fucking brilliant. synthesizes a lot of the thoughts I was having while reading Social Order of the Underworld.
efficient trust & cooperation is the cornerstone of making any organization function. & this can only be achieved initially via *rewards* and not punishment. You can't emerge from a state of anarchy by punishing defectors and free-riders (because there are far too many of them), only by rewarding those who cooperate with you. The optimal mindset for rising up to the top in such an organization is "greedy" but extremely "non-envious" -- motivated heavily by rewards like money status fame but happy to engage in positive-sum trade that gets other people what they want to.
but if there are no rewards to give -- like in prison where all you can reward people with is smuggled cigarettes, drugs, or male prostitutes -- you can also "reward" people by burning down the commons and offering them respite from the damage you caused. prison gang leaders have no power to make the lives of their followers (or even their *own* lives) better; they "reward" their followers by exempting them from the random murders and acts of violence that they themselves cause.
similarly, politicians have no ability to make the lives of the average citizen they rule better -- they're not smart enough and social problems are far too intractable to solve by the machinery of the state. but they can create problems and then offer temporary solutions to their interest groups, which keeps them in power.
the optimal mindset for rising to the top in such an organization is "selfless" (i.e not motivated by personal reward, which is actually kind of monstrous when you think about it) and envious / spiteful -- willing to cut out one of their own eyes as long as someone else is losing two. the James Taggarts of the world (to channel Rand for a second here). Petty, small-minded, miserable bastards all of them.
your final conclusion is the standard libertarian one, that stability breeds dysfunction, while "creative destruction" keeps organizations healthy and seeking to create value rather than destroy it. i'm not quite sure I buy it though. stability is the *consequence* rather than the cause of the dysfunction. Prison gang leaders rot in supermaxxes because no one who isn't locked in solitary confinement wants to be a fucking prison gang leader. 90% of Congress incumbents win reelection, despite the 15% approval rate, because no one who isn't absolutely despicable wants to be a politician. (even if a rare honest, decent man or woman does get into DC they're certainly not running for a second term, it takes a certain level of depravity to do that.)
so I don't think stability is the issue here. but I don't know quite what it is that makes some organizations ruled by the best, and others ruled by the worst
"but I don't know quite what it is that makes some organizations ruled by the best, and others ruled by the worst."
Surely part of it must be the nature of the organization?
Criminal gangs exist to, at best, parasitize the host community. That organizational goal is going to exclude pretty much all non-awful people, and the structural incentives work their magic from there.
The other examples given fit this explanation. Kulak points to the military, contrasting its output to Washington and Grant. Washington and Grant emerged from a military with a clear constructive purpose and immediate goals, whereas the current US military has neither. Like the prison gangs, it's secured itself from any test of fitness, and now exists most straightforwardly to self-perpetuate, and to empower and enrich its own members at the expense of the community at large.
If I squint, the Scottish Kings fall into this same category. Ideally, Kings would be the hub of a community, providing leadership, coordination, and arbitration. For a king to serve any of these purposes, though, the first step of course is to have a secure throne. When the situation grows sufficiently chaotic, efforts to secure the throne themselves undercut any other objective, and conflict becomes self-perpetuating. The Throne is no longer a center of coordination but a prize to be fought over, so fighting is what the claimants do.
You mention the dysfunction of Congress and politicians generally. As with Grant and Washington, this doesn't seem to be an inevitable state, because I can point to politicians who really did seem to deliver solid governance and growing prosperity. It seems to come down to clear purpose and immediate goals. Are politicians running on whether to cut taxes or build a new hydro dam, to either prune government or to use it to deliver immediate, obvious utility? Not lately. Without any actionable plan of worth, all that's left is status games and grifting, so you get gamers and grifters. Maybe it's that simple.
"stability breeds dysfunction, while "creative destruction" keeps organizations healthy and seeking to create value rather than destroy it."
Well, we actually have an American historical example that this is really how it works. The Founders were famously opposed to having a standing military. When you track the level of government-funded armed forces in America, you will see that for the first 150 years, the American military is ALWAYS cut to the very bone following every peace treaty. Almost everyone is fired and sent home.
Consequently, the beginning of every new military action requires a massive call-up of civilians who have no formal training in the ways of war. In every case, the American military then spends the first six months of the new war trying to figure out how to do things, but once it has finished this shake-down period, it goes on to win the war.
