Tag: highlight

The End of Rail

This year there were more large increases in the cost of rail tickets.

I was largely uninterested, though by no means disinterested, in the subject. Passenger rail travel is just inherently enormously expensive. The government taxes road travel heavily through road fund duty and fuel taxes, and at the same time subsidises rail travel heavily, and the net result is that for most journeys, rail is not an option, and for most of those that rail travel is available, it is about three times the cost of road travel. If you take the true cost, without the effect of the taxes and subsidies, rail transport is probably about ten times as expensive as road transport.

Privatisation was an obvious response to this long-standing situation, but the improvements were small, and the cost differential has only increased over time.

I’ve never clearly understood where the huge costs of rail come from. There are several sources I can think of, but whether some of them are insignificant, or if one of them dominates all the others, I’m not sure.

One obvious contributor is the safety standard that rail is held to. Rail travel is about a hundred times safer than road travel, and that is achieved through massive expenditure on signalling, inspections, pre-emptive maintenance and staff to supervise.

A second factor is evolution. Cars are sold in their millions, and the industry is subject to constant, intensive competition and improvements. Trains, by comparison, are rarely-produced items. The result is that trains evolve relatively slowly: a ten-year-old train and a thirty-year-old train are barely distinguishable, while cars of similar vintages are very obviously distinct. The manufacturing process is affected as well as the finished product.

The third is the lack of flexibility which defines rail travel. A road vehicle can go anywhere provided the ground is hard and flat. A train can only go where the network has been built for it. We do talk about a “road network” in the same sense as a rail network, but the concepts are not equivalent for that reason. A motorway might be planned and engineered to just the same degree as a railway line1, but the defining feature of road travel is not the motorway, but the driveway — the thing that allows anyone to join the road network at almost any point. That makes the road system an open network, while the rail system is a closed network, and the differences between road and rail are mostly the differences between open and closed systems. (That also covers the evolution factor above: vehicles for the rail network are selected by the network operator; vehicles for the road network are selected by the network users).

If road travel is so far superior to rail travel, why am I paying £4000 a year to sit on the train and write this?  One reason is of course the subsidies — but the commuter routes into London aren’t directly subsidised; they run at a profit (though they gain from the subsidised local routes that feed into them). The fact remains that  for the one case of bringing a very large number of people to the same place at the same time, rail still has benefits. It has the advantages of a closed system as well as the disadvantages.

I am on a packed 12-coach train currently at St Pancras station. About a thousand people will get off within the next mile. Eight minutes ahead is another train, and eight minutes behind, yet another.

The chaotic open system of road cannot achieve the same peak efficiency in terms of use of space and labour, just as TCP/IP cannot achieve the same peak efficiency as a circuit-switched connection. That peak efficiency gap is very visible, whereas the very large cost gap the other way at lower levels of utilisation is not so visible. These packed carriages will spend most of the rest of the day empty or near empty, trundling around the network with almost the same cost in fuel and supervision. An unused car has significant storage costs, but because the costs are concentrated on the vehicle rather than the network, the overall cost is much more sensitive to levels of usage.

The other reason for taking a train rather than a car is that I would have to actually drive a car, whereas I can sit in a train and blog.

The crucial fact for the future is that the two decisive advantages that rail has, in a limited set of cases, over road — better peak space-efficiency and better labour-efficiency in the form of driving — are both on the decline because of the technology being applied to road. Self-driving cars are twenty years off at most, and I would expect nearer ten. That allows vehicles to travel faster and closer together, since human reaction times are taken out of the process of maintaining separation. I will be able to read, blog or watch television in a car as I do on the train. Parking costs will reduce because the vehicles will be able to disperse themselves until needed, instead of all having to compete for scarce parking space at the highest-density destinations.

That’s another way in which the rail/road comparison resembles the closed/open network comparison. Rail’s advantage is that it takes away the need for intelligence in the vehicles; road is best placed to take advantage of putting more intelligence in the vehicles. As intelligence becomes cheap, road could even exceed rail’s peak efficiency, by being more adaptive and responsive to conditions — using alternative routes or schedules. Rail’s throughput is limited by the flow of people through the chokepoints at stations more than by the capacity of the rails themselves.

