The president does not make decisions. The presidency does not make decisions either, at least not in the sense that an individual, or a well run corporation makes decisions.
Rather, it is driven entropic forces, which tend over time tend to have certain outcomes, like a river slowly changing its course. Thus we see the presidency gradually yielding on Aleppo.
If Xenophon, or Raffles, or Clive of India, or Atilla the Hun was running the show, he would decide whether to hold them, fold them, walk away or run. What we see the American government doing is drifting and wobbling, and right now it is gradually drifting amorphously and slowly towards abandoning its long held plans for regime change in Syria. By and large, the decisions of the presidency have no clear motive, no clear objective, and are not well modeled as decisions by a self interested individual. When IBM does X, it is generally because the CEO has decided that X would be profitable. When the presidency does something, it is the net outcome of a bunch of individuals each pursuing his particular self interest, each maximizing his particular microslice of power and his particular reputation for holiness, the net outcome of a great many individuals each with a tiny microslice of power each doing something that serves his particular interest, as a river changes its course as the net outcome of the drift of many tiny grains of sand. There are no elders of Zion, or if there are, they don’t care what happens to Zion.
If Clive was running the Aleppo operation, he would fight, or run, or cut a deal with Russia. But the presidency is incapable of cutting a deal with Russia over Aleppo because, as the Russians have discovered, it is “not agreement capable”, a term generally used for failed states. The American negotiators may agree with Russia that America will do X in return for Russia doing Y, but then X does not happen, not so much because anyone in America made a conscious decision to double cross the Russians, but because there is in fact no real chain of command connecting the negotiators with people who might have the ability to make X happen. So the presidency neither fights, nor runs, nor cuts a deal. Today it is drifting slowly in the general direction of running.
The amorphous, erratic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable drift of the presidency on matters of war and peace contrasts dramatically with Harvard’s ability to decisively and abruptly make decisions on matters of faith and morals, for example global warming or second hand smoke. One day every academic everywhere in the entire western world believes X. The next day, every academic everywhere in the entire western world believes Y, and not only believes Y, but has always believed Y, and has absolutely no recollection than anyone anywhere ever believed X, except perhaps a few ignorant bible thumping racist loons in the wilds of Appalachia or the marshes of Florida.
[…] If Xenophon, or Raffles, or Clive of India, or Atilla the Hun was running the show, he would decide whether to hold them, fold them, walk away or run. What we see the American government doing is drifting and wobbling, and right now it is gradually drifting amorphously and slowly towards abandoning its long held plans for regime change in Syria. By and large, the decisions of the presidency have no clear motive, no clear objective, and are not well modeled as decisions by a self interested individual. When IBM does X, it is generally because the CEO has decided that X would be profitable. When the presidency does something, it is the net outcome of a bunch of individuals each pursuing his particular self interest, each maximizing his particular microslice of power and his particular reputation for holiness, the net outcome of a great many individuals each with a tiny microslice of power each doing something that serves his particular interest, as a river changes its course as the net outcome of the drift of many tiny grains of sand. There are no elders of Zion, or if there are, they don’t care what happens to Zion. […]
[…] Big Piece This Week® takes a tragicomical look at Cathedral decision making. Not quite putting the “cis” in […]
I like this post and I agree, in fact I think the Harvard description could be applied to populations in democracies as a whole.
Harvard makes decisions the same way Washington does, sand grains in the river. When they “decided” that they all believed in gay marriage and always had, that was merely a preference cascade, like a flock of birds suddenly deciding to turn left.
In nature as in war, cephalic organisms swim circles around acephalic organisms like jellyfish and sea stars, which, like Afghanistan, survive only by being extremely unpalatable.
No, Harvard is cephalic, unlike today’s pentagon.
When Beria suddenly became an unperson, this left a gap in the Soviet Encyclopedia at Ber, which was filled by an invented history of Bergholz, as in “1984”, when Winston Smith invents Comrade Oglivy to fill the gap created when Comrade Withers becomes an unperson.
Similarly, when natural selection suddenly ceased to be the central organizing principle of biology, it was necessary to give Darwin something else to be famous for, otherwise students would start asking “Why does the the biology department have all these stone busts of a little known nineteenth century racist?” and they would have to chisel the busts off the walls and replace them with a black lesbian poet.
That everyone suddenly ceased to believe in the centrality of natural selection could be preference cascade. That simultaneously everyone suddenly came to believe that Darwin invented common descent cannot be explained by preference cascade, requires unitary central authority ruling with an iron fist, at least on matters of faith and morals.
