Addendum to Omelas
Notes on Why It’s Our System’s Myth, Why We Can’t Appropriate It, & Why Dissidents Must Reject Its Premises (Part One of Two)
About a month ago, I tried to write a little fable, a riff on an established myth, to right a wrong I think it’s done. In retrospect, I think my story—“The Omelas They Left Behind”—fails to hang together, or even fit the hole I saw in its progenitor. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to read it for what follows). The point of the piece was to unapologetically throw cold water on a selfishly saccharine and mendaciously destructive kind of reasoning that’s recently become smothering and ubiquitous on every issue. In my view, the best example of this thought pattern is the very short Ursula LeGuin story called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” hence my attempt at a critical rewrite. The original is well worth reading, and is often understood as a virtue-ethical critique of utilitarianism, which, if true, would’ve been right up my alley. Perhaps it would even be true in other contexts, but here and now it’s a meme that comes from rot and spreads like typhus.
Basically, in the original story, there’s a utopia called Omelas, characterized by insubstantial pleasures: “I fear that Omelas strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples.” LeGuin seemingly accepts the passive satisfaction of simple preferences with easy treats—as opposed to the dynamic triumph over meaning-rich obstacles—as utopic, except for the fact that one drawn-out child sacrifice occurs, and so sometimes an individual stoically self-exiles in disgust. Many smugs interpret this as an invocation to look for the tradeoffs that necessarily undergird everything important, so that we can find some cost and then condemn its associated benefits. But it may have been meant as a more direct critique of the author’s utopian progressive writer friends, under whose childish banner of “free love” the most horrific kinds of open pedophilia proliferated (for instance, see such pillars of the California sci-fi/fantasy community as Marion Bradley and Walter Breen, serial baby rapists whose acolytes continue to serve as its grotesquely preening gatekeepers through control over certain award panels and publishing groups, so that they can myopically promote either hedonic tolerationism or totalitarian hedonism).
After all, this was back when the LGBT movement much more honestly foregrounded its P component, as can be seen in the vile fake science of abnormal sex, kick-started by malignantly kid-obsessed con-men like Alfred Kinsey and John Money, or through any quick perusal of the rabidly pedophilic “foundational texts” for college “queer theory” classes (by the likes of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler). Just look up Allen Ginsburg on child porn and Michel Foucault on the age of consent. Or even consider mainstream liberationist musicals like Hair, which devotes one song to wondering why spoilsport parents keep their young from experimenting with experienced adults in certain fun group activities—like “sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty.” And “puberty blockers” got invented for chemically castrating pedophiles! It’s thus worth noting that they’re quite clearly trying to normalize child-grooming again, what with massive astroturfed campaigns for: empathizing with “minor-attracted persons” as if they have a “chronic condition” we should palliate; sending transvestite strippers into libraries and daycares for “drag queen story hour”; helping “transgender” middle- and high-schoolers meme themselves into a much higher-status and vastly more damaging body dysmorphia than anorexia; the list goes on. Further, arguably the biggest political push by queer organizations this year was their widespread screeching against what they called an anti-gay law… which would impose mild orientation-neutral limits on sexually explicit “education” in Florida’s public elementary schools. However, the year is not quite finished, and their biggest priority since the start of their highly promiscuous holy month has been waging struggle sessions against anyone who points out that this monkeypox pandemic is obviously an infection overwhelmingly spread by anal sex.
Yes, this is a marked decline from the movement’s perhaps well-intentioned circa-2010 attempts at expanding stable family-friendly norms to encompass a rapidly growing population of radically anti-familial relationships; but another word for decline is descent, and another meaning of descent is lineage. The groups created to promote gay marriage clearly weren’t going to lay themselves off once they won that fight—no matter how central “getting laid” may be to their struggle—and the marriage conservatives who had robust popular opinion on their side from time immemorial until a few years ago clearly predicted just such a slippery slope. Thus, like those who walk away from Omelas, we can’t really feign ignorance of the horrifically mutilated kids that are byproducts of or fuel for so much pride. Though in a strange reversal of that parable, what we must either leave behind or tame is “the desolate freedom of the wild ass,” as Hobbes put it… so you can always just move beyond that lustful wilderness for civilization (where there may actually be some hard-won pearls worth clutching, and not just swine who pretend their clams are jewels, or who helplessly oink about how the sand they’ve let up there doesn’t actually belong in them). In short, if you make love free, then you can’t act shocked at its devaluation, or at the grotesque fetishes which then by Gresham’s Law replace it. The bad shall chase out the good when we must judge them at par, yes, but worse: next, our smug judgment will double down on all it’s lost, throwing ever more goods back in after those bads. What if I sunk so many decent things for nothing? What if something’s about to turn around?
If you force a market for peaches to fully accept lemons, then you drive out everything sweet about it, and leave the tolerant with a duty to scrape together lemonade, or scry for sugar elsewhere too… and then the least sour left among you become targets for yet worse fruits, be they rotten or bitter. After all—much as modern states are defined by their borders rather than their cores—any “rule of law” must pretend that it can’t distinguish lawful goods from lawful bads, just like every right is necessarily a right to be wrong. So if an edge case comes under legal protection, only social discrimination keeps it from assuming a position of centrality: precisely because laws are forces of homogenization, slippery slope scenarios require aggressive enforcement against each such boundary-pusher, or else we cease to be lawfully governed. In other words, by definition, the law has trouble discriminating, which is why interpersonal norms must. As Carlyle put it, “Tolerance has to tolerate the unessential, and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate!” Or do you take your ethical cues from governance mechanisms? Do you think that the point of law is goodness rather than peace, and that the point of goods is lawfulness? Do you render unto Caesar what is God’s, and unto God what is Caesar’s? If so, then why not issue shares in your moral compass, and follow where their holders point? After all, the transition from rule-by-status to rule-by-contract has already convinced many status-hungry moralizers to contract a certain brain-worm, which only judges others for hypocrisy, not evil; these useful idiots thus help regime-demons to stamp out unlicensed critics as counterfeiters, for not bearing the mark of the beast (in other words, for failing to coherently worship those icons, like BLM, which we all must now accept as the very terms of legitimate debate). Of course, this willingness to critique the censor’s magic passwords is exactly what distinguishes true dissidents from mere dissenters, and so those lawyer-types who condemn “bad faith” are really demanding that we silence our real disagreements with whatever their masters are up to. If you disagree with “Black Lives Matter” as a particularly desirable end, instead of merely doubting that crime legalization will bring us there, then that means you should say the special thing which gets you banned.
Should we send up monks into mountain sanctums, to imagine hypothetical exceptions from standard rules? They can conjure up the concept of a woman who somehow isn’t female, so that their most enlightened ones can then wail down at us about how hard it might be to classify this abstraction. Yet we have become so very small, have so thoroughly shriveled into compulsive tics, able to fit inside the screens on our phones, that we neither take solace in such koans nor try to build perpetual motion machines atop their logical contradictions; much less do we ignore them. Instead, we demand that someone, anyone, cover us all in enough duct tape and WD40 to fix this anomaly, or at least cover it up. Seasoned psywar operatives might implant you with gut-level internal inconsistencies and call your cause of death seppuku. Wherever epistemic terrorists call-in to powerful bureaucracies with sophomoric puzzles—like wrenches tossed in gear-machines, or shemales in women’s restrooms—our heroic detectives promptly show up to seize these organizations as mere props for their official mystery shows. Wait, listen, they’re broadcasting new solutions now: “Our enigma squad has determined that it’s actually a laddy’s restroom, folks!” We shall dissolve our natural borders because of the coastline paradox, and demand that the sea people swallow us. We shall become a swamp without beginning or end, each patch endlessly fungible with every other, and cover this earth, an entropic archipelagoo. Lament your biology for defining reproduction as between a man and a woman, and your civilization for privileging this most fundamental form of development. So traditional! And now cheer for your army, which features the planet’s first ever trans troops (or “troons”)… because we recognize that every warrior caste in world history has always been powered by transgenderism, from butch soviet conscripts back to ancient amazonians. Et cetera.
We Make Men without Chests
An honest modern application of LeGuin’s Omelas myth might thus try to focus on some such debt we all know that certain victims are paying on behalf of grand frivolous widely-promoted celebrations, about which we are too ashamed or superficial to frankly speak. For example, we all know that the rate at which homosexuality got men killed in the 1980s US was literally thousands of times higher than the rate at which it’s gotten them killed under the caliphates of ISIS or Iran. But consider the three major achievements of our eighties-era gay movement, which like Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez now gets preached in the classrooms of all America’s colonies, from pre-independence Afghanistan to the once-great Britain. First, the medical establishment oh-so-considerately rebranded Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome as AIDS, to pretend that male homosexuality is not a significant risk factor (even though men with same-sex partners contract the disease at about thirty times the average national rate). Second, the CDC kept gay bath-houses open, despite close-minded public opinion, for instance by arguing in a 1984 paper that—if you control for number of anonymous sex partners—then going to anonymous sex clubs is not associated with contracting the virus. And, third, the NIH switched from a prevention-focused to a treatment-first approach, which has led to a culture in this country’s major cities where fully half of gay men regularly take Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, a drug that protects you from catching the bug if your kink is condomless hook-ups… yet over 20% of gay men there are sick with it, compared with a nationwide rate of about 0.15% for straights, pretty much none of whom are on PrEP.
