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> Almost everyone, liberal or conservative, builds their arguments around the idea that there's some mythical golden age that we need to go back to.

Except for most conceptions of socialism/communism (talk of proto-communist hunter gatherer societies notwithstanding).

(Non-strawman) communists see communism as a future post-scarcity society, like Star Trek economics. To them, the path to get there must involve ownership models that (to them) are not exploitative.

From the very start the idea was to figure out how to arrange society in order that the incentives are maximized to bring about post-scarcity. (Let's not get into a discussion about how well anyone did in attempting to bring that about - that's a very complex topic by itself).

So I don't know what you're talking about when you say that socialists are looking to back to some golden past.

I read a lot of broad ideological writing as well, so when people make statements that go completely against what adherents of a particular ideology have been saying themselves for over 150 years, well, it's a little jarring.

Again, this isn't about any ideology being right or wrong, this is about accuraccy.

> There are no better ideas.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that history is over.

I think you're misinterpreting me a little. I don't think history is over. I'm just saying that I get the sense that everyone else does. :)

I've toyed around with a few radical thoughts recently, but political ideology isn't my bag so it's just private speculation.

One is that the problem with socialist schemes is that they don't really address the root of inequality. It's become kind of clear to me that the root is heritable inequality of both the genetic sort and the inherited-privilege sort.

So I've speculated a little about some sort of "transhumanist socialism" that would attempt to address inequality at the biological level by making both germ-line and postnatal enhancements universally available. The idea would be to transform humanity itself into a runaway self-improving AI by siphoning off some percentage of GDP and applying it to the artificial redistribution of beneficial adaptations and the augmentation of human intelligence across familial lines. By far the best thing to be taxed here would be inheritance, since the whole aim is to break heritable inequality.

It's the sort of idea that would make everyone's head explode. Most dogmatic libertarians would hate it since it contains the word "socialism" and involves some sort of wealth redistribution. Liberals are all greens now that worship the naturalistic fallacy, so they'd all scream "no GMO!" Conservatives would hate it since it's theologically sacrilegious and would disrupt the social order rather deeply.

Makes me think I'm on the right track. :)

Ah yes, I think we might actually be somewhat on the same page, at least in terms of our exploration of these things.

>So I've speculated a little about some sort of "transhumanist socialism" that would attempt to address inequality at the biological level by making both germ-line and postnatal enhancements universally available. The idea would be to transform humanity itself into a runaway self-improving AI by siphoning off some percentage of GDP and applying it to the artificial redistribution of beneficial adaptations and the augmentation of human intelligence across familial lines. By far the best thing to be taxed here would be inheritance, since the whole aim is to break heritable inequality.

Technically speaking, "anarcho-transhumanism" is an existing ideology, but...

PLEASE DO THIS. I'm freaking salivating. I mean, screw "runaway AI", but yes, hell yes, let's go ahead and slaughter inequality and injustice at their source, and unleash everything that people can be and aren't allowed to right now because their "betters" wouldn't get to feel a hierarchical status difference in their retarded ape-brains.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that real time fmri neurofeedback would enable people to train to reduce /eliminate bad feeling due to hierarchy in the near the near future <10 years .

What you're talking about is "desire control" -- the ability to "choose what you want to want."

While you could do what you say, you could also do a billion other things. I consider desire control to be one of the most subversive technologies possible. We are to a great extent enslaved through the manipulation of inborn and conditioned desire. If we can manipulate our own desires...

I'd expect the first applications to be essentially medicinal: helping people overcome persistent unwanted urges like addictions, pedophilia, or obsessive compulsive disorders. But think about where it could go from there.

Making yourself "want to work" for example could be either empowering or disempowering depending on the context. Making yourself not care about hierarchy could be both as well. For example: how much money could you save if you genuinely no longer cared about status symbols?

I agree, such technologies could be of huge importance in the future,possibly far more than most breakthrough technologies we hear about from the media.

On the other hand, we hear almost nothing about such "desire/mind shaping" technologies, and in general people people show little interest in them. I wonder, why is that?

I'm very interested, but haven't bought in yet because I don't see anything yet that seems to unambiguously work (other than careful use of a few nootropics).

I may try one of these tDCS devices soon. If I do I will blog it.

While EEG neurofeedback doesn't always work ,isn't it safer than tDCS , and if it works it's more targeted ?

