A chat with Mr. Land

Last month I had the pleasure to meet in person with Nick Land in a small classy bar in Shanghai. It was quite surreal to talk about this matters in person, meeting for the first time. At first it was the two of us alone loudly discussing Moldbug this Moldbug that, but after a while the place got quite crowded. Shortly we were surrounded by rich kids with outrageous hairdos and high voices wooing teenage girls in short dresses. All while we were dead serious talking about the future of human society.

The discussion was very amiable but somewhat awkward too. We have very different backgrounds, I am basically a student of history , and Nick Land is a philosopher, with a more theoretical, aesthetically driven way of seeing the world. Or at least that is the impression that his writings give me. That difference didn't mean much in practical terms though, as we pretty much agreed in everything. We talked about the reactionary blogosphere and its connections with various anti-liberal movements (Game, MRA, traditionalists). It was funny that we happen to read almost the same blogs. We agreed that while the analysis of the sheer madness of liberalism is mostly right, all the proposed solutions are all implausible. Monarchy? Christian traditionalism? Henry VII? Come on. As a futurist, Nick Land is surely extremely bored by proposals which amount to pretty much turning back the clock.

Given that we didn't really believe in any way of fixing the mess, the discussion turned to how is the situation likely to evolve. He has this model on the elite, which he defines in a Pareto distribution as the productive 20% (against the useless 80%), would simply flee to civilised fortresses mega-cities a la Singapore where they would enjoy the benefits of a high IQ society.  With robotics and other advances the utility of low skilled labor will decrease into what amounts to nil, so the masses would left to their own devices in the hinterland. Where they'd starve to medieval densities.

I didn't really agree with this model. He argued that the elite is incredibly globalised, and doesn't give a shit about their nations or countries. Which is true. Also true about both of us. American HBDers have a certain sense of white solidarity, but that's because most dysfunction in America is caused by NAMs, so whites represent both the tribe and the good of civilisation. But in Britain it's hard to love your own people. But still the elite today is still characterised by allegiance to the post-christian creed of human equality, and while flight into civilised fortresses has been slowly happening for some time already, with cynical liberals bidding up home prices to isolate themselves,  a complete removal is in my opinion quite unlikely. I don't think it's plausible that the elite would be having fun eating fancy food in a Shanghai mall while the left half of the Bell Curve is starving. Welfare has been the highest moral principle for centuries.

Which is the most important point in my view. Welfare and it's associated political arrangements are destroying the world economy, and by any measure it won't last much longer. I know I'll see it collapse. Still I don't see how elite liberal will be able to rationalise fleeing to Shanghai to enjoy french cuisine while fellow humans are starving in the interior. We know a lot of people, especially white people, prefer to die rather than being morally inferior. So there's no moral framework that justifies letting the proles starve. Well, there is one, HBD. But HBD is scary business, and according to your temperament it might mean different things. HBD taken seriously might also mean total NAM removal. Wars for lebensraum. Mandatory eugenics. It's nasty business, and all my models of a HBD realist world involve a lot of blood. Nick Land doesn't see it that way, he says people will isolate themselves and make up stuff to rationalise it.

I guess it's the age difference. Mr. Land is 50, I'm still in my 20s. He'd rather have fun in Shanghai than try to remove the NAMs from Britain. It's understandable. If current fertility rates stand, his point of view will grow in numbers. So perhaps he's right after all.

Oh I think you will find that humans can justify pretty much anything to themselves so long as their own comfort is at risk. Bear in mind that the typical liberal doesn't involve themselves in helping the disadvantaged beyond voting for redistribution and giving to charity. Anyway, Neal Stephenson's 'Diamond Age' is worth a read for a well-thought-out sci-fi world somewhat similar to what you are describing.

Well yes but there's always a Savonarola, a Marius, an annoying junior member of the elite who seeks status by being holier than thou. Brave New World was awesome by any measure, yet there was a Bernard Max spoiling the fun. Hell Singapore's PAP almost lost the last election to the socialists.

[apologies for the flaky mask, it's the only way I can get into the system] "... so the masses would left to their own devices in the hinterland.Where they’d starve to medieval densities." -- OK, we were getting seriously Malthusian, but I don't recall any conclusion quite this definite. It doesn't seem very plausible to me, because before mass starvation people will trade (almost?) anything, and even accept previously unacceptable ideological revisions. At what point do people starve themselves into an approximation of common sense? (Some time before they perish, I'm guessing.) Absent a stubborn totalitarian government, and assuming the off-shoring of otherwise lootable productive resources (and thus the isolation of the left (behind) in their own debris), my assumption is that things would reach a new, sullen equilibrium some distance before gigadeath. ... but by then the novo-sapiens speciation, rogue AIs, and other wild cards are getting shuffled into the game ...

