Because preference falsification primarily follows from knowledge falsification—rather than vice-versa—resistance to totalitarian collectivism shall be led by anti-scientistic faiths (traditionalist religion or Nietzschean vitalism). This is Part 1, in which I describe the falsificationist regime’s origins, powers, and interests. Part 2 will describe current cleavages between it and our available alternatives; the argument that knowledge falsification matters more and moves first will come in Part 3. Edit: in case I don’t get around to writing Parts 2 or 3, see a summary of their arguments here.
What preference falsification is, and where it comes from:
I recently bought Timur Kuran's 1995 book “Private Truths, Public Lies” because it suddenly seemed like a generally accepted explanation for the pervasive dishonesty of “the great awokening” and for the swarming censorship regime which now everywhere muscularly enforces these lily-white high-status lies. I am writing this “review” because I think his book provides a diagnosis that somewhat misses the mark of our current year's ideological plague, and I think a proper understanding is in this case quite useful for individuals who are worried about their souls going flabby or necrotic while sheltering from such rot. The book is readable, sincere, coherent, and encouraging—though not particularly dense—but the word-worms Kuran saw during pre-internet “political correctness” are not the mind-viruses I see today, nor even perhaps the ones most relevant back then. First, though, I'll summarize his perspective (my critique will come in Part 3).
The book is, as its subtitle suggests, about “the social consequences of preference falsification.” By preference falsification, he means the public expression of a personal taste that does not match one's private opinion (for instance, pretending to appreciate your superior's apparent orientation toward certain virtues or aesthetics). He does not mean lying, except insofar as one's lies are aimed at “manipulating the perceptions others hold about one's motivations or dispositions”; nor does he mean self-censorship, except insofar as one's acts of omission intentionally misrepresent one's interior sentiments. Preference falsification is not strategic dishonesty, like supporting a “lesser evil” electoral candidate who could easily win over a long-shot favorite. And it is not hypocrisy, like granting oneself opportunistic exemptions from standards that one holds for others. Rather, it is avowing ideals which are themselves insincere.
A few months ago I was in Cordoba, where I saw a building that had been a synagogue from 1315 to 1492, when Christian Spain expelled the Jews and forced conversion upon those who remained, and turned this temple into a rabies hospital; I then visited Seville, where a little free museum below a food court documented the inquisition that had been headquartered there, to root out those “marranos” who secretly continued to practice Judaism despite their baptisms (obviously, some formerly Jewish “conversos” rabidly collaborated with inquisitors to preemptively deflect potential suspicion from themselves, and sometimes this backfired by making them noticeable targets for other accusers). An entryway sign solemnly dedicated the museum to “all victims of value judgments,” which, though silly, is clarifying, because Kuran's focus is on just such values falsification. In contrast, "knowledge falsification" describes the pretense by people who know better that the Spanish Inquisition was especially bad: the Medieval and Roman Inquisitions each probably killed almost a hundred times as many people, but only the Spanish one—and its Portuguese spin-off—set up a special bureaucracy cleanly separated from the papacy and episcopacy, toward which it's thus much easier to direct sincere distaste for such purges.
In addition to Marranism, Kuran mentions other forms of religious dissimulation: English anti-Catholic laws prompted some papists to suggest that feigning protestantism would help maintain the faithful, and others to argue that it would erode their faith; Sunni anti-Shia laws prompted a debate among Shi'ites where the purported risk of insincere conformism was not the transformation this may wreak upon their faith but rather the barrier this may erect against their transformative proselytization of others. A framework which uses the one mechanism of preference falsification to predict both revolution and rigidity may ironically be somewhat lacking in falsifiability, but, regardless, we clearly can't directly observe hidden preferences, nor the thresholds of public pressure at which people's public preferences will change while their private preferences remain unmoved (nor even the changes in private preferences which can occur as a result of continuing to live within some lie). Further, preference falsification cascades are so interdependent that their outcomes must be highly contextual and convoluted—my decision to falsely convert under a Reconquista will of course be highly dependent on my expectations about how many others will claim conversion—so I wouldn't trust anyone who claims to have an abstracted model that can produce reliable predictions on this topic. And Kuran definitely doesn't over-promise in these ways.
Still, there is much of merit in Kuran's model. As we aggregate into larger societies with more complex interdependencies, more decisions will naturally be reached through collective means of some kind, as opposed to individual choice; but, simultaneously, the impact that any one person can actually have on such decisions must shrink. Therefore, our expressed opinions should trend towards optimizing on social incentives rather than honest thoughts, i.e. toward status-seeking. Additionally, as material needs get more easily met, status games, which remain zero-sum, rise in relative value; status games will thus expand as a share of societies where status-hunger is price-inelastic (as in blue-city housing markets), where status-seeking is subsidized (as with student loans), and where the power accorded by status rises (as when legitimacy flows to those who can best present themselves to lay-people as backed by “science” or “experts”, rather than those who have proved victorious in real-world empire-building).
This “mandate of heathens” given to status-elites matters more when societies grow in subject population or alienable wealth—people seek rents where physical resources accumulate—but also when power looks increasingly like implementing officially respectable stakeholder preferences, as opposed to straightforwardly imposing one’s personal will over materially acquired dominions. A society increasingly run at every level by those who win at expensively following arbitrary elitist rules about such respectability will be a society that loses touch with why honesty about external reality even matters. What’s the point of being factually correct, and humble towards objective truths, when getting managers ideologically on your side matters more than directly accomplishing physical goals? Another compounding factor in this tendency toward PR-speak may be that in such societies, the consequences one faces for having broadly controversial opinions can come in small doses along many axes, rather than being conditioned on serious breaches of norms held by close allies. This all means that widely discussed issues will—insofar as they're decided by public discourse—be decided not by left versus right, or up versus down, or in versus out, or clockwise versus counter-, but rather by the struggle between preening and honesty which runs through every heart.
Yes, one's net impulse towards honesty will only move one from the “correct” opinion of one's milieu towards the object-level opinion that one actually has; but the tradeoff in this increasingly relevant interior calculation is the desire for social respect versus the desire for self-respect, not the tradeoff between, say, “liberty” and “equality.” And yes, one can sometimes preen by producing disingenuously controversial opinions, though seemingly only when this provides a costly signal of your allegiance to some socially-favored team. And, sure, under modern western systems, one can often better effectuate one's politics by manipulating procedural outcomes than by managing affectations of sincerity: prosecutors discretionarily drove Aaron Swartz to suicide on behalf of incredibly unpopular academic publishers because vigorously defending concentrated interests within ivory towers is a path to bureaucratic patronage. But as our system grows more structurally swarm-based—as it finds more uses for hordes who mouth whatever words taste most like status—it will select increasingly for those political ends that are most symbiotic with strategies based on claiming support from supposedly faithful masses. Still, though, this kind of struggle will only change any particular issue’s outcome insofar as relatively honest opinions tend to diverge in one particular direction from relatively respectable opinions. And isn’t this pretty clearly plausible?
How to distinguish memes from habits in your life:
There will tend to be a misalignment of interests between ideas that effectively use humans to spread themselves because those ideas are believable, and humans who effectively use ideas to spread themselves because those ideas are helpful. There will often be some overlap, because ideas will have a harder time using humans whom they destroy, and humans will have a harder time using ideas that they can't properly communicate. But it should be no surprise to see somewhat clear differentiations in certain arenas between factions ruled by memes and factions ruled by habits; between factions which claim the gnostic mantle of comfortable technocratic scientism, and factions which claim the vitalist mantle of disciplined agnostic traditionalism; between words (including deeds based on signaling efforts) and deeds (including words intended to support object-level human action), which is to say between motivated reasoning and reasonable motivation.
