the alt-right

this is "kantbot" ranting in times square about trump and german idealism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOk6HB609po

it's kinda wild that a philosophy of govt (authoritarianism/monarchism) that was the predominant one throughout every culture in the world for thousands of years is so marginal now that its adherents are seen as weird kooks [and apparently the most powerful man in the United States]. presumably some of this has to do w/ complete hegemony the cathedral has over the ideological overton window bc i imagine the idea that democracy is a failure and people need a strong leader to make decisions for them is probably much more popular among citizens than it appears. (and an idea so simple and at one time so omnipresent doesn't really need moldbug and nick land to write treatises justifying it in the modern world.)

I really don't think that idea was ever omnipresent. Took a heck of a lot of violence to stamp out all other ideas all the time.

how is it arguable that monarchism/authoritarianism has been the most common form of government in human history

lol @ that tumblr in the article.. what a bunch of boring dinks http://post-anathema.tumblr.com/

Video was hilarious. Is that really Kantbot?

kurt otm these guys sound as delusional and cloistered as the worst lefty academic

how is it arguable that monarchism/authoritarianism has been the most common form of government in human history

― Οὖτις, 10. februar 2017 22:57 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's not what I'm arguing at all. But I'm saying that that was the case, not because most people wanted it to, but through incredible violence. Most Trump voters don't want an authoritarian leader to take care of them as well. They want him to take care of *those people*, you know.

I really don't think that idea was ever omnipresent. Took a heck of a lot of violence to stamp out all other ideas all the time.

it's interesting bc during the english civil war by far the predominant revolutionary perspective was monarchist w/ reform and those who were anti-monarchy were the edgy kooks marginalized from the central discourse. even during the french revolution it takes some time to go from constitutional monarchy to no monarchy (and even then they couldn't help but get back in bed w/ an authoritarian almost immediately, and then following him straight back to the monarchy)> and the french revolution is really the genesis in western civ of things like universal emancipation going mainstream! i've been thinking a bit about this recently but it seems pretty evident that there was a political breakthrough in terms of our expectations for the correct organization of society that took a long time to ferment before hitting a critical mass. i always wondered what the deal was with brunelleschi's innovation in perspective - like how could it be that in thousands and thousands of years of human art no one put it together and then suddenly in the 15th century this guy figures it out and boom now a five year old can draw a horizon. (iirc martin jay writes about this kind of breakthrough of human thought in... Songs of Experience i want to say?)

and now we can't go back (or at least not w/out, as Nick Land describes it, the sisyphean task of rolling back democracy) - the switch has been flipped.

---

the atlantic piece is kind of a shit article sadly proving the nrx ppl right - it treats them like a freak show when their ideas, while wrong, are worth engaging w/. i think i understand politics better today for having worked through some of moldbug's provocations and figuring out where they work and where they fail. at the v least i don't understand why ppl are into having their opinions regurgitated back to them - listening to things that agree w/ what you already believe, reading things you already believe, etc. isn't it boring engaging w/ work that you could produce yourself from scratch? i'd always prefer to read something i never could/would have written. (tho tbph nrx turns out to be pretty superficial once you scratch the initial insights about cultural hegemony - there isn't much /there/ there in terms of a real ideology. presumably one reason no one wants to be interviewed is bc v few of these ppl feel confident engaging in discourse that might challenge their beliefs / force them to convince an outsider. nick land seems bright enough tho and incidentally also seems to be the least personally attached to the ideology casting it more as an anticipation of where a segment of our population is heading - he predicted trump long before most ppl did and unlike scott adams he's not a complete moron.)

(nb after i first wrote this last paragraph half an hour ago i went back to the dark enlightenment piece and i want to modify this last bit at least bc i do think Land does identify to a large extent w/ this kind of neo-libertarianism but at the same time he's careful there to create space between what ppl want and what he believes which is left off the page - i think he considers a lot of the nrx project quixotic at best tho clearly he engages w/ it bc there's some kind of empathy/association there)

yr misreading Mordy Frederik - the idea was omnipresent = everybody knew what it was and understood it (whether they wanted it/consented to it is immaterial)

even during the french revolution it takes some time to go from constitutional monarchy to no monarchy (and even then they couldn't help but get back in bed w/ an authoritarian almost immediately, and then following him straight back to the monarchy)

This is a pretty inaccurate precis of the French Revolution tbh.

tbph probably most ppl didn't even consider that it was something you could want or not want or consent to etc since most ppl just lived within it like a fish in water. and like i mentioned the ppl who began to roll the boulder of emancipation down the hill took their time to get onboard w/ eliminating authoritarianism altogether. look sometime at all the democracy-skeptic quotes from the US founding fathers.

xp which part do you take exception to? it for sure started as a constitutional monarchy and from what i've read v few ppl in 1789 were thinking that they were going to abolish the monarchy altogether. or do u take exception to calling the rise of napoleon jumping back into bed w/ an authoritarian?

like obv this stuff was much more in the air in 1789 bc this is what the revolution radicalizes into (even if it can't sustain it for v long), but for a more dramatic example look at the english revolution where even the break in monarchy ends up being a pseudo-authoritarian regime (complete w/ hereditary rule!) and ppl like the levelers and diggers are def marginalized compared to the ideologies on the minds of most ppl involved in the revolution.

