"The flaws of the left are procedural, while the flaws of the right are spiritual."
What do you say about the fact that leftism, at least as we see it most commonly manifested today, has at its core an ugly motivation of egalitarian resentment against those they perceive to be the strong, beautiful, powerful, and successful? I think that's a pretty important flaw that goes beyond procedure.
Also, “liberals are smarter than conservatives!” is just a fact and fairly important even if you don't think it's a loadbearing pillar for your ideology. In addition, EHC theory is not in conflict with minoritarianism, but complements it. Just because Karlin and Hanania often use EHC expansively (especially when describing midwit bureaucrat types) this doesn't therefore mean it should be disregarded completely.
I address the paradox of leftism in the essay, re: American and Russian revolution. MAGA is as guilty of this as the left, if not moreso.
I don't discard your point but think that Midwit Human Capital is a more clinically accurate term. Maybe it's a semantic point. I'm just trying to clarify what my position is for people who think I would change my mind if Democrats lost a few IQ points.
Do you consider Ayn Rand right-wing or left-wing? I've noticed you define left and right differently from most people. I don't think right = afraid of technology.
Also I don't think defending technology requires elitism. It requires long-termism. Even if the poorer people are hurt initially, their posterity is usually greatly advantaged by being in the more advanced society. They are safer from invasion and wealthier than the poor in other areas.
I used to be into primitivism, and in some ways I still am. You can live elements of that lifestyle while promoting progress, though. It's better for everyone in the long run not to be hostile to technology, because being in The Tech Empire is infinitely better than not being in it. It may take generations to come to fruition though, and I guess you can say that having faith that your elite will be responsible with the technology and not use it against your descendants (even if they don't make it into the elite themselves) is its own form of elitism.
Don't flatter me too much, DeepLeft! Not everyone who can think imto the future is an elite. At least according to your ideas, I'm more a midwit. I'm finishing up my Masters but I'm poor. I suppose I have to give it time though. My father was a high-ranking military officer and my brother is a principal at Microsoft. Maybe I'll catch up! I'm only 25.
The term “elite” seems to be used primarily as something approximating a marketing technique to sell ideology to people with class anxieties. Looks like you’ve picked up on this with such a comment lol:
“there are only 2,353 elites in the world (subscribers to my blog). Become an elite today!”
I like to think of things in terms of layers of abstraction.
At the lowest, but still abstract, layer, leftists are good at performing the language games associated with technocratic implementation of policy.
A layer above that: the symbolic capital bubble has yielded perverse incentives that have generated some utterly astounding colossal stupidity (DEI, "green" but not nuclear energy, etc.) . Hence the touching-grass masses recognizes the elite has failed and is justifiably voting for candidates based on their social media trolling abilities.
At a layer above that: solutions cannot lie in the past, but require a re-think of the incentive structures that define the institutions that the technocratic and professional managerial class ultimately staffs. This requires the neurotic and openness-to-experience personality traits that is more frequently associated with leftists.
I don't see why the right in its essence must be anti-technocratic. For me it goes back to the French revolution - the right is about hierarchy, authority and tradition whereas the left is about egalitarianism and novelty.
Technology itself is neutral with respect to these ends - it can either be used to create forms of tradition and hierarchy or to reject and upend it. Consider if you will a right winger genetically engineering the next generation to be more religious and less queer.
I respect your right to make your kids super-straight and dogmatically conformist, but I think most on the right would be horrified by that idea because they believe that religion comes from God, not from genetics, and messing with genetics is "playing God."
True of higher church types but most Protestants like myself tend to adapt to new technology over time. It's in our DNA - it goes all the way back to the printing press when Protestantism first emerged. That's also part of what the whole "Solas" thing is about - by emphasising the simplicity of the Christian religion you allow it to adapt to changing technological contexts. By contrast high church religions are hamstrung, unable to adapt to a changing context, always trying to stifle innovation.
Theologically yes Protestants have been more open to new things than Catholics, but that’s at an elite level, not a popular level. At a popular level, protestants are more conservative.
I don't agree. It's the low church evangelicals who pivoted first on things like contraception. Who pioneered the use of social media and the internet as an outreach tool. Who adapted modern music for religious uses, who created corporate -style churches to befit a corporate culture, who try their hand at every new technology that comes their way.
The elites don't do that. They're a conservative force by nature, in all branches of Christianity. If anything, the decentralised and non-elite status of low church evangelical types keep them ahead of the game. They are the technocratic Christianity.
the history of the church’s position on contraception is an empirical historical question. I stand behind the fact that it was elites within the church who changed the church’s position, not the congregation. But I’d have to provide you with some evidence to progress the argument. I’d start by researching when these decisions were made and who made them. I don’t think you’re aware of Bruno Bauer and the historical school of Biblical Criticism.
