Scott has done a great amount of good in giving us the tools to debate neoreactionary ideas as an "immune response" (to contrast the forces that acted though it was a more effective approach to suppress, and generally hoping that neoreactionary ideas would die if deprived of sunlight).
Past that, however... what comes next? Or, what is happening now? "Banned ideas" have broken "containment" and the current administration seems to be taking the same approach in the opposite direction. The pendulum is now reading illiberalism, and liberalism is in the process of being suppressed. Universities, law firms, and political opponents are in the process of being de-platformed or coerced into silence, supporters of liberalism are questioning whether what they say could be used against them by those in power, etc.
Every group of cultural heavyweights with power eventually seems to get stagnant (as you said, "Liberalism has grown stale"). The regime is incapable of changing its identity quickly enough as cultural tension begins to shift away from it, and the powerful engage in both intentional and unintentional suppression behaviors (shielding the public for their own good, deciding that certain ideas aren't worth discussing, finding ad hominem reasons to dismiss ideas). These ideas don't go away - "secret" societies form around them, and these ideas still evolve, get polished, and some emerge virulently. The rate at which this happens may be strongly related with the speed of information and the frictions involved in discussions happening "outside of the dominant cultures".
So, I believe that Scott has sown the most seeds to salvation out of this cycle of illiberalism; perhaps even introducing us to a new way of doing things. Things such as: showing us how we can think clearly under conditions of ideological pressure. Showing us how to steelman, be skeptical even of our own ideas, apply compassion to rationality, put more attention on attractors than pathologies, and be tolerant without being blind. This is just a sampling, Scott's ideas are incredibly important for us to have on hand as people become disillusioned with the new regime. We can heal the damage that ideological overreach causes with compassion, and then really test if these foundations are strong enough to rebuild liberalism on.
“The pendulum is now reading illiberalism, and liberalism is in the process of being suppressed. ”
Cool story, dude.
But the left has been pushing illiberalism for years now, FAR more than anything Trump has done.
If you wanna look for the root causes of illiberalism, it don’t start with Trump or the alt-right.
It starts with the left.
You wanna argue it doesn’t end with the left, fine; I can accept that.
But claim that illiberalism is wholly or primarily or even equally a phenomenon of the right rather than the left is just to be unbelievably blind or obtuse. Or rabidly partisan.
During the 1920’s and 30’s, illiberal ideas were popular among a certain segment of the literati, people like Pound, Wyndham Lewis, et all. This neo-illiberalism is just a rehash of the same ill-considered tropes that those fellow travelers on the right in the 1930’s were tossing about. Their illiberalism is made possible by the very liberal society they complain about. Their shrill denunciations of the “left” itself proves the sterility of their rhetoric and ideas. At best these foolish people will be little more than footnotes, like Oswald Spencer, and so on.
The "Great Man Theory of Platforming" is absolutely dominant among the folx on Bluesky. They will move heaven and earth to maintain the sealed perimeter against any breaches by bad guys or bad ideas.
For such people, the "dialogue" or "marketplace of ideas" absolutely does not describe what is going on. Instead it is something to do with purity and contamination, a threat to holiness. But they can't avail themselves of religion so it all had to be phrased in an incoherent makeshift rhetoric of appeals "science," common sense and authority.
Despite being a religious reactionary right-wing social conservative myself, I actually love Hanania, Yglesias, Alexander, Noah Smith etc. because of their fundamental commitment to reasoned dialogue, a commitment the woke/Bluesky crowd obviously do not share. I see that as a fundamental political divide: will you engage in dialogue, or not?
I think they thought they could prevent support for ideas like immigration restriction that they wanted to place outside of the pale by suppressing discussion of them, and could gain power by effectively sacralizing groups that vote Democrat (LGBT, women, POC). That actually worked back in the 90s and even 2000s, but the Internet weakened the power of legacy media significantly.
You marginalize Warren Farrell, you eventually get Andrew Tate.
In their defense they did manage to shut down a lot of ideas for a very long time. The Internet just meant they couldn't do it anymore, and they were too slow to adapt.
One sees the same phenomenon in left-wing condemnations of Derek Thompson for appearing on Hanania's podcast to discuss Abundance. The animating idea, I think, is that there is a social club called "mainstream respectability" which has defensible boundaries and which can be gatekept by shunning and name calling. And therefore public intellectuals who fail to do this shunning and name calling are traitors to civilized values.
I sincerely sympathize with the desire to believe this, given how horrible the barbarians rampaging around now are. But anyone who looks honestly at 2025 can see there is no gate to be kept and no boundary to police, and anyone who reads _The Revolt of the Public_ can see that there hasn't been for a long time.
In my experience when you point out to people that the gatekeeping they want has consistently failed, they respond with some variant of "that's because you didn't keep the gate hard enough, you traitors!" which strikes me as a sort of "real Communism has never been tried" for our time.
Hanania himself is about this far [puts two fingers close together] from outright saying that yes, that gate should been kept harder. The flood of misinformation and vitriol on X is worse than the systematic ideological bias and hate speech stuff that came before.
The idea of keeping the public conversation within some bounds of usefulness does seem defensible though. Do we really need to prioritize the discussion of how flat the Earth is or whether or not tech-authoritarianism is a better way to run a country?
For some global value of priority, you're right. But a healthy society needs places where radical ideas are discussed seriously and liberal-mindedly, even though most radical ideas are terrible and wrong, just as a healthy species needs mutations even though most mutations are deleterious. And it's hard to imagine a more constructive discussion forum for mostly-wrong radical ideas than SSC.
We don't need to prioritize discussion of either idea and no one is obliged to engage with them.
But if a generous spirit wants to try to talk someone out of those ideas, we should absolutely get out of their way, and if the conversation is good, making it easier for others to find their conversation is a valuable public service.
The two ideas you mentioned are bad in different ways, but I don't think that matters much. In the end, I'm temperamentally curious, so of course I think it's bad to discourage curiosity, but I hope you find Milton's argument persuasive, "I cannot praise a cloistered virtue". or Nicholas' (elsewhere in the comments).
I agree with you and with Matt Y's 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵, but I think it's obviously false as a descriptive statement.
In the US, respectable intellectuals have generalized about race for decades, often frequently and at length. They're obviously not crude generalizations like the one Matt Y was talking about, but they qualify nonetheless. I don't think a society can sustain the kind of multiple standards about any topic that explosive for long, and I think the best way to address that is to encourage responsible, smart people hash it out.
Perhaps for any particular pernicious idea one needs to assess its vitality and extent in order to decide whether tactical silence or refutation is the most effective course of action at any given time.
Scott Alexander importantly made a post Steelmaning neo-reactionaries before he critiqued them. And because Scott is sensible and a great writer, it is by far the best argument for neo-reaction.
In some areas his Steelmaning is more convincing than his criticism
Steelmaning is good and right but it might accidentally help your opponents, that is in the nature of the technique.
NRx stuff isn’t very hard to steelman for people who come to the conversation in good faith. There are good arguments that really exist there, so most smart people can do it, but most wouldn’t do it out loud (sidenote: this is kind of the overall thing about rationalism, that it’ll say things out loud most people wouldn’t). I had a pretty unique position in the movement and I can confirm that a huge number of people read NRx stuff and/or are partially aligned who would never admit that in public. That the mainstream refused to engage at all is, as Ruxandra says here, one of the most important parts of how we got into this mess imho.
Oh, you're quite correct. I was secretly agreeing with these guys on a lot of the stuff for decades, never told anyone in real life. I had read Sailer since the mid-2000s. Still voted Democrat on many occasions; I just didn't think all the HBD stuff was enough to vote to, say, lose my health insurance or vote for someone with Trump's record.