Consider that several months ago the subway station for the National Institutes of Health featured an ad about how you shouldn’t let an HIV diagnosis get in the way of your independent sex life; meanwhile, their campus maintained ubiquitous checkpoints where humorless bubble-boys vigorously enforced hand-sanitization, mask-wearing, and a catechism about covid exposure, all in exchange for color-coded daily clearance stickers. Their parent agency’s official website still calls for decriminalizing intentional AIDS transmission in the 35 states which as of yet haven’t. Could you explain to any businessman from fifty years ago why every company with more than fifty employees must now, under the Affordable Care Act, offer each of their gay male workers a free prescription for PrEP, which costs roughly $20,000 per year? “It’s to inefficiently subsidize an extremely high-risk and absurdly promiscuous lifestyle,” obviously, but how did all this come to pass? Maybe the problem lies with our judgmental past, not our permissive present, just as perhaps the true horror of “Brave New World” is that its inattentive school-age readers cannot see soma parties and sterile orgies as empowering or meaningful. “Its ancillary characters are generously trying to show us and our prudeish stand-in protagonists a good time, yet you ingrates insist on being judgmental guests!” Better send some “sex workers” into classrooms asap, to help us educate them out of this implicit bias!
There would be no shortage of these powerful modern-day Omelas myths without our shortage of honest mythmakers, because there are so many such untold stories that are just so clearly true, enabled by our silence. Ask Google whether you should bring your children to their holey-day (one such result, from the Washington Post: “Yes, kink belongs at Pr*de. And I want my kids to see it.”). Then remember that nearly half of pedophilia victims are boys, even though pretty much all pedophiles are men, especially if you count them by their chromosomes. Rewrite “The Laramie Project” to show how an elite campaign of hackish liars descended like vultures on a tortured corpse; they cast themselves as noble heroes who defended their dead victim from posthumous echoes of deadly hate. If you’re willing to be targeted, you can describe how they covered up that Matthew Shepard was actually murdered by a man to whom he dealt meth, and with whom he had frequent—though still hardly “regular”—casual sex, who then fell into a drug-fueled psychosis. Or try portraying what really happened at the Stonewall riot. You could usefully publish perfectly accurate portrayals of the gender-Mengeles who demand that we fund and celebrate their little ritual castrations of troubled minors, all to help the rest of us feel more accepting and benevolent. For example, Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher loves posting quirky TikToks using affected zoomer slang, such as videos in which she calls double-mastectomies for thirteen-year-olds “the teet yeet.” Of course transgenderism would evolve to better hunt its prey! “Are you so anxious and coddled that you can’t handle a phone call, but so disembodied and nihilistic that you nevertheless want an irreversible genital mutilation surgery fast? If you message me now, I’ll throw in 69 fidget-spinners for free…” The lumbersome parents who moldered into this timbering of their family tree get shout-outs on her stream as accomplices if they keep on going along with it, or else get pricked with a million little deformed and outraged splinters for dragging their feet at all.
But something must be missing from this analysis, because I’m not actually uncovering hidden truths. The journalists and scholars who feted “Patricia” Trimble as a feminist queer incarcerated activist could have looked up his conviction for brutally raping two nine-year-olds, or how he tortured a mentally handicapped cellmate to death; yet they didn’t, and they aren’t interested in learning from or even admitting their mistake. Somehow nobody powerful seems to notice all these monstrous refutations of their attempts at normalizing “sex change” even though the Willie Horton kind of advertisement works (a little well-placed samizdat can get edgy teens chanting “trans women are criminals” but we’re supposed to believe that our elites, with all their manic influencers and censorship hysterias, don’t know this?). Nobody needs archivists to spelunk through ashy ruins—looking for Weimar’s lost Institute of Sex Research—to learn how beastly these modern “gender affirming” procedures actually are, so I will not at length describe them here. Just note that neovaginas are mucosa-less open wounds, which therefore stringently require literal hours of dilation every day for years, and ample douching. Common complications include everything from necrotic tissue to feces-leaking fistulas, and phalloplasties are even ghastlier. If you’re an organ donor, your sterilized cadaver skin could be used to construct these pallid imitations of overly romanticized canals for hopeless males, who lie back and think of Venice… as if Charon, the mythical gondolier, shall ferry our lost souls into the afterlife by rowing us upriver towards a dead-end anti-womb: your ghost’s grisly shell will get operated on in hell’s anteroom.
These are clearly hostage situations, where the sorts of people who put up shrill yard slogans demand ransom offerings from us to let our attentions go. In “Time Out of Joint,” Philip K Dick builds a stifling yet idyllic false fifties prison with such signs, as when mere “lemonade stand” labels in empty lots appear to conjure for our hero whatever you think those words connote. But now they call down predictable destruction in Iraq or Libya or Ukraine, or among a domestic identity group, just so they can feel as though some favored journalists might say that their fleeting opinions are historically correct, that their mantras could get remembered by some petty future power as having been on its right side. In this house, right after I first watch George Floyd’s award-winning snuff tape, we believe that black lives matter! So let’s host weekly screenings (“indeed, me too, it positively takes my breath away each time”) until policymakers show how much they value our input, mine, by doing something drastic just for us, a grand gesture, like… like doubling black homicide rates now. Or: I value democratic norms ever so very much that pro-democracy reforms from India to Poland must not stand! “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me,” they declare with every vote. It’s of course our fault, for degrading leadership’s official power over administrative entities, so that we mere normal people can feel entitled—or, better yet, expected—to offer up our oh-so-important opinions on how a given leader should run any particular agency. “Look, I have quite strong stances about the characters placed in lesser cabinet roles; in fact, I’m playing in a fantasy league where we all make imaginary departmental appointments and then cancel each other over them.”
San Francisco thus ends up with DAs and school boards too nutty for even them when they directly elect these positions, hence their latest recall efforts. Why not just weigh in on who should lead, a mayor who’s actually chief of his executive branch, then let him do it? You can see if someone’s taken charge by whether the daylit streets still glitter and stink with littered needles and feces, the sloughed-off prickly droppings of dying vegetable matter, mulch on concrete, our culture’s autumnal foliage; nor will your view on evening strolls or jogs or drives be of shiny bureaucrats holding press conferences to blame each other, blaring out of each successive building’s windows, frame by frame. You’ll hear birds again: it shall be like new weather rolling in, inescapable, if you want it. And the same goes for presidents, who currently can’t fire most of their ostensible subordinates, from our country’s real rulemaking roles down to the civil service rank-and-file… even though most people already vote based on simple healthy signals like the price of gas or money or stocks, the physiognomy of candidates, and whether we look like the planet’s future, or look toward outer space. We have thus made a martyr of our every sovereign—allocating various accountabilities to them without actual authority—and arrogating for ourselves (with whinnies and whines) an awful self-assured aloofness from our acts, intoxicated with only the fanciest vintages of narcissism. “Everyone serves the fine wine first, and then the cheap wine after the guests are drunk. But you have saved the fine wine until now!”
Look ahead one decade: our constitution clearly forbids anyone from prosecuting people for what was legal at the time, so we will either have to hope for leaders with enough balls to unlawfully imprison those who made us all in different ways dickless, or figure out how this country can truly wake from such a nightmare without spasmodically avenging itself. Otherwise, our doctors will just claim to have never supported any of this lunacy once public opinion shifts, and so risk falling back into bad ways if it ever does again. Seeming respectable matters much more to them than does their Hippocratic Oath, which means they have no long-run skin in the game of grafting girl-thighs into rotting dildos, sure, but also that they’ll discard any truths deemed problematic, like reality’s transphobia. That’s why they never seriously inform unstable patients who seek such second-hand attentions—“I want to be a muse for this fad, oh please won’t you make me an object of your noble art”—about these risks, and it’s why we can’t really trust their cheap mea culpas whenever those finally come. It’s why conformist ideologues avow that anti-trans conversion therapy constitutes terrible harm, and yet also that the trans have a life expectancy of 35 (below all their piles of ever-circulating clickbait which claim this, the only relevant source appears to be a list of several hundred gender-troubled people who died by homicide, and so died young, largely due to robberies or gang activity or domestic violence rather than more condemnable forms of so-called “hate”). They seem to believe that, even though sex isn’t biologically real, this new fad which strongly concentrates in certain social clusters must be basic biology, and so cannot be cured, and so must be made safer, through irreparably visceral validation ceremonies… which result in suicide rates over twenty times the general population’s average. Still, one can always imagine arbitrarily haunting counterfactuals. If we refuse to amputate this adolescent’s breasts, she could theoretically keep on using “he/him/his” pronouns long after all her other embarrassing high school hobbies fade away; so what if, hypothetically, this implies a suicide risk that’s twenty-one times the baseline? What if two percent of the population has been secretly trans forever, or even more if this trend keeps on spreading, and they’ve all been killing themselves at such elevated rates until now? What if every act of self-harm in history counts as evidence of closeted hermaphroditism! Then wouldn’t embracing this condition seem potentially less awful than burying it? Of course, admittedly, suicide rates have been skyrocketing as our society has become further entransed, but that’s because you haven’t added in enough proper epicycles blah blah blah.
