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Anomaly UK blog posts

A Consumer of Theory

The thing in the last post about politicians being consumers of theory reminded me of something. I read “Dreams of My Father” a couple of months ago. I found it very thought-provoking.

Strangely, the least important thing about the book is that its author later became U.S. President. The fascinating aspects are quite independent of that. The book is the best account I have read of the life of a small-time politician: the business of politics and the kind of person who participates in it. On the other hand, the book doesn’t tell us that much about the second Barack Obama, the one who became Senator and President. He is a later creation.

Anyway, Obama is a perfect example of a consumer of political theory: he neither has a political theory of his own, nor is primarily motivated by theory. His motivation is “be important by helping black people”, and he simply picks the first theory off the top of the pile and follows it. Even where he can clearly see the shortcomings of the theory, he doesn’t attempt to innovate or look elsewhere, because that’s the theory he has, and that’s the movement he’s part of. His choices are to carry on or to give up.

That’s why it’s so important to have a theory out there, rather than a handful of inchoate principles.

The Library

Candide and anonymous commenter suggest in comments that my programme of a few posts back just looks like an excuse to w—, let’s say waffle, on the internet instead of doing real work.

On the contrary, it is a project that demands a lot of work aimed at some measurable deliverables.

True, I followed my post with some very typical “waffle on the internet” posts on human nature. They do not advance the project in the slightest, however.

The Project is to define the methods of moving from a collapsed liberal order to a secure, effective, responsible government.

Since there are many forms of collapsed liberal order, there will probably need to be many methods. Because a newly-created government is by definition not stable, there will need to be methods to maintain the government in place, without sacrificing effectiveness or responsibility.

If anyone fancies it, we could have methods to move from still-functioning liberal government to a stable, effective, responsible government. I can’t see it myself, but I’m open to suggestions.

What do we have so far? Very little. We have some very iffy sketches from Moldbug: the “True Election“, the “Reboot“. We have a couple of historical Restorations to look at. Examples of fascist or Marxist takeovers might provide a few clues, but are unlikely to be usable as-is.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask, in the case of a national bankruptcy or a disputed election, what happens next? Do those who are left call on a retired statesman, a general, the Queen? Do they appoint Lords Lieutenants to administer in their name, or Barons to rule as independent subordinates? Is a committee of airline pilots appointed to oversee?  What will the universalists be doing at the same time, and how will our aims be achieved instead of theirs?

We need a library of this stuff. Even if, when the time comes, it doesn’t really work as a user-guide because of general unpredictability, it will enable those who follow it to look as if they know what they’re doing, which in terms of public opinion will be of more benefit than our waving a banner around and looking like loonies would be today.

The kind of people who end up with power are generally not theoreticians, or even motivated by political theory. They are consumers of theory, and will seize on a theory that serves their purpose at the time. Having a ready-to-wear theory available on the shelf would be enough to put neoreaction in the game.

That is the project. Unlike neoreaction itself, it needs a good and respectable name — something like “Restoration Library” (that one’s taken by some Christians, but it’s a starting point). Something with an arbitrary component might be better for uniqueness and recognisability — “The Caddington Library of Restoration”, say.

There is a huge amount to do, but we can make a start. If we were anywhere near ready, the library should actually be printed as books. Mind, by the time we actually are nearly ready, the credibility benefit of paper might have gone.

For now, it’s just a matter of creating and collating the material. Presentation can wait. Some selectivity will be needed even now, though nothing we have currently is very good, it isn’t worthwhile to weigh ourselves down with any old tripe that fits the criteria, such as Breivik’s blueprint for civil war.

This is an ambitious project, but I think it is genuinely a feasible route to implementing our principles. Marxism’s successes in the 20th Century didn’t come because its theories were overwhelmingly persuasive; they came because Marxism had theories and nobody else did.

And in any case approaching the principles from this direction really brings home how far they are from anything anyone could actually act on. I have written half an essay on one example of what a restored royal government of Britain might look like in 20 or 30 years’ time, and it’s hard work, even with generous helpings of wishful thinking. Backtracking from that to how it could have come about will be even more difficult.

Laws not Men

Per my earlier post, I think one of the major changes of the last couple of hundred years is that the previously normal role of subordinate has become denigrated and almost eliminated, and the previously exceptional role of loner has become idealised and made normal.