The question is, did they successfully stave off Trump or a similar figure's ascension until 2024, or did they strengthen it by creating the air of forbidden knowledge? We'll never know. It's possible if they had expanded the welfare state neoliberalism would have actually worked out and they wouldn't have all the unemployed people ready to go populist. Again, we'll never know.
This is a great point but I think on balance Scott does a great job of them proving his actual points. But he is also such a great writer that not everyone might be entirely convinced
Generally I agree with much of what you’re saying here. However, I think you meant to say “Kwisatz Haderach,” unless you’re referring to something other than the concept from Dune.
Can you expand on your comments on aesthetics? What are the 'bad aesthetics' of Astral Codex Ten and its predecessor? I think you are using "aesthetics" in a very particular way that does not rhyme with how most people use it - that may be part of the issue.
The “bad aesthetics” of EA are primarily that they seem to most people to be hopelessly weird about the future (following from Parfit’s formulation of the ideal discount rate being virtually zero) and that EA is obsessed with ideas such as AI risk, virtual consciousnesses, and shrimp welfare.
In other words, the critique is that EA is a movement that follows its own utilitarian reasoning to a fault, and refuses to quietly bury the stuff that turns off a lot of “normies.” That’s a valid critique! The flip side is that arguably that exact commitment to internal consistency is what makes EA uniquely virtuous.
The face masks I always thought were more of a straight leftist thing, and leftists and rationalists don't get along, but they could both be doing some of the same stuff. Leftists have polycules too, after all.
You should view rationalism more positively, because if it didn't exist, they would all be Progress Studies people instead, and then your aesthetics and vibes would be even more directly tainted.
But seriously, though, I don't think either Rationalism or EA have liberalism as a central tenet. The better lens to view them is probably as different approaches to utilitarianism: EA is about minimizing global suffering (which can often lead to authoritarian vibes sometimes), while Rationalism is more individual-focused (making it somewhat indifferent, actually, hence the flirtation with edgy heterodoxy). Both of them accept liberalism mostly as a side effect that alternative systems are so bad that it would interfere with their daily tasks. It's Progress Studies that is strongly committed to liberalism because of its goal to maximize global utility.
For me, the core difference between "core" EA (malaria bednets, slightly less horrible factory farming, personal commitment to 10% charity and at least considering the suffering of others in your dietary choices) and Progress Studies is, simply, one of fatalism.
EA is, at its core, fairly pessimistic about the ability of random individuals to radically change history, whereas Progress Studies is not.
I wish the Progress Studies people the best of luck, I really do! I'm hugely sympathetic to the ideas, would vote for most of them given the chance, etc... but don't really believe that I can do anything meaningful to help.
I can definitely save a few kids' lives though, at trivial impact to my lifestyle.
I think if a more Progress Studies minded person wanted to take the donation approach, they would probably donate more to GiveDirectly (or become an angel investor) than to GiveWell. So I maintain it's a difference in utilitarian mindset.
I tend to think of rationalism is a tool kit to use to reason about the world. EA and progress studies then came out of that to help fulfill certain niches to do with the real world
rux & trace: liberalism needs to be reinvigorated.
moldbug: we need to go back to the roots of libertarianism
rux & trace: anyone got ideas about how to reinvigorate liberalism?
It's one thing to *disagree* with Moldbug. But I don't think you really grok his proposal to begin with (and Trace has basically admitted as much.) Otherwise, the obvious thing to do here, would be to disavow Nrx as being an inadequate cousin of the dominant strain of liberalism. It's like when I had to explain to someone irl once that Islam was an Abrahamic strain, as opposed to a religion that was created ex nihilo.
Edit:
> The battle lines of culture, at their very core, are between illiberalism and liberalism.
I know what you mean here. But this is mental gymnastics.
liberty = freedom
Your problem with Nrx isn't a lack of freedom, but an excess of freedom. Nrx is simply what you get when you follow Libertarianism to its logical conclusion. Thus, there's a sense in which NRX is even more classically-liberal than you're comfortable with. But you can't see that, because the modern understanding of liberalism has been polluted with other ideas about egalitarianism, meritocracy, and nationalism.
You might not ever understand this, unless you start thinking long and hard about what you actually mean by "liberalism", from first principles. Otherwise, you're just going to keep falling into the same trap of "nrx is authoritarian, and therefore *illiberal* (as opposed to *undemocratic*)". If you grok this point and still disagree with moldbug's prescription, fine. But at least call a spade a spade.
How is the US turning into a monarchy libertarian? Ah yeah, it's gonna be city states ruled each by a monarch. Well, I support the development of new city states. But in practice I think it’s gonna be very hard to create a new entire culture to create a city state-- these are organic emergent things.
> How is the US turning into a monarchy libertarian?
Monarchy represents the privatization of the state. Anarcho-libertarians: "privatize everything (except the state, which we'll abolish)". Moldbug and Hoppe: "privatize literally everything (including the state)". Perhaps this terrifies you, because the education system has taught you that "monarchy = autocracy" and "autocracy = totalitarianism". And relatedly, "absolute power corrupts absolutely". However, I don't believe this is necessarily the case. Because:
A) the state is just a security company. It's typically the progressives and the nationalists [0] who want to co-opt the state for non-security (read: totalitarian) purposes.
B) Power can be used toward both good and evil. It depends on how it's wielded. (Huh, kinda like Bostrom's Orthogonality Thesis.)
But when all you know is Modern Liberal Democracy, everything looks like Esoteric Hitlerism. Modern Liberal Democracy *needs* Hitlerism qua boogeyman, because it's morally bankrupt and has nothing else to hold itself together. Again, I don't expect you to understand this immediately, because it's a different reflective-equilibrium than the one you're probably used to.
> Ah yeah, it's gonna be city states ruled each by a monarch.
Almost, but not quite. Scott and Moldbug both basically want a defederated archipelago, where each political island's customs are governed however its inhabitants wish. Which may or may not include submonarchs/democracy/theocracy/(etc?). This dovetails with my comment in the last post, where I posited that democracy is better-suited to small communities.
> But in practice I think it’s gonna be very hard to create a new entire culture to create a city state-- these are organic emergent things.
This sentiment echoes one of my own criticisms of moldbug. I think he focuses too hard on the governance question, but not enough on the cultural question. Both extant neoliberalism and moldbug's libertarianism strike me as a compromise for keeping the peace between different tribes, as opposed to a substantive vision. As things stand currently, I feel that U.S. culture has been hollowed out, to a large extent. (I have strong feelings about this, but they're not entirely coherent.) In any case, Moldbug does occasionally gesture in a cultural direction. But the vast majority of his writing is about political arglebargle.
And regarding the cultural question, I'm not really impressed with Vance. I've seen various accusations that Vance and Thiel have been laundering NRX ideas into the Trump administration. I was skeptical at first. But I find the claim becoming more plausible lately. Assuming this is the case, Vance is breaking Moldbug's Steel Rule: "No Activism". The general idea here, is that reactionaries ought to build cultural capital and parallel institutions to replace the old regime when it inevitably collapses under its own weight. Instead, Vance is kicking a hornet's nest. Also, trying to revive autocracy via democratic means is the same mistake the nazis and bolsheviks made.
[0] One reason why I suspect moldbug is perenially misunderstood, is because I feel like he often says "democracy" when he really means "nationalism". Nationalism is the ur-ideology that sired modern-democracy, fascism, and communism. *Nationalism* is where the idea of "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" comes from. And *Nationalism* is the original sin (as opposed to elections). In moldbug's opinion, the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, and the U.S. founders were revolutionary nutjobs (read: terrorists). And I get the sense that, back in the day, "nationalism" and "democracy" were interchangable terms. And since Moldbug is basically just the avatar of the authors he's read, he chooses to wield the same archaic terminology. To the detriment of his readability.
You can't privatize the state, that's a contradiction in terms. If this is how neo-reactionaries use language then I am not surprised people are confused about it.
