Political systems are about problem solving. Inherited rule, for example, solves the problem of selecting the next ruler. Blood also provides legitimacy, which is an essential element for any ruler. One of the problems a political system must solve is the problem of trade-offs. Public policy, regardless of the system, is about trade-offs. A political system has to have a mechanism for selecting between competing options, by weighing the trade-offs and determining the best choice.
A great story from the ancient world about trade-offs is the story of the emperor Tiberius and flexible glass. A craftsman was presented to the emperor claiming that he could make flexible glass. That is, a substance that looked and functioned like glass, but did not break like glass. He produced a bowl that the emperor tried to smash, but it only suffered some dents. The craftsman then repaired it with a small hammer, knocking out the dents made by the emperor.
Once the emperor was assured that no one else knew how to make this new material, he had the craftsman beheaded. The reason was that Tiberius saw right away that this material was revolutionary. Innovation always comes with trade-offs, as the new thing replaces an old thing. In the case of flexible glass, the trade-offs were incalculable, so the proper course was to make sure this new material never got loose. Tiberius chose the well understood over the completely unknown.
This story is useful to us today, because we have lived through what could be described as a series of flexible bowl incidents. The technological revolution that was set in motion by the microprocessor has swept through the West. As Tiberius anticipated with flexible glass, the silicon chip has set off changes that no one anticipated. In the material sense, our world is quite different from 70 years ago. In a cultural and political sense, we now live at the other end of a perpetual revolution.
In theory, democratic systems of government are about solving the problem of the general will. Through the ballot, the people tell the office holders what they want from their government. In turn, the people in office try to guide the general will through public debate and public advocacy for their ideas. The trade-offs involved in the options being debated are fleshed out and the public, directly, or indirectly, makes their choice and that becomes public policy.
The trouble is the system always selects for innovation over continuity. When the microprocessor came along, there could be no debate about whether this was a dangerous new innovation or how best to prevent this radical new thing from overthrowing the old rules. Democracy always comes down on the side of the new thing over the old thing. Every innovation, no matter how pointless, is celebrated as another step in human progress. Democracy is a perpetual revolution.
As a result, there could be no Tiberius moment with the microchip. There was not one to examine the new thing and contemplate its ramifications. Instead, it was quickly adopted setting off the technological age. Not only did no one think about the trade-offs before unleashing this new thing, not one thought about them afterwards. New is always good in a democratic society. The only thing better than innovation is more and faster innovation. Constant change is the ethos of liberal democracy.
The technological revolution was expected to solve lots of problems that plagued the industrial age. Society was supposed to become more democratic, for example, as improvements in communication made it easier for people to express their preferences in the public square. The distribution of goods would become more equitable, as innovation would smash the old bottlenecks. The technological revolution would make the world flatter, more egalitarian and more peaceful.
Some of the promised benefits have happened, but the trade-offs have been enormous and could very well be the end of us. For example, the cost of being able to call anyone anywhere from a device that fits in your pocket is having millions of people experiencing the lives through their phone. All the benefits of the mobile phone were realized with the first car phone. Everything that has came after that point has been the trade-off that no one could imagine. Most of them negative.
Similarly, the cost of instant communication across time and place is millions of people standing in front of a firehose of information. Humans are not made to experience the world this way. One result is everyone is dumber and less informed. Another result is the number of rage heads screaming in the face of their fellow citizens is growing exponentially. The cost of knowing what is on everyone’s mind is knowing what is on everyone’s mind whether you like it or not.
Again, this is not to say the technological revolution is a mistake. E-mail is better than the postal service. Modern automobiles are better and safer than their analog variants from the old days. Having the sum of human information at your fingertips is an amazing leap forward for humanity. There has been great material progress that has come with the technological revolution, but it came with a price. The question the West is slamming into is whether that price is warranted.
The trouble is democracy is incapable of evaluating trade-offs. This may be why our systems are becoming increasingly authoritarian. The only way to tone down the rhetoric in public forums is for the heavy hand of the ruling class to limit what can be said in public forums. The only way to break people from being constantly on-line is to make on-line less rewarding. There is no democratic way to get rid of Twitter and Facebook, so we get an authoritarian approach.