Those changes take away any reason for passenger rail to continue to exist. (It’s possible that rail vehicles are more suited to very heavy loads, and so will remain useful for rail freight. I doubt it, but I don’t know enough to be sure).

Any forward-looking, integrated transport policy today will be oriented towards phasing out rail and preparing for self-driving cars.

Whether the Luton Guided Busway meets those criteria is anyone’s guess. It’s not out of the question.

 1. It probably isn’t, but let’s pretend it is.

Meritocracy and other bad ideas

Referring to my 2037 piece, I said:

when it comes to any kind of power, loyalty is more important than exceptional ability. That’s not to say that incompetence is OK, but if your system of government depends on having people of exceptional ability, then it’s broken. Instead take the most competent people from the pool of those brought up to privilege and loyalty, and if they’re not good enough to, say, run a car company, the solution is not to have a government car company… The motto of the civil service should be “Good Enough for Government Work”

Commenter newt0311 objected that “real power always ends up with the exceptional”, and that if the elite is no longer composed of the exceptional, the civilisation dies. My immediate response was that the elite might need the best people, but the government doesn’t.

That’s what I had in mind when I wrote “good enough for government work”; that the middle management of the state administration should not be sucking up top talent that would contribute more to the common good in the productive sector. That’s only half the argument, though; my initial point was that the most senior people had to be trustworthy, and it is better to compromise on ability than bring in people who cannot be counted on to be loyal.

The loyalty factor does not necessarily go away outside the government itself. I wrote that “If you have real power, you will be expected to positively show loyalty”, and that includes those outside the state.

(In itself, that is admittedly a questionable idea: the problem is that market competition could be corrupted by participants attempting to get their competitors into trouble. I think that’s a small risk compared to the massive rent-seeking that goes on under democracy, but it’s a worry).

So, is newt0311 right; does civilisation require that exception people be in control?  I don’t see it. If the elite systematically excluded those of exceptional ability, that would leave a superior “shadow elite” with an argument for, and the ability to, replace the ruling elite. That would be a bad situation. I’m not arguing for excluding the exceptional, nor for ignoring the value of ability. I am only claiming that there are other important factors to balance it.

To put my case in the simplest form, the single hardest thing for civilisation to achieve is to coordinate people effectively. Doing so does require individuals of great ability, but more than that, it requires trust. That, as I wrote before, is the solution to the “lobotomised by activity” problem that we see in both Nick Clegg and Barack Obama. Thus I advocate that the elite select first on the basis of insiders — people who have a stake in the system and can be trusted, and then choose for ability within that.

(An aside: “being from a good family”, which is more or less what I mean by “insider”, is not in itself a sufficient guarantee of loyalty. For more sensitive positions, more evidence than that will be needed. But it’s a good start, and it also provides a way to get other evidence: the employer will know people who know the candidate, and be much better able to gauge their character than in a meritocratic system.)

Our current form of government is effectively the opposite. We are ruled by people of exceptional ability, in the public and private sectors; every position is open to anyone, and the winners are those who have beaten their rivals in the most demanding contest. However, they then represent themselves, with varying degrees of credibility, as ordinary people. Also, because they have all come through highly selective processes, they have no connections to each other, and are still competing and fighting each other at the highest level of government.

This leads to the “arrogance and recklessness” problem I discussed some time ago: not only is each individual selected for ability over reliability, but they are in a peer group that is immersed in the idea that second-best is a disgrace. That produces the “champion or bust” attitude that has caused so many of our recent disasters. A soupçon of meritocracy is a manageable thing when added into a culture of in-group loyalty. When meritocracy becomes the culture, it is time to head for the bunker.

(The other problem, of course, is what their exceptional ability actually is. They’re not necessarily the best people for doing their jobs; they are the best at getting their jobs. But the premise of the discussion is that ability is ability; these are exceptional people.)

Kingdom 2037

(see previous article for commentary)

It is 2037

William V is King and Ruler of England. He lives in Buckingham Palace and is guarded by soldiers in fancy uniforms.

He has 5 children, the eldest is heir apparent.

The old Parliament Building houses his personal art collection. It is not open to the public. The House of Commons is abolished. The House of Lords no longer meets regularly, but is summonned to a 1-day meeting every two years at a Royal residence, and ad-hoc committees are appointed, usually meeting by videoconference.

