Fighting
The Dark Enlightenment is Dark. That's the whole thing about it. The more you know the truth the darker it gets. The very term was coined by Nick Land who is pretty much a Skynet apologist. He doesn't seem humans have it in them to get out of this shit. Now most people don't agree with that, but the term Dark Enlightenment has stuck, and there's a reason for that. Many understand that truth is dark, and that we're heading to dark times.
I also get called very gloomy and pessimistic myself. I think that's a bit unfair; I write more about history, which is plenty dark, and more abstract points on how human society works. There's always some room for uncertainty when you write in the abstract. You wanna see real dark? Real, concrete, visceral dark? Take a look at this guy.
Now I don't know who this David Hines guy is. But he knows his stuff. He knows it really well. Some snippets:
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107066933202944
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107288459546624
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107345695035393
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107423683899392
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107598234087425
Of course they are. The Left is about Power. The Left is where psychopathic status maximizers go in order to attain power, i.e. maximize their status. It follows that the Left will always have the upper hand in any political conflict (i.e. war), because they're more committed to gaining power. That's the whole point on being on the left. All the stuff they believe in, all that "progressiveness", that's just means to an end. The ideas change; the goal does not. The goal is to have crush your enemies having them driven to you and hear the lamentations of their women. The left is good at that.
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820110007572320256
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820110298237587460
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820110368353779714
https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820110508577656833
Yes, yes. The Left knows how to fight. The left is an army. What we call the left is the descendants of the dissenting mobs which destroyed the old state order in Europe. They destroyed the English monarchy, the French monarchy. That's no joke. Nobody ever managed to destroy the traditional order in China or the Islamic world. It's some pretty virulent virus that managed to destroy European states. Of course they had inside help; but that's besides the point. Once the tactics were created, once it was shown how effective political agitation can be, it could never die again. Every time a psychopatic status maximizers was born, all he had to do was to look back, see how it's done, and do it.
I could paste the whole series of Tweets; but go read the whole thing. His point is very insightful. The Left knows how to do violence; it has been doing it for centuries. They invented this shit. As I say, a better argument would be that the tactics come first; the ideas are accessory. They come up with whatever ideas are best in order to raise a bigger army, have it funded, and keep agitating. If the Right wants to survive, if it wants to fight back, it's not going to be easy. Having balls is important. Donald Trump has balls. Many of his people have balls. But balls is not enough. You need organization. You need logistics. And you need the will to power. You need the psychopathic status-maximizing drive to keep you from giving up. Remember Leftists died all the time for the cause. The Right doesn't want to die. That's the whole point of being on the Right! If the Left is about maximizing status whatever the costs; the Right is about being left alone and allowed to survive.
Well, in a fight, the guy without scruples always has an advantage over the guy with scruples. When the Jihadists in Europe go bust Rightist demonstrations, they shout "you will lose, you love life, we love death". It's hard to argue against that. The Samurais also said their edge was that they loved death. It's hard to fight against an army who doesn't mind being sacrificed. It's not impossible; especially if they're dumb Muslims who are a bit too eager to die. But Communists aren't suicidal, the get that point. They're just ruthless. They are willing to kill, and ostracize, and starve their enemies.
As David Hines point out; the Left is not a set of ideas; it's a set of optimized tactics for agitation. And the only way to win a fight against an optimized set of battle tactics is to adopt them yourself. That was Fascism was about. To use Communist tactics against them. Some retarded conservatives use this point to argue that "fascism was leftist". No, that's really dumb. That's like saying that a Republican army is monarchist because it has a chain of command. The words "left" and "right" are not about their proclaimed ideas. They're just fighting teams, you got two of them, and you gotta give them opposite names so that the idea gets across. If the Left is winning because it's doing something right, well the Right is going to do the same. So Mussolini and Hitler ran party armies harassing the populace, it run massive rallies, it assassinated political enemies. And yes, it adopted some ideas that made it easier to raise and fund an army. He had to if he wanted to get anywhere.
The thing is that to raise an army you gotta motivate it. The Left pays it people, but more than anything it has a very solid memeplex to sell. It sells equality. If you're below average, "equality" to you sounds like "raise in status", so by definition half the population is always on board for that. And if you're running the army you get to be pretty high in status, which is very attractive for greedy status-maximizers. The problem with the Left of course is that to deliver equality you have to destroy society. The whole thing. But society has this habit of reconstructing itself, because that's what social species do; so you need to become increasingly crazy and destroy everything that can support human life if you want to deliver equality. So you get a signaling spiral. Now they're denying that biological sex is real.
The Right really just wants to survive. The Right is by definition the reaction against the Left, whatever the Left is in a particular time and space. AlfaNL says that the Dutch Right are Left Libertarians. He means they are what Americans would call Left Libertarians. But in Holland they are the Right alright, because the Left comes first, and the Right is whatever army can be raised to oppose the Left. If the Left becomes crazier and murderous, the Right will morph into whatever can effectively oppose the Left. When the Left was Jimmy Carter, the Right was Ronald Reagan. When the Left is Hillary Clinton, the Right becomes Donald Trump. If the Left is going to go back to the 1930s, the Right might as well have to do so too.
Nationalism used to be a Leftist movement against the traditional monarchies of Europe. Once they won, and Nationalist democracies became the establishment, the Left became Socialist internationalism. That was a winning strategy. It spread like wildfire. It destroyed 3100 years of Chinese monarchy, which was no mean feat. But as 20th century history showed, there was a way to counter act that. Doubling down on nationalism. Equality is effective. But tribalism is pretty effective too. Especially for men. If anything, this time it should be even more attractive for men, as the Left has gone much further on feminism this time around. Now of course tribalism is harder because every Western country has hordes of enemy tribes in their midst; so going racist is basically declaring a will to engage in ethnic cleansing war. Those are harsh. Being racist in 1933 Germany was pretty much harmless LARPing. Yeepee, Aryans are awesome. Trying saying that in Berlin right now. It takes balls.
