The Future Of Virtual Society

Posted on February 23, 2023 by thezman

At the dawn of the internet revolution, it was common for big-brained public intellectuals to talk about what it meant for the nature of society. As is always the case, they confused what they wanted to happen with what would happen. That usually meant some form of “as information is democratized, more people will have access to information and therefore come to agree with me on everything.” The internet would bring about the glorious egalitarian future.

Most of the predictions about the impact of the internet turned out to be wrong, but the internet has changed society. In fact, it has changed people by changing the selection pressures within society. For example, the phenomenon of the digital grifter is something that could not exist in the past. These people certainly existed in some form, but the digital age rewards their behavior, while the analog age did not, so they now flourish, while in the past they were suppressed.

That is how to think about it. Virtual reality is not reality. Life on-line exaggerates certain features by removing constraints or offering incentives. The solitary nature of on-line life removes the social signals that people rely upon to figure out what they can say and what they should not say. When you are on-line, you are by yourself in the physical realm, even though you are interacting with others in the virtual realm. Those people, however, are mere avatars of people.

Of course, things that get the user attention are rewarded with likes, clicks and views, so this encourages more of that behavior. It does not take long before the weak minded are consumed with attention seeking. Twitter is full of hollow people who amplify the current thing as a way to get attention. In the hours after every cable news actor was sporting a Ukraine pin and chanting “keev”, the internet personality was pulling down her Covid stuff and putting up Ukraine stuff.

Years ago, Dave Chappell did a skit where the internet was a real place. What made the skit amusing, in addition to Chappelle’s delivery, was the fact that the internet is such an absurd place compared to reality. Imagine walking through a store and everyone in the store is doing whatever they can to get your attention. Imagine the day after the war started, everything at the store is in Ukraine colors and all of the employees are chanting “keev” at the top of their lungs.

Another novelty that the digital age has brought is the clout chaser. This is a person who spends his days scanning the internet looking for the next thing so he can seem like the first person to get on it. These people front-run trends in order to present themselves as trendsetters. They will often glom onto a person, positively or negatively, who has a big following on-line. This lets them free-ride off that person to gain attention and followers for themselves.

This is not something that could exist in the analog age. Famous people had flunkies, but the flunky was never going to use their association with the famous person to make himself famous independent of the famous person. Mike Cernovich could never have become a thing in the analog age by stalking famous people. On Twitter he was able to build a huge following mostly by front running trends he had no role in creating and glomming onto big Twitter accounts.

Another version of this is the manufactured influencer. If you watch YouTube, you will have noticed that Lex Fridman was always in your suggestions. You could only watch woodworking videos, but YouTube would suggest to you a Fridman video. The reason is the people backing him paid YouTube to do it. A similar thing is now happening with Jordan Peterson, who signed up with the Ben Shapiro operation. They are now paying to have Peterson promoted on YouTube.

They did the same thing with Ben Shapiro. The people behind the Daily Wire made a Mortimer and Randolph Duke type of bet to see if they could make this obscure hobbit man into a star. How they did it was social media. They paid to have Ben Shapiro pushed heavy to middle-class whites on Facebook. He was what they hoped young people were really thinking. It worked. This helium voiced nobody is now a household name and a major influencer of old white conservatives.

Tim Pool is another version of this phenomenon. Spend some time watching his YouTube channel and ask yourself why he has a huge audience. There are hundreds of people doing some version of the same act. The answer is he has the backing of an influencer production company. Richard Hanania is the most recent example of the manufactured influencer. The guy suddenly appears on-line and before long all the other influencers are mentioning him.

This deranging of the public culture to now has mostly been about rewarding qualities and people that existed but were suppressed in the analog age. What we see with the Zoomers is a whole generation of people raised in this culture. This post in the New York Times, of all places, is a good read on the subject. Those born around the turn of the century are the first generation raised on the internet. This is their normal as they never knew a world without the internet.

One result of this cohort being raised on-line is they lack the normal social skills that have defined human life for ten thousand years. People have noted that in real life, this cohort is shy, awkward and quite weird. On the other hand, they are the exact opposite as their on-line persona. Meet Nick Fuentes and you are not all that impressed as his social skills are non-existent. Turn on a mic or pull out a camera and he goes from shrinking violet to boisterous and confident.

This is why this generation was not upset by the lockdowns. They did not complain about Zoom school because that was better than having to be around those talking meat sacks on campus. They prefer life on-line to life outside. They have grown up with the chat room as their playground. Instead of playing games with their friends in the physical realm, they played games on-line. Their peer group was the collection of avatars and personalities in the chat.

Everyone has their opinion on this stuff, but the important question that no one seems to be considering is if society is possible under these conditions. China’s heavy-handed censorship is viewed as a defense of the regime, but it could simply be a way to tamp down the negative selection pressures of the internet. American censorship is driven mostly by ethnic paranoia, which is another negative quality that is being amplified by the forces of the digital age.

It could very well be that the newly diverse Western societies cannot hold up under the selection pressure of the internet. The digital age amplifies the differences, which amplifies the natural reaction to those differences. This has the effect of bringing diverse civilizational outlooks into virtue contact. The result is hostility. The West may be forced to choose between the glories of diversity or the virtual public square. The answer may be a segregated internet in order to keep the peace.

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The Final Boss

Posted on February 22, 2023 by thezman

Since the concept of the “red pill” got going, there has been a debate about the progression one takes in the awakening. Logically, this implies that there is a final boss on this journey, some belief one must drop in order to finally become fully aware of what is happening behind the façade of life. Once you defeat that final boss, you see things as they are, not as they are presented. Of course, the nature of this final boss almost always reflects personal bias.

Strangely, the real final boss in this process may be the crux of the whole normie belief structure that gets ridiculed by dissidents. That last belief may simply be that the political class cares about public opinion. Even the most cynical among us still thinks that the people in charge worry about public opinion. They may have ways to fortify democracy against the voters, but they still worry about the voters. After all, no democracy can be completely fortified.