When did this stop? Right after WW II - the very first war when we did NOT draw down the military following the signing of the peace treaty. Nobody got fired. And that's when America stopped decisively winning wars. If you study military theory from the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, it's a story of officers from the previous war trying to use the techniques that worked a few decades prior, and finding those old techniques didn't work at all in the new war.
There's a strong argument to be made that the American military should be cut to the very bone, so that when the next armed conflict occurs, civilians with fresh eyes and fresh ideas can be called in to resolve the issue.
Holy crap. Now that's a thesis I've never heard before. So does that mean that the old adage that "War is chaos. The American Army is chaos. The American Army wins wars" is no longer true?
>prison gang leaders have no power to make the lives of their followers (or even their *own* lives) better; they "reward" their followers by exempting them from the random murders and acts of violence that they themselves cause.
I think that applies equally to governments.
I think stability is the issue just on a survivability bias level: Unstable systems don't hang around, so we end up with a bunch of stable crappy systems. In other words: Moloch.
Beautiful. A lot to chew on in here, but I particularly like your dichotomy of Aristocracy as a pyramid of power and reward VS Cocytarchy (Or Cocytarcy? Still uncertain which I prefer...) being a literal open-air pit of concentric rings of power and suffering. Stark, evocative, and it feels instinctively right, in the way that only the greatest sense-making metaphors do.
As well, your thoughts here remind me of the old Slate Star Codex musings on Moloch. IE, why do systems designed to do good end up becoming nightmare abominations devouring human hopes and dreams and spitting out horror, ugliness and pain? Being part of the "public servant" kayfabe myself, I can say that your observations on bureaucracy and public institutions are spot-on. You have no idea (or maybe you do) what debasements I have been forced/seen forced/seen others be forced to submit to over the years solely to maintain inflated budgetary powers in localized fiefdoms desperate to have more, always more. Soul-deadening stuff.
I research Kubrick’s symbolism, and your discussion of Aristos illuminated something for me that I hadn’t understood very well before.
Kubrick has a sort of catch phrase that pops up in several of his films about “the best people.” It’s commonly interpreted as a snarky comment about social elites who abuse their positions and power over others, but I think there is more to it than that. I think it is also a hint about what we could do to make things better.
Kubrick loved to stack multiple layers of meaning beneath the elements in his art.
Kubrick was well aware of Korzybski’s General Semantics, as were other artists he admired. Tippi Hedren’s character in The Birds mentions studying General Semantics in San Francisco as a throw-away line, and Goldie Hawn’s character in Foul (Fowl) Play does the same.
Non Aristotelian logic, or Null-A was central to Korzybski’s methodology, and thus I think Kubrick’s sarcastic on screen praise for “the best” is a nod to those ideas. Null-A was also one of the sparks that inspired L Ron Hubbard to write Dianetics, so it seems clear (sorry) that it’s not ā technology that was or is ready to heal all minds.
But I think Kubrick figured out how to adapt and improve what he learned from Korzybski and others to embed subliminal lessons in his art that could heal some minds - the ones patient enough to learn his symbolic code.
I very much enjoyed reading your work, and I will probably let it sit in my mind for a few days and then go back through it again. Thank you for the effort you put into this. It really gave me a valuable new way of looking at some of my own research.
Hi. I just found you today and read this article. I’m an Objectivist (and happy to answer questions or criticisms, which I don’t think most other current Objectivists would do – I don’t get along with them either). I didn’t know you were a Marxist until I got to the end and read your Twitter bio. So on the one hand are beliefs are very different, but on the other hand I think we overlap quite a bit on disliking the current rulers, power structures, social hierarchies, etc. Perhaps being a disillusioned outsider or not matters more than left or right. I write philosophy https://criticalfallibilism.com
I know something about the mainstream being bad that you might potentially not already know, so I thought I’d tell you. In three words: *science is broken*. It’s not just how much the government controls grants and universities. It’s not just the replication crisis or “publish or perish”. It’s not just that a massive expansion of the number of scientists has flooded science with uncreative people who are bad at it (just like has been happening to every other scholarly pursuit – similarly on Substack you are competing for attention with vast numbers of people who don’t have anything novel or important to say, but nevertheless are flooding the public with their writing because they want attention personally and they anti-socially don’t care about the overall social problem of how people’s attention can find good ideas).
