status men are now self-deprecating and keep praising their team! Smart thing for motivation, sure, but they are overdoing it, they are making their own role seem minuscule.

And indeed, why bother? If you cannot own your success, your power, your privilege (let’s not fear this word: status-seeking is all about achieving privilege: if I could become an aristocrat in the old sense, I of course would), why even bother achieving it? Why get status if you are not allowed to internalize it and behave like a high-status man?

And we lost not only the internalized or subjective status but also the interpersonal kind. Today we need to learn complicated body language cues to figure out if others defer to us.  It has been a whole lot easier in the past. People addressed each other different “up” and “down”. This was even more outspoken in non-Anglo soceties, where Japanese has complex grammar for talking “up” and “down”, where languages with a T-V distinction had the case when higher status people used the T form and lower status people the V form, I figure Anglos had to contend with Sir/Madam vs. first-name terms. Similarly, while clothing is today largely something you wear depending on the occasion, suit to the office, jeans to the mall, back then it was something that depended on your status: gentlemen were always elegant. So all these things served to express interpersonal differences of status: making status gains all the sweeter and hopes and aspirations for higher status all the more fervent.

Let’s try to tie it all together. We have plenty of scientific evidence now that when people gain status, they get more T. You could even call it a reward system. Our culture systematically suppresses the expression of high-T behavior. You can gain status but not behave as if, not even really feel as if you gained status. People don’t much of the older kinds of dominant-submissive courtesies, and other status markers like class-dependent clothing were also outdated.

So indeed, why bother? If you would never allowed to feel not hungry, would you eat?  Would you bother having sex if orgasms were denied to you? Awkward parallels, but illustrate the point. All the fun was taken out from high status and all the reasons to aspire for it.

And without these status aspirations, we suddenly lack goals. Hence the kind of depression we can see in Houellebecq’s work.

And I think this is why we cannot find a common goal with our family members: in the past the common goal was to acquire status and bring honor to the family name, while competing with other families. This tied families together.

Let me add something more, perhaps an even deeper insight. Status-seeking shouldn’t be seen as a specific desire but as a meta-desire that underlies most other desires and gives them strength and focus. So when your little nephew wants to be a violinist it doesn’t simply mean he likes the sound of the violin or has talent for it, although it means both, too. But it also means he desires the status, respect, prestige, estimation that a Paganini used to have. This is a driving, animating force between most human desires. Without this, without a status drive to give an extra boost, most drives and desires lose their power. Then they just become an idle hobby. And depression, anhedonia lies that way.

Counter-check: today, men who are still driven and have bold goals and not threatened by anhedonia and demotivation tend to work in subcultures that managed to retain some kind of a status system, that gives them this kind of boost in the ass. Computer hackers and Silicon Valley are a good example. Eric S. Raymond is some sort of a “tribal elder” in hackerdom, and in order to preserve that kind of status he elected to work on projects that hackers respect, not projects that offer lucrative payoffs, even to the extent of courting financial difficulties. Want a smart man work his ass off for free AND be perfectly happy and motivated doing so? Give him the respect of a tribal elder. This is really how a strong motivator it is.

Every time we like doing something really much, more than half of it is liking the potential status doing it really well could bring.

It is the Bruce Lee movies that sent us kids to the martial arts dojos in the eighties, because the Little Dragon was such a cult figure, but of course he was precisely so because we normal mortals had no chance of becoming like him.  It was not the local competitions, where we actually had a chance to win, but precisely for this reason they were not so exciting. It is all about wanting to become members of clubs that would reject us. Marx was right. Not that one, I mean, but Groucho Marx. What is the point of becoming a member of a club that would take you? If they would take you, they don’t have a higher status than you so it means no elevation for you. And if they do have higher status they will not take you, because you reduce their average status. He understood this just perfectly.

Want more proof? People like to play videogames, and there are different kinds for different tastes. But it was already discovered in the arcades of the 1980’s that it all works better if we there are high score tables and we can brag about our initials being top for a week in the local arcade. Today, it is Steam achievements or Xbox trophies… same story, it is all about bragging rights i.e. status. Videogames are enjoyable without status gains, and clearly very few people have status gains as the main reason to play videogames, they are simply a fun activity, but status gains make them sweeter.

Once we see the status motive in everything, we can see how family cooperation used to be important. Sure, Joe wanted to be a  businessman and Jack a music conductor, but ultimately both meant becoming (or staying) a respected gentleman with the tall top hat. This was mostly taken for granted: they both are ambitious men, just with different ambitions. Ambition literally meant status-seeking. If you look at a quote page about ambition you can see that it did not just mean any difficult goal (like today) but a goal to gain status, a goal to climb high on that ladder against the sky.  To succeed meant not to achieve any random performance marker you choose but to actually gain the respect of your peers by doing your thing. It was less subjective, less of this “Achieve your goals!” and more intersubjective, like achieving the admiration of our peers.