I suppose you think the state is inherently public, since the state's primary function is to provide collective security, and collective security is a public good. But just because collective security is a public good, doesn't mean that the company which provides that collective security is publicly owned. What you're describing is an idea known as "Popular Sovereignty", which is the idea that a state ought to be publicly owned by a *nation* (i.e. a people), as opposed to privately owned by a single ruler or a warrior/priest caste. Notice, for example, that Mercantilism's logic of "maximize trade-surplus" is practically indistinguishable from a private company trying to maximize profit. Conversely, modern nation-states are theoretically indistinguishable from a worker's cooperative. Also, Popular Sovereignty is rooted in Nationalism [0]. Notice that Nationalism is only a few hundred years old [1]. Ergo, Popular Sovereignty is not necessarily a universal principle.
I understand what you're getting at but the use of language here is decidedly non-standard; you should acknowledge that before trying to make points based on your definitions, or on archaic definitions that typically don't hold in the 21st century.
Yes you can theoretically rely entirely on private militias for defense. There is historical precedent for this, but in practice kings who leant into that approach too far didn't make it and today the collective security is privatized only up to the supply chain. That's most of a modern industrial military, so in my view, collective security is already mostly privatized. The tip of the spear is, however, still very much The State regardless of what kind of state you're talking about. It would still be the The State even if it were ruled by a monarch or warrior caste.
> It would still be the The State even if it were ruled by a monarch or warrior caste.
Before we continue, what exactly do you think "the state" means? Please provide your own plain and explicit definition. E.g. do you think it's simply synonymous with "society"? (That's not what it means, even in the modern age. Yet this is the only interpretation that seems to fit the blockquote.)
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edit: Oh, perhaps you think "state" is synonymous with "nation". Correct? As in "nation-state". But again, a "nation-state" is only a recent invention. The fact that it's a compound word should tip you off that "state" and "nation" are not (and never were) definitionally equivalent. People treating them as equivalent is just a lazy shorthand, like when people say that the sun "burns" (which is a fine figure of speech, so long as everyone in the room understands that the sun isn't combusting oxygen and hydrocarbons).
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edit2: Assuming I understand your second comment correctly, my quibbles are:
A) "country" = land/terrain/territory; "nation" = a group of people (c.f. natalism, natives); "state" = political institution.
These are all terms that have separate meanings. When people treat them synonymously, it's a lazy colloquialism. Not a redefinition. When people discuss libertarianism in a modern context, it's common to redistinguish these terms, in order to more precisely investigate the nature of politics from first principles.
> There is historical precedent for this, but in practice kings who leant into that approach too far didn't make it and today the collective security is privatized only up to the supply chain. That's most of a modern industrial military, so in my view, collective security is already mostly privatized.
B) I'm not saying that the military gets contracted out. I'm saying that the monarch owns the political apparatus, and therefore personally profits from tax collection. Taxes are revenue, military upkeep is opex, barracks are capex, soldiers are employees, the monarch holds the equity.
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edit3: also, "privatize the state" is more in line with Hoppe. Moldbug himself never really uses that exact phrasing, and would prefer that the U.S. to be run like any other publicly own corporation on the stockmarket. What's important to *moldbug* is that decision-making is centralized in a single authority figure (i.e. a CEO). But I'm not really sure I agree with this, and Moldbug himself is vague on the implementation details. Which makes it all this harder to explain, especially to people who don't really understand moldbug's medieval frame of reference.
"But fance, then why say 'privatize the state' to begin with?" I used that phrase in attempting to demonstrate that monarchy is a natural and logical extension of libertarian principles for didactic purposes. Which ostensibly seems like an oxymoron. The important thing is to break normies like rux out of their reflective equilibrium. If she would rather go read theory, in all its gorey details, I think she knows where to find it.
I pretty much completely agree with your essay to the extent that I follow it; thank you. My main reservation (and the reason I haven't yet subscribed) is that it contains too many obscure "insider" references to people and events I know nothing about. As a (very) elderly biologist, it seemingly has some traits in common with the seminars of young scientists, who employ a vast but bewildering array of acronyms in their talks.
On re-reading, I decided that my critique was basically unfair. For me there was too high a ratio of names to concepts, but that's just me. As compensation, I'll subscribe.
It’s bizarre to me to see a kooky guy (Yarvin) that I once argued with in blog comments be discussed as influential in mainstream publications.
I put it down to post-Trump theorising. People didn’t vote for the guy because they thought he was the second coming of Napoleon. But if you can’t put yourself in his voter’s shoes then it is as good an explanation as any.
I think the Scott Alexander strand of liberalism that tries to both know itself and know its enemy is commendable if a bit contrived.
Whenever I see ‘take-downs’ of non-mainstream liberals like Alexander I wonder if it is projection. A love that dare not speak its name. A frustrated desire for authoritarianism for the good. If only those pesky neutral liberals would take a side.
Eh, the average Trump voter just goes along with the party, and there's 7-8% of swing voters who go back and forth based on the economy + vibes.
Yarvin is more representative of the Elon faction. They don't sway a lot of voters per se, but they provide material and intellectual support. Kind of like the National Review did for Reagan after Nixon. It's mostly forgotten now, but movement conservatives disliked Nixon and Eisenhower. They wanted a version of Goldwater who could win.
Yeah, I remember reading Unqualified Reservations back in 2010 and thinking it was weird stuff I was reading off of a link from Sailer's blogroll somewhere, like this weird secret thing I knew about. I never expected to see the guy in the NYT.
You overstate Musk's role in Tesla. Tesla would be better and would have always been better without him. His obstinance and not listening to his engineers has put FSD behind China. Space X is legitimately his baby. Not Tesla (which I suspect is why he has lost interest in it as people learn that he isn't the "man behind Tesla" in the way he is Space X).
Curtis Yarvin is an idiot. We have the technology now for direct democracy, and not just direct democracy, but direct democracy which is region or locality specific. That doesn't mean that their is no room for technocrats or experts, but in a hypothetical future world it would mean that any government change would begin and end with the ordinary citizen- an outcome which is sadly lacking in all current political systems, with democracy simply the best of a very bad bunch.
How would it work? Ask ordinary citizens exactly what they want in the broadest possible terms. More jobs? Better paid secure jobs? Housing affordability for young people in the form of a generation of starter homes? Less migration, and more cultural homogeneity (with local veto nimby powers)? Then let the technocrats and experts go away and do their thing, and work out exactly what would work to achieve local community aims. Finally, make sure that the technocratic expertise is a marketplace of ideas, with all comers able to form their own associations and produce their own costings for projects, subject to the falsification of their claims through the scepticism and scrutiny of other competing technocratic expert groups. Then let ordinary people vote on what alternatives they want from the suite of projects available. Crucially, make all public employment from public projects time-bounded. Give people the chance to vote for or against specific bureaucracies or their reform every five to ten years.
Our Western societies have fallen into decline and deterioration specifically because the voters weren't consulted about the imposition of policies by an expert technocratic class. Over the last fifty years Western populations have become the proverbial boiled frogs. The problem wasn't a lack of experts, but too many, or least a lack of control over which experts were listened to. Nobody asked us whether we were willing to swap secure jobs and strong communities for cheaper stuff- if they had, I expect the answer would have been a resounding 'hell no'.
It's not that we don't want or need experts or technocrats, its merely that we need better means of democratic control and vetoes over which areas of our lives they get to influence or make decisions. We don't need less democracy, we need better democracy. One in which ordinary people have a veto. The illusion upon which the arguments of Curtis Yarvin rest is in imagining that the blandly close-to-identical uniparty politicians we've been offered have represented any form of real democratic control over who represents us. Behind the scenes, the experts have been busy making terrible decisions for fifty years. The only area where they've really made a net positive impact is in the area of scientific research.
