the alt-right

Harsh. In that case I can't even imagine what you think of Frederik.

guys we all need to relax and listen to some Kenny Loggins

You're boring, stupid, and quite honestly seem scared and scarred.

LOL. There may be many ways to criticize Mordy but these are none of them.

Also Fred definitely lost

― El Tomboto

yeah mordy did a great job proving what all of us already knew about fred, good job

even Glass Joe fights a few tomato cans now and then

(So far, part 2 of the Moldbug open letter is a lot better than part 1.)

What would it take to get you guys to stop saying 'Mencius Moldbug'?

Or to stop reading jk Rowling entirely

Mind of Mencius

I'm partway through part 9. Guy has really let me down. Despite all the horseshit, I had a certain respect and admiration for an American tech bro who was willing to take conservatism not just to the point of wanting to undo the New Deal or Civil War but the American Revolution itself, not just liberal democracy but the Protestant Reformation. And his connection of progressivism to Protestantism is interesting. But what does he want to replace all of this decadent liberalism/Americanism with? Restoring the political power of the papacy or the old European aristocracies? No, he just wants to turn everything over to the even more pervasive Americanism of corporate capitalism and make tech CEOs dictators, based on the largely American belief that the private sector handles everything better than the public sector, which he holds to be so self-evident that he never argues it aside from creating a strawman fictional state-owned burger chain and claiming that it would be a disaster compared to the brilliance of McDonald's or Burger King, overlooking the large number of successful publicly owned institutions (Statoil, the BBC, the University of California system, any number of publicly owned health care or health insurance systems). My fiancee (a contract instructor who is not sure yet if she is getting paid to create an online course this semester) and I did have a good laugh about the idea that, as university professors, we're actually running the world though.

From the comments:

As one of the very few people who read this blog on occason and could conceivably be called an open-minded progressive, let me just say that this series is not accomplishing its stated goal. I find the material you dredge up fascinating but entirely unconvincing.

I confess that I've given up on reading the postings all the way through, since they exceed my attention span. My random dips into them reveal propositions like:

- Noam Chomsky is the power elite (I suppose that explains why he is such a so pervasive presence on the talk shows and op-ed pages).

- Some obscure humanities prof is the living embodiment of evil.

- Busby Berkely == Leni Riefenstahl.

- Present-day governments are omniously oppressive, yet they can be rebooted painlessly in a single operation. The result will be control by a single individual whose powers extend to being able to disable all extant weaponry from a button on his desk.

Exactly who this person is, or why the current holders of power are going to sit still while he accumulates such power, I'm not sure. Maybe I missed that part. But whoever he is, he will avoid both being the object of a cult of personality and being a faceless bureaucrat, because those are both bad.

The above propositions are entertainingly ludicrous. No progressive is going to take them seriously. That's too bad, because progressivism (like any belief system) could stand to gain from having its suppositions questioned.

JUNE 6, 2008 AT 8:21 PM

My fiancee (a contract instructor who is not sure yet if she is getting paid to create an online course this semester) and I did have a good laugh about the idea that, as university professors, we're actually running the world though.

https://mises.org/library/intellectuals-and-socialism

I gave the Hayek a quick read over lunch, and may read more closely after I'm done with my day of world domination, but I don't think it says the same thing that Moldbug was saying. What is your opinion of it, Mordy?

I think Moldbug is clumsily reaching for the same idea - that there's a class of intellectuals who create the ideological conditions that the rest of the country comes to adopt and Moldbug would call this group the Cathedral.

in a way, a lot of revanchists have defined themselves by which war they thought was won by the wrong side. your average neonazi: ww2, obv. old euro patrician types: ww1. segregationists: the civil war. colonialists: a bunch, indian independence. royalists: the english civil war. trads and anti-muslim folks: constantinople.

moldbug's bright idea is to roll these all into one thing and say it was a common enemy winning them all.

write about it at great great length with the right tone of snide condescension, bob's your uncle

"Moldbug is [...] class. [...] Adopt [...] Moldbug." - Mordy

smdh @ another shameless defense of this guy

in a way, a lot of revanchists have defined themselves by which war they thought was won by the wrong side.

i like this

there's a class of intellectuals who create the ideological conditions that the rest of the country comes to adopt

This, the way you write it, does not strike me as especially controversial (ideas have to come from somewhere, after all) but it seems like an extremely mild reading of Moldbug. A lot depends on why these intellectuals are coming up with the ideas they do, the amount of diversity of thought that is present among intellectuals, and whether there are other powerful forces in society who might be able to counter or even influence the intellectuals.