So as long as you were ambitious about anything, which meant not simply liking to do a thing but also to achieve status via that thing, you had a goal, or at least a meta-goal in common with your family members. This was what kept people together.

A quick rule of thumb to tell, even some extent to quantify to what extent a society stayed sane so far: high-status men should wear distinctive clothing. Like suits a few generations ago in the West, when they were about showing your class, not just a uniform for office workers. There must be a form of clothing in a healthy society that advertises that a man is higher status than the average, of the privileged class or of the high achievers. Because this shows the extent to what a society is non-egalitarian: it shows the extent that status aspirations are still possible because you are allowed to express and enjoy it.

From this angle, let’s look at a few examples. Somewhat surprisingly, America looks worst – their love for baggy jeans is legendary, comparable only with the Brit love for tracksuits. (It is surprisingly only because the higher levels of wealth inequality they have: why do people aspire to be rich if they don’t express their richness is unambiguous ways?) France or Italy fares slightly better, at least their TV celebrities won’t  be caught dead by the paparazzi shopping in a mall in tracksuits and baseball hats, but a succesful lawyer or surgeon still will be… Eastern Europe is kind of weird, clearly suits are more respected by the average people than in the West, they give you vary looks, and the guidos in the richer discotheques dress downright kitchy, but it is hard to tell, because high-status people are rare there, there is not enough wealth in general to go around and the slightly less struggling are not going to differentiate themselves much from the far more struggling. In Arab soceties, for example, Iraq, I have read conflicting opinions, some say the bisht is just like a suit today, wear it for occasions then put it away, and some say it is like a suit a few gens ago, a class marker.

Can someone name a society where men of the top wear distinctive clothing and wearing it is still clearly respected, even a tad bit feared, wearing it for lower-status men is forbidden or laughed out, and they are not outcompeted by the “in” guys who wear fashionable Western stuff?

Not sure I can see any remedies for it. The point is, the Progs managed to destroy any other status than their own, but they kind of failed in creating high status for themselves. I know not everybody would agree with it,  but try going to some working class pub and ask the patrons about Noam Chomsky, 90% will be “no idea” and the rest will oscillate between “some prof” and “fucking commie”. Do you think they talked that way about Rockefeller? I think there was genuine respect, mixed with some fear perhaps. They don’t even respect each other. When Bismarck said of Disraeli “The old Jew, that is the man!”, that bore immense respect. Today the proggiest Progs get attacked for being white males, and feminist women get attacked for not being trans inclusive so basically we see a weird inversion now, we see the futile attempts to gain a bit of personal status by attacking other people’s status, even each others, but this doesn’t really work. Of course it does lead to equality of status, but in the sense of everybody equally resented. The old model was different: by tolerating a high inequality of status, it was possible to extended some amount of respect for a large number of people.

Incidentally, I remember a debate with liberals about 10 years ago. I talked about my medievalist fantasies and they told me – you wanted to be a lord, if you lived back there, not a servant, nobody wants to be a servant, right? And I told them I would totally be OK with being a medieval servant because if I am the best servant, and that is I could achieve with hard work and being smart, and in the baron’s grace, that would actually give me more status and power than what even a CEO can have today. Why have a problem with someone being above you if you can potentially have a lot of people deep under you? But apparently it seems they are mostly motivated by not wanting to have anyone over them, while I would be more motivated by having enough under me. To put it a bit cynically, the goal wouldn’t be to not kiss any ass, but only to have a good net sum of giving and getting it.

Anyhow this reminds of one SSC commenter who proposed a really plausible theory of depression. Dogs can get depressed, it is not a human thing. And one hypothesis says its evolutionary function is make the low-status lay low so that they won’t get killed for being too uppity. Clearly, depressed humans and dogs look really submissive. But how does a brain as simple as a dogs detect his status position? And he – I think Chaosmage was it – proposed that plain simply by detecting if there is anyone under you or not. If anyone defers to you, your status is not the lowest of the pack, so no point in laying low. And that is how having a pet or doing mentoring cures depression. Anyway, if it is true, then one can say men like me focus on not getting depressed: we are not troubled by having others above us, we just also want people under us. While it seems liberal types are motivated by a certain form of pride: really disliking having anyone put above them.

This can give us a certain hope that this Prog system could collapse, after all, seeing how futile it is for the goals of most people. If you cannot be Big Man by spouting Prog slogans, why bother? But until that, there is hardly any solid status-seeking possible, which means shared goals and alliances are hard, which means meaningful human relationships are hard.