The force behind this epoch-making change is liberalism’s love of system. In the enlightenment view, there is no need for a hierarchy of authority such as was believed to be necessary from Aristotle to Charles I. Rather, there are just rules, and if everyone follows them order will result.

Classical liberalism is the purest and simplest form of this. If non-aggression and private property are protected, then everyone can be free and the emergent phenomena of economics will provide security and prosperity. It is an exquisitely beautiful theory, concentric spheres in Ptolemaic perfection.

However, between difficulties eliminating the last vestiges of hierarchy, and widespread dissatisfaction with some of the results, the beautiful theory has never succeeded entirely. The mainstream liberal response has been to lump epicycles onto it. Collective defence, clean air, fair contract terms, anti-drunkenness, poverty relief. By now, the system has epicycles on its epicycles: it provides patent monopolies to encourage innovation, then competition law to restrain the monopolies. The self-evident beauty of the original liberal conception is entirely gone.

To complete the analogy, I should now propose a Copernican alternative. Alas, if there is such a thing, I have not found it. All I can offer is going back to the order of being, to the sun rising in the morning because some dung-beetle god has rolled it around the sky. Scrap the system, the Civil Procedure (Amendment No.2) Rules 2012 that will finally make the orbits work out: let’s just pick someone and put them in charge.

The astronomical analogy is important though, because that, by many accounts, is how the enlightenment came about. Natural Philosophy showed that an interfering deity was not necessary to explain the world, and that a system of impersonal natural law did a better job. By analogy, the natural philosophers felt that the King and his minions were not necessary to order human society, and a few impersonal laws would work better.

The flaw was they did not ask where the idea of the interfering deity came from in the first place. I suspect that the analogy first went in the other direction: men assumed that the ordering of nature mirrored the ordering of a well-functioning human society: that because men need to have a ruler in charge, and followers loyal to him, the natural world also must be obeying the directions of some ruling consciousness.

I say a solar system and a human civilisation are just different. No God is needed to make the sun rise, but a King is needed to make a civilisation function successfully.

Leaders, Followers, Outsiders

Tweetable link: https://t.co/tRKq54LTL3?amp=1

In the ancestral environment, there were probably three basic strategies a man could follow. He could be a leader, a follower, or an outsider.

The most desirable role is that of leader. The leader tells other men what to do, and impresses the girls in the process. There can’t be all that many leaders, but the “Genghis Khan effect” suggests we are all disproportionately descended from those few.

Leaders have followers, and followers can have descendants too. I think simple observation is quite sufficient to show that many men are easily persuaded to follow a leader. The tendency towards governments which emphasise the personality of a leader suggests it is easier to get people to follow a leader than to follow an ideology or a set of abstract rules.

Not everyone is a leader or a follower though. There is a third role as someone who does not seek to lead others, but tries to avoid being led. I would guess that in the ancestral environment there was frequently an option of leaving the band, either with a woman or managing to retain access to one or more. It is a risky strategy, but potentially a very successful one.

In the modern environment, heading for the frontier is rarely an option, but it is easier than ever to reject all authority in society without being geographically separate from it. In medieval society, the only “outsider” roles were beggar or hermit, but today, in addition, we have freelancers, independent businessmen, the unemployed; indeed, even in employment the norm is to deny any personal authority belonging to employers or hierarchical superiors. Being under personal authority, as opposed to some rulebook, is seen as demeaning and inferior.

So we have a strange reversal: in political activity, people are nominally supposed to be adherents to some theory or ideology, but tend instead to offer loyalty to a leader. In productive activity, most people are nominally answerable to some superior, but bridle at that and prefer to see themselves rather as performing an abstract function.

What could explain this contradiction? I have a couple of ideas. First, the statesman on the television is likely to be a far more charismatic figure than the pointy-haired boss in the office next to the cubicles. He is selected from a large pool mainly for that value. In other words, large-scale media distorts our perception of what is a worthy leader in the same way that some argue it distorts our perception of what is a worthy mate. Also, loyalty to a political figure is a fake kind of followership: unlike the office General Manager, the politician isn’t going to directly tell you what to do. By analogy, the charismatic TV politician is to our innate sense of loyalty what a cupcake is to our innate sense of nutrition. The status of entertainment celebrities may be another aspect of the same tendency.

