Jim's Blog

Entropy is always increasing. A fully disordered society is illustrated by wild animals and primitive peoples such as the Tasmanian aboriginals, where all other creatures except for close kin are enemies, obstacles or sources of raw materials – Hobbes state of war.  So if you look back in history, you can always see entropic processes, bringing us back towards that condition.

So, how come ordered societies exist, how come surviving and prosperous societies are generally at least somewhat orderly?

You cannot make something clean without making something else dirty, but you can make any amount of stuff dirty without making anything clean. Order for the ingroup always comes at the expense of someone else: Thus, for example, chastity and monogamy requires men hitting badly behaved women with a stick. (Dalrock banned me for pointing this out.) Thus, for example, in Africa we saw societies that herded cattle and planted crops had to enslave, or kill and eat, vagrants that were apt to hunt other people’s cattle and gather from other people’s gardens. The shift from hunting and gathering to herding and gardening involved extended cooperation – and a fair bit of brutality to hunters and gatherers.

As birds are born to fly, humans are born to cooperate. That is our key capability. Our telos is various forms of cooperation, as the heart’s telos is to circulate blood.  The whites of our eyes are white, so that other people can see what we are looking at. We are vulnerable to choking, because our throat is optimized towards making a wider variety of distinct sounds than other animals. We have a more muscles in our face than other animals, so that we can unfalsifiably communicate our emotional state, just as every feature of a bird’s anatomy is optimized for low weight and high metabolic output. This cooperation manifested as tribes cooperating to kill other tribes and capture their women. Order consists of extended cooperation. Because entropy naturally tends to increase, because there are a near infinity of ways for society to be disordered, but only a small number of ways for it to be ordered, maintaining order requires a fair bit of ruthlessness towards disorderly people and towards outgroups whose cooperation is unlikely.  Gays undermine male solidarity.  David’s mighty men could cohere because David could love Jonathan.  David could love Jonathan because gays were put to death.  Peoples who have gay parades do not win wars.

The ten commandments consist of four commandments concerning man’s relationship to God, five commandments that had the effect of ensuring that congregation of the Lord operated on a cooperate cooperate basis, and the final commandment, the tenth commandment, prohibited coming up with clever rationales for undermining, subverting, and re-interpreting those five.

The four commandments that facilitate cooperation are:
Exodus 20:

12. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
13. Thou shalt not kill.
14. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
15. Thou shalt not steal.
16. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

The rule on honoring thy parents and committing adultery secured ownership of family, thus cooperation within the family. The rules against killing, stealing, and false witness enabled economic cooperation on the basis of property rights and the market economy.

And the final commandment:

17. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

prohibits people from concocting ingenious theories as to why someone else’s property or wife is rightfully their own – forbids the entire ideology and program of Social Justice.

Compliance to the four commandments concerning God made fellow members of the congregation readily identifiable, and by complying with these four commandments, for which compliance was as visible as possible, one gave other members of the congregation reason to believe one would comply with the other five commandments, for which compliance was less visible, and thus reason to believe that cooperation with people who complied with the first four would be reciprocated and rewarded by cooperation, resulting in cooperate/cooperate equilibrium.

Social Justice Warriors have turned the tenth commandment on its head, making envy and covetousness a sacrament. This explains their chronic failure to cooperate, explains why rallies to save the earth leave a snail trail of trash behind them.  Social Justice declares that what people have is “privilege” and should be taken away from them.  Which creates a society in which people have no reason to have wealth or family.

A religion is a synthetic tribe. If the priesthood has power and status, and also has open entry into the priesthood, one gets holiness spirals – as for example priestly celibacy. Cooperate cooperate equilibrium, giving every man his due, makes all good members of the religion equal in holiness though unequal in property and power, thus a holiness spiral is going to redefine holiness away from forms that promote cooperation. The tribal religion has to reward exceptional and unusual holiness with honor, but not power and wealth. Send saints to live in a hermitage with spartan living conditions on a remote island as far from the capital as possible, where they can demonstrate superior holiness without subverting and undermining social order.  On the one hand, to encourage good behavior, the society must honor supererogatory holiness.  On the other hand preaching superogatory holiness always threatens to redefine holiness in ways that undermine order, making holiness a force of disorder instead of order.

As for example:

Starbucks hates its customers, and LucasFilm hates its customers, which subverts cooperation on the basis of exchange.  While practicing supererogation should be honored, preaching it needs to be forcefully suppressed.  People who preach supererogation should not be martyred, which might increase their status, but rather treated like a stray dog that chases chickens – punished in ways that lower their status.

As example Russia dealing with Pussy Riot:

If the Sovereign is forced to punish someone who preaches supererogatory holiness in a way that might potentially increase their status (and Charles the second was forced to burn one conspicuously and irritatingly holy nonconformist woman at the stake) the Sovereign should lock the body in a mortuary for three days, and on the third day ironically check the body to see if they have risen from the dead.  But it is as dangerous to martyr those who preach supererogatory holiness, as it is to tolerate them.  The Sovereign must always strike at primarily at their status, as Russia dealt with Pussy Riot and European University.

While entropy always increases, it is always possible to locally reduce entropy, usually at the expense of someone else less effective and successful at extended cooperation (as, for example, women, pussy riot, gays, or hunter gatherer outgroups).

The highest and best example of this is western civilization, which is anglo civilization, which is the restoration of Charles the Second. The restoration gave us science, technology, corporate capitalism, industrialization, and world empire, which represent the highest level of extended cooperation ever achieved.