To give an example, I used to think that our food was broadly safe to eat. I had trust in science to have studied things like food additives and determined that they were safe. Now, having looked into it more, I’ve concluded that many things are horribly under-studied including e.g. milk homogenization, artificial sweeteners and food dyes/colorings. And industry has a recurring strategy of replacing problematic ingredients with unstudied ingredients. Another example is sunscreen – chemical sunscreens (as opposed to mineral), in short, have only been studied at doses below the recommended dose, and are probably a bad idea to use (especially for young children). But that doesn’t stop everyone from believing science has proven they’re safe and effective. There are many mundane scientific issues that aren’t particularly controversial, and are important to our lives, but just don’t ever get properly studied. It’s like that throughout. There’s no competent leadership organizing scientists and scientific experiments, yet for all sorts of understudied things we are constantly told to listen to the scientists and told that a particular conclusion has been reached by science (the people saying this are broadly incapable of reading scientific papers and just trust the media. also making scientific papers difficult to read is part of the game). It’s difficult to deal with because, while pretty much everything has a few contrarians opposing it, the contrarians generally don’t know what they’re talking about and are often wrong too.
Oh that one I was well aware of. I was following Scott Alexander currently at Astral Codex Ten, Eliezer Yudkowsky and the wider rationalist diaspora around the time the replication crisis became the big discussed thing.
That experience I attribute to my reluctance to get the jab. Saw every single way "The Science" had been conclusively shown to be systematically untrustworthy.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist in the sense that I think we need a total class war against the extractivist class who takes value without creating any and use violence inherent in the system to do so.
Where I disagree with Marx and Lenin is i don't see the ownership of property having anything to do with it as opposed to access to and holding rank within the state.
I want a class war of the kulaks and productive class of the free market, against the government employees and cronies, as class war as total and employing methods as extreme as Lenin's.
I agree that people with high rank/privilege are a problem. I’m guessing you’d agree that many people outside the state/govt are also privileged elites who can get favors from politicians and other elites. This includes most mega-rich people and executives of big corporations.
But I dislike the concept of class war. I agree with the (classical) liberal theory of the *harmony of men’s interests* (if they are rational and take into account the medium term not just the very short term) advocated by both Rand and Mises. I don’t want to fight with people or split society into warring classes/tribes (I know it already partly is that way, but I’m *against* that).
I see the elites broadly as foolish and ignorant people, who don’t actually have very good/happy lives, who (for their own benefit) need education with better ideas about their own interests (as well as about economics, politics, philosophy, etc.) There’s malice and dishonesty mixed in too, not just good intentions, but a lot of that would go away if they had and understood better options. Individually, each elite person is about as trapped as anyone else with no significant control over society and its major, flawed systems.
I define class by where money comes from. Some earn wages at private businesses proletariats , some run private businesses kulaks or bourgeoise depending on size...
The issue is private ownership of the means of production is no longer a chokepoint for extracting rents. Marxian economic analysis just does not apply.
The chokepoint for extracting rents and enslaving others is access to Government taxation paying your wage, government grants to ngos or univerties, or government violence to regulate your market and protect your rents.
The class of people who get their money solely as a result of state violence in vast and fundamentally an enemy of those who still make their money via free exchange on the open market.
Marx's economics is completely wrong, but his moral and political calaculus, that a productive class subjected to violence and exploitative extraction can only free themselves by waging war on the exploitative class... That remains one of the most powerful and accurate political analyses.
Thus why marxists were able to conquer half the world's countries but couldn't make them rich... Great political calculus, terrible economics.
but if you wed accurate libertarian economics to the Marxist political methodology of open total class war?
This is a truly fucking phenomenal Substack post and I’ll definitely be getting that book as well as recommending this to all.
Btw fun fact when Andrew Jackson was trying to beat his would be assassin to death it was Senator Davy Crockett who had to pull him off him so the assassin could stand trial.
As for Teddy there was a drunkard who came with 2 guns and called him 4 eyes in a bar. The Bull Moose may be one of the rare men in history who proceeded to knock him out cold with a 1-2 punch. Literally brought his fists to a gunfight and won. His life story is crazier than an anime like JoJo or Baki.
It strikes me that in a cocytarchy typical virtue, masculine behavior, and defense of your honor or dignity leads to ruin and descending down the pit. It could help us understand how Christian ethics developed, what purpose they serve and why they were so appealing. Embodying the sacrificial lamb and idealizing your own victimhood seems pathetic at first but if it's the only way to avoid being cast into the inferno then suddenly it starts to make sense. And if you're already on the edge of the pit or in the first layers then turning the other cheek, accepting your humiliations, and waiting for salvation/release may be the only path through purgatory.