But the Right by definition doesn't have balls. It just wants to live. Nobody wants Civil War. The Left doesn't mind it, if that's what it takes for them to gain more power. So they might force it. Somebody else said that the USA today sounds like Spain before the Civil War. That was a textbook example of the Left forcing the Right into rebellion. I recall reading that the Army generals that rebelled said on the day of the uprising: Half Spain does not resign itself to die. The Right half. I think that really says it all.
71 comments
reply"Of course they had inside help; but that’s besides the point. ” Only if you want to maintain the fraud of an anarchistic ontology, which you and Land do. De Jouvenel and Moldbug made the precise point that this “inside” help IS the game. Leftism is is high-low against the middle. The low sure as hell isn’t the primary actor in this.
-
reply
[…] Fighting […]
-
reply
[…] Spandrell with another terrific article: […]
-
reply
Should a pessimist be sensitive about being called pessimist?
-
reply
I actually look forward to be persuaded of the likelihood of a bright future.
-
reply
If he's brave enough to accept that agency is an illusion, and to bear with that awareness consistently, there's no more things like optimism and pessimism left for him, just as there is no more good and bad, virtue and wrong. Things are as they are, and will be as they will be. One can only tell his dislike or like, keep watching or try to avert his look.
-
reply
" They destroyed the English monarchy, the French monarchy. That’s no joke. Nobody ever managed to destroy the traditional order in China or the Islamic world. It’s some pretty virulent virus that managed to destroy European states." Well, the difference is in the brain type (remember about 95% of cultural achievements have been attained by Whites: this means having a type of restless brain that constantly overturns governments and seeks change. You invent things, things of all kinds. The alphabet (a system infinitely smarter than ideogrammatic scripts. No wonder the East Asians copied the alphabetic way of writing: this idea's author died a couple days ago at 111), the symphony (while the rest of the world beats drums or plays monophonic music only) as well as the atom bomb, bacteriological weapons, Christianity, Communism (and Facebook, and digital money, ...). "You need the psychopathic status-maximizing drive to keep you from giving up. Remember Leftists died all the time for the cause. The Right doesn’t want to die. That’s the whole point of being on the Right! If the Left is about maximizing status whatever the costs; t" As if those who died were the power-mad ones. That was rare. It was their useful peasantry to die, mostly. As for these psychopaths, they did a fantastic job of self-description with the famous The Authoritarian Personality. Whenever they throw allegations at their enemies you can appreciate how good they are at self-description. " It sells equality. If you’re above average, “equality” to you sounds like “raise in status”, so by definition half the population is always on board for that." You mean "BELOW". This apart, that's the briefest clearest picture of the concept of equality you can have, and yes it's an ingenious way to appropriate for your purposes vast energies (what energizes people more than envy and hurt pride?) You get the support of all who FEEL below. Doesn't overlap with all who ARE below average, but more or less we are there. These people will do everything in return for the feeling that they aren't "inferior" (their biggest dread). "Psychopathic status-maximizer" is a great definition. What I encourage you to do is to think over whether it's perfectly OK to keep using "status" and "power" interchangeably. I don't think they are exactly the same thing. One could desire status to avoid being harassed while not desiring to harass.) "Left" and "right" are a little misleading flag terms maybe? It's globalism vs. nationalism. Actually, it's powerful, determined, capital-backed (includes media-backed) globalism vs. flabby clueless nationalism, lest for a fringe that has a space only on the Internet (as long as it is left free). There's going to be globalism, because the "same people" who made nationalism when they so wanted want it now; the same forces (technology, economy) that led to nationalism will naturally lead to globalism now. Inequality will increase. The talk of equality, which is needed by the high to keep themselves high with the approval of the low, will increase. I mean, spandrell, you seem to have awakened to a lot of things you were oblivious to as late as 1 year ago. When you squarely state there's no agency, "nobody is free", you accept something an infinitesimally little share of people can stand accepting. Your post on deception and self-deception is a delicacy, really. While reading it I kept thinking "yes! yes!", glad that someone who can write better than I was there who said things as they are, in the face of the sciences of deception & self-deception, aka social sciences. But don't you contradict yourself when you are back to thinking of conflict in terms of armies, guns, ...? Conflict has become a matter of neurons in the First World, and more refined technology will keep it this way from now on. The ultimate trench of this war is drawn along the definition of "love" and "hate": channel owners can now "Love" comments on YouTube (lol), and "I love it" is one of the SIX codified emotional responses allowed on Facebook. The opposite is not "hate" or even "dislike": the opposite is "sad": it's sad not to love, the happy and cool Love! :)))) It's not just that you can't say Aryans are awesome in Berlin. It's that you can't say Whites or Han Chinese are, perhaps, a little more intelligent than Samoans and Sudanese in every forum/comments section/class/social setting where people with a bit of "status" are gathered. You can't say that there are races or that they mean something more than different hair type and skin color. Look at Wikipedia or any social sciences (toilet) paper: the lexical boundary is "ethnicity". What's different between the Samoans and the Han is "ethnicity" :)))) So the battlefields are culture (school media) and international government bodies (starting from all what's connected with issuing money and banking), not the streets as your posts seem to suggest. And banks and capital are the main force that's pushing for the dismantling of nations, not the no-self-esteem leftist mobs (as your posts seem to suggest). It's Capital, not the Mob and the generals of its army, what's trying to establish complete rule. Capital so smart as to brand itself as Leftist merchandise to gain the support and favor or the ingenuous left, sure. When the left seems dangerously smart (Sanders and his supporters) you'll see them slandered by those very mainstream media and journalists you (ingenuously?) see as left-wing. Weren't Bernie Bros. slammed on the NYT, Huffington Post and the likes? Sure, they had to be slammed GENTLY on the surface: the Fake Left can't show hatred of the Real Left as it does of the Real Right. Politically, we have no enemies to the right, you said; we also have no enemies from Sanders to the left of Sanders, say I: not because if they become powerful they wouldn't be a problem, but because they are far from being powerful and a problem. "A problem", I say, to people of views like yours. Personally, I am beginning to like globalism and no-borders. Globalist tyranny should be fought, not globalism in itself. Not of this variety (https://gumshoenews.com/2014/12/27/everything-is-in-place-and-nobody-can-stop-us-now-dr-day-1969-lecture/) though, if possible.