The trouble, of course, is that the current ruling class is the product of the democratic system that created this mess. These are people bred to overturn the tried and true in favor of the novel. That instinct is seen in their fetish for men in dresses. They are attracted to it because it is disruptive. Our ruling class is was selected by a system that rewards pointless novelty over sober mindedness. A ruling class of such people means we are ruled by a class of powerful toddlers.
That may be the next turn of the wheel. Democratic dictatorship gives way to some form of personal rule, where stability and continuity are prized over innovation. The ruling class is symbolically and physically walling itself off from us, but what comes next is a culling inside those walls. The feckless and stupid will be pushed out as a matter of survival, by those actually capable of wielding power. That will be a trade-off that everyone can accept, because it brings stability.
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I want the Ruling Class even more walled off and in a state of perpetual fear. The junta seems inclined to embrace isolation and paranoia, so it may provide what is necessary. Only then can we have personal autonomy or at least the outlines of it and begin to form our own communities away from the decaying empire.
The more walled off D.C. is, the less capable they will be of swaths of people outside of it shrugging their shoulders and giving them the middle finger. When they hire mercenaries to do what they are now incapable of doing, the mercenaries will just learn how to deceive and grift the insular D.C. intelligentsia. Within a short time period, they will be passing edicts everyone just ignores. Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere And build them a home, a little place of their own The Fletcher Memorial Home For Incurable Tyrants and Kings And they can appear to… Read more »
The FBI formerly played this role, but it has grown almost universally distrusted due to its corruption and incompetence. If private mercenaries in fact are hired, their first clashes will be with the criminal class found in the J. Edgar Hoover Building. My money would be on the mercs, which would be unfortunate for the innocents they would oppress.
Agreed. Stability would be nice.
my poor Krell!
There is a democratic way to get rid of youtwitfacegoo, stop using them.
This smug attitude got us nowhere so far, but what the hell, let’s keep trying, right?
Just because it hasn’t worked yet doesn’t mean it never will. Social media companies are essentially content archival systems with an advertising and/or market research team included for revenue generation. The fundamental problem is that operational costs increase exponentially over time (because they need increased data storage, and the technical management for it) which leads to an increasing need for revenue. Revenue can only be increased by selling more data or selling more ads. The former strategy increases the odds of legal retribution and the latter chases away users, driving down the cost they can charge per ad. It’s a… Read more »
Not sure if it costs Google any extra, but I always click on the ad button saying to get rid of an ad because it’s offensive
i realize it’s probably handled by computer AI, but my guess is it’s still a pain in the butt for them lol
i hope so at least. Sand in the gears. Sand in the gears.
I am talking about “Just stop using them”, which is equivalent to “Why don’t you build your own platform?”.
It’s not that it cannot be done on an individual level. But it’s not going to happen on mass level just because some smart ass on the Internet proposes it as a solution.
There is also a generational issue. How many young people do you know who use Faceberg and Twatter? They are not cool. Maybe some will grow into using them as they get older and want to post pictures of their kids, but probably not. With my kids, they actually get together with friends in person. When they are on their phones, they are usually showing each other silly videos, and not trying to build some online brand for themselves, like adults do, even though the kids could run circles around them technologically.
They’re designed and continually refined to be literally addictive. If you don’t understand the power of this, you (blessedly) do not understand the power of addiction.
“Try harder” is not a solution for the masses.
Big tech designed it to be addictive, but I don’t think they designed it for control. They’re rectifying that as fast as possible.
Just Say No.
Is a banality. But also true and good advice.
Get off of social media and limit the use of all tech because it’s addictive.
This just doesn’t work on mass level. Be realistic.
Exactly. The other side of the addiction coin is when the users go cold turkey, and never touch the stuff again.
I watched Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy last week and enjoyed it so much that I’m now reading the books again. I haven’t read them since I was a child. I’m onto the two towers but I can’t help noticing that cellphones seem to be a good substitute for the highly corrupting one ring that rules them all.
I loved the trilogy immensely, thinking them very well done. Everything looked amazing and the battle scenes were epic. I never read the books, however.
also 100% white. The only black people are Orcs. I cannot believe it hasn’t been banned
You know that’s coming. A woke remake with the protagonists being people of color and the Orcs will be white, blonde haired, blue eyed. Although maybe not, since the Orcs were tough, savage fighters and Whites are always depicted as effeminate, bumbling soyboys, so I’m not sure how that will play out in the remake.