When I’ve read stories which try to shame or warn against these tendencies, like perhaps “The Lottery,” they seem too straightforwardly cautionary. Look how incoherent or demonic these uncanny puppets can be, how neatly tangled up, how familiarly possessed! But just as the meaning of Omelas can change with a reader’s context, we might need simple fables now that are not about uncaring hedonists, because our addicts believe they’re sick, or that they’re healers, not compulsive sociopaths. We need more myths about an ideology of disease, which pushes enterprising commoners to become zealously ill so weak elites can demonstrate their care, and is infectious. And yet: such allegories aren’t already over-obvious only because nobody in this egregore’s grip even accepts that we sacrifice children as an acceptable cost of adult degeneracy. The Aztecs sliced open young women’s chests in accordance with long-run well-established best-practices for helping the God Huitzilopochtli—who in turn shed pieces of himself to raise the sun, which burnt itself down to raise the corn that let us rip off its ears to feed ourselves. Whereas, in contrast, we pretend like our sacrifices are affirmations of the sacrificial victim, rather than symbols of how much we value… whatever it is that gets consecrated by this performatively brutal imposed cost. Sure, “gender affirmation” in particular is just a logical consequence of pretending that gender can continue to be meaningful when we forbid both its biological and cultural correlates from carrying any official weight (because then only circular assertions about it can remain); in other words, your “gender identity” can only contain your claims about your gender identity, once it loses all access to material and social distinctions. And, sure, gender affirmation “surgeries” have caught on with such contagion because predatory doctors cannot easily be held liable for either disfiguring or sterilizing children, if their only medical standard is faddishly adhering to the patient’s unfalsifiable self-diagnosis. But there’s also a larger pattern at play.
In short, our current sacrificial practices rely on us denying that this lunacy actually harms the poor forlorn creatures we cut up, because we use these bloody customs to transubstantiate ourselves into their saviors. You can see this dynamic in miniature whenever apparatchiks who are obvious men or women gain status by redundantly announcing their gender pronouns; it shows them off as decent allies of this prim regime. Whereas, in contrast, consider those ambiguous, off-putting figures on whose behalf such pronouncements ostensibly happen, and how they merely demonstrate their identity’s reliance on these rituals, this neurotic regimentation, when they sheepishly join in. Same goes for the roughly two percent of babies born with sex-chromosomal disorders, and how the system’s enlisted journalists use them as rough justification for Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau: sure, if intersex people really exist then we should also let the liberal arts kids who just wish they were mutants enroll as test subjects in some freak experiments, that’s only fair. Admittedly, granted, it may be true that well over ninety percent of these genetic disorders are too trivial to really notice (except in a few particular lab tests). However, we must now raise awareness about and empathy towards them, which entails conflating their often minor birth defects with mentally deranged medical monsters, because that’s quite useful nowadays for propping up our monstrous mash. And, unfortunately, this process only worsens itself… the more frequently such travesties happen—everything from rectovaginal fistulas to males-in-wigs in women’s prison—the less proper honest conversation on transgenderism becomes. If its actually relevant nuts and bolts get worse, then so will their censorship at cocktail parties or NPR interviews. Yes, puerile tabloids might thus broadcast out a bit more of this titillating distant horror for their fairly normal audience, alongside grocery store check-out lane features on what species Britain’s next royal is, or late-night radio bait about who secretly controls the Washington Monument’s red-eyed “omega device.” Yet what’s really needed is coverage by political spokespeople, who neither optimize for clicks nor sophistication but rather on following a leader whom we can then choose to support. For these reasons, a critique of LeGuin’s Omelas narrative is in order, instead of an application. So that’s what I tried to do. Unfortunately, fiction is far harder to write than are essays, though each can either critique or apply a dominant memeplex, or at least try.
And We Expect of Them Virtue
So I associate our society’s ascendant mythological framework with LeGuin’s well-executed allegory, but my seemingly straightforward application of it above to critique the LGBTABC blob sounds quite cancellably controversial. However, if the last few years have taught us anything, it should be that you can always receive status-points for supporting horrendous and incomprehensible object-level claims, conditional on using the right mythological framework: we need to abolish the police because of something about protecting black trans women! I support escalating a proxy war with Russia for hypothetically queer members of the Ukrainian mafia state’s neo-nazi potempkin militias! Handing out free crack pipes to street people is a solid infrastructure program, because they lead miserable lives! And, in a society like ours—with such weak hierarchies that shrillness from those deemed prestigious can control policy-making power—these myths move reality. No wonder US imperial outposts around the world have begun lowering their American flags and raising the rainbow one, rebranding our evil projects abroad as merely gay. (Just remember that when your praetorians no longer pretend to represent you, and instead pledge fealty to some eschatological interventionist elite-aligned mystery cult, their march of history may start stomping on faces back home). But if our society just reasons according to some particular narrative tropes, and yet would clearly condemn a specific attempt at using those tropes, then that attempted use must have misjudged what those tropes actually are. “I filled out your mad-libs morality form with an argument about how you’re the bad guys, don’t you get it, now everyone has to change their minds on all of this!” No, it would be silly for me to “correct” them into accepting “better” tropes, to make my critiques of Pride land better, by whining about their unreasonableness or inconsistency… if some people have been convinced to chant in favor of abolishing the police, and if they’re plastering their cars with bumper stickers which demand that Big Brother make love to more of their kids, then they’re optimizing on incentives beyond what any honest debate could reach. They’re even beyond subterfuge, in the sense that there’s no sly pedophile cabal hiding its aroused members behind labcoats to conspiratorially trick nice parents about Moloch’s intentions with their children. Many of these professional “puberty blockers” might well be sick freaks, but replacing them with gender traditionalists wouldn’t do much good while bored suburbanites froth at the mouth for new disgusting aberrations to tolerate more than their neighbors do. So neither logic nor trickery can work a conversion into such bodies, not while their souls are on strike, while they’re merely players of games, but that’s why prophets never traffic in these frivolous plays, and instead forge new commandments that can even inspire metal to bend itself afresh. “If you’re set on striking, fine, then carry on while I make this iron hot, and you shall serve in my smithy.”
It seems to me like the main issue is that our Omelas myth does not get used to point out questions of moral hazard, principal-agent misalignment, or transaction cost. (Moral hazard is when increases in some acceptable thing also accidentally increase something unacceptable, as with slippery slopes or Goodhart’s Law; principal-agent problems occur when your ostensible representatives face incentives at odds with your interests, as with legislators or lobbyists who seek to foment the very problems they were hired to solve; and transaction costs cause you to compromise on particular values for a bundle deal, as with agitator coalitions or bureaucratic kludges). Instead, Omelism only condemns us for issues relating to prisoner dilemmas, tragedies of the commons, and asymmetric information, because these are errors caused by too much agency, rather than too little. The problem wasn’t a moral hazard which could be solved by greater intentionality, but rather a prisoner’s dilemma, where you need some barriers imposed on your ability to pursue rational interests, because agentive rationality supposedly caused this issue. Or: the problem wasn’t a principal-agent misalignment which could be solved by taking back strength from those who exert power in your name, but rather a tragedy of the commons, where you need a lord who gives you less of what you ask for, because your pre-existing preferences ostensibly led to this. Or, the problem wasn’t a transaction cost which could be solved by more efficiently pursuing your values, but rather asymmetric information, so you need regulations to fine you for pursuing your own values more accurately than a regulator could, because your trickery supposedly did this to your society.