It says terrible things about the late Roman Empire and the modern day. Every American man knows that if they live out their natural role as men they're taking on a life destroying risk. As we saw with with Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, if you try to be a hero demons will come from the ether to drag you to perdition. How can anyone live as more than a lamb in that system?
We can use this theory to further deconstruct Christianity by identifying it as the experience of cocytarchy taken to a cosmic world view. Cocytarchy creates Christianity, and given our modern experience, perhaps Christianity creates cocytarchy. Yahweh as prison warden.
I realise his anthropology has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but so much of this reminds me of Frazer's account of the King of the Wood at Nemi, and how he found it so baffling he essentially used it as a starting point to trying to explain all of human mythology.
Happy to have discovered you through your compelling twitter threads and now this masterpiece. In the end, do you think aristocracy and cotytarchy are only inverse societal structures that appear in greater or lesser profusion in different places at different times, or rather is this dynamic one reflection of a spiritual conflict that runs through human history.
I really enjoy your work - exercises the mind and conscience. I liked the reference to USMA. I was a third generation attendee, for two years anyway and bounced before being committed for 7 more.
Even in those ancient times and in a between war period (imagine that!) I found the collective either already planning for a Harvard MBA either in service or after doing the 5, or being part of the 200 or so who do 20-30 years as kings or princelings. My father and grandfather got over it eventually, their lamentations of how much they sacrificed to assure my candidacy aside, and I turned to the other dark arts - the law. We're all damned one way or another I guess.
*When Rand Paul proposed a bill mandating sufficient time be allocated to actually read bills it was regarded as an absurd stunt and earned him the ire of Washington insiders… largely because party heads are able to keep congressmen and senators in the dark and voting on whipped party line votes by keeping them drowned in fundraising activity and only granting access to 2000 page bills mere days before a vote. And of course Chuck Schuemer and Mitch McConnell don’t actually read these bills, they merely trust that the lawyers of the lobbyists who write them will do as their masters bid.*
The USA Congress vote 100 times per day. The average law is written on 2000 pages.
but what authority do you offer your readers that prisons used to be better ?
holly wood movies:
quote
he vast scale of mass incarceration in America makes the old informal social structure of prisons practically impossible. The Shawshank Redemption or prison shows like Orange is the New Black accurately capture the reality of prisons
unquote
now it is possible this is true, and it is possible it is in the book you cite, but you don't tell us that the book is your authority for this
This essay, a la Noam Chomsky, covers a lot of ground; one commends you on your renaissance erudition
but, sadly, for the one thing i know about and can easily fact check (as can anyone with access to the internet), you are in error
which certainly casts doubt on your entire essay
you don't need a congressional rec for west point ; but to flog a dead pixel, many colleges and jobs requier some sort of rec; this is almost standard
also, your rosy eye view of mafia families is, afaik, wrong; they didn't have some sort of code; they were just violent thugs who constantly murdered each other
Loved this! As for the "Why"s, I think many of the principles of Systemantics come into play here!
System incentives leading to a combination of:
1. "Functionary's Falsity"
- people in systems rarely do what the system says they're doing (eg. Kings focusing on assasinating eachother/defending from assassination rather than doing any actual ruling)
2. "Operational fallacy" - the system itself rarely does what it says its doing (eg. The parks admins not letting the public access the parks due to the self-preservation instincts inherent in a complex system, prisons serving as defensive fortresses for underworld generals rather than containing and diminishing their influence)
I think these things happen because of a combination of the fact that the path of least resistance tends to apply more often to emotions like "fear, greed, corruption" than more heroic traits, and the fact that large systems have infinite different ways to fail (the odds are super stacked against them due to unending complexity).
Considering all this, I think its a remarkable and awe inspiring testament to the greatness of humans that anything even "kinda works" at all!
Disturbing and brilliant. My feelings are a mix between my first exposure to excerpts of David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" and a particularly dark episode of "The Twilight Zone."
I'm passing this one around.