-
reply
You mean “BELOW”.
Thanks, fixed.
Well, the difference is in the brain type (remember about 95% of cultural achievements have been attained by Whites: this means having a type of restless brain that constantly overturns governments and seeks change. You invent things, things of all kinds. The alphabet (a system infinitely smarter than ideogrammatic scripts. No wonder the East Asians copied the alphabetic way of writing: this idea’s author died a couple days ago at 111)
Come on, let's not overdo this. First of all East Asians didn't copy phonetic writing. Japan invented his own. China doesn't really use pinyin, and they only adopted to make it easy for Soviet advisors to learn the language. By your argument us stupid whites learned phonetic writing from the sagely Egyptians. Good things spread. Whites got inventive after 1400, we weren't for quite a long time. I wrote a post years ago about why Asians don't like innovation; it takes power away from the old patriarchs. They have a point.
“Psychopathic status-maximizer” is a great definition. What I encourage you to do is to think over whether it’s perfectly OK to keep using “status” and “power” interchangeably. I don’t think they are exactly the same thing. One could desire status to avoid being harassed while not desiring to harass.)
As Jim says, the foremost duty of the King is to prevent others from being the King. One could desire power to avoid being harassed while not desiring to harass. As the old Chinese annals say, the sagely king set things right so he can cross his arms and do nothing.
“Left” and “right” are a little misleading flag terms maybe? It’s globalism vs. nationalism. Actually, it’s powerful, determined, capital-backed (includes media-backed) globalism vs. flabby clueless nationalism, lest for a fringe that has a space only on the Internet (as long as it is left free).
"Left" and "right" is what we call the psychopathic status-maximizers and their current-year enemies. Words get used because they're useful; they are only inaccurate if you essentialize the definition, which you should never do. In China the "left" are the Maoists while the "right" are the pro-cathedral globalists.
But don’t you contradict yourself when you are back to thinking of conflict in terms of armies, guns, …? Conflict has become a matter of neurons in the First World, and more refined technology will keep it this way from now on.
Tell that to the Trump supporters being physically beaten up, and the cops being killed by BLM. Every conflict ultimately resorts to violence, if only hypothetically. As Hines says, the Left has being carrying out quite real physical violence for decades, and they get away with it. Because that's the way you show who's boss. The Cathedral does its work through capital and the universities and Twitter and Facebook because they can resort to their goons and actually kill people when they want to. If Trump supporters could beat up SJWs and get away with it, the Twitter trannies would go back to being men in a nanosecond.
-
reply
The right doesn't react in violence to the left because a) times are good, and b) it makes them look bad. Plenty of Trump supporters were ready to start killing leftists this election cycle. They held themselves back so they wouldn't look bad and Trump could win the Presidency. And it worked.
-
reply
I don't use pinyin. East Asians invented plenty of things, we tended not to evolve them due to an emphasis on stability and active efforts at research suppression - foolishly, when it came to gunpowder, for example.
-
reply
I read the twitter storm earlier. My initial thought was the following: The left has all the organizational know-how. That's beyond dispute. The right doesn't have the means to build its own know-how on a time scale short enough to be competitive in civil conflict. However, the left really, really looks like it can be broken on racial/ethnic lines. Here's a relevant example: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/us/womens-march-on-washington-opens-contentious-dialogues-about-race.html So the topic of discussion for now I think is how best to fracture the left coalition. If we can change the conflict from left vs right to white (probably plus east Asian) vs. everybody else, then "our" side will inherit all the good white agitation generals from the fractured left. David Hines was very adamant that "you do not want white people rioting." I can really see where he's coming from, but I'm at a loss to conceive of a better strategy for actually winning.
-
reply
The thing is the white leftists get paid. Soros et al. have a very good apparatus for funding rioting. They like the status but you still have to pay them every day. We're not getting an army unless we pay the soldiers.
-
reply
Again just my immediate thought: Need more diversity agitation in silicon valley. Thiel broke, maybe any of them can. If silicon valley is driven to revolt at approximately the same time the left coalition breaks on racial lines, money and army could materialize at once. I admit I probably sound desperate.
-
reply
Unfortunately, you can't extrapolate from Thiel's sexual orientation; he never "broke". He has always leaned conservative; as an undergrad, he was one of the founders of The Stanford Review.
-
reply
And along comes this article. I must admit you have a pretty good point: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/17/ads-two-dozen-cities-offer-protesters-2500-agitate/
-
reply
We should be sending people to join. Take their money, and report on them.
-
reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZl37py\_rOQ The ads are fake. Freaking hilarious video.
-
reply
Lol. Who the hell is that guy.
-
reply
Dominick To-YEEP-so. #freePaytonManning
-
reply
Doesn't mean that there aren't real leftists paid agitators, btw.
-
reply
[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
-
reply
I've beaten more liberal groups before. I don't know if its possible for long, but their very organization opens them to vulnerabilities that more tribal organizations don't have - infiltration, as Project Veritas has shown. They also are ultimately brittle, and don't take defeat well. They don't esteem tradition, and by definition, lack a martial tradition or much personal courage. Focus on their weak points and enormous damage can be done to them. Its been done before, it can be done again.
-
reply
May I ask for some more details?