A Group Dynamics based explanation of the decline of the West

I have an impression that the development of Group Dynamics-based theoretical approaches was a bit neglected lately in NRx. So I will give it a try, but really, understand that I am a hobby level, amateur blogger, not like the major, professional-ish ones, I write like I speak, so I cannot write well at all. If there is any point of me blogging is to kind of push the better bloggers to reformulate somewhat similar ideas in a far better ways.

Group Dynamics basics: two failure modes

So. Group Dynamics. We are essentially tribal beings, and to maximize our output and happiness we need a tribe we can trust and engage in reciprocal altruism with. This is called group cohesion. The cohesion of, and thus the efficient cooperation inside any group depends on competition with an outgroup. This is a major mistake a lot of nice people commit. They start some local stamp collectors club and wonder why the membership is kind of lukewarm. Well, the reason is they lack enemies. And that sounds of course quite weird and back-asswards, why would you need enemies if you have shared values goals or interests? If you have enemies you want to defeat them quickly, not have them around forever? The equilibrium state is no enemies? And if having enemies is good for you, are people who do something good for you really enemies? So it sounds like the most asinine thing ever. And despite the WTFness of it all, it is essentially true – having a hostile outgroup kicks in ingroup solidarity, enthusiasm and esprit de corps like nothing else does. It is a huge WTF but try to digest it somehow. It is illogical, but human nature isn’t always logical.

The nicest civilized way is Ye Olde British sporting spirit, with Fair Play and good sportsmanship and being gentlemen and all, they always had this idea, more often than Americans and far far more often than Europeans that if your local pub is boring, you start playing darts, but you don’t just play darts, you organize a little local darts championship. My favorite Brit TV series, River Cottage, is all about having these tiny fun cooking or even honey-collecting competitions.

So, outgroup competition is a must for having a proper group. And you want to have a proper group, you are human, and humans are tribal, you cannot function without a good “gang” any better than without toes or ears.

The most brutal intergroup competition is war. Then there is business, monetary competition between groups, but it is fucked up in modern capitalism, there is no ingroup identity because everybody could just quit and work for the competition tomorrow. Competition without loyalty, competition without discouraging defection is really asinine and yet this is how modern corporate capitalism works, the boss is all like “FUCK YEAH we are showing ’em aw yiss, we have the largest market share now baby!” and then every employee is just scratching their ass and thinks “meh, maybe I am gonna work for them in two months, it is just a fucking job”.  I can promise you, if only we would make defection i.e. both firing employees and them quitting far far more discouraged, and corporations would form true group identities, going to work could be almost as interesting than going to work as an accountant at your favorite football club. We could make corporate jobs un-boring with just this one move, to make employment more permanent and defection rare and shameful and thus let competition form sports-club like group identities at corporations.

Anyway.  I was at the monetary form of intergroup competition. Then there is prestige competition – like in sports championships or building national prestige projects, like the TGV for France, it was rather obviously about showing the German engineers who is the alpha engineer. And that is why the Concorde was a financial disaster, but it kinda showed the world the Brits and French can still into cool. Then you can have friendlier competitons, and then you can even have that kind of virtual competition when you just sit with your ingroup and just crack jokes at the low-status pariah idiots in the outgroup. Like how political blogging works, OMG conservatives are hatey and opressive, OMG liberals are short-sighted cry-babies, all safely in the ingroup “safe space” echo-chamber.

So one way your group can malfunction is not having a proper outgroup competition, not having a THEM that keeps US together.

The other way your group can malfunction is that, well, people are members of multiple groups at the same time. And as they partially overlap, they partially intersect, this leads to tension. The stronger kind of group identities basically tear apart the weaker ones. If I am fully religious (in the year 1600AD sense) and my cousin is a heretic, then either the cohesion of the family will suffer for it, or the cohesion of my religion, as one member is now chummy with a heretic. Or both. If religion’s cohesion is stronger, I will disown my cousin and treat him like a not related enemy, if my family’s cohesion is stronger, my co-religionists will maybe kick me out as a lukewarm heretosymp. Or, religious divides can tear nations apart. Or the other way around, when Lutheran nationalist Swedes and Danes had a lot of wars against each other, the cohesion of Lutheranism suffered for it.

Now armed with these theoretical tools, let’s investigate the West!

The demise of nationality

The basic group used to be the nation, at least for Europeans. It is highly artificial a group, far too big, far beyond the natural, tribal, gang-like Dunbar number, it was probably created by poetry (see national poets) and similar intellectual activities. The Gutenberg-press enabled intellectuals to create nationalism. It also enabled them to basically abolish it, after 1945.

