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Comment by netbioserror | Hacker News Reader

Do we have the same DoD and State Department? Whiggist progressive ideals are the reigning ideology of the executive bureaucracy, and the idea of a benevolent, democratic US empire enforcing prosperity and freedom on tyrannical despotic regimes rules the roost in the halls of the Pentagon. By contrast, American conservatism has been isolationist for far longer than anyone currently alive has been around. The Reagan and Bush neoconservative (read: Whiggist) years were a blip in a very consistent longer trend.

Or am I reading too much history to be taken seriously in this myopic place?

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I'm not sure how much you can learn from history when you take claims of "democratic US empire enforcing prosperity and freedom on tyrannical despotic regimes" on face value.

The justifications to project power changed greatly over time and vary between the set of political ideologies in charge at any given time, but US and western foreign policy was always rooted in unspoken, consistent motivations.

That's why the transition between pre- and post- cold war foreign policy was so seamless. The covert action, coups, interventions, military support, economic warfare didn't change at all. Afganistan 1 was about the "red scare", 2 was about "international terrorism". Iraq, Syria and Libya was about "tyrannical despotic regimes". etc.

Those are nominal justifications. They reflect persuasive arguments (aka propaganda), not true beliefs and actions. The true beliefs and actions of the military and state bureaucracy for many decades has had an imperial focus that is crystal clear through the prism of action and belief.

I could cite the revealed preferences of many prominent figures in the military and state policy world: Rice, Power, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Bolton, Nuland, etc. And those are just the people at the top; the hierarchy is stocked with true believers.

> the hierarchy is stocked with true believers

Yes, the belief in the empire, it was always about (neo)colonialism/imperialism, I think even neoliberalism and LIO is just justification rather than a true belief of the people that drive foreign policy of western nations.

> They reflect persuasive arguments (aka propaganda), not true beliefs and actions.

People have been so infantilized by this propaganda, its really frustrating to talk with most people about it.

I don't think you understand. Some of these people genuinely believe that US imperialism will spread progress and prosperity. Yes, some are Machiavellian and understand the geopolitical game, and are simply playing for keeps (resources, dominance, US hegemony, self-enrichment, etc). Others actually believe in the forceful spread of the Enlightenment project worldwide to accelerate the upward curve of history.

Never underestimate how stupid an aristocracy can become. Some portion will always be true believers. The idea that it is all Machiavellians is a probabilistic impossibility, and revealed preferences (interviews, slips of the mic, secret conversations, whistleblowers, etc.) have shone sunlight on them in the past. There are genuine ideologues in the US military and state department. Calling them "conservative" or "neoliberal" is a useless simplification that does not adequately describe how deranged their beliefs are.

By that line of analysis, we'd expect a Whiggist regime to have optimistic propaganda with contemporary scifi being pessimistic because the Whiggist faction is ineffectual?

There is nothing that says that a ruling Whiggist regime can't be coupled with naively optimistic contemporary sci-fi which essentially shares the views of the regime and only critiques a shadow of an enemy long-vanquished from power. Precisely because there is no rule that requires sci-fi to always critique the current regime. If the beliefs are shared, we shouldn't expect that. I think that's exactly the scenario we're in right now.

I also think it's why most contemporary sci-fi isn't resonating, but that's just my own opinion based on speculation. I have a suspicion that contemporary sci-fi doesn't sell well. They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.

Short story "Best Of" omnibuses are especially depressing for me personally. This is where I found some of the most mindblowing stories and concepts I had encountered when I was younger, and now they're essentially no better than tinder for firestarting. The people running the Nebula or other awards have astoundingly safe and poor taste.

>They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.

What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.

Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.

What is this surface skim literary analysis? I'm getting the sense that you have a Whiggist interpretation of history and reality yourself and you are not aware of it. You assume that the society depicted in a work constitutes its tone and philosophy, while the characters apply universal values to save the day. Re-calibrate a bit. The society depicted within inculcated Whiggist "dystopian" sci-fi works represents the previous, backwards, regressive kraken to be slain, while the methods the characters use to correct that society are the manifestation of the author's progressive values applied.

The maximally unequal society of Hunger Games is resolved via a violent revolution in favor of more egalitarian values. Same with Divergent. Star Trek Discovery is about a sexually and ethnically diverse crew somehow (in a future that was supposed to have solved these things) facing bigotry and solving it by simply applying or arguing for the "morally correct" values they already have. In Foundation, enlightened technocrats shorten a regressive civilizational collapse and return to "upward" progress by literally tricking the surrounding cultures into the Foundation's value judgment of the "correct" path (very VERY State Department of them). The Expanse is a TTRPG novelization and subsequent TV adaptation where a near-literal paladin (Holden) applies enlightened egalitarianism, diplomacy, and pacifism to stop an interplanetary faction war.

ALL of the specific stories you mention feature extremely strong Whiggist storytelling, and further than that, Isaac Asiimov (author of Foundation) was a famously outspoken activist for enlightened, Whiggist, progressive, technocratic ideals. Many peoples' first introduction to these ideas was Star Trek, though modern Trek handles its themes with all the subtlety of a mace.

Since we're criticizing reading comprehension, you seem to be shoehorning whiggist interpretations of history into every story that needs a villain, so do be careful not to stare into that abyss too long. My question was about a surface skim literary analysis, 'Golden Age' scifi have many utopias, modern scifi prefer distopias, why is? Since Asimov wrote plenty of utopian scifi, and that's not the portion of his work getting film adaptations today, I don't think your whiggist bogeyman theory really works for the question I was actually asking. And I'm well aware of my whiggist beliefs, though I despise the term. If you want to be polite, you can call me an evolutionary humanist.

I suppose I might have been imprecise in my speech by conflating optimism with utopianism, but 'depiction of future I'd like to live in' and 'optimistic scifi' are close enough concepts to those of us untouched by modern English departments that those of you who are could just disambiguate and move on when you encounter it.

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