-
reply
Basically, their strengths carry inherent weaknesses. I've had experience in beating one very conclusively before, but I have a feeling that unfortunately, people like myself are a scarcity. This isn't a good thing, and highly suggests that 4chan is actually our most significant force, because they actually have experience. Anyway... 1) A large part of their strength comes from the mob, and more or less, running in the same direction at the same time. Its surprisingly powerful, but it leads to very poor op-sec. You can't quite tell a hundred people to do something and also vet them all at the same time. 2) At the same time, it is very difficult for them to exclude people, because their brand is inclusion. This is a strength that we fundamentally have - its hard to get in, for example, an ethnic gang because you have to be of that ethnicity. But when your group is focused on welcoming all, then its easy to get inside of them. 3) Make them suffer their own rules. They want to advocate for the diverse, so its very possible to get them internally to promote someone for basically, affirmative action points rather than skill. I've done this before, and its extremely powerful - pick someone who has enough holiness points: a black woman or something. Feed her dreams of delusion and advancement. Promote her, while making sure that its someone incompetent. Your target organization will end up promoting someone completely incompetent into a position of importance. Pound for pound, they are better en masse, while we are better if we can reduce the fight to a brawl where they can't use the advantage of numbers. The left doesn't take defeat easily and looks much more to its leaders for guidance. If basically you can "drag things down into the mud", whatever that means on an internet level, then we usually will prevail.
-
reply
Spandrell. Excellent Blog. I spent a few days over Christmas reading over quite a bit of it. I enjoy and value your theory about status. I believe it forms part of the explanation. I was surprised to see RF here. His work provides the structural, systematic background, the base if you will. Your theory concerns the pycho/social aspects of the superstructure. They can be united into a coherent theory. I will be talking about this quite soon, when I post my series on Moldbug. You write: "I could paste the whole series of Tweets; but go read the whole thing. His point is very insightful. The Left knows how to do violence; it has been doing it for centuries. They invented this shit. As I say, a better argument would be that the tactics come first; the ideas are accessory. They come up with whatever ideas are best in order to raise a bigger army, have it funded, and keep agitating. If the Right wants to survive, if it wants to fight back, it’s not going to be easy. Having balls is important. Donald Trump has balls. Many of his people have balls. But balls is not enough. You need organization. You need logistics. And you need the will to power. You need the psychopathic status-maximizing drive to keep you from giving up. Remember Leftists died all the time for the cause. The Right doesn’t want to die. That’s the whole point of being on the Right! If the Left is about maximizing status whatever the costs; the Right is about being left alone and allowed to survive." Yes. I have a series coming soon about this very thing. Like I said above with Reactionary Future, it will have a structural, systematic aspect and it will have an explicit, status building aspect. Indeed, part of the design's purpose of the structure is to have an inbuilt status-maximising, and expansionary aspect. Wellington said that Napoleon was worth 50,00 men on a battlefield. Why? Why did the men fight all the harder because Napoleon was-watching-them? When Caesar invaded Britian, it was nearly a disaster at the start. The legionaries refused to leave the boat. Then, the vexilarius carrying the standard jumped overboard and walked towards the enemy. If a Legion lost a standard, it was considered shameful. The legionaries faced a choice: either jump out and fight, or stay and face enternal shame, and Ceasar's wrath. The men jumped out, and fought to victory. Why? My design question is how to build an online system that creates the conditions for this kind of thing. You know a lot about history, and the importance of status — indeed I like your point-dear-horse meme — and I look forward to getting your feedback on my idea.
-
reply
[…] ADDED: Spandrell’s take. […]
-
reply
They're mad but it's just fashionable and LARPy. 99% of protesters have it prettty good by historical standards, and (even tho they lack common analytical thinking) they know this. Within the context of the "old world" revolution comparisons, the ppl were fucking starving; Now they just want abortions and pronouns- Big difference. "Antifa's" worst crime yet is plotting to stink bomb the deploraball and delay an inauguration with protests, chanting, blocking traffic. Only BLM protests really carry volatility, I can't think of one even mildly recent movement (besides weather UG) where liberals did any damage unless they facilitated large black swaths into it. pussies. The major domineering ppl should focus on is the left's penchant for CommunityOrganizing/indoctrination/sinicization through their influential institutions. That is extremely effective, and so effective that there will come a point when ppl fucking starve and ppl will fucking revolt (old world style).
-
reply
Doesn't matter. Mass can create a hysteria of power. Breaking it requires finding the center point of mass and breaking it. It doesn't take a lot, and they'll stampede over each other. The main problem is that I don't think most in the Right have any practice in dealing or inflicting violence of any kind nowadays. Its not necessarily about punching people, its about the optics and the ability to manipulate the crowd.
-
reply
The left-right labels are blurring your vision. Mao and Trotsky are not in the same team. Social order is the game, and we have three main types: distributed power (left), hierarchy (right), and cult of personality (Mao, Mussolini, Trump, Monarchy). Status isn't power, though. It's just a marker for it. Today's left seems ill suited to deal with a right cult of personality, because they've traded power for status.
-
reply
Excuse me, but I'm the guy with the label theory. Labels are context-dependent. Mao and Trotsky didn't play the same game, so of course they were not on the same team. But in their contexts, Trotsky was in the Russian left team, Mao was in the Chinese left team; they were called so in their time, and I the linguist am explaining why those words were used. If you wanna start a new game and propose we use some new words, well you can do that, but that's not what I'm doing here. And if status is a marker for power then status is power. If you get a medal for every level of power you have, the number of medals *is* your power. That's what markers are for.
-
reply
Glad to see I am not the only one to notice you conflate status and power in a theoretically VERY clumsy way. This is not to troll, and you should be glad we point it out. There can be cases in which people will put their life at risk for "glory" (a form of status), without no power gain in sight even if they succeed. I see many in the right have fallen in love for this word and it is all the buzz now, but fads are to be resisted, not espoused. You can see this "status" buzzword repeated endlessly by the drumbeat followers, the alt-right mob -- this alone should be of warning. Conflating status and power is = conflating narcissism and narcissists with sociopaths and psychopaths. To begin with, psychopaths and sociopaths are gonna be narcissists, but the reverse isn't bound to be true. "The left-right labels are blurring your vision. " That's true too. You and your terminology (oh yeah Mr. "I am the linguist") look backward instead of forward?!