Nationalism was all glorious until about 1914. Then it went pathological quickly. Maybe Anglophone countries could keep their nationalisms sane in the 1914-1945 period but we Continentals don’t have much  to be proud about from this era. Our nationalisms got too rabid in this era. And thus after 1945 people were tired and scared of it, and were willing to go with the liberal project to end nationalism, especially in countries like Germany where Allied occupation, its ideology provided by the Cathedral, actively tried to demolish local nationalism. It was so extreme that in the late forties, even the term “German language” was forbidden in Austrian schools, they used the term “teaching language” (Unterrichtssprache) instead.

So, right now there is not even the mildest form of nationalism in the West, like investing money into money-losing prestige projects, man on the Moon, TGV, Concorde, because taxpayers are no longer willing to sacrifice money for glory. Simply put, people don’t value their national identity anymore, don’t want to throw a few beers worth of money into a hat just to build something impractical but impressive they can collectively brag about.

The other kind of problem, intersecting and overlapping group memberships, well, we had that too and the weird part was that originally it participated in nation formation. I mean, it all began with the French Revolution type class-struggle, sans-culottes against the aristocracts, which can be interpreted as two groups, placed vertically as rich vs. poor inside the same horizontal national group hating each other. This is supposed to weaken national identity, and yet, many historians say the French Revolution not only didn’t weaken, it CREATED nationalism. This is confusing for me.

Yet, it is clearly true that since from about Marxism these vertical group identities weakened national identities. Communists explicity wanted to replace national identity with a class and ideology based one, saying proletarians have no country.

The longer-term effect of Leftism and Liberalism was that more and more competing group identities were created inside nations, and that more and more eroded national identity. First it was just workers against capitalists, then later on gays against homophobes, feminists against chauvinist pigs and so on, all these group identities acted as a centrifugal  force and shattered national identities more and more.

In fact, this model leads us to predict why was fascism so brutal. You can define a fascist as someone who wants to rescue national identity, national cohesion, where the poor no longer hate the rich and generally no “accepted” groups hate each other, and he wants to rescue it at ALL costs. That is of course done by focusing competition, or desire to conquest, or hatred, or contempt of an outgroup. It is clear, ALL  group dynamics works like that, this is teh basic rule: if you want to have cohesion in any tribe, you need an opposing tribe. But because the national identities were already on the brink of shattering, only truly extreme amounts of hatred on the outgroup could keep these nations together. They had two choice, either to abandon the project of saving national unity, or to really do it at ALL costs, no matter how much innocent blood needs to be spilled to do it.  The price of temporarily rescuing national unity was thus mass-murderous hatred on the outgroup and an insatiable hunger for  conquest in order to focus all the aggressive energies outward, not inward. The only way to have Prussians and Austrians in the same nation and not hate each others guts is to hate someone else with a fierce, bloody force. And North and South Italy still dislikes each other, so they only way the old Axeface could beat serious cohesion into them is trying to go on a rampage of conquest against any random Mediterrean outgroup and valorize heroism and heroic death and all that. This is why it all was so cruel and bloody, they wanted to save national unity at ALL costs and thus accepted to pay any price in blood for it, no matter how high. (I am not making excuses: they were evil. I am saying it was the particular kind and subset of evil where evil means were used for goals that are more understandable, like national unity. You don’t need to have all your goals being evil in order to be evil, for being evil it is enough if your methods or means are evil.)

Which suggests it is perhaps better not to rescue national identities.  To let them fail. Do they even worth rescuing in their 19th century form? Is there even any rational reason why Austrians and Bavarians, Valloon Belgians and French, should belong to different nations? We could have a West defined culturally and loosely ancestry-based, or perhaps larger areas in it like Greater Anglo-American Sphere, Scandinavia, Francosphere, Mediterrania, and then just just city-states inside it, Patchwork-style. But that does not sound likely. What would worth rescuing is ethnic cultures and shared ethnic ancestries as such, not necessarily every aspect of the nation-state. Nation-states in many cases even repressed ethnic cultures: it was easier to be an out-and-out Venetian or Neapolitan  before the unification of Italy. Germany is a myth that represses the actuality of Bavaria. Or at least that is one way a lot of people see this.

Anyway, we can conclude that nations were killed both by an explicit liberal postwar anti-nationalism, using the the excesses of 1914-1945 nationalism for their own goals, and subnational group identites, especially rich vs. poor, egged on by leftism, which ended up shattering national identities.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to replace national identities with other functional group identites – like religion – so the origin of our modern malaise is simply individuals being atomized and thus their productive output and enthusiasm sapped, because most people today don’t feel they belong to any serious tribe.