"I am monitoring Reactionaries to try take advantage of their insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing Reactionaries for several reasons.
"First is a purely selfish reason – my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it do. when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Such followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.
"Secod is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they hold, the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional-gender-talk and the feudalism-talk – would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working – as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven’t gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
"Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought. Becoming a Reactionary would both be stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts of Reaction while also menioning my appreciation for the good parts of their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And in fact I think it’s possible (though I can’t prove) that my [Anti-Reactionary] FAQ inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries."
I think any defense of Scott's relationship with the reactionaries has to deal with what Scott himself thought he was doing: (1) using culture war controversy to gain himself followers; (2) building goodwill to the NRx community in the hopes that they would improve their thinking; (3) spreading the "good parts" of reactionary thought to the masses and (in his opinion) the media. What actually happened? Scott got more followers, the NRx community did not improve their thinking (in fact, they got much worse), the bad parts of NRx thought became more mainstream and are now held by some of the most powerful people in the world. Whether you think this would have happened in the counterfactual where Scott ignores the NRx or is actively critical of the NRx, it's clear that Scott's goals/approach failed (other than goal #1) and failed quite spectacularly.
This echoes the concerns that people have about platforming in general: you will raise the salience and credibility of a set of views that otherwise would have lingered in obscurity; that people who are convinced by your criticism were already predisposed against those views anyway; whereas people who are not convinced by your criticism (either because your critiques are poor or, more likely, because those people are not very good readers/thinkers themselves) will now take up interest in fringe views that they otherwise would have never seen.
Whatever Scott thought he was doing (and I was not aware of these quotes from him -- maybe that's why he feels guilty), I just do not think in the era of social media and internet deplatforming works. Scott was not "platformed" by anyone. The fact that we are arguing abt a completely non mainstream platformed blogger platforming someone else shows the futility of this exercise. If an idea hits some nerve at a certain point in time, it will spread.
Scott's a smart guy, has years of experience writing on the internet, clearly thought hard about his role in these discussions, and saw himself as a platformer of "good" NRx views. Was he just totally wrong on this?
Setting Scott aside, while I think you're right that ideas will spread if they hit a nerve, I also think ideas that wouldn't otherwise hit a nerve can spread if people are acclimated to them. Something that Yarvin does periodically is quote from Nazi writers and philosophers and say something like "yes yes, I'm obligated to tell you that the Nazis are double-plus-ungood, but isn't it *remarkable* how many things this Nazi actually got right?". Do you think the writing of Nazi philosophers would still be getting the same level of traction organically if Yarvin wasn't around to elevate them? How many people other than Yarvin are going into the archives to read up on obscure Nazi thought? Now we take a step back, someone like Scott links to Yarvin and says "yes yes, this Nazi-quoting NRx guru is double-plus-ungood, but it's it *interesting* how many things he happens to get right?". Do you think the typical SSC reader would have trudged through Yarvin's thick-as-molasses prose and regular flirtations with Nazis if someone like Scott hadn't vouchsafed that this was a thinker worth listening to?
To be completely fair, I have not read a lot of Curtis Yarvin because I find his style incredibly tedious & I find him self-contradictory in a way that annoys me. So I was not for example even aware he quotes Nazi writers (though I am not surprised). I wrote a piece arguing against one of his more recent posts abt viruses: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-latest-killer-virus-panic and I found it hard to get through his original article in full -- I did it in a duty-like way, so I was sure I was not misrepresenting him. I have been sent essays by him from like 2008 that I forced myself to read just because they are so reminiscent of a lot of current RW discourse and it's fascinating to witness this -- but I just really, really avoid reading him bcuz I like writing that has a logical flow and is not just "vibes-based". So I think it's important to start with this disclaimer, which is that I am really not that familiar with Yarvin per se.
Secondly, I think it depends what you mean by "Nazi writer" and "has good ideas". Because some people consider Nietzsche a "Nazi writer". The other day Rufo was saying how much he derives understanding of how to influence culture from Gramsci, who was a Communist. Now, Rufo is clearly not a Communist, but what Rufo was deriving from Gramsci was a sort of "authoritarian" approach to enforcing your ideology. Which is something I completely disagree with and which is kinda what I am fighting against. But nobody would say Rufo is a Communist -- he is literally the opposite! So I guess to me what really matters is the exact ideas each person is directly promoting, regardless of what label the original writer had. If Rufo likes Gramsci for his authoritarian ideas, I see Rufo as an authoritarian liking person, not as a Communist. I have generally not seen Scott promote any illiberal ideas, so I do not see him as illiberal.
Yarvin has written a lot, but to give you a sense of what I'm talking about, one article that someone pointed to me a ~decade ago is titled "The Holocaust: a Nazi perspective". It is structured as follows: first, Yarvin says that he's being intentionally very provocative and coy with the title; then he quotes at very long length from a Nazi radio commentator and Goebbels protege; then he quotes at very long length from the testimony of an SS judge being tried at Nuremberg; at various points in the article he interjects to say that, whatever you think of these Nazis, they provide a different perspective than "the screenplay legend" the Holocaust has become; then he makes an Elders of Zion joke at the end. I remember reading this at the time and thinking "well, this guy is a total crank, and a boring one at that". But if someone like Scott points you to Yarvin as a knowledgeable thinker worth listening to, you probably stick it out.
im like 15% on it. that there were few places promoting NRX seems to make the great man theory more likely, easier for scott to make the difference to critical mass
The fatal flaw of liberalism is that its core tenets, secularism and democracy, and equality, are fragile and thin. Whereas ethnicity, religion, and hierarchy are thick and robust. This is why the latter survive cataclysm and upheaval, and the former do not. It’s not so much that we ought to choose Yarvin’s prescription for society, but that eventually there will be no choice in the matter. The cratering of the global birth rate will be sufficient to bring about a total reordering of societies within the next hundred years or so.
“ The fatal flaw of liberalism is that its core tenets, secularism and democracy, and equality, are fragile and thin. ‘
You are confusing liberalism with progressivism a.k.a. leftism.
I basically agree with you about progressivism/leftism.
Liberalism (which is the opposite of the illiberalism discussed here) is not thin, is not inherently secular, and while it interacts strongly with democracy, does not have democracy - and most especially mob rule democracy - as one of its core tenets, but rather strong limits on the power of majorities to impose their will on minorities.
Search “classical liberalism” to get a more proper sense here.
Scott has done a great amount of good in giving us the tools to debate neoreactionary ideas as an "immune response" (to contrast the forces that acted though it was a more effective approach to suppress, and generally hoping that neoreactionary ideas would die if deprived of sunlight).
Past that, however... what comes next? Or, what is happening now? "Banned ideas" have broken "containment" and the current administration seems to be taking the same approach in the opposite direction. The pendulum is now reading illiberalism, and liberalism is in the process of being suppressed. Universities, law firms, and political opponents are in the process of being de-platformed or coerced into silence, supporters of liberalism are questioning whether what they say could be used against them by those in power, etc.
Every group of cultural heavyweights with power eventually seems to get stagnant (as you said, "Liberalism has grown stale"). The regime is incapable of changing its identity quickly enough as cultural tension begins to shift away from it, and the powerful engage in both intentional and unintentional suppression behaviors (shielding the public for their own good, deciding that certain ideas aren't worth discussing, finding ad hominem reasons to dismiss ideas). These ideas don't go away - "secret" societies form around them, and these ideas still evolve, get polished, and some emerge virulently. The rate at which this happens may be strongly related with the speed of information and the frictions involved in discussions happening "outside of the dominant cultures".