I'll have to contemplate deeply to seek workarounds. The ideas you expose here are BIG.
fucking brilliant. synthesizes a lot of the thoughts I was having while reading Social Order of the Underworld.
efficient trust & cooperation is the cornerstone of making any organization function. & this can only be achieved initially via *rewards* and not punishment. You can't emerge from a state of anarchy by punishing defectors and free-riders (because there are far too many of them), only by rewarding those who cooperate with you. The optimal mindset for rising up to the top in such an organization is "greedy" but extremely "non-envious" -- motivated heavily by rewards like money status fame but happy to engage in positive-sum trade that gets other people what they want to.
but if there are no rewards to give -- like in prison where all you can reward people with is smuggled cigarettes, drugs, or male prostitutes -- you can also "reward" people by burning down the commons and offering them respite from the damage you caused. prison gang leaders have no power to make the lives of their followers (or even their *own* lives) better; they "reward" their followers by exempting them from the random murders and acts of violence that they themselves cause.
similarly, politicians have no ability to make the lives of the average citizen they rule better -- they're not smart enough and social problems are far too intractable to solve by the machinery of the state. but they can create problems and then offer temporary solutions to their interest groups, which keeps them in power.
the optimal mindset for rising to the top in such an organization is "selfless" (i.e not motivated by personal reward, which is actually kind of monstrous when you think about it) and envious / spiteful -- willing to cut out one of their own eyes as long as someone else is losing two. the James Taggarts of the world (to channel Rand for a second here). Petty, small-minded, miserable bastards all of them.
your final conclusion is the standard libertarian one, that stability breeds dysfunction, while "creative destruction" keeps organizations healthy and seeking to create value rather than destroy it. i'm not quite sure I buy it though. stability is the *consequence* rather than the cause of the dysfunction. Prison gang leaders rot in supermaxxes because no one who isn't locked in solitary confinement wants to be a fucking prison gang leader. 90% of Congress incumbents win reelection, despite the 15% approval rate, because no one who isn't absolutely despicable wants to be a politician. (even if a rare honest, decent man or woman does get into DC they're certainly not running for a second term, it takes a certain level of depravity to do that.)
so I don't think stability is the issue here. but I don't know quite what it is that makes some organizations ruled by the best, and others ruled by the worst
"but I don't know quite what it is that makes some organizations ruled by the best, and others ruled by the worst."
Surely part of it must be the nature of the organization?
Criminal gangs exist to, at best, parasitize the host community. That organizational goal is going to exclude pretty much all non-awful people, and the structural incentives work their magic from there.
The other examples given fit this explanation. Kulak points to the military, contrasting its output to Washington and Grant. Washington and Grant emerged from a military with a clear constructive purpose and immediate goals, whereas the current US military has neither. Like the prison gangs, it's secured itself from any test of fitness, and now exists most straightforwardly to self-perpetuate, and to empower and enrich its own members at the expense of the community at large.
If I squint, the Scottish Kings fall into this same category. Ideally, Kings would be the hub of a community, providing leadership, coordination, and arbitration. For a king to serve any of these purposes, though, the first step of course is to have a secure throne. When the situation grows sufficiently chaotic, efforts to secure the throne themselves undercut any other objective, and conflict becomes self-perpetuating. The Throne is no longer a center of coordination but a prize to be fought over, so fighting is what the claimants do.
You mention the dysfunction of Congress and politicians generally. As with Grant and Washington, this doesn't seem to be an inevitable state, because I can point to politicians who really did seem to deliver solid governance and growing prosperity. It seems to come down to clear purpose and immediate goals. Are politicians running on whether to cut taxes or build a new hydro dam, to either prune government or to use it to deliver immediate, obvious utility? Not lately. Without any actionable plan of worth, all that's left is status games and grifting, so you get gamers and grifters. Maybe it's that simple.
"stability breeds dysfunction, while "creative destruction" keeps organizations healthy and seeking to create value rather than destroy it."
Well, we actually have an American historical example that this is really how it works. The Founders were famously opposed to having a standing military. When you track the level of government-funded armed forces in America, you will see that for the first 150 years, the American military is ALWAYS cut to the very bone following every peace treaty. Almost everyone is fired and sent home.
Consequently, the beginning of every new military action requires a massive call-up of civilians who have no formal training in the ways of war. In every case, the American military then spends the first six months of the new war trying to figure out how to do things, but once it has finished this shake-down period, it goes on to win the war.
When did this stop? Right after WW II - the very first war when we did NOT draw down the military following the signing of the peace treaty. Nobody got fired. And that's when America stopped decisively winning wars. If you study military theory from the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, it's a story of officers from the previous war trying to use the techniques that worked a few decades prior, and finding those old techniques didn't work at all in the new war.
There's a strong argument to be made that the American military should be cut to the very bone, so that when the next armed conflict occurs, civilians with fresh eyes and fresh ideas can be called in to resolve the issue.