This is our root problem. The nation was the FORM in which Western civilization lived, it was the framework holding everything together. Without this form, everything is falling apart: without group cohesion, all kinds of social pathologies emerged.

History seems to teach us that most kind of groups, like political movements or sexual identities, can only destroy, not build. We saw only two kind of groups so far that can build, that can create the systems of trust and cooperation for their members which is necessary for maximizing output and enthusiasm. One is something loosely kinship, ethnicity  and sometimes geography based, like tribes or nations, the other is religion.

So either we do what Spandrell says and start a New Religion – or revive an old one – or find a different, non-national way to keep ethnic kinship based groups with their distinct languages, cultures and ancestry alive.

 

 

 

Copying is everything

All life, including human life depends on the DNA’s ability to copy (replicate) itself.

The second step was intelligence and speech, where hominids and early humans who randomly invented new things could explain and teach it to each other, thus copy the idea from their own heads to other people’s heads.

(This is why I don’t think the Yudkowsky/LW model of intelligence is right. A species could have infinite technological progress by random brute-force tinkering, by trying everything in every combination, as long as they have enough capability to write down what worked and in every generation to learn all that and then tinker some more. Thus, intelligence is more about teaching and learning than about figuring things out, although of course model-building could be seen as a process of copying, of the most important features of a thing, too. “Intelligo” means “I understand”, i.e. “OK, thanks, I managed to copy your idea into my head”.)

The third step was writing and literacy, where ideas could be copied forever and widely distributed. Thus, culture, religion and science became possible.

The fourth step, Gutenberg. The fifth step, the Internet.

Everything that matters rests on copying.

Reproduction is copying (genes) and thus sex is about copying. Fighting a war is about  copying, first in the training and drilling and weapons manufacturing way, but even battle strategy depends on copying the enemy commander into a model in our head and trying to predict his moves that way. Religious faith depends all on copying, holy books, social traditions, it is remarkable that in Christianity only God does not copy, but creates ex nihilo, but according to René Girard’s mimetic violence theory, even Jesus’ role can be interpreted as way to put an end to a particulary vicious form of copying: vengeance-escalation, mimetic violence.

There is hardly anything that would not rest on copying.

Philosophy professor Ruth Millikan’s insight that everything that gets copied from an ancestor has a proper function or teleofunction: it is whatever feature or function that made it and its ancestor selected for copying, in competition with all the other similar copiable things. This would mean Aristotelean teleology is correct within the field of copyable things, replicators, i.e. within biology, although in physics still obviously incorrect.

Darwinian Reactionary drew attention to it two years ago and I still don’t understand why didn’t it generate a bigger buzz. It is an extremely important insight.

I mean, this is what we were waiting for, a proper synthesis of science and philosophy, and a proper way to rescue Aristotelean teleology, which leads to so excellent common-sense predictions that intuitively it cannot be very wrong, yet modern philosophy always denied it.

The result from that is the briding of the fact-value gap and burying the naturalistic fallacy: we CAN derive values from facts: a thing is good if it is well suitable for its natural purpose, teleofunction or proper function, which is the purpose it was selected for and copied for, the purpose and the suitability for the purpose that made the ancestors of this thing selected for copying, instead of all the other potential, similar ancestors.

If the proper function of a horse is to carry riders or draw carriages, sorry, open sleighs, it’s December, and look pretty while doing so and be docile and so on, because breeders selected their ancestors for these traits, then a good horse is one that is good in these because these ware what a horse was selected and copied for.

And the same way we have better and worse citizens, and better and worse women and men in general.

What was humankind selected for? I am afraid, the answer is kind of ugly.

Men were selected to compete between groups, the cooperate within groups largely for coordinating for the sake of this competition, and have a low-key competition inside the groups as well for status  and leadership. I am afraid, intelligence is all about organizing elaborate tribal raids: “coalitionary arms races”. The most civilized case, least brutal but still expensive case is arms races in prestige status, not dominance status: when Ancient Athens buildt pretty buildings and modern France built the TGV and America sent a man to the Moon in order to gain “gloire” i.e. the prestige type respect and status amongst the nations, the larger groups of mankind. If you are the type who doesn’t like blood, you should probably focus on these kinds of civilized, prestige-project competitions.

Women were selected for bearing children, for having strong and intelligent sons  therefore having these heritable traits themselves (HBD kind of contradicts the more radically anti-woman aspects of RedPillery: marry a weak and stupid but attractive silly-blondie type woman and your son’s won’t be that great either), for pleasuring men and in some rarer but existing cases, to be true companions and helpers of their husbands.