Alternatively, it may simply be that leadership was always something relevant to warfare and politics, while productive activity was more a matter of men acting independently or in voluntary cooperation. When we slot into the “follower” role, we expect to be led in raiding the next band, but we look for food on our own and hunt to display our own skill and courage. (Note I’m following the mainstream methodology of anthropology here, which is a technique I call “making shit up”).

Still with the making shit up, while a precivilised band probably followed a leader, at least for political purposes, I doubt it had middle management. The role of follower of one but leader of others may be an innovation driven by larger social groups in the last few millennia, and an awkward compromise in terms of our social instincts.

The replacement of direct personal loyalty with celebrity-worship is a very modern phenomenon, but at the same time the culmination of a centuries-long process. That is worth another post.

The Neoreactionary Programme

I’ve not been sure, in the years since I started reading Mencius Moldbug and moving towards neoreaction, that we neoreactionaries really exist. Is this really a school which has a future, or is it just a wild idea of a handful that has probably always been around and probably always will be without going anwhere?

However, it seems that our enemies have noticed us, so it looks like the anti-enlightenment is a thing that exists. Since we exist, what is our programme?

The main thing about the neoreactionary programme is that there isn’t one. A programme is something a political movement has, and we are not a political movement, we are an anti-political movement.

The nearest thing we have is what Moldbug put forward as The Procedure

Step 1: Become worthy
Step 2: Accept power
Step 3: Rule!!1!

We are not competing for power, we are preparing to accept power.

The time is not yet ripe for power to come into neoreactionary hands. It is fortunate that the time is not ripe, because neoreactionaries are not ready.

Indeed, we’re not, or at least I’m not, even preparing to accept power personally. If we win, we will not rule, but our ideas will. The people who rule will probably be the same bastards who rule now, but with better ideas and a better political formula. After all, the idea of neocameralism is that rich people have power. The idea of monarchy is that the hereditary King has power. Neoreactionaries are in the business of producing theories for other people to rule by. I don’t want to be a Royal Advisor, let alone a King, but I hope that some Royal Advisor will have read my blog.

Our activity for the present is not to enact our ideas, or even, primarily, to spread our ideas. It is to improve our ideas. What we have is little more than a set of principles: a loosely-connected collection of features of a good society. For example:

  • Competition for power is illegitimate
  • Equality is a false goal
  • The hierarchy of security needs: peace, order, law, freedom.
  • Government requires personal responsibility

The difficult question is what social structures can exist which would exhibit these features. I reject Moldbug’s neocameralism as unstable. I suggest absolute monarchy as the alternative, but not with very great confidence. I advance the idea in order to test it: to understand how it might fail, and to search for alternatives.

For the last couple of months, I have been hanging out more with libertarians — more than I did when I actually was a libertarian. I’ve been doing that to talk to them about my ideas, in order to refine and improve them. I can talk to libertarians because I used to be one, and I can explain neoreaction as a development of libertarianism because for me that is what it is*. I am not talking to them in order to convince them (though I wouldn’t mind that); I am talking to them in order to get their criticisms. And I’m not looking specifically for libertarian criticisms, it’s just that they’re the easiest for me to talk to. (Does that mean I’m looking for my keys under the lamppost? Probably).

(When I was a libertarian, participation in libertarian meetings was a bit pointless: “You think drugs should be legalised and taxes should be lower? So do I. No, actually I don’t drink.”)

So stage 1 of the Procedure is still in progress, and the essence of it is to improve our ideas to the point where they have a good chance of actually working. That means explaining how a neoreactionary ruler can resist challenges, and how neoreactionary principles can be applied in various plausible scenarios of future systemic breakdown. We really want a lot of detail on this — the equivalent of at least tens of books — and we need it to be good. (The list of principles I scribbled above could use some work, too).

Propaganda really isn’t a priority. In the sort of scenarios where success is feasible, public opinion will be very fluid, and a small group who know what they’re doing will be able to carry the public with them to the degree necessary.

It is worth keeping in mind that knowledge of the faults of democracy already exist in the public consciousness, just dormant or buried under strata of habit and conventional wisdom. It’s not necessary for us to actively argue that (a) the present government is terrible, and (b) the other lot are more or less equally bad. Most intelligent people already accept both. We only have to wait for those facts to become relevant. At that point the task will not be to attack the old system, it will be to show a feasible and superior alternative. That’s what we should be preparing for.