Holy crap. Now that's a thesis I've never heard before. So does that mean that the old adage that "War is chaos. The American Army is chaos. The American Army wins wars" is no longer true?
>prison gang leaders have no power to make the lives of their followers (or even their *own* lives) better; they "reward" their followers by exempting them from the random murders and acts of violence that they themselves cause.
I think that applies equally to governments.
I think stability is the issue just on a survivability bias level: Unstable systems don't hang around, so we end up with a bunch of stable crappy systems. In other words: Moloch.
Beautiful. A lot to chew on in here, but I particularly like your dichotomy of Aristocracy as a pyramid of power and reward VS Cocytarchy (Or Cocytarcy? Still uncertain which I prefer...) being a literal open-air pit of concentric rings of power and suffering. Stark, evocative, and it feels instinctively right, in the way that only the greatest sense-making metaphors do.
As well, your thoughts here remind me of the old Slate Star Codex musings on Moloch. IE, why do systems designed to do good end up becoming nightmare abominations devouring human hopes and dreams and spitting out horror, ugliness and pain? Being part of the "public servant" kayfabe myself, I can say that your observations on bureaucracy and public institutions are spot-on. You have no idea (or maybe you do) what debasements I have been forced/seen forced/seen others be forced to submit to over the years solely to maintain inflated budgetary powers in localized fiefdoms desperate to have more, always more. Soul-deadening stuff.
I research Kubrick’s symbolism, and your discussion of Aristos illuminated something for me that I hadn’t understood very well before.
Kubrick has a sort of catch phrase that pops up in several of his films about “the best people.” It’s commonly interpreted as a snarky comment about social elites who abuse their positions and power over others, but I think there is more to it than that. I think it is also a hint about what we could do to make things better.
Kubrick loved to stack multiple layers of meaning beneath the elements in his art.
Kubrick was well aware of Korzybski’s General Semantics, as were other artists he admired. Tippi Hedren’s character in The Birds mentions studying General Semantics in San Francisco as a throw-away line, and Goldie Hawn’s character in Foul (Fowl) Play does the same.
Non Aristotelian logic, or Null-A was central to Korzybski’s methodology, and thus I think Kubrick’s sarcastic on screen praise for “the best” is a nod to those ideas. Null-A was also one of the sparks that inspired L Ron Hubbard to write Dianetics, so it seems clear (sorry) that it’s not ā technology that was or is ready to heal all minds.
But I think Kubrick figured out how to adapt and improve what he learned from Korzybski and others to embed subliminal lessons in his art that could heal some minds - the ones patient enough to learn his symbolic code.
I very much enjoyed reading your work, and I will probably let it sit in my mind for a few days and then go back through it again. Thank you for the effort you put into this. It really gave me a valuable new way of looking at some of my own research.
Hi. I just found you today and read this article. I’m an Objectivist (and happy to answer questions or criticisms, which I don’t think most other current Objectivists would do – I don’t get along with them either). I didn’t know you were a Marxist until I got to the end and read your Twitter bio. So on the one hand are beliefs are very different, but on the other hand I think we overlap quite a bit on disliking the current rulers, power structures, social hierarchies, etc. Perhaps being a disillusioned outsider or not matters more than left or right. I write philosophy https://criticalfallibilism.com
I know something about the mainstream being bad that you might potentially not already know, so I thought I’d tell you. In three words: *science is broken*. It’s not just how much the government controls grants and universities. It’s not just the replication crisis or “publish or perish”. It’s not just that a massive expansion of the number of scientists has flooded science with uncreative people who are bad at it (just like has been happening to every other scholarly pursuit – similarly on Substack you are competing for attention with vast numbers of people who don’t have anything novel or important to say, but nevertheless are flooding the public with their writing because they want attention personally and they anti-socially don’t care about the overall social problem of how people’s attention can find good ideas).
To give an example, I used to think that our food was broadly safe to eat. I had trust in science to have studied things like food additives and determined that they were safe. Now, having looked into it more, I’ve concluded that many things are horribly under-studied including e.g. milk homogenization, artificial sweeteners and food dyes/colorings. And industry has a recurring strategy of replacing problematic ingredients with unstudied ingredients. Another example is sunscreen – chemical sunscreens (as opposed to mineral), in short, have only been studied at doses below the recommended dose, and are probably a bad idea to use (especially for young children). But that doesn’t stop everyone from believing science has proven they’re safe and effective. There are many mundane scientific issues that aren’t particularly controversial, and are important to our lives, but just don’t ever get properly studied. It’s like that throughout. There’s no competent leadership organizing scientists and scientific experiments, yet for all sorts of understudied things we are constantly told to listen to the scientists and told that a particular conclusion has been reached by science (the people saying this are broadly incapable of reading scientific papers and just trust the media. also making scientific papers difficult to read is part of the game). It’s difficult to deal with because, while pretty much everything has a few contrarians opposing it, the contrarians generally don’t know what they’re talking about and are often wrong too.