So, I believe that Scott has sown the most seeds to salvation out of this cycle of illiberalism; perhaps even introducing us to a new way of doing things. Things such as: showing us how we can think clearly under conditions of ideological pressure. Showing us how to steelman, be skeptical even of our own ideas, apply compassion to rationality, put more attention on attractors than pathologies, and be tolerant without being blind. This is just a sampling, Scott's ideas are incredibly important for us to have on hand as people become disillusioned with the new regime. We can heal the damage that ideological overreach causes with compassion, and then really test if these foundations are strong enough to rebuild liberalism on.
yeah I agree
“The pendulum is now reading illiberalism, and liberalism is in the process of being suppressed. ”
Cool story, dude.
But the left has been pushing illiberalism for years now, FAR more than anything Trump has done.
If you wanna look for the root causes of illiberalism, it don’t start with Trump or the alt-right.
It starts with the left.
You wanna argue it doesn’t end with the left, fine; I can accept that.
But claim that illiberalism is wholly or primarily or even equally a phenomenon of the right rather than the left is just to be unbelievably blind or obtuse. Or rabidly partisan.
During the 1920’s and 30’s, illiberal ideas were popular among a certain segment of the literati, people like Pound, Wyndham Lewis, et all. This neo-illiberalism is just a rehash of the same ill-considered tropes that those fellow travelers on the right in the 1930’s were tossing about. Their illiberalism is made possible by the very liberal society they complain about. Their shrill denunciations of the “left” itself proves the sterility of their rhetoric and ideas. At best these foolish people will be little more than footnotes, like Oswald Spencer, and so on.
The "Great Man Theory of Platforming" is absolutely dominant among the folx on Bluesky. They will move heaven and earth to maintain the sealed perimeter against any breaches by bad guys or bad ideas.
For such people, the "dialogue" or "marketplace of ideas" absolutely does not describe what is going on. Instead it is something to do with purity and contamination, a threat to holiness. But they can't avail themselves of religion so it all had to be phrased in an incoherent makeshift rhetoric of appeals "science," common sense and authority.
Despite being a religious reactionary right-wing social conservative myself, I actually love Hanania, Yglesias, Alexander, Noah Smith etc. because of their fundamental commitment to reasoned dialogue, a commitment the woke/Bluesky crowd obviously do not share. I see that as a fundamental political divide: will you engage in dialogue, or not?
I think they thought they could prevent support for ideas like immigration restriction that they wanted to place outside of the pale by suppressing discussion of them, and could gain power by effectively sacralizing groups that vote Democrat (LGBT, women, POC). That actually worked back in the 90s and even 2000s, but the Internet weakened the power of legacy media significantly.
You marginalize Warren Farrell, you eventually get Andrew Tate.
"...I actually love Hanania, Yglesias, Alexander, Noah Smith etc. because of their fundamental commitment to reasoned dialogue,..."
Hanania is no longer committed to reasoned dialogue. He has moved to mostly ad hominem, most of the time.
Noah has always done some of this, but I’ll just leave him out of it.
Alexander and Yglesias I agree with you. Even when I disagree with them, I usually find them reasoned and reasonable.
Your point on "The Great Man Theory of Platforming."
BRILLIANT!!!
thank you!
In their defense they did manage to shut down a lot of ideas for a very long time. The Internet just meant they couldn't do it anymore, and they were too slow to adapt.
One sees the same phenomenon in left-wing condemnations of Derek Thompson for appearing on Hanania's podcast to discuss Abundance. The animating idea, I think, is that there is a social club called "mainstream respectability" which has defensible boundaries and which can be gatekept by shunning and name calling. And therefore public intellectuals who fail to do this shunning and name calling are traitors to civilized values.
I sincerely sympathize with the desire to believe this, given how horrible the barbarians rampaging around now are. But anyone who looks honestly at 2025 can see there is no gate to be kept and no boundary to police, and anyone who reads _The Revolt of the Public_ can see that there hasn't been for a long time.
In my experience when you point out to people that the gatekeeping they want has consistently failed, they respond with some variant of "that's because you didn't keep the gate hard enough, you traitors!" which strikes me as a sort of "real Communism has never been tried" for our time.
Hanania himself is about this far [puts two fingers close together] from outright saying that yes, that gate should been kept harder. The flood of misinformation and vitriol on X is worse than the systematic ideological bias and hate speech stuff that came before.
I don't agree, to be clear
The idea of keeping the public conversation within some bounds of usefulness does seem defensible though. Do we really need to prioritize the discussion of how flat the Earth is or whether or not tech-authoritarianism is a better way to run a country?
For some global value of priority, you're right. But a healthy society needs places where radical ideas are discussed seriously and liberal-mindedly, even though most radical ideas are terrible and wrong, just as a healthy species needs mutations even though most mutations are deleterious. And it's hard to imagine a more constructive discussion forum for mostly-wrong radical ideas than SSC.
Yes he was very good at doing that. A genuinely interesting “host”.
There is no *the* public conversation. The Internet put an end to it, and not a moment too soon.
I think I just mean what people want to discuss publicly.
We don't need to prioritize discussion of either idea and no one is obliged to engage with them.
But if a generous spirit wants to try to talk someone out of those ideas, we should absolutely get out of their way, and if the conversation is good, making it easier for others to find their conversation is a valuable public service.
The two ideas you mentioned are bad in different ways, but I don't think that matters much. In the end, I'm temperamentally curious, so of course I think it's bad to discourage curiosity, but I hope you find Milton's argument persuasive, "I cannot praise a cloistered virtue". or Nicholas' (elsewhere in the comments).
I feel like I definitely agree with your first two paragraphs but also agree with Matty Y when, referring to generalizations based on race, he said:
"because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions."
I agree with you and with Matt Y's 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵, but I think it's obviously false as a descriptive statement.
In the US, respectable intellectuals have generalized about race for decades, often frequently and at length. They're obviously not crude generalizations like the one Matt Y was talking about, but they qualify nonetheless. I don't think a society can sustain the kind of multiple standards about any topic that explosive for long, and I think the best way to address that is to encourage responsible, smart people hash it out.
Perhaps for any particular pernicious idea one needs to assess its vitality and extent in order to decide whether tactical silence or refutation is the most effective course of action at any given time.
Scott Alexander importantly made a post Steelmaning neo-reactionaries before he critiqued them. And because Scott is sensible and a great writer, it is by far the best argument for neo-reaction.
In some areas his Steelmaning is more convincing than his criticism
Steelmaning is good and right but it might accidentally help your opponents, that is in the nature of the technique.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
Thanks! I will read it. I am curious if it's better/more convincing than what Nrx people themselves actually say lol
NRx stuff isn’t very hard to steelman for people who come to the conversation in good faith. There are good arguments that really exist there, so most smart people can do it, but most wouldn’t do it out loud (sidenote: this is kind of the overall thing about rationalism, that it’ll say things out loud most people wouldn’t). I had a pretty unique position in the movement and I can confirm that a huge number of people read NRx stuff and/or are partially aligned who would never admit that in public. That the mainstream refused to engage at all is, as Ruxandra says here, one of the most important parts of how we got into this mess imho.
Oh, you're quite correct. I was secretly agreeing with these guys on a lot of the stuff for decades, never told anyone in real life. I had read Sailer since the mid-2000s. Still voted Democrat on many occasions; I just didn't think all the HBD stuff was enough to vote to, say, lose my health insurance or vote for someone with Trump's record.
The question is, did they successfully stave off Trump or a similar figure's ascension until 2024, or did they strengthen it by creating the air of forbidden knowledge? We'll never know. It's possible if they had expanded the welfare state neoliberalism would have actually worked out and they wouldn't have all the unemployed people ready to go populist. Again, we'll never know.
This is a great point but I think on balance Scott does a great job of them proving his actual points. But he is also such a great writer that not everyone might be entirely convinced
Playing Devil's Advocate but not for Catholicism
Generally I agree with much of what you’re saying here. However, I think you meant to say “Kwisatz Haderach,” unless you’re referring to something other than the concept from Dune.
