In Footnote 3, "The elites of the early 20th century did not manage to protect their own from the social engineering they enacted." sounds like a phenomenon I've seen elsewhere, but I don't have a clear definition of it. The Motte (an ex-reddit) called it 'generational loss of hypocrisy' and Auster used 'eliminating the unprincipled exception' for something similar. One generation knows not to do the Thing but is covert about the reason, the next generation is raised and taught not to do the Thing but grows up without the reason, and the third generation abandons the tradition and does the Thing. The elites of the early 20th century might have protected their own children, but couldn't transmit the protection *mechanism* for their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren ended up believing the propaganda and the social engineering that the original elites used to get everyone else in.
Am I making sense? Is there a better name for this, or a more precise definition?
Yeah, it's not necessarily that they didn't protect their immediate kids, but there was some kind of generational loss of the fact that protection was needed and how to do it. Cool to see it being talked about elsewhere. I haven't seen that pattern named or discussed before.
Exceptional synthesis. The Debtor's Revolt framing explains so much abou the pyramid scheme thinking that's become normalized. I've been puzzled by how obviously bankrupt institutions just keep getting bailouts, but the insight about correlated stupid decisions creating too-big-to-fail solidarity makes it click. The part about sovereign vs managerial power also helped me understand something kinda personal.
A part I forgot to emphasize which Ben considers important is that the too-big-to-fail coalition also gets various others involved, both people who are genuinely fooled and not complicit, and some who are complicit but not the ones putting in the work to make problems, and these groups are much more sympathetic when appealing for bailouts.
I really enjoyed this post. It gives me some concrete stories to better understand the stuff that Samo Burja et. al have been talking about in regard to “institutional disfunction.” I’ve also seen criticism of wokeness as a common thing but haven’t and still don’t always understand the nuance behind it. Thank you for writing this up.
If you're a certain kind of autist and you read a lot of history books, with an eye toward figuring out what is Actually True, you end up gravitating towards a kind of Rothbardian libertarianism. Not endorsing all of the following, just laying it out.
19th-century liberalism was basically fine. The foundations of the modern megastate were laid around WWI - in the US you had the invention of the Federal Reserve, in Russia you had Lenin and Stalin pioneering something we might as well call "totalitarianism", an essentially sadistic method of bringing all of human life under one political party's control.
FDR was sort of the original slop populist. The New Deal did not actually alleviate the Great Depression - you can tell because the Great Depression continued the entire time the New Deal was happening. All he did was arbitrarily ban gold, bulldoze a bunch of perfectly good crops, spend money the country didn't have on mildly fake jobs and act like anyone who questioned any of this was a spoilsport.
WWII led to a massive and permanent expansion of the state. The current system would immediately be recognisable as "socialism" to anyone from 1899, but for whatever reason we've all been frogboiled into not noticing this. The neoliberals under Reagan tried to undo this but mostly failed, and ended up just increasing the national debt further. (His advisor David Stockman wrote a book where he says this explicitly.)
The reason the Current Situation is so hard to address is that you need to go back to at least 1933 to get your head around it. Social Security for instance was specifically designed by FDR to be impossible to get rid of - a time bomb from the thirties that's only now, a hundred years later, getting to the point where it as a spending commitment is a genuine threat to American fiscal stability, and hence to the entire world economy. Lots of socialist takes are confused because they fail to realise that they already won all the big arguments a hundred years ago and we've been living in their world ever since.
We're obviously not just "going back" to 19th-century liberalism. In fact, we already had a big political movement which aimed to do this, and as previously mentioned it failed. So if you accept this historical framework (which of course would be hotly disputed by many intelligent people) it doesn't leave you with many places to go. Just sort of sitting around buying Bitcoin, establishing private islands and waiting for the debt bubble to pop.