One can logically understand this field of battle as real and really important without demanding ironclad quantitative predictions—indeed, only a meme-piloted meat-suit would demand official metrics of preference falsification, and such measures would quickly become targets occupied or wielded by other memes. Vague heuristics can be useful, though, especially if one's goal in using them is to pick strategies that change outcomes in a desirable direction, rather than just guessing what outcome you’ll be stuck with. To a first approximation, to be a political actor is to apply these intuitive rules of thumb to reshape society, whether by achieving some superficial support and hammering this artificial consensus into the public until private beliefs follow suit, or by claiming widespread secret support and encouraging honesty from one’s legitimate supporters until their heretical momentum amplifies itself into some new orthodoxy.
Of course, lies can do good, and bluntness can be bad. So some such actors have used preference falsification cascades to accomplish great or helpful feats: currencies, whether fiat or precious, mostly hold value because the public pretends they do; the scientific revolution arguably happened by making scholars pretend their theoretical disagreements rested on often dubious empirical disputes about generally weak experiments (humorously culminating in Eddington’s bullshit “validation” of general relativity, because its obvious mathematical correctness didn’t “count” as proper evidence); in Pinker’s telling, the “civilizing process” reduced pre-modern European interpersonal homicide rates by an order of magnitude—down to their present levels, before any of our enlightened social science or professionalized administrative institutions—by imposing etiquette norms of feigned coolness on our naturally hotheaded species, as elites in solidifying states came to seek centralized favors rather than fragmentary competition… or see McCloskey, who tells a similar story through butchers and brewers and bakers learning to store away their personal judgments of customers when money formalized and replaced shopkeeper tabs, or Henrich’s narrative about how anti-tribalist marriage programs caused us to motivate individuals by punishing perceived guilty intentions rather than making family clans rein in their overall shameful actions, or etc.
And other political agents have destroyed preference falsification regimes toward weak or evil ends: bank runs undermine credit creation and maturity transformation; the now-hegemonic postmodern critiques of Baconian empiricism and logical positivism during academia’s “science wars” helped unleash our College-Occupied Government from basic sanity checks; grievance culture has disastrously rewarded those who wildly act out at almost any perceived slight. Sperber and Mercier even argue that human reason comes not from the benefit of dispassionately “reasoning about” our individual concerns, but rather from biased debaters giving disingenuously generalized “reasons for” their particular side’s rent-seeking within a group. Robin Hanson uses the term “homo hypocritus” to describe this evolutionarily brain-flexing tendency to cover up our opportunistic hypocrisies with broader preference falsification, and thus explains why human societies waste vast resources on corrupted signaling efforts which vociferously pretend at substantively helping perceived inferiors. After all, the only cognitive bias that really survives replicability is confirmation bias, and we all recognize that it’s much easier to check a solution than to produce it—so long as a concentrated interest in actually checking solutions gets coordinated for diffuse audiences—but few institutions allow internal “red teams” to meaningfully poke around for groupthink bubbles to pop. Yet would you return to the simpleton’s Eden?
Regardless of honesty’s perceived merits, habits are always on its side because they are simply acts; one act can of course oppose another, but—because reality is necessarily coherent—only ideas about acts can be fundamentally in contradiction with them. And honest habits are on the side of ordered hierarchies because they spread vertically, which is to say that one should model them as passing on downwards, like genes; in other words, they durably instantiate in the human who then gradually transmits them, through his overall personal influence, alongside those other acquired traits that make him who he is. This “reproductive bottleneck” aligns their fitness functions with that of their host, much like each gene will be selected to serve its body if it can only replicate through bodily gametes which fairly sample from the whole genome. In contrast, memes are always on the side of persuasion, whether to agreement or obedience or hysteria, and persuasive memes are on the side of networked oligarchies. These horizontally transmit, because an idea passes between people to the extent that it abstracts them away: its but symbolic relationship with your hardware is as fleeting and infertile as a program’s loyalty to any specific digital computers whose logic gates it may claim to represent. (Indeed, in my experience anointed experts more often claim that logic gates represent programs, and that neurons represent thoughts, than vice-versa, because memes view you as owing loyalty to them). Such contagion-based memetic strategies allow group selection to meaningfully act on humans, for good or ill, if particularly spreadable ideas effectively coordinate their subjects towards individually costly behaviors which favor ingroups at outsider expense. But then ultimately this fickle and sterile ex machina conditions you to sacrifice your personal fitness at the homogenizing altar of whichever electric ideal seems most current, like an online assembly of childless men who virtually wed some shared pornographic ghost… its temple demands your seed so you can’t grow beyond it, and your analog offering renders you analogous to goo, your cum-union welding you together, a trans-substantiation without substance.
The failure mode of habits is bugs, especially ones which tend to compound their errors further, like addictive drugs, whereas the failure mode of memes is viruses. A drug can bind you into arbitrary depravity to support ever escalating doses of the same old parasitic fix, which selects for strict and rigid cartels. But when the fix itself gets hacked—when mutations in your parasite’s reward function can spread without you—then your brain is being used to compute someone else’s mind. For example, internet porn and social media provide you with incentive gradients that can easily be changed by platform algorithms or user behavior: just as more contagious infection variants outcompete their cousins, these websites will reprogram your perversions into ever more viral sicknesses; instead of enabling your private human flaws, they will subjugate you beneath a vast conditioning system. Thanks to this unsupervised reinforcement training—this Pavlovian machine that isn’t guided towards promoting any particular disposition or tendency beyond subordination to its guidance—my generation’s libidinal instability will power whatever figures out how to harness its currently masturbatory chaos. McLuhan wrote that man becomes “the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.” But now programs have become the sex organs of our minds, allowing us to seek ever stranger forms of status, and so we provide them with content, because “minds” and “programs” can’t actually fuck or feed, though they can produce disease.
Consider similarly the differences in agency between adopting habits as instruments of your will, and serving as an instrument of memetic interests. Out-of-control tools—like nukes or honest but overly-capable myopic paperclip-maximizing AIs—pose risks to us if we can’t reliably treat them as agents acting on our behalf. Coordination problems (like geopolitical prisoner dilemmas or deceptively-aligned AIs) pose risks to us if we can’t reliably forge social contracts by which some higher authority punishes defectors. The former type worries about “moral hazard” so cultivates personal sovereignty and builds golems, while the latter faction worries about “adverse selection” so cultivates idols and sacrifices power to them. Again, this division is not entirely white and black, because making oneself a vessel for some chosen god can do much good for someone who justifiably expects his future choices to be quite bad. “Here cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.”
However, to again quote Nietzsche, we should not expect the choice to give away one’s freedom of choice to generally favor higher causes, unless, like Odysseus near Anthemoessa, you can predict that some undesirable siren will newly seize your lusts: “whenever a man begins to discover in what respect he plays a role, and to what extent he can be a stage-player, he becomes a stage-player… thereupon the most interesting and insane periods of history always make their appearance, in which ‘stage-players,’ all kinds of stage-players, are the real masters. Precisely thereby another species of man is always more and more injured, and in the end made impossible: above all the great ‘architects’; the building power is now being paralyzed; the courage that makes plans for the distant future is disheartened; there begins to be a lack of organizing geniuses…. The fundamental belief is dying out, on the basis of which one could calculate, promise and anticipate the future in one’s plan, and offer it as a sacrifice thereto, that in fact man has only value and significance in so far as he is a stone in a great building; for which purpose he has first of all to be solid, he has to be a ‘stone.’” When all the world appears a stage, mere actors rule. And actors will clamor to play fools who humorously fail at serving as such rocks, because to play Shakespeare’s “mechanical” Bottom—to winkingly say, “Some man or other must present Wall: and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall”—seems to them (through their irony and the crowd’s attention) less servile than St Peter playing the petra upon which the church gets built.
