Moldbug argued for Formalism – that the official reality of political power should match up with the actual reality.
And I would add to that the rectification of names: That words should cut reality at the joints, rather than lay a comforting layer of snow over what everyone knows but no one can actually say. We need to bring back words like “bastard” to accurately describe the consequences of fatherlessness.
The advantage of formalism is illustrated by comparing Dubai with North Korea.
If you say your hereditary King is King because he personally owns the right to rule Dubai, which he inherited from his father, works a whole lot better than if you say your King is democratically elected to give effect to the will of the people of North Korea. Because if you say your King is democratically elected and so forth, you have to shoot anyone who shows signs of noticing reality.
We are increasingly in an informal situation since Harvard exercises informal power – for example making it illegal for white males to have sex with their wives is an immensely unpopular law which is being backdoored in through the endless redefinition of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, since any politician that openly stood for such a law would be instantly reduced to a smoking grease spot.
The more the actual distribution of power differs from the nominal and formal distribution of power, the more political repression is needed, and the more those that exercise power need to act illegally.
The need for widespread and frequent hypocritically and corrupt acts lead to criminal acts done for profit, as for example the looting of Haiti and the looting of post Soviet Russia.
Because your entire real government is acting illegally and criminally even when it is filling in potholes and managing the water supply, tends to act illegally by stealing and raping. I am not aware of the guys from Harvard raping – seems that our male ruling elite is increasingly forbidden to have sex at all, and you cannot make it into the elite unless you have abnormally low testosterone, but the high in the high low alliance turn a blind eye to rapes by their low political allies.
However, though the high have not been raping, and high males are increasingly not having sex at all, they have been stealing on a grand scale that gets steadily grander.
Since lies, fraud, and violent repression needed to just do the routine everyday stuff that governments are supposed to do, particular members of the government are apt to use lies, fraud, and violent repression to get ahead and benefit themselves.
Informal government is thus apt to suffer lack of cohesion, thus those that actually own the government are apt to have trouble defending their ownership.
If property rights poorly defined, violence apt to ensue. Who owns the government is bound to get nasty sooner or later. Informal government has been fairly peaceful in recent times, but has a potential for apocalyptic violence.
I think singular undivided authority is a good idea but only part of the picture. If I get Moldy right, the core issue is that elites compete and this pretty much wrecks the country. But aren’t people who put their own interest above their country’s interest plain simply traitors? Wouldn’t things would be far better if plain simply elites would be loyal to their country and keep the competition to the level where it does not wreck things? Why does it have to be taken for granted that elites are treasonous?
There is a strain of libertarianish incentive analysis that I find a bit autistic, the logic that if people are incentivized to do X then they will do X, regardless of whether X is a normal thing or a reprehensible act of utter villainy. This does not really work that way – does not _normally_, does not work that way in a normal period of history. Normal periods of history tend to think loyalty is the highest virtue and treason is the worst crime, instill loyalty in elites from birth and shame and punish disloyal ones. In normal periods of history elites who grossly violate their country’s interests don’t get off the hook just because they were incentivized to do so.
With actually loyal elites, even divided authority can work: think Republican Rome, Venetian Republic, Switzerland.
Then again I agree that to really ensure and prevent the erosion of said loyalties, the elites need to pretty much formally own the place, because everybody is loyal to his own property (or sells it to someone who will be).
But you can’t just rely on incentives – or not only these kinds of incentives. It has to be hardcoded into the culture that treason is shameful. That people should not just follow their incentives, because it makes them no better than any thief who grabs the opportunity: leaving your front door wide open is an incentive break in and steal your stuff, right? And yet every normal person understands this is wrong.
So I think some kind of a two-pronged approach is needed. Set up good incentives, but also make it clear that being an autistically incentive-programmed robot is wrong, you gotta make actually moral judgements and not do things that are wrong no matter how good the incentive is. Because incentives sometimes fail and consciences (and social shaming as another kind of incentive) sometimes fail too, but the two together are stronger.
Selection beats incentives.
The problem is not that people inevitably act in what society regards as a despicable manner if they will benefit from doing so. The problem is that people who simply wanted to act in any given manner come along now and then, and if the system doesn’t push back against despicable actions when they occur it will increasingly become despicable.
What happened in the English-speaking world is that the left kept outflank its right opponents by expanding the franchise, first to poorer men, then women, and now to foreigners. This generally resulted in the left becoming the new right and the old right vanishing. There was no push-back mechanism so this process, although it has been slow, is never reversed, and always steadily advances.
All these changes suffered a lot of opposition – only in the 20th century did Britain complete the 17th programme of the Levellers – but they only needed to get lucky occasionally because their changes, once made, are permanent. The right needs to get lucky every time.
Jim:
What can I say? That is just silly. Both ideology overruling what we see in front of us, and ideology overruling logic.
In the ancestral environment, if a low status person got into status competition with a high status person, he got killed.
Art:
Lacking observations of the ancestral environment, what I observe in modern (and historical) humans and across social species is that sometimes challengers get kills and other times they succeed.
Must be my lying eyes.
what the hell are you talking about “other times they succeed” of course “other times they succeed” its an exciting story when they succeed
usually when someone gets something this wrong, they have an ideological reason for it. what’s your reason
I must be brainwashed by the commie historians telling me lies about rulers being assassinated and killers taking their place.
“I must be brainwashed by the commie historians telling me lies about rulers being assassinated and killers taking their place.”
and commie biologists
Art:
And the intensity of that drive is proportional to the perceived distance from the top.