Adminstration

Downing Street is demolished. Government offices are in Whitehall. Essentially the entire central government fits in a few office complexes near Green Park.

The Lord Chancellor is chief administrator of the government. He is answerable to the King. It is not clear to outsiders what are his positions that are approved by the King, and what are the King’s positions represented by him. He has a peerage, which like all peerages is hereditary. He has been rewarded for his service with the peerage, if he did not already have it, and with an estate to go with it. His heirs will probably tend towards the King’s service themselves. Government service is open to all classes, but those with familial ties have a significant advantage.

The official salary of the Lord Chancellor is high but not spectacular: in 2012 terms, maybe GBP250,000.

Defence

The King is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. He has a Chief of General Staff — a personal appointment. In peacetime, the Lord Chancellor has no detailed responsibility for the armed services or for foreign policy. The army is possibly a bit bigger than strictly necessary, and is directly associated with the monarchy. That said, there will not be a large army if there is no foreign threat that requires it.

Economy

Government can intervene in the economy, but will do so either tentatively or on a small scale. Poor relief will not officially be from government, but via “Royal charity” funded mainly or partly from the King’s personal revenues. Any government employment schemes would be on the same basis, as private business owned by the King.

Justice and Police are government functions funded from the government budget. The distinction between government spending and the King’s personal spending and expenses isn’t fundamentally meaningful, but it distinguishes areas that are run according to publicly defined rules from those which are essentially under personal supervision.

Health and Education would be largely private with some charity. Both would be nearly unregulated. Customers without assets could contract to supply labour via a hospital or school, if that can be made profitable.

If England is one of the first countries to move in this direction, it would become a magnet for the global rich. If the world economy moves in the direction of greater automation and few productive jobs for low-IQ/low-skilled workers, then personal service is likely to be a growth area.

(Personal service is currently depressed due to the low status which results from the present-day “system”-oriented theory, and also due to high taxes and a general culture which admires rebellion).

Taxation runs at about 25% of GNP. About half of this is raised from taxes on land, and there are also sales taxes on a selection of goods, and turnover taxes on a selection of businesses. The government runs to a budget, which is paid for out of the tax revenue, and the surplus goes to the King. The King accumulates land and financial assets, and spends a substantial amount on the welfare charities.

Immigration is not tightly restricted, but the King’s charities prefer to support citizens than foreigners, and would help with resettlement abroad in preference to supporting immigrants. Foreigners can live and work freely, but are subject to an income tax.

Law

The legal system and trial by jury is retained, but formalities are reduced and the discretion of judges enhanced. PACE is abolished. All reporting restrictions on court procedings are abolished, including those relating to family law. The highest court is a royal audience.

Legislation is passed by royal decree. An advisory committee of Lords and senior lawyers is appointed by the King.

Marriage is not legally recognised, but adults can publicly take responsibility for children. It is a crime to maltreat the children in one’s care. If poverty is used as a defence for such maltreatment, forced adoption can be ordered by the court. If necessary, there may be state orphanages, but they would be run cheaply and the expectation is that family or a charity would do a better job.

Private citizens are permitted to use force to keep the peace. They are allowed to carry weapons, but this is not a fundamental right, and individuals can be ordered not to go armed by competent authorities. Organised armed bodies are required to have a Royal charter, which can be withdrawn. Some private security companies have such charters and provide armed guards. The guards have no special legal powers beyond those of independent citizens, though.

Communications

There is a small state-run media consisting mostly of official announcements. The ceremonial of monarchy is maintained.

Private media are not subject to any special regulation, but it is a serious criminal offense to oppose the King’s rule. Criticism of government policy is allowed and individuals or groups may publicly petition the King, but criticism of the system of government is sedition. Also, to combine any crime, such as vandalism or obstruction, with complaints about policy, thereby constitutes sedition.

Foreign content which breaches these rules can be transmitted and indexed, but not specifically promoted.

Police officers are organised along similar lines to today, with each officer holding a Royal Warrant. Their role is to preserve the King’s Peace and protect the realm from internal enemies.

Authorities may only demand information or other cooperation from private parties via a limited system of court warrants. However, state investigators are not restricted from using whatever non-intrusive methods of intelligence and evidence-gathering they can find. Rules of evidence are oriented only towards the reliability of the evidence in question.