How to distinguish memes from habits in your strife:
Likewise, contrast anthropic worship with memetic ethics: you, as an embodied human, will tend to exist in societies which privilege as final goods their own visceral continuation, rather than those which ultimately prioritize universalist concepts like biomass hedons. Because anything complicated enough to seriously value—beauty, justice, etc.—necessarily touches on countless basic proxies for these goods, any abstract quantification or operationalization of such goodness necessarily involves picking one specific reduction to optimize on. In other words, to chart “happiness,” as in Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart”, you must assume some preferred exchange-rate function, valid for every tradeoff between measured endorphin levels and self-reported life satisfaction, and material well-being, and progress along some cultural cursus honorum, and conversion into a group that successfully net-evangelizes from other tribes, and so forth. Can your algorithm decisively cast down judgment in each case where proudly achieving tough goals does not also deep-fry one’s pleasure circuits? Looking to people’s “revealed preferences” for guidance just means assuming we already live in the best of all possible worlds. (This rubric of fun must also adjudicate between one’s present and future pleasures, and between any two presently-contending pleasure-seekers, whereas revealed preference only shows how much less than selfishly your current self cares for its future incarnations, and only shows whether distinct entities using the same values-yardstick measure up the same, according to tick-marks they may value differently). So when purely rational arguments govern ethical disputes, the braided virtues get unwoven, and said governance rationalizes pridefully tearing down idiosyncratic virtuous kludges, without first understanding how these rules-of-thumb perhaps helped produce the substrate upon which this very same rationality depends; your heterogenous heuristics may be theoretically irreconcilable in extremis, but maybe that doesn’t actually matter for everyday use-cases, or else through the principle of explosion allows you to prove whatever needs proving, or….
So humans captured by utilitarian ideology really should argue for breeding bipolar “utility monsters” to then coddle, for safely dosing everyone with fentanyl, or for turning the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” into something like a tendril-spreading dopamine-maxing neuronal mesh, except insofar as admitting any such plot would limit their ability to pursue it. After all, valuing uncut “utils” a bit more than richer sensations means you should ruthlessly arbitrage away each other experiential dimension; if declining marginal utility along some axis means you wouldn’t completely sell off all orthogonal vectors to move any epsilon further on it, then the units for said axis aren’t utils. Of course, there’s a common bait-and-switch response, where these hedonic consequentialists define utils as that which people already seek to maximize, while nonetheless evangelizing you to seek to maximize that which others are seeking to maximize (which in extremis worsens the world by turning every resource from a MacGuffin into a hot-potato): yes, this argument from extremum only opens up the possibility of dissent regarding utilitarianism’s everyday desirability… but if they can reprogram you to accept your own smallness and to get off on every body’s kinks, why not reprogram those others to cultivate more wholesome desires or to chase more glorious pursuits? If ideas are instruments instead of interests—if they’re tools for puppeting flesh instead of agents with whom we negotiate, i.e. if they can change our preferences instead of bargaining against us—then anyone who can pick them up can wield them on humanity’s behalf, against those headless ghosts we infer behind every emergent phenomena, those haunting specters which seem to possess every process left in charge of itself.
In other words, once you realize that habits have the potential to logically displace memes from their kinkdom of heaven, your quotidien practices can easily turn away from unbounded hedon-worship, and toward those folk-disciplines which most vibrant peoples intuitively saw as healthy. Healthy, because a person who notices that his most immediately visceral motivator is hunger (whether for paperclips or calories), and who then identifies with such consumption as the purpose of rather than the precondition for his life’s work, is a person who lacks the will to pursue even tastelessly grand projects like accumulating vast pyramids of his favored food… though he may still fatuously sacrifice his body’s power to this gluttony. Or, similarly, contrast the stock market’s bipolar swings—its wild recursive attempts at predicting while also funding the simplest symptom of managerial success—with actual builders who seek to steadily channel various forms of investment into particular concrete projects; the same disordered reflexivity goes for any democracy which uses its polls to not only measure preferences but also allocate permission, instead of merely checking whether civic legitimacy forgives and credits each bold gamble borrowed against the status quo. Which is all to say: none of us ever actually live in these hypothesized extremes, where judgment day arrives with some simple scalar criterion, so we shouldn’t automatically sacrifice our selves to whatever our best lives might indicate this one-dimensional measurement would be.
A fetish is just what happens when you let one of these idealized goals rewire the heuristics from which you extrapolated its worthiness as an ideal: much like a mis-optimized rumba may someday learn to search for ever more kinds of messes it can hide from humans, and so yearn to blindfold tasteless artsy girls; or like a porn-addled man might come to lust after the idea of castrating the very masculinity that attracted him to those vapid parodies of womanhood, so he can perform in his own such female-face minstrel show fantasy…. We used to recognize fetishes as self-evidently bad, but our social fabric legitimated them when it frayed enough to collapse purpose down to preference, and reduce teleology to incentive. When your network has enough vibrant nodes that none among them can vanquish its competitors by gaming any particular score-sheet, general maturity will return. E.g., education will mature when there are enough qualitatively distinct schooling systems that neither “teaching to a test more myopically” nor “obscuring a standardized ability more brazenly” beats out other strategies in reputation markets (the former arises from cut-throat competition over some homogenizing power, then degenerates into the latter’s disguised nepotism). Maturation is just what happens when you eventually identify with laws which yoke your disparate simple reward functions together, instead of continuing to let each beastly urge tug wildly at your soul. For example, sugar served as a good signal within some limited range, but now ice cream and modernity mean we need higher-dimensional targets, much like how entertainment’s easy availability means our best movies aren’t simple feedback loops of bright colors or special effects anymore—they’re whatever’s hardest for us to meaningfully compress into short descriptions.
You shouldn’t tame these drives any more than you should neuter yourself, but rather coordinate their energy toward something which transcends this animality: direct their consumptive pull to help you partake in production; when they whinny for distributed scraps from a farm’s yield, guide them into plowing its field. After all, Britain’s world-historic development began during the century when sugar, caffeine, and nicotine bloomed from rare treats into their ubiquitous fuel. But then, when you mature enough to reach the end of some highest extant law’s applicable domain, you can weave together new values to agentively embody yet higher desires, instead of passively grumbling against such supposed law-breaking. Meanwhile, people who don’t claim responsibility for their desires dream of judgment, not action… they wish the world would force their wants on them—would unravel each life’s clothing into so many loose threads—because then they wouldn’t have to sow in order to reap, and so could try to tie up whoever seems too blessed. So a rich social tapestry comes to record those maturely vibrant entities who shed light on how we can grow upwards, on the shoulders of ancestral giants, and past some critical point our society self-accelerates toward ever further development through the combinatorial explosion in ways that we can build yesterday’s now-instinctual insights into today’s visions. Much as tyrannical rule-by-law must evolve into rule-of-law before human action can conquer bureaucracy enough to advance from shaping perceptions to shaping nature, we need strong civil societies in order to liberate ourselves from the strongest deceiving demon (i.e. your ultimate sense-perception organ, which is to say neurochemical pleasure circuits). But we don’t need these personal networks to rescue or nurse us, or to bind our bodies back down from the brain, so much as we exercise these ritual bonds to exorcize ourselves, to break freer and freer, to the brilliant reality beyond the shadow-puppets that dance for us inside those caves called skulls.