Jim:
Obviously untrue. I mean, just look around.
The lower people’s status, the less violent they are. Blacks are violent in part because…
Art:
I think it kinda follows from the premise (which you are agreeing with), and if that is not what we observe – that is a puzzle that needs to be explained. But I think we do observe it, as long as we are willing to consider other related factors.
I don’t know enough about modern black communities and even less about the historical ones but here is what I observe among the whites.
Higher status people tend to have good opportunities to further improve their status by non-violent means. To them direct violence is rarely a good option. More importantly, to them the mating market while not as good as at the very top is still pretty good.
Lower status people find themselves in a much tighter market with much fewer opportunities to rise above competitors.
That’s where we start to see higher levels of indirect violence and direct non-criminal violence. The former manifests itself as support for policies designed to hurt higher status people, and the latter as willingness to get into fistfights.
The prospects are most bleak for the underclass. That’s where we see anger, desperation, and higher levels of criminal violence.
What can I say? That is just silly. Both ideology overruling what we see in front of us, and ideology overruling logic.
In the ancestral environment, if a low status person got into status competition with a high status person, he got killed.
So you engage in (possibly violent) status competition with your equals, not your superiors.
“Equal” means “have not yet settled the hierarchy”. More hierarchy, less violence.
pdimov:
You can construct a hypothetical reality in which this is true, by positing that people genuinely believe in equality…
Art:
You misunderstood me.
I am saying the opposite. People belive in inequality and are driven to put themselves above others.
Yes, and I am saying that the intensity of the drive is not proportional to the distance from the top.
Formalism in its ultimate level: you choose a leader from among your genetic best in terms of leadership skills, and ignore the wailing of the 99%, who are essentially known to be worse than useless for leadership decisions.
>you choose a leader
Who is “you” in this construction? Could you mean “we”, the people?
— from among your genetic best in terms of leadership skills
I.e. elect a king from the aristocracy. Most people think succession should usually be by birth though
The advantage of monarchy is that all the potential heirs are formalized, in sequential order. If someone assassinates the king, they -usually- do not become the new king. Thus, the quest for power is not a good rationalization to assassinate the king – after all, assassinating kings is always risky business. No incentive, no assassination.
Disadvantage: The king dies; your new king is insane. Such is life.
_Then_ you assassinate him.
Instead of rehashing the only good essay Anissimov ever wrote, please consider Spandrell’s recent translations
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never gotten around to reading MoreRight. Just a lot of Moldbug, among others.
And I don’t mean to patronize. I just enjoy the banter.
This part, I suppose?
“And that’s the story of how the Song Dynasty fell and how it came back to life in the South, mostly because the emperor put more value on his mother than on 20 million of his subjects. When people like Hoppe say that Monarchs tend to govern well because they have a stake in their property, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
[…] Formalism (versus priestly power), or lies. Herding cats. On independence. Activist error. “The answer to global ethnocultural diversity is a global diversity of political regimes.” Reality inversion, and American Mayday. A case for popularity. The weekly round, plus outliers. […]
Rectification of names was an idea of Confucius.
You may have noticed that Confucius was ignored by all feudal lords of his time, only gaining fame centuries later because his disciples found it useful for signaling.
Confucianism is a virtue signaling system, not an actual theory of government.
All states need a state religion. Confucianism is less dangerous than most.
So was traditional Christianity though. Per Moldbug’s Darwinian metaphor, one would expect Confucianism to eventually evolve into egalitarian universalism, for the exact same reasons that Christianity did. That is, because of unsecure power.
If you keep on this road you are going to eventually hit the Same points Moldbug did, and you will have to come to the same conclusions.
-blocks on power create leftism.
-liberalism is just the symptom of blocks on power and the resultant chaos you describe in the post. (moldbug correctly draws it back further by placing the roots in xtinanity, but this has unfortunate problems with rhetoric.)
-Marxism, Fascism, libertarianism and Conservativism are historically contingent liberal heresies.
– the convergence of everything (even Marxism) to liberalism/leftism is explained by Jouvenel. Both pressure to conform, and simple gatekeeping ensure liberalised strains are rewarded. Dugin spots this as well. Frankly Marx is a shitlord compared to Marxist liberal strains that have survived.
Interesting. I remember reading a long comment thread some while ago, with Jim arguing with someone else whom I can’t remember, on the merits and practical applicability of formal constitutionalism, as a levee against the rise of power – the growth of the Minotaur, if you will.
Moldbug, in his writing, makes a convincing case that constitutional formalism doesn’t work in that sense. Jim seems to disagree; or at least, he did back then.
Yes, here is Land’s recording of it – http://www.xenosystems.net/rules/
There are two direction that can be taken from the issue De Jouvenel makes clear. The first is to take the De Jouvenel’s and Hayek’s approach (see here for Hayek’s comments on “On Power” http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/129.html) This route keeps you within the liberal tradition, and makes concepts such as the degradation of Christianity and the Cathedral incoherent. It makes no sense without the power system being the actor on Christianity, and not some spontaneous morphing or conspiracy as seems to be the implicit assumption here – http://www.xenosystems.net/cladistic-meditations/. It is facing the grim situation and clinging to fantasy. Hayek as you might note as well from the link completely misreads De Jouvenel.
Moldbug simply rejects it, and takes the dark route which means rejecting imperium in imperio. Power flows down or degeneracy will be flooded into the system. Harsh, but that’s the reality of the situation. The ground to be explored once this is grasped is incredible.
