The Coming Clash of Civilizations
notesfromthecircus.com
notesfromthecircus.com
There are some good bits in this writing, it did point out some of the core problems, I was going to discuss some of those points, but the sentences kept rolling by, losing focus and getting sidelined into heroic drama like the quote above.
Actually, there's nothing new, those who taste power want more of it, and since power corrupts, attaining absolute power requires absolute corruption, at some point it must be made legal, based on some theory of rightful oppresiosn and cannot be allowed to be called corruption - "1984" was written long time ago.
It's kind of disturbing to see something so simple and ancient being effectively deployed with absolutely nothing realistically useful against it.
It's time to stop acting surprised that this is happening in America, the Constitution won't defend itself, and Hollywood drama isn't the way to defended it.
We need politics 101, streetwise edition, which ironically, isn't about going to the streets. The first step is to to discuss the policies of the Democratic party, motivations aside, they appear to be more of an aid than a deterrent of the process unfolding before us.
I, personally, think we should separate it from the Democratic party to start. The operating paradigm is wrong there. You need to define the new ideal party and then co-opt.
Agreed. In the U.S., the two-party duopoly is a manifestation of the problem. Neither party really stands for any long-term principle anymore (if they ever did). Although both parties will still sometimes selectively campaign on some historical principle, once in power they'll strategically weaken legislation, craft loopholes, defund enforcement or stage manage their votes so nothing that really matters to their stakeholders changes meaningfully.
Anyone still invested in the Kabuki theater of party vs party, even on a 'lesser of evils' basis, is missing the real meta that's unfolding.
The most valuable part was studying formal magic theory - a rather academic specialty focused on human perception and psychology. Very few magicians ever get into it because the vast majority of magicians don't invent their own tricks. Even David Copperfield buys almost all of his tricks from specialized magical inventors you've never heard of, often under exclusive 'performance rights' contracts (which can be fairly lucrative). Most magical inventors don't actually perform magic professionally themselves, in much the same way that many great song writers and music producers aren't singers. To me, magic theory is still the most fascinating and enjoyable part of magic.
If you can identify why humanity keeps regressing to feudalism, you could perhaps introduce just the elements that make it successful and stable while keeping the egalitarian ethos of democracy.
What happened was the United States became, for all intents and purposes, post-scarcity. We had enough stuff, now it was a game of who got it.
"Feudal" approaches to running corporations and is because Democracy isn't about being the most competitive, so of course it isn't right for an economically incentivized business. It is making an intentional trade-off from efficiency for long-run stability and human dignity. Feudalism is playing a finite game (you must win). Democracy is trying to play an infinite one (you must make it to the next turn).
It's the game theory playing on individuals' personal interests. The feudal system is aimed at assuring the status-quo for each participant in the power pyramid. The king relies on the high nobles to keep him and themselves in power, the high nobles rely on lesser nobles in the same way, and so on, everyone having to acknowledge and pledge loyalty/protection to someone else in order to get a modicum of security for their stance. Of course, everyone also has to extract and share resources upward. The collective interest is only secondary and this fact, for better or worse, keeps the life simple and fits the human psychic very well.
However, I do not agree that feudal social order is efficient. The nature of relations between people made things very transactional and specific, which imposed hard limits on the amount and degree of mobilizing and engaging people for pretty much anything.
Normally, that would also make it easier to model, but feudalism also tends to gain entropy through inbreeding.
I agree that it has less productive efficiency - democracies usually have stronger economies, often much stronger, than feudal societies. I suspect that this is actually related to the previous point. The increased decision-making efficiency of feudalism comes from a reduced need to get buy-in from people, but if you don't have buy-in from the people doing the work, they will probably half-ass the work. You see this throughout history: the serf works less than the freeholding peasant, the feudal society does not innovate, new inventions get shot down by the social hierarchy, industrialism does not take hold or when it does it's in inefficient top-down forms, etc.
There's still an unresolved contradiction here in that this would imply that feudalism would be more successful in times of quick change, but the historical record is that feudalism becomes very entrenched during times of stasis or decline, but often gets outcompeted in times of rapid growth and innovation. I still have no idea what's up here; perhaps it has to do with the existence of feudal-structure organizations (eg. corporations) within a democratic framework.
The flagnark??
The intelligent few? When becoming fantastically wealthy is almost 100% down to luck, doesn’t he really mean the lucky few?
Because I’m seeing some pretty stupid and moronic people there at the top. People who have let greed dominate them, people who have become drunk with power, people who have lost all semblance of empathy.
The people at the top aren’t any more smarter or better than the rest of us. They were just luckier.
The current president of the US has a rap sheet miles long of egregious and downright heinous acts against his fellow man and woman. And yet, here we are.
Please show up peacefully at the next No Kings. Take some small steps and do something.
Is it really just citizens vs subjects? left-right, ying-yang, black-white?
Are the anti-democratic paths deliberate or simple drift?