Afaict:
Hayek - In 1949, socialists dominate the intellectual class (even though they are a minority among economists) because: left-wing parties are better at targeting them (suggesting, on its own, that politicians can have some influence over intellectuals); because socialists are doing a better job of articulating a large-scale vision of how things should be, which is important for intellectuals; because socialism seems to line up with currently influential ideas in STEM disciplines; and because conservatives have more opportunities (that offer more wealth and short-term influence) outside academia. This can change if right-wingers develop a grander, more visionary theory of society (which Hayek's own career served to demonstrate, let alone the history of the world since the 70s).

Moldbug - The 'Cathedral' of professors and journalists (who are trained by professors) not only wields power indirectly by putting ideas out there and shaping the Overton window but they are literally making and administering the key political decisions since democratic bodies have outsourced all real decision-making to the Cathedral, creating a new (or cosmetically new) aristocracy. They favour progressive ideas not because anyone influences them nor because of any intellectual or ethical principle but because progressivism increases the power of the intellectual class itself. There is no significant dissent within the Cathedral of progressivism and the Cathedral will never move away from progressivism because of this predatory self-interest.

Me - I see the same story at most universities I come across: shrinking budgets, less security and dismal pay for younger professors despite their higher levels of academic qualification, increased corporate involvement, more pressure to pander to students. The Cathedral is either failing at empowering itself or doing a damn good job of painting itself as the underdog.

I have to admit I haven't read the Moldbug piece in quite a while and my takeaway was primarily the way I described it. It's very possible that he has this other stuff going on as well (that they are administering political decisions directly, that progressivism is the reigning ideology only because it increases the power of the intellectual class) and I glossed over it bc, as you point out, it's pretty dumb. Intellectuals of the Cathedral are not making the decisions themselves (though per his schemata Obama is the par excellence representative of the Cathedral and he certainly was) but they're creating the context in which decisions are made. It's hard to imagine that Moldbug believes that academics are all living high on the hog and just using ideology to keep u their decadent lifestyles. Surely he knows that despite some comforts of the professorial life that are unavailable to most of us (like tenure) no one is making as much money as business ppl. Maybe he doesn't though. My argument would be that the intellectual class trades the promise of security + amazing pay for the influence that the position brings, to have the mantle of the "public intellectual." And I don't think that progressive beliefs are uniquely able to sustain the intellectual class - I see no reason why right-wing ideas couldn't do the same as long as they placed the academy at the center of its cosmology. I'm split on the diversity of thought question. From my experience it's not extremely diverse and even at my fairly conservative undergrad institution a professor who was awarded a Templeton grant caused a huge stir from the vast majority of the [left-leaning] faculty who were uncomfortable with that fact.

Intellectuals of the Cathedral are not making the decisions themselves (though per his schemata Obama is the par excellence representative of the Cathedral and he certainly was) but they're creating the context in which decisions are made.

Starting here, from "Starting from the usual first principles, we are attempting to understand our system of government. What one word, dear progressives, best describes the modern Western system of government?": http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol7-ugly-truth-about-government.html

So if politicians should not rule, who - dear progressive - should? If we continue our pattern of two-word answers, the answer is: public policy.

To the progressive - rather ironically, considering the history - Lenin's question is completely inappropriate. You reject the idea that government means that "who" must "rule" "whom." Rather, you believe that government, when conducted properly in the public interest, is an objective discipline - like physics, or geology, or mathematics.

...
Public policy, of course, must not contradict physics, geology or mathematics. But these are not its main linchpins. When we look inside the magic box of public policy, we see fields such as law and economics and ethics and sociology and psychology and public health and foreign policy and journalism and education and...

And when we look at the history of these fields, we tend to see one of two things. Either (a) the field was more or less invented in the 20th century (sociology, psychology), or (b) its 20th-century principles bear very little relation to those of its 19th-century predecessor (law, economics). ...

As a progressive, you regard the fields of public policy as more or less scientific. The 20th century is the century of scientific public policy. And just as there is no German physics or Catholic mathematics, there is no German public policy or Catholic public policy. There is only public policy. There is no "who." There is no rule. There is no world domination. There is only global governance.