(Ah, it was Foseti; interesting blogger indeed.)
Yes, I believe that is my interpretation of Jouvenel as well – imperium in imperio is the key problem. To state it another way, unsecure Power is the root issue, and the “evolution” of Christianity reflects that schism; the fiction adapts in order to justify the acquisition of power – to act as a Schelling point in the service of the high-low alliance – not the other way around.
Following this logic, the reason that the clade has “evolved” to become more egalitarian over time is obvious.
I fully agree that formalism would be a better and more efficient system, on average better for everyone involved.
Problem is, the masses are too stupid to listen when smart people tell them to mind their place and do as they’re told, even if they don’t understand why, because it’s for the best. The masses are much more receptive to flattery, hedonic carte blanche, gibs, and promises of future gibs. Hence our current situation.
The divide continues to expand between people who are willing to accept their lot in an imperfect world that functionally works, and those rapt in marxist promises and/or deriving power and wealth from marxist promises.
» the masses are too stupid to listen when smart people tell them to mind their place and do as they’re told, even if they don’t understand why, because it’s for the best
ლ(ಠ▃ಠლ) the one thing that stupid people can do is understand their place in the social hierarchy, the whole reason the alt right is a thing now is that FUCKING WHITE MALEs understand that they have no place in the progressive world
» receptive to flattery, hedonic carte blanche, gibs, and promises of future gibs
the smart people get to think really hard about how to make things better and the stupid people get to obey them in exchange for having cool stuff. that stratified model is the 20c version of civilization.
21c version is that families occasionally include smart people who try to make things better for their family and nation, and occasionally include stupid people who need to be closely monitored and taken cake of their entire lives. normal people live normal lives obeying the smart and taking care of the stupid, have cool stuff, feel great about it.
20c version includes the Roman system of replacing the Roman laborers with foreign imported labor and the need for Roman laborers with foreign imported goods.
Solution to Fall of Rome appears to be more democracy.
21c version includes normalfags agreeing with whatever to get along, where whatever is White genocide, while the smartfags prove their smarts by coming up with ever smarter justifications for White genocide to get along, up until the point at which they realize that Whites aren’t allowed to have jobs and reproduce anymore.
“Problem is, the masses are too stupid to listen when smart people tell them to mind their place and do as they’re told…”
No, they aren’t. The problem is that “smart people” have been telling them that they are equal and deserve equality.
Although there’s a related issue here which is that in certain situations the masses eventually develop an understanding that “smart people” aren’t exactly on their side and don’t quite have their best interests in mind, so they stop listening, leading said “smart people” to claim the aforequoted.
The stupid always follow the smart, for the smart and ambitious tend to become the elites, whatever else the case.
As peppermint more or less implicitly states, the stupid do as they are told. I would add that this is only true of the good and decent men, who happen to be not particularly smart; for the unruly and stupid, we can lead them to the end of a rope.
Create a structure with secure power, where the elites, that is, the smart and ambitious, are selected for and trained to become good and decent men; and the lowly masses will, by and large, follow their leaders and also become good and decent men, content with their place in society.
>> Create a structure with secure power, where the elites, that is, the smart and ambitious, are selected for and trained to become good and decent men
This is the root of the problem isn’t it? The vain and dissatisfied make better consumers than the good and decent, and the harvesting of said consumers is best done by sociopaths. So the incentive structure creates more of both.
Decay and destruction is just more profitable for the ruling class, until it isn’t, then things change.
“People as rational economic actors” strikes again. But it’s obvious from what Hollywood puts out that people aren’t. They could have made more money with less crappy movies, but they don’t. The motivation isn’t profit.
» better consumers
of what?
By a society of “good and decent men”, I mean to define that in terms of a society that is orderly and nonviolent – where people understand their relative worth, and are content with their inevitable place within the social and economic hierarchy. Whatever else “good and decent” means beyond that is arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant.
Although, having been inculcated since my youth into the ethical system of mainline ecumenical secular protestantism, I tend to hope for a society in which good, hard-working and loyal men of non-thuggery, even if socially and economically worthless, are at least given a meaningful existence: work, food, shelter, and protection from thuggery.
However, my interpretation of reality runs completely orthogonal to my acquired system of ethics, which is why I place exactly zero emphasis on actively preaching them to others.
>Decay and destruction is just more profitable for the ruling class, until it isn’t, then things change.
That is why step 1) of “cuckservatives anonymous” is to understand that real and secure power (authority that is both formally and informally matched), in the hands of one interest, one ruler, is the only possible hope to mitigate the damned thing.
Otherwise, it’s the high and low against the middle once again, and the rest is history.
Once you understand that middle exists, you can appreciate how aristocracy is actually supposed to work, and stop advocating for, since Rome fell as a result of low not having the political power to stop high from importing lower, to import nigger, and when nigger rapes low, telling low and nigger to figure out how to get along to overthrow high.
Dictatorship of the fnargl would be better than the abject farce that is dictatorship of the low, or dictatorship of the middle which is democracy which is rule by Jews. But what we really want is aristocracy, rule by the smart people born into the families, who prove themselves by amassing 500,000 dollars in assets, having a happy wife and raising at least three children who aren’t felons. The aristocrats may gather at a “thing” which has the authority to force the king to retire, or maybe the idea of having aristocrats physically congregate is moot in this new world of text messages.