I know about biblical criticism. It's basically the scholasticism of liberal Protestantism - the "high philosophical" era which was the beginning of the end. Liberal Protestantism today is a shell of its former self, having been mostly succeeded by wokeism.
Your description about luddite right reminded me a French guy I read on Substack. He's a degrowther Unabomber fan, but besides that is a very smart guy. A debate between you and him would be fantastic.
This is an interesting take. I found myself agreeing on some parts, but disagreeing on other parts.
One spot where I disagreed: technology. This piece claims that elites broadly like technological change while the masses dislike it. This doesn't really seem true when looking through history. There are very few dedicated anti-technology movements or revolts. There were things like the Luddites and the Arts and Crafts movement, and you could probably squeeze in some other things like the anti-nuclear movement if you squint, but anti-tech sentiments have never been a particularly driving force in the human psyche compared to stuff like nationalism, religion, or ideologies like Communism or Fascism. Furthermore, the elites have had their share of tech-haters too. When new technologies arise, existing business leaders will often try to smother them in their cradle so they don't have to compete -- look up information on "creative destruction" in economics. Also, many leaders probably would have very much liked to have put the printing press genie back in its bottle if they could have done so.
Elites drove the agricultural revolution against the interests of their slaves. What is occurring now is similar in scope to that. The opposition to tech mostly surrounds genetics.
In what way did elites drive the agricultural revolution? It was a spontaneous practice that appeared roughly simultaneously across several river systems, it wasn't something that elites "forced" on "slaves". People that wanted to be nomadic hunter-gatherers were still free to do so by migrating elsewhere. I can think of no major anti-agricultural movements nor riots.
Can you provide any evidence for your claims? My evidence is proof that early cities were centrally planned, not spontaneous, with the earliest human structures being religious and not practical or functional. Are you aware of Gobleki Tepe? Nabta Playa?
My entire point about religion is that while you claim that “people were free to leave,” they didn’t believe that was the case, because they thought they would go to hell.
Saying that “we have no evidence of anti-agricultural political movements in 10,000 BC” is a very silly statement. Do you see why saying that is really silly?
As far as I know, the earliest settlements were "planned" in a geometric sense, i.e. a few people plan to build a few houses in a certain way, but that's it. There's not a lot of evidence that they were planned from some sort of central government. Actual planned cities like those of ancient Egypt or the Indus came long after centralized states had appeared.
I've never heard of religions being used in the way you describe. If they were, then they weren't very good at it. Migrations weren't infrequent, and some places had hunter-gatherers mixing in with sedentary farmers for millennia (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05131-3)
No, I don't know why you think what I wrote was silly. You put what I said in quotation marks, but then added "in 10,000 BC" which is load-bearing. I can't think of major anti-agricultural movements basically *ever* in recorded history. Note that some places only got agriculture later, and some much, *much* later.
You have a very strange way of arguing. Dismissing central planning as "a few people to planned to build centrally, so what's your point?" is semantic distortion and not a good faith or honest way to think about these things.
There's a big difference between an authoritarian king forcing people to live in a specific area with e.g. planned irrigation ditches to maximize crop yields, versus a guy and some of his friends in a hunter-gatherer band building a house in a certain way.
Basically I'm saying your outlook on this specific fact of agriculture is backwards. Centralized states didn't really exist before agriculture, but rather it was agriculture that slowly developed that led to centralized states. Maybe once humans got to Old Kingdom Egypt they would have had leaders capable of forcing specific agricultural practices that people didn't like, but it's hard to claim that agriculture was a top-down intervention from the start.
Great read, as always. I wonder how the Tech Right and their Network States proposals fit into your historical vision or worldview, like, are they the path forward, or a dead end? I feel you haven't covered them yet enough (unlike Elon, which you have made clear points about recently).
My main concern is: Will they succeed with their goals (Network States-"Freedom" cities, JD Vance as president, NrX ideology wins, AI Police State, etc...)?
Also, what do you think about AI enabled Survaillance State? Some fear it may allow a Stable Totalitarianism (a.k.a. Forever Dictatorship/Police State) Scenario, which may happen under China or Tech Bros.
But his transition to the right may have destroyed him more than having a daughter trans.
If he had supported trans stuff just a little bit, he could have weeded out the unstable ones from future generations, and created the left in his image.
But he was seduced by the rights promise of vengeance, which destroyed his wealth and status.