Local Administration

The government is mostly centralised, but each county has a local office which organises roads, planning, water & sewerage, and anything else that remains a locally-provided service. These offices report to the Lord Chancellor and are centrally funded, but consult locally.

Succession

The King will probably abdicate in old age, though it is up to him. His eldest child will succeed, and is brought up to do so. The younger children know that there is a risk of being called upon.

Long Live The King!

(comments please on the related commentary post)

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.

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.

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.

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:

Neoreactionary

In a facetious comment at Aretae, I wished for a “shit neo-reactionaries say” list along the lines of the amusing libertarian one.

I was hung up on a label, but the more I think about it, the more I like neo-reactionary, for the reasons Lawrence Auster gives in a comment at Mangan’s:

“Neo-reactionary”–that’s clever. The neo-reactionary is not an old-fashioned, hardline, darkly pessimistic reactionary, like de Maistre, but a modern, enlightened, cool reactionary. To paraphrase Irving Kristol on the purpose of neoconservatism, one could say that the historical task and political purpose of neo-reaction would seem to be this: to convert American reactionaries, against their will, into a new kind of reactionary capable of living in a modern democracy.

There’s also a post from Arnold Kling, discussing Codevilla and referencing Moldbug in passing.

The only change I would make is to elide the hyphen.  Neoliberals and Neoconservatives don’t need them any more, and I thnk google’s search syntax treats a hyphen as a space.  Neoreactionary will bring back only neoreactionaries.

Formalism and Coalition

Aretae insists that all government is coalitional.

Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to widen the coalition further, and spread power about randomly.

The point of formalism is that power should be aligned with some form of responsibility, so that the powerful not benefit from destructive behaviour, and that attempting to obtain more power should be illegitimate, so that energies not be directed to destructive competition for power.

Formalists tend to believe that stable, effective and responsible government would follow a largely libertarian policy, choosing to limit government action to maintaining order and protecting private property, and taking its own loot in the form of predictably and efficiently levied taxation rather than by making arbitrary demands of random subjects. Such a policy would maximise the long-term revenue stream from the state.

Given a policy which sets limits on government, it becomes reasonably straightforward to deal with those centres of power which are not sovereign but which cannot be eliminated. They get subsidies, but not power over policy. Given that the sovereign chooses, for reasons of efficiency, to take taxes and buy food with them rather than to take food directly from whereever he fancies, there is no problem in giving pensions or subsidies to those whose support is needed.

The key formalist idea is that if those with informal power go beyond what they are entitled to but seek to influence general government policy, then they are doing something anti-social and immoral. All those who have an interest in the continuation of stable, effective and responsible government will see such an attempt as a threat. Fnargl does not have a ring, and I do not much fancy engineering weapon locks implementing a bitcoin-like voting protocol, so a combination of popular will and, in due course, force of tradition is all we have to fill the gap. In as much as there is a general interest in anything, there is a general interest in good government, and I do not think it is all that far-fetched to to see sovereign authority as something that people will reflexively stand to defend, were it not that that they have been taught for 250 years to do the opposite.

What’s striking is that our current political morality holds the opposite view: that attempting to influence policy is everyone’s right, but to receive direct payoffs is unjust. The powerful are therefore rewarded indirectly via policies with enormously distorting effects on the economy or on the administration of government, whose general costs greatly outweigh the gains obtained by the beneficiaries. Further, it is easier for them to seek to protect and increase their power, than to seek reward for giving it up, even if the general interest would benefit from the latter.

I could do with an example to illustrate this — if a person has necessary power, such as a military officer, then he should keep his power and be rewarded for it. If alternatively his arm of the military is no longer needed, but he still has power because he could potentially use the arm against the sovereign, then it is preferable to pay him extra to cooperate in disbanding the arm, rather than to maintain it just to keep him loyal. The same logic might apply in the organisation of key industries, or sections of the bureaucracy.

It would not necessarily be easy to resolve these things perfectly, but it would be made easier by recognising that concentrating power over general policy — sovereignty — is a good thing, as far as it is possible, and that the sovereign who has control over policy has the right to use it in whichever way he sees fit: to hand out cash presents as much as to award monopolies.

The exercise of democracy makes things very much worse, by adding to the number of those with necessary power anybody who can sway a bloc of voters, and enabling them to make demands for more inefficient indirect sharing of the loot.