And clearly you're an exception. And i'm not talking about buying - just general awareness about that tech and it's possibilities(which might be tied to more investment and faster development of the tech).

I don't think I'm the right person for this.

To do it right -- to propose something like that that isn't just an off the cuff manifesto -- you'd have to do a lot of research and work out all the economics and game theory everything out. You'd have to do a real scholarly treatment of it. It'd take at least someone deeply educated in economics with several years to dedicate.

Then you'd have to steel yourself against the howling, since if you actually put something like that out there you'd be a communist baby eating God hating liberal right winger Illuminati Satan worshipper who wants to poison us all with GMO from fracking wastewater and torture kittens and make us all take the mark of the beast, or something.

>Then you'd have to steel yourself against the howling, since if you actually put something like that out there you'd be a communist baby eating God hating liberal right winger Illuminati Satan worshipper who wants to poison us all with GMO from fracking wastewater and torture kittens and make us all take the mark of the beast, or something.

So, basically, you'd be me. Well, except for the Mark of the Beast thing: I think even wearing a logo on a T-shirt is a little too dehumanizing.

If you do try to flesh out an idea like this, I've got some suggestions. They're my opinion only of course.

1) Be relentlessly practical. No "magic happens here" utopian vaporware bullshit.

2) Be historically practical. Don't presuppose the existence of a purely volitional state from which all initiation of force or fraud has been outlawed, or other such bits of moral futurism. We are simply nowhere near such things. Grapple with political realities. We still live in a world that is absolutely ruled by force and arbitrary authority. If we want to get beyond that, we have to chart a practical course toward the betterment of the human condition that begins where we are now and takes concrete understandable steps.

3) Put forward a vision, but also talk about baby steps -- about things we might do here and now to evolve toward a condition like this without requiring the whole kabang to be sold at once.

4) I'd suggest dealing with the critics -- and there will be shitloads of them from every quarter of the political landscape -- by turning sanctimonious moral arguments around. A conservative is implicitly advocating the maintenance of the present condition and its state of injustice and suffering, etc. A liberal is inconsistent -- claiming to advocate progress while opposing its concrete methods. Greens (of the "religious" sort) have simply made a god out of fate -- the naturalistic fallacy.

5) One specific thing you'll get is the Hitler comparison. Anyone who advocates going beyond the human condition in some deep or fundamental way gets compared to Hitler. In addition to pointing it out as dishonest hyperbole, it's important to point out that Hitlerian eugenics is the opposite of this. It's curing the disease by killing the patient... the very opposite of making the means of human betterment more universally available.

Frankly, I'm saving my Hitler and supervillain points for later. My hope is to have things firmly in hand by the time the press and public catch on and then be able to stand there going, "Even if you hit me with everything you've got, resistance is useless, useless, useless, completely and utterly and absolutely futile and useless!!!!"

You can only pull off multiple exclamation points once in a lifetime.

(Real answer: I'm a computer scientist, not a geneticist :-(.)

Everyone is arguing over what we should go "back" to -- back to the 50s, the 60s, pre-industrial hunter-gatherer societies, etc. Almost everyone, liberal or conservative, builds their arguments around the idea that there's some mythical golden age that we need to go back to.

Everyone I see is not doing this. I'm not sure how to reconcile our completely different takes on CA. FWIW, I live in the East Bay Area.

My original post wasn't all that clear. I'm kind of scatterbrained at the moment.

I actually think the "California ideology" is probably the most progressive thing standing, but that's not saying much. I do agree with the article that it sort of wins by default for being the only worldview to advance any kind of optimism at all.

This is going to be a bit discursive, but bear with me.

Imre Lakatos, a philosopher of science in the 60s/70s, had an idea to try to rescue science from the earlier attack on it by Kuhn (or, at least, his more radical misinterpreters). A body of science isn't so much defined as a particular set of facts, but by the core theoretical underpinnings behind it. And what's key: instead of the naive falsificationism of Popper, he recognized, like Kuhn, that scientists would come up with ad hoc elaborations or patches on the core theory to save it for the day.

Unlike Kuhn (or his misinterpreters), he believed that these ad hoc justifications weren't necessarily bad. They can be part of a progressive research program or a degenerative research program. The key difference being that ad hoc explanations in a progressive program enhance the explanatory power of the program--suggesting new experiments and new possible insights--while degenerative ones don't.