Standard operating procedure is to call all dead white men racist, pull down their statues, and rename streets and buildings after some black lesbian Hispanic disabled woman poet no one’s ever heard of. Darwin gets to hang around because he’s still useful for bashing Christians.
I suspect that older scientists stopped talking about Darwin’s racial views for fear of getting in trouble, and younger scientists never read his books. In science it’s best to keep your head down and your mouth shut, because you can’t just walk across the street and get another job.
Outside of college biology departments, “Darwin discovered evolution” is all most people ever bother to learn.
Orwell had 1984 published in 1948 and died in 1949. Beria was purged in 1953. 1984 was an apt commentary on Soviet society but that its “critique” of the Beria purge was more a “prediction” based on knowledge of the USSR’s character than it was a direct reference to Beria’s purge (which hadn’t happened yet!).
I stand corrected.
As an aside, a peccadillo; cathedrals are one of the signature symbol of european civilization; they are great and impressive achievements, emblematic of a civilization that can both recognize beauty, and has the will and wherewithall to call it into being.
Of course only a hebrew would see no problem with rechristening it into a snarl word.
Yeah, people have been making that point for years, and it’s fair, but the term fills a necessary niche, and nobody’s managed to make any alternative stick. When you inspire a political/intellectual movement, they tend to stick with your terminology, even when it has problems.
Moldbug was a techie, so it’s pretty obvious that his “Cathedral” owes a more to the seminal techie screed, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which also slaps that name on the guys we’re supposed to boo, than it does to direct anti-Catholic or anti-Western animus.
The orthosphere guys have suggested Babel, which ive personally found to be apt, particularly given its more esoteric connotations of multikulti/universalism, and attempted defiance of natural order and divine law in general.
I mean shit, the demon haunted neurotics-in-chief even use it themselves: http://www.chapel-house.org.uk/images/EUstudy160602.jpg
Babel was one, and became many. The oneness of the Cathedral is its most striking feature – that many supposedly independent voices speak in unison.
It was an act of god that made them many and (re)set the nations apart, as punishment for their attempt to be one in the first place, very much like what we see today.
“Cathedral” is also a dig at its adherents’ supposed lack of religion. They fancy themselves dispassionate, rational, secular thinkers, when in fact their ideology is a highly mutated and virulent strain of millennarian Christianity (made all the more potent by a contingent of hyper-progressive converso Jews).
Opponents of the Cathedral love real cathedrals, Moldbug included.
Cathedral means “seat” or “bench” or perhaps “throne” — it is the place from which a Christian bishop exercises authority. So yes, that “seat” along with the building that went around it got to be a very impressive engineering and artistic accomplishmenst, but the original meaning of the word refers to the power that flows from that architectural wonder.
So you could say that the Cathedral means the power or exercise of authority in the modern world. You could also say that the term is meant ironically or even sarcastically that this exercise of authority has some of the arrogance and hypocrisy attributed to the authority exercised when Christianity had a similar level of influence. And just as the ancient Cathedral had its impressive works, so does the modern Cathedral have its impressive works, although these may be more in the form of information technology rather than stone-and-stained glass structures.
Another term for the Cathedral could be the global or perhaps Western Deep State. But again, the term Cathedral also denotes the smug sense of moral authority held by those exercising power. Yes this is obliquely pejorative of Christianity, but it is pejorative according to the belief system of the modern Cathedral that views traditional Christianity with some level of contempt, as in term an indirect means of Alinsky-like turning of the modern believe system against itself in a mocking way.
somehow Cathedral stuck instead of Polygon, referring to the older Iron Triangle meme, that more accurately describes its operation. I like this meaning that the Cathedral has its power because it has taken control over the institutions our ancestors built.
I like Gothic architecture and stained-glass windows as much as anyone here, but “Cathedral” is a perfect descriptor of just what we’re talking about: it implies permanence, authority, respectability, a desire to strike awe into the peasants, and most importantly, Holiness.
They are great achievements, but they are achievements of Aryans, the race is more important than any thing the race has built. Surely destroying the cathedrals would not be necessary to get rid of the christcucks and their muslim pets, but if it is, so be it.
What are the reasons for this lack of clarity in command? Why don’t other countries have them? Or is this a feature of all democracies everywhere?