I find it useful to lay it all out in one place though. I feel like we've gone through a similar process of "doing our own research". The Debtor's Revolt post seems good, I haven't read that one before.
absolutely fantastic work, i feel like i've heard echoes of some of these things but never seen it all laid out so cleanly and in such depth. i feel like this is a big important piece of a puzzle i've been trying to put together
i want to talk to you about this, because i'm puzzled. my experience is that people who are "less domesticated" (disagreeable, non-submissive) are intolerable and i wouldn't want to live in a world where they were common. but you seem fine irl. and most of the other stuff in this post is bog standard libertarian-perspective American history that's been part of my worldview since forever. but "rewilding" humans seems like the worst thing in the world to me & i want to unpack that sometime.
I don't think "domestication" as used here is analogous to "agreeability", not in the sense that I presume you or I value. More of a habitual cynicism and amorality, even "antimorality" that takes expressions of real moral fiber and sneers at them as weakness. I think Zvi's sequence on the linked book Moral Mazes does an excellent job of describing the incentives set up to break people in this way, at least in one form.
Yes, this incongruity was also what I wanted to comment on.
I like this essay, but I’m currently halfway through and and saw this passage:
> If you ignore this, because based on your lived experience it seems utterly unreasonable to expect any large number of people to give a shit about this, then you’re going to be stuck trying to create systems of governance that somehow create good outcomes while allowing arbitrary amounts of bad faith, and you will fail. This is the real blocker to implementing even the most detailed RETVRN type plan: you can’t put domesticated people into a system built for sovereign individuals and expect it to work out.
Sorry, but sovereign individuals are the people who can output arbitrary amounts of bad faith. Maybe in the past the cultural script was that you could just lock someone away for that, but if people back then didn’t generate lots of bad faith attacks, it wasn’t because they were “sovereign individuals”, it actually implies the opposite
Why Republican Liberalism? Not "why is it good?", but why is it the single model to restore rather than one of many historical systems that can inspire whatever comes next? Republican Liberalism has many good qualities, but it did not invent markets, rule of law, or intelligent and moral people.
Would it be accurate to summarize your claims as follows: America is stupider because of school, poorer because of finance, and less just because of the law?
Fascinating post!
In Footnote 3, "The elites of the early 20th century did not manage to protect their own from the social engineering they enacted." sounds like a phenomenon I've seen elsewhere, but I don't have a clear definition of it. The Motte (an ex-reddit) called it 'generational loss of hypocrisy' and Auster used 'eliminating the unprincipled exception' for something similar. One generation knows not to do the Thing but is covert about the reason, the next generation is raised and taught not to do the Thing but grows up without the reason, and the third generation abandons the tradition and does the Thing. The elites of the early 20th century might have protected their own children, but couldn't transmit the protection *mechanism* for their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren ended up believing the propaganda and the social engineering that the original elites used to get everyone else in.
Am I making sense? Is there a better name for this, or a more precise definition?
Yeah, it's not necessarily that they didn't protect their immediate kids, but there was some kind of generational loss of the fact that protection was needed and how to do it. Cool to see it being talked about elsewhere. I haven't seen that pattern named or discussed before.
Exceptional synthesis. The Debtor's Revolt framing explains so much abou the pyramid scheme thinking that's become normalized. I've been puzzled by how obviously bankrupt institutions just keep getting bailouts, but the insight about correlated stupid decisions creating too-big-to-fail solidarity makes it click. The part about sovereign vs managerial power also helped me understand something kinda personal.
A part I forgot to emphasize which Ben considers important is that the too-big-to-fail coalition also gets various others involved, both people who are genuinely fooled and not complicit, and some who are complicit but not the ones putting in the work to make problems, and these groups are much more sympathetic when appealing for bailouts.
I really enjoyed this post. It gives me some concrete stories to better understand the stuff that Samo Burja et. al have been talking about in regard to “institutional disfunction.” I’ve also seen criticism of wokeness as a common thing but haven’t and still don’t always understand the nuance behind it. Thank you for writing this up.
If you're a certain kind of autist and you read a lot of history books, with an eye toward figuring out what is Actually True, you end up gravitating towards a kind of Rothbardian libertarianism. Not endorsing all of the following, just laying it out.