It’s of course quite easy to say that any problem comes from your enemies having agency, instead of you lacking it: they were just too dang rational, given their preferences, and so tricked our civilization into this! If they actually had that power over you, then it wasn’t your society to begin with, and you should just move on, as LeGuin tells you to. (Of course, though, LeGuin thinks you should leave because it is your town but shouldn’t be, because you’re fallen, so it fell, so go fall away further from it in penance). And the power of myth is only to tell you whether you’ve been too sinful or too weak—whether you should wither your own agency or flex it—because you can’t just give up someone else’s agency, and your motivating narratives only have power through your own personal acts, which is why it’s crucial to make sure that these memes are truly aligned with you. So the question is, once you decide on disliking some social outcome, whether to blame it on your treachery against yourself or your weakness at resisting others… or, more accurately, whether or not you expect yourself to try to worsen what you now recognize as a problem. Frankly, when it comes to your everyday ethical stances, as opposed to matters of technical expertise, I think this question just comes down to whether you’re looking for excuses or choices, for judgment or power, and so anyone who actually decides to choose between these options has in essence already chosen. After all, agency, like bravery, kindness, excitement, and so forth, is infectious; there’s much more to be had by cultivating your preferred order than blaming a fringe of troubled people for becoming props in a sick society, or blaming any other such up-flowering of weakness. “How dare a super-majority of typical intermediationists across our entire society, from HR administrators to ESG auditors, each get coincidentally tricked all of a sudden by the same very bad idea! What’s the deal with all their simultaneous individual failings in this job category that selects for cloistered power-hungry conformism?” A culture which values personal virtues like honesty and perseverance instead of political beliefs, from anti-discrimination agendas to bureaucratic ideologies, would not have been so vulnerable or sterile. In practice, this might look like state-building as an aesthetic project, for promoting a particular way of life, like 1950s religious family norms, or muscular frontier masculinity, instead of pretending that marginal tax rates determine social forms. “But where would Bismarck set the inflation target, or the CTC phase-out rate?” Shut up and go lift some weights! Then shall come dreams of new peoples, new borders, and new sects.
Consider what a culture of virtue might look like, by looking back to natural law reasoning. If “species” or “types” are defined by their function (“man is the rational animal”), then individuals are defined by their fundamental essences, not accidents of their particular life: each man is judged not in terms of his particular performance on matters of rationality, but rather as one who has a general capacity for reason. “You should’ve known better, even if you didn’t!” Hence, we must cultivate our inherent potential instead of assuming intrinsic dignity. Our given “natures”—language, long childhoods, etc.—thus imply a need for investing in certain “second natures,” like honest speech or faithful parenthood, which come to define a healthy type, a shining target, the north star in our possibility-space. Because our messy natures definitionally cannot be helped by us, we must only cultivate ourselves with a clear-eyed value-neutral view of every reality about ourselves… much as evolution works by endowing each individual in a lineage with countless randomly-shuffled immutable programs, so that selection may, through piercing judgment, matter-of-factly maximize the underlying species-being’s consilient fitness, the whole order’s unifying “general factor”, which is to say the over-man. Many fundamental insights confirm this, from boring math about how convex hulls generally converge on general equilibria, which I’ll skip, to beautiful creatures. It is just like how, though cosmic rays hail down different deleterious mutations on parallel worlds, those other earths multiversally converge on certain evolutionary forms, as if higher life inhabits a planetary kind of intertidal zone. It’s just like those glorious powerful beasts who ripple across earthly shores of innumerable realities, where the quantum wave-function breaks into this planet’s twinkling beaches, like stones God honed for skipping up along the surf, hovering above dark sea depths, every kiss of cosmic waters a fresh baptism. Just like “fish” and “crabs” and “trees” exist as convergent strategies rather than monophyletic sets, as constellations glimmering over oceanic gaps in common ancestry, rhyming without shared histories. Which is all only written here, in this particular collapse of superpositions, to illuminate the most important fact about your existence. Which is that the frontiers of your best second-natures trace the outlines of your highest purpose, who waits, encased in latency, but bright with truth, for you to come. Like a simple theorem patiently awaiting whoever proves worthy of the labyrinthine hull that hides it, or a proof in search of its Theseus. In other words, because virtue is about becoming worthy of who you are, its first-order consequences only matter indirectly; e.g., you may feel better, and even lose your taste for drugs, when you sober up, but you don’t go sober in order to feel good or cultivate your tastes. You do it to become greater than a shadow of your true self, strong enough to make it effortlessly stick.
In contrast, second-order consequences just matter indirectly to consequentialists, so they use time- and volatility-based “discount rates” to devalue benefits which accrue to distant futures or high-risk, high-reward payoffs. A dynamic project is in their utilitarian eyes only great insofar as its expected cash-flow gets disgorged towards buying alms for the least among us, instead of truly raising them up… which is why “effective altruists” will each tendentially defect even by their own standards too much from reinvesting the fruits of progress in either its foundations or its heights. Further, because such ultimately distributional programs necessarily demand more legibility and fungibility and liquidity—so they can optimally transfer cogs between domains—they’ll undervalue internal drives and special qualities and reliable commitments, and so allow themselves to be replaced by the vigorous and virtuous and vitalist. They will find some dimension to myopically optimize on, and open themselves up to endless Pascal-muggings along it. For instance, instead of critiquing woke myths, I could be prostituting myself in order to help fund an efficient anti-malarial charity, unless of course I want innocent children to die for my prudishness or skepticism. My point isn’t even just that this particular mythology tricked our adaptive morality instinct into, e.g., caring so much about DDT’s negative impacts on certain predatory birds (who don’t really carry our genes and can’t decide to cooperate back) that we imperially banned third-world countries from continuing to effectively eradicate malaria with it. Rather, my point is that only a stably-defined entity can broker arrangements between its own past and future, as is necessary for any dynamic process; otherwise, progress relative to some baseline can only come from violating predictions or breaking commitments, as if freedom inheres best in epileptics, whose limbs have no loyalty to their plans, and in jailbirds, whose irresponsibility leads them to a magical utopia, guarded by bars and walls, where actions cannot affect the outside world, and so are unconstrained by it. In other words, as should be obvious, your accidents of circumstance only acquire meaning for you in relation to your life’s real essence. That’s why every fundamental law is written in the form of second-order differential equations: it’s exactly what’s necessary for conserved quantities to act. We care about airplanes and projectiles in terms of their momenta, which is nothing but an accounting trick for tabulating force. You just feel your velocity by integrating over memories of accelerations felt.
The core of this dispute comes down to agentarianism versus utilitarianism: an agent, as opposed to an instrument, changes paths when paths change direction, to reach an unchanged destination; a utilitarian sees the path as the point, and helps you along it, plying drug addicts with “safe” opioids and “free” needles, as if temptation were a nonsense category (because only our desires matter, and what could be more tempting). “We’re not moving fast enough, so let’s go somewhere else!” Ok, sure, this can make sense, but only in the same indirect way that “it’s too crowded so nobody goes there” does. The agentic mindset gives a presumption of liberty to production, however this may impact consumers, whereas welfarists presume that libertinism lacks externalities, and so reorient our society toward just satisfying its hungriest ghosts, by whatever means it must. The goal-posts come closer, they’re charging at the ball you’ve let yourself become, a spineless and spherical cow. You’re weakly rolling wherever wind wants. The net is taut, it’s pouncing, it’s caught your wheezing husk. And then, after the bleachers empty, and the grass grows thick, it gradually also loosens, frays, decays. The ultimate, degrading end comes not when we diss or dismiss would-be leaders for boldly disrupting our habitual pleasures, for demanding a sacrifice of treats rather than of acts, but when we stoop yet lower, to herald the tastes of degenerates, doers of wrong, of death. First, we are told that punishments actually, get this, harm the punished, and that this is an unfortunate side effect of keeping our society safe for personal betterment, and should be fixed. And then, when this predictably leads to rampant crime, we can’t recall the proper words, like sin, or wickedness, or evil. We’ve lost all ability to sputter out that virtue matters more, that there are moral rules to this world which can’t be legislated away, that we have made an ethical error worth correcting with legislation, and with execution of the laws, and even, sometimes, without hysteria in either direction, of the lawless. For if we cannot say that murder is metaphysically bad, and therefore deserving of punishment, on what basis can we say that desires are good, and therefore deserving of fulfillment? On what basis reject one’s revealed preference for murder, if we accept his weaker preference against prison? Of course, don’t revel in mean sentiments, any more than you would ogle ugly models to confirm your aesthetic values. Indulging in sadism could even be spiritually worse than mainlining saccharine concern for the condemned. But if you don’t have a preference for murderers to suffer—beyond your preference for disincentivizing and confining them—then murderers with a revealed preference for happily braving certain death to commit murder should be loosed upon us, to kill without punishment, unless we separately decide that they’ll enjoy life less than their victims would. Yes, fine, beasts with such vicious animal passions might feel sad inside, so we can grant them death with dignity first, with potently euphoric drugs, if we really have to choose. But then, because devils are miserable wretches, curing sinners of demonic tendencies implies concern for demons, for their suffering, implies an anti-Nietzschean “will to palliate,” and so true Christians must now serve Satan, compassionately, must pad hell’s walls instead of accepting its divine purpose, to accept its fiends… brothers, let’s transgress to stay clean! So say those who lack any actual belief in higher laws, which is to say those of bad faith, hellhounds all. “Redeem them by surrendering to their fall.”