Leftists elite won't starve, it's the proles left behind. Their problem is cognitie ability, not lack of common sense. I don't think they'll all starve to death, but there's no way to maintain modern population densities without elite assistance. If all the 120 IQs are amusing themselves in Singapore, who is going to grow the GM food? Maintain the supply chains? Even keep basic peace. Medieval densities aren't that bad. Egypt would be so much nicer with them. China would be close to paradise.

"there’s no way to maintain modern population densities without elite assistance" They'll always find a way to get elite assistance, through coercion if possible, begging if necessary, and if that doesn't work, trading for it on tough terms. Medieval densities aren't coming back. Human populations are simply too resilient, even at the fag end of the Pareto distribution.

Who was is who said, ""the poor are a goldmine?" He had a point. There's too much money to be made for all the elites to abandon the masses.

That's not much different from the present situation. Which we all agree is unsustainable. I don't know how but at some point before this http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/world\_population\_projections happens, the ghost of Mr Malthus is going to appear. There's not enough poppies in Afghanistan to trade food for 110m Pathans.

"That’s not much different from the present situation." Except that the present situation is coercive, with the productive fraction held hostage by the actual and potential violence of the mob (that's pretty much the essence of the welfare state, isn't it?). To the extent that productive capability is able to extract itself from such 'solidarity' and expose the culture of dependency for what it is, economic logic compels behavioral change. Of course, you're right that it's going to be hideously messy ... giga-scale die-off level messy just doesn't seem a credible outcome to me though. Lawful Neutral gets it (IMHO): cheap disciplined labor remains the ultimate bargaining chip. Populations without productive talent or the capacity for basic work discipline can expect things to get rather bleak, though.

Word is, they used to grow tons of other fine stuff but their sophisticated irrigation was wrecked by the Sovs -- who had nothing else to attack once the mujahedin shot the shit out of them and then beat it for the high hills. Dope will grow dry or dryish. They may all get behind whoever can restore irrigation, even if it takes a terror state of sorts to do so. As we have seen in Iraq, it's easy for actors with ethnic or warlord motivations to destroy electrical and pipeline systems ; that doesn't necessarily mean people accepting 'medieval' ethical standards, such as crucifixion less coup de grace, catherine wheel sans coup de grace, cannot protect these systems. For instance, Sadaam's state seems to have been cruel but orderly, granted he had a ton of oil. The Taliban started when mujahedin, who were sort of ethnonational heros vs the Sovs, but sort of became warlords, and obviously were fractious in nature, choked off the country with roadblock shakedowns and other antics. This was only mildly unlivable, yet it swept the Taliban to power in an enormous wave despite their mega uptight puritanical rules. Mullah Omar via best pal Bin Laden then made the rather bold move of trying to provoke the USA to invade them, because they had the 80s/Sovs-inspired dream of a mideast not in vassalage to USA. I don't think they really accomplished this in a great degree ; USA is far richer than USSR and has probably been considerably more damaged powerwise by phenomena other than invading Afghan. The question is always where does it stop, the fecundity? India is at least slowing down a lot and may conceivably not go down in flames. Nigeria, Boliva(IIRC) .... parts of ME .... uhmm .... Given its fecundity momentum, a PRC-style fertility limitation policy seems inevitable in Afghan.

The PAP for all their general enlightenment have been big on immigration. While Singapore's no hell, I can obviously understand these mixed feelings on PAP. Western papers have been strangely frank about this being the main cause of their popularity problems.

The again, I'm not sure all their pomegranates and melons and stuff were actually more lucrative than dope. They may just have felt less of an ethical impediment to doing that stuff. I cannot say.

Anyway you need a helluva lot pomegranates and melons to feed 110 million Pathans.

So it's back to the 19th century where disciplinable people dominate the non disciplinable. I think we'll get the singularity before we rebuild a class based society, but who knows.