-
reply
Each of us, thinking of the people they know, can see how status and power matter to different extents to each of their acquaintances. OF COURSE those who give their selves to power pursue status obsessively (but even here: don't we have "mad" scientists who dream of blowing up the whole world while they are alien to society and hyper-introverted? Isn't this power without status?) I also know people who care for status, they never fail to say the right hypocritical word at the right time "in the group", are good enough at deception and self-deception but they are utterly indifferent to power. Come to think of it... this very type of people are better at self-deception than at deception. As they don't want to control others, they have little need for deception.
-
reply
Spandrell is right, though; has using the labels in context, we're protecting our values onto them. Your narcissism/sociopathy frame is very strong, and I think works well with the three dispositions I've mentioned in another comment. Modernity increases narcissism (imo, by turning every child into a spoiled child), which makes people more vulnerable to sociopaths. Humility is the core of every decent religion, because good judgement can only be attained consistently through humility. Spandrell is so insightful because he is humble, which is why he lets us insult him in his own comments to an extent.
-
reply
Look, ignorant uneducated togib. You can make your arguments politely or you can get the crap out. I am glad for people pointing out flaws in my argument but I am not glad for snarky nitpicks. Yes, of course my terminology looks backward. I do evolutionary history. How the hell do you get what words mean if you don't look back at how they're used and how the usage evolved? What does "look forward" even mean? As for status vs power; yes you could narrow down the definitions so that power means the explicit ability to make people do your will, and status to be just high social regard. But the point of being highly regarded is so that people will do your will to some extent. I agree it might be useful to narrow down the definitions and use the words distinctly; but the usage out there, not just here, overlaps a fair bit, and there's a reason for that.
-
reply
Yeah, I saw your response to someone else's comment after I posted this, and stand corrected. I'm reading an interesting (Jewish) book right now, where the author divides people up into three dispositions, which I think is helpful in this context. The first disposition tracks with what you've said about Chinese Kings: people who just want to understand reality so they can make rules that let things run themselves. The second disposition is sociopathic status maximizers (and here, he suggests selling these folks on morality by showing them that they'll have their rivals above them in heaven if they don't score more mitzvah points than their rivals), and the third is gen pop, who take simple carrot and stick motivation. Here's the part I'd like your opinion on: the key to good governance is "the sagely king set things right so he can cross his arms and do nothing." For religious reasons, European nobility became convinced that letting the meek inherit the earth meant expanding the distribution of power downward. This is the flaw in western Christianity (there's an element of it in Jewish dogma, too), imo, and is being repeated by the current "left" leadership. We're giving the "left" points for knowing how to organize, but they seem increasingly incapable of doing so for exactly this reason. They insist, religiously, on puting the person with maximum oppression Pokémon points in charge. On some level, the trans thing is probably a means to allow (insane, but) competent people near the levers of power. TL;DR: am I engaging in wishful thinking on this, or does this ring true as a meaningful difference between West and East, and a partial explanation for why Chinese leadership seems to have reverted to something useful much faster than Western leadership? If this is all stuff you've covered before that I'm rediscovering, I'll go ahead and blame having a toddler distracting me.
-
reply
If toddlers distracting was a valid excuse I couldn't have a blog.
For religious reasons, European nobility became convinced that letting the meek inherit the earth meant expanding the distribution of power downward.
This is obviously not what it happened. The nobles first shafted the kings because they didn't want to pay taxes, they set up Parliament, and soon the junior nobles and upstart bourgeois started agitating for an expanded franchise so they could outflank the senior nobles. Now of course this was overtly justified with religious rhetoric, so in that sense you could say that it was done for "religious reasons", but saying "the European nobility became convinced" is too much of a stretch.
We’re giving the “left” points for knowing how to organize, but they seem increasingly incapable of doing so for exactly this reason. They insist, religiously, on puting the person with maximum oppression Pokémon points in charge.
No, come on. No matter how you define the Left, you gotta give them that they are very well organized. The Bolsheviks, the Cathedral, the myriad QUANGOs that do agitprop both abroad and domestically. Those guys are everywhere, they have lots of people, they are very well funded and very professional. Is Obama actually in charge? Or just some figurehead put there because he looks good in pictures? How much actual leeway does he have? Note that a King doesn't have to rule. Plenty of Chinese emperors were openly put there by the court Mandarins, chosen because they were easy to manipulate, or had family connections to powerful factions at court. Remember the Rules for Rulers video. The best ruler is the one who doesn't grab anything for himself, and shares everything with his ministers. That is supremely stable as nobody has an incentive to remove him. Now, the democratic identity politics signaling spiral is indeed wreaking havoc among the Left. Having figureheads on top is never ideal because you never know when they are going to go self-aware, so you gotta be very sure they will obey the wider ruling coalition, and there's transaction costs to that. To the extent that identity politics made people take Hillary Clinton seriously, well that indeed is an advantage that China has against the West.
-
reply
I'm trying to make a distinction between "having a bunch of people on the team" and "having a strong, functioning hierarchy." Clearly the left has that first part down, and did have the second down in the past. Now...I'm not convinced. Just watched the rules for rulers video, and it suffers from a complete misunderstanding of religion and status. The material wealth of the West, especially the US is absurd. This is why religion is important. If this guy was right, then all the old nobility needed to do was buy everyone off, yet we see over and over again that when you try give a narcissist what he wants, he just turns around and asks for more. The best ruler is the one who gets his people more than they could get themselves, not one who gives them what they want. It's basic parenting; my daughter asks to watch TV instead of going to bed, and I'm a crap dad if I let her. The common people are large sized children. They are narcissist beyond the point of having any agency, and they need to either be enslaved (suboptimal), or strapped to a nice, lean religion that tricks them into behaving like they're not horrible animals. The left used to get productive effort from their narcissism, but is now a victim of its success.