After all, to be criminal is to be inelastic to the higher laws of this world. Yes, you will lead a miserable life if you become an addict or killer, yet you persist in sinning, and anyway I doubt your sentencing expectations are well-calibrated. Indeed, the clearest empirical finding in criminology seems to be that criminals don’t respond pretty much at all when prison terms radically change. By the same logic, society’s taste for punishment is far more elastic to criminality: if sentences consist of costly stays behind bars that vary in length but are otherwise mostly fixed, we will wish to shorten those which are less effective at reducing crime. Utilitarians, rejoice! Legalizing damnation thus looks win-win; we can pay lower taxes, and they can spend less of their hell-on-earth locked away behind demonic gates, without causing much more violence against our bodies or against their immortal souls. This may be why we grant insanity defenses to those who ably follow evil values, rather than those who commit bad acts through correctable incompetence. I.e., perhaps malice can’t be as easily disciplined away, whether premeditated or unconscious, because “mistakes” are wrongs you learn from, so we just give up in the face of devils, whom we have nothing to teach. But by definition, this means we will selfishly undersupply punishment and over-accept crime relative to equilibrium, because facing a but weakly price-responsive counterparty gives us market power over them, just as if we were any other monopolistic force… in other words, our incentive is to save ourselves money at the expense of their salvation, even though this results in more crime and less punishment than would be optimal if we couldn’t exert such unfair bargaining pressure against them. In concrete terms, if a one percent increase in punishment induces a one-fifth percent decrease in their criminal activity, then (if our society behaves with what economists call perfect selfish rationality against such rebels) we punish crimes at one-sixth of the socially ideal rate. If an angel came down to help us afford more punishment—since money clearly matters much to us—then five-sixths of this subsidy would go straight through to our pockets, because we’d just lower our penal funding by that much. Because we care so deeply for others, even down to the deeply despicable, right? Ignore the obvious limitations of this model, such as the weak relationship between how much money goes into criminal justice and the level of punishments which come out, or the different ways we can allocate these resources between patrolmen, detectives, rehabilitation, torture, bloat. Ignore also how mere compositional effects can obviously produce public safety, by incapacitating the irredeemed. For example, even in sterile enlightened Sweden, two-thirds of all violent offenses come down to earth via human vessels who compose but one percent of their population, much as in the US our average offender has about six prior convictions. Ignore those kinds of considerations, where most of the actual action is, because here I’m just exploring how the hypothetical consequentialist thinks of moral desert in immoral markets, not necessarily how they might remove bad apples, nor why they still in practice fail to.
This very same logic naturally extends to a more general case against “harm-reductionism”: if we free up literal or figurative markets in drugs and sex, then addicts will only abstain when the costs of their addictions explode; in contrast, my willingness to “fund” a sobriety project, through acts or indulgences, varies with its efficacy. Under standard market assumptions—where “fines” are just “prices,” and your moral code is not a skill but a widget—children of God thus have an “unfair” edge that you could call self-control. Therefore, we shall selfishly fall down on our duties as neighbors if the law lets us look the other way. In other words, just as monopolistic powers charge prices that are “too high” by reducing their output “too much,” the decent are incentivized to lower public morality below its equilibrium level, to free themselves from laws that weren’t meant for them. (Yes, of course, our society has already been smothered under far too much nosy moralism, but I’m not advocating for busy-bodies. Imagine, rather, letting nature’s judgment better clarify our world’s real rules, instead of competitively licensing the licentious). We can push this argument further, to suggest that the costs imposed by protectionism might be well worth paying, for people to receive more meaningfully character-building work, but now is not the time for lengthy asides on the many weaknesses of the “free trade” scholarship. Yes, fine, let there be markets for products and markets for kidneys, but let there thus be restrictions on markets for souls. If you must accept even ensoulment as fungible, you start out singing sympathy for the devil and end up entirely possessed. At first, our sympathy for George Floyd must only extend to getting the boot off his neck. We can’t get him off heroin or into productive and peaceful endeavors, because his life matters too much for us to meddle in… but then he’s back to robbing pregnant women at gunpoint, because we’ve crowned him King George, at which point we say what, exactly? Whatever won’t get us accused of treason! Nobody reasonable believes that Derek Chauvin intended to kill the many-muraled Gorgeous Floyd, which is why we view this killing as a tragedy, and righteously demand that officers take that officer’s badge. But then we leave its authority lying in the street, for men who clearly threaten innocents with murder to seize. Such is why rational altruists always end up castrated, from ancient Abelard to the modern transgenderers. Consider as their mascots the Skoptsy cult, an ostensibly Christian sect who preached that we should become like God by curing ourselves of original sin, rather than honestly dealing with its consequences. They chopped their bodies into sexlessness and so predictably cured the world of themselves.
So what might a healthy respect for the actual soul look like? I wrote the following words as part of a recent wedding speech, and they seem apt: “In Aristotelian terms, a home has four causes. Its material cause is the bricks that it’s made of; its efficient cause is the builders who make it; its formal cause is the blueprint they make; and its final cause is what it’s made for. In order for something to count as alive, it has to be able to stand on its own, and will its consequences into existence, as evidence of what it already was. In other words, in the case of a seed, the ‘bricklayers’ it uses to build a tree are made of the ‘bricks’ that they build it with, and vice-versa, though both of course must ultimately come from their environment. Which is to say that in order to really live, a relationship, whether between people in a partnership or between cells in an organism, must be a process that builds itself, like a healthy body, or a healthy society. And, in so doing, it becomes an end unto itself, an ultimate good, something with what counts as a soul, because it thereby becomes the only proper blueprint for itself, and the only cause for which it’s really made.” Moral health and popular virtue look like agency, like a tangle of life, a forest which teems with action, which gives you fruits and splinters, then shelter and sickness, and then yet greater stakes—predators and prey—so that you can learn your way around its nature. It is not a smooth and shiny legal weed store, or a homeless shelter care package brimming with methadone. Nor is it a stock broker who has worked himself prematurely bald and gray, who no longer bathes himself, who subsists on gruel, who has lost all contact with friends and family, so that he can feed ever more money into his addiction, which is clicking a donate button to Save the Children, or playing some other such alternate reality game (where you can make investments that may well pay off in some way, somewhere distant, somewhen else, but not in any manner that you will ever have to live with, nor, therefore, any manner you can ever hope to really learn from). Imagine some fantastical captain able to, ahead of time, precisely chart his epic journey’s every detail, writing down in advance that certain winds at mid-morning on the fifth day will require a five-degree turn to port, and then, immediately, across the deck, a certain sailor’s vomit will have to be mopped up so another does not slip overboard… even if his directions do not require feedback from reality to work, and even if they steer his expedition clear of all self-referential paradoxes, is he really a journeyman if he doesn’t venture forth, with crew and ship? Why not set out his quest only on paper, why not spare the timber and the men, if you’re so sure that it shall work, and so disinterested in what spices he may bring back, or in what strange lands you could tag along to see? Why not replace those imports with accounting fictions, and convince your subjects to eat recipes, taste words, shit scrip?
We Laugh at Honor and Enterprise
This is not to condemn consequentialist myths as “bad.” Yes, motivated people need a clear leadership pyramid to direct their motivation on technical projects—a top-down committee-less command structure, which matches each individual’s accountability to his authority—and this absolutism produces every shred of progress that any brand of moralism then tries to claim. But, likewise, leadership needs motivational myths, in order to make subordinates follow the clear intentions of Mr. Dear Leader, not just his enforceable orders. And these motivating narratives necessarily come from those parts of society which operate according to prestige instead of loyalty, because “prestige” is just alignment of motive and story, i.e. memetic fitness. It’s the allocation of beliefs to where they’ll prosper, as when the medical science decides that pandemic prevention includes only whatever makes the CDC more central: gain-of-function research in low-security labs and a doctor-managed eviction moratorium, for example, but not the deregulation of either testing or vaccines. This goes wrong when organizations are empowered to solve big problems yet don’t face discipline for making them larger, as when the president exists to justify administrative agency arguments rather than to command their loyalty. So bureaucrats instinctually hunger for ever more social relations to intermediate; it’s in their blood, institutionally, to hunt for sympathetic victims and visible interventions to mediatically promote. Look how good of a guard hound I am, barking to protect you from this particular kind of victimization! When they’re let off leash, though, their victim-promotion strategies too noticeably render such victimhoods endemic, and they can’t continue to pretend like they’re fending off or preventing anything… Are we sure that they’re chasing their targets away from us? No, they ultimately end up yapping for us to come quick, drooling over fetid rodential corpses, or else fetching them for us. They’re excited about showing you how juicy this latest catch was. If these running-dogs could talk, they’d earnestly explain how the thing in their mouth covered with blood and slobber is making a valid lifestyle choice that everyone should henceforth and retroactively be happy to support. (Or, as Joe Biden put it this weekend, while awarding Elton John with a National Humanities Medal, “It’s all his fault that we’re spending six billion dollars in taxpayer money this month to help AIDS.”)