The reality is, they probably do not care at all. The people controlling the politicians certainly do not care. The unanimity of opinion among this group is why the two parties are barely distinguishable from one another. What is the main different between Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer? The people who animate the politicians have their aqendas and they do not care about public opinion. Most people get that, but they still think the pols care and they need to care.

The trouble is, there is no evidence of this. For example, it was rather obvious that the Republican Party threw the 2018 midterm to spite Trump and his voters. They could do this knowing that they would not suffer in any meaningful way. Sure, some back benchers in the party would have to transition into lobbying jobs or (gasp!) the dreaded private sector, but 90% of the caucus would do just fine. In fact, the bosses could expect to be rewarded for throwing the fight.

The last midterm was a similar display of indifference. If the parties really cared about the result, they would have pulled out all the stops. On the Democrat side, it was a chance to prove those election deniers were wrong. Joe Biden really was the most popular man in history. On the other side, the Republicans could have got their red wave of rebuke. Instead, both sides worked to make sure none of the populists got the support they needed to beat a system candidate.

The indifference of the political class is most obvious with what is going on in the town of East Palestine Ohio. There was a time not so long ago when the place would have been crawling with Democratic politicians, including the President. They would bring the media to show how much they care about the people. Instead, Pete Buttigieg is antiquing in Vermont and Biden is in Poland promising the people of Ukraine that he will take care of them forever.

Of course, the media could cover it on their own. It is the ideal story, ripped right from one of many movies over the years. We have a small town being victimized by a mean and indifferent corporation. It is as if someone decided to make a real life version of the movie Erin Brockovich. Instead, the media cannot be bothered and the reason is the political class does not care about it. More important, they do not care that the people might think they do not care.

The fact is, the political system in America reached a point where elections make no difference to the system. Over 95% of incumbents win reelection and those who lose land in cushy jobs. John Boehner now makes seven figures selling weed, after a disastrous run as Speaker. Paul Ryan makes seven figures sitting around one of the banks, making calls to Washington on behalf of the bankers. When the losers get rich the winners do not fear losing.

In the bigger picture, even a wave election does little to change the makeup of the political parties in Washington. If forty House seats change hands in a wave election, it means close to 400 remain safe. Look at the last twenty years and you see that maybe 60 Congressional districts can be competitive. Most years only about twenty seats are genuinely up for grabs. American Congressional elections are ceremonial. It is a big expensive show that means nothing.

What appears to have happened over the last thirty years is the political class has internalized this reality and they no longer care about elections. The contempt we see is not so much about public opinion, but about the lingering need to keep up appearances with regards to elections and public opinion. The leaders of both parties are increasingly irritated that they have to pretend to care about your opinion. They have better things to do than take questions from the slobs.

This reality is hard for Americans to accept. Central to the American identity is the invincibility of the marketplace. The “go woke, go broke” business reflects the enduring belief that public opinion matters. The fact that none of the woke are going broke does nothing to alter this belief. Something similar is in play with elections. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, people still cling to the idea that public opinion not only matters, but it matters to the politicians.

Even people on this side of the divide cling to this belief. The concept of the psy-op rests on the idea that the people in charge care about public opinion. In reality, the secret police just like their work. The same can be said for the busy bodies that police the internet for bad think. They are not shaping public opinion. They simply enjoy playing hall monitor. Contempt for the public and public opinion is now the coin of the realm in the ruling class.

That is the final boss. You can be red pilled about race, ethnicity, history or conservatism, but still believe public opinion matters. You only become fully aware when you defeat that final boss and realize that the people in charge are indifferent to public opinion and often contemptuous of it. The reason elections change nothing is the entirety of the political class is in agreement on most everything. Mainly, they agree that they are in charge and your opinion does not matter.

Elite Escapism

Posted on February 21, 2023 by thezman

In every society there is a gap between the truth the ruling class asserts and the truth the people experience. This used to be a feature of Western criticism of the Soviet economic system during the Cold War. Communist rulers would make claims about their system and critics would compare that to reality. Today, the obvious gap is in the West where the ruling class exists in another world. Over the last year this has been on display when they speak about the war in Ukraine.

Yesterday, the regime sent Joe Biden to visit Kiev, thinking this was going to be a public relations coup on the anniversary of the war. This is the New York Times lead story in which they make him sound like Lenin crossing into Russia. The Washington Post has a very similar story. They even use the same photo. Obviously, much of the content was supplied by narrative men in the regime. The point of these stories is to maintain the sense that victory is at hand!

In reality, Washington coordinated the trip with Moscow so that nothing bad could happen during Biden’s trip. Serious people in the Pentagon, who still have contacts in Russia, made sure the Russians knew Biden was making the trip long before Biden got on the plane to Poland. Those serious people know Russia does not want a direct war with the West. Two days before Biden made the trip, social media was buzzing about it, as word was leaked by both sides.

This public relations stunt was conducted against the backdrop of a policy that has failed at every turn and now promises to end in disaster. No one in the ruling class bubble wants to think about that, so they tell each other stories like this one from one of the Kagan cult members. Another cult member chimed in with this post in the same publication, now operated by the cult. This post in a conspiracy site gave the kooks out in the fever swamps something to discuss.

There is a theme coming from the cult members, which is aimed at maintaining the fiction that animates Ukraine policy. That theme is inevitability. The subtext to these stories is like the quote from the Terminator movie. The neocons are out there. They cannot be reasoned with. They do not feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until Russia has been destroyed. You hear that Europe? Washington will never stop until victory is achieved!

Of course, the reason for this is reality is starting to creep in at the edges, especially among the Europeans. The stockpiles of old Soviet weapons are all gone, blown up on the battlefields of Ukraine. The extra Western weapons have also been used up to the point where many NATO countries no longer have a functioning army. The German army is back to using slingers and berserkers. America is no longer able to provide Ukraine with enough ammunition for the war.

What is going on here is that the people inside the bubble created a glorious story for themselves regarding Russia. The story said that if they could bait the Russians into war, they just had to sit back and wait for Russia to collapse. This version of reality created by the cult was a reboot of the Bolshevik Revolution. This time, war would crack the Russian regime and the heroes would ride into Moscow to finally exact their revenge on their ancient enemy.