We can, of course, try to revolt against nature, but at least understand what it makes – a replicator going against the function it was selected for… something I would not take lightly.

I suppose a revolt against nature would work if you would 1) change the environment, so adapted behavior is no longer functional 2) change the selection mechanism 3) wait a long time.

In other words, if we were transhumans or a humanoid race descended from the homo sapiens but evolved away from it, living in space habitats, we could and should behave really differently. But we feel any sort of romantic attachment to living on this Earth the way we were meant to, or if we want to fix the decline here and now that technology gets any chance to get to that kind of level, we have to work within the natural framework.

 

Reconsidering epistemological scepticism

What I used to think

I blogged before about how I consider an epistemological scepticism fully compatible with being conservative/reactionary. By epistemological scepticism I mean the worldview where concepts, categories, names, classes aren’t considered real, just useful ways to categorize phenomena, but entirely mental constructs, basically just tools. I think you can call this nominalism as well.  The nominalism-realism debate was certainly about this. What follows is the pro-empirical worldview where logic and reasoning is considered highly fallible: hence you don’t think and don’t argue too much, you actually look and check things instead. You rely on experience, not reasoning.

I have various reasons for being an epistemological sceptic – having been influenced by the highly sceptical British conservatives of the Oakeshott-Burke-Scruton type, having been influenced by Buddhism, having been influenced by General Semantics, Peircian Pragmatism, Eric Raymond and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, who are all epistemological skeptics, but my biggest reason is perhaps an over-correction to Prog idealism: for example when Progs scream about the need to protect the environment, the simplest rejection I can offer is that the environment is just a word, an empty concept, that does not predict anything.

On other other hand, I am keenly aware that the whole conservative tradition from Aristotle to Richard M. Weaver flat out rejects epistemological scepticism or nominalism. Besides, despite being an atheist, I have a high respect for Catholic practical-mindedness, and they, too tend to reject nominalism. So I suspect there is something wrong about it, but I have not seen any truly acceptable arguments against nominalism.

What I think now

Well, reading Darwinian Reactionary is changing my mind about this. Apparently I really should read Millikan’s Language: A Biological Model   and her Clear And Confused Concepts.  It seems everybody has their favorite writers, like Moldbug has Carlyle, and DC has Millikan as his favorite writer. More or less. This is news to me, I didn’t think contemporary philosophers are worth reading?  I mean, they are, even, alive?🙂

Anyhow, the argument is that there are classes, which are indeed artificial, and there are kinds, which are products of natural forces, products of causality.

These behaviors, characteristics, and properties tended to clump together in Scottish people for historical reasons. If you plotted all the people in the world on a massively multidimensional graph that had dimensions like frequency of eating haggis, frequency of wearing argyle, frequency of listening to bagpipes, etc., you would find a clump on this graph which denotes the Scots.

And the deeper – Darwinian – argument, unspoken but obvious, is that any being with a model of reality that does not conform to such real clumps, gets eaten by a grue.

This is impressive. It seems I have to extend my one-variable epistemology to a two-variable epistemology.

My former epistemology was that we generally categorize things according to their uses or dangers for us. So “chair” is – very roughly –  defined as “anything we can sit on”. Similarly, we can categorize “predator” as “something that eats us or the animals that are useful for us”.

The unspoken argument against this is that the universe or the biosphere exists neither for us nor against us. A fox can eat your rabbits and a lion can eat you, but they don’t exist just for the sake of making your life difficult.

Hence, if you interpret phenomena only from the viewpoint of their uses or dangers for humans, you get only half the picture right. The other half is what it really is and where it came from.

So I used to think like a woodworker: this one is here a softwood, that one is a hardwood. If I want to quickly make a table, I use softwood, if I want a table that will serve my family for generations, I use hardwood. This is not wrong, but not the full picture. We glean more evolutionary fitness, more advantage if we know what pine and oak trees really are and how they became what they really are, if we know even the features that are not so directly useful for us. We could use that kind of knowledge to e.g. grow more oak trees and thus make oaken furniture less expensive.

That is why I now revoke the objections I raised in the comment section of another post of DC.

He wrote:

>On the other hand, the contemporary view is that concepts are not classification schemes. Instead, concepts are mental abilities to reidentify what is objectively the same on disparate occasions and under disparate conditions.

And I objected:

How could sharp categories exist outside the mind?

I revoke that now. Of course sharp categories don’t exist outside the mind but these clumps do. These exist even the mind of animals, like in the mind of a rabbit who runs away from foxes but from pigeons not. Of course foxes are clumps: their genes are not 100% accurate copies of each other, they are not cloned. But they really distinct clumps.