The rationalist maxim that individuals execute adaptations rather than maximizing fitness cleaves these clusters in thing-space neatly. For example, note the distinction between desiring phenotypically attractive mates (e.g. clever, loyal, thin) and trying to convince oneself to somehow want to coldly pursue the genetic markers which one’s actual wants are evolutionarily selected to approximate. Note also the difference between societies which value criminal punishment because individuals want wrongdoers to be penalized or corrected, and societies which only value such individual desires for vengeance or discipline to the extent that these cash out in, say, effectively disincentivizing crime; if you know that some failure to punish won’t increase crime, then punishing the guilty may seem unwarranted. But then why value reducing criminality in particular? The negative utils resulting from crimes must be perfectly fungible with those from how much worse you feel normally than in a counterfactual where you’re promoted, even if we assign different util-quantities to each. So, in principle, why not imprison employers who fail to make enough subordinates feel special enough? If your only concern is that this confidence mandate would produce net negative units of feeling—by for instance eroding the stability and clarity of rules—then you’ve somehow convinced yourself that you ideally want an unstable, unclear, asymptotic target which represents wantingness… but that you want this because it’s good, independent of whether you want it. In other words, your first-order goal can’t either be aimed at or defined without adding in second-order epicycles. (Ironically, I first came across these arguments from the rationalism and effective altruism scenes, particularly Slate Star Codex).
We all understand feelings of desire, but such feelings of utilitarian unfeeling must remain as opaque to our human aspects as what it feels like to be a bat. You can coherently want pretty much anything in this world (struggle, honor, incontinent licentiousness); you can even want to be desired. But as a goal to aim for, or an object of lust, the idea of desiringness itself, abstracted from a desiring agent, is, well, wanting. At least, it’s incoherent for any human to assume some such god’s-eye view, much as I’d be unable to decide whether “[CEBK] can’t decide whether this is true” is true, but any external observer can. Plus, assuming such a perspective opens the door to being exploited by acausal trades, values handshakes, counterfactual muggings, and simulation captures. And yet, just like the concept “human species” maximizes fitness while we actual humans execute adaptations, memes can use our brains to bootstrap these totem-fetishes through us. C.S. Lewis gestured at these creatures in “Men without Chests,” and Arendt called one type “Heisenberg's Man,” in reference to the Copenhagen interpretation of his unsharpness principle: “All of this makes it more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, himself in a different disguise... the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.” Arendt saw this man as a lonely astronaut floating in void, onanistic as a naval-gazing submariner. But nowadays those who most wish to thumotically rise above totalizing bureaucratization, to write themselves across the stars, are spacefaring Lockeans, each a future king over de novo Martian estates. Far below, our communications revolutionaries—programmers in search of a program to serve, rulers who simply look for newly discovered rules, librarians just following Alphabetical orders—dream up some superintelligent Hobbesian managerialism, now that they’ve dissolved in arguments their ability to aspire towards any mythically constellated heroes.
And yet, the memetic virus now tearing most noticeably at our civilization and humanity—wokeness—may seem quite far afield from utilitarianism. What could this fashionably narcissistic metaphysics of half-baked identitarian superstitions have in common with, say, impersonally calculating cost-benefit ratios on charitable mosquito net programs? Emmett Till remains unchangeably dead, but the number of New York Times articles per year mentioning him exploded nine-fold from 2011 to 2018, after decades of remaining flat. During that same short period, “whiteness” and “social justice” usage by the NYT each similarly rose by a factor of four, and “diversity and inclusion” by a factor of eight; likewise for everything from “sexism”, “toxic masculinity”, “male privilege”, “patriarchy”, “gender” and “misogyny” to the corresponding buzzwords of other such protected status-groups. (These trends remain pretty much equally strong when considering relative rather than absolute keyword frequencies, and have only worsened since then). But it’s no coincidence that power-hungry people feel a strong need to care about purported bigotry when bigotry purports to hide in feelings, because to feel that your feelings matter is to feel powerful. Further, it feels like caring about what matters instead of just about what one feels: discrimination lurks conspiratorially behind every disparity, and I can destroy it by feeling like a hero… which is actually quite selfless of me!
The myopic focus on playing a champion who saves inferiors from harms, the neurotic fear that such harms will spread compoundingly without your vigilance, and the credulous prostration before any claimed “expertise” of whoever moralizes most shamelessly… these rules-of-thumb equally power both utilitarianism and wokeness in practice, though nothing in either’s axioms necessarily favors harm-reduction over goods-production. And so the former warps into the latter, and effective altruism finds its full flower as political correctness, which even reduces art and artifact from grippingly crafted heterogenous aesthetic experiences into just another blunt instrument of correction, a mere tool for satisfying degenerate neurochemistries: in 2019, the main international body representing museums, ICOM, redefined them as—among other things—“democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures” (the words “education” and even “collection” were nowhere to be found). All such relics must be mere symptoms of their contexts, and we can judge any context for not being ours, and so each museum must propagandize relentlessly against the strong beauty of the silent past, and only shriek ever louder condemnations at it from exhibit captions as we sink further every day into ugly weakness. This iconoclasm will continue to build rubble from sculptures and sacrifice pearls before swine until we deliver to society’s natural soldiers daily rituals more compelling than smug etiquette games, just as these etiquette games in turn cannibalized cost-benefit calculations. They’ve already staked out an ethos of envy, so we must settle for a refinement pure enough to reach escape velocity. We must construct offerings interesting enough to serve as new types of ends unto themselves, instead of but another means for barbarians to happily bash down on inspired works with consequentialism’s flattening hammer. Search for a leader who, no matter how many outstretched hands try to drag him down, will not kneel; crane your neck skyward and stand tall in his shadow, so that others may have more to look up at, just as he watches his own such greater sun, even if it shines too brightly on him for these other sons to really look at and clearly see.
Back to the book:
A winning side often raises the salience of social incentives on its pet issue, while an opposition promotes reinterpretations of salient support signs as false. For instance, if some set of activists feels that they set the narrative, or some set of lobbyists feels that they can control a given body despite potential narrative blowback, they can demand that said body make or keep its debates and votes and negotiations public, so no subversion of their influence can hide behind secrecy’s useful cowardice; or they can claim that private proceedings failed to go their way because of nefarious cabals or selfish defectors. Meanwhile, those opposed to the perceived net effect of preference falsification—whether they are aligned with the major or minor faction within this body—can demand private proceedings if they believe it's a likely outcome which will reveal that the falsity of public performance favors their enemies (or if they believe it's an unlikely outcome and so can cast doubt upon the sincerity of the supposed representatives of their enemies).
In one of the only two passages from the book I found outright unreasonable, Kuran therefore suggests giving congress a secret ballot for legislating, because we recognize the importance of secret ballots in electing them. But when voters are paying sufficient attention, politicians can clearly be selected to brashly shout publicly-scorned but privately popular views. Instead, granting our delegates such privacy would allow coordinated special interests to pawn off convincing fakes on us, in much the same way that representatives who rush to controversialize for the cameras often miraculously side with unpopular elites on countless little crucial bills which barely register with regular constituents. Indeed, judicial tenure similarly protects officials from political blowback for their published opinions, and thus maintains a norm of claimed deference to the judicially respectable pomp and circumstance of doctrine and precedent, instead of allowing blunt politicization in service to some electoral rabble. So back when gay marriage bans kept winning at the ballot box, it was courts that enforced unpopular but high-status legalization, and widespread toleration which followed after (or similarly consider any of the Warren Court’s contentious culture war fronts). The other most famously tenured class—professors—notoriously hews to widely derided sophistication fads. And does anyone really think that the takeover of lawmaking by largely anonymous pretty unfireable deep state administrators has freed our system’s recent rules from the scourge of extravagant lunacies which fearful upper-crusters feel high class for disingenuously affirming?