Amazon’s already doing it. The lead is a half black woman.
it’ll be great, can’t wait to see orcs teaching hobbits how to twerk and female elves explaining to the tv audience the benefits of interracial relationships.
d’Gandoltavious will save the day.
Now that you mention it, this is only something that really would have registered with me in the last five years; that really being when woke went into overdrive. When I first saw those films, I just loved them for what they were – great story, no tedious woke politics. The other day the wife and I watched The Green Mile, which I also enjoyed. Now bearing in mind I am an Englishman, there is only one stereotype of the southern ‘redneck’ that gets air time over here. Yet most of the guards, who were southern whites, seemed like thoroughly… Read more »
The most interesting aspect of the technological revolution is just how vapid it is. Not just the social media or infotainment sites, but most deep machine learning applications are pretty pointless since they mostly end up confirming long-existing stereotypes. The big accomplishment has been to trade precision for redundancy, which has made many systems more efficient and simultaneously more vulnerable.
Consider all the PhD man-hours going into an Amazon recommendation for a blender, or an automatically generated title for an email from Google, let alone online/app advertising.
It’s really astonishing. In my profession, the biggest vendor is data and marketing driven, which had led to a system where they don’t have enough money for product R&D/testing. There basic sales model is to make barely adequate products then give there sales force a ton of technical sales tools to get me to buy. The end result is that I buy from a much smaller company whose products are vastly superior.
The reason they focus on the banal is because interesting A.I. research would end up confirming all sorts of bad-think.
All those PhD man-hours, and then most of the blender reviews turn out to be fake.
Stability and continuity is something we’ve all needed for a long time – just some down time to catch our breath. As for the feckless & stupid getting pushed out, there are 535 in DC that seemingly never weigh the costs and benefits of anything that’d be a good group to start with.
Stability in today’s world is pretty frightening. It means white people will have had to accept their diminished role and the supremacy of (((them))) and their foot soldiers. Stability equals white submission.
It is the worst thing for whites.
Well, you may be right. Everything seems very unstable at the moment and were it to “stabilize” where we are currently – that might not be the optimum situation as you say. I guess in order to create the stability and continuity we need, we’ll have to make things even more unstable – both for the ruling class and tech overlords. The only way out of this mess is going to be costly – for us and them.
Society and civilization have grown completely unsalvageable.
it’s time to summon Gozer The Destructor who will come in the form of Aunt Jemima.
She’s already here. Her first name is actually Maxine and she’s rolling.
Common sense & practical knowledge are eternal survival skills. Going Dark (Cont) If you live in a rural area, chances are that your vehicles get mud splashed all over them regularly; so much so that older pickups rarely get washed anymore. In such cases, your truck almost becomes unrecognizable. And on bright sunny days, that big honking visor must stay down in order to keep the sun out of your eyes. Safety matters after all. Wraparound sunglasses are a big help too, and a full beard will keep you extra warm if you should need to change a tire in… Read more »
<i>One result is everyone is dumber and less informed. </i>
—
The first part isn’t debatable, the second part though is maybe a smidge brief as people are less informed (and misinformed) about topics that matter. I see this even on normie-con sites where the readers know more about some oil project in Iran than how the local church is cramming “refugees” into their city.
I keep thinking that all the comparisons of Trump to Hitler are mistaken. To me, the real comparison is to the chaos caused by (to oversimplify) the Communists in the streets. The reaction by the NAZI’s was favored by the people and Hitler looked pretty good. Similar to your last paragraph.
I think you overlook the desperate financial situation the US has been in for a while as a motivator for technological innovation, which really has been “financial technology” innovation more than anything. We have tens of millions of people who are entering their elderly years and who expect to live well on social security for at least 20 more years. The economy had to expand in almost miraculous ways for that to be possible, but in reality all that expanded was debt and then all this extra money had to find things to invest in. The best things to invest… Read more »
Most people desperately want to believe that the financial bubble will never burst because that reality could ruin their comfortable lifestyle and force them into tangible action of some sort. And prolonged affluence has made us soft and fragile, so few among us have the robustness necessary to survive a return of real hardship. This is the viscous cycle that has locked us into a suicide spiral and will drive downward to a much, much lower bottom. The future is whining, louder whining, mass street protests, rioting, crackdown, wanton violence, civil war or manufactured foreign war as distraction.
