Category: Mini

I’ve been off Twitter for a couple of months. I’m bored with coronavirus, and more irritated than interested in aggregate. I expect I’ll be back, but not imminently.

This is another matter. We are promised twice-monthly fragments of a new Moldbug book. I am in.

As a bit of random context, here’s a bit of 2008 Moldbug, from the Open Letter (part 7). You might judge that it doesn’t add up to accurate prediction. But you can’t deny that recent events have validated its underlying model.

Second, let’s observe the relationship between the Cathedral and our old friend, “democracy.” Since 1933, elected politicians have exercised minimal actual control over government policy. Formally, however, they have absolute control. The Cathedral is not mentioned in the Constitution. Power is a juicy caterpillar. Maybe it looks like a twig to most of us birds, but Washington has no shortage of sharp eyes, sharp beaks, and growling bellies.

We can see the answer when we look at the fate of politicians who have attacked the Cathedral. Here are some names: Joseph McCarthy. Enoch Powell. George Wallace. Spiro Agnew. Here are some others: Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon. Margaret Thatcher.

The first set are politicians whose break with the Cathedral was complete and unconditional. The second are politicians who attempted to compromise and coexist with it, while pulling it in directions it didn’t want to go. The first were destroyed. The second appeared to succeed, for a while, but little trace of their efforts (at least in domestic politics) is visible today. Their era ends in the 1980s, and it is impossible to imagine similar figures today.

What we see, especially in the cases of McCarthy and Powell (the recent BBC documentary on Powell is quite good) is a tremendous initial burst of popularity, trailing off into obloquy and disrepute. At first, these politicians were able to capture large bases of support. At least 70% of the British electorate was on Powell’s side. This figure may even be low.

But Powell—Radio Enoch aside—never had the tools to preserve these numbers and convert them into power. Similar majorities of American voters today will tell pollsters that they support Powellian policies: ending immigration, deporting illegals, terminating the racial spoils system. These majorities are stable. No respectable politician will touch them. Why? Because they cannot afford to antagonize the Cathedral, whose policies are the opposite.

Oops — a few paragraphs later. If this is accurate, we might be in trouble

Devotees of the Inner Party and the Cathedral are deeply convinced that the Outer Party is about to fall on them and destroy them in a new fascist upheaval. They often believe that the Outer Party itself is the party of power. They can be easily terrified by poll results of the type that Powell, etc., demonstrated. There are all kinds of scary polls that can be conducted which, if they actually translated into actual election results in which the winners of the election held actual power, would seriously suck. That’s democracy for you.

But power in our society is not held by democratic politicians. Nor should it be. Indeed the intelligentsia are in a minority, indeed they live in a country that is a democracy, indeed in theory their entire way of life hangs by a thread. But if you step back and look at history over any significant period, you only see them becoming stronger. It is their beliefs that spread to the rest of the world, not the other direction. When Outer Party supporters embrace stupid ideas, no one has any reason to worry, because the Outer Party will never win. When the Inner Party goes mad, it is time to fear. Madness and power are not a fresh cocktail.

Holy shit. Still re-reading Open Letter. There is a lesson in this: if you are paying attention to current affairs, your time would be better spent reading Moldbug, even if you’ve read it before. 2008, remember:

there is another way to succeed in the Outer Party. This might be called the Huckabee Plan. On the Huckabee Plan, you succeed by being as stupid as possible. Not only does this attract a surprising number of voters, who may be just as stupid or even stupider—the Outer Party’s base is not exactly the cream of the crop—it also attracts the attention of the Cathedral, whose favorite sport is to promote the worst plausible Outer Party candidates. As usual with the Cathedral, this is a consequence of casual snobbery rather than malignant conspiracy, but it is effective nonetheless. It is always fun to write a human-interest story about a really wacky peasant, especially one who happens to be running for President.

I recently wrote “if [a thing] is not under some central control, then there is nobody who can make it other than what it is”, talking about Decentralised Monopolies.

I just remembered that three years earlier I wrote, “To change the action of a collective, some more significant force than an individual impulse normally has to act on it”, talking about Personal and Collective Power.

Around the same time, I described the collective of shareholders of a company as “a single non-human ‘virtual’ decision-maker, the shareholder-value maximiser“, in Checked Power.

It seems to be an important idea to me, that I haven’t previously isolated as something worth thinking about directly.

There is a slight connection to Asimov’s (fictional) “psycho-history” — the idea that while individual humans are hard to predict, collectives can in principle be predicted reliably. But while I wrote “In many cases, we can predict the action of the collective with virtual certainty”, I don’t think that is generally the case, and I never have. In 2012, I wrote “Predicting herd behaviour, contra Isaac Asimov, is probably the hardest thing there is.”, in The Unthinkable. Maybe, compared to individual behaviour, collective behaviour is subject to fairly simple rules. But even things subject to fairly simple rules are not always predictable, but can instead be chaotic.

On those lines, I wrote while considering voting in the 2010 election that “A butterfly’s wings might affect the path of a hurricane, but it’s not possible to aim a hurricane at a particular target by strategically releasing butterflies.”

Just to emphasize how correct that was: The result of that election gave enough seats to Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties together to form a government, but did not give Labour enough seats to form a government even with Lib Dem support. This produced a Conservative/Lib Dem coalition, but one in which the Lib Dems had little influence, because they had no other choices of coalition partner. This produced a 2015 campaign in which the Conservatives felt safe to offer a referendum on membership of the EU, which they could later renege on by blaming the necessity of future coalition with the Lib Dems, but on unexpectedly winning an overall majority in 2015 — in part because the lack of influence that the LDs had over coalition policy meant they failed to satisfy their voters and lost votes — they had to go through with it, but Cameron, in his second term as PM and with an increased vote, was overconfident he could win it. How predictable was all that when I blogged about releasing butterflies in April 2010?

Anyway, this is supposed to be a “mini”, I’ve noticed the link between all these references I’ve made previously to “collective behaviour”, and it needs more focus.