There was a recent post on the Social Matter forum about cephalization, the process by which complex systems give up their command and control functions to a well-defined “head”. This was similar to that described by Coase for why a firm arose in a market economy. Biologists have known it for a while, since evolution seems to lead to increasing cephalization when an organism has to deal with uncertain environments.
An executive with clear chain of command is a form of social cephalization, self-organized and anti-entropy. Is the loss of this clarity just another symptom of the progressive acid corroding all structures and forms, to move everything into the formless void, where we are finally all “equal”?
It also resembles a move from how male social groups are organized (hierarchical, like the military and sports teams) to the pattern seen in female social groups and female-led spaces like kindergarten (ostensibly egalitarian where everyone is superficially friends with everyone, but with lots of intrigue and cattiness).
The Australian military and diplomatic corps seem capable of acting decisively, of giving effect to government policy literally overnight, of acting as one being with one will. Other countries, it varies.
Nowhere in the west is the entire government capable acting decisively, of acting as one being with one will. And it seems to be generally getting worse, perhaps due to feminization.
Note Duerte’s solution to government internal disunity.
“And it seems to be generally getting worse, perhaps due to feminization.”
Speaking of which, perhaps this is the key to understanding the nature of the Obama Administration: femininity.
Is BHO the first “female” President, much as Bill Clinton was the first “black”?
Think about it: he pouts, he holds grudges, he males a show of independence then follows immediately with a show of subservience; his “red lines” are mutable, and he’s vain. Is this the source of the “not agreement capable” morass?
Certainly things have gotten strikingly worse under Obama, but things have been getting worse for a very long time.
Since Ellis Island, when the heretics injected themselves in for a mission that they were unable to accomplish from the more obvious, but better defended southern border.
You boys are losing yourselves in the small details of a very big picture. Simplified – there is a power vacuum in the Whitehouse. It became apparent when the black baboon in the Oval Office made it clear he would rather play golf and vacation in Hawaii than do his job or act in the interests of his country.
I personally believe there is a power vacuum in that cathedral of yours too. Hillary will be no better than Obutthole was and most liberals can’t stand her.
I suspect that in the days ahead, Trump will do either very well – or very badly and there will be no in-between.
Did the Russians really bomb the UN humanitarian aid convoy bringing relief supplies to the beleaguered civilians in rebel-held Aleppo? Did they really do this in response to U.S.-U.K. bombing of some Syrian troops, which our side explains was “a mistake”? Is there any equivalence there because dropping bombs on troops, mistaken or only “mistaken” is still bombing uniformed combatants whereas dropping bombs on a UN convey is seriously taking a dump in the punch bowl? But it seems that the Russian decision-making apparatus is very much intact, that is, if they decide to drop their pants and sit over the punch bowl, they will certainly do as much?
If so, this would be a Serb-magnitude war crime, and would this not bring to bear some serious shaming from the Cathedral? Or are the Russians in actuality Serbs with a very, very large nuclear arsenal, and since the Cathedral does not countenance a preemptive nuclear first strike to bring war criminals to justice (or at least, not quite yet), no war crime took place?
But do we know the Russians bombed the UN convoy apart from some anonymous Cathedral apparatchik saying this was so? But then if this was made up, why the lamest of lame explanations from the Russians that the convoy “caught fire on its own accord.” Their Syrian puppets are going to the trouble of blaming the convoy burning up on account of an attack by “the terrorists.” Is claiming the convoy just plain caught fire a way of “sticking it to us”, kind of in James Bond-villain fashion?
Is Hillary going to continue (the foreign policy) legacy of Barack? I get this vibe that in dominant partner in a female same-sex relationship style, she will kick backsides and take names. Whether we get into WW-III is another matter, but would her presidency involve a power vacuum?
It may well be the Americans bombed the convoy in a false flag operation, the Syrians shelled the convoy as part of their overt and official policy of starving out enemy held regions, or any one of the innumerable terror groups in the area who are at war with most of the other innumerable terror groups shelled the convoy, etc.
My bet is on the Syrian government, and I would totally support them in so doing, and would do the same in their shoes, as “äid to civilians” is in fact a cover for financial and logistic aid to al-Nusra which is the latest name for al Qaeda in Syria.
Since the Caliphate, Islamic State, is also pissed about American assistance to Al Nusra, it is also quite likely Islamic State did it. Or Al Nusra did it just because they hate Americans, cutting of their nose to spite their face. There is a large oversupply of suspects – including American agents in the convoy blowing it up.