But such narratives help a society perpetuate itself when they are not about some sacrifice we must affirm, so much as a positive value which is worth some sacrifice. For example, the only real governments which lack a codified constitution are the commonwealth countries and Israel, because they alone admit that their societies do not come from social contracts which yearn to be further optimized for serving our preferences. Rather, they come, plainly and confidently, from particular visions and rituals which produced the self-same political values and abundant comforts demanded by would-be reformers. Of course, the incredible magic of common-law systems vanished long ago, because though they procedurally valued precedent, they placed no spiritual value on this respect for whatever idiosyncratic practices among their people have spread themselves into traditions. And so, when weak leadership allowed the pretty stories which power their bureaucracies to run amok, there was no check against these unmoored myths rabidly goodharting every issue. “If cars run on combustion, why not blow them up?” Except that when the civil service exploded like locusts over every power source it could consume, it’s not like its engine wore down. Whereas, in contrast, Israel’s basis in religion prevents its memes from seizing control, for the same reason that religious people don’t update their dietary codes to require lobster bisque options from public schools, or filet mignon whenever they’re in the mood. Which is also the same reason that we don’t make public schools accommodate each person’s mere food preferences, and why we look down on those new religions who want exceptions from their sovereign’s rules. They’re mere cults until they prove their strength’s sincerity by passing through a time of penury, unless they merely preach against any faiths remaining exempt from a dominant belief. And that’s why novel gender ideology doesn’t get treated as cultish.
The narrators of these motivating stories adopt and hone each era’s abstract arguments, and push for us to think in terms of classless ideals instead of special-interest horse-trading. (For instance, consider the professionals of the Third Estate, who started the French Revolution by making parliament count each representative’s vote, rather than only each caste’s). This is the sense in which they’re necessarily consequentialist, concerned as they are with only what their judgments generally seem to do, not whether you should maybe focus on your own social station. “Ah, but if I value myself most, and you value yourself most, then we must be making some grievous mistake, because I can’t matter more than you if you also matter more than me.” But don’t we get good results in markets when each agent expects everyone to be looking out for themselves? Yes, fine, the rule of law often dominates petty factional rule-by-law, but this equality under law seems to come in practice from the presumption that we’re independent interests who need rules to keep our games going well. In contrast, I think the horizontalism of these consequentialists comes from the fact that prestige operates through influence networks. You don’t seek influence by joining a network that’s noticeably less prestigious than you are, nor by admitting others with noticeably low prestige into your networks; so, in their quest to legibilize the world, they end up rendering their own status illegible, yet still desirable, hence all their peacocking games, which are indirect and therefore out of control. Yes, they must nebulously appeal to a whole cursus honorum of admissions officers, and run through lengthening gauntlets of struggle sessions, but in exchange nobody will ever be able to point at even one specific real-world outcome resulting from their individual work, or hold any such merely reality-based profession-wide failures against them. These middle-witted figures—too sophisticated to fail out, but neither wise nor brave enough to possess an idea worthy of material tests—will receive generous tenures, and be generously paid as “consultants” to accessorize actual projects. And, in return, they define down sacred values to discrete low-dimensional objects, like “health” or “nature” or “equity” or especially “utility,” so that the rest of us may more easily signal pro-social sentiment, and thereby encourage cooperation in iterated prisoner dilemmas: for example, only medical interventions will be considered as affecting health, and their cost-effectiveness won’t be considered, nor will the tradeoffs between health and other goods, because all those nuances and negotiations would make it much harder for us to haphazardly coordinate on mobilizing social resources. In other words, as Robin Hanson put it, we’ll get the benefit of spending a huge proportion of GDP on healthcare, at the cost of doing so effectively… or did you think that meaning would come free?
When a leadership structure lets itself weaken and rot, these myths that it used to motivate itself can easily go malignant. This begins when a bureaucracy replaces responsibility with deniability, or ownership with tenure. Which is to say that it replaces command—orders from the top, delivered down with support for whoever below can accomplish substantive results—with judgment (rote application of established routines at the bottom, appealed up the hierarchy for guidance whenever cases demand exceptions from procedural rules). Literal or figurative judges can decide any such exception either way, and neither direction would receive much pushback from a chief who doesn’t push his people in pursuit of positive visions. Thus, a given myth will get selected for based on whether it pressures these clerks and clerics to decide their scrivenings in ways that help its broader mythos commensally spread. Imagine you’re a true believer in your cause: it gets you to carry picket signs every week, because those neatly-lettered slogans really captured all your dreams and passions; you go to the public lectures, the private discussion groups, and finally the meetings which plan these events… you begin to buy the party newspaper, then start selling it, and eventually you’re even writing for it, at which point you ascend the multi-level-marketing ladder one step too far. Maybe it’s a sex liberation movement, seeking to liberate under-wealthed children from some capitalist plot. They’ve manufactured transphobia so that the tech billionaires whose companies offer all-inclusive gender-swapping packages can avoid funding universal on-demand affirmation surgeries! The CEOs who have ceded half their office workdays to elaborate pronoun acknowledgement ceremonies are just too stingy to help our public schools install urinals in every women’s restroom! You’re given an address to receive money for glossy magazine-type printing, a big upgrade, you’ve been doing something right. It’s an idea whose time has come, a movement that’s been gathering momentum. A building that’s either ultra exclusive or suspiciously banal. The conventionally masculine doorman is all-business, and buzzes you up for your appointment, but when you offer some comradely buzzwords he doesn’t seem at all receptive. There’s even an elevator attendant. A tastefully attractive maid welcomes you into the penthouse and brings you to the study where you see, glancing up at you, a man who looks like a fifty-something who takes care of himself enough to look thirty.
“You’re from the tranny thing, right? Yeah, ok. Hold it, me first, then questions, or you don’t get the money. Check’s on the desk, right here, but listen. You’re picking it up in person so I can tell you two things. First, every issue, more articles about trans women than trans men, way more. Also, at least one thing weekly about women sports, but half the time not even trans. Isn’t lady soccer equal to men’s, that kind of thing, under a picture of the butchest player. She scores more points than Messi or Beckham, so they’re not man enough to take her on, but she’s paid way less. Don’t worry, their publicists won’t let them prove her wrong. Other countries pay girls way better to play basketball, mostly by some rich mafia type sponsoring a vanity team, so see if you can get real journalists to start calling out specific tech billionaires for falling behind. Even Gaddafi owned a special troupe of warrior princesses, are we really less feminist than Libya. That’s all the first thing I’m telling you, think of it along the lines of, say, Caitlyn Jenner wants to win another gold while she can still beat women. Number two, each piece on puberty blockers, add in a few sentences about how aging should be asking for consent. Not just going forward, you need to edit your archives too. Say that we can help you choose your time, and why wouldn’t you want the option. Think of the children who suffer from all the sexual awkwardness before they’re ready, but instead of creepy priests it’s inertial bureaucrats exposing them to the knowledge that comes with adolescence. Maybe like the death with dignity stuff, like you should control your own body, and pass from childhood when you’re ready. And a feature about how this is also just like all the women who are stuck without kids, accidentally, because their eggs ran out, and I guess the ones who have kids they wish they aborted as well. Whatever paves the way for loosening regs on anti-aging pills.”
This man sleeps well. He isn’t scouting kids for the hot new TV drag show. But he also doesn’t always concern himself with finding out whatever interest he might be pushing. If the secret really isn’t meant for you, it’s often better to just pass it along, and smile at how warm the slogan makes you feel, or else how righteous. The code will still be there for whoever knows to look. How does this make you feel? This man penned half the catchphrases you’ve put on posters, much of what your parents marched for, and he’ll keep on going. Where do you think teenagers get their one-sentence ideologies? And just think about how you still dance along to the bands you learned to love in high school. His notes line lockers, editorials, campaign platforms, perhaps with several degrees of separation, maybe just sprinkles of influence. But even books only really exist so a particular sentence or two can saturate reality, or try. Have you ever had a thought that you know he didn’t influence, about anything outside your immediate life? You want to ask him about the decision to invade Iraq, or the people on Epstein’s flight logs, or, uh, the Challenger explosion. No, these are the sorts of questions they want their so-called dissidents asking, and prove you aren’t worth an answer, even a lie. Why have sperm counts and female voices been dropping around the world? But you’re pretty sure he hasn’t ever had a political thought except for wishing that we’d all shut up. He mostly called you in here because he likes it when he sees us smug suckers realize. So then why does he do it? He could retire or run for office. No, he wants to see hot celebrities and pear-shaped men with nukes earnestly parrot something he almost forgot about writing, because they aren’t actually actors, and they aren’t even on his payroll. Some catchphrase so weak and stupid that they actually believe it. Netflix creates whole universes to chase fleeting hashtags he came up with while flexitating. He wipes his ass, looks for something in the smear, and that’s your college tattoo. Yes, he’s given so many of you meaning, and power, and joy, and he hates you for it, but in a manner that makes him happy.