And I should add that the purpose of a manufactured foreign war is to kill off as many homegrown Alpha males as possible so that they are not available to support an internal civil war. Real high class leadership that.
Alpha males are reckless and get themselves killed easily
beta males are cucks
rather, I think something else has been killed off. The sort of resourceful, intelligent fighter of old. Neither alpha nor beta. Where they go? We still have plenty of alphas and a huge surplus of betas but we don’t have the crafty, wily sorts
I’m still here!
I think Z’s readership could be a formidable force !
I think we have a different definition of Alphas. In my experience, Alphas are natural leaders, not reckless muscle-bound meatheads. Most common folk will follow men of both strength and intelligence, and strong in both physical ability and character/integrity.
John C. Wright somewhere called it “the Great Inversion.” We’re all Postmodern now, and the only thing Postmoderns know to be True is: There’s no such thing as Truth. Thus, whatever is, is wrong. Give the men-in-dresses fad five years to run, and when there are no more barriers to “transgress,” they’ll all turn into prudes. Before that happens, though, I’m betting on a Third Great Awakening, a neo-Luddite version that rejects most technology simply because it’s technology. An updated Promise Keepers, for instance, would clean up in the Current Year.
What if this whole thing and obsession over weirdos having special rights goes on for another 100 years
right now living through this age is a form of hell. I can’t imagine what it would be like if it becomes something of an eternity
The obsession with weirdos is just another aspect of America’s circus – as in bread and circuses.
Circuses are fun
this is a torture chamber
The bane of ignorance is always knowledge. Insulation from reality can calm the weak but never adequately shield an emperor from a truthful and discerning eye.
Adapt.
Minor quibble, But it’s not true that we have the sum of all information at our fingertips. What is readily accessible is curated and finite. Put another way, the biggest libraries still dwarf the info available to someone with a smartphone. Not everything has been digitized. And what has, people may not trust its fidelity to the original.
moral of story. Buy used books and originals
vatican digitized some of its archives, but one needs to learn latin to read them.
Laquisha is on it. She’s gonna learn her some Latin. 😂
What is Latin for ‘How do I get welfare?’.
“we are ruled by a class of powerful toddlers” I was immediately reminded of the episode in the original series of Star Trek where they encountered a certain Gen. Trelaine, Ret., who on closer examination, turned out to be precisely that – a toddler with way too much power. In the story, Capt. Kirk and his team were saved by the toddler’s parents. Who will intervene to save America? Is there a Caesar who will properly discipline America’s class of powerful toddler’s?
not sure modern cars are safer. Someone is always much safer in a two ton box of 1950s American steel or in a massive SUV than in a tiny little aluminum car with airbags and crumple zones
these people hate us. Why are they going to preside over a world where cars make it tougher to kill us off? Does not stand up to scrutiny. And I think anyone who know cars knows there is no replacement for heavy gauge steel when it comes to safety.
so the trade off here is affordability for safety
Old cars are more fun. They have personality, you have more control over them, and you can work on them. Gotta give new cars the point for reliability though.
There is a great scene in Andre Rubilev, by the master Soviet filmmaker Tarkovski, where an icon painter is being chased through the woods, eventually caught, and his eyes gouged out….
Rival kings wanted to best eachother with the greatest icons.
Nietzsche was a genius.
THought-provoking post, thank you, Zman. As a traditional Catholic, I have started to notice that many dissidents and certainly most conservatives, consider the Enlightenment/ Liberalism of the 18th cent as the beginning of civilization. But it seems to me it was another novelty, just in ideas, not in technology. you could say it was a philosophical novelty, that every man his own pope, and his own little king, with his own little franchise.
Wonderful quote!