-
reply
Ok, get out of the synagogue and come back to earth for a while. I'm not talking religion here. Religion is a part of the basic economics of power, one among many. The "best" ruler is not the best ruler in the eyes of some moral standard that you like. I meant the most convenient ruler for a bunch of cynic apparatchiks, which is how most countries end up being run. You are not the ruler of your daughter, your are her father. Rulers have no offer something to their allies if they want to get obeyed. That something can be money, or can be vanity, or status of any sort. But they must give them something.
-
reply
I'm not saying a leader doesn't give, I'm just saying that he cannot give them what they ask for directly without negative consequences. You gave the perfect example of the newly crowned emperor retiring his generals with maximum status and limited power. This is pretty much what Trump did with some of his top campaign allies. It's also good judgement; if they're likely to be a risk, appease them in a way that reduces the risk. My impression of Moldbug and Land is that they get that leaders need to reward the competent to get the outcome the leaders want, but they're focused on the money part. Your innovation, if I'm not misunderstanding it, is that raw status doesn't necessarily come from money, or even power, per se, but from faith as well. Those generals are most efficient if they can be rewarded with holiness. That's a big part of the left's success: those 1960s Marxist rich kid revolutionaries don't get paid in money. Suicide bombers don't get paid in money. A new religion is an infinite pool of status, most people are happy with a chocolate bar and a certificate of "you're a good [member of our religion], in good standing with the divine," and the sociopathic status maximizers can be paid in statues and saint status.
-
reply
Well those Marxist 1968 revolutionaries are making a damn lot of money these days. The Clinton Foundation was making zillions. Yes, they weren't paid back then when they started agitating; but see how eventually the top agitators managed to cash their power into cold cash. You seem to be thinking of normal people, the lower echelons of the chains of patronage. Sure, perhaps those are pacified in religious terms. But the top echelons of the ruling class aren't being paid in faith. They are paid with real power. If you're the kind of people to be content with a goodness certificate you are not bloody likely to become a member of the inner circle of the ruling class. Note that Zhao Kuangyin was eventually murdered.
-
reply
My experience with left leaning groups is that they organize to win, and actually avoid drinking their own koolaid until some time has elasped.
-
-
reply
I think your frame may need to take account of education. The Left won because they captured education. Then, since they had education, they could define in the minds of the malleable younger set what status was, and wait for the older set to die. For example, if we look at the resumption of the French Monarchy under Orleans, it was quite a popular move - for about twenty years. It never purged the student/professor bulwark of the Left. With this apparatus in place, the Left is empowered. All people of the society go through its programming, and therefore are defined by the Left's frame (even if they end up disagreeing). In order for the Right to triumph, we need to re-capture (and possibly raze) this mechanism of social coordination. The question then, is how did the Left capture education? It wasn't with crowds of students in the streets getting shot at Kent State or Chapel Hill. Effectively I think what happened is that the Church badly misplayed her hand. It became fashionable to criticize her, first in purely moral terms, then in social terms, then in religious and theological terms. Had she handled the crises of the Universities differently - playing the long game instead of trying to shore up short-term gains, and ruthlessly stamping out dissent among the scholars as among the peasants - we'd be living in a much different world. Of course the further question is why did it all work out this way? And I think you have something strong there: the Church was weak and corrupt, yet rich, and attacking her (in certain ways) was a 'yuuuuge' road to status, especially after (for example) the English aristocracy and Crown got involved in the game. The Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, the mendicant orders and the Society of Jesus were attempts by the Church to regain moral legitimacy by cleaning house and showing that priests could, indeed, be virtuous, but they were too little, too late. All of this is to say: I don't think the picture is quite as bleak as you paint it, historically speaking. The Right can fight, and can do so strategically, but right now the Right is a headless army, i.e. a disparate, scattered set of individuals desparately trying to learn what unification and direction even looks like, whereas the Left is a very effective and ruthlessly understood machine. So right now it looks like the Right just wants to be left alone, because of course a routing army wants to be left alone and not run down, and historically the Right just wanted to be left alone, because by default leaving the Right alone was leaving the Right in power. However, the playing field has changed: if the Right ever gets its shit together, instead of just wanting to be left alone it will want to attack, because now it's out of power and the Left is in. Whether that organization looks like fascism or (a fanciful suggestion more for humour than anything else) a hard-nosed tribalistic throne-and-altar monarchism (a man can dream) remains to be seen. Unless the Left wins the war first and completely roots us out. At which point the battlefield resets, because as you point out the terms are always relative. ...that was a lot more long-winded and less directed than I would have liked, and I'm not sure I ended up addressing the point I intended to. My apologies. It has been a long time.
-
reply
As our friend Vladimir would say, education behind the iron curtain was orthodox Marxist, but the people were thoroughly mesmerized by western culture decades before the fall. So I don't think education by itself matters that much. The null hypothesis cuts both ways.
-
reply
Fair enough. But I still argue that it's the starting point that got the ball rolling, and the point of attack.
-
reply
You have a point there; if people were drilled on schools about Nazionalsocialismus, the Führerprinzip and the imperative of seeking Lebensraum, they might become good Nazis. The Germans didn't seem to find it any less cool than British liberalism. The problem of Marxism in the Soviets was that it was obviously less cool than what the West was selling: fast cars, short skirts and plenty of food. But again education is hardly a cause; it is an effect of other things going on. The Church run the education system for centuries. It didn't stop those very alumni from joining Masonic lodges and working to dismantle the authority of the Church. Criticising the Church became cool because it *was* cool. The money and the poon was most certainly not in the Church. Dividualist keeps saying that we just have to show people that the way to get poon is by not being leftist, and that men will follow. Problem is people want poon *and* money, and money is in the hands of the Cathedral, which is why people still play ball and love big gay brother.