I am not clear of the "not good enough jobs" how it fits to the arguments.
I am not convinced in deterministic path for tech.
i am also certain this is inconsistent across the Western nations, let alone the world.
finally, (real/true/proper) democracy has some very serious practical problems. "More democracy" may not fix what the author does not like.
> Is it really just citizens vs subjects? left-right, ying-yang, black-white?
Much of modern history is in one of these two modes of operation because the "middle" is an illusion. What we think of as the "middle" is a set of systems which choose the trade-offs from those two things across different axes for different times. This process, when done well, also creates dynamism that drives us forward.
When the system that is designed to keep them within a certain set of bounds (the Overton Window is closely tied to this) breaks, for any reason, then you are at risk of revolution which drags us one way or the other for a period of time. Historically that revolution has been towards authoritarianism, not freedom.
> Are the anti-democratic paths deliberate or simple drift?
They can be both - there is an ongoing, deliberate strategy to fight against democracy which is gaining in strength as a result of drift caused by the failures of the current paradigm, accelerated by technological change.
> I am not clear of the "not good enough jobs" how it fits to the arguments.
Not enough good jobs is measuring the wrong thing, which is part of the point. Should the system produce good jobs or human flourishing? Right now we say good jobs, and if people can't get those, that tells the people that the system has failed and opens the door for other paradigms.
> I am not convinced in deterministic path for tech.
There isn't a deterministic path for tech. However, the way technocrats think and what society measures has a strongly directional effect on it, and right now it is pushing tech towards extraction.
> I am also certain this is inconsistent across the Western nations, let alone the world.
It is inconsistent in velocity, but it doesn't appear to be in direction. I'm open to arguments as I have an American-centric viewpoint, but it seems like most other western nations have embattled liberal governments or right wing leaders and they are undergoing substantial oscillation between the two.
> finally, (real/true/proper) democracy has some very serious practical problems. "More democracy" may not fix what the author does not like.
They're not arguing for a "real democracy" to fix it, they're saying western democracy has gotten stuck in a local minima which no longer works, and you can make a paradigm shift without throwing out the democracy, but those who believe in Liberalism (as in liberty) need to both:
A. fight to retain democracy B. fight to create a new paradigm using democratic systems that works better
The best way to evaluate the latter is what metrics we judge success with. Right now that is highly biased towards things like GDP, employment, trade, etc. A new paradigm could emerge around better metrics for human flourishing.
An example: for many decades the number of people getting a college educations has been an important metric to countries. Why? If you play it out in a low-regulation market economy you can easily end in a system where college is a (government supported) tool for wealth extraction from future generations of citizens. If the focus was never about college educated and was instead based on "public educational attainment" we could have invested in better public school teachers, reduced student/teacher ratios, further pushed college curricula into the classroom, etc.
Liberals (as in liberty) understand very well that democracy is the worst form of government… until you look at the other options. This means that democracy may not be the best at any given point in time, and a democracy may get trapped in a local minima after substantial societal change, or that it may be out-competed by a well-run authoritarian government; it is, after all, susceptible to all the natural failings of human nature. Yet, for all its flaws, democracy remains the only system that consistently honors the principle that no person is born above another, that every individual deserves a voice in shaping the conditions of their own life, and that the human desire for self-determination is not a defect to be corrected or stamped down.
Anything less... well, give me liberty or give me death :)
I assert that Curtis Yarvin is absolutely a fringe crank. Peter Thiel is somewhat less so, but only somewhat. Being a billionaire doesn't change that.
Otherwise, Peter Thiel's company has billions of dollars of contracts with the government in completely non-trivial spaces (mass surveillance and military).
Calling one of the richest, most connected-with-power individuals on the planet a "fringe crank" is somewhat ridiculous.
That is totally wrong.
The far right believes people like Thiel and Yarvin and Elon are geniuses, special people, who only They can do The Necessary Hard Thing and only They can prioritize resources effectively.
Actual smart people recognize that they are low quality classic authoritarian petty nobility desperate to hold on to and rationalize power that they do not deserve. They are no different from the dumbasses in 1850 England insisting that the Irish are starving because they are lazy catholics, and they must be made to suffer for their "character", or the shithead Southern Baptist preachers in 1850 USA that insisted that slavery was the rightful place for the brutal negro as ordained by god himself.
These impotent, pathetic, egotistical losers fell into lucky power and money, and because they do not have the moral integrity to be honest even with themselves, are forced to invent an entire worldview that says they deserve what happened, the same way a housecat deserves their litterbox cleaned out. They have to build this insane and farcical worldview where it is right and just that they make billions of dollars as people suffer, that they get to control nations because they deserve to, as ordained by god I guess.