 *Of course, it doesn’t have to be. One could come to neoreaction from mainstream conservatism, or from distributism, or from nationalism. In theory it would be possible to come via a kind of luddite environmentalism, but that would probably create a lot of friction.

Louise Mensch

I maintain that day-to-day party politics is completely unimportant. Because of that, when the name “Louise Mensch” kept cropping up on twitter I didn’t know anything about her: I gathered that she was an MP, and more or less got it straight in my head that she was a Tory, and that was about it until she hit the headlines this week for resigning to spend more time with her family.

It was only at that point that I discovered she was a successful novelist, writing books under the name “Louise Bagshawe” which I have seen people reading on the train.

Having missed the fuss when she ran for and won the seat of Corby, I was not in a position to make the link to Esther Rantzen, who ran as an independent in my own constituency (and therefore had come to my attention).

In the context of Rantzen, I wrote:

I have suspected for a while that media figures are capable of moving into politics very successfully, through the more normal mechanism of joining major parties rather than running as independents. In the long run, the question is not so much whether celebrities will be able to win seats in parliament, as why they would want to.

Had I known what was going on in Corby, I might have said something prophetic…

Lobotomised

The most significant effect of the coalition has been to bring into the highest level of government people who have little investment in maintaining the pretences about the way the system works.

This is because, as with the Liberals 35 years ago, the merest contact with the reality of government has made the Liberal Democrats unelectable for a generation. Nick Clegg’s importance will hit zero on the day that the date of the next election is announced.

I’ve commented about this before, when Clegg forgot to pretend that as “Deputy Prime Minister” he was supposed to be “running the country” when Cameron was away.

His comments on being “lobotomised” by the demands of his position are familiar to anyone who reads politicians’ memoirs, but the impact has always been lessened by the passage of time between the experience and its publication. “Things are different now”, “he’s just bitter, every political career ends in failure” etc.

Here is a man still not only at the peak of his achievement, but at the peak of what he could ever reasonably imagined he would achieve, all but saying that it is worthless, that responding to events so dominates activity that whatever he actually believes, whatever he was elected to do, is irrelevant.

This is no accident. One of the most overlooked facts in modern life is the time that it takes for a person in authority to understand a question and decide on an answer. (This is as true of business as it is of politics). The only way for a leader to function is by delegation, and it only works if he can delegate to people he trusts. There are two ways to do it. Either you choose someone to deal with an issue who you believe is the best person to understand and decide on that issue, in which case your power is fully exercised in making that appointment, or you choose someone who you believe will honestly and accurately inform you of the most salient elements of the situation so that you can make the decision that you would have made had you time to do it all yourself.

The first of these paths is never possible for a democratic politician. The appointment of subordinates cannot be made on the basis of their effectiveness in their position, because keeping power requires trading favours, and positions of subordinate power are the most important favours that the politician has to offer. Positions must be awarded primarily on the basis of who is to be favoured, not on who is best for the job.

The second path is rarely achievable either, for the same reason. Occupiers of subordinate offices are potential rivals, and can be expected to act in their own interests, not in yours. The normal expectation is that they will use their greater knowledge of the issue in question to manipulate you to the decision they want, rather than help you to the decision you would want.

This is the SNAFU principle. It says that hierarchy doesn’t work, because “Communication is only possible between equals”.

I do not say that the second path is impossible, though, because I do not believe the SNAFU principle is completely true. There is a phenomenon so unfamiliar to the 1970s Discordians who formulated the SNAFU principle that, radically open-minded as they were, they failed to take it into account. That is personal loyalty.

If a leader has followers who are personally loyal to him, and do not have independent ambitions for themselves, they can be trusted to assist his decision-making. Such loyalty is scarce, but the most effective political leaders have managed one or two loyal followers among their tail. Blair had Alistair Campbell. Thatcher had, I think, Keith Joseph, Willie Whitelaw, possibly Norman Tebbit. They both were able to have substantially more effect on government as a result.

Clegg, of course, has no such effect. There is nobody in the entire world who is personally loyal to Nick Clegg, with the possible exception of his wife – and he would not be allowed to make her a minister. For that matter, I rather doubt that Cameron has anyone either.