I wasn't sure which authoritarian you were referring to tbh, I thought that might have been Robespierre, but, in any case it's pretty broad brush stuff to say 'they couldn't help but get back in bed w/ an authoritarian almost immediately'. Of course NOT ending up with Cromwell was what French revolutionaries were obsessed with up until they got shot of Robespierre.

right i didn't men robespierre i meant napoleon and then of course immediately following him they bring the bourbons back!

Well, that's France for you, never a dull moment!

But the thing is, the members of parliament in Britain weren't exactly serfs either, they were quite depended on the societal system as well. Go ask the peasants being squeezed by everyone above them whether or not they liked the system. There were republics and democracies in antiquity, who knows what on earth happened in Italy and Germany in the middle ages up through the renaissance. I don't buy the idea of democracy as a 'switch' - and it works both ways: the founding fathers were slaveowners, the French who wrote of the Rights of Man still wanted to keep Haiti as a slave system, and nobody thought women should be included. Distribution of power has been a gradual process, and it does go back and forth.

And I don't get why I'd need to read neo-reactionaries to read something different and provocative. I could read the historical classics for that. Rousseau rubs me the wrong way, as does Nietschze. Celine, d'Annunzio, de Sade. But what little I've read of moldbug has been so riddled with historical mistakes as to be useless.

who knows what on earth happened in Italy and Germany in the middle ages up through the renaissance.

yes who indeed wtf

"we may simply register strong agreement with the Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indespensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy. No bourgeois, no democracy"

xp. yes, quite, lol

I seriously doubt even the most knowledgeable scholar can keep that shit straight ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as usual, whatever point you are trying to make seems both incoherent and irrelevant

Perhaps it might help if you didn't pull one sentence out from the middle of it?

But the thing is, the members of parliament in Britain weren't exactly serfs either, they were quite depended on the societal system as well.

why is this relevant

Go ask the peasants being squeezed by everyone above them whether or not they liked the system

We can't, they're all dead and generally didn't leave behind twitter feeds.

There were republics and democracies in antiquity,

all of them involved strong heads of state and severely limited the franchise, and even then they tended to be the exception, not the rule, as forms of government. The French and American Revolutions built on these examples, but were also radical departures. This is fairly conventional wisdom.

who knows what on earth happened in Italy and Germany in the middle ages up through the renaissance

there are p clear (if complex) historical records of what forms of gov't existed in these places during this time. They did not have republics or democracies in any real functional sense.

I don't buy the idea of democracy as a 'switch' - and it works both ways: the founding fathers were slaveowners, the French who wrote of the Rights of Man still wanted to keep Haiti as a slave system, and nobody thought women should be included.

OK sure, in this respect they were v much like the republics/democracies of antiquity that they looked to for inspiration. But they *were* broader in terms of the voting franchise and various other enumerated rights. This is what Mordy was getting at by specifically tying the ideas of the french revolution to the (yes, revolutionary) idea of universal emancipation. Which was definitely not "mainstream" before then.

Distribution of power has been a gradual process, and it does go back and forth.

No one's really arguing this point. But you seem to want to jump on Mordy for positing the French Revolution as a significant turning point, even though it's undeniable that it was just based on how it affected other subsequent developments, how it impacted the US, etc. This stuff is v well documented, it isn't controversial.

Frederik will tear us apart, again ;_;

I seriously doubt even the most knowledgeable scholar can keep that shit straight ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

― Frederik B, Friday, February 10, 2017 10:54 PM (forty-one minutes ago)

lol at this

who even knows what quantum mechanics is, i seriously doubt even the most knowledgeable physicist can keep that stuff straight

Shakey, I think you're simplifying history. Massively. What Mordy was talking about wasn't just political history, but history of mentalities - and I have studied that, for years, the Annales shit, Roger Chartier, Carlo Ginzburg, etc. While the Revolutions are massive turning points, it's not as if they just all of a sudden made people think differently. But the people who drove them were, as you say, the ones who left twitter feeds. But what were the thoughts of the people in the many, many peasant revolts, or the millennial movements, or the religious 'fanatics' like the cathars?

When I've read the testimonies of medieval peasants - and is it really mostly 'testimonies', because they've mostly left written records from when they were dragged into court - it's so often surprising the open mindset they had. Which, of course, was why they got in trouble with the law to begin with.

I also kinda think most scholars of quantum mechanics would agree they still don't understand what it 'is' as much as what it 'does', btw ;)

Go ask the peasants being squeezed by everyone above them whether or not they liked the system

We can't, they're all dead and generally didn't leave behind twitter feeds.