So we see why it's inappropriate for George W. Bush to "politicize" the Justice Department. It is because the Justice Department is staffed with legal scholars...

Thus we see the fate of representative, political democracy, which survives as a sort of vestigial reptile brain or fetal gill-slit in the era of scientific government. In classic Machiavellian style, the form democracy has been redefined. It no longer means that the public's elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest...

[Adams on FDR] Adams, with only a mild glaze of sycophancy, reports the results:
[FDR] was, in fact, with the help of what he considered the best expert advice, although always making final decision himself, trying experiments, and occasionally he frankly said so. In these experiments he has been motivated by two objects - one the overcoming of the depression, and the other the making over of the economic organization of the nation, the latter being what he called in his campaign speeches "the New Deal."

As the latter loomed large in the administration, to a considerable extent displacing the regular Cabinet in public sight, the so-called "brain trust" requires some comment. Of recent years college professors have been more and more frequently called into consultation as "experts." Hoover made frequent application to them when President; Roosevelt did the same as Governor of New York; and foreign governments have done likewise. However, they have never been so in the forefront of affairs as since Roosevelt entered the White House, and this, together with the vagueness of what the "New Deal" might signify, helped to hinder the restoration of confidence...

We can read this story in two ways. We can read it as the coming of modern, scientific government in the United States. Or we can read it as the transfer of power from political democracy to the American university system - which, just for the sake of a catchy catchword, I like to call the Cathedral...

Either power has passed into the hands of the Cathedral, or it has disappeared and been replaced by mere science. "Public policy." Of course, you know what I think. But what do you think?

If we can conceive the Cathedral as an actual, non-divinely-inspired, political machine for a moment, suspending any resentment or reverence we may feel toward it, not assuming that the policies it produces are good or bad or true or false, we can just admire it from an engineering perspective and see how well it works.

First: if there is one pattern we see in the public policies the Cathedral produces, it's that they tend to be very good at creating dependency...

...
Second, let's observe the relationship between the Cathedral and our old friend, "democracy." Since 1933, elected politicians have exercised minimal actual control over government policy. Formally, however, they have absolute control. The Cathedral is not mentioned in the Constitution. Power is a juicy caterpillar. Maybe it looks like a twig to most of us birds, but Washington has no shortage of sharp eyes, sharp beaks, and growling bellies...

http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/15/media/steve-bannon-breitbart-matt-boyle-reince-priebus/index.html

Lol

that progressivism is the reigning ideology only because it increases the power of the intellectual class

From here: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol4-dr-johnsons-hypothesis.html

Without acquiring a central coordinator, the Cathedral can capture the resources and powers of the State. It can devise theories of government which it can incorporate into the Synopsis, and which the State must follow. These theories naturally involve lavish support for the Cathedral, which becomes responsible for the production of "public policy," ie, government decisions. Ie, real power is held by the professors and journalists, ie the Cathedral, not through their purity and righteousness but through their self-sustaining control of public opinion. Lenin's great question, "Who? Whom?", is answered.

But why does the Cathedral not break into factions? What keeps Harvard aligned with Yale? Why doesn't one of the two realize that there is no need for a thousand synoptic progressive universities, and a vast unfilled demand for a single top-notch conservative university? Why, in short, is the Synopsis stable?

I think the answer is that the Synopsis includes only political propositions whose adoption tends to strengthen the Cathedral, and weaken its enemies. It rejects and opposes all other propositions. Inasmuch as these sets shift over time, the Synopsis will shift as well. It follows a sort of hill-climbing strategy - not in the landscape of truth, but that of power. Thus, by definition, it cannot be opposed from within.

To be progressive is simply to support the Cathedral and the Synopsis.

"The Cathedral is not mentioned in the Constitution."

Well, he got you there! I guess it's all despotism for everyone, then.

He's just playing straw men against each other in his little dollhouse of government. Meanwhile actual research goes on into the way institutions and states work and nobody gives a shit because too many words?

It annoys me to no end that people give any nonzero amount of shits about this drip and I never get to talk to anybody else who's really read Seeing Like A State or Why Nations Fail

I feel like he is trying to explain to progressives exactly what's on page one of every sociology book ever? And expect it to blow our minds.