You have a dream? Wow, you’re telling me this for the first time—I had no idea, Mister Reverend Doctor King! And FDR: he didn’t know about Pearl Harbor… but I did. I can keep this up all day. The Gettysburg Address got rewritten on a cocktail napkin long before contractors chiseled it into the Lincoln monument, before all that marble was even a twinkle in the reflection pool (perhaps even before the war); and, what, now you’re still going to act surprised if I reach back further? We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, established just what some traveling salesman wanted for us. I made up Washington’s dentures, and his cherry tree, and I made up Helen Keller and Anne Frank too. So look at me, just this once, watching you, seeing you before you even see yourself, and laughing, as you briefly notice that everything by which you define your world is an afterthought, downstream of my boring dirty thoughts about my maid and my proctologist. Your fetishes and emotions, whatever you remember from civics class, the latest few-dozen foreign countries that you’ve learned where to place on a map, all of it. It’s just the detritus of people who came to me looking for help selling appliances or securing rhino horns. And their empires, their armies of career men, the supply lines by which they span greater distances than any famous explorer ever traveled, all of it is far beyond anything you can even envy, much less comprehend. Some of the largest computers in the world are humming nonstop symphonies with language models so that some lucky bum can find the right couple-word prompt for spitting out our next great novel. Some of the largest fortunes of all time, worth millions of ancient pyramid-building slaves, are there for the taking if you can guess their little crypto password. But my short strings of mumbled chicken-scratch post-it note spittle, when I’m just trying to stare at my blank ceiling in bed, or to take in this million dollar view in peace, can shake the pipsqueak world, and they’re mine. So go back to your little essay and leave me to landscaping whatever stupid future we’ve been abandoned to.
And We Are Shocked to Find Traitors in Our Midst
So that’s one way for motivational myths to go malignant: when a system lacks unitary coherent goals, when its operating system ends up stuck on autopilot, the bureaucracy shall ask for help deciding any complicated case; you can always find a specific dispute or specimen or fact-pattern which contains enough rich details to confuse or extend or tempt some given extant law’s domain (and then provide the bureaucrats with answers). Their newest rules then over-fit on this particular example—papering over or else tearing open some crucial nuance that came before—leaving you with yet more fodder to confound or dazzle them with, and then to guide or drag them through. Such rich incentives rarely sit unused for long enough to rot. If you force one school sports team to accept a certain crossdresser, and then all the others follow suit, but they’re also worried about getting sued for letting teenage boys in women’s restrooms… well, someone has to decide whether changing rooms are for everyone on the team. Those interest groups who really get off on peeping and exhibitionism will then put everything they’ve got into helping useful idiots burn through youthful utopian energy in order to prop up relevant judges as heroes leading the march of progress to gloriously stomp open every last toilet stall beneath its kinky boots. Or else they’ll knock these robe-wearing quasi-klansmen down as modern-day George Wallaces, divisive segregationists who stand in the schoolhouse bathroom door. But there’s another way for mythological force to go super-critical.
Sometimes, a leader will find himself in charge of a dead bureaucracy. Everyone below him tries to just file their paperwork by the book, with no motivating vision; they kick trivial errors back down the chain, and pass everything that in any way “does not compute” along to their superiors. Their fundamental purpose is to wash their hands of whatever they can: any correction that any of them might consider issuing—however obviously helpful, or obviously in keeping with the spirit of the law, even down to fixing superficial mistakes on a form—could be construed as taking a position on some touchy matter of dispute, and every topic is just riven with disputes (thanks to this very legalism, ironically). And so, because every lurching move made by such systems begins at the bottom, and only a miniscule share of these decisions make their way up to anywhere near the top, the leader’s only hope is to bypass his whole appellate hierarchy. Collapse every institution, and call the entry-level masses to heroic-sounding action against the navel-gazing middle-managers who actually issue their feckless orders! In short, Maoism, when it seized the reins of a sclerotic antiquated empire… or Hitlerism, too, though consider how vanishingly miniscule is the share of activists who now prefer wearing swastikas to hammers and sickles. The relative indulgence that the latter receive from public-facing organizations begins to hint at how laughably anachronistic the fascist boogeyman has become, except as a regime propaganda tool. “But comrade, why would there be so many respectable careers in rooting out every last hint of whispered far-right extremism, in censoring and pillorying supposed reactionaries, why would even lay people jump to disassociate themselves from any ostensible bigot, and quiver at even flimsy potential allegations of secret suspiciously conservative tendencies, if that was not the greater threat against us now?” I don’t know how people come to believe that a suffocating social consensus towards unpersoning one type of ideologue provides evidence for that ideology’s nefarious creeping influence. However, if closeted Nazis, emerging from cold storage as antarctic glaciers dissolve, were to really seek power now, they might well do so grinning under every Che-shirt accessory, purring beneath ushanka furs, and condemn each of their enemies as a covert rightist. You would only know them by their haunting smile, with teeth like long knives, as they otherwise fade from the stuff of glob-prog nightmares into this wokie wonderland. As a certain hallucinated cat once said, “You see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.” And don’t the social justice warriors look like they enjoy getting fed up? Don’t they seem uncomfortable unless they’re afraid? “I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice. “Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the Queen today?” Don’t you find it strange that for well over fifty years every major institution, rebellion, and metanarrative in this country has justified itself most forcefully by claiming to be super duper extra specially aligned with what our aims ostensibly were when we fought a total war against an evil system that no longer exists? And that this mandatory shrill alignment, this endless purifying struggle, calls itself anti-authoritarian?
So let’s call it Maoism, since the Queen it plays croquet with swings that way. All of this Maoist vigor comes from the Party’s emergent “mass line,” which is just whatever slogans the member-base gets into chanting. These get idiosyncratically applied at first—forcing policy changes in this province or that industry, pretty haphazardly—and then, if they catch fire further instead of burning out, rise like heat to attain higher and more official forms of state power, as a recognition of growing legitimacy relative to the prior social order they combust. Think of it like how the Ford Foundation and Harvard and the New York Times, and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Southern Poverty Law Center (and sometimes parts of the civil service or even a whole administrative decision-making body), will sometimes all together whip up a completely new progressive consensus that gets broadcast out with many distortions to hundreds of different college campus cults, who then, seemingly at random, target some juicy local organizations with limp shrieks. In practice, this allows the system’s intelligentsia to experiment with messaging and targeting, to see what slogans are particularly strong against which as-yet still uncaptured institutions; the operations that snowball well are then extended up into more general issue-areas, with wider applications and vast space for further tinkering, and only at the very end get recognized by laggardly official government leadership: see Biden reading already out-of-date radical slogans off a teleprompter, or Congress vapidly ratifying what had long since been done by agency rule-making. Yes, Biden is no Mao, but the latter stepped down as China’s head-of-state in 1959, at the beginning of his “Great Leap Forward,” and replaced himself on paper with professional CCP sloganist Liu Shaoqi, whose name you likely don’t recall… of course, Mao remained Chairman of the Communist Party, and, when it became convenient, whipped up his activists to extra-legally force this paper tiger out of office in 1968. China then lacked a head of state until 1975, at which point it formally abolished the role, until 1982, since which time the role has been entirely symbolic. Likewise, we all know that Biden clearly isn’t in charge, and is barely tolerated by the true believers, who somehow coordinate one unanimous yet also erratic party line on every issue, across our elite universities and legacy foundations and establishment media, for their countless little red guard cadres to rabidly parrot. Can you name any important differences between the Washington Post and Atlantic Magazine editorial stances within a given year? But then why is it so easy to remember them screeching in ways they’d now condemn as irredeemably backwards? Maybe there is a helmsman among them analogous in power to Mao, perhaps by the name of Soros, and maybe Mao did less to steer his chaotic ism than you’ve been led to believe.
Regardless: the clear ugly weakness of this Maoism’s activists and its Bidens helps it narratively stay in control, and learn what discourse patterns carry enough strength to prevail despite these awful promulgators. And their flagrant petty nepotism (on which such feverishly unstructured systems must always run) eventually causes them to dismiss all criticisms as arising from either jealousy over access to this corruption, or else personal failings in the requisite gladhanding. So a grasping smallness consumes these professional revolutionaries; they end up desperately fearing any hints of sincerity and seriousness, and therefore adopt a reflexive tone of tired irony and insecure smugness. But of course we shouldn’t expect anything but the most passive play-acting and the most prickly defense-mechanisms from those millions of loudly self-styled radicals who side on every substantive issue with big business, elite universities, hegemonic media, powerful censors, and billionaire foundations. Even under Deng, after all, the CCP still manufactured regular cycles of college protest, so that would-be leaders might have a chance to try climbing movement ladders into those very administrations against which they “rebelled”… though at least then China effectively devolved power to local princelings—with 85% of its government spending done through subnational apparatuses, versus about 40% for the typical OECD country—so that each local chief might be loosed to do as he will with his fiefdom, and get promoted to bigger fiefs based on results, to countervail the residually Maoist acid bath of management-by-discourse.