― Οὖτις

thank christ for small favors

ok Frederik so it seems like yr real issue is w this:

the french revolution is really the genesis in western civ of things like universal emancipation going mainstream ... it seems pretty evident that there was a political breakthrough in terms of our expectations for the correct organization of society that took a long time to ferment before hitting a critical mass

and specifically with the "mainstream" and "critical mass" terminology, which is doing the heavy lifting here

I assume your explanation re: why democracy flowered after the French Revolution has nothing to do with its ideas becoming incredibly popular

See, I don't even know what you're talking about? Where did democracy flower after the French revolution? Did any country become democratic between 1789 and, I don't know, 1848? (Really, I'm asking, I don't know)

The reason I jumped into the discussion was because it seemed to me that Mordy suggested authoritarianism was popular as such today, and had been in the past. When really, feudalism, monarchism, had to use incredible violence to keep the plundered population in check. And probably the main reason that I find the neo-reactionaries to be completely useless is that they either ignore, or lie, about this. At least in what I've read.

It's like with communism: At this point you can't ignore the question of political violence, which is why Slavoj Zizek is worthwhile while JacobinMag is worthless.

i think you misunderstood what i was saying.

it's kinda wild that a philosophy of govt (authoritarianism/monarchism) that was the predominant one throughout every culture in the world for thousands of years is so marginal now that its adherents are seen as weird kooks

i was merely noting that for an ideology (authoritarianism) that defined most of human existence, it's interesting that today in the West ppl who advocate for it are considered marginal figures. that is all.

i think maybe you're not sure about the meaning of omnipresent?

I really don't think that idea was ever omnipresent. Took a heck of a lot of violence to stamp out all other ideas all the time.

what does its omnipresence have to do with the violence it inflicted?

mordy, nick land's twitter account is a lot less uh subtle about where he actually stands than his theoretical texts are - https://twitter.com/Outsideness

tho he does seem to have brought in more slipperiness there too lately. some reflective older tweets - https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/498491899016003584 / https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/498147406593028098 / https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/497084751400796161

the racism/race realism probably the least interesting thing about neoreactionaries and something they share w/ the populist nativists that they despise

Isn't it essential to their program? They want to defeat the idea of universality.

I'd want to learn more about what, if anything, Bannon takes from Moldbug. He is really smitten with this idea of a grand clash of civilizations, and I think he sees in this conflict an opportunity for "the West" to assert itself as a particular ideological force. His ideas aren't too far from Houellebecq's -- in "Submission" France dissolves because it doesn't stand for anything, it doesn't offer people some concrete explanation of who they are and what they should do. I think that's how Bannon sees the liberal West, especially America, whose identity is supposed to reside in its very pluralism.

In any case this is all extraordinarily dangerous stuff. We live in a pluralistic world; any political program that tries to turn back the clock on that by inflaming long simmering cultural conflicts is a program of destruction. I don't know how the left will overcome it but I think it should start with affirming universality as a positive value in clearer, starker terms. They need to have a strong narrative if they're going to go up against Bannon.

it's certainly an important feature (not sure that it's 100% necessary to the core idea which is anti-democracy and pro-authoritarian - we can all be equal under the caesar) and certainly there are cruder and more sophisticated ways of defeating universality. when they engage in the basest bigotry masquerading as an important part of their ideology then it's the clearest that it's just a sop for their baser instincts. not all cultures are the same and some have more successful memes than others = something that is obviously true to everyone but the most ideologically committed liberal. hurr hurr jews love money = like gmafb i need to read a thousand pages of neoreactionary thought for something i could get from a 4chan meme?

Yeah I think a lot of this is a kind of pseudo-intellectual cover for racism/base tribalism. But that's what reactionary politics very often is. In the Magic Mountain there is a character called Naphta who attacks humanism on the ground that it deals in ideals, not reality, that nothing in its message speaks to people's emotional needs. His actual ideology was all over the place, including some far right ideas, some anarchistic ones, and involving a veneration of the Gothic middle ages, but the main current was just a general resentment of the kind of optimism one would need to believe that a successful society could be built on the basis of freedom and equality.

That's how I see Bannon -- I'm not sure he knows what kind of world he wants, just that he is dissatisfied with this one. It's an incredibly childish way to look at the world, but one that is obviously shared by the throngs of people who voted for Trump because they craved "change."

http://jezebel.com/check-out-these-dribbling-nazi-milkboys-1792240299

i was merely noting that for an ideology (authoritarianism) that defined most of human existence, it's interesting that today in the West ppl who advocate for it are considered marginal figures. that is all.

― Mordy, 11. februar 2017 02:05 (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry if I read more into it than there is, but this just seems really uninteresting and basic. Authoritarianism as practiced was never popular, and rested on extreme suppression and violence, so it's really not surprising that once people got rid of it, it became marginalized. It's a bit like asking why nazism was marginalized in Germany so quickly after it had been law of the land for years. It's really not surprising at all. It failed, it was marginalized.

Nazism was fairly popular in Germany, wasn't it? and there were polls taken in West Germany in the 1950s still showing a pretty high level of support for Hitler and nazism

You're not seriously arguing that nazism wasn't marginalized after the war, are you?

it was marginalized after the war, but I don't think it's correct to say it "was never popular" or that its maintenance between 1933-45 rested solely on "extreme suppression and violence"

Look, not to turn the tables, but a lot of you guys don't really live in former feudalist monarchies. I'm guessing you don't read the same history books in school that for example Danish kids does, don't walk around monuments to the freeing of the serfs as in Copenhagen.