Like, what he is saying is that social science isn't actually objective, but an ideological construct meant to mask simple power relations. Right? It's basically Foucault, except even badlyer written.

even badlyer written

xxxxp It's interesting because I read that and I think of things like "the Cathedral can capture the resources and powers of the State. It can devise theories of government which it can incorporate into the Synopsis, and which the State must follow," as implying this indirect influence of society. "Resources" throws a bit of a monkey wrench into that and implies like you said that the academy comes up with theories of government and those theories inevitably direct resources back to them (which from the foundational pt isn't entirely wrong - this idea that we wrongly treat social sciences as sciences seems like a valid observation to me, and so we fund these humanities programs to figure out how society/government is scientifically supposed to work) but this obviously falls a part on the ground level since plenty of professors are struggling to get resources so if this is in fact the plan they're doing a pretty bad job. If we speak entirely in the realm of thought + influence his points make much more sense but I agree w/ you that he doesn't quite get there and he's ultimately making a materialist argument that then fails on its own merits. If what the Cathedral directs to itself is its own authority and importance (and it's hard to argue that the academy and media are not central facets of American life - now more than ever) then he's right. If it's cash then he's confused.

I don't think it's just about thought and influence. The first long quote is him explaining how the actual decision-making is increasingly done by bureaucrats and advisors who are all academics or otherwise part of the Cathedral, since no one actually trusts politicians to know shit.

But "lavish support for the Cathedral" does seem to imply $.

Anyway, I'm p sure Tombot's right that there's better stuff to read.

foucault is a great stylist, freddy b god damn you

read that as "even baldlyer written"

Well, Moldbug does write like a skinhead.

foucault is a great stylist, freddy b god damn you

― Islamic State of Mind (jim in vancouver), 16. februar 2017 01:31 (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is he though? I mean, he is much funner to read than most of the Cathedral curriculum, but is it really because of his style, or because his sentences actually tend to make sense?

he was a great stylist. check out how he builds his argument in the opening pages of discipline and punish. https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish199.html

he is way better than moldbug at building up to these "aha" moments where the reader is able to experience the disorienting pleasure of having their preconceptions come crashing down around them

foucault is better at writing than some punk with a shitty pseudonym? fuck I'm glad that was cleared up

I kinda hate that thing Foucault does in that example and elsewhere, where he takes two different texts, different types, different times, different contexts, and go: 'See?'. I think it's in chapter 2 where he compares a diary to an instruction manual and through analyzing the language concludes the military went from being ceremonial to disciplinary, right? I really like Foucault, but he wasn't always the most rigorous historian. But he's still one of the best theorists.

Isn't that why he drowns you in examples and quotes though, so you can see it's not about connecting causal dots but about revealing a discursive pattern, recurring phrases or ways of characterizing things, etc.? It's methodologically distinct from the kind of rigor you're looking for, I think.

I want more examples, is the thing. I don't drown at all.

there's a class of intellectuals who create the ideological conditions that the rest of the country comes to adopt

fwiw I think this is false or at least misleadingly incomplete. intellectuals are not unmoved movers channelling the world of forms. or to frame it in a different set of jargon: they're not outside the dialectic advancing it all by themselves, but are led and directed by it. any intellectual history or theory of intellectual change that doesn't pay attention to the way material, historical, social contingencies etc. shape the production, form and content of ideas is not worth bothering with imo. the conditions in which intellectuals operate have a political & ideological character which is shaped by other factors outside of their control

https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb#.mnxmotyrg

Can we step back to where Mordy thought that academics were forgoing mad cash from the business sector in order to gain the prestige associated with being a tenured member of the tweed classes

Man ain't nobody in business wants the skillset of furrowing yr brow and saying idk man gimme a year to think about that

yeah but that's one reason business sucks

one of my good pals gave up his v well paid job to go do his phd and enter academia, tho for fun/love rather than prestige. pretty sure he could go and get another wacky job and a hefty golden handshake whenever he wanted. not arts tho so mb you won't allow it.

basically there's a point at which you're too smart to work in the private sector

Exactly!

Yeah but I'm asking did he give up his job to do the same thing in academia or did he give up his job so he could stop doing what he had to do in his job.

Not about smart. About willing.

Also there's always the middle ground of public service. Take a year to do the terrible thing.

he had a few nuts-sounding jobs which he enjoyed but he had an idea for what he really wanted to do and wanted the bigger challenge