“The amorphous, erratic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable drift of the presidency on matters of war and peace…”.
Interesting post. Two questions:
1. Is this amorphous nature a direct result of BHO’s personal style of “leadership”, and endemic to the Obama administration? Or is it a function of the bureaucratic apparatus? Would/will it change under a President Trump, or would he be enveloped in the same uncertain milieu?
2. Is this amorphous nature a feature or a bug? In other words, does modern executive authority benefit from an atmosphere of “unpredictable drift”. Is it some new form of ambiguous positioning for a desired effect? A cocooning mechanism?
I would say it has been steadily getting worse under both Democratic and Republican presidents, and that for Trump to fix it, will have to fire a lot of people.
Indeed, I speculate that he made his catchphrase “You are fired” with that possibility in mind.
Does your 2026 prediction of collapse include localized civil war akin to the Mormon War?
You accurately predicted years ago that the Cathedral would become “not agreement capable” with itself:
“Eventually the money runs out […]. As that happens, the increasingly lawless behavior of the rulers against the ruled will become increasingly lawless behavior of the rulers against each other. Civil war, or something close to civil war, or the dire and immediate threat of civil war will ensue.”
This implies the Cathedral does not have the organizational capability to survive a sustained military conflict, even if it had access to well-kept infrastructure.
More likely that local K-strategists would be able to take advantage of failing infrastructure to bully local r-strategists into submission. Local militias would become much more likely in that scenario. The US/Canada would become a thousand local militias in competition for a monopoly on power. The rise of feudalism 2.0?
One thing i feel this analysis misses or is weak on is the interplay between your sundry status whores and pharisees with right leaning elements acting in procivilization manners, along with a broader swell of less ‘ideologically aware’ but ‘commonsense’ ‘just doing my job’ folk so to speak, which even now still exist in portions of babels tower and society in general, moderating or cleaning up after entropic forces in their own incipient ways.
If civilizations descent into leftism appears janky and uneven, it is because leftists themselves are unevenly distributed. If i could describe it, i would say every day thousands of ‘mini-reactions’ occur as people butt up against fashionable nonsense, which they can sense on an intuitive level doesn’t feel quite right and doesn’t have much to do with ‘getting the job done’, even if they can’t really articulate it explicitly.
The actual trajectory will probably have a strong resemblance to a polygraph or a seismometer; even without metapolitical initiation particularly egregious eruptions of daemoniac effluence in one particular area or another provokes reactions from people with commonsense (ie, white western europoids of neandertalic extraction), even if on simple pragmatic levels. Fractioning or splintering is likely before any big ‘system wide’ collapses.
Thats one reason why im actually reservedly optimistic about the way things will play out.
Also, there really were elders of zion, but by and large they progressively failed to transmit their legacy across the generations (our modern gnostic revolutionaries are so much lesser in quality than they once were).
*snip*
One thing i feel this analysis misses or is weak on is the interplay between your sundry status whores and pharisees with right leaning elements acting in procivilization manners, along with a broader swell of less ‘ideologically aware’ but ‘commonsense’ ‘just doing my job’ folk so to speak, which even now still exist in portions of babels tower and society in general, moderating or cleaning up after entropic forces in their own incipient ways.
If civilizations descent into leftism appears janky and uneven, it is because leftists themselves are unevenly distributed. If i could describe it, i would say every day thousands of ‘mini-reactions’ occur as people butt up against fashionable nonsense, which they can sense on an intuitive level doesn’t feel quite right and doesn’t have much to do with ‘getting the job done’, even if they can’t really articulate it explicitly.
The actual trajectory will probably have a strong resemblance to a polygraph or a seismometer; even without metapolitical initiation particularly egregious eruptions of daemoniac effluence in one particular area or another provokes reactions from people with commonsense (ie, white western europoids of neandertalic extraction), even if on simple pragmatic levels. Fractioning or splintering is likely before any big ‘system wide’ collapses.
Thats one reason why im actually reservedly optimistic about the way things will play out.
Also, there really were elders of zion, but by and large they progressively failed to transmit their legacy across the generations (our modern gnostic revolutionaries are so much lesser in quality than they once were).
This coffeeshop in Harvard Square used to have one unisex bathroom but this summer Transitioned to having one bathroom for each sex, I only found out when I accidentally tried to walk into the women’s bathroom and was told it was the women’s bathroom by another customer.
It’s a small place without enough seating during the day.