Oh that one I was well aware of. I was following Scott Alexander currently at Astral Codex Ten, Eliezer Yudkowsky and the wider rationalist diaspora around the time the replication crisis became the big discussed thing.
That experience I attribute to my reluctance to get the jab. Saw every single way "The Science" had been conclusively shown to be systematically untrustworthy.
P.S. i'm also a big reader of Rand.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist in the sense that I think we need a total class war against the extractivist class who takes value without creating any and use violence inherent in the system to do so.
Where I disagree with Marx and Lenin is i don't see the ownership of property having anything to do with it as opposed to access to and holding rank within the state.
I want a class war of the kulaks and productive class of the free market, against the government employees and cronies, as class war as total and employing methods as extreme as Lenin's.
Anarchocapitalism via Marxist-Leninist methods
I agree that people with high rank/privilege are a problem. I’m guessing you’d agree that many people outside the state/govt are also privileged elites who can get favors from politicians and other elites. This includes most mega-rich people and executives of big corporations.
But I dislike the concept of class war. I agree with the (classical) liberal theory of the *harmony of men’s interests* (if they are rational and take into account the medium term not just the very short term) advocated by both Rand and Mises. I don’t want to fight with people or split society into warring classes/tribes (I know it already partly is that way, but I’m *against* that).
Here are two Mises quotes that explain which I really like: https://curi.us/2341-mises-on-harmony-of-interests
I see the elites broadly as foolish and ignorant people, who don’t actually have very good/happy lives, who (for their own benefit) need education with better ideas about their own interests (as well as about economics, politics, philosophy, etc.) There’s malice and dishonesty mixed in too, not just good intentions, but a lot of that would go away if they had and understood better options. Individually, each elite person is about as trapped as anyone else with no significant control over society and its major, flawed systems.
I define class by where money comes from. Some earn wages at private businesses proletariats , some run private businesses kulaks or bourgeoise depending on size...
The issue is private ownership of the means of production is no longer a chokepoint for extracting rents. Marxian economic analysis just does not apply.
The chokepoint for extracting rents and enslaving others is access to Government taxation paying your wage, government grants to ngos or univerties, or government violence to regulate your market and protect your rents.
The class of people who get their money solely as a result of state violence in vast and fundamentally an enemy of those who still make their money via free exchange on the open market.
Marx's economics is completely wrong, but his moral and political calaculus, that a productive class subjected to violence and exploitative extraction can only free themselves by waging war on the exploitative class... That remains one of the most powerful and accurate political analyses.
Thus why marxists were able to conquer half the world's countries but couldn't make them rich... Great political calculus, terrible economics.
but if you wed accurate libertarian economics to the Marxist political methodology of open total class war?
You'd free the world.
I strongly recommend you both listen to this, on the subject of class from a classical liberal perspective. https://mises.org/library/liberalism-what-living-and-what-dead
This is a truly fucking phenomenal Substack post and I’ll definitely be getting that book as well as recommending this to all.
Btw fun fact when Andrew Jackson was trying to beat his would be assassin to death it was Senator Davy Crockett who had to pull him off him so the assassin could stand trial.
As for Teddy there was a drunkard who came with 2 guns and called him 4 eyes in a bar. The Bull Moose may be one of the rare men in history who proceeded to knock him out cold with a 1-2 punch. Literally brought his fists to a gunfight and won. His life story is crazier than an anime like JoJo or Baki.
Excellent article! Lots of horrifying imagery.
It strikes me that in a cocytarchy typical virtue, masculine behavior, and defense of your honor or dignity leads to ruin and descending down the pit. It could help us understand how Christian ethics developed, what purpose they serve and why they were so appealing. Embodying the sacrificial lamb and idealizing your own victimhood seems pathetic at first but if it's the only way to avoid being cast into the inferno then suddenly it starts to make sense. And if you're already on the edge of the pit or in the first layers then turning the other cheek, accepting your humiliations, and waiting for salvation/release may be the only path through purgatory.
