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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

It's about enforcing single-minded-ness across masses, similar to soldier training.

But this is not new. The very goal of a nation is to dismantle inner structures, independent thought, communal groups etc across population and and ingest them as uniformed worker cells. Same as what happens when a whale swallows smaller animals. The structures will be dismantled.

The development level of a country is a good indicator of progress of this digestion of internal structures and removal of internal identities. More developed means deeper reach of the policy into people's lives, making each person as more individualistic, rather than family or community oriented.

Every new tech will be used by the state and businesses to speed up the digestion.

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Relevant https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-devian...

> It's about enforcing single-minded-ness across masses, similar to soldier training. But this is not new. The very goal of a nation is to dismantle inner structures, independent thought

One of the reasons for humans’ success is our unrivaled ability cooperate across time, space, and culture. That requires shared stories like the ideas of nation, religion, and money.

It depends who's in charge of the nation though, you can have people planning for the long term well being of their population, or people planning for the next election cycle and making sure they amass as much power and money in the meantime.

That's the difference between planning nuclear reactors that will be built after your term, and used after your death, vs selling your national industries to foreigners, your ports to china, &c. to make a quick buck and insure a comfy retirement plan for you and your family.

> That's the difference between planning nuclear reactors that will be built after your term, and used after your death, vs selling your national industries to foreigners

Are you saying that in western liberal democracies politicians have been selling “national industries to foreigners”? What does that mean?

Stuff like that:

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1796887086647431277

https://www.dw.com/en/greece-in-the-port-of-piraeus-china-is...

https://www.arabnews.com/node/1819036/business-economy

Step 1: move all your factories abroad for short term gains

Step 2: sell all your shit to foreigners for short term gains

Step 3: profit ?

That's a fairly literal description of how privatization worked, yes. That's why British Steel is owned by Tata and the remains of British Leyland ended up with BMW. British nuclear reactors are operated by Electricite de France, and some of the trains are run by Dutch and German operators.

It sounds bad, but you can also not-misleadingly say "we took industries that were costing the taxpayer money and sold them for hard currency and foreign investment". The problem is the ongoing subsidy.

> That's why British Steel is owned by Tata

British Steel is legally owned by Jingye, but the UK government has taken operational control in 2025.

> the remains of British Leyland ended up with BMW

The whole of BL represented less than 40% of the UK car market, at the height of BL. So the portion that was sold to BMW represents a much smaller amount smaller share of the UK car market. I would not consider that “the UK politicians selling an industry to foreigners”.

At the risk of changing topics/moving goalposts, I don’t know that your examples of European govts or companies owning or operating businesses or large parts of an industry in another European country is in thr spirit of the European Union. Isn’t the whole idea to break down barriers where the collective population of Europe benefit?

It's no use pedanting me or indeed anyone else; that's the sort of thing people mean when they use that phrase.

Some things are better off homogeneous. An absence of shared values and concerns leads to sectarianism and the erosion of inter-communal trust, which sucks.

That is also how things wind down and progress ceases and civilizations decay. You need a measure of conflict and difference to move things forward.

I do agree however this needs to be controlled and within bounds so as not to be totally destructive and also because you can't get anywhere with everyone pulling in different directions.

In evolutionary terms, variation is the basis for natural selection. You have no variation then you have nothing to select from.

Inter-communal trust sucks only when you consider well-being of a larger community which swallowed up smaller communities. You just created a larger community, which still has the same inter-communal trust issues with other large communities which were also created by similar swallowing up of other smaller communities. There is no single global community.

A larger community is still better than a smaller one, even if it's not as large as it can possibly be.

Do you prefer to be Japanese during the period of warring tribes or after unification? Do you prefer to be Irish during the Troubles or today? Do you prefer to be American during the Civil War or afterwards? It's pretty obvious when you think about historical case studies.

> ability cooperate across time, space, and culture. That requires shared stories like the ideas of nation, religion, and money.

Isn't it the opposite? Cooperation requires idea of unity and common goal, while ideas of nations and religion are - at large scale - divisive, not uniting. They boost in-group cooperation, but hurt out-group.

No stronger argument has been made to convince me to help the superintelligent AI enslave my fellow humans.

Knew it was only a matter of time before we'd see bare-faced Landianism upvoted in HN comment sections but that doesn't soften the dread that comes with the cultural shift this represents.

Some things in nature follow a normal distribution, but other things follow power laws (Pareto). It may be dreadful as you say, but it isn't good or bad, it's just what is and it's bigger than us, something we can't control.

This fatalism is exactly the problem. Human nature has been somehow transmogrified by you and your allies in this ideological war from "fight against the dying of the light" to "actually dark cold nothingness is good". Pooh-pooh, you.

What I find most interesting - and frustrating - about these sorts of takes is that these people are buying into a narrative the very people they are complaining about want them to believe.

That's a great metaphor, thanks.

It’s a veiled endorsement of authoritarianism and accelerationism.

I had to google Landian to understand that the other commenter was talking about Nick Land. I have heard of him and I don't think I agree with him.

However, I understand what the "Dark Enlightenment" types are talking about. Modernity has dissolved social bonds. Social atomization is greater today than at any time in history. "Traditional" social structures, most notably but not exclusively the church, are being dissolved.

The motive force that is driving people to become reactionary is this dissolution of social bonds, which seems inextricably linked to technological progress and development. Dare I say, I actually agree with the Dark Enlightenment people on one point -- like them, I don't like what is going on! A whale eating krill is a good metaphor. I would disagree with the neoreactionaries on this point though: the krill die but the whale lives, so it's ethically more complex than the straightforward tragic death that they see.

I can vehemently disagree with the authoritarian/accelerationist solution that they are offering. Take the good, not the bad, are we allowed to do that? It's a good metaphor; and I'm in good company. A lot of philosophies see these same issues with modernity, even if the prescribed solutions are very different than authoritarianism.

I used ChatGPT to figure out what's going on here, and it told me this is a 'neo-Marxist critique of the nation state'.

Incredible teamwork: OOP dismantles society in paragraph form, and OP proudly outsources his interpretation to an LLM.. If this isn’t collective self-parody, I don’t know what it is.

No it's actually implicitly endorsing the authoritarian ethos. Neo-Marxists were occasionally authoritarian leaning but are more appropriately categorized along other axes.

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