The restoration cured the disorderly tendencies of the protestant holiness spiral by putting priests under bishops, and bishops under the King. Which was the imposition of order, at the expense of “non conformists” – whose very name implies their disorderly tendencies.   “Non conformists” were priests, professors, judges, and suchlike who were disinclined to accept this hierarchy, on the grounds that the King at the top was conspicuously lacking in holiness.  We need to do something similar with our university system, as well as radically reducing its size and the amount of time it sucks out of people’s lives – we need to do Charles the Second’s Bishops, and Henry the Eighth’s dissolution of the monasteries.

Universities have always had as their primary job inculcating people in the official religion, and giving people cultural and scientific knowledge has always been merely their secondary job. Lately, their secondary job has largely been abandoned.  It used to be that giving people job skills was entirely irrelevant, since this was done by enforceable apprenticeship.

We shall restore the enforceable apprenticeship system and divest universities of the task of giving people job skills, in the process divesting them of the power to accredit people to jobs. We shall give considerably higher, but still secondary, priority to the task of giving people cultural and scientific knowledge, and change the official religion to make it saner, by erasing all doctrines that are potentially falsifiable by the realities of this world.  Members of the elite will still be required to adhere to the official religion, as they are now, but the task of checking adherence will not be outsourced to the universities. Instead, people in state jobs and quasi statal jobs will be required to recite a catechism and take an oath.

Contrary to the myth about the plymouth rock puritans, that early puritans supposedly filled the North American continent, where we have genealogies, puritans are descended from those who left restoration England to establish their own dissident theocracy, not from the pre english civil war wave of migrants fleeing Charles the first, but from the post civil war wave of “noncomformist” migrants fleeing the restoration, fleeing Charles the Second and subsequent Kings.  The first wave, the pre civil war wave, left very few direct descendants.

Restoration England was successful at elite eugenic reproduction, because women were kept under control, and cured the disorderly propensities of the protestant reformation by keeping “non conformists” under control, thereby enabling the extended cooperation that made science and industry possible.  Immediately after the restoration, we see Ayn Rand’s heroic archetype appear, the scientist engineer CEO, mobilizing other people’s capital and other people’s labor to advance technology and make that technology widely available.  Often these were people who before the restoration had competed for superior holiness, (analogous to Musk’s subsidized and money burning tesla, solar panels, and solar batteries), but after the restoration competed for creating technology to produce value (analogous to Musk’s reusable booster rocket.)  This form of order was made possible at the expense of “non conformists”, such as the excessively holy woman that Charles the Second burned at the stake.

In order for society to have cooperate/cooperate equilibrium, the science, industry, and technology that we see promoted by the corporate form, in order to promote cooperation with cooperators, the sovereign must promote defection on defectors.  One such defector being a holy woman conspicuously holier than Charles the Second.  Charles the second successfully redirected status competition from unproductive channels into productive channels, as for example members of the Royal Society gaining status by discovering truth and speaking truth, while previously puritans had gained power and status by having a Christianity that was purer than the other man’s Christianity.  You will notice that Putin dealt with Pussy Riot’s weaponized supererogatory holiness preaching in a way that deliberately maximized disorder – maximized outgroup disorder in order to sustain ingroup order.  That is the way to do it.

The restoration created a society that had the greatest cooperate/cooperate equilibrium ever, where people were able to engage in positive sum cooperation, which was made possible by severely negative sum uncooperation – you cannot get more negative sum than burning an excessively holy woman at the stake. If Charles the Second had not burned a holy woman at the stake for excessive, conspicuous, and obnoxiously superior holiness, he would have had the William Wilberforce problem.

Humans are inherently tribal.  We have ethnicities and religions, all of which are in substantial part the same phenomenon.  A millet is a smaller tribe (religion) within the empire that the empire recognizes and grants some limited self rule and autonomy.

Two tribes cannot co-exist in overlapping territory, except they create little zones for themselves, for example the black table in school cafe.  One tribe will always rule, and another will always be ruled.  Segregation and Jim Crow was an effort to give blacks autonomy and self rule, make them into a millet, conditional on the black rulers assimilating to white middle class values and behavior. Integration proved to be black dominion. When the blacks were allowed to the front of the bus, they inevitably wound up forcing white people off the buses.

This tribalism is the problem with libertarianism – if you allow liberty, people will use it to synthesize smaller ingroups within the larger group in order to dominate the detribalized majority. William Wilberforce and his “elect” destroyed what the restoration had accomplished, undermining the small scale cooperation between men and women to have children, and the cooperation between elites and individual members of the elite to maintain an empire that kept large scale economic cooperation over the oceans.  His successors transliterated the religion of the elect from the next world to this world, creating modern progressivism.  Since the transliterated tenets, such as equality, are transparently false to this world, this required them to reject truth telling and truth speaking, resulting in peer review and the replication crisis that has destroyed science.

The earthly telos of holiness is to promote the broadest possible cooperate/cooperate equilibrium.  Holiness competition results in people finding grounds to declare other people unholy, thus Starbucks and LucasFilms declare their customers unholy, thus holiness competition destroys the earthly telos of holiness.  Therefore we cannot allow excessively holy people to gain power in the state religion.  Instead, need to send Social Justice Warriors away from the universities off to a hermitage in a remote island and honor their superior holiness from a safe distance.  If someone wants to demonstrate superior holiness, it should be costly for himself, rather than profitable for himself, and costly for everyone around him.  Superior holiness and performing superogatory acts has to be made unprofitable.