-
reply
Thinking about it further, I think the two things synchronize. Education is a lubricant, and it shapes what opportunity looks like. To explain, I'll use your example of the Soviet education system vs the Soviet cultural reality, because exceptions are instructive. Yes, it's true that despite rigid orthodox Marxist schooling, practically everyone in the USSR was obsessed with Western culture for decades before the collapse. However, the whole size of the Soviet pie was decreasing, and it was getting harder and harder to secure the good life by being a good Party repeater. At the same time, the Stalinist system of brutal repression and torture-murder stations had effectively been greatly diminished, so people were operating primarily to seek the carrot rather than avoid the stick. Contrariwise, the West from the 60's to the 80's was a damn nice place compared to the USSR. So, stuck in a culture that wouldn't allow status gain (and the material goods that come with it) to any but a tiny fraction, no matter what, people fetishized another culture. Education teaches people what status looks like and how to get it. Sometimes reality is harsh enough to override that, because people are good at ferreting out when they're being lied to about how to gain status. I think I'm confusing the issue by considering two separate problems: the indoctrination of the youth and the takeover/creation of the specialist institutions built for that purpose.
-
reply
It struck me while reading (excellent link, thank you) about 'tanks in the streets' that, while we're right to scoff at the idea of military pre-eminence saving us in political warfare, the Right still has a point about the military. That is, the thing to be done isn't have Caesar march into Washington and declare himself the new Imperator-for-Life. What's to be done is to convince military members to radicalize, and use their 4GW (and psyops?) training to support the Right cause. It's an infrastructure in place just waiting to be used, and all it takes is a Colonel or two or a General with a 'boys will be boys' attitude toward what the junior officers get up to. Not that that's likely in the current day. The Left is very, very careful to psychologically shackle the military. Note that all of the most prominent cuckservatives either had careers in, or base their careers on sympathy with the military.
-
reply
[…] the various recent takes on the matter of the enemy’s relative state of strength or weakness (Spandrell, PT Carlos, Dividuals for a […]
-
reply
[…] picks up where David Hines leaves off: What we’re really talking about is: Fighting. And who can do it […]
-
reply
[…] But the Right by definition doesn’t have balls. It just wants to live. Nobody wants Civil War. The Left doesn’t mind it, if that’s what it takes for them to gain more power. So they might force it. Somebody else said that the USA today sounds like Spain before the Civil War. That was a textbook example of the Left forcing the Right into rebellion. I recall reading that the Army generals that rebelled said on the day of the uprising: Half Spain does not resign itself to die. The Right half. I think that really says it all.” […]
-
reply
[…] In light of Charlottesville, the entire thing is worth reading. Spandrell also had a wonderful analysis of Hines’ tweetstorm here. […]
-
reply
[…] BAW is a tragic love story about two obnoxious brats. One has the excuse of being a vampire so no one else has ever been able to teach him a lesson. The other has the excuse of being a woman so no writers will ever correct her to a be a better character, because no one will correct the writers on stronk independynt wymyns or other leftist agitation, otherwise they get blacklisted and @’d on Twitter and probably a lot of other actual dangerous things. […]
I don't think Louis XVI agrees.
That comment means two things 1) You clearly haven’t read “On Power” and 2) You have clearly not read Moldbug
Well why are you commenting here then? Either make a proper argument or go back to your blog.
Perhaps he sees hope in you?
Then he has to be nice about it.
The whole point is that the monarchs themselves were engaged in promoting equality and building up the very actors who took over. These actors did not rise from nowhere. They were promoted by the very sovereign they superseded. Authority begets authority. The continuation between the leveling of the monarchs, and the leveling of the subsequent "democratic" states is not a coincidence. Moldbug worked from precisely this. This ontology is fundamentally a rejection of anarchistic ontologies. All revolutions overthrowing sovereigns are then products of the very same sovereigns that are overthrown, unless they are sponsored from abroad, in which case the sovereign is negligent and/or incompetent. This plays out well with both the Russian Revolution, and the French Revolution.
Look, dude. The king playing the commoners against the nobility is as old as Confucius. Indeed that was his own schtick. Nothing new about that. But you might have noticed that Confucian benevolence didn't result in the kings getting their heads cut by the Jacobins. Or the Mohists or whatever. Which is emphatically not what happened in modern Europe. So you can either explain that pretty humongous difference, or you can go back to your blog and thinking that a 4-word phrase explains the whole of human history.
Let me take a crack at it: By the time the French and Russian revolutions happened, the monarchy was no longer the High. The new High was financial/banking power, and the monarchy had become the Middle that needed to be got rid of. So the High agitated the Low using methods that we're familiar with, resulting in a new order which was more efficient for the needs of the High. This new order became the modern unlimited State which was able to far exceed the powers of taxes, regulations, and especially of military conscription that the old Monarchical order was able to gather. DeJouvenel explains it beautifully in his book On Power. It took me a long time to read it because every few pages of some chapters i just had to set the book down and think about the profundity of what I had just read.
Oh please, let us not play with words. By that token every single conflict in human society is high-low vs. middle, as everybody powerful enough to stage a rebellion is by your definition “high", and obviously the cannon-fodder are always the peasants, so there's always the low involved somewhere. That's not a very useful framework. Just call it "the secular tendency towards power concentration" and leave it at that.
"That’s not a very useful framework. Just call it “the secular tendency towards power concentration” and leave it at that." Or "Imperium is conserved." http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.tw/2010/03/divine-right-monarchy-for-modern.html
The low is not the primary actor, but it is an actor. In democracy moreso than other political systems, due to the nanoslice of formal power each voter commands. Also, in the high-low alliance the high is just as subject to leftist memetic virii as the low. Which is as Spandrell notes: the low may be dreaming foolishly about achieving equality with the high, but the high are high on the the actual leadership of the army of the low. (Note that generals tend to be on the right -- they are already leading an actual army, so they have plenty of status, and thus no need for an ersatz army.) In both cases, absent leftism, the group would be frustrated and have to accept their current lot.