That has not happened. In fact, it is the American Empire that is now cracking under the strain of this war of attrition. Western economies are struggling. There is growing unrest in the public about the political class. Meanwhile, the Russians have organized themselves for the long haul. The story Western elites told each other about this war are falling a part, but rather than face reality they fill their minds with more versions of the big lie from the biggest of big liars.

This form of elite escapism is not unique to Ukraine policy. This is the defining feature of our ruling class. When asked about how all of these magical electric cars will be charged, people like Pete Buttigieg just reply with some hand waving or maybe say they will supply more sockets. He has no idea and he has no reason to care, because his world is the world of fantasy. The people running energy policy are just as divorced from reality as the people running foreign policy.

It is not confined to the elites. This is how the managerial class maintains its sense of identity and cohesion. The answer to the primary question of life, who are we?, is supplied by the many narratives that define the managerial class. Whether it is pronouns, support for deviant sexual practices, saying “keev” all of a sudden or any number of affectations, the point is to signal membership in the club. For these people, the answer to the big question is one of the approved narratives.

This is why the neocons have managed to dominate foreign policy. They are expert at creating complex narrative structures that provide simple moral choices for the audience, moral choices that favor their preferred outcomes. In a society that lives by words, rather than deeds, being good with words counts for a lot. Robert Kagan tells one side stories about monsters and heroes, while his wife tells the other side similar stories, always with the same monsters and heroes.

In the fullness of time, Francis Fukuyama’s seminal essay, The End of History, will be seen as the point at which Western elites became untethered from reality. For them, history was always a nightmare from which they could not awake. All of a sudden, the nightmare was over because history was over. What was ahead was whatever their imaginations could conjure. They could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as they had a mind.

Much of what constitutes democratic politics in the West is the people debating with one another about the precise time their rulers wake from their dream. Surely they will see the folly of making war with Russia. Maybe this event will do it. Surely they will see the lunacy of banning fossil fuels. Maybe now they will see it. So far, nothing has worked, suggesting nothing will work. Elite escapism is now too much a part of what defines the elite, so their can be no awakening from their dream.

Turf Wars

Posted on February 20, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about cat prison, a post about the interplay of politics and war in the Ukraine and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In the political heyday of Conservative Inc., back in the Bush years, Karl Rove would speak about the benefits of “big tent” conservatism. The main upside was that it provided a winning coalition politically. This not only gave the people controlling it power, it made it easier for the coalition they assembled to ignore their differences, as there would be plenty of goodies for everyone. This was the theory behind the FDR coalition that ruled politics for half a century.

The Rove argument never held together for the simple reason that most of the people in this new coalition were never going to get anything. They were being lied to by the neoconservatives who seized control of the conservatism. Their singular quest was to use the American empire to further the long term goals of the neocons. This became clear in the Bush years where we got pointless wars of choice, a massive expansion of government and the creation of a police state.

That said, there was some bit of truth in the Rove claim. A successful political movement is always making compromises with itself. Regardless of the types of politics, practical necessity means cutting corners when it comes to ideology. The communists figured this out after they gained control of Russia. This means there is always going to be tension between the true believers and the ambitious. Success is what allows both sides to look past these differences.

Again, this was true with the communists in Russia. When they were easily crushed by the tsarist system, they spent their time squabbling with one another. When the tsarist system began to wobble and victory became a possibility, the various factions of Russian communism came together to fight the system. The Bolshevik coalition held together through the resulting civil war. Once victory was achieved, the factions began to go at one another.

There is much more to it than that, of course, but the point is that winning and the prospect of more winning can keep opposites attracting. Logically, losing or the dim prospects of winning will highlight the differences. That is what we are seeing inside the conservative industrial complex. The array of ideological groups is starting to turn on one another as their prospects dim. Faced with a shrinking pie and a growing threat from outsider politics, they are turning on one another.

For example, we have this post from the submissions editor of National Review Online attacking the Claremont people. The first thing to note is the post was published in the far-left conspiracy site The Daily Beast. The cozy relationship between people in the conservative ecosystem and the people they claim to oppose has always been a tell, but this is like satire of that old dynamic. If NRO was anything like it claims, Jack Butler would have been fired immediately.

The other thing to note is that the post is supposed to be a rant against the internet character Bronze Age Pervert, but it is an effort to purge Claremont. This may explain recent behavior of some Claremont people. Behind the scenes, where money changes hands and the donors do their best Randolph and Mortimer Duke impressions, a decision has been made to do something about Claremont. Jonah Goldberg’s flunky Jack Butler is playing the Billy Ray Valentine role.

Alternatively, the yesterday men of National Review may simply be going to their Trotskyite roots and taking a shot at the winners of the internal power struggle within the conservative entertainment wing. Claremont did not roll out a real person to respond to this attack and instead used an internet character. This post at American Greatness is mostly laughing at the ridiculousness of that Butler post. He restates the dissident case against conservatism made a decade ago.

In fairness, this spat is between low ranking parties in the conservative industrial complex and may not reflect what is happening inside it. Both National Review and American Greatness struggle to stay in business. The former relies on school children to produce much of their content. the latter relies mostly on unpaid volunteer writers to produce its content. Their respective not-for-profit operations take in a few million per year according to their tax returns.

In comparison, the neocon outfit American Enterprise Institute takes in over $100 million per year and has its tentacles wrapped around the Republican Party. Similarly, The Heritage Foundation takes in over $100 million and remains the primary engine for Reagan nostalgia in the system. Then you have the left-libertarian Cato Institute that takes in $30 million to promote globalism. In other words, two pipsqueak operations beefing with one another is a tempest in a teapot.

The billion dollar thicket of not-for profits that controls the conservative ecosystem remains unified in its opposition to the people they claim to represent. In other words, at the top of the system, the three legs of conservatism remain on reasonable terms with one another, mostly sharing the same donors. Endless war (AEI), liberal internationalism (Cato) and romance for a long lost past (Heritage) continue to hoover up cash to animate the shuffling husk of conservatism.