Now I come back to your main point about political ideas. I believe this scheme can be applied to many different fields, including state political philosophy. And the issue we are seeing is that all these existing approaches--from libertarianism to Rawlsian liberalism, state socialism to anarchism--are more or less spent forces. Which is to say, the various experiments and experiences we've run all point to the reality that the only stable state is one that's run on neoliberal principles (which is ideologically a rationalistic Rawlsian state and materially a state dominated by powerful, propertied interests). All others fail, from either internal or external competition.

Worse, we're unable to really run further experiments, so the ability to create alternative, progressive research programs is sharply circumscribed. Any failures of the neoliberal state are to be handled ad hoc in neoliberal frameworks. And that's as much a condemnation of all the previous attempts at state building and management as neoliberalism itself: in terms of politics, we're stuck using degenerative Newtonian mechanics despite obvious failures, and all of the critics of it are attacking it from programs that are not so much degenerative as dead.

I think for anything different, we need some kind of radically disruptive technology that would change the material terms we build our society on. But how we get from here to there--or if there's even a there, there--is an entirely different question.

>Which is to say, the various experiments and experiences we've run all point to the reality that the only stable state is one that's run on neoliberal principles (which is ideologically a rationalistic Rawlsian state and materially a state dominated by powerful, propertied interests). All others fail, from either internal or external competition.

What have been the experimental failures of social democracy and democratic socialism?

Just saw this now.

I'll take the societies of northern Europe that have established a large welfare state--at least relative to the Anglosphere--within a framework of capitalist economic institutions to be the (really only) representatives of social democracy. I don't really know anyplace that could be characterized as democratic socialism.

And... they're not bad off. If I could choose to be born anywhere under the veil of ignorance, they'd probably be my top choice. But I'd classify them as wholly neoliberal regimes. Even if you take issue with that characterization, at the very least, if you look at their governments over the past twenty years, they have moved sharply toward a more neoliberal program.

Which is the key point: at best, social democratic parties are mostly engaged in rearguard actions, trying to protect the best of what was built during the 20th century. Ideologically, however, they're adrift, having jettisoned pretty much everything they had, and their claim to governance always amounts to "we'll do neoliberalism better than the other parties!" Even then, more often than not they lose against opponents on the Right. Whatever you think of the ideology of social democracy, it's not offering anything new nowadays because it can't even imagine a world different from the neoliberal one we inhabit.

I couldn't stomach reading the entire link, but I think your post is quite lovely.

One thing I wonder, is whether the next new thing will be thought out first and then executed, or executed almost by mistake, in pieces, only being seen to take shape as a social trend once it has assembled itself, little link by little link, from the ground up. Two of my favorite social paradigms/ trends/ somethings (which I believe are almost, but not quite spent) -- Christianity, Capitalism -- have done just that. Sure there is theory that happens along the way (St. Paul, Milton Friedman), but it is actually in the thick of the action as people jockey for power (in the wide, Nietzschean sense). (Edit: FYI, this is almost straight Foucault, except he believed in some naive French justice and couldn't take the Nietzschean medicine full strength). (Edit, 2: If I remember, Uncle Fritz also predicted that God would give his last shudder and be finally dead about two centuries after the publishing of Genealogy of Morals about 1889... I love that guy... Just 75 more years...)

Another thing I wonder, is didn't Nietzsche also predict that only once we finally finish our utter boredom with empty ideologies that make us feel safe will we be free to start realizing our potential as human beings? And, he promised, there will be LOTS of good music....

The irony here is that your jaded insight is a retread of Fukuyama's 1992 framing of liberal democracy as a Hegelian end-state in _The End Of History_.

Maybe so, but I think it's worse than that. Liberal democracy has also failed in that it's regressing into extreme wealth inequality.

I'm definitely very jaded about the prospect for political improvement. Politics seems like something that has to be hacked around and contemptuously ignored for the foreseeable future.

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl...

The feeling of "it's all exhausted" is at least partially a deliberate product of neoliberalism itself.

I've read that before, and I think it makes some great points. I do get the impression that paralysis is an intended endpoint for some people.

BTW... George Gilder is really an oddball character. He's a bit of a visionary, but also an ardent theocrat and believer in creationism... albeit of a less literalist more "deist" variety than Ken Ham. Peter Thiel strikes me as similar to Gilder in a few ways, but Thiel is less theocratic and more socially liberal.