Thx for confection
Correction
love confections 💕
😂
Well, Musk is kind of spicy I guess.
Can you expand on your comments on aesthetics? What are the 'bad aesthetics' of Astral Codex Ten and its predecessor? I think you are using "aesthetics" in a very particular way that does not rhyme with how most people use it - that may be part of the issue.
The “bad aesthetics” of EA are primarily that they seem to most people to be hopelessly weird about the future (following from Parfit’s formulation of the ideal discount rate being virtually zero) and that EA is obsessed with ideas such as AI risk, virtual consciousnesses, and shrimp welfare.
In other words, the critique is that EA is a movement that follows its own utilitarian reasoning to a fault, and refuses to quietly bury the stuff that turns off a lot of “normies.” That’s a valid critique! The flip side is that arguably that exact commitment to internal consistency is what makes EA uniquely virtuous.
Thanks for explaining.
I think it’s this. But also people associate rationalist Bay Area culture with “polycules” and unnecessary face masks. They're all related imo.
The face masks I always thought were more of a straight leftist thing, and leftists and rationalists don't get along, but they could both be doing some of the same stuff. Leftists have polycules too, after all.
Lotsa people in the Bay Area conform and virtue signal, because the leftists there are so powerful.
Musk and Andreessen have made it easier not to conform than it used to be, but the incentives there are pretty whack.
So...why are they all still wearing masks? Everyone still worried about COVID?
First generation Asian-Americans got this from China.
The rest who are still wearing masks are the hard core leftists or the young snowflakes.
And yes, those folks are still worried about COVID.
And it’s very sad when you see the occasional (mostly white) ones who masks their children (usually just child) at the farmers market.
I usually think we have too many laws, but those who mask their kids outdoors should imo be jailed.
"Weird nerds who think a sufficient quantity of shrimp are more important than a human life"
You should view rationalism more positively, because if it didn't exist, they would all be Progress Studies people instead, and then your aesthetics and vibes would be even more directly tainted.
But seriously, though, I don't think either Rationalism or EA have liberalism as a central tenet. The better lens to view them is probably as different approaches to utilitarianism: EA is about minimizing global suffering (which can often lead to authoritarian vibes sometimes), while Rationalism is more individual-focused (making it somewhat indifferent, actually, hence the flirtation with edgy heterodoxy). Both of them accept liberalism mostly as a side effect that alternative systems are so bad that it would interfere with their daily tasks. It's Progress Studies that is strongly committed to liberalism because of its goal to maximize global utility.
For me, the core difference between "core" EA (malaria bednets, slightly less horrible factory farming, personal commitment to 10% charity and at least considering the suffering of others in your dietary choices) and Progress Studies is, simply, one of fatalism.
EA is, at its core, fairly pessimistic about the ability of random individuals to radically change history, whereas Progress Studies is not.
I wish the Progress Studies people the best of luck, I really do! I'm hugely sympathetic to the ideas, would vote for most of them given the chance, etc... but don't really believe that I can do anything meaningful to help.
I can definitely save a few kids' lives though, at trivial impact to my lifestyle.
I think if a more Progress Studies minded person wanted to take the donation approach, they would probably donate more to GiveDirectly (or become an angel investor) than to GiveWell. So I maintain it's a difference in utilitarian mindset.
That's a fair point, and also an empirical one! Perhaps one for Astral Codex Ten's next survey.
I tend to think of rationalism is a tool kit to use to reason about the world. EA and progress studies then came out of that to help fulfill certain niches to do with the real world
rux & trace: liberalism needs to be reinvigorated.
moldbug: we need to go back to the roots of libertarianism
rux & trace: anyone got ideas about how to reinvigorate liberalism?
It's one thing to *disagree* with Moldbug. But I don't think you really grok his proposal to begin with (and Trace has basically admitted as much.) Otherwise, the obvious thing to do here, would be to disavow Nrx as being an inadequate cousin of the dominant strain of liberalism. It's like when I had to explain to someone irl once that Islam was an Abrahamic strain, as opposed to a religion that was created ex nihilo.
Edit:
> The battle lines of culture, at their very core, are between illiberalism and liberalism.
I know what you mean here. But this is mental gymnastics.
liberty = freedom
Your problem with Nrx isn't a lack of freedom, but an excess of freedom. Nrx is simply what you get when you follow Libertarianism to its logical conclusion. Thus, there's a sense in which NRX is even more classically-liberal than you're comfortable with. But you can't see that, because the modern understanding of liberalism has been polluted with other ideas about egalitarianism, meritocracy, and nationalism.
You might not ever understand this, unless you start thinking long and hard about what you actually mean by "liberalism", from first principles. Otherwise, you're just going to keep falling into the same trap of "nrx is authoritarian, and therefore *illiberal* (as opposed to *undemocratic*)". If you grok this point and still disagree with moldbug's prescription, fine. But at least call a spade a spade.
How is the US turning into a monarchy libertarian? Ah yeah, it's gonna be city states ruled each by a monarch. Well, I support the development of new city states. But in practice I think it’s gonna be very hard to create a new entire culture to create a city state-- these are organic emergent things.
> How is the US turning into a monarchy libertarian?
Monarchy represents the privatization of the state. Anarcho-libertarians: "privatize everything (except the state, which we'll abolish)". Moldbug and Hoppe: "privatize literally everything (including the state)". Perhaps this terrifies you, because the education system has taught you that "monarchy = autocracy" and "autocracy = totalitarianism". And relatedly, "absolute power corrupts absolutely". However, I don't believe this is necessarily the case. Because:
A) the state is just a security company. It's typically the progressives and the nationalists [0] who want to co-opt the state for non-security (read: totalitarian) purposes.
B) Power can be used toward both good and evil. It depends on how it's wielded. (Huh, kinda like Bostrom's Orthogonality Thesis.)
But when all you know is Modern Liberal Democracy, everything looks like Esoteric Hitlerism. Modern Liberal Democracy *needs* Hitlerism qua boogeyman, because it's morally bankrupt and has nothing else to hold itself together. Again, I don't expect you to understand this immediately, because it's a different reflective-equilibrium than the one you're probably used to.
> Ah yeah, it's gonna be city states ruled each by a monarch.
Almost, but not quite. Scott and Moldbug both basically want a defederated archipelago, where each political island's customs are governed however its inhabitants wish. Which may or may not include submonarchs/democracy/theocracy/(etc?). This dovetails with my comment in the last post, where I posited that democracy is better-suited to small communities.
> But in practice I think it’s gonna be very hard to create a new entire culture to create a city state-- these are organic emergent things.
This sentiment echoes one of my own criticisms of moldbug. I think he focuses too hard on the governance question, but not enough on the cultural question. Both extant neoliberalism and moldbug's libertarianism strike me as a compromise for keeping the peace between different tribes, as opposed to a substantive vision. As things stand currently, I feel that U.S. culture has been hollowed out, to a large extent. (I have strong feelings about this, but they're not entirely coherent.) In any case, Moldbug does occasionally gesture in a cultural direction. But the vast majority of his writing is about political arglebargle.
And regarding the cultural question, I'm not really impressed with Vance. I've seen various accusations that Vance and Thiel have been laundering NRX ideas into the Trump administration. I was skeptical at first. But I find the claim becoming more plausible lately. Assuming this is the case, Vance is breaking Moldbug's Steel Rule: "No Activism". The general idea here, is that reactionaries ought to build cultural capital and parallel institutions to replace the old regime when it inevitably collapses under its own weight. Instead, Vance is kicking a hornet's nest. Also, trying to revive autocracy via democratic means is the same mistake the nazis and bolsheviks made.