I would add that religion is more about coordinating and assuaging the overseers, those who drive the people in the fields, rather than doing the same for the field workers directly, although as you say the latter would be helpful.
Great article. I have been wanting to write an article for some time about my personal ideology, but I might just copy and paste your descriptions of right wing luddism.
Thank you for your interesting work. But why do you read it with the air of a somewhat bored student who is trying to get to the end of a somewhat tedious essay as fast as possible! 😊
Agriculture spread because it allowed way more people to be fed and have surviving offspring. The ones that kept hunting in forest got outnumbered. The fact that agriculture facilitated slavery, religions (by tying to a population to a piece of land) or caused height reduction does not mean that Slavery/religion/leftism was necessary for or the cause of agriculture or any other technological progress
I’d like to echo a comment left by someone else— how does Ayn Rand fit into your worldview? Obv she is typically considered right wing, and you seem to not like her too much (considering your recent Note about Luigi Mangione), but I feel like Atlas Shrugged for example has some pro-elite themes that you would sympathize with based on this post.
Tbh what you have to say about liberals/leftists was probably correct in 2016, but not really by much anymore.
The biggest issue(per Scott Alexander’s Paranoid Rant) is that Wordcels basically ran a coup against the Stemcels. The Stemcels do have the potential to enact the changes you want, but frankly it would require a change a change in the regime to pre-Awokening norms, when they had far more power.
Leftism in the West very explicitly desires an inverted hierarchy. These are the same people, who vehemently insist that measuring whether or not a kid is good at math is as unexplainable as the Dao. I lurk in their spaces, something I notice are the end of the 2010s is how even something as basic as strength differences in sex or any kind of below the skin sexual dimorphism as something they hold with suspicion.
Pretty much all their transhumanist aims seem to be in service of reifying those goals. These people will petition for neuroscientists to be burned stake if they ever
"The flaws of the left are procedural, while the flaws of the right are spiritual."
What do you say about the fact that leftism, at least as we see it most commonly manifested today, has at its core an ugly motivation of egalitarian resentment against those they perceive to be the strong, beautiful, powerful, and successful? I think that's a pretty important flaw that goes beyond procedure.
Also, “liberals are smarter than conservatives!” is just a fact and fairly important even if you don't think it's a loadbearing pillar for your ideology. In addition, EHC theory is not in conflict with minoritarianism, but complements it. Just because Karlin and Hanania often use EHC expansively (especially when describing midwit bureaucrat types) this doesn't therefore mean it should be disregarded completely.
I address the paradox of leftism in the essay, re: American and Russian revolution. MAGA is as guilty of this as the left, if not moreso.
I don't discard your point but think that Midwit Human Capital is a more clinically accurate term. Maybe it's a semantic point. I'm just trying to clarify what my position is for people who think I would change my mind if Democrats lost a few IQ points.
Do you consider Ayn Rand right-wing or left-wing? I've noticed you define left and right differently from most people. I don't think right = afraid of technology.
Also I don't think defending technology requires elitism. It requires long-termism. Even if the poorer people are hurt initially, their posterity is usually greatly advantaged by being in the more advanced society. They are safer from invasion and wealthier than the poor in other areas.
I used to be into primitivism, and in some ways I still am. You can live elements of that lifestyle while promoting progress, though. It's better for everyone in the long run not to be hostile to technology, because being in The Tech Empire is infinitely better than not being in it. It may take generations to come to fruition though, and I guess you can say that having faith that your elite will be responsible with the technology and not use it against your descendants (even if they don't make it into the elite themselves) is its own form of elitism.
Only elites are capable of long-termism.
Don't flatter me too much, DeepLeft! Not everyone who can think imto the future is an elite. At least according to your ideas, I'm more a midwit. I'm finishing up my Masters but I'm poor. I suppose I have to give it time though. My father was a high-ranking military officer and my brother is a principal at Microsoft. Maybe I'll catch up! I'm only 25.
I asked the same question before reading your comment. Totally agree with your long term/short term point.
I will have the temerity to answer for him. Drawing on the field of complex numbers,
Ayn Rand is proportional to (Right + i*Left)/sqrt(2)
Another great read.
The term “elite” seems to be used primarily as something approximating a marketing technique to sell ideology to people with class anxieties. Looks like you’ve picked up on this with such a comment lol:
“there are only 2,353 elites in the world (subscribers to my blog). Become an elite today!”
This is pretty astute.
I like to think of things in terms of layers of abstraction.
At the lowest, but still abstract, layer, leftists are good at performing the language games associated with technocratic implementation of policy.