These clumps apparently exist only in biology. They are a somewhat mysterious feature of biology. Outside biology we frequently don’t find such clumps, for example, celestial rocks exist in all kinds of sizes, from tiny to planet, their size distribution graph does not have much in the way of clumps. Same thing about the size distribution graphs of hills and mountains. The lifeless universe knows no real concepts.

But biology is somehow special. The size distribution graph of lions has a certain clump, that of the average, typical lion. Moreover, the size distribution graphs of felines or great cats also has multiple clumps, which correspond to species.

I don’t know why biology works so, but it does. Why biology is not too continuous… why does it like these distinct clumps. Schelling points? Do we have a theory why speciation even exists and why does genetics tend to clump into species instead of having continuous distribution graphs? No, it is not simply reproduction. I think if the world’s largest man gets the world’s smallest woman pregnant, she has an awfully high chance of dying during childbirth. So species-clusters don’t really match with reproduction-clusters.

Anyway, the lesson is that we are biological beings. When we interact with other humans, and other biological beings, we should perceive these real clumps. Hence, concepts are more real than I used to think. Hence, nominalism is less real than I used to think.

Anyway, my mistake was to think the alternative to Aristotelean essentialism, which I reject, can only be nominalism. So for example sex is either real as in essentially real, or sex is just a concept. And I am certainly no essentialist. There is no “real essence of treehood”. That has always been nonsense – sorry, Aristotle, sorry, Ed Feser, but it really does not work like that. We need a third category, such as DC’s “teleofunction”, so we need to put more emphasis on the teleological aspect of Classical philosophy and less emphasis on the essentialist aspect of it. Not tree-as-just-a-word, nor tree-as-the-real-essence-of-treehood-embodied, but as something-suitable-for-the-ecological-function-of-trees.  The same way, sex isn’t just a concept, but isn’t an essential thing either, but a reproductionary teleofunction, that can function well or can malfunction. People with XXXY or other intersex conditions chromosomes have a real sex, but a malfunctioning one.

I still think it is a weird exception that biology works so. The lifeless universe, in general, does not have these clumps, only living beings do. Neither do artificial things have these clumps – chairs come in all sizes and shapes. Don’t know why biology works so… But we evolved to deal with living beings, and we are living beings ourselves. Thus we must see these clumps.

So basically I must reject Scott Alexander’s “The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories” now. Real plants and animals were not made for man, that is creationism. For whatever reason – but probably teleofunctional optimality – real plants and animals cluster. Correct and objective categories predict these clusters as they really are, as they arised from their own casuality, from natural forces, not simply based on how they seem to us. Misdetection of real clusters leads to getting eaten by a grue.

So we need two epistemology, one for biology, including ourselves, and one for everything else, such as lifeless universe and artificial objects.

I think my previous over-scepticism about epistemology and real categories comes from the fact that I am something sort of a technical guy with an engineering mind, I am far more interested in artificial things than in natural things, and nominalism is very, very correct about artificial things: there is no real clump or cluster of chairs. It is idiotic to argue if a large teacup is a real chair or not – can you sit on it safely? Yes, but it is kind of uncomfortable. OK then call it an uncomfortable chair and stop arguing whether it is really a chair or not.

Nominalism is correct about artificial things. The big mistake is confusing natural things with artificial things.

How I am going to keep my immune system against Prog Idealism now?

Can I still claim equality, justice or the environment are just words or do I have to take them seriously now? Well, I think my new Schelling-fence will be biology.  Things that are not directly biological are just words. In other words, I can still be nominalist about things like justice, equality or the environment, because they are artificial, not natural. So, the argument that something is wrong because it is socially unjust or conserves inequality still carries as much weight that saying weird chairs are wrong because they aren’t like other chairs.

Traders, Masters, Servants, Predators, Victims

A Trader is a libertarianish type who prefers to engage in free, equal exchanges. A Master has a clearly dominant relationship with Servants, bad Masters just exploit Servants, good Masters also care  for and look after them in a paternalistic way. Predators aren’t merely dominant towards Victims, they are downright brutal and violent, which is a different thing.

US Conservatives tend to be Traders, European, Asian, Latin American (e.g. hacienda type) Conservatives tend to be Masters. Good Servants are probably Conservative too, but it is hard to tell, their voice is not exactly loud. The Hard Left of the Robespierre and Pol Pot type are obviously Predators, leading an army of rebellious Servants. Criminals are typically Predators, when more organized, in a Don Corleone sense, they tend somewhat more towards Masters.  In Eric Raymond’s terminology, Predators are Wolves, Victims are Sheep, and the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance fighting the Predators are the Sheepdogs.