I don’t want to overstate or oversimplify: such personal loyalty is never total or unconditional, and cannot be perfectly verified. It is not a magic formula that will result in effective organisation. But it is real, and it helps, and it is reasonable to conclude that we could have a lot more of it if we were to respect it as something useful and admirable. Instead, there is a tendency to see it as questionable or even corrupt. We hear that executives (in the public or private sector) should be selected for intrinsic personal qualities, rather than for their external relationship with their superiors.

The end result is that Nick Clegg is made helpless by being surrounded by rivals and enemies, and doesn’t even see that as the root of his problem, because that is how politics is supposed to be.

This is the flip side of this post from February, where I looked at the relationship of personal loyalty from the follower side. There, I argued that having a personal tie to a superior had a beneficial effect on the long-term, moral behaviour of a subordinate. Here I claim that having a loyal subordinate increases the effectiveness of a leader.

Anomaly UK Realtime

An experiment:  Because I don’t get the time to write half the articles I’d like to on this blog, I’m shoving the half-finished, the TODO pile, and some rough notes onto a separate blog Anomaly UK Realtime.  Some of the scribbles there might yet make it to here as proper articles, but most probably won’t.  Currently I have brief pieces up on Tanistry, the abolition of a parish council in Lincolnshire, and whether everyone should learn to program.

The unthinkable

I wrote in the last post that the unthinkable can become thinkable shockingly fast.

We can see an example of that on any day’s news at the moment. As the current Private Eye reports, in 2002 the Mirror Group Chairman held a lunch, at which the then Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan made a speech featuring jokes about various celebrities, based on the voicemails he had heard. These included even references to messages between then England manager Sven Goran Eriksson and former TV weathergirl Ulkrika Jonsson, who was present at the event.

Private Eye is bringing it all up to prove the dishonesty of all those who are now denying that they knew or suspected anything at all of such outrageous activity as phone-hacking going on. But to me the fact that they’re now hiding it is much less significant than the fact that only ten years ago they didn’t feel any need at all to hide it. Almost overnight (and I particularly noticed how sudden it was because I left the country for three weeks in 2011 and it happened while I was away), what had previously been taken for granted became a huge scandal.

Another example was raised recently — that within living memory, leading US evangelical Christians were in favour of legalising abortion. I read an article a month or two back which explained how, like the 2002 Mirror Group lunch, writings of prominent protestants have been dropped from the narrative, not because they’re embarrasing to the people involved, but because they simply does not make sense in the context of the narrative as it is presented today by everyone.

The conventional wisdom, as modulated by the popular media (but I’m not  sure their role is all that vital) is governed by the following constraints.

  • Everyone wants to say something interesting
  • Nobody wants to be seen to be wrong
  • People have very short memories

The result is that there are remarkably few public arguments about substance. It is much more effective, whether you are a media pundit or a political practitioner, to show that you are the most in tune with the conventional wisdom than to claim that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Since everyone important agreed with the conventional wisdom of five years ago, it is in nobody important’s interest to remind people that it’s the opposite of what everyone agrees with today.

Where there are disagreements, the number of things that have to be assumed on all sides — because they are part of the current conventional wisdom — but which are blatantly untrue make realistic argument about the facts impossible. So instead, we have emotional arguments about meaningless abstractions — things like “Austerity” or “Europe”, that are safely divorced from the things that are actually going on, and can be consistently supported or opposed while one fictional narrative after another sweeps through the newspapers.

(It is also safe to argue about weak foreign countries. It doesn’t matter what’s really going on in Bosnia or Egypt or Syria: we can have an argument about who to kill, based on our fantasy conventional wisdom, and nobody who matters will ever know or care what was actually happening.)

There is, at the same time, a kind of debate among the elite that deals with facts rather than imaginary narratives, but it is not independent of the fantasy. It would be nice to think that the people who really run things could get together at a Bildeberg meeting or something and actually try to work out what real solutions exist for real problems, but if that was ever the case, it probably isn’t now. I rather suspect that that was always an aspiration for those meetings rather than a reliable achievement.