A junta of aristocrats just leads to those same aristocrats utilizing the mob, the masses (the “low”) against other aristocrats, in their quest for power. Which is pretty much how virtually every revolution in history has taken place. In the modern era, the “aristocrats” are often college students who believe they themselves should rule; the results prove to be exactly as predicted. You really do need to secure power and authority in a “king”, or at the very least an entity which acts as a unified interest. Otherwise, it’s revolution again. And again. And again.
— In the modern era, the “aristocrats” are often college students who believe they themselves should rule;
That’s a contradiction. They aren’t aristocrats because they aren’t aristocrats.
Aristocrats should rule, and should normally vest their power in a king. Natural aristocrats are the smart people born into families. You probably know a few. When they reach the age of 50 and have a bunch of property and a vested interest in the future of the nation, they can be trusted with actual authority. Their children can not in general; let the children who can maintain daddy’s money stay in the aristocracy. Also let war heroes in.
Hence the scare quotes. Who rules America today? Why, college graduates! Specifically, graduates of the great Ivy League tradition. You’re defining “aristocrats” as “worthy men”; I used the term to mean “elites”, where that means “reasonably intelligent people who are highly ambitious, and hunger for power”. After all, elites rising in status to power is practically a tautology. This does not mean that all or any of them are necessarily “worthy men”.
Is there any revolution in history that did not involve the “elites”, as I have defined, in rallying the masses? The mob does not rebel of its own accord. Look at the revolutions in Latin America or the Middle East over the last 70 years: all of them, fermented upon university campus, often supplemented by Nationalist military coups.
But using your definition, I don’t think that an oligarchy of power divided between “worthy” aristocrats is any better than the scum who rule today. Power doesn’t corrupt; -potential- power corrupts. And an oligarchy of aristocrats is one with much potential power, for any one aristocrat, if he can manage to strip it from the others.
“Aristocrats should rule, and should normally vest their power in a king.”
Who is the high-middle-low in your scenario?
King – nobles – serfs has traditionally worked well in the past. Fuehrer – Aryan capital – Aryan labor may work well in the Glorious Aryan Future. But the aristocrats are always the middle here.
It’s obvious that socialism -selects- for unscrupulousness. But the real problem is that it corrupts perfectly good men, by -training- them to game the system; after all, in the late-stage brezhnev-sclerotic form of democracy, that’s the only way to get anything done anyway.
Imagine being a judge in the appeals process, knowing that your peers are all surreptitiously abrogating the formal constitution, state or federal, in order to field their own particular interests and values. It would take a man of strong metal in those circumstances to resist the urge to do the same. Surely no different for the rest of the civil services.
So you end up with a government ruled by natural-born crooks, and otherwise good men who have been trained to become crooks. And of what sort of values do crooks have in the first place? When your government corrupts even some of the best and brightest of your society, it’s time for a new government.
» government ruled by [jew]s
why couldn’t Eliot Spitzer find someone else to pay for his whores? Why wasn’t Anthony Weiner able to get in touch with fans safely?
But yeah, it’s pretty degrading to have to say that niggers are equal and really contuses my colon to have to watch my gf’s body language when letting niggers walk past us.
2008: The Plinth must (a) obey the principles of existential politics as described above; (b) conduct all operations in a perfectly democratic, transparent and responsible way; and (c) place its absolute confidence in the Antiversity and the Program.
2012: If the Cathedral’s evil consists primarily in heresy, in suppressing non heretical Christianity, on coercing all Christian churches to follow in its heresy, then you get the Theonomist Reaction… I admire the success of England under the restoration Church of England, an official state church which was much better than today’s official progressivism
2016: cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck
As they say, politics makes the mind stupid. And thus NRx gives way to the alt-right. I don’t care much for activism, even rightist activism, but the memes they produce are pretty dank indeed.
Not seeing the Dark Enlightenment give way to the Alt Right. When the alt right calls for Trump to suspend the constitution and crown himself Trump the first, to be succeeded by his son, they are absorbing NRx memes, not the other way around.
Men turned to the Manosphere to learn how to be men and succeed with women. They learned that the government was working against them, so they turned to Neoreaction to figure out how to make better governments. They learned that the culture has grown against them, so they turned to the AltRight to learn how to change the culture. There, they will learn something new, and move on to the next step, and so on. Neoreaction is only a place to stop along the path, but so is the AltRight.
The Shadowed Knight
The memes that the Alt-Right has inherited are not actual NRx/Dark Enlightenment memes though, but a falsity, a corruption. NRx is explicitly non-political, non-activist, and so any imprintation of NRx memes onto a political movement is corruption by definition. As Moldbug said, if you draw your sword, make sure to throw away the scabbard. Maybe it will work out for them; maybe Trump will be elected God-Emperor. But I doubt it. I certainly wish them well; at any rate, watching the destruction of cuck-cervatism in real-time is well worth the price of admission.
>If property rights poorly defined, violence apt to ensue
Property rights, whether clearly and rigorously defined or not, benefits the few and harm the many, and it is this inequality which makes violence inevitable.
Agreed. There should be no property rights for anyone. That way, everyone can share in the bountiful spoils of anarchy, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. And if there should be conflict, then the masses, who hold within them the holy inner light of pure and true democracy, shall adjudicate the matter freely among themselves.
I’ve no problem with property rights, and it wasn’t my intention to convey that I did.
Okay, but as far as violence is concerned, I don’t think that “inequality” has anything to do with it. Violence is the result of chaos, of lack of order.
Even if we were to somehow temporarily arrange a perfectly egalitarian society at t=0, then without the explicit enforcement of order upon it, it would quickly degrade into violence. Inequality would inevitably follow.