Even so, the turf wars between the low ranking soldiers of conservatism suggest the system has far deeper problems than personal squabbles among some of the circus freaks they put on stage. The institutions that control funding of conservative operations are now clearly suffering from Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. These operations care only about hoovering up as much cash as they can in order to keep the leadership of these groups in the lifestyle they think they deserve.

This is why they failed to thwart the Trump insurgency in 2016 and why they are struggling to produce a coherent alternative for 2024. The slobbering over Nikki Haley and Tim Scott suggests they have learned nothing. It is also why they have failed to coopt ideas and people from the dissident space. A guy like Bronze Age Pervert should have been easy to crush or corrupt, but the system is now too sluggish and stupid to handle such tasks. It is a fighter past its prime.

All of that said, we are a long way from see the collapse of Conservative Inc., even as its influence fades to black. Even so, it is encouraging to see it pick fights with itself, as it confirms it is entering the end stage. From the dissident perspective, this dispute between Team Claremont and Team Buckley is like seeing your ex-wife drive your new Mercedes over a cliff. You hate to see BAP get singled out for extra treatment, but the bigger picture makes it tolerable.

An Imperial Disaster

Posted on February 16, 2023 by thezman

One of the most studied and debated events in human history is the decision by the Athenian empire to send an expeditionary force to Sicily. This happened in 415 B.C. during the middle of the Peloponnesian War between the Delian League led by Athens and the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Athens decided to send military support to allies on Sicily who were opposed to the dominant city state of Syracuse, which also happened to be an ally of Corinth.

The Sicilian Expedition is one of those events that offers something for everyone interested in the ancient world. The politics involved in the decision to send the expeditionary force are fascinating. Then you have the military side of things, which is one of the first examples of politics undermining military effectiveness. Of course, the political psychology around the war to that point is also important. Much of Athenian politics had been shaped by war.

The decision to send the navy to Sicily would turn out to be the turning point in the war with the Spartans. The expedition was a spectacular failure. In fact, it is on the list of great military disasters in human history. The defeat not only permanently weakened the Athenians militarily, but it also crippled their political culture. The politics of the region quickly moved against Athens, leading to the overthrow of the democratic system and the eventual defeat to the Spartans.

Like all great events in history, if you ask ten people with an interest in the topic, you will get eleven theories as to what happened and what it means today. Academic careers have been made studying the war and the events surrounding it. There is also the fact that Athens, despite losing the most important war in human history, continues to cast a shadow over the West. Sparta, on the other hand, is largely remembered for being a cartoonish version of a warrior state.

It matters to us today because the Global American Empire models itself after the Athenian empire. The Athenians had a moral certainty about themselves and what they did based on their form of government. Their system was superior, therefore whatever they did to spread their system must be righteous. Of course, spreading their system often meant overthrowing the rulers of neighboring city-states and installing their system, led by people friendly with Athens.

We see the same thing with the American empire. In fact, it has become a defining feature of the system. For the last thirty years, Washington has been trying to overthrow governments around the world in defense of democracy. There is even an organization called The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which works with various tentacles of the American empire to overthrow governments around the world. The business of America is not business. It is regime change.

Like the Athenian empire, the American empire has found a way to embroil itself in a war with a land power. This proxy war with Russia over Ukraine has little to do with the facts on the ground in Ukraine and everything to do with the politics that drive the expansive polices of the American empire. Like the Peloponnesian War, this is just the latest phase of a war that goes back to the defeat of fascism, which is the analogue for the defeat of the Persians by Athens and Sparta.

Like all historical analogies, this one is far from perfect, but it does provide a lens through which to view current events. Looking at this fight with Russia as a continuation of the Cold War helps explain the actions of the people involved. For the people driving American foreign policy, the main enemy was always Russia. In fact, they were at war with Russian long before they set foot in the new Athens. World War II was just another chapter in that long fight.

This might seem like a stretch but look at the people running foreign policy for the American empire. The people named in Seymour Hersh’s piece on the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines is a who’s who of neoconservatives. All of them are members of the same club, which is led by Robert Kagan. The wife of Robert Kagan is Victoria Nuland, who runs Ukraine policy for the empire. She is also the person who engineered regime change in Ukraine in 2014.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is the fact that Robert Kagan is the ideological leader of the war party. He was born in Athens Greece. His father was Donald Kagan, “the Sterling Professor of Classics and History Emeritus at Yale University and a specialist in the history of the Peloponnesian War.” His book on the Peloponnesian War is excellent. His book on the Sicilian Expedition is also quite good, but more aimed at an academic audience.

Robert appears to have read none of his father’s books, as his cult has led the American empire into its own version of the Sicilian Expedition. The decision to bet on Ukraine is turning into a catastrophe. Instead of sending triremes to aid a supposed ally in order to undermine an opponent, as Athens did when she sent that expedition to Sicily, Washington has sent its prestige and military production capacity to Ukraine in a futile attempt to undermine Russia.

Much like the Sicilian Expedition, the Ukraine war has become a dynamic all its own, sweeping up everyone in the empire. The Europeans, which should know better, have gone along with Washington. In the process, they have revealed themselves to be nothing more than a collection of flunkies serving Washington. The rules-based world order that Washington has claimed to defend has also been exposed as a rigged game to serve the interests of the empire.

Probably the biggest parallel between these two events is how the political class in both cases failed to consider failure as an option. When news of the disaster reached Athens, no one believed it. No one had prepared the Athenians for the possibility of defeat, much less a catastrophe. Once reality sunk in, panic gripped the people as they processed what the disaster meant for the war. Everything about the Sicilian Expedition assumed victory was inevitable.

Something similar is brewing for Washington. For a year the war party has been feeding the political class stories about the Russians running out of weapons and Russian troops being forced to fight naked in the snow. Political leaders are given scripts with big talk about total victory and the dissolution of Russia. The public has been told nothing about the reality of the war. Once news of this disaster makes itself fully known, we may see panic and disbelief in Washington.