Whats crazy to me is the laws being dreamed up by these crazies have very little support in raw numbers. Blacks and latinos are more likely to be religious than whites, in opposition to gay marriage and transgender gibberish, latinx, etc. Yet they vote for the party of these ideas for the gibs. If this was a democracy in the sense that every law was put on the ballot, we’d have a more socially conservative set of laws. Latino catholics are the fastest growing group in the US and most of those i met oppose using birth control let alone… Read more »
That’s why the future of the GOP, if they had brains or balls, would have been economically populist / protectionist, and socially conservative. Trump kinda had it. And look at the results in Miami and South Texas.
They like alpha males. Trump’s pandering wasn’t the reason for their support. Anyways, Mexican / mestizo Hispanics are no longer the ruling classes main focus. Expect full Indians from central America and increasingly African aliens to be coming in.
The ruling class is insane and suicidal.
Same way our diversity in Canada is now getting enriched and fucked over too. Hindu coders are just as likely to be paying for Muslim “refugees” as white taxpayers. Refugee shelters and Somalians are popping up in Chinese areas.
They are just pawns, like mexicans, in whatever sick game the elites are playing. They will be cast aside just like whites when they are no longer needed.
i don’t think they are suicidal, non whites are incapable of taking charge of usa, not even china is capable of doing it without war.
Latinos are easily corrupted. In a generation they start getting abortions like no tomorrow. Whites are the hardest nut to crack. Always going to be that way. Hence why they hate us so much.
The pozzing of non-white immigrants and their kids in Toronto is insane. Momma might be in a burka but her kids will be riding white/black cocks starting in high school, and getting abortions. A Pakistani acquaintance got knocked up by a white guy a couple years ago and terminated it (wasn’t me lol)
The boys become porn, and weed addicted coomers. Addicted to rap and sports cars and sail foams.
Whites are the only group who has a large portion that remains conservative. Exactly.
In my heavily Hispanic town there’s a subset of Puerto Ricans who are Pentecostals. I’m not sure what sartorial requirements there are for men, but the women only wear dresses/skirts. No, I’m not advocating for more of them, but they present a very striking contrast to the typical slatternly dress of most everyone else in town. As a small minority, they could be tolerated and would probably be a net positive on the community.
Much of Trump’s success was his entertainment value. Biden is brain dead and Kamala is annoying. Instead of them, who next will entertain us?
her
That’s progress if I ever saw it
😜
A clown with xer pants falling down
Or the dance that’s a dream of romance
Or the scene where the villain is mean.
That’s entertainment!
It. Precision in pronouns.
That thing causes a visceral reaction of hatred. A strong one. The best result for it is that I am as far away from it as possible.
The ideal result for it? Well, I can’t post it. That may be coming later.
Thousands of years of evolution is telling it to stay the fuck away from me. I listen to my “unconscious biases” and take them seriously.
Notice how when Trump lost his ability to shock the left or piss them off that it coincided with his downfall in his fourth year. People were just tuning him out. He had barked too much with no bite.
He made the classic mistake of overexposure.
Forgot to leave them wanting more.
Military competition has been one of the primary drivers of innovation pretty much forever. That competition increased exponentially in Europe in the early modern era (ca 1500) almost simultaneously with the development of “capitalism”. Which catapulted Europe into global supremacy and made innovation a fun away freight train impossible to stop.
In the 20th century, fear of rival nations developing new technology and leap frogging the military status quo reached a crescendo. It was in that environment that nukes, planes, microchips, drones and more were created.
I get the concept of the essay and that constant change is the ethos of a liberal democracy, however, at the same time, ironically the ethos of the bureaucracy writ large is to never change anything – or at least not to the extent it woud actually solve a problem, or fix whatever does not function properly, and thereby eliminate the need for said bureaucracy to exist.
Anyone else finding the mask thing as a form of intentional deceit?
twice now I have met people whose faces behind masks look nothing like you’d expect them to. When I saw them without mask I was literally startled. They could tell too. Obviously, they were better looking behind the mask.
After 11 years on Twitter this is precisely why one day last year I shut down the account. The Knowing had become unbearable. It makes me wonder about the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge. Maybe it’s a warning from a prior advanced civilization that had seen what happens when one obtains a form of omniscience but limited to the brain droppings of our fellow inmates.
Apple basically pulled a Tiberius with their suppliers on sapphire glass. The Tiberiuses of the world aren’t government but the large companies that it serves.