You can put people back on subsistence farming. I'm sure that will happen to a great extent. But I'm not sure ecologies will bear it well. Also I think it really incents fecundity. Hail and I studied why fecundity slowed in France round the revolution. I forget but I think it was mainly because people moved off-farm -- to complex economic roles where it was not effortless to integrate their kids into economic activity. It didn't have to do with advancements in contraception. A seven-year-old girl can sweep the floor and gather hens' eggs in a basket, pull a few weeds, all while following her mother around. You aren't yet "in the black" on having borne her but she's costing you all of 200 kcal a day, big deal. An eleven-year-old boy is probably making you 300 kcal a day doin it up with dad, spreading manure, though you haven't yet paid down the expenses of having created him. Ten years later, 10% more dads are off making wagon wheels in some shop and eleven-year-olds are kind of sitting around doing some less supervised and less tutelaged household production that's less efficient. Next thing you know half the boys aren't even on farms and aren't even half-productive til age fourteen or so. Even then his productivity may be modest indeed during a couple years apprenticing in some less-than-instinctive activity that demands some level of precision. The 14yo on the farm can do highly productive stuff all day long blindfolded, though his dad is probably still way better at sharpening the scythes, fixing tools, optimizing planting and harvest. Someone smart can invent crudely mechanized, not-so-crudely transgenic versions of subsistence farming, which are probably a big step up. But again: fecundity. Will fecundity stop just because you've invented a hip Steve Jobs upgrade to subsistence farming with some mass-produced plastic tools? I'm gonna guess no, you will need state intervention, the humane version of which is 'one child'. The works of Borlaug and other (White) people may have 'landed' India safely, or semi safely, without much need for coercion on fecundity (though I would guess there may be a small amount in India at the bottom in future). 'Land' is my technical term for getting a society back to non-downspiral state. Without Borlaug's dwarf-stemmed grains, it's possible India could have 'ehrliched' (gone down in flames). But dwarf grains alone probably cannot land Afg.

Not that it's even clear primitive farming will make a comeback, anyway. But it could, due to price of oil, and Asian meat cravings, pushing up the price of vegetal food. If vegetal food stays fairly cheap, the resulting policy could just be 'lounge around, read Proust, eat free gruel, maintain your scrap shanty -- one child'.

Why do we blame Marius instead of latifundae? Or not share the blame? If we believe wik, there weren't enough small freeholders left, so that's why Marius wound up creating client armies. He had places to go and wogs to kill, and could scarce be expected to go kill them all by himself. Wouldn't wisdom have been to skim from latifundae and redistribute, not to random or feckless or even middling persons, but to meritorious ones -- who could then be freeholders, and bear arms loyal to SPQR exactly as per tradition, and not as Marian clients trusting in Marius to get them spoils and colonial homesteads? Latifundae maybe just too powerful to be forced to do that?

We can probably agree that economically incompetent populations / groups can either: (a) Loot (b) Learn to comply (adapt to functional norms), or (c) Perish The Left advocate (a), the capitalist Right advocates (b), and the Ethnonationalist 'Right' advocates (a) for their 'own' people, and (c) for everyone else. Whether "disciplinable people dominate the non disciplinable" hinges hugely on the sense of 'dominate' -- if there's a break from the 19th century, my guess is that it involves a decided aversion to direct governmental responsibility for chaotic grievance-mongering populations, but that doesn't imply indifference to their behavior (if only because it's uncomfortable to watch them angrily implode).

Well that sounds a lot like starving into medieval densities to me. You got a link on your findings with Hail?

"the ghost of Mr Malthus is going to appear" Malthus was going to be the second of my classic Dark Enlightenment thinkers (after Hobbes), but I got side-tracked by the Derbyshire purge. Darwinism is just Malthusianism plus half a step (selected variation within Malthusian culling), and the whole tradition of political economy goes Malthusian through Ricardo (the 'Iron Law of Wages'), which also does all the work for Marx (who is Ricardian on equilibrium wage rates). Because the dynamism of capital development has tended to outstrip demographic expansion, the economically-grounded Right has generally been dismissive of Malthus. That's shallow, and a mistake.

I'm just saying that main focus of instability in all historical polities is elite infighting. Latifundia owners (which is a plural neuter btw) vs Marius is the classical example. Landowners had the power, and Marius contested it. It's not about blame, of course landowners had it coming. But in this case Marius was the agitator against the status quo. An agitation which eventually killed the Republic and begat panem et circenses dysgenic Roman Empire. Which also had plenty of latifundia anyway. “Wouldn’t wisdom have been to skim from latifundae and redistribute, not to random or feckless or even middling persons, but to meritorious ones " I tend to stop reading when I read "virtue" or "merit“. You couldn't find enough meritorious Italians to give land to. There's never enough of those.