Again, historical analogies are never perfect. At best they help contextualize current events by providing an objective viewpoint. Washington is not Athens. Robert Kagan is not Alcibiades and there is no one playing the role of Nicias. Instead, the empire is led by spoiled children of the managerial elite that rose along with the American empire in the aftermath of Word War II. The disaster for this empire, however, will be just as real as it was for the Athenian empire.

The Organism

Posted on February 15, 2023 by thezman

The typical politician in Washington knows what his staff tells him, plus whatever he remembers from his prior life. Given the nature of the life, what happened in the before times is a fading memory. Of course, few of these people ever did productive work before they got to Washington. In fact, having ever had a real job is close to a disqualification in politics. As a result, most have always been in politics and this is the peak of their political career.

Those staffers who make up the reality for a politician are not earthy men of the people, spending their days talking with the hoi polloi. They are from a specific class and spend their days socializing and networking with one another. What they know about the world is what they tell one another and what they get from the media. Their main focus is to make sure their guy is on the right side of the current trends and primed to say the right things at the events they organize for him.

Of course, the news of the world that flows from the media to the staffers and then to the politician is not news of the world. The content creators in the media do very little in the way of actual reporting. Their job is to take what is given to them by the agency they are assigned to cover and make it into a story. Most of the time this means taking canned quotes they get via e-mail and using them to salt a narrative, always with the phrase “sources say” to make it sound right.

The government agencies feeding the media have their agenda, which is always about what is good for the agency. Pournelle’s law of bureaucracy is on full display at this point, which means the people dishing to the media are people who care only about the bureaucracy they serve. In modern Washington, it is no longer about power and money, but rather the weird internal competition in the system. Leaks to the media are often about signaling between factions.

Washington itself has become something like an organism. All of its parts have a prime directive and that is to benefit the whole. Their secondary directive is to benefit their part of the whole. This means that everyone inside the organism is surrounded by nothing but other bits of the organism. To be inside the system is to live entirely around those who in one fashion or another serve the whole. Washington is both a system and a collective with its own sense of identity.

This helps explain why the war in Ukraine staggers on with no effort by Washington to make a deal with Moscow to end the war. Objectively, a deal should be easy to make and in the best interests of the West. Russia is not an expansive, ideological state with designs on the rest of Europe. There would be no war in Ukraine if not for the senseless meddling of the neocons that run American foreign policy. Making a deal to end the war basically means Washington stops poking the bear.

We hear nothing like this in Washington. There are zero politicians questioning the sanity of American policy. A few make noises about how the money is being spent, but they do not know why those lines are in their script. The people who put them there, those staffers, saw something about this in the media. The media is told by the Pentagon that there are worries about the accounting. Otherwise, no one questions anything because no one has a reason to question anything.

This dynamic plays out in the bureaucracy too. To be in good standing is to be on the right side of the current initiatives. In this case, everyone who knows what is good for them in the Pentagon makes sure to put on that Ukraine lapel pin. Information about what is happening on the ground leaks into the system, but there is no demand for it, so it sits in unread reports. The current narrative demands different facts, so people are busy getting those facts together.

This is also why we get insane press conferences from the people running the war machine part of the organism. Larry Johnson gives some useful commentary on the absurdity of what Milley and Austin had to say. Both men are reading from a script, prepared by people who care first and foremost about the bureaucracy they serve, which is the Pentagon and the military. They probably know the reality on the ground, but there is no incentive to mention it.

Probably the best example of how the organism works is the catastrophic train derailment in Ohio. The DC pols have nothing to say about it because their staffers have not put it in their scripts. The lone exception is J.D. Vance, the newly minted senator from Ohio, but he has yet to be assimilated. The staffers have no idea where Ohio is or if it is even in America. The reason is the media is full of stories about balloons, weird sex stuff and Trump news.

Here we have the most serious environmental disaster in decades and the organism has yet to respond. The reason is none of the entry points into the organism have pathways linked to the middle of the country. All of those pathways open in coastal cities and only the ones that matter to the organism. Unless what is happening in Ohio poses some risk to the organism, it does not exist for the organism. Ohio could become a dead zone and Washington does not care.

This is why our politics are insane. America is run by what amounts to a closed religious cult that cares only for its internal operations. Like any other organism, it draws sustenance from its surroundings, but unlike any other organism, it has little interaction with its surroundings, other than for defensive purposes. It is why elections have no impact on policy. Whatever the result, what gets sent to the organism is digested and put to use by the organism to defend the organism.

Artificial Stupidity

Posted on February 14, 2023 by thezman

Over the last few months, the internet has been buzzing about artificial intelligence, largely due to the release of ChatGPT. Lots of people have been having fun with it and lots of bad people have been making it do bad things. Even more people, those who fashion themselves as big-brained thought leaders, have been telling us what this means for the future of humanity. Of course, everyone selling a product is quickly adding the letters “AI” to their marketing kit.

The ChatGPT is an interesting project, but as the bad people referenced above have shown, it is still a work in progress. Even so, it does reveal two things that are important in the much larger discussion of artificial intelligence. One is that there has been some progress is creating what feels like intelligence. A bit of software that feels like it could be a human making small talk is a big step. That big step, however, is relative to where things were to this point.

This is a barely perceptible move forward, relative to where things need to be in order to start discussing anything close to artificial intelligence. In fact, you would need a much more powerful algorithm to detect the progress than what we currently possess, in order to quantify the progress. The main reason for that is we are not entirely sure if we can define human intelligence at the moment. In fact, we cannot even agree on where to start with such a project.

Now, HBD types and psychometrists might bristle at that, but crude methods to quantify aspects of intelligence are not the same as understanding the nature of it. We can sit two children down, give them a battery of intelligence tests and make some mostly accurate predictions about their life outcomes. We have enough data now to make statistically significant observations about relative intelligence. That is not the same as understanding the nature of human intelligence.