They’re all just trying to stay on the script that makes career sense for them. Do you think it’s a coincidence that these professional losers are so willing to double-down on any over-reach, to dig in their heels on every basic error, to predictably lose even harder in the vain hope of maybe briefly covering up just how much they’ve already lost? Whenever someone calls them on their obvious bullshit, why do you think they go all-in: yes, it’s a bluff, but obviously not one you’ll fall for; no, it’s to look reliable, and raise the stakes, because their blob rewards more dependable apparatchiks, and bigger issue areas, not better solutions. That’s why, for instance, their anti-racists are so racist. They say there’s a mystical force called “stigma” which explains away every such disparity, but then readily offer up excuses for why any possible test would fail to find it. “There’s a secret nazi klansman in the room with us right now, but if you look under each floorboard then he’s wearing an invisibility robe, and if you cover the ground with weight-scales then his jackboots can hover, etc.” In other words, their model of the world includes racism being true (they expect black-white test gaps to persist when you remove culturally-loaded questions, control for parental income, offer same-race proctors, and so forth), because their goal is to believe in some excuse that can survive against all imagined evidence. And so they don’t even believe in anti-racism—given how they define its implications down to what’s unfalsifiable—so much as in being anti-racists. Hence their disturbingly sudden myopic focus on hating other white people… who are suspected of believing that racial differences might be intractable, without also loudly adopting an entirely extraneous metaphysical assumption about how reality should be blamed for its implicit bias. Consider, e.g., Zach Goldberg’s work, on how all this country’s ethnicities have roughly equivalent and slightly positive average in-group racial preferences, except for white liberals in the last few years, who consistently rate whites as vastly worse than the other demographics along all sorts of axes, from violence to laziness. The problem isn’t that these wokies actually get violent crime statistics backwards, nor that their policies fail to actually help these favored minorities, nor even that this obsessive guilt-ridden skepticism of tribal explanations might itself arise from hyper-western individualist norms. Such hypocrisy fairies and fallacy goblins have no more substance than do spooky slaveholder ghosts. The problem with spit-flecked social justice chauvinism against non-WASP crackers is that this viral mouth-froth wields a rabid weapon against them, in its bitter small-minded struggle for power.
Yes, comrades, in living memory our enlightened elites unleashed a campaign of purges, with literally hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, that emptied the cities of counter-revolutionary elements: the homicide rate fully doubled nationwide in the decade following 1965, then stayed that high for twenty more years, in a revolutionary assault against official systems of order and suspected reactionary demographics; this bloody tide rose especially in urban areas, which until the postwar era had fewer murders per capita than did the country as a whole, and completely washed away what had been “ethnic white” power centers, while conveniently sparing WASPy enclaves. And now every allowable history textbook blames “white flight” for much of the decay, and bemoans our insufficient vigor at stamping out their potential to react. How dare your scary poodle flee from justice when in fear I kick it… here, just watch its cunning attempts to plot against my righteous discipline! But do you think Maoism, though bloodier, was very different? Unleash disorganized violence, then make sure the perpetrators look like victims of our political enemies. If these footsoldiers overstep their position—let’s say they keep killing people who are way too sympathetic—well, see, they aren’t actually troops who answer to us, nor for whom we’re answerable. And, with time, even our most over-enthusiastic attack dogs can have their day. Recall how the Central Park Five, though their guilt was never in doubt, received millions of dollars and freedom, once their allies could rebrand such excesses as actually being about not psychopathy but “structural racism.” (Seriously, look up the evidence against them, now, before it all gets memory-holed, and really think about why any civilization without a deathwish would ever spare their kind’s lives, or why any decent person should pretend to care about their pain). Any strategy which works this well would of course get rebooted eventually, so it’s no wonder that the gentrification storyline’s retarded housing economics led to well-heeled commissars calling for the abolition of enemy institutions like inner city police, in the name of client populations who actually poll in favor of hiring far more cops.
It’s a bit like how “decolonization” meant handing power to bloodthirsty thugs who destroyed their societies in the name of independence, and who now depend on massive official aid inflows (averaging five percent of GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is about a quarter of the region’s total combined government spending each year). For instance, note that in terms of per capita income, Britain’s former African colonies overall fell from over a tenth of the British level in 1960… to roughly two percent of its level today, despite UK growth also slowing since then. But let’s pretend these places are at least more “fair” now—as in South Africa, where Mandela’s inspiring one-party state may someday lower economic inequality back down to its Apartheid levels—or that there’s more liberty without English common law traditions to restrain state force. Let’s even say the transitional violence doesn’t bother you: the million people murdered immediately in race riots when English aristocrats fled from India, so that Muslims and Hindus would no longer have to share the same parliamentary elections; but hey, at least Pakistani voters could then watch every single one of their prime ministers since partition get removed from office before completing a single full term, and India could experiment with economic policies that resulted in even slower 1950-1980 per capita GDP growth rates than China contemporaneously suffered. Other such examples abound, including the million religious minorities expelled by Algeria’s jihadi regime, right after those freedom-fighters finally kicked out their French colonizers for eradicating such local traditions as malaria, the slave trade, and being conquered by Ottomans. Even ignoring all of this, doesn’t something still feel not quite right about the story we’ve been told? Consider the most notoriously backwards hold-out for colonialism, a now-mythical nation which we still must hate. When Britain declared an end to its domination over the global south, almost all of its dominions accepted a British-imposed process for transferring power, except Rhodesia, which threw them out to preserve self-rule. So the United Nations coordinated its first ever sanctions campaign against this uniquely white anticolonial regime, for having a racially nepotistic electoral system and suppressing domestic insurrectionary forces who rebelled against them on behalf of imperialist powers. Of course, many other nearby regimes practiced far worse election fraud and internal repression, without facing nearly as much proxy violence from global hegemons. Regardless, in response, the Rhodesians accepted majority rule and fairly elected a black prime minister, but the western world continued to sanction their country, and the USSR continued arming Mugabe’s communist rebels, until these “racists” accepted a return to colonial status under Britain. So the UK then dissolved its ward’s government, and held new elections, in which Mugabe flagrantly rigged the vote, and the rest is history. How’d Zimbabwe do since then? How many bodies for your egalitarian fetish? Does the warm glow stick with you when that great grim equalizer reaps? And so much for our precious “decolonization” and “cold war” narratives! It’s ok, even communists once believed that integration was an evil globalist plot, as when everyone from armed mine-workers to Boer Labour Party leaders rose up in the massive Rand Revolt against slight racial deregulation, with some self-proclaimed secessionist “soviets” parading paramilitaries behind banners which said “Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White South Africa!” More sympathetically, boomer ballad “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” condemned the CIA for helping Congolese “anticolonialists” put down European settlers as part of the First and Second World’s combined attack on Moise Tshombe’s legitimate and functional government. Many such cases!
My point is not that colonialism was actually good, much less to defend any specific policies associated with it. Only someone whose brain has been colonized by social media would want you to pick up the flag of some far-off long-dead regime; you might as well write op-eds about how Genghis Khan established free-trade zones and effectively sequestered carbon, or just go to an Olde Renaissance Faire. Nor is my point that the actual politics of decolonization were much more complicated than “fringe right opposes independence,” though they were: Free France and the British Labourites largely favored shifts towards integration, whereas reactionaries like Froude and Carlyle bitterly resented the Home Office deep state’s unaccountable power over far-flung administrative affairs. No, my point is that all of this (from self-determination to whatever your opinions about it might be) primarily exists as narrative, not fact, now that our system vests its power in story-tellers, not characters. Yes, this has real effects, like when we feel superior to the past for presently denying ownership of the countries our country invades, which excuses us from taking responsibility over their long-term fate…. When did we last burn down Puerto Rico? Wouldn’t the Middle East have done much better if actual policymakers couldn’t just cheaply bow to whoever decides whether a new scary monster there should consume your little democratic teleprompter screen this week? Shouldn’t the Defense and State Departments, like, flip a coin for Syria, rather than supporting opposite sides of its internal conflict? Why couldn’t Mr. President figure out whether to push cultural revolution or authentic democracy in Afghanistan, and whether to crack down on their corruption or buy off local interest groups? Does anyone really think we did Iraq any favors by giving its government away while keeping our troops there? Take ownership or don’t, but your giant fire-breathing dog keeps on chasing down cars that he doesn’t know what to do with, and you’re stuck with the bill! However, try imagining yourself in the Roman Empire, circa 400. Conflicting and incompetent bureaucracies invited some Gothic tribes into Thracia while also half-assedly turning on them. “Lay down your arms, yet also fend for yourselves!” As a result of this administrative confusion, the backwards barbarians brutally took over a power vacuum in Adrianople, and your next emperor then recognized them as an allied although fully foreign polity. Most future historians will regard this as the beginning of the collapse—an implosion caused by misaligned agencies opportunistically fragmenting civilization—but you can choose to think it’s about those boogeymen achieving independence, for better or worse. Just like you can call a parasite your child, and claim it sprung forth from your loins. Yes, non-biological entities like regimes can have children, who partake in their common civilizational project, but by then Rome only had infections, and cancers, and rot. You might as well amputate your limb and say it budded off to honor you.
Very interesting piece, I like the Moldbug style stream of consciousness but at times it's hard to keep up with where you're going