You can’t have order and equality, because equality is unreality. But you can certainly have order, and we certainly at all times live in a very inequal reality.
we reached the point a while ago where merely stating what leftists actually “believe” in the terms in which they actually “believe” it:
without Irving being able to threaten you with social consequences for refusing your assent, this is obviously a hateful parody. if Irving had kept himself to shorter slogans, the way Corvinus does, it would have been questionable
Leftists have become parodies of leftism. Indeed, anything that is still inside the Overton window, such as cuckservatism and Churchianity, is ridiculous.
The leftist idea that the poor ought to murder the rich and take their stuff at the slightest opportunity is not new. It’s centuries old.
Leftists are always surprised by the poor’s unwillingness to play along. After all, were they in the same situation, they would’ve murdered the rich, would they have not?
>Leftists are always surprised by the poor’s unwillingness to play along. After all, were they in the same situation, they would’ve murdered the rich, would they have not?
Sadly, if the poor were the descendants of those who organized murder, they would not likely be poor. They would have in them the genes of the winners, and would thus currently be doing what their ancestors did: attempting to organize the poor, to murder the rich. In other words, they would be leftists.
The recognition of property rights implies the acceptance of some form of inequality, which to me is fine. Yet, inequality, no matter in which form it manifests itself in society, will mean that there will be winners and losers, and one cannot reasonably expect that the losers will peaceably accept being losers. The losers will chafe at the fact that they have failed, and they will react, likely violently. That was my point.
Never happens. Has never happened once in all of human history. Revolutions are always made by elites against elites.
» The losers will chafe at the fact that they have failed, and they will react, likely violently.
if you are so intimidated by losers, how are you a winner?
>if you are so intimidated by losers, how are you a winner?
Who said I’m a winner? I’m just trying to look at things dispassionately. I’m doing OK for now, but I wouldn’t say that I have won anything, yet.
yeah, see, the problem with breaking people down into marxist classes like winner and loser is that most people aren’t winners or losers. the best marxists can do is call them the loser aristocracy and hope that they turn into losers so the marxists can overthrow the winners and establish a dictatorship of the losers to administer a losers paradise
if you see nothing but winners and losers, you ask why there are winners and losers if the losers are the children of the same great grandparents as the winners, and whether the losers or the winners will ever conclusively win
20c didn’t take normalfags seriously.
so far we’ve only mentioned the stupid, smart, and normal. in the nazi state of the future, autistics will be marked as special from birth and given government money or jobs at government regulated wages so they can stay on infinity-chan and funpost all day with their penetrating analyses, and when they all agree about something like gas the kikes race war now, the smartfags will listen to them and do it
Of course, I use the terms ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ as ideal types, and recognize that the reality is typically ambiguous, with much that is unclear
“The recognition of property rights implies the acceptance of some form of inequality, which to me is fine.”
Inequality and property rights exist regardless of whether you formally recognize them. That’s the whole point of formalism. It states that to minimize violence and disorder, things that already exist need to be formally recognized, and things that do not exist must not be.
“Yet, inequality, no matter in which form it manifests itself in society, will mean that there will be winners and losers, and one cannot reasonably expect that the losers will peaceably accept being losers. The losers will chafe at the fact that they have failed, and they will react, likely violently. That was my point.”
That’s simply not how it works. IMs don’t slaughter GMs and create a New Chess Order with themselves on top. As Jim said, revolutions are always made by elites.
Another myth is that the poorer the poor, the more revolutionary the situation. The opposite is true.
>Never happens. Has never happened once in all of human history. Revolutions are always made by elites against elites.
Very true, but the violence need not be revolutionary violence.
>Inequality and property rights exist regardless of whether you formally recognize them. That’s the whole point of formalism.
Understood
>Another myth is that the poorer the poor, the more revolutionary the situation. The opposite is true.
Look, at the end of the day, whether property rights are formally recognized or not, property owners are going to have to use violence, or at least make a credible threat of violence, in order to defend their property, and sometimes, depending on the situation, . That they feel that they must do all of this is an implicit acknowledgement of the truth of what I’m saying, which is to say that property owners recognize that they might be the target of violence from those who own no property, and so they seek to preempt that violence by securing their persons and their property with violence (i.e. police officers, private security, etc.), and through bribery (i.e. the welfare state, bread and circuses, whatever).
Defining the “winners” and “losers” is not an abstraction, it is an empirical question.
Many descendants of yesterday’s winners become today’s losers, it is true, but the reason is that life is a bell shaped curve.
@Irving, I see what you mean now (although I don’t happen to agree), but I did not actually think you were some sort of communist-Stalinist retard from reading your top level comment. I’ve seen you post elsewhere to know as much, and I was merely iterating snark with more snark.
>Who said I’m a winner?
Are you not? Reading the comments here, I was under the impression that everyone posting on this forum was a natural-born winner, with an IQ of 160+, and each the patriarchal master of an harem of loyal virgins, reduced to their natural womanly roles as breeders and sex-slaves. I know I certainly am.
>@Irving, I see what you mean now (although I don’t happen to agree), but I did not actually think you were some sort of communist-Stalinist retard from reading your top level comment. I’ve seen you post elsewhere to know as much, and I was merely iterating snark with more snark.
Fair enough, but would you mind elaborating on why you disagree with what I’m saying?
>Are you not? Reading the comments here, I was under the impression that everyone posting on this forum was a natural-born winner, with an IQ of 160+, and each the patriarchal master of an harem of loyal virgins, reduced to their natural womanly roles as breeders and sex-slaves. I know I certainly am.