A layer above that: the symbolic capital bubble has yielded perverse incentives that have generated some utterly astounding colossal stupidity (DEI, "green" but not nuclear energy, etc.) . Hence the touching-grass masses recognizes the elite has failed and is justifiably voting for candidates based on their social media trolling abilities.
At a layer above that: solutions cannot lie in the past, but require a re-think of the incentive structures that define the institutions that the technocratic and professional managerial class ultimately staffs. This requires the neurotic and openness-to-experience personality traits that is more frequently associated with leftists.
Related:
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/for-meta-rationality-part-2-application
I don't see why the right in its essence must be anti-technocratic. For me it goes back to the French revolution - the right is about hierarchy, authority and tradition whereas the left is about egalitarianism and novelty.
Technology itself is neutral with respect to these ends - it can either be used to create forms of tradition and hierarchy or to reject and upend it. Consider if you will a right winger genetically engineering the next generation to be more religious and less queer.
I respect your right to make your kids super-straight and dogmatically conformist, but I think most on the right would be horrified by that idea because they believe that religion comes from God, not from genetics, and messing with genetics is "playing God."
True of higher church types but most Protestants like myself tend to adapt to new technology over time. It's in our DNA - it goes all the way back to the printing press when Protestantism first emerged. That's also part of what the whole "Solas" thing is about - by emphasising the simplicity of the Christian religion you allow it to adapt to changing technological contexts. By contrast high church religions are hamstrung, unable to adapt to a changing context, always trying to stifle innovation.
Theologically yes Protestants have been more open to new things than Catholics, but that’s at an elite level, not a popular level. At a popular level, protestants are more conservative.
I don't agree. It's the low church evangelicals who pivoted first on things like contraception. Who pioneered the use of social media and the internet as an outreach tool. Who adapted modern music for religious uses, who created corporate -style churches to befit a corporate culture, who try their hand at every new technology that comes their way.
The elites don't do that. They're a conservative force by nature, in all branches of Christianity. If anything, the decentralised and non-elite status of low church evangelical types keep them ahead of the game. They are the technocratic Christianity.
the history of the church’s position on contraception is an empirical historical question. I stand behind the fact that it was elites within the church who changed the church’s position, not the congregation. But I’d have to provide you with some evidence to progress the argument. I’d start by researching when these decisions were made and who made them. I don’t think you’re aware of Bruno Bauer and the historical school of Biblical Criticism.
I know about biblical criticism. It's basically the scholasticism of liberal Protestantism - the "high philosophical" era which was the beginning of the end. Liberal Protestantism today is a shell of its former self, having been mostly succeeded by wokeism.
Your description about luddite right reminded me a French guy I read on Substack. He's a degrowther Unabomber fan, but besides that is a very smart guy. A debate between you and him would be fantastic.
I come across the term 'ethnic liberal' often in Russian social media - where it is a euphemism for 'jew'.
This is an interesting take. I found myself agreeing on some parts, but disagreeing on other parts.
One spot where I disagreed: technology. This piece claims that elites broadly like technological change while the masses dislike it. This doesn't really seem true when looking through history. There are very few dedicated anti-technology movements or revolts. There were things like the Luddites and the Arts and Crafts movement, and you could probably squeeze in some other things like the anti-nuclear movement if you squint, but anti-tech sentiments have never been a particularly driving force in the human psyche compared to stuff like nationalism, religion, or ideologies like Communism or Fascism. Furthermore, the elites have had their share of tech-haters too. When new technologies arise, existing business leaders will often try to smother them in their cradle so they don't have to compete -- look up information on "creative destruction" in economics. Also, many leaders probably would have very much liked to have put the printing press genie back in its bottle if they could have done so.
Elites drove the agricultural revolution against the interests of their slaves. What is occurring now is similar in scope to that. The opposition to tech mostly surrounds genetics.
In what way did elites drive the agricultural revolution? It was a spontaneous practice that appeared roughly simultaneously across several river systems, it wasn't something that elites "forced" on "slaves". People that wanted to be nomadic hunter-gatherers were still free to do so by migrating elsewhere. I can think of no major anti-agricultural movements nor riots.
Can you provide any evidence for your claims? My evidence is proof that early cities were centrally planned, not spontaneous, with the earliest human structures being religious and not practical or functional. Are you aware of Gobleki Tepe? Nabta Playa?
My entire point about religion is that while you claim that “people were free to leave,” they didn’t believe that was the case, because they thought they would go to hell.
Saying that “we have no evidence of anti-agricultural political movements in 10,000 BC” is a very silly statement. Do you see why saying that is really silly?