[0] One reason why I suspect moldbug is perenially misunderstood, is because I feel like he often says "democracy" when he really means "nationalism". Nationalism is the ur-ideology that sired modern-democracy, fascism, and communism. *Nationalism* is where the idea of "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" comes from. And *Nationalism* is the original sin (as opposed to elections). In moldbug's opinion, the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, and the U.S. founders were revolutionary nutjobs (read: terrorists). And I get the sense that, back in the day, "nationalism" and "democracy" were interchangable terms. And since Moldbug is basically just the avatar of the authors he's read, he chooses to wield the same archaic terminology. To the detriment of his readability.
You can't privatize the state, that's a contradiction in terms. If this is how neo-reactionaries use language then I am not surprised people are confused about it.
I suppose you think the state is inherently public, since the state's primary function is to provide collective security, and collective security is a public good. But just because collective security is a public good, doesn't mean that the company which provides that collective security is publicly owned. What you're describing is an idea known as "Popular Sovereignty", which is the idea that a state ought to be publicly owned by a *nation* (i.e. a people), as opposed to privately owned by a single ruler or a warrior/priest caste. Notice, for example, that Mercantilism's logic of "maximize trade-surplus" is practically indistinguishable from a private company trying to maximize profit. Conversely, modern nation-states are theoretically indistinguishable from a worker's cooperative. Also, Popular Sovereignty is rooted in Nationalism [0]. Notice that Nationalism is only a few hundred years old [1]. Ergo, Popular Sovereignty is not necessarily a universal principle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848 (C.f. "Arab Spring")
I understand what you're getting at but the use of language here is decidedly non-standard; you should acknowledge that before trying to make points based on your definitions, or on archaic definitions that typically don't hold in the 21st century.
Yes you can theoretically rely entirely on private militias for defense. There is historical precedent for this, but in practice kings who leant into that approach too far didn't make it and today the collective security is privatized only up to the supply chain. That's most of a modern industrial military, so in my view, collective security is already mostly privatized. The tip of the spear is, however, still very much The State regardless of what kind of state you're talking about. It would still be the The State even if it were ruled by a monarch or warrior caste.
> It would still be the The State even if it were ruled by a monarch or warrior caste.
Before we continue, what exactly do you think "the state" means? Please provide your own plain and explicit definition. E.g. do you think it's simply synonymous with "society"? (That's not what it means, even in the modern age. Yet this is the only interpretation that seems to fit the blockquote.)
----
edit: Oh, perhaps you think "state" is synonymous with "nation". Correct? As in "nation-state". But again, a "nation-state" is only a recent invention. The fact that it's a compound word should tip you off that "state" and "nation" are not (and never were) definitionally equivalent. People treating them as equivalent is just a lazy shorthand, like when people say that the sun "burns" (which is a fine figure of speech, so long as everyone in the room understands that the sun isn't combusting oxygen and hydrocarbons).
----
edit2: Assuming I understand your second comment correctly, my quibbles are:
A) "country" = land/terrain/territory; "nation" = a group of people (c.f. natalism, natives); "state" = political institution.
These are all terms that have separate meanings. When people treat them synonymously, it's a lazy colloquialism. Not a redefinition. When people discuss libertarianism in a modern context, it's common to redistinguish these terms, in order to more precisely investigate the nature of politics from first principles.
> There is historical precedent for this, but in practice kings who leant into that approach too far didn't make it and today the collective security is privatized only up to the supply chain. That's most of a modern industrial military, so in my view, collective security is already mostly privatized.
B) I'm not saying that the military gets contracted out. I'm saying that the monarch owns the political apparatus, and therefore personally profits from tax collection. Taxes are revenue, military upkeep is opex, barracks are capex, soldiers are employees, the monarch holds the equity.
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edit3: also, "privatize the state" is more in line with Hoppe. Moldbug himself never really uses that exact phrasing, and would prefer that the U.S. to be run like any other publicly own corporation on the stockmarket. What's important to *moldbug* is that decision-making is centralized in a single authority figure (i.e. a CEO). But I'm not really sure I agree with this, and Moldbug himself is vague on the implementation details. Which makes it all this harder to explain, especially to people who don't really understand moldbug's medieval frame of reference.
"But fance, then why say 'privatize the state' to begin with?" I used that phrase in attempting to demonstrate that monarchy is a natural and logical extension of libertarian principles for didactic purposes. Which ostensibly seems like an oxymoron. The important thing is to break normies like rux out of their reflective equilibrium. If she would rather go read theory, in all its gorey details, I think she knows where to find it.
I pretty much completely agree with your essay to the extent that I follow it; thank you. My main reservation (and the reason I haven't yet subscribed) is that it contains too many obscure "insider" references to people and events I know nothing about. As a (very) elderly biologist, it seemingly has some traits in common with the seminars of young scientists, who employ a vast but bewildering array of acronyms in their talks.
Oh no! I'd like to make it more accessible. Could you mention some stuff you'd like more explanation on?
On re-reading, I decided that my critique was basically unfair. For me there was too high a ratio of names to concepts, but that's just me. As compensation, I'll subscribe.
Thanks :)
It’s bizarre to me to see a kooky guy (Yarvin) that I once argued with in blog comments be discussed as influential in mainstream publications.
I put it down to post-Trump theorising. People didn’t vote for the guy because they thought he was the second coming of Napoleon. But if you can’t put yourself in his voter’s shoes then it is as good an explanation as any.
I think the Scott Alexander strand of liberalism that tries to both know itself and know its enemy is commendable if a bit contrived.
Whenever I see ‘take-downs’ of non-mainstream liberals like Alexander I wonder if it is projection. A love that dare not speak its name. A frustrated desire for authoritarianism for the good. If only those pesky neutral liberals would take a side.
Eh, the average Trump voter just goes along with the party, and there's 7-8% of swing voters who go back and forth based on the economy + vibes.
Yarvin is more representative of the Elon faction. They don't sway a lot of voters per se, but they provide material and intellectual support. Kind of like the National Review did for Reagan after Nixon. It's mostly forgotten now, but movement conservatives disliked Nixon and Eisenhower. They wanted a version of Goldwater who could win.
Yeah, I remember reading Unqualified Reservations back in 2010 and thinking it was weird stuff I was reading off of a link from Sailer's blogroll somewhere, like this weird secret thing I knew about. I never expected to see the guy in the NYT.
You overstate Musk's role in Tesla. Tesla would be better and would have always been better without him. His obstinance and not listening to his engineers has put FSD behind China. Space X is legitimately his baby. Not Tesla (which I suspect is why he has lost interest in it as people learn that he isn't the "man behind Tesla" in the way he is Space X).
Curtis Yarvin is an idiot. We have the technology now for direct democracy, and not just direct democracy, but direct democracy which is region or locality specific. That doesn't mean that their is no room for technocrats or experts, but in a hypothetical future world it would mean that any government change would begin and end with the ordinary citizen- an outcome which is sadly lacking in all current political systems, with democracy simply the best of a very bad bunch.
How would it work? Ask ordinary citizens exactly what they want in the broadest possible terms. More jobs? Better paid secure jobs? Housing affordability for young people in the form of a generation of starter homes? Less migration, and more cultural homogeneity (with local veto nimby powers)? Then let the technocrats and experts go away and do their thing, and work out exactly what would work to achieve local community aims. Finally, make sure that the technocratic expertise is a marketplace of ideas, with all comers able to form their own associations and produce their own costings for projects, subject to the falsification of their claims through the scepticism and scrutiny of other competing technocratic expert groups. Then let ordinary people vote on what alternatives they want from the suite of projects available. Crucially, make all public employment from public projects time-bounded. Give people the chance to vote for or against specific bureaucracies or their reform every five to ten years.