LOL
“That they feel that they must do all of this is an implicit acknowledgement of the truth of what I’m saying, which is to say that property owners recognize that they might be the target of violence from those who own no property…”
No. The violent need not own no property. The fact that property is defended does not imply a correlation between inequality and level of violence, or between delta property and danger of violence. Nor does it imply a causal relationship. Violence is an independent factor that exists without formal property rights and without formal inequality. Their presence lowers violence, instead of increasing it. That’s pretty much their purpose.
Having more stuff (and/or being less well defended) obviously makes you a more appealing target for the hypothetical immoral/amoral rational economic agent, but that’s not the same thing.
@Irving, as I’ve said elsewhere in these comments, I understand that it is, in a sense, LITERALLY true that property rights are the ultimate cause of violence, at least at a certain level of abstraction.
What I mean is that, at best I don’t think it’s a particularly useful abstraction (at worst it leads to Stalinist-retardation). I prefer to consider it from the abstract perspective of order, which produces the obvious solution to the problem: violence is the result of chaos; of lack of security and order. To produce order in this case means the formalization of property rights, which means to match formal (nominal) property rights with informal (real, or actual) property rights, and thus to provide an authority (power monopoly) which enforces that pattern consistently and securely. (At least, unless we have a major (technology-driven) paradigm shift into sovereign or primary property rights, per Nick Land.)
So, while the inevitable existence of property rights may be the -ultimate- cause of friction and violence, and lack of order the -proximate- cause, for all intent and purpose the reverse may as well be true.
“i.e. police officers”
The police does not defend against the poor, it defends against thieves. There is a difference. First, the poor are not necessarily immoral or amoral. Second, the poor are targets of theft too.
“… the ultimate cause of violence…”
Violence, like poverty, doesn’t have a cause because it’s the default state. Its absence has causes.
And even if we accept Irving’s criterion of measuring how credibly threatening property owners are, it’s still obvious that they are less threatening when their property rights are formally recognized.
That’s the whole point of formalization, to eliminate the inherent inefficiency of everyone maintaining a credible threat level.
» The police does not defend against the poor, it defends against thieves. There is a difference. First, the poor are not necessarily immoral or amoral. Second, the poor are targets of theft too.
Ironically, in our late stage leftism, the police defend thieves against the poor. Which is why future Phillipine president Duterte Harry comes in with his RWDS –
» “if you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination”
In the White world, the police exist to protect niggers against the poor –
» …Police went to a house outside which a father was demanding the release of his daughter, who was inside with a group of British Pakistani adults. Officers found the girl, 14, who had been drugged, under a bed. The father and his daughter were arrested for racial harassment and assault respectively…
does this make the niggers winners and the White father a loser? Are the niggers and the White father both losers and they need to put aside their racial grievances and take out the winner Jews? Winners and losers aren’t simply abstractions, they’re incorrect terminology originating with the Jew Karl Marx, and, before him, the Jew Yeshua bar Yahweh who divided the world into saved and unsaved and defined global peace and happiness as getting everyone into the saved category. Stop letting yourself be Jewed even in the privacy of your own thoughts.
>That’s the whole point of formalization, to eliminate the inherent inefficiency of everyone maintaining a credible threat level.
Yep, that’s it in a nutshell. A higher order – an authority with a monopoly on violence – carries out the threats for us, in order to secure our (secondary) property rights; we can then carry on with our business, not having to ourselves devote neuron and muscle to the task of (credible) threats and (actual) thuggery.
Anything more than this is quibbling with semantics. Irving states that property rights are the cause of violence; others in this thread, including myself, state that it is caused by lack of order – which you can equivalently invert, so as to state that violence is the default, and that it is in fact mitigated through the imposition of order.
If we at least agree that “imposing order”, “nullifying friction and violence”, and “the lawful and strict enforcement of formal and arbitrary property rights”, are all equivalent – whatever it is specifically that that means – then we are in agreement.
In principle, “lack of order causes violence” and “order causes lack of violence” may be viewed as equivalent. In practice though people who disbelieve the noble savage myth ought to prefer the latter. Napoleon Chagnon deserves at least as much.
The three pillars of getting it wrong:
– noble savage
– Marxism, rich and poor necessarily antagonists
– rational economic actors, morality not represented in the equation
It is “equality” which is to say envy and covetousness, that causes violence. Over a hundred million murdered in the twentieth century. By and large, the more unequal the state, the more peaceful and prosperous. Compare the arab monarchies with the other arab states. Consider the murder levels of the communist states.
Because people are inherently unequal, envy and covetousness never succeeds in attaining equality, but can murder unlimited numbers of people attempting the impossible.
The only way to have peace, safety, and order, is for the superior people to rule over their inferiors.
>Compare the arab monarchies with the other arab states.
The Arab monarchies, unlike the other Arab states, have huge welfare states that are so generous that their people are practically exempt from having to work for a living.
That citizens are exempt.
Only a small minority of the people are citizens. Ten million people live in the UAE and there are 1.4m citizens.
The Gulf monarchies are what leftists pretend European colonialism was and what Roman imperialism once actually was: a metropolitan national elite living off taxes imposed exclusively on foreigners.
>That citizens are exempt.
Yes, all of the physical labor there is done by workers–that is, slaves–imported from India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and other places.
In any case, the point that I was making was that Jim was wrong to point to the relative stability of the Arab monarchies as a support for his position, given that in those countries the monarchies are having to buy the support of their people through generous (and increasingly unsustainable, given the collapse in the price of oil) welfare programs.