The reason for this is we do not understand human consciousness, of which intelligence is just one aspect. In fact, the human sciences are struggling to come up with a definition of consciousness. The physical sciences operate under the assumption that collections of non-conscious agents can come together somehow and create consciousness, but that is probably wrong. There is a good chance that it puts the cart before the horse.

That is, conscious agents are what cause non-conscious agents. What we think of as space-time and the objects within it are the result of human consciousness. This is the basis of Donald Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality, in which he explains why much of what we assume to be true about the universe is probably wrong. For those who prefer an audio version of his work, here is a good interview of Hoffman by the ubiquitous YouTuber Lex Fridman.

Hoffman’s approach rests on two things that seem to be true. One is that nature does not reward accuracy in our perceptions, but rather the fitness of our perceptions, which Hoffman stated as Fitness Beats Truth. The short version is that evolution only cares about that which impacts fitness. As a result, a strategy that seeks only to improve fitness will, over time, dominate a strategy that seeks to create a more accurate perception of the world.

There is a lot of math involved in Hoffman’s presentation, but there is a much simpler way to think of it. We see in the marketplace for goods and services that the most popular product is never the ideal product. The Windows desktop won the computer wars not because it was the platonic ideal of the personal computer, but because it was good enough and cheap enough to win the fitness game relative to the other options, some of which were technically better.

The game of life works the same way. That which makes it easier for a living thing to replicate itself gets rewarded. That which inhibits replication gets punished. That is it and nothing more. If human perception evolved to improve our fitness, then it means it did not evolve to give us a more accurate perceptions of reality. That does not mean we live in a dream world. It just means that we cannot assume that our perception of non-contextual reality is accurate or even real.

The other thing Hoffman points out in his book is that theoretical physics has run into a very big problem. That problem is local realism. This is the principle of locality which states a thing is changed only if it is touched. The second half states that properties of objects are real and exist in our physical universe independent of our minds. This is the foundation of physics and it may not be true. Experiments have challenged locality and realism, suggesting one or both are false.

This brings us back to the artificial intelligence problem. The likelihood of us creating intelligence, much less conscious intelligence, even by accident is so low as to not be considered a serious topic of discussion. As Hoffman explains in his book, we are not close to understanding the nature of consciousness. We are not even sure the world we assume to be objective reality is more than an interface. It could literally be a figment of our collective imagination.

Like discussion of space aliens floating balloons over North America, talk of artificial intelligence is a nice distraction. We seem have a need to believe that such things are possible and perhaps discoverable in our time. In reality, they lie well outside our ability to grasp, other than the fictional. Intelligence is an aspect of consciousness and most likely that is not the result of non-conscious agents. That means intelligence is not simply clever math operating on non-conscious agents.

If a non-human intelligence were to visit our local concept of space-time from its place on the N-dimensional manifold that is reality, it would point out that our fancy new AI is not much more than a relatively faster calculator. From its perspective, it would be comically simplistic compared to our own consciousness. AI and the pursuit of it is a fun distraction, but it is not the dawn of super-intelligent robots enslaving humanity. We can do that without the aid of a clever chatbot.

The Paradox Of Openness

Posted on February 9, 2023 by thezman

At the core of the American cultural outlook is the assumption that the more open something is, the better it will become over time. Openness means a low barrier of entry and a low of barrier entry means lots of people with a wide variety of ideas can enter the system, thus improving the system through competition. Therefore, the more open a system is to new people and ideas, the faster it will mutate and improve into something better than the original.

As much as conservatives like to label the cultural lunacy we see happening as the product of Marxism, it really is the product of Americanism. Sure, the people who brought us novelties like gender and racial grievance were trained up in radical philosophy, but they have always operated under the assumption that reducing the barriers to entry is a primary goal. In fact, their presence in the academy is the result of this bedrock belief in total openness.

Whether it is the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace of goods and services, the starting American assumption is the more the better. If you want better health care, so the argument goes, you need more competition among providers. Get more providers competing for patient dollars and inevitably the quality of service will improve and the cost to the patient will decline. Similarly, open the marketplace of ideas and the number and quality of competing ideas will improve.

George Soros is now a stock villain in normie politics, but look at what he calls his umbrella organization. It is the Open Society. George Soros literally seeks the end of all borders in the world. That is not just national borders, but all of the cultural and social borders that define human society. In many respects, Soros is the extreme representation of the core American principle of openness. He imagines the world as one giant wide open frontier.

Of course, the frontier is why Americans love openness. The founding of the American way of life was based on the idea that you could always head west and find a new place to call home if you were not happy. This later transformed into the natural mobility Americans take for granted. The typical European lives his life in one place, only leaving for holiday trips. Americans move all over the place, often from one type of community to another, without thinking much about it.

You cannot move from Boston Massachusetts to Nashville Tennessee if the people in these areas are naturally hostile to strangers. The typical person from Tennessee may think the typical person from Massachusetts is a mean word, but both people assume it is immoral to exclude someone based on their place of origin. We will never see a campaign by one region to block the migration of people from another region, even when it is terrible for the receiving end.

We have a good example in Idaho. People are fleeing California due to the economy, crime, taxes and general lunacy. They first moved to Colorado where they promptly started voting for politicians that promise to ruin Colorado. Now people are leaving the state because it is getting as bad as California. The people of Idaho know this and should erect barriers to entry in order to protect themselves from California, but they would rather die than be rude to the newcomers.

American openness is the heart of the immigration problem. You can get a majority behind enforcing the laws against migrants flowing freely over the border, but you cannot get majority support for an end to all immigration. The idea of closing a border brings shame and guilt to the mind of the typical American. He cannot explain why he thinks closing the border is wrong, he just knows it. Like the Idahoans, Americans would rather die than be mean to newcomers.

In fairness, American openness was a great advantage. The openness to new ideas and new people turned an empty continent into a superpower. It made it possible to flood the continent and make the most of the natural resources. If Americans were not willing to pick up and move, the West would never have been conquered. Much of the technological progress the world enjoys is the result of openminded sorts coming to America and challenging old assumptions.