As I said in a comment recently, P.R. is fundamental to government. Most of the hard problems in government are about how you get group X to accept A or group Y to support B. Many of the people who rise high in the elite are those who are able to solve those hard problems, and in many cases I suspect they are good at that because they honestly believe the fantasy narratives. If the media and the mob were really having their strings pulled by a secretive cabal of cynical technocrats, things would probably work a lot better than they do. It’s much more likely that the tail is wagging the dog.

But the upshot of all this is that democracy can be thrown under the bus just as quickly and as decisively as The News of the World and Yugoslavia were. It doesn’t even have to be for a good reason. By 2017, saying we should still have elections for government would be as odd as saying that journalists guessing celebrities’ voicemail passwords isn’t a big deal or that Yugoslavia was a sovereign country and forcibly breaking it up from outside was illegal.

Unfortunately, while I can see that it could happen, that’s not the same as knowing how to make it happen. Predicting herd behaviour, contra Isaac Asimov, is probably the hardest thing there is.

 It might be worth collecting a list of huge non-partisan shifts in belief.

  • I’ve mentioned previously the idea that humanitarian political action can only be taken with UN approval. That went from not being suggested at the time of the bombing of Belgrade, to being generally accepted by the buildup to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
  • The notion that children up into their young teens can never be left unsupervised (as opposed by Lenore Skenazy) has arrived somewhere in the last 20 years, not sure exactly where.

neutrino-cannon contributes:

Thoughts on the Diamond Jubilee

I saw a post recently attacking constitutional monarchies (can’t find it now, I think it was one of the Ortho types). There is also an article by Sean Gabb, specifically criticising HM Queen Elizabeth

Both articles are correct on the facts. A constitutional monarchy is, for practical purposes, a republic, with all the faults of a republic

Further, the Queen’s practical influence over the last sixty years has been, as far as we are able to tell, smaller than it could have been and harmful in its direction.

 Does that mean that neoreactionaries should stand against the celebrations of the second Diamond Jubilee in British history?  Of course not.

 The value of our monarchy is not in the effect the monarch has either on public opinion or on the government —- both are negligible. The value is as a reminder and as an alternative. Some day this war’s gonna end. One day, maybe one day soon, though I don’t hope for it, democracy will fall apart: due to lack of electricity or money, unresolvable election disputes, exposure of criminal entaglement of all of them, civil war among the progressivists, or some other Black Swan I haven’t even thought of. When it does, we will need a ruler with some other basis of legitimacy. And we have one, ready to hand.

If it does happen soon, the new ruling monarch will, like Juan Carlos in 1975, not doubt see himself as a caretaker, overseeing the handover to a reconstituted democratic regime. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That is where we come in, between now and then: our role is to  make the concept of restored monarchichal rule an alternative.

That’s not so very far-fetched. Democracy could go out of fashion. Try just dropping into conversation the suggestion that Her Majesty (or the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Cambridge) could not actually be worse as a ruler than Gordon Brown or David Cameron, and quite a few will accept the point. That doesn’t make them Royalists —- they still see the idea as unthinkable, but not as actually bad. The unthinkable can become thinkable very quickly if the right noises are made publicly (I have another article planned about that).

I wrote much the same thing on the occasion of the Duke of Cambridge’s wedding. My argument is that the actual merits of members of a constitutional monarchy are not relevant. They, like the rest of us, are products of a liberal democracy. The choice of both the Queen and the Prince of Wales to concentrate their public attention on matters of great unimportance (the Commonwealth and the environment, respectively) is one forced on them by their situation. Could they have done better?  Undoubtedly. But you restore monarchy with the Royal Family you have, not the one you might wish to have.

I suppose there is another path, the only one open to republics, to start from scratch: let somebody rule absolutely, and start a dynasty. It could work. It’s not at all preferable, though: the first King must actually be a politician, and the politics is likely to stick: the North Korea precedent again. It would be easier for a republic to adopt monarchy if a constitutional monarchy could make a success of it first.

Failing that, probably the best bet for a republic is total collapse, and a recapitulation of the phylogeny of monarchy via anarchy, warlordism and feudalism. Possibly this is what John Robb has in mind when he talks about neofeudalism —- I’ve not quite been able to understand him. The whole process needn’t take longer than a couple of generations, provided technology doesn’t regress too far on the way.

Restoration of a constitutional monarchy to an absolute one seems a much smoother process.