Dubai does not live off oil. It lives off taxes and rents charged to non citizens.
Nor are those non citizens slaves. The punishment for misbehavior is expulsion.
The punishment for failure to rise up the status hierarchy, for failure to become affluent, is eventual expulsion. It is up or out. All the foreigners that are there want to be there, and are continually threatened with not being allowed to remain.
Even if Irving is right that non-citizrns are slaves, the UAE does not need to buy their support. It charges them rent and has absolutely no problems imposing absolute discipline on them with the loyalty of 14% of the population. There is far more disorder in inclusive, egalitarian USA than in the UAE.
The USA could be ruled exclusively by male mortgage-free home owners and suffer less disorder than it does now.
“… and it is this inequality which makes violence inevitable.”
Nonsense. There’s plenty of violence without property rights, and whether people are equal or not doesn’t matter.
but it is true that the only possible reason for incurring the danger of violence is to assert a property right, as when the vegan asserts a property right to the marijuana plant’s leaves. property rights must be asserted according to the the first commandment – go forth, be fruitful and multiply, fill and subdue the universe. cucks call following that commandment being a paperclip maximizer and instead try to follow the commandment that since they don’t value their lives but other people value their meat they offer themselves to be eaten, but can usually manage to offer someone else to be eaten first.
At a certain level of abstraction, sure, that’s essentially true.
But taken literally, the only way to ensure that you aren’t (even implicitly) asserting property rights would be to kill yourself.
Which would still be violence.
Yes, I was not precise. When I said “without property rights”, I meant “without formally recognized property rights”.
“… cucks call following that commandment being a paperclip maximizer. …”
*LOL* Someone has been reading LessWrong. Are you comparing the “friendly” AIs, which supposedly will be so much smarter and more moral than we are, to Cthulhu?
Humans very much care about relative status. It is in the human nature to desire to rise above others or to bring them down, below oneself.
In that sense inequality does fuel violence. Do you disagree?
Owning stuff is one expression of status but not the only one.
One way to solve this is with social technologies that allow and encourage everyone to feel in some way superior to others – by being the best mechanic in town, or being most religious, or being the one who cares the most about homeless dogs, or knowing more than anyone about baseball, etc…
“In that sense inequality does fuel violence. Do you disagree?”
Yes, obviously. Accepting your premise, if humans care violently about relative status, _equality_ would fuel violence because when everyone has equal status, nobody yet has any relative status. There will be a period of mass violence until a stable status hierarchy is established, then occasional brief splashes of localized violence when there is a status challenge.
In practice, the status hierarchy is established without mass violence because humans are good at that.
“Accepting your premise, if humans care violently about relative status”
Yes, because of the degree to which it affects reproductive success.
“, _equality_ would fuel violence because when everyone has equal status, nobody yet has any relative status.”
Correct. The further you are from the top the more you driven to get closer.
But if you are at the top but have share this position with everyone else – that is still not enough. You need to be above.
That’s why equality does not solve the problem of inequality, it only reduces it.
What I think is a better solution is a society with so many different hierarchies that anyone can feel at or near the top in his market.
Art:
Humans very much care about relative status. It is in the human nature to desire to rise above others or to bring them down, below oneself.
In that sense inequality does fuel violence. Do you disagree?
pdimov:
Yes, obviously.
Art:
Maybe I am not making myself clear.
What I am saying is that because status matters to reproductive success men care about a great deal. So much that they are driven to apply any means necessary, including violent ones, in order to improve it. And the intensity of that drive is proportional to the perceived distance from the top.
I wasn’t expecting you to disagree with this.
True:
Obviously untrue. I mean, just look around.
The lower people’s status, the less violent they are. Blacks are violent in part because blacks are inherently violent and incompetent at cooperating, but in large part because higher status than whites. Look at the way they walk and talk. Obviously higher status. Back when they were lower status, they were peaceable. Read, for example, “a South Side View of Slavery” and “The Bow of Ulysses” to discover how blacks behaved when low status.
See also Mencius Moldbug ruling underclass
And, similarly, the less property people have, the less they are inclined to steal – see for example India and the rural Philippines. If no welfare, then no theft.
It is simply obvious in your everyday life. If someone threatens you with violence, or actually engages in violence against you, he has high self esteem and views himself as higher in status than you. If someone robs you, he probably has less money in the bank and does not own his own home, but he has a bigger television than you do and probably a nicer car.
Genuinely low status people, like the blacks depicted in “The Bow of Ulysses” do not fight. Genuinely poor people, like the poor of India, do not steal. Self esteem causes violence. Welfare causes crime. It is as plain as the nose in your face.
“And the intensity of that drive is proportional to the perceived distance from the top.”
You can construct a hypothetical reality in which this is true, by positing that people genuinely believe in equality and therefore the farther a person from the top, the more wronged he would feel, therefore intense drive.
The fact that actual human beings do not behave in this manner – those close to the top are in practice MUCH more intent to rise to it – tells us that nobody actually believes in equality.
People believe in equality all right, even when they are already on top: “For thee, but not for me”.
They believe in equality on a rational level, which muddies their thinking and leads them to come up with things like “drive should be proportional to distance from the top.”
But they don’t believe in equality on a gut level, which can be inferred from their actual behavior.
The fiercest status competition is between peers, that is, those perceived as most equal. Next on the list is the immediate superior.
>The fiercest status competition is between peers
Yes, that is absolutely true. And he who masters the mob against his enemies will acquire much power indeed. How convenient this “equality” thing is!