The process of civilization is all about eliminating the worst Predators and turning the less bad ones into Masters – in 900AD you could easily see Don Corleone as a feudal lord, not a very good one, obviously, a type who treats serfs like slaves (they were slaves, anyway). In the longer run, Master-Servant  relationship gets nicer, more formal, more benevolent and more free, and finally, like e.g. with the Renaissance, an Age of Traders emerges.

The process of decivilization, or Collapse, is the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance being unable to hold the line against the flood of Predators, and the defense collapses. The thin blue line vanishes and we all get Victimized.

I hope so far it is uncontroversial? Because now comes the controversial part.

Who are the Liberals in this model?  The Moderate Leftists, the Progressives, the Scott Alexander type sophisticated, urbane Nice Guys?

They are the Victims.

Once you see this, you will shit bricks… but it is true. Hence the culture of victimhood. Hence the “only victims are virtuous” type of suicidial bullshit. Scott is far better then most, he exposes and debates with much of the lies in Victimhood Culture – but still a perfect Nautral Born Victim at heart.

The problem is, Liberal Victims are kinda “power bottoms”. They rule the world, basically, they are the intellectuals, they are the professors who raise and indoctrinate the next generation of politicians, journalists, even businessmen.

The problem with Victims is that they constantly hold back the hand of the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance when it would be about the strike down, hard, on the head of Predators. That’s not nice! Don’t be brutal! Be civilized!

Why? Holiness status-signalling, obviously, but that is probably not the final answer, that is an intermediate answer, or a partial answer.

I think part of the story is that they tend to confuse these archetypes. They think when a Trader refuses to deal with them, he is like a dominant Master (see: “discrimination is oppression”). And they think a dominant Master is like a brutal, hostile Predator. (See: “rape culture is patriarchy” – no, actual patriarchy is fathers shooting rapists.) Because, after all, Traders and Masters are Not Nice.  Because they are Not Victims. Clear?

The tragedy is that Liberal Victims focus their efforts on fighting against Masters, and also Traders, instead of Predators. To give you a random example, rape is a major issue for feminists, and feminists are female Liberal Victims, largely. The traditional way to deal with rape is that women have a male guardian who kills the rapist. Now I am not saying we cannot make a better system, but why are feminist Liberal Victims are so hostile to the idea? Why do they hate the Master (the Patriarchy) more than they hate the Predator? Why don’t they see the Master as at least the lesser evil than the Predator?

I don’t know what could be done here. Perhaps we could try telling Liberals that they are, indeed, Victims. But maybe they know it. Perhaps we could tell them being a Victim sucks, but you cannot reason people out of a position they haven’t been reasoned into: it is obvious that being a Victim sucks, they put up with it for some different reason, like holiness-signalling. Perhaps only a full Collapse will teach Liberals how much being a Victim truly sucks. I don’t know.

Perhaps we should just stop protecting them from the very Predators they enable… but that sounds cruel.

Perhaps we should engage in Catastrophe Tourism. Organize tours for Liberal Victims into the parts of the world where they can see what happens when you don’t allow Traders, Masters, Top Servants to kick Predator ass, hard. But would it really work?

Well, the only thing to be done is to really, consciously form the Trader-Master-Top Servant alliance. Libertarians tend to be Traders, NRx tends to be Masters, but sometimes, like in my case, Top Servants. (I don’t have the easy confidence and radiant authority of true Masters, so if it was the year 1200, I’d rather be a feudal lords employed overseeer with a nice pension than the lord himself, rather work with his borrowed authority than generate mine.)

Nassim Taleb is right that nothing really works well without skin in the game. Liberal Victims should be somewhat exposed to the Predator violence they enable, so that they learn, but I can’t think of any non-cruel ways to do that. I think I became a right-winger at least partially because the gangsters in my school. (Mostly white gangsters, in Europe, 1980’s: they are not going to be very white for the next generation though.) I was exposed to Predators. I know the only thing that would have helped those kids is some painful canings and military discipline, not “addressing” the social fucking causes of the problem,  there wasn’t any. (And to those liberals who think this only teaches them that violence is okay: they already know that. Of course violence is okay. It is a tool for peace. The point is teaching them that civilized, organized, peacekeeping violence is stronger than the gangster type.) Perhaps all you need is truly “integrated” schools, and not let Liberal Victims escape into private schools or public schools in “nice” areas, and their kids stop being Liberal Victims, because regular beatings by school bullies work like a charm against holy-victimhood signalling. But this sounds highly cynical, too.

RE: Servants without masters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morality/Ethics As A Social Prestige Engine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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