You can tell they are stupid because their worldviews are always that of a child. They have to be "strong", not just of will, but physically, in a world where war is fought through controllers and actuators. They have to be bullies because they are incapable of recognizing anything more substantial. They miss the important parts of scifi (like star trek's "Hey, isn't socialism just the best?") because they are incapable of (and do not respect) things like media literacy, which is why they spend such immense effort trying to ape the very surface level details like "Talking computer". They couldn't write a persuasive essay to get themselves out of a paper bag, but no they are definitely smart.
That's not even mentioning that these people are pretty open that they believe the important "Hard Thing" they have to do is totally unnecessary cruelty, like murdering your puppy that you have poorly trained, or keeping black people and women out of jobs they "don't deserve" or by siccing the temu-SS on people who make a fuss. People disparage grok for being racist, but it's intentional, because the followers of these people believe racism is objective. They believe an LLM that isn't forwardly racist cannot possibly be accurate because they believe that racism is true, and are trying to bring back scientific racism.
It doesn't seem that finished to me. Life isn't perfect but it never has been. I'm betting that flawed democracy will still be with us as it has for the last century.
By the way I slightly object to appropriating the perfectly good term Clash of Civilizations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations) for some Thiel dumb stuff.
My one hope is that these people fall out of favor with the Trump admin and face his wrath.
The neo feudalist fervor among these autists has been transparent for some time now, but in retrospect the constant calls to destroy (as opposed to reform) institutions like education is just one piece of breaking the middle class as a requisite for the sort of power structures they desire.
However, this argument isn't about the "teams" it is about "the playing field." We the people need to defend the playing field, the one that makes us citizens not subjects (as the article put it), by acknowledging the game needs to be changed, so that the teams work for our benefit.
The game, of course, being defined by what the goals and metrics of the system are.
They've used more that that, like Plenary Authority, but it's only the movement of the Overton window and it means nothing more than that, for now. These calls sound OK to the people because of the total dysfunction of both sides in Congress which justifies the need for a "strong hand" at the executive level.
I wrote some more about it in another comment, but the multi-trillion dollar question is why "our" side have kept and keeps coasting along the disaster driven politics in front of us?
> by acknowledging the game needs to be changed, so that the teams work for our benefit.
It's not clear who you ask to acknowledge the game but it's very clear that neither team is going to do it, much less to work for our benefit.
> The game, of course, being defined by what the goals and metrics of the system are.
The game is well into its end stage and the people who defined it, play it every day. What are the chances of those who haven't even figured it out yet?
Edit: typo
I see very people trying to define a new platform for the US that clearly redefines the terms in these ways. Mostly just fringe folks, closer to Yarvin than a politician. I don't think the ideas are hard to grok, or to package and sell, but I do believe it is possible to create alternative political beliefs and brands (e.g. MAGA), and fully co-opt an existing political party.
I don't even think it takes that long to get a train rolling if you have the backing money and fame/platform. If you look at polling results on policy instead of party, there are some alternative alignments that can be drawn that have broad population support across many of the hot button topics, and then you can enter a few new topics into the mainstream discussion point.
Barring that, it is millions of people who agree these things are bad (see No Kings protests, even if some are just anti-Trump and not actually aligned) and are willing to stand up for it.
> The game is well into its end stage and the people who defined it, play it every day. What are the chances of those who haven't even figured it out yet?
People are fickle, that plays against them as much as for them. Trump is proof you can shift the paradigm in less than a decade but, ironically given their slogans, opponents are stuck trying to take us back to "normal" instead of defining a new one. Old people die. Vision can overpower nostalgia.
> I do believe it is possible to create alternative political beliefs and brands (e.g. MAGA) and fully co-opt an existing political party.
Co-opting is a rich man's business, and Trump is indeed a proof of it.
> Old people die. Vision can overpower nostalgia.
Again, that's their playbook too. It's going to be their vision, you can't outshout a bag of money when it comes to new and unproven ideas.
> opponents are stuck trying to take us back to "normal" instead of defining a new [paradigm].
Those opponents got at least that right, America should stick to being America, anything else will be a lot weaker and a lot more susceptible to attacks which are, as I already said, enabled by money we can't match.
I mean, the paradigm is here and well known, keeping the flies away from the honey is the tricky part.
Whatever you think that is, it doesn't and won't exist anymore. In the last ~120 years we have had the most technological change in all of history, our cultural change is faster than ever before, and the people no longer have the same set of values they did.
The Democrats would like it to go back to BAU from the late 2000s and early 2010s. That doesn't exist anymore. The Republicans want us to move to some idealized fantasy of 1950s and 60s, and not only did it never exist, but it can't happen again either. I once asked a Republican candidate what they thought the goal of all of this was and they said "you know, enable the American dream, white picket fence, a couple of kids, nice neighborhoods..." I nearly did a spit take.
Neither present a compelling vision of the future or how we rise to our new challenges.
Because in this article, the Democratic Party (quite honestly, the entire NeoLib/NeoCon complex) is best associated with the technocratic elite and centrists. He is directly blaming them for failure. I don't see any tap dancing about that.