You say it’s illegal and increasingly impossible for men to have sex with women and thus we’re increasingly lead by eunuchs.
As evidence, Scott Aaronson, who wrote this book about quantum computing in which he demonstrated that he doesn’t really understand quantum mechanics but does like the Talmudic doctrines of computational complexity theory, and being a kike, gets to be the famous MIT computer scientist. Oh, and he’s such a wimpy cuck of a kike that he asked to be chemically castrated because he couldn’t bear the thought of thinking for himself, even about sex.
Also Scott Alexander, who is a cuck whose blog is popular because he’s a cuck and writes semi-edgy cuck bullshit, and got to be some kind of doctor because he’s also a kike with a reasonably high IQ of maybe like 115 or whatever.
Eliot Spitzer had to pay for his own whores, and got nailed because he was moving money around secretly because he was afraid of his wife.
Anthony Weiner married a haji and was trying to nail some of the young women attracted by the scent of his political power, but got found out because he sexted the wrong person.
Let’s compare with non-kikes who didn’t get their positions through ethnic nepotism.
Marco Rubio is a foam party faggot who was given whores in DC.
Ted Cruz got plenty of tail, and Heidi only complained when it was clear that he was banging Carly and losing.
Jeffery Epstein helped Bill Clinton with whores, but Bill Clinton did plenty of raping, and Hillary supported him through it.
GWB seemed to have a good thing going with Laura.
This is what young women actually think about men: http://imgur.com/BA2a7eA
“I promise I will always let you (controller) me… you will be my (final fantasy”
Laws are made to be broken.
But our younger leaders are disturbingly law abiding. Look at Obama’s wife. I swear the man is a mostly abstinent gay.
https://youtu.be/jfxCkYAPW4Q?t=176
which younger leaders? Back when I was in elementary school I heard everyone talking about how great Bill Clinton was going to be and saw the ads on TV in which George Bush lied about not raising taxes. Bill Clinton was supposed to have been a younger leader at some point with liberal attitudes towards women or whatever.
Liberal attitudes towards women means you do stuff with any woman who you can convince to let you put your boner in which is liberating towards women because it liberates them from the oppression of no sex and waiting for someone to marry them like it’s still the nineteenth century and women need husbands who are probably just going to drink and ignore them.
The only way to come by the bizarre unnatural pedistalizing view of women is to be a christcuck. Thus, my mom is constantly talking about how degrading towards women it was when George HW Bush talked about nailing his wife in vulgar terms to a bunch of vulgar white men, but never really opposed Bill Clinton because his wife stood by him. Because women don’t believe in ideas and equality of souls is an idea.
There are cuckservative christcucks around today and they almost nominated pussy crushing Ted Cruz. Other than them, the only people under 40 who actually believe in equality of souls are committed dhimmicrats. And probably the only young dhimmicrat leader is Alan Grayson, who probably crushes a lot of puss.
That gamer girl picture was probably by someone under 20, and I saw it shared on Faceberg by someone under 20.
tl;dr the people who point and laugh at Moot and Jake Rapp aren’t like them, and only dirty old men and the cat ladies they try to nail approve of Moot and Jake Rapp
Christians believe we are souls incarnate.
If souls are equal:
In marriage why does the flesh become the man?
Why did Christ die for our sins? Surely any soul would have worked just fine, what is the need for the Son of God to incarnate?
Religion is created so that Dumb people do smart things which smart people intuitively know to do.
Alternately, Religion was created so Dumb people did not do dumb things which smart people intuitively know not to do.
That clear your doubts? Feel free to ask more
There is clearly more to the world than snark and cynicism.
I’m not sure how earnestly you pose the questions, but one could make a start at answering them by saying:
Christianity does not believe that we are souls incarnate.
All souls are not equal.
The flesh does not become the man in marriage; rather, the flesh of man and wife is united into one flesh in a marriage.
The efficaciousness of Christ’s Passion and Death do not derive from the value of His human soul per se, but from the value that the Passion had by virtue of the union of His humanity (i.e., the human body animated with a rational soul) to the Divinity, in the one Person of the Eternal Son and Word of God. This union lent an infinite worth to the Passion, and the perfect and infinitely valuable charity of the Son of God’s voluntary self-immolation rose as a pleasing and propitiating fragrance before the sight of the Father. Moreover, the Incarnation allowed Christ to offer this to God in the place of mankind, as a man, creating a new race of men in Himself, the New Adam, which would have no share or inheritance in the disobedience of the first Adam.
Also, it made Christ into a new “ark,” as it were, in Whom the faithful are saved from the deluge of judgment that inundates the whole world outside. Christians are united to Christ in Baptism and the other Sacraments, participating more or less effectively in this according to their response to grace through Faith, Hope and Charity. Thus, the life of the Christian becomes “hidden with Christ in God;” he no longer lives his own life, but receives another birth and an incorporation into the Body of the Son of God. Thus, his own sufferings and death are no longer the just desserts of his own enmity towards God (provided he perdures in the innocence of his new birth in Christ), but become associated with Christ’s own sufferings and death – i.e., they are weaponized against the system of sin rather than being the fruits of sin (in their own, renewed lives), and thus, as with Christ’s sufferings, they become the prelude to the victory of a resurrection unto glory, in which incorruption and immortality swallow up corruption and mortality. Christ came to be a point of contact between men and God, so that men, joined to His manhood, can be reconciled also to His Godhood, and participate in It by grace. Hopefully that is helpful.