Id say high and low are the "left" more on that later. Inside help would be non left. The left seems to win a lot because it has some minor point it is able to magnify or able to propose a solution to which although not realistic is good enough to fool a lot of people. Slavery and serfdom, yeah sure we could as dark knights make this case about how its simply part of human evolutionary strategy etc. However its a pretty bad idea that gets worse as a society progresses.Leftist can work with that because reasonable people on the right will agree, usually only to a certain extent but agree. Monarchy has legitimate problems, a good king is hard to find, one with an equally good son is impossible to find, kings become worthy by conquering,which is destructive. Vast complicated kingdoms simply cant be administered by one person, etc leftists can work with that a parliament a meritocracy, these are not unreasonable suggestions. Feminism this might be the trickiest of all, cant live with them cant live without them,means of limiting their influence without losing their productivity and that we are comfortable applying to our own family and that can work across classes is not an easy fix. Any of these type problems can begin as a reality [right] civilization attempting to innovate as circumstance change can become a thread the left can continue to pull. As civilization succeeds it becomes too complicated for most individuals to understand it deeply enough and simplistic arguments prevail. Not training and incorporating all elites into the power structure leaves them outside it as ill informed critics that do actually have the brainpower to inflict damage. So leftism as a ideology is really just ignorance, sophist elites leading those who rightly act in what seems there interest.These masses also should not be left to rot. Thos is why landian elitism is stupid its simply another cathedral taking over.A civilization is holistic all parts have a purpose when parts of it are not utilized it is the fault of the leaders not the masses.That is not to say, it is in fact to exactly say leaders should cultivate and elevate their masses today that would mean eugenics etc. So leftism as socialism multiculturalism etc is just stupidity by both the hegemonic right and the outsiders high and low. But what after the left is hegemonic, ok high and low against the middle works, so of course the middle also is going to have a hard time articulating the error effectively against the now hegemonic left high.But there will be outliers they will be a better larger group and some of the old elites will be left out of the new order.So now we have todays situation. But what else has happened. Forget signaling thats for the SJW class, whats happened to the elites that are actually in control, they have had to learn to keep the nation empire functioning, they are quickly educated in reality.They no longer believe in leftism as an actual philosophy they understand reality, but they are leading a leftist hegemony so they have to pay lip service while keeping the nation afloat through rightism [realism]. of course this lip service is expensive and schemes are hatched taxes are levied and they lie to themselves about sustainability, and if they are really good they can pyramid the scheem into an empire for a while maybe a long while. So far the technology hasnt been available to control the entire globes and rule with absolute authority if its now available or if it becomes so the scheme might be able to continue indefinitely however it would increasingly be run on realistic principles because the laffer curve would limit taxing and geography to extort would run out. Eventually it would seem a bother to figure out how to simultaneously feed the stupid while keeping the smart from rioting and the stupid would be killed.Its the story af a kid learning the hard way why his parents insist things are done a certain way. Ultimately leftism as an ideology is no more sustainable than communism as a economy, we know this thats the dark. what wew seem to forget is the left leaders Clintons NSA Already know this they simply dont want to give up power.You are not fighting leftists you are fighting oligarchs.But they have made the same mistake they have left people on the outside. Both because they want to avoid entryism and because their system is better at creating resentment than bread. NOW THIS IS NOT A POPULIST MANIFESTO THIS IS A FACE REALITY. theres different ways to go, you could accept the situation as is and slowly make changes to shorten the left tail and lengthen the right, you could fire up the oven and in fell swoop get rid of the worst. you could create massive armies to make them at least pay their way or other things but what you must do is use the entire people, cogelites cant sustain a nation it needs proles to hold the natural resources defend against aggressors provide markets and make life human like.we can though work to raise the quality and consistency of our people and an ethnostate is a big step in that direction
Can skip almost all of this by absolutely denying that a decision between a monarchy (or governance by a sovereign person or body) and a democracy is a possibility. There is always a central sovereign. Democracy in every stripe is no different just because the sovereign is concealed by nonsense and lies.
There are still important differences and you must know it (first coming to mind: in democracy sovereigns are multiple, not a single one. There's more hope for power-maximizers to enter the elite, so you are going to see more political variety and a more dynamic cultural and political scene. Democracy resembles plutocracy rather than monarchy (especially absolute monarchy).
Problem being that the central sovereign in a monarchy is usually not the monarch either.
@Spandrell: true. sovereign decision making often differs from the formally and publicly accepted individual. For example, child monarchs. Again, if if neatens the discussion, monarch can be replaced with sovereign. So in effect, there is always a sovereign (as Schmitt covers with the state of exception.) the only question is how clear they are. So democracy doesn't exist, it is just a mirage, same with oligarchy, aristocracy, constitutional monarchy and mixed government and every other concept: they just act as concealment of the true nature of sovereignty. There is one, they are sovereign, and everything else is distraction. @ifruit No, in "democracy" there is one sovereign body. See above comment. It really boils down to an issue of logic. Either the sovereign is sovereign and is therefore in control of the realm in which their sovereignty extends, or they are not. If not, then not sovereign and we should look for the actual sovereign. Suarez, Bellarmine, Hobbes and the rest that form the basis of accepted understanding of sovereignty are logically incoherent in that they claim a general agreement can be made by the people which is an assertion that governance is a chosen state. Ergo anarchism is possible. That makes no sense. It defies logic. I mean, popular sovereignty? states of nature? law as sovereign? lol. There is no logic in any of this.
So if it were you to make this chart (
) it would be much simpler? I can't find or imagine a single person that is the sovereign in that picture.
Follow Schmitt. Who decides the exception. Who makes the decision when the laws don't cover something?, or who can determine that actually the laws didn't mean X all along, but actually meant Y?