Our Western societies have fallen into decline and deterioration specifically because the voters weren't consulted about the imposition of policies by an expert technocratic class. Over the last fifty years Western populations have become the proverbial boiled frogs. The problem wasn't a lack of experts, but too many, or least a lack of control over which experts were listened to. Nobody asked us whether we were willing to swap secure jobs and strong communities for cheaper stuff- if they had, I expect the answer would have been a resounding 'hell no'.
It's not that we don't want or need experts or technocrats, its merely that we need better means of democratic control and vetoes over which areas of our lives they get to influence or make decisions. We don't need less democracy, we need better democracy. One in which ordinary people have a veto. The illusion upon which the arguments of Curtis Yarvin rest is in imagining that the blandly close-to-identical uniparty politicians we've been offered have represented any form of real democratic control over who represents us. Behind the scenes, the experts have been busy making terrible decisions for fifty years. The only area where they've really made a net positive impact is in the area of scientific research.
Here it is from the man himself in 2014.
"I am monitoring Reactionaries to try take advantage of their insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing Reactionaries for several reasons.
"First is a purely selfish reason – my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it do. when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Such followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.
"Secod is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they hold, the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional-gender-talk and the feudalism-talk – would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working – as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven’t gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
"Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought. Becoming a Reactionary would both be stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts of Reaction while also menioning my appreciation for the good parts of their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And in fact I think it’s possible (though I can’t prove) that my [Anti-Reactionary] FAQ inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries."
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/
yeah well, I am pretty sure they would have gained attention without Scott
I think any defense of Scott's relationship with the reactionaries has to deal with what Scott himself thought he was doing: (1) using culture war controversy to gain himself followers; (2) building goodwill to the NRx community in the hopes that they would improve their thinking; (3) spreading the "good parts" of reactionary thought to the masses and (in his opinion) the media. What actually happened? Scott got more followers, the NRx community did not improve their thinking (in fact, they got much worse), the bad parts of NRx thought became more mainstream and are now held by some of the most powerful people in the world. Whether you think this would have happened in the counterfactual where Scott ignores the NRx or is actively critical of the NRx, it's clear that Scott's goals/approach failed (other than goal #1) and failed quite spectacularly.
This echoes the concerns that people have about platforming in general: you will raise the salience and credibility of a set of views that otherwise would have lingered in obscurity; that people who are convinced by your criticism were already predisposed against those views anyway; whereas people who are not convinced by your criticism (either because your critiques are poor or, more likely, because those people are not very good readers/thinkers themselves) will now take up interest in fringe views that they otherwise would have never seen.
Whatever Scott thought he was doing (and I was not aware of these quotes from him -- maybe that's why he feels guilty), I just do not think in the era of social media and internet deplatforming works. Scott was not "platformed" by anyone. The fact that we are arguing abt a completely non mainstream platformed blogger platforming someone else shows the futility of this exercise. If an idea hits some nerve at a certain point in time, it will spread.
"where Scott ignores the NRx or is actively critical of the NRx" -- but he was actively critical of them!
Scott's a smart guy, has years of experience writing on the internet, clearly thought hard about his role in these discussions, and saw himself as a platformer of "good" NRx views. Was he just totally wrong on this?
Setting Scott aside, while I think you're right that ideas will spread if they hit a nerve, I also think ideas that wouldn't otherwise hit a nerve can spread if people are acclimated to them. Something that Yarvin does periodically is quote from Nazi writers and philosophers and say something like "yes yes, I'm obligated to tell you that the Nazis are double-plus-ungood, but isn't it *remarkable* how many things this Nazi actually got right?". Do you think the writing of Nazi philosophers would still be getting the same level of traction organically if Yarvin wasn't around to elevate them? How many people other than Yarvin are going into the archives to read up on obscure Nazi thought? Now we take a step back, someone like Scott links to Yarvin and says "yes yes, this Nazi-quoting NRx guru is double-plus-ungood, but it's it *interesting* how many things he happens to get right?". Do you think the typical SSC reader would have trudged through Yarvin's thick-as-molasses prose and regular flirtations with Nazis if someone like Scott hadn't vouchsafed that this was a thinker worth listening to?
To be completely fair, I have not read a lot of Curtis Yarvin because I find his style incredibly tedious & I find him self-contradictory in a way that annoys me. So I was not for example even aware he quotes Nazi writers (though I am not surprised). I wrote a piece arguing against one of his more recent posts abt viruses: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-latest-killer-virus-panic and I found it hard to get through his original article in full -- I did it in a duty-like way, so I was sure I was not misrepresenting him. I have been sent essays by him from like 2008 that I forced myself to read just because they are so reminiscent of a lot of current RW discourse and it's fascinating to witness this -- but I just really, really avoid reading him bcuz I like writing that has a logical flow and is not just "vibes-based". So I think it's important to start with this disclaimer, which is that I am really not that familiar with Yarvin per se.
Secondly, I think it depends what you mean by "Nazi writer" and "has good ideas". Because some people consider Nietzsche a "Nazi writer". The other day Rufo was saying how much he derives understanding of how to influence culture from Gramsci, who was a Communist. Now, Rufo is clearly not a Communist, but what Rufo was deriving from Gramsci was a sort of "authoritarian" approach to enforcing your ideology. Which is something I completely disagree with and which is kinda what I am fighting against. But nobody would say Rufo is a Communist -- he is literally the opposite! So I guess to me what really matters is the exact ideas each person is directly promoting, regardless of what label the original writer had. If Rufo likes Gramsci for his authoritarian ideas, I see Rufo as an authoritarian liking person, not as a Communist. I have generally not seen Scott promote any illiberal ideas, so I do not see him as illiberal.
Yarvin has written a lot, but to give you a sense of what I'm talking about, one article that someone pointed to me a ~decade ago is titled "The Holocaust: a Nazi perspective". It is structured as follows: first, Yarvin says that he's being intentionally very provocative and coy with the title; then he quotes at very long length from a Nazi radio commentator and Goebbels protege; then he quotes at very long length from the testimony of an SS judge being tried at Nuremberg; at various points in the article he interjects to say that, whatever you think of these Nazis, they provide a different perspective than "the screenplay legend" the Holocaust has become; then he makes an Elders of Zion joke at the end. I remember reading this at the time and thinking "well, this guy is a total crank, and a boring one at that". But if someone like Scott points you to Yarvin as a knowledgeable thinker worth listening to, you probably stick it out.
Definitely - this was Scott saying he was piggybacking on the attention they were getting, and not the other way around.
That's what I got from the first point I quoted, but perhaps not the third.
idk I'm not convinced that Scott surely wasn't the Great Platformer of Nrx. he was smaller at the time, but then bigger
so you do not think an ideology that was blocked literally everywhere mainstream would have penetrated without Scott?
im like 15% on it. that there were few places promoting NRX seems to make the great man theory more likely, easier for scott to make the difference to critical mass
The fatal flaw of liberalism is that its core tenets, secularism and democracy, and equality, are fragile and thin. Whereas ethnicity, religion, and hierarchy are thick and robust. This is why the latter survive cataclysm and upheaval, and the former do not. It’s not so much that we ought to choose Yarvin’s prescription for society, but that eventually there will be no choice in the matter. The cratering of the global birth rate will be sufficient to bring about a total reordering of societies within the next hundred years or so.
“ The fatal flaw of liberalism is that its core tenets, secularism and democracy, and equality, are fragile and thin. ‘
You are confusing liberalism with progressivism a.k.a. leftism.
I basically agree with you about progressivism/leftism.
Liberalism (which is the opposite of the illiberalism discussed here) is not thin, is not inherently secular, and while it interacts strongly with democracy, does not have democracy - and most especially mob rule democracy - as one of its core tenets, but rather strong limits on the power of majorities to impose their will on minorities.
Search “classical liberalism” to get a more proper sense here.