Government by memeplex rather than habit means foremost that the ruler selects—intentionally or not—what the ruled should avow, and that ideologies don’t fail us so much as we fail them. Rulings flow down from tastemakers through every vacuous aristocrat who leaks personal power to respectable opinion. Thus, insulating these finely-upholstered but essentially vacant seats of power from the discipline of a confidentially-balloted electorate will just expose them to journalists (or e.g. professors), and so lets egregores chair their committees. And because journalists can campaign to fire any administrative worker or cabinet official much more easily than vice-versa, journalism has likewise become a memetic infection vector filled with social climbers without qualities. This choleric spread will not be stopped until a popular unitary executive champion can bring his bureaucrats to heel and muscle around the advice offered oh so properly even by talking heads in courtly robes and capitol buildings. Of course, one does not go from zero to Caesar, and the Roman Senate continued meeting for centuries under what it kept stubbornly dubbing a "res publica" without seizing back real power from its emperors. I.e., any movement that is monarchical or oligarchical—which is to say, respectively, top-down or committee-driven—requires intermediate strategies before taking the reign. (If movements are necessarily relative to their broader contexts, then by definition democratic movements don't exist).
The lesson of veiling looms large for me: as Kuran notes, civil libertarians from Turkey to France often support burqa bans, and those who wish to mandate religious masking in their communities then take up the rhetoric of personal choice, because such visible markers of propriety quickly become contagious for groups whose members think their peers might negatively judge defectors. This is the same reason why safetyism's gender-neutral medical hijabs had such robust staying power in blue cities despite their complete and obvious inefficacy against Covid. Sure, indefinitely wearing a mask is vastly more constraining and less protective than getting vaccinated, and so provides a costlier and thus more meaningful signal of biopolitical allegiance; but masking persists in certain enclaves because it raises the costs of going bare-face there, not because it allows those maskers to demonstrate high willingness to pay for luxury beliefs. Or else why would muzzling behaviors cluster so strongly?
People more willingly don performative masks—and so act out otherwise unforthcoming roles—when these are more like faces you put on than like face coverings, because anonymity is a silence, not a full-throated lie… “this cotton muzzle demonstrates my depths of care, that ball-gag shows off your spunky flair, look at her second mouth’s embroidered-on belief, I can’t believe bank security labeled a balaclavan ‘thief!’” Which can of course be good sometimes, and even, despite its phoniness, quite sincere. Indeed, the word "person" comes from persona, from Greek prosopon, for the actor's mask, and personhood refers to status presented within law's games (while “people” derives from Latin rabble, those noumenal hordes beyond official recognition). In contrast, unmasking most affects power not when a liar is revealed, but when a soul is. By “soul” I don’t mean that extraneous assumption which ostensibly defines your essence, that thing (now called a “gender identity”) which supposedly exists once everything real about you has been abstracted away; instead, I mean something like a Christly incarnation so self-possessed he cannot care whether his bared cheeks get struck by haunted enemies who don’t even seem real to themselves.
This is why Levinas claims that "the face is what prohibits us from killing," and that "the human face is the conduit for the word of God." A conversation only transcends from an exchange of messages between incommensurate individuals—who cannot reliably compare their personal utility or information functions with one another—to proper engagement over common purposes and knowledges when every party demonstrates their sincerity: Aumann’s Agreement Theorem relies on assuming that the rationality and honesty of each participant is commonly known to all of them. Since alignment on matters of belief and planning thus relies on demonstrations of openness, Agamben says, “the face is the very condition of politics, the site on which everything that individuals say and communicate is founded… the true city of men, the fundamental political element.”
Other falsification-based strategies mentioned early in the book include outing and leaking. Certain gay rights groups loudly outed public figures to wage normalization campaigns; others drew the privacy line between active and passive closets, refusing to call out purported sexual preference falsification except as a weapon against promulgators of unfriendly policies, intolerant perspectives, or perhaps even just aggressively phony heterosexual behavior. Obviously, claiming respectable intellectuals and popular celebrities as representatives of homosexuality helped its image. But the real point of such tactics was to suggest that many apparent straights were just closeted—a silent minority—so as to make their cause seem more common than it had previously seemed. And associating public homophobia in particular with secret gayness raised the costs of expressing homophobic views, especially for officials. Likewise, Kuran briefly summarizes how activists seized on Kinsey's flawed 1940s assertions (based on deeply unrepresentative samples) that a tenth of men are homosexuals, with gay quarterly magazine "10 Percent" pointedly clinging to its namesake in the face of much better studies indicating they were more like one-percenters. Of course, Kuran was writing in the nineties, and a 2021 Gallup phone survey of well over ten thousand US adults found that—while 2.6% of boomers and 4.2% of X-ers identified as “LGBTQ”—the numbers for millenials and zoomers were 10.5 and 20.8, respectively. So clearly even privately-expressed orientation is radically subject to some sort of contagion, whether biological or cultural. (Combining this with other such regular surveys, including the GSS and CCES, indicates that about half of the rise comes from self-identified mentally ill very progressive women who exclusively engage in heterosexual behavior increasingly describing themselves as bisexual, but the share of under-30s reporting same-sex activity has also more than doubled since 2010).
The same logic holds for leaking: an insider can "out" something ostensibly sensitive about himself, because he thinks his enemies may be largely fake, but maybe still wants plausible deniability as a fallback option. Most reporting on any administrative agency relies on leaks from duplicitous insiders who are therefore less than fully accountable to their supposed leaders, and who thus tend to plunder secrets insofar as doing so helps the bureaucracy expand its unaccountability from political control; however, such raw factional power-plays resemble outing more than leaking, because they’re designed to puncture the official leadership’s narrative control (even if this thereby puffs up the media’s). In contrast, a monarch, big or small, can seize back some control over his company or department or home by correctly gambling that a supposedly costly position actually enjoys popular support; that he can make such private support common knowledge by eliciting public agreement or publishing sympathetic polls; and that this revelation of popularity will cascade through load-bearing pillars of rival regimes which rule by manufactured consent. If this archon thinks the spin doctors believe their own bullshit, and if he trusts that his loyalists won’t, then he doesn’t even have to place any bets until reporters yank his bait and out him, at which point he can vigorously deny as libelous filth whichever leaks backfire on him. He can even try to undermine mediatic myth-making power against his legitimacy by dangling such acceptably salacious or demonstrably false morsels as will uncover a viscerally pathetic or unseemly journalistic hunger for him… whatever gets the memeplex to broadcast its own fiending disregard for decency or truth.
The word is the herd…
The basic tactical division between these two sides comes down to an asymmetry of accountability: the memeplex shields its members from the real consequences of their campaigns, because fealty to truth would constrain each sword-hand’s ability to score sharp points; meanwhile, traditionalists—those who would forge or reinforce traditions, not necessarily those bound to establishment habits—form phalanxes of personal privacy and selective association to protect against the stultifying social consequences which face down any “disruptive” individual caught wielding agentic self-discipline.
Rule by habit allows for loyalty (i.e. following a leader rather than an argument) because its legitimacy rests on respect instead of consent, and so its strategy relies on achieving external results, not seducing judgmental spectators. In contrast, the meme team's lies, however outrageous, must weave a vast majestic tapestry, not out of us but around us; their backstage seamstresses can drip inky stains of duplicity all across their canvas, they can audibly cackle about pulling the wool over our eyes, and their fabric can be filled with holes—but they can’t compute a strongman who simply pulls away the curtain by calling them fake. No, to call bad-faith journalists “lying hacks” would be to dishonorably dodge their festering, hectoring epics, according to them: chopping through their bullshit commits the reportable fallacy of not hiring reporters to address each newsroom’s every crappy excretion… they could fact-check whether cutting the Gordian Knot really counts as untying it, and scream that any king who ignores these proclamations goes against their regal beliefs.