When the continent was protected by two massive oceans that were not easy to cross, this ethic of openness was a great asset. Now that the world is much more crowded and oceans are no longer a barrier, openness is a liability. Not only are millions of people flowing into the country ever month, every stupid and toxic idea is free to jump on stage and do its worst. American openness is turning the country into the dayroom of a lunatic asylum with no way to close the doors.

Many blame the problems of the West on individualism, but the more serious problem may be American openness. Since the middle of the last century, American values have been imposed on Europe. They now sound like grievance studies professors because of the American cultural dominance. For three generations, the ticket up the status ladder has had the stars and stripes on it. As a result, openness is now as much a European principle as an American one.

In the West, it is now immoral to close the door on anyone or anything, with the exception of those who want to close the door. The surest way to be removed from polite company is to question the open door policy. Only fascists and white supremacist want barriers to entry and objective standards. Paradoxically, the most tolerant and open culture in human history is violently intolerant of anyone suggesting that there must be a limit to tolerance and openness.

Fitness applies to all things, even morals and ideas. It is looking like the open society, like many species, was able to flourish in an exceptional environment, but once the environment returned to the norm, the open society is no longer fit. Like the giant panda, the open society is only suited for specific conditions. Unlike the giant panda, there will be no zookeepers to maintain it. Either openness is abandoned or it dies out taking the people with it.

The Museum Keepers

Posted on February 7, 2023 by thezman

Last month Paul Gottfried wrote a brief note in Chronicles about an event hosted by The Philadelphia Society. The event was a virtual debate between Christopher Owen and Glenn Ellmers on the topic of which is the more important founding document, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Presumably, this is some sort of old person role playing game where the two men reenact the debates between Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall from half a century ago.

In fairness, revisiting this topic is useful for those wondering why conservatives have a fetish for Lincoln. Maybe not this debate specifically, but the debate between Kendal and Jaffa in the last century. So-called conservatives embraced Jaffa’s rewriting of American history because it solved their race problem. If one wants to understand the “conservative case for” and the “democrats are the real racists” memes, you start with Harry Jaffa’s Lincoln project.

Putting that aside, the purpose of Gottfried’s post was to point out that these sorts of conservative groups operate like eccentric museums. They claim to exist in order to promote debate, but in realty they exist to prevent debate. Gottfried could be describing all of Conservative Inc. with this line. “Although founded by Frank Meyer in 1964 as a center for vigorous debate on the intellectual right, the Philadelphia Society now exudes the freshness of an ancient Egyptian tomb.”

That is a slander against Egyptian tombs. At least when someone finds a tomb, there is some curiosity about what is inside it. There is a chance that archeologists will find something new or maybe answer an ancient question. Inside conservative institutions there is nothing new. No one needs to be curious about what is inside because everyone knows what is inside. The point of these operations is to make sure nothing new ever happens on the so-called Right.

Gottfried goes on to call for some new voices to be invited into these institutions in order to freshen up the debate. Even if the geezers inside are not interested in new ideas, at least they can freshen up their old arguments a bit. Even museums spruce up the exhibits from time to time. Of course, this will never happen and Gottfried concedes that it can never happen as long as the tomb managers remain. Politics on the Right advances one funeral at a time.

The thing is though, it is not all that clear that the actuarial tables will solve the problem that haunts Conservative Inc. Look around at the various institutions and you see plenty of young people, but they were selected for their obsequiousness rather than their willingness to challenge old thinking. They get picked and promoted in the same way the Chinese exam system promoted people in the Song dynasty. Conformity is the highest virtue in the conservative ecosystem.

The model for this is National Review. When Bill Buckley started searching around for a successor, he went through a few talented men until he found Rich Lowry. Those talented men threatened to change things at National Review. Lowry was simply too stupid to change anything. More important he was an obsequious rumpswab who would tend to Buckley’s lifelong project like the men assigned to keep Lenin’s body on display in the Kremlin. He was the ideal museum keeper.

This is not just a problem with conservatism. The ruling class of the Global American Empire is the product of the 20th century. It evolved for the 20th century and therefore seeks to maintain the conditions that made it possible. It is why the origin point of every subculture within it is the 20th century. Every issue is jammed into a narrative structure that dates to 1938 or 1968. Every foreign enemy is a new version of Hitler and every domestic villain is Bull Connor.

This is why there can be no airing out of the institutions. Even if the crypt keepers of conservatism fling open the windows and let in some fresh air, they will be forced to close those windows. The survival of conservatism depends on it fitting into that 20th century narrative structure that controls the ruling class. The only way those windows remain open is if it is a bankruptcy sale. That particular institution is being sold off because it is no longer needed.

It is also why the new “conservative” operations quickly begin to conform to the old narratives as soon as they get attention. As long as they are not an explicit rejection of the old thinking, they are assimilated into the collective. First some famous people show up to look around, then the money begins to flow. Before long, the “rebels” are beginning to enjoy the perks that come with submission. They are assimilated into the blob and become another node of the system.

Modern conservatism suffers from the same malady that plagues most of the institutions of the empire. That is, it has no purpose. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the organizing purpose of the West collapsed with it. The difference was the West thought it won the Cold War and therefore was validated. The communists were under no such illusions, so they got busy escaping the 20th century. The West thought it had arrived at the end of history.

While it would be nice to see a wrecking ball smash through these decrepit institutions of conservatism or maybe see a peasant revolt against them, the reality is they will stagger on as long as the empire exists. A feature of every dying empire is a fear of change and we are clearly in that stage. Those old men keeping the museum exhibits going on the Right, as well as their youthful apprentices, care only for keeping the lights on for another day which means keeping the doors locked.

The Paradox Of Liberal Democracy

Posted on February 6, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the great awakening, a post about the 1980’s classic comedy Trading Places and the Sunday podcast. This week the plan is to do some more Ukraine stuff, given the uptick in war news. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The communists were fond of picking at what they claimed were the inherent contradictions within capitalist societies. They argued that these contradictions were irreconcilable and would eventually bring down the system. The accuracy of their claims is debatable, but the examination of contradictions within a system is a perfectly valid analytical technique. Conflicts in logic are often the cause of defects in a system and not just political or economic systems.