As far as I know, the earliest settlements were "planned" in a geometric sense, i.e. a few people plan to build a few houses in a certain way, but that's it. There's not a lot of evidence that they were planned from some sort of central government. Actual planned cities like those of ancient Egypt or the Indus came long after centralized states had appeared.
I've never heard of religions being used in the way you describe. If they were, then they weren't very good at it. Migrations weren't infrequent, and some places had hunter-gatherers mixing in with sedentary farmers for millennia (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05131-3)
No, I don't know why you think what I wrote was silly. You put what I said in quotation marks, but then added "in 10,000 BC" which is load-bearing. I can't think of major anti-agricultural movements basically *ever* in recorded history. Note that some places only got agriculture later, and some much, *much* later.
You have a very strange way of arguing. Dismissing central planning as "a few people to planned to build centrally, so what's your point?" is semantic distortion and not a good faith or honest way to think about these things.
There's a big difference between an authoritarian king forcing people to live in a specific area with e.g. planned irrigation ditches to maximize crop yields, versus a guy and some of his friends in a hunter-gatherer band building a house in a certain way.
Basically I'm saying your outlook on this specific fact of agriculture is backwards. Centralized states didn't really exist before agriculture, but rather it was agriculture that slowly developed that led to centralized states. Maybe once humans got to Old Kingdom Egypt they would have had leaders capable of forcing specific agricultural practices that people didn't like, but it's hard to claim that agriculture was a top-down intervention from the start.
Great read, as always. I wonder how the Tech Right and their Network States proposals fit into your historical vision or worldview, like, are they the path forward, or a dead end? I feel you haven't covered them yet enough (unlike Elon, which you have made clear points about recently).
My main concern is: Will they succeed with their goals (Network States-"Freedom" cities, JD Vance as president, NrX ideology wins, AI Police State, etc...)?
Also, what do you think about AI enabled Survaillance State? Some fear it may allow a Stable Totalitarianism (a.k.a. Forever Dictatorship/Police State) Scenario, which may happen under China or Tech Bros.
This captures my thought on tech bros
Elon was formally on the left.
But his transition to the right may have destroyed him more than having a daughter trans.
If he had supported trans stuff just a little bit, he could have weeded out the unstable ones from future generations, and created the left in his image.
But he was seduced by the rights promise of vengeance, which destroyed his wealth and status.
What could have been I guess.
I would add that religion is more about coordinating and assuaging the overseers, those who drive the people in the fields, rather than doing the same for the field workers directly, although as you say the latter would be helpful.
Great article. I have been wanting to write an article for some time about my personal ideology, but I might just copy and paste your descriptions of right wing luddism.
Thank you for your interesting work. But why do you read it with the air of a somewhat bored student who is trying to get to the end of a somewhat tedious essay as fast as possible! 😊
xD yes I could do a better job with the audio recording. I suppose it is because I am anxious about whether what I have written is good enough.
Agriculture spread because it allowed way more people to be fed and have surviving offspring. The ones that kept hunting in forest got outnumbered. The fact that agriculture facilitated slavery, religions (by tying to a population to a piece of land) or caused height reduction does not mean that Slavery/religion/leftism was necessary for or the cause of agriculture or any other technological progress
You don't think religion was necessary for agriculture? I don't think you understand how group coordination works.
Is this supposed to be common sense? Cooperation, group coordination and religious beliefs existed before and after agriculture started.
My intuition is that getting enough food for yourself and your offspring is enough as motivation to start farming once the knowledge is there.
This was a really great read, thanks!!
I’d like to echo a comment left by someone else— how does Ayn Rand fit into your worldview? Obv she is typically considered right wing, and you seem to not like her too much (considering your recent Note about Luigi Mangione), but I feel like Atlas Shrugged for example has some pro-elite themes that you would sympathize with based on this post.
Tbh what you have to say about liberals/leftists was probably correct in 2016, but not really by much anymore.
The biggest issue(per Scott Alexander’s Paranoid Rant) is that Wordcels basically ran a coup against the Stemcels. The Stemcels do have the potential to enact the changes you want, but frankly it would require a change a change in the regime to pre-Awokening norms, when they had far more power.
Leftism in the West very explicitly desires an inverted hierarchy. These are the same people, who vehemently insist that measuring whether or not a kid is good at math is as unexplainable as the Dao. I lurk in their spaces, something I notice are the end of the 2010s is how even something as basic as strength differences in sex or any kind of below the skin sexual dimorphism as something they hold with suspicion.
Pretty much all their transhumanist aims seem to be in service of reifying those goals. These people will petition for neuroscientists to be burned stake if they ever
*found a way to measurably improve intelligence, even if they made it free with racial quotas.