19th-century liberalism was basically fine. The foundations of the modern megastate were laid around WWI - in the US you had the invention of the Federal Reserve, in Russia you had Lenin and Stalin pioneering something we might as well call "totalitarianism", an essentially sadistic method of bringing all of human life under one political party's control.
FDR was sort of the original slop populist. The New Deal did not actually alleviate the Great Depression - you can tell because the Great Depression continued the entire time the New Deal was happening. All he did was arbitrarily ban gold, bulldoze a bunch of perfectly good crops, spend money the country didn't have on mildly fake jobs and act like anyone who questioned any of this was a spoilsport.
WWII led to a massive and permanent expansion of the state. The current system would immediately be recognisable as "socialism" to anyone from 1899, but for whatever reason we've all been frogboiled into not noticing this. The neoliberals under Reagan tried to undo this but mostly failed, and ended up just increasing the national debt further. (His advisor David Stockman wrote a book where he says this explicitly.)
The reason the Current Situation is so hard to address is that you need to go back to at least 1933 to get your head around it. Social Security for instance was specifically designed by FDR to be impossible to get rid of - a time bomb from the thirties that's only now, a hundred years later, getting to the point where it as a spending commitment is a genuine threat to American fiscal stability, and hence to the entire world economy. Lots of socialist takes are confused because they fail to realise that they already won all the big arguments a hundred years ago and we've been living in their world ever since.
We're obviously not just "going back" to 19th-century liberalism. In fact, we already had a big political movement which aimed to do this, and as previously mentioned it failed. So if you accept this historical framework (which of course would be hotly disputed by many intelligent people) it doesn't leave you with many places to go. Just sort of sitting around buying Bitcoin, establishing private islands and waiting for the debt bubble to pop.
I find it useful to lay it all out in one place though. I feel like we've gone through a similar process of "doing our own research". The Debtor's Revolt post seems good, I haven't read that one before.
absolutely fantastic work, i feel like i've heard echoes of some of these things but never seen it all laid out so cleanly and in such depth. i feel like this is a big important piece of a puzzle i've been trying to put together
i want to talk to you about this, because i'm puzzled. my experience is that people who are "less domesticated" (disagreeable, non-submissive) are intolerable and i wouldn't want to live in a world where they were common. but you seem fine irl. and most of the other stuff in this post is bog standard libertarian-perspective American history that's been part of my worldview since forever. but "rewilding" humans seems like the worst thing in the world to me & i want to unpack that sometime.
I don't think "domestication" as used here is analogous to "agreeability", not in the sense that I presume you or I value. More of a habitual cynicism and amorality, even "antimorality" that takes expressions of real moral fiber and sneers at them as weakness. I think Zvi's sequence on the linked book Moral Mazes does an excellent job of describing the incentives set up to break people in this way, at least in one form.
Yes, this incongruity was also what I wanted to comment on.
I like this essay, but I’m currently halfway through and and saw this passage:
> If you ignore this, because based on your lived experience it seems utterly unreasonable to expect any large number of people to give a shit about this, then you’re going to be stuck trying to create systems of governance that somehow create good outcomes while allowing arbitrary amounts of bad faith, and you will fail. This is the real blocker to implementing even the most detailed RETVRN type plan: you can’t put domesticated people into a system built for sovereign individuals and expect it to work out.
Sorry, but sovereign individuals are the people who can output arbitrary amounts of bad faith. Maybe in the past the cultural script was that you could just lock someone away for that, but if people back then didn’t generate lots of bad faith attacks, it wasn’t because they were “sovereign individuals”, it actually implies the opposite
Why Republican Liberalism? Not "why is it good?", but why is it the single model to restore rather than one of many historical systems that can inspire whatever comes next? Republican Liberalism has many good qualities, but it did not invent markets, rule of law, or intelligent and moral people.
Because it's the specific one this specific country had and did well with, and the one its institutions are formed to take as axiomatic?
Would it be accurate to summarize your claims as follows: America is stupider because of school, poorer because of finance, and less just because of the law?