In fact, software developers spend much of their lives hunting down these sorts of errors in the code. Perhaps the cause was poor coding or maybe it was the business logic which defined the code that was flawed. Those bugs in the software are the result of one set of rules contradicting or overriding another set of rules. One user enters data and gets one result, while another user enters data and gets a different result, despite both users expecting a similar result.

This software analogy is further useful in that the users will lose confidence in the system if these internal contradictions are not resolved. Systems are sets of rules and if the user of a system cannot trust the rules, they cannot trust the system. Many software systems have been scrapped due to a collapse in confidence. The same holds for political and economic systems. Some communists thought if they could exploit the contradictions in capitalism, confidence in it would collapse.

When we look around at the general lunacy that has come to define the West, it is often assumed that the lunatics are operating outside the rules of liberal democracy and that is the cause of the lunacy. “If we just go back to our constitutional principles” is the call of every civic nationalist in the comment sections of Conservative Inc. No doubt the people in support of the lunacy have similar claims about their opponents not following the new rules of blessed progress.

What if the reason our age is so deranged is the rule-set that defines the ideology we call liberal democracy? What if the crisis facing the West is simply the result of a system that contains irreconcilable contradictions? People are naturally reticent to think like this because liberal democracy has been sacralized. Democracy means good, so anything it touches must be good. Liberal democracy is even better because it contains two words that have come to mean morally good.

If we take a step back and look at what liberal democracy means in theory, it may help explain why it is increasingly deranged in practice. The off the shelf definition of liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under a representative democratic form of government. The word liberal here means the political philosophy based on individual rights and liberty. Individuals are equal before the law and equal in their political relationship.

A liberal society, regardless of the political system, will be defined by things like equality before the law and the rule of law. Further, those laws are written down so everyone can understand them. Those laws also codify things like the right to own property, the right to speak and organize in order to address the government, and a market economy that is open and transparent. There are other things that can be part of a liberal society, but in general it is a society based in individual rights.

Democracy, of course, is where everyone gets a say. In theory, everyone participates equally, but this is obviously not possible in a large society. As the political theorist Robert Dahl showed, you cannot have a true democracy in a large society. Instead you have the features of democracy to one degree or another. You can have free and fair elections in which everyone can participate, even though many people will simply choose to ignore the process entirely.

There you have liberal democracy in a nutshell. It is a set of rules based on liberal moral philosophy where the people, through direct voting and through indirect representation participate in the rule making of society. Right away you can see a problem. If the people can make the rules, then they can vote to get rid of those rules that are based in liberal moral philosophy. The public could be persuaded that free speech is a bad idea and vote to suppress political speech.

Now, the usual suspects will jump up and down and say this is not so because those liberal rules are placed outside the democratic process. They are based in nature, maybe, or rooted in the ancient traditions of the people. In fact, they are written on a piece of paper which is kept in a museum. That way everyone knows that those rules are off limits to further tinkering. This is obviously not true, which is why America is shaking itself to pieces over those timeless rules.

Liberal democracy has the same problem that any democratic system has in that the people are the source of all authority. Those timeless rules based in human nature are deemed timeless by people who pretend they are based in human nature. They are not, in fact, rooted in a moral authority outside man. Since an axiom of all democratic systems is that no parliament can bind subsequent parliaments, all rules, even the timeless ones, are open to question.

In theory, liberal democracy has the same problem as communism and libertarianism, in that it has no answer for what happens when people change their minds. It has no answer for what happens when a decent number of people decide that those liberal rules are no longer working. If authority lies in the people, which is true of all democratic systems, then whatever rules you make, however you describe them, will be subject to the whims of the people.

Communists solved this problem by creating a new class of people who will be the vanguard of the revolution. The party makes sure that the rules remain fixed, so that the people never get any wild ideas about communism. Libertarians, of course, solved this problem by never coming close to creating a libertarian society. Even in their solons where everything exists in theory, they never solved this problem, because there is no way it can be solved.

Interestingly, the post-Marx culturalists landed on what they think is a solution to the internal contradiction in liberal democracy. They relied on anachronistic language to appeal to their audience at the time, but in the modern age, repressive tolerance has become the solution to popular dissent. In modern hands, this means those who are deemed a threat to our democracy are surrounded by the defenders of democracy and threatened with destruction if they continue.

Putting that aside, liberal democracy has no solution within the ideology of liberal democracy to the paradox of liberal democracy. If the people are sovereign, it means their are the authority for all the rules of society. That includes those foundational rules that the creators would like to think are immutable truths. When the people are the source of authority for the rules of society, they can change even those immutable rules of the universe if they so please.

This is why America has become increasingly chaotic as it has become increasingly democratic since roughly a century ago. In a time when a limited number of men of high status controlled the rule making, respecting those limits on the popular will was not just possible, it was necessary for their survival as a class. Once authority began to expand through expansion of the franchise, the cancer of democracy began to eat at the rules and the reasoning behind those rules.

As is true of other ideologies, the only way to make them work is to find some authority outside mankind to legitimize those fixed rules. Theocratical liberalism, for example, could work if the holy text codified the liberal moral code. A liberal dictatorship could work, assuming the people at the top saw an advantage in maintaining the liberal order for their people. Tradition could also work as a useful authority. Even belief in the simulation could work if explained properly.

In the end, liberal democracy suffers from the same central defect of all radical ideologies, which is that it seeks to free man of coercion. The liberals dreamed of a world free of political coercion. The Marxists dreamed of a world free of economic coercion, while the post-Marxists dream of a world free of cultural coercion. As the last radical ideology standing, liberal democracy promises a world free of all coercion, which is a direct threat to society itself.

It turns out that humans evolved to live in societies and societies are nothing more than a system of rules. In order to maintain the rules, people must often be coerced into abiding by the rules. Therefore any ideology that promises to eliminate coercion is promising to destroy that which makes society possible. Liberal democracy is a direct challenge to the very idea of human society. it is a suicide pact, which explains the the lunacy of the current age.

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