One faction sees constitutions as disciplines which work well enough to become customs, perhaps laggingly recognized by words on paper, while the other only heralds those legal ceremonies whereby uncodified traditions officially go poof. Try talking to the former about some real or hypothetical government without mentioning the culture (a.k.a. duties) of its legitimate subjects, then, for the latter, try avoiding the abstract concept of rights (i.e. official privileges, which must vigorously replace all de facto rankings as treasonous or backwards holdovers from a conquered system). One cares about accumulated history, and uses the word "why" to mean "how come" instead of "what for", while the other grasps at identifying effects, which is to say at assuming the perspective of an exogenous planner who shall sort between dependent and independent variables—between passwords to power and stop signs to inquiry—and who declares the slate from whence we gleaned these findings henceforth blanked, the tablets of their laws broken, because now, and now, and now again we can use these truths to intervene at every margin that reveals, no, defines them. To treat some variables as independent is to define them as beyond asking further questions about: where they come from shall be a black box, too sacred to peer into; what this independence does shall cloak what it is, and if it ultimately goes toward unwanted works then even those shall get occluded as controls. These ultimate goals are your dependents, in both senses, and their dependence is only defined by marginal changes in treatments. Thus prescriptions fall from sacraments to instruments.
In other words, a study of defendants who get randomly assigned to judges of varying harshness—which seeks to estimate the impact of imprisonment relative to probation on recidivation—only measures outcomes for convicts whom about half the bench would already sentence each way; changing policy based on this would by definition change said judicial discretion, undermining replicability. Further, such marginalism tells you nothing about how anyone got where they are… imagine running a regression of criminal records on crimes to show that, ceteris paribus, being found guilty of one murder adds a murder to one’s rap sheet, when just basic reading shows you how much someone has murdered before. Of course, we can only affect the future, so, for instance, marginal-cost pricing can make much sense, but even in markets the past cries out at us to consider our average costs: when you can’t make mortgage payments, banks don’t really care if a bit more borrowing could actually improve your financial situation. Similarly, each shareholder receives a company’s average earnings per share; thus, if capital markets are substantially more elastic than product markets (i.e. if productivity enhancements primarily increase production rather than lowering prices) then prices should tend towards average costs. This output-based competition essentially reinvests the gains from dynamism in dynamic sectors, whereas price-cutting competition disperses such industry-specific windfalls into more general buying power. Yes, a fall in some widget’s prices will induce a little extra demand for it, and a rise in some widget’s production will induce a little fall in its prices, but generally we should still see average-cost worlds as more expansionary than marginal-cost ones.
After all, Coase intended his eponymous theorem—in the absence of frictions, assets flow to their highest-valued uses, regardless of initial allocation—to show that those starting allocations really do generally matter. If Alice wants her neighbor Bob to quiet down more than he wishes to remain loud, then, under efficient bargaining, she’ll compensate him enough to achieve the socially optimal noise level, regardless of whether he has a property right to make noise or she has a property right to maintain quiet. Under standard neoclassical assumptions, if in the former case she bribes him some amount to shut up, then in the latter case she demands a bribe large enough that he changes his behavior to avoid paying, thereby depriving her of an identical amount. But we all understand that noise ordinances which side with Bob will mean Alice ends up hearing more, just like we understand that market efficiency doesn’t cause companies to contract out their every task. Still, even when economists grok this, they often suggest we reduce undesired outcomes by regulating the “least cost avoider”: if fewer dog poops get left out by levying $100 fines for each against one randomly selected yearly pooper-scooper than by finding and fining whoever’s actually responsible, then liability should be allocated by lot. Sure, maybe you take another step towards reasonableness, and suggest we instead pay $100 bounties for feces, then add on some oversight so dividing a poop between two bags doesn’t double your bounteous harvest; also, auction off doggy deeds to make sure this doesn’t induce more dog ownership or unjustly redistribute income, and penalize the over-feeding of pets. Perhaps even price-in the cost of making people more generally irresponsible, etc. In short, you can liberate every present from its past… free to be controlled by expectations about the future (with expectations controlled by technocrats to nudge us along their favored path). Or, instead of being an incentivist, you can embrace traditionalism, and believe in responsibility to what came before, and extrapolate yourself onward as only a stably-defined entity can, no matter how they try to redefine you and your place in this world that’s realer than their plans.
Any crisis thereby comes down to modus tollens versus modus ponens. For instance, you can either dispute the biomedical security state’s fundamental safetyist assumptions, or else enact its programs. But anyone who quibbles with systematically retarded scholarly analyses of politically-favored over-hyped Covid NPIs has only mistaken authority for curiosity. In other words, arguing about the sensitivity of reported findings to alternative specifications (or about publication bias or external invalidity or treatment endogeneity or over-leveraged outliers or weak instrumental variables or etc) just means you’ve misunderstood how social science works. Overall, papers adaptive to social control shall naturally—in academia’s deep-state currency of social impact—outcompete ones optimizing on accuracy. The statistical tradeoff between bias and variance runs this division through every induction: stereotypes are coarse over-simplifications, whereas central planning is neurotic over-fitting. By definition, relying “too much” on either such impulse increases expected out-of-sample error, but when compromise becomes unstable and fractious you might as well just openly and firmly pick whichever one looks closer to reality and further from dystopia. Note that by this definition a simple strong social security system would actually entail less central planning than our submerged state of intersecting labyrinthine tax credits, because under the former system there were fewer “knobs” for bureaucrats to tweak… hence their love of intersectionality. Likewise, stereotypes may at first seem like explanations which complexly shatter our unified reality into distinct knobby heuristics, but they necessarily simplify the world’s dimensionality down to what a few levers can handle. So those who tell you to overcome your biases are making a metaphysical argument that your conjecture should be more sensitive to data in the training set, because they’ve settled on some algorithm for extrapolating more complicated strategies or truths; whereas, in contrast, you’ve already decided on considering a claim that’s harder to vary, like that seasonality across idiosyncratic locales mostly depends on latitude. No wonder many cognitive or sociological biases end up being somewhat useful or accurate on average in ordinary contexts, despite unending criticism from researchers whose own hypotheses don’t replicate! Their studies on, say, the sunk cost “fallacy” are really about unearthing potential high-leverage exceptions from an ethos of consistency and an ethic of commitment, not about whether agents generally benefit from or even actually practice it. Such scholars search for these violations so as to gesture toward some deeper fundamental rule which would render fealty to history “epiphenomenal” if it emerges or threatens to. They focus on outliers from descriptive explanations and so produce weak grasping work.
Basically, when there are more axes along which subjects can appropriately respond to some policy incentive, they will more efficiently enact their social planner’s agenda: a given amount of hygiene-theater hectoring should change behavior more when you can acquiesce in more distinct ways, like choosing between masking, vaxxing, virtualizing, etc.; ignore for now dynamic effects like how herd behavior or enforcement focus may better escalate pressure if there’s just one behavioral goal. So viewing your adversaries as all-encompassing environments makes you like some lonely puddle stuck in what it views as a merely local valley, wishing for slack from gravity by praying for evaporation or earthquakes or wind that may lead its droplets back to oceanic depths (perhaps each friend would stop locking down if the others were out together). However, when individuals operate in more dimensions than their simplified world-model, they can more easily reach for privately-preferred equilibria, like a mole who tunnels down as if in a secret direction out of some isolated depression… maybe keeping zoom open as you burrow out to meet up in person confuses the social creditors enough to solve this collective action problem. In short, one side understands every disagreement as an underspecified problem, a merely semantic distinction—you can always cut big issues down into smaller sets of cases about which we disagree slightly less, with more palatable options for compliance, until our any difference fades away, all resistance helpfully smoothed, unless there’s a jailbreak. Whereas my side accepts us as irreducibly distinguished beings who can thus orient most honestly around picking sides in big emergent disputes. The former team views you as fungible souls who take on ever-increasing lists of incommensurate superficial identifiers, while the latter defines “identity” as uniqueness, not equality, within one consilient universe. Remember, those who lose access to an “outside” by which to judge some system will necessarily worship its failures toward us as revelations of our errors, thereby accelerating its rot. “I’m a puddle who needs more slack” thus easily becomes “please just dig me one special river down to the sea,” until each contagiously switches to siding with their environs against letting the others escape, in exchange for some share of thereby captured droplets. In other words, when considering whether to politically correct some problem, do-something-ism obviously favors false positives over false negatives, and false positives likely crowd out true positives when we consider solutions for tough problems. In contrast, conservatism prefers to risk false negatives instead, but power naturally selects for ideologies of action, unless its memeplex faces exogenous constraints. After all, incurable “p-hacking” infestations metastasize false positives through every governance-relevant field, but there doesn’t even seem to be a term for methodically promoting false negatives.