It says terrible things about the late Roman Empire and the modern day. Every American man knows that if they live out their natural role as men they're taking on a life destroying risk. As we saw with with Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, if you try to be a hero demons will come from the ether to drag you to perdition. How can anyone live as more than a lamb in that system?
We can use this theory to further deconstruct Christianity by identifying it as the experience of cocytarchy taken to a cosmic world view. Cocytarchy creates Christianity, and given our modern experience, perhaps Christianity creates cocytarchy. Yahweh as prison warden.
Sadly many high schools are like this. The lack of sanctioned tribes that fit Dunbar numbers mean such a descent
I realise his anthropology has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but so much of this reminds me of Frazer's account of the King of the Wood at Nemi, and how he found it so baffling he essentially used it as a starting point to trying to explain all of human mythology.
Happy to have discovered you through your compelling twitter threads and now this masterpiece. In the end, do you think aristocracy and cotytarchy are only inverse societal structures that appear in greater or lesser profusion in different places at different times, or rather is this dynamic one reflection of a spiritual conflict that runs through human history.
I really enjoy your work - exercises the mind and conscience. I liked the reference to USMA. I was a third generation attendee, for two years anyway and bounced before being committed for 7 more.
Even in those ancient times and in a between war period (imagine that!) I found the collective either already planning for a Harvard MBA either in service or after doing the 5, or being part of the 200 or so who do 20-30 years as kings or princelings. My father and grandfather got over it eventually, their lamentations of how much they sacrificed to assure my candidacy aside, and I turned to the other dark arts - the law. We're all damned one way or another I guess.
*When Rand Paul proposed a bill mandating sufficient time be allocated to actually read bills it was regarded as an absurd stunt and earned him the ire of Washington insiders… largely because party heads are able to keep congressmen and senators in the dark and voting on whipped party line votes by keeping them drowned in fundraising activity and only granting access to 2000 page bills mere days before a vote. And of course Chuck Schuemer and Mitch McConnell don’t actually read these bills, they merely trust that the lawyers of the lobbyists who write them will do as their masters bid.*
The USA Congress vote 100 times per day. The average law is written on 2000 pages.
They do what they are told.
Wow! Amazing to see you grow as a writer. This is your most beautiful work I've read yet. Bravo! Amazing.
When you say prisons use to be better (Parchman !!) it sounds a bit like this
https://mas.to/@paulisci@mstdn.ca/110561699098994193
but it might be possible
but what authority do you offer your readers that prisons used to be better ?
holly wood movies:
quote
he vast scale of mass incarceration in America makes the old informal social structure of prisons practically impossible. The Shawshank Redemption or prison shows like Orange is the New Black accurately capture the reality of prisons
unquote
now it is possible this is true, and it is possible it is in the book you cite, but you don't tell us that the book is your authority for this
shrugs
This essay, a la Noam Chomsky, covers a lot of ground; one commends you on your renaissance erudition
but, sadly, for the one thing i know about and can easily fact check (as can anyone with access to the internet), you are in error
which certainly casts doubt on your entire essay
you don't need a congressional rec for west point ; but to flog a dead pixel, many colleges and jobs requier some sort of rec; this is almost standard
also, your rosy eye view of mafia families is, afaik, wrong; they didn't have some sort of code; they were just violent thugs who constantly murdered each other
Loved this! As for the "Why"s, I think many of the principles of Systemantics come into play here!
System incentives leading to a combination of:
1. "Functionary's Falsity"
- people in systems rarely do what the system says they're doing (eg. Kings focusing on assasinating eachother/defending from assassination rather than doing any actual ruling)
2. "Operational fallacy" - the system itself rarely does what it says its doing (eg. The parks admins not letting the public access the parks due to the self-preservation instincts inherent in a complex system, prisons serving as defensive fortresses for underworld generals rather than containing and diminishing their influence)
I think these things happen because of a combination of the fact that the path of least resistance tends to apply more often to emotions like "fear, greed, corruption" than more heroic traits, and the fact that large systems have infinite different ways to fail (the odds are super stacked against them due to unending complexity).
Considering all this, I think its a remarkable and awe inspiring testament to the greatness of humans that anything even "kinda works" at all!
Disturbing and brilliant. My feelings are a mix between my first exposure to excerpts of David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" and a particularly dark episode of "The Twilight Zone."
I'm passing this one around.
I'll have to contemplate deeply to seek workarounds. The ideas you expose here are BIG.