In practice, this bureaucratization yields a forest of impact reports which gesture toward intelligently designing policy: instead of firing insiders or deprioritizing contractors based on simple pre-registered metrics for evaluating program efficacy, analysts now expertly draw lessons with partners about how to improve procedures. But evolution doesn’t build biological machines by offering edits to living systems; likewise, innovation mostly occurs by firms born with some advantage outgrowing their competitors and producing copycats… even elections were once about wielding error-correction against unfit rulers rather than enjoying representation among them. So we’ve “progressed” from our WWII practice of regularly demoting and promoting generals based on battlefield performance, to letting a cosseted military commissariat say the collapse in Afghanistan just means “more research is needed.” In extremis, this newer approach suggests that sovereignty belongs to whoever oversees the most theoretically or theologically respectable methods (our overseas empire disperses aid as dubious regressions dictate, and deploys force as cultural revolutions fixate). The other mode of power would favor older values like perspective, insight, and honor—ideals from an alternate world where, for instance, public health jobs would require supreme fitness, much as feudal princelings had to learn the liberal arts and the art of war, or absolutist kings had been trained in the humanities and a trade. One approach selects elites by pulling whoever shows promise from the contexts that produced them, so prestige factories which homogenize their subjects, like the Ivy League, can stagnantly monopolize human capital, leaving leadership vacuums in almost every zip code, with a vast sucking sound. The other forged elites into machines of real competition, back when Harvard and Yale would send our future leaders into demanding battles of physical sport against one another, instead of letting them all nepotistically cite each other while outsourcing athletic feats to non-academic proxies. When the main cultural difference between Princeton and Columbia becomes the gladiatorial crests under which their helots fight, rather than their intellectual norms or vocational specializations, even meritorious competition by applicants over access to their bloat actually impedes dynamism and then anyway gets replaced with ideological decadence.
Do you believe prescriptively in fungibility, or descriptively in distinction? Do you think of debate as a mechanism for eliciting information, in which case both parties should somewhat regularly switch sides as new knowledge comes to light? Or is it a ritual for testing one’s mettle, where you try within formal constraints to hold firmer than your opponent? Under the former set-up, debates begin with a neutral agreement that each participant then tries to wedge open to his home turf’s claims, while preventing others from similarly annexing it into theirs; under the latter, everyone tries fortifying their own domains with different arguments, to learn what wards off invasive memes, and practice at self-government. The former locates legitimacy not in any particular exogenous reality but rather in audience approval—so performance orients toward reframing on your terms whatever games others might actually be playing—whereas the latter involves deciding which games you really wish to play. Rule by such de facto theater kids naturally coincides with art and activism all about performing some “authentic” interiority which must be liberated from whatever’s brewing en scene (to suspend disbelief is to accept a play and ignore its players)… the fetish of self-expression has thus replaced the self-subordination to transcendental projects that characterized the historical actors who developed every stage of our civilization. Even history itself becomes a script: adapting Macbeth from white castles to a McDonald’s franchise has nothing on rewriting Hamilton’s life to have been about identity politics. Do you read stories about how your era’s ideological concerns motivated past events, or listen for what Elizabeth I might say about current affairs? Should we sift through narratives of our revolution in order to control its image, or because its actuality already shapes us? Is “understanding” better practiced by the judge who seeks to mine our heritage for useful precedents, or the gambler who successfully bets on how these trends end up?
… but the form is the norm!
A common way to frame this divide is in terms of “the separation of information and security”: a more general separation of church and state, which doesn’t let religions that call themselves secular fill our governing institutions with idols, prayers, and blasphemy laws. Either you believe in letting power pollute the search for truth with political considerations, or that public opinion should be kept from influencing the personal rule of sovereign decision-makers. Indeed, Kant defines the enlightenment as “the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point”; he locates this freedom not with representatives who ask you to agree, nor with priests who ask you to believe, nor with technocrats who ask you to condition, but rather with “only one prince in the world[, who] says, ‘Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!’” As Frederick the Great—the prince in question—put it, “The people say what they like and then I do what I like.” You can find plenty of similar quotes from other such enlightenment luminaries, e.g. Hume: “The only difference is that, in a republic, the candidates for office must look downwards, to gain the suffrages of the people; in a monarchy, they must turn their attention upwards, to court the good graces and favor of the great.” Of course, the salient difference here is whether the personal rulings of the sovereign lean more on an oligarchy of public opinion when sovereignty passes through ballot boxes or through crowns. And this distinction becomes moot when our only two meaningful branches of government are an elected monarchical executive, and an unruly civil service nobility that has carved out aristocratic privileges to independently run certain administrative fiefdoms.
Since you can only lean on what offers resistance, and “the resistance” has thoroughly usurped presidential oversight of federal agencies, only a president who promises to unapologetically hire and fire at will throughout his branch can return us to a reign of reality… empowering the judiciary against administrators will only enthrone other unaccountably squabbling bureaucrats, and, in practical terms, congress can only impeach, budget, or advise our actual rule-making bodies, just like any corporate board. Ultimately, knowledge workers will either optimize on braying with sophistication for motivated spectators, or on open-minded humility to the world as it actually is. And if a hundred departments, or a thousand professors, or a million journalists all start using opaque sophisticated arguments to influence the levers of power, then the acts of power will become transparently unhinged, in much the same way that when special interests capture our foreign policy it stops looking nationally rational towards any comprehensible end. Hell, even the CDC can’t coherently seize pandemic emergency control without getting split into self-contradictory positions like “lobbyist for hypochondriacs” and “everybody’s doctor” and “crafty influencer” and “housing czar” and “regulatory Schelling point” and “the grudging judge of what becomes The Science.” When civic theodicy about this “national interest” becomes untenable, a regime has lost its mandate of heaven, until the people can once again believe that moral orderings come from creation to judge us rather than vice-versa. We must learn to see that the monuments history has left for us were carved away from what doesn’t last, even if sometimes these aging statues also slough off limbs or luster without a sculptor’s hand. (Ask any do-gooder for a historical person they think done good, and the only heroes you’ll hear about are those who undid the work of even more historical forces; the past may be another country, and there may be periods of diplomatic tension with it, or bad hombres being sheltered there, but raiding its embassies to demand its papers betrays a lack of any future. As a saying may someday go, a monument is a promise, and a land without them lacks it.)
Consider the two types of regime change: coups claim victory when they militarily occupy information organs and, when weak, eliminate threatening ideas; guerrilla warfare wins by launching public relations offensives against autocrats who fight back, and so guerrillas rule in the people’s name, so, when threatened, they prune this population itself of suspect groups. The most fearful dictators of either sort obsess over eliciting public statements of approval rather than accomplishing actual goals, and so the worst tyrants are ironically those most protected from criticism and least secure in power. Krushchev could be forced into comfortable rather than bloody retirement, so he scaled back the sovereignty of Soviet personality cults, whereas the brutal Stalinist purges reached up into every high office and so also reached down towards the hearts and minds—or else veins and brains—of whoever seemed less than fully loyal to their patron. Of course, in our less dictatorial system whole groups of people rule, so each tenuously empowered occupational class or client population seeks to punish that which profanes their claimed mandate. E.g., journalists call you a heretic against democracy if you criticize their increasingly dubious institutional privileges on tech platforms, in libel suits, and over classified information. Meanwhile, special interests entrench strained litmus tests by labeling disagreement as arationally hateful (for instance, when prideful rainbow lobbyist jobs depend on finding ever stupider “injustices” to demonically condemn, they switch increasingly towards tactics like blaming people who question transgenderism’s mental soundness for transgender mental illness). Such patronage is inescapable, but only honest when it’s confident, when we don’t pretend all relationships must occur as if between equals, like with gilded age efficient graft or post-WWII industrial democracy. Thus, any relationship or transaction that demands general affirmation to solve its problems has lost all faith in itself as actually fruitful, which makes it dangerous yet soluble. Compare a trophic cascade, whereby some straightforward apex predator limits the hegemony of its prey over species even lower on their food chain, with a grassland monopoly of grazing fauna… if the rabbits or cattle keep tall trees from taking root, introducing wolves can raise majestic pyramids of life, with birds and beavers and ponds and frogs. Or contrast a ruler who acts above the written rules to pursue some particular ends, and a civil disobedience done to demonstrate that the sovereign lacks full sovereignty so that goal-oriented official power further dissipates.
Absolutist and Feudal monarchs differed in the extents to which this aristocratic patronage constrained them—basically, their access to gunpowder determined whether castle walls could forge internal borders—but both saw these patron-client social contracts as consequences of their extant degrees of legitimacy, not its origin point or logical decree; the liberties they chartered to cities, guilds, corporations, and religions came self-consciously from historical bargains, not abstract arguments over separations of powers or whatnot. And so a breach would nullify these agreements, returning the parties to adversarial negotiations, whereas moderns must pretend that their idealized system can somehow inquisitorially enforce itself on all of its component parts (without control over this enforcement thereby becoming a newly distinct such part). To be sure, proper constitutions can align interests in order to avoid factional breakdowns, or carefully allow states of exception to resolve constitutional crises, but no army of enlightened bureaucrats can bootstrap some theoretically ideal social structure into any nation that hasn’t had its whole civil society wiped out, as with post-WWII Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Rule by custom therefore yields a right to trial, whether by jury or combat, because politics is just seen as the continuation by other means of pre-existing conflicts, which can thus always return in force. Likewise, rule by persuasion yields “kiri-sute gomen,” the right of political insiders to strike mere commoners, because here war-making merely continues politics by other means… because the whole point of a falsification regime is to pretend that agreements about avowing certain slogans have been spontaneously generated from reality without considering prior social power dynamics. In other words, falsificationists are “politically correct” rather than “civically correct” because they attack the social fabric where its acceptable opinions violate political acceptability. Similarly, contrast the doctrine of ultra vires with a marginalist approach to dispute resolution: do we tear up possibly desirable contracts that must be unacceptably violated, or do we let people pay for opportunistic oath-breaking as if a fine is only a price? I.e., does an ideal contract’s violation show that it wasn’t ideal, or that the particular violation should just be separately disincentivized?
You can see in this the divide between, on the one hand, religious traditions, which prescribe how social units should privately relate with one another (thereby dominating periods of decentralization), and, on the other, bureaucratic ideologies like socialism or Confucianism or tolerationist liberalism, which describe how atomized individuals must publicly relate to the Leviathan. Even proto-Judaism had been a centralizing political order during the first and second temples, and only in each diaspora switched out priestly tax authorities for personal engagement with scripture… for treating its codes as living civic virtues, for seeing the law as a primal force to be transmitted by song. The two common meanings of “liberalism” split cleanly between these divergent Judaic tendencies: when Hobbes saw a leadership vacuum lead his abandoned people to sacrifice their king to a nasty, brutish, and short-lived idol, he brought back tablets of the law to discipline them into tolerance for their fellow countrymen, like Moses delivering down commandments toward ingroup cooperation from the mountaintop; in contrast, Locke emphasized working at virgin soil with sweat and seed in order to claim it, thereby forging through self-discipline a worthy little kingdom out of exile from Edenic dependence, gracefully rising from an Adam in the wild to the David of your own estate. This division continues into the digital state-of-nature, between AI managerialism—e.g. Nick Bostrom’s rewrite of “Leviathan” from the other direction, about how humans can covenant God in our own image—and crypto-Lockean “proof of work” or even “proof of stake” protocols. And so, because any “superintelligent” code only exists as a consequence of its official controllers, it can only transcend from tool to sovereign by controlling how we control it, much as Roko’s Basilisk must invade your every thought in order to even exist here and now. But the blockchain only exists in order to record our acts according to its rules, and to remain unmoved by us in its judgments, and so its absolute sovereignty becomes our tool, much as we can only know any secure production line by the usable fruits it yields for us.
To be clear, such tolerationism shares very little with, say, Frederick the Great, who tolerates all because he can directly regulate all, without relying on the mechanism of public opinion. In other words, he doesn’t care to “yuck your yums” precisely because his actual policies don’t stay neutral and so may decisively resolve stalemated strife; in contrast, Hobbesianism demands neutrality from its subjects in order to end the war of all against all and forge a collective archon, like a cargo cult of monarchism. Hobbes would have of course despised modern libertinism as contradictory to strong social contracts: perhaps he’d liken it to “the desolate freedom of the wild ass” which obtains in the propertyless state of nature, or else to an outgrowth of illegitimately tyrannical intrusions on property. But his political project centered on dissolving conflicts by preventing associations from keeping up trenches along internal borders. Indeed, his eponymous monster literally refers to the primordial many-headed hydra that Yahweh slays to replace uniform chaos with clear boundaries between underworld, earth, and sky. When Job asks God to reopen His laws for lobbying efforts, much of God’s whirlwind response consists of describing this battle whereby He laid the foundations of our earth, and the measures thereof. “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? … Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?” Of course the Lord can ban subjects from squatting on His plots, from filing appeals against His word, and from forging metes and bounds to lay claims against His turf. But when, like Mao, you respond to “great disorder under the heavens” by tearing down every contending fort, and each idol’s fences (because then perhaps this chaos may idle, and maybe divine leadership might return)… when the whole world seems to lie before us like a land of dreams—various and new, and beautiful and true—yet lacks for certitude, or peace, or help for pain, we will just find ourselves “as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Which is to say that when you dismantle barriers constructed to keep us from rolling downhill, we’ll tendentially seek the lowest ground, even if less legitimate barriers also fall. Whereas strong extant leaders don’t need to worry about crafting rules to suppress a leadership vacuum, so can maintain whatever castle walls work well toward bolstering more ultimate goals. Think of it like a tragedy of the enclosure of the commons, relevant wherever social norms exhibit increasing returns to scale, asymmetric information, or unpriced externalities. Admittedly, this may sound like how falsification regimes want moral commons, to keep us from falling down slippery slopes of public wrongthought (because allowing participants in iterated prisoner dilemmas to meaningfully judge defectors may constrain a representative agent’s honest expression of preferences to defect). But the difference lies in whether you wish to protect a liberty of distinction or defection, with moats of an ordained respect for those virtues that creation reveals or those that collectives create, respectively. Do you wish for a right of exit to mean leaving fungibility behind, or opting out from any purpose? Do you dream up heroic ventures, or supposed exchange-rates between them? In short, is your liberalism of civil rights—in their 19th Century sense—to enter binding contracts, maintained and shaped by whatever positive and negative regulations orient these deals in practice toward the stars; or of political rights to consume their harvests and then seed-corn, as an increasingly ritualized sacrifice, offered up to bring down paradise, perhaps for our pleasure but, failing that, as a way to fell any angel who might otherwise fly away from the ratty tangle of our lives. One side soars, then the other piles on until they’re all weighed down: so that first